Best posts made by Arkandel

@admiral said in Good TV:

I thought Achilles was gay? Or did I read the Illiad wrong? Making him bisexual seems kind of pointless.

The term didn't exist at the time Homer was alive (and for centuries later) so there's no way to answer that question. Someone's sexual preference wasn't a defining characteristic for them at all.

There were basically two taboos. The first makes sense - as a married male it was part of your civic duty to be willing and able to father children, since cities needed people. So you still had to perform with your wife no matter your preferences, at least to that extent.

The other taboo ranges from pretty iffy to really creepy because it was frowned upon to be the passive half of a homosexual relationship as an adult man since it was considered a submissive trait, which in turn was seen as a feminine quality. But hey, that's okay because that was okay if there was a large enough age gap! That's what mentoring those boys entailed... so... yeah.

But yeah, anyway. Achilles wasn't bi or gay or anything since the term made no sense for the time.

@Rook said:

So, maybe something to think about is removing locations from any OOC commands. +finger, +where, etc. +hangouts and equivalent simply show numbers. Force people to communicate to find or arrange RP. Force people to use the hangouts to wait for happenstance scenes. Force people to be adults.
.

I don't see how making RP harder to find is the more adult thing to do.

It occurs to me the adult thing to do is to make people resolve their own interpersonal problems.

@aria A while ago me and my buddies were changing after a baskeball game and they saw I had Hulk underwear on.

One of them went "so when you take it off you turn into Bruce Banner!".

You know, that's a fucking good burn. I'm not even mad.

@thatonedude said in Do we need staff?:

SF bans Spider in an attempt to keep her crazy from spiraling out into the game. Then we see "staffer rants", the type that make most people uncomfortable as players. This is followed by banning situations where people come on here and claim innocence and it was their past bad behavior that made them banned.

That's why I dislike people focusing on VS as much as we do here. It carries the implication Spider is the WORST and since I'm not Spider how bad can I be, really?

The answer is: Pretty fucking bad.

@aria said in Critters!:

Pasha is an adorable BabyCat. Pasha is also a rampaging asshole cat.

FTFY

Now and then I re-read a pose I just sent out and sigh because I repeated a certain word too much. The obvious fix for it is to re-read them before I hit enter; after editing and rephrasing things a few too many times it happens.

Other than that I don't worry about it too much. I roleplay a certain way, I write a certain way, and there are those who enjoy it yet not everyone necessarily will. I'm okay with that.

@aria said in Holiday materialism! Let's talk gifts.:

My boyfriend reads this forum, too, so I'm being subtle like a punch to the face.

I'm sure it's not that bad.

Look, @insomniac7809 - this is for you!

I take it all back.

@tyche said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@wizz said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

I get a little tired of the dumb, brassy lynch mob attitude around here sometimes.

Toxic femininity.

What the hell man. Especially not in this forum section, not that it works in any. Come on.

So, this thread isn't about providing identifying information of any kind (don't do that!).

We're all hanging out here anyway, some of us for years, so I figured we might want to share some casual details about what makes us... us, in real life. Weird little things, stuff we like to do, eat, visit, watch or read.

No humble-bragging, either!

So I'll give it a start, see if this thing catches on.

• My favorite pizzafood involves pineapple, pepperoni and BBQ sauce. Judge me all you want, fools.

• I don't like hot showers. Or, rather, my threshold for 'hot water' has been historically much cooler than most people's I know.

• Perhaps on that note! My sense of smell doesn't work - or, rather, it's woeful. When I enter places like bakeries I can sometimes smell something for a few seconds, then it goes away, else... nothing. I'm paranoid over this and overcompensate with extra showers just in case.

• My car has a manual transmission. That's a European thing I carried all the way to the New World but I prefer it now even though obviously standard is easier.

• E-reader > physical books. Fite me. My shelves have been full all my life, and now I can carry my entire to-read list with me anywhere I go.

• My parents didn't like animals when I was growing up (although they changed their minds later on) but I always wanted pets... so I went overboard as an adult, and now I share the house with five critters.

• I don't need variety in my diet. If I like a specific meal I can have the same thing for weeks at a time - and I have. Usually I order the same one thing from each restaurant I go to, once I find one I like enough.

• I have no tattoos. I'm not cool enough.

You go. Who are you?

@saosmash said in Apology to Darinelle:

@tinuviel On the other hand, when you insult someone publicly, why should you get to apologize in private? I'm not super impressed by the public theater either but I don't have a better solution.

The obvious solution is to not repeatedly do a thing that is worthy of an apology.

If it's an one-time deal it probably doesn't warrant a public one.

If it's repeated then the apology itself ought to be the least of a person's concerns.

@kanye-qwest What I begrudge is that the way things are shaping with streaming services starting to fragment we'll back to square one again... basically exactly like cable, but with services like Netflix, Disney, HBO, Amazon etc instead of channels and bundles.

It was great while it lasted to pay $12 and get nearly everything under one interface.

