Best posts made by Arkandel

@Ganymede said:

This presumes that one is "fit," and that maintenance is the goal. For many, it's not.

I'm in no way an expert and on top of it I'm not a doctor, so this will be likely different for people dealing with different health issues.

However a few years ago I found myself in my early 30s, overweight and completely out of shape. I wasn't used to that, it sort of snuck up on me since I always used to play basketball, I walked everywhere, loved hiking, etc. But my lower back was suddenly giving up on me and even half-court ball with 25-year olds was killing me.

I found relatively non-critical adjustments to my diet and exercise helped a ton. I mean I went cold turkey on Coke, stopped eating obvious bad things like cookies, and replaced fries/rice with salads. Basically my diet was pretty much described as "meat with salad", and I'm not talking small helpings either. Lots of it. I went to the gym three times a week and lifted, 30-40 minutes a session tops.

I lost 50ish pounds in half a year. It does work. It doesn't even take huge sacrifices, it takes small ones on a daily basis. So I wasn't on maintenance - that's empirical though, it's what worked for me, and it might be different for other people.

Either way those small sacrifices, compounded by life and other obligations are still hard. Christmas? Try eating right around Christmas when there are sweets everywhere, right? Willpower is a muscle and like every muscle if you overwork it, it'll get tired and fail. Plus as mentioned above those 30-40 minutes hurt when you're on a rather limited time budget to begin with. But it's doable, for sure.

I think the best trick is to figure out some motivation even if you have to invent it. Be competitive with someone if you've got a competitive nature, or be part of a group to get peer pressure to work in your favor or... something. It's a personal thing obviously.

Alright, I'm playing Adrian on SHH and soon (?) Daniel "Thugbear" on Eldritch. I'm usually available for scenes between 20:00 and midnight EST.

@lordbelh said:

@Arkandel At Christmas I gorge myself. Screw it all, it's Christmas.

It's a Christmas miracle that calories of all you eat around the 25th are reduced to zero. Everyone knows that.

Something I neglected to mention - I think most people give up because they either expect results too fast, or vastly underestimate the calories they burn with exercise compared to the calories they eat.

So for example going to the gym to work out for most of us, even if we go at it hard, is say... 600 calories in an hour. Relatively few people can pull off more than that even if they think they are without injuring themselves, and the majority will burn less. However eating a cookie or two will replenish those calories within minutes - you know those 'rewards' we give ourselves for a job well done? With the excuse of 'if I don't treat myself now and then I'll never pull this off anyway'?

So a few weeks later after busting our ass we weigh ourselves and it's the same as before or more. So we give up thinking it just 'didn't work' for us 'because of our metabolism'.

Abs are made in the kitchen.

@lordbelh There are a few things to consider here, I think.

1. As long as there's no clear separation between "I lose" and "my character loses" it's impossible for someone to even understand their behavior is an issue. It doesn't help some people are just hypocrites. I've literally seen someone complain that people are afraid of losing on WORA while on Skype they were trying to rally OOC support to help their PC avoid losing.

2. Having said that I can still understand being attached to a character. You invest time in them, you have developed IC friends, in some cases regaining XP is hard... it's natural losing them would suck. "My character got his ass kicked/humiliated/disgraced" is a whole lot different from "my character is dead". Especially if it just happens for no semi-meaningful reason.

3. Other than multiplayer gaming specifically, nothing prepares players for the idea they're not the center of the universe. In books or movies the protagonist doesn't die (or not often), in table-top PCs tend to benefit from plot armor, etc. Then you play a MU* and that nasty homicidal Gangrel just took your head off, wtf!

@buttercup said in Good TV:

So far The Falcon and the Winter Soldier feels sidekick melodrama level to me.

I can totally see that! For me what made the difference is how cleverly it was written to present the villains' point of view well.

***=NSFW content***

There are a lot of scenes drawing humor from the buddy-cop movie tropes for sure but for me it's the other stuff that's interesting since the movies kinda glossed over all of it.

@ThatGuyThere said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

i know this is the old musher in me yelling at kids to get off his lawn but the horrid ANSI colors (basically any use of color) is the major reason I could never try mud-like games.

You also won't play a comics MU* if Barry Allen is the Flash! Your will-not-play peeves list must be a long-ass document dude.

@testament said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I'm down three pounds from I started working out two weeks ago.

Yay for small victories.

That's like one third of my ENTIRE DOG. And she hogs so much of the bed.

Three pounds is a lot!

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Sunny

That's true. If I was better about doing economic tasks, I could have a lot more silver, theoretically. If we assume that people could average 100 economic resources a week (which of course, some people can do more but I think that is a very generous average), you're only looking at 33 weeks.

Which seems more fair, certainly.

(Though I would like to emphasize that I think 100 economic resources a week is a VERY generous estimate. That means every week, you have to get a lot of support for econ about the pop.)

If people can get 100 economic resources (or whatever) a week the game will eventually run into a very large divide between players who can be online a lot and those who can't. Some sort of diminishing returns might be better else the gap will only grow.

