Best posts made by Aria

Fourth nor'easter this month. It's been a colder March than February, when we had some random 60 degree days.

I don't mind the cold and actually prefer it to summer, but... piss off, winter. You had your chance.

@krmbm Oh! Okay, so....

Basically the Reach was, from what I recall -- it's been, like, five years?? -- written to be set in Maine, in a fictional town called Dunlin's Reach. Not even as big as Portland, with it's ~60,000 or so people, and IIRC, had an apocalypse storyline connecting all of the WoD lines set on the game into what was supposed to be a single metaplot.

The thing is, it became huge, by far the biggest WoD MU* on the net at the time. All of those things I mentioned - a major television studio, a casino, masses of nightclubs, etc, - were all things players created. And set in what was supposed to be a very Lovecraftian small town. So as I said, it got super fucky and weird pretty quickly and that thematic drift got worse and worse the bigger the game got. I'm pretty sure the legacy of that game is why you see so many MUs set in the Northeast trying to anticipate the possibility of that by adding in "But there's also a big city!" and some do that a whole lot better than others.

So my bad on assuming you were in alpha and still working on things. I legit was asking that question - and making the suggestion of a big grid if you were trying to both run with that stereotypical Maine feel and accommodate players Doing Things (tm) - because I was on The Reach, wanted to understand what you were shooting for, and trying to help make sure you didn't have to deal with that level of hair-pulling theme drift.

Players will always surprise you! Sometimes it's super awesome and fun. Sometimes you hand them the magic sword to slay the dragon and then watch them stab themselves in the face with it. Either way staff ends up working with whatever players come up with and I figured "Here's a suggestion that will hopefully give you fewer nosebleeds when someone decides they want to set up a NASA launch station in their mansion's backyard." ¯\(ツ)/¯

Thanks to autocorrect, I just responded to a player's friendly bear hug greeting with "From afar, Mia drugs you back!"

I can't stop laughing.

@warma-sheen said in Why are there so many MUs set in Maine?:

I've never understood why people are willing to blindly accept all kinds of supernatural ridiculousity in a setting, but then something like its setting is just untenable. A million people? In one city in Maine!? That's ridiculous!!!

But... it makes sense that supernatural monsters/creatures have been around since forever and only a teeny tiny sub-percentage of the population has ever been aware of them because the one thing people do really well consistently throughout the history of human existence is keep secrets well.. That part makes sense. Why would anyone question that.

I honestly don't care. It's not a matter of "Wahhhh! This isn't believable." At least not for me. It's a matter of "What game am I supposed to be playing so I make sure my character fits?"

....Unless you're going to set a game in Philadelphia. Because then I expect you to do my city proud and set the Four Seasons next to a crematorium and a dildo store as Ben Franklin intended.

@mr-johnson said in RL things I love:

@aria said in RL things I love:

B-b-bbbut @Auspice ! You made his boner sad.

That's practically a war crime, you heinous bitch!

Nobody wants a sad boner. :<

As a mostly-straight woman who really likes dick, can confirm. I generally prefer happy boners. Perky, even.

@auspice said in Good TV:

@aria said in Good TV:

I'm two episodes into "Troy: Fall of City" and I can't decided whether it's objectively just not very good or if my recurring sentiment of ".......You cancelled Marco Polo but decided to pay for this?" is just spoiling everything for me.

I AM STILL SO ANGRY ABOUT MARCO POLO BEING CANCELLED.

esp because I mean hasn't Troy been done over and over and over and over

Yes. Usually badly. And while I realize there's mythos there to depict... I dunno... you could make three goddesses seem slightly less random and lame??

I cannot second @Auspice's recommendation of "The Witch" enough. It's so, so, so good....

Like, to the point that I contacted my favorite professor from several years back, who I had for multiple courses.... including "American Gothic" as a subgenre of literature. Given the rotating cycle he teaches that class on, I was pretty sure he was running the course the year it came out. So I sent him what amounted to a five paragraph analysis/sales pitch as to why he should go see that movie and why he should seriously consider offering it up to his students as a potential extra credit assignment that semester. Last I heard, he's teaching it in this year's cycle of that class, because it really holds up as an amazing example of the thematic differences between the British and American versions of gothic horror.

@arkandel Ohh, I was more referring to the timing of the 300 movie coming out in the US and it being all about a band of valiant white boys fighting back the evil, monstrous hordes of brown people from the Middle East all in the name of 'freedom'.

Kind of like how Taken, much as I enjoyed that movie, is essentially every middle-aged white American dude's dad fantasy of fighting like a badass to save his wholesome daughter from the sexual depravity of a sheikh. Like, the bad guy is literally a sheikh with a harem of drugged up white slave girls.

I'm just sayin'.

I just spent entirely too much money that I don't effing have, but.....