@gangofdolls said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

The reasons for this are a few but in my experience of this hobby and in the games I tend to frequent, the coders tend to be a particular roster of people. Since they have a skill set that's particular, they do hold a certain amount of cards when it comes to agreeing to take or pass on a project and sometimes its time and interest but finding both can be difficult when you don't want to work with who is asking for either.

It's not just the skillset itself, it's the specificity. For example I'm not half bad at python but that doesn't mean I can just pick up a platform written in python and start writing that new combat system staff wants implemented, not without figuring out how the whole thing is structured first, picking up some small things to work myself up to bigger ones, etc.

It's a lot of upfront work.

On the issue of upfront work, as we know there are a lot of flakes in the community. That's not a black mark on anyone, it's natural for hobbyists to prioritize based on their life's circumstances at any given time... but look, unless I know you are going to be there in the long run, which the only way I can is if you have a track record showing just that, I would risk sinking weeks' worth of quite real effort - we're talking stuff companies pay decent money for - and then have you vanish in the end, leaving me with an implemented system maybe no one else wants since it was so particular to your vision.

That's a big ask.

@magee101 said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

Hold up, I'm noticing threads being locked up and discussions popping up, so a conclusion was formed but no official word with an announcement as to the new way we gonna do things? I just care about transparency here is all @Arkandel

I made a post about this in this thread but it probably should have been somewhere more visible than that.

Recently active ad threads were forked; the initial post remained in the Ads section, locked and editable by their originator, and the rest of the posts were placed in the Mildly Constructive forum under their own thread.

It's going to be the way we do it going forward, at the very least until we do have a wiki but possibly after that too (although I'll look for a way to dynamically tie the locked ad threads into the wiki content in that case, since @faraday had a point in saying she wants to check one place for content instead of two).

@Ghost How bored are you right now, dude?

Although some of the mainstream interest is religious I think a lot of the horror is about ancient antiquities - and important works of architecture, art, etc which just so happen to be related to Christianity because that's what people created at the time - being destroyed.

I could see the same amount of attention being given to a similar event happening in the Louvre, say. And that's what all the corporate interest is from - free publicity from all the public interest, showing they care for art, etc. IMHO, of course, this isn't (mainly) a religious thing.

@Ghost said in Historical MUSHes:

In short: Adrian Brody in THE PIANIST would mean little without the theme of racist, fascist Nazis sacking Poland.

Sure, and it's true that a lot of themes could be very interesting to explore if they weren't almost definitely going to be completely derailed by idiots who essentially glorify the horror, trolls who just want to get a reaction and the SJWs they would be getting the reaction from.

... But that's a very big if unfortunately. And while The Pianist is a static work of art that narrates events within a specific context and tells a specific tale. MU* simply don't work like that due to their interactive nature.

Hell, it might not even be possible after the fact (let alone in a vacuum) to tell if it was staff who had bad intentions to begin with or if a player or group was responsible for messing it up for the rest, or even if the theme itself poisoned its own well then things got progressively bad as time went by. But, again unfortunately, it's pretty much a matter of time before these things go really wrong.

Holy shit, now we have to wait a week for the next episode?!

<hype intensifies>

One opinion I wanted to bring up in this thread was that each game really should have a firm design from the ground up. That doesn't mean it ought to be 'complete' on day 1 - or even day 365 - since that isn't feasible (or even fun). But it does mean each game ought to have its principal administrators put in some honest thought in how it's different than every other MU*; why does it even have to exist? What are their goals? What excites them to create this new thing? What would make it exciting for players to come in and participate?

It always drove me a little crazy when the whole process became "let's put this new thing out with as little work as possible, as soon as possible". I've maintained that thought through the years because this is the whole thing about a MUSH - the possibilities are endless. You're basically staging an interactive, multiplayer novel-slash-improv theatrical production whose characters can be any damn thing you choose, you can set it on any stage (today's Earth, a galaxy far far away, Westeros, Gotham City, anywhere)... so why would you choose to just copy/paste what the last three MU* did pretty much verbatim, slap a new name on it and call it a day?

And this kind of hurried let's-just-go-ahead process can infect other important decision making due to the lack of a central focus or guiding set of principles throughout the way an entire MUSH is being ran. Decisions get made in a hurry without real thought behind them; for example it's very common to see fledgling games create a larger issue than what they're trying to solve by creating hoops good players need to (and will, since that's what makes them good) jump through trying to prevent the symptoms of bad players' behavior - only most often they won't, since those folks will ignore or go around the obstacle to get what they want, since that's what makes them bad. The result is alienating the former and barely inconveniencing the latter. The cause varies.

Another example is games which simply copy house rules or policies from other MU*, a tactic that can result in perpetuated systemic issues, mixed signals and conflicting goals if other aspects of those games don't match them. For instance one sphere can be ran very liberally ("spend your XPs, y'all!") while another in a draconian fashion ("to buy Renown 3 you need to cut yourself and show me the wound") or treat PrPs as an afterthought or even a net negative - and all of that results in isolationism, not being able to create any kind of sustainable culture not to mention - quite often - a revolting door of staff who come in and go right back out.