@insomniac7809 and I now have tickets to see Dorothy tomorrow night -- opening for Greta Van Fleet. YEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

@arkandel Soooooooooo, Aggretsuko is a Sanrio character (yes, as in the company that owns Hello Kitty) announced a few years ago. She is a tiny red panda that works for a financial firm, whose name is a portmanteau of Aggressive Retsuko. So named because she expresses her frustration with her work life and her co-workers by singing rage-fueled death metal karaoke. She was released in 2016, but now has an animated Netflix series that consists of 10 episodes of 15 minute shorts.

As a woman who works as an executive assistant in the marketing department of a massive financial firm with a secret penchant for punk rock, I can relate to this tiny cartoon character and find her super cute.

@jibberthehut said in RL Anger:

I still smell it. I don't get it.. WHERE ELSE DID THEY FUCKING PEE?!

Black light time! (Seriously, I love our cats. But also seriously, fuck our cats. Fuck our cats hardcore.)

@cupcake said in RL Anger:

@tinuviel said in RL Anger:

@admiral Yup. Knee to the groin usually shuts down all questions.

Would that the misogynistic remarks could be responded to with a knee to the groin in my workplace.

In the words of Kat Stratford:

The best thing about living in what was once a primarily Jewish neighborhood in one of the largest cities in the US:

The food. I'm about to have apple cake French toast. Delivered to my front door.

@wizz One of the things that I deeply value about the particular area I studied in school was learning to appreciate the difference between something being 'good' -- a term which I use here largely to mean well-done, culturally important, transformative for its genre, etc. -- and things that I like. Sometimes these overlap. Sometimes they don't. Hemingway, for example, totally changed English-language literature. He can also pretty much just eat my ass. I hate him very, very much and would punch his stupid face if I could.

Buffy, thus far, seems to be a strange amalgamation of cultural zeitgeist that may or may not stand up to time, deeply influential re: pop culture, thoroughly entertaining, and at times hilariously awful. This is not a complaint. I am enjoying it immensely, as much for the good as for the really bad.

Except Xander. Fuck Xander. Yes, I already said that. Imma say it again. Fuck that guy.

PS -- Who else is SUPER EXCITED about The Man in the High Castle dropping tomorrow?

So I binged the entire third season of The Man in the High Castle yesterday. (Look, it was my first day of vacation. I wanted to spend it in leggings, eating garbage and watching TV with my dog. Don't you fucking judge me.)

1. It was reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally good.
2. Be prepared to have a lot of difficult and uncomfortable feelings this season.

@sunny THANK GOD. I like their pants, but every time I go in there, part of my brain is mentally preparing me for some asshole to moo at the fat girl going in.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is amazing. Go see it.

I, personally, try to make them laugh.

"Hi, it's Jenessa with PA Dems. Do you have a plan for voting tomorrow?"
"Don't you worry, Jenessa. The only thing that could keep me from my polling place tomorrow is if it's LITERALLY on fire."
"That's great! And don't forget to encourage your friends and family to vote. They can find their polling place at <link>, and every vote counts!"
"Yeah, I know. And my parents are crazy old racists, so I think I'm just going to not mention it and see if they can figure it out themselves. Y'know, like their new Comcast remote."

Same conversation five times so far today, with Melissa, Mitchell, Meek, and an unnamed text bot.

@insomniac7809

@rnmissionrun said in RL Anger:

@iluvgrumpycat said in RL Anger:

I really love how you can go to the marketplace, qualify for a certain amount of help towards a premium. And then STILL be paying over a hundred bucks a month for a single person with a 6000 dollar deductible. Like....isn't it just cheaper to pay out of pocket unless something really, really, really bad happens? 'cause I'll never spend 6k a year for just going to the dr when I get the seasonal crud.

It's cheaper, until something serious does happen, or you require prescription medications that cost hundreds of dollars per month.

^ This. @insomniac7809 used to go to the doctor once a year, maybe twice, if I nagged him. Or tricked him, which I have legit done before. (Fucker had bronchitis. I regret nothing.)

Then last year he had an explosive eye surprise that recurred six times, required he go to a subspecialist for no less than three visits every time, and landed us in the ER of an eye hospital one night at 10pm.

I literally would've had to wipe out our savings accounts, my savings bonds, and my employee stock from my last company to pay his bills were it not for my current company letting me put him on my insurance as an after-tax dependent. Which means I have to the IRS taxes on that as "imputed income", but that's still, like..... $1000 out of my refund annually to get him deeply discounted insurance that actually covers stuff.

This year he had surgery to correct that eye issue and chewed through our entire deductible by March. He's gone to the doctor.... exactly twice since. For post-surgery follow up.

It's kind of a crapshoot with insurance, really, but.... that's also kind of the idea behind it? Like, that's how the company makes money? It's a shared pool of funds that only works if most people are paying more into it than they're getting back out of it. That's also why it's a fairly shitty way to manage healthcare because sooner or later, pretty much everyone is going to need to use it for something major. Unlike homeowners insurance, where it's unlikely that everyone's house is going to burn down at some point