@warma-sheen said in Good TV:

@arkandel said in Good TV:

Unless it stretches suspension of disbelief... you're already coping very well with people shooting energy beams out of their hands, y'all. Do you really draw the line at them also being Asian?

I know it is rhetorical, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that some people are this shallow. Race/gender identity is a big, complex thing, but the answer is definitely - yes. That's over the line for a lot of people. And by a huge margin.

When it comes down to it, if I'm a fan I usually don't want changes in general for their own sake. Not including Tom Bombadil in Fellowship made sense; he didn't serve the narrative but took a long time to introduce.

Changes also need to serve the story, and they have to fit the setting; if your long secluded fantasy town has the racial diversity of NYC then make that be part of your plot. It can be a single line ("there used to be a trade route nearby a long time ago"); done.

And basically when you switch things around, make it interesting. Don't just do it for the novelty factor. Add something to your story.

To me that's the difference between Ben Reilly and Miles Morales. If you take a character I care about - like Peter Parker - away then give me something more than "lol, here's another dude going by the same moniker". Miles was really well done; Ben was shit on a stick.

I think sometimes we take game themes too... seriously? I mean, my impression is we gravitate toward gritty-and-realistic where most TV shows are never afraid to break out of their own molded continuity to do weird shit for the sake of doing weird shit. So while we're bound by mechanics and rules ("fetishes can't do that!") a good show introduces elements just on the sake of how well the story is served.

Maybe it's because some bad tropes have poisoned the well, I don't know. But think of the indignation of introducing... dunno, a pregnant Vampire to the average nWoD MU*. There'd be riots. Not saying it'd necessarily make for a good story, just that it wouldn't happen, because we are oddly enough running games with more rigid rules than multi-million dollar productions.

Is that weird?

@ortallus said in Good TV:

And it's good that Marvel is finally addressing these sorts of issues, a la Falcon as the new Cap and inclusion of Isiah Bradley.

You mean Black Falcon.

@Misadventure said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Make a duplicate of the room in a RP space.

Sheesh, geta room.

You own room.

But that's not how many scenes work. It's not always (or even usually) that I go out and think "hey, I need to meet Bob to talk about the thing" because then yes, we have the option of meeting somewhere private or cloning a room.

A very sizable portion of my RP comes from simply walking into a room with a couple of other people and clicking with them about something. It's usually quite unplanned; in some cases we've never met before.

So it starts to happen, the poses quickly move out of the generic bar RP and into a thing then a forth person comes in. Cool, let's bring them over and...oh, a fifth person. Hey there, at least it'll flow faster now and... oh, a seventh and eighth. And now the topic is completely neutral again, everyone is resetting. And one of the initial people has to drop out because they can't keep up with the sudden influx of OOC spam (one of my biggest peeves, folks joining a scene and starting to chat OOC right in the room). Crud.

And then it's over, this is now a generic bar scene again.

... Case in point:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/michael-b-jordan-without-remorse-diversity-tom-clancy-universe-black-superman-rumors-165718542.html

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Or do what you would do in reality. If your conversation in a public place has turned into something that really needs to be continued in private...go somewhere private. Stand up and make your goodbyes and go chat about your secret plot to overthrow the shadow government.

It's not a good example though because the issue isn't really privacy - you could be talking about completely non-confidential matters - but spam.

Let's say you're sitting at a bench in a park somewhere iRL. Sure, now and then you can hear someone's kid yelling something or a couple will go by, but for the most part you can have an undisturbed conversation with someone else.

Now take the exact same thing in a 'park' room on a MUSH. You may sitting at a 'bench' place so your poses are limited to it, but everyone else who's not is posing globally. So you are still spammed for the exact same volume as if no one else was using the places code.

Now if you argued people should use places then yes, I'd quite agree, but it's not the default (and places don't exist in every room, of course).

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Ugh. It's gonna be a long year.

Spend that time building up your Little Black Book, to enact terrible vengeance later when you're a big time lawyer!

@Arkandel I'd hope so. If they aren't getting real interaction, they don't have to validate the claims and I'd hope they wouldn't. But it's kind of up to them and on the honor system, and I think that it's better to lean towards generosity on this as I think it DOES feel welcoming. I hope.

Oh, I agree. Perhaps what you guys could do is suggest (since you can't enforce) what the etiquette should be.

For example, mention right in the command help file that there should be roleplay taking place between the claimer and the newbie, not just posing in the same room. Right now that's kinda of a gray area - people walk in, have conversations with their existing friends ignoring the newbie but since it's taking place in the same room (and not coincidentally ) they toss the claim.

It might also be a good idea to give the XPs to the newbie whether they validate or not (else they're penalizing themselves by not validating it, which won't happen) but give no way for the claimer to know if it was validated or not so there can't be OOC pressure about it.

@ortallus said in Good TV:

@silverfox said in Good TV:

I'm watching Taskmaster and damn is it funny.

You must mean the British TV show? For a second I thought this was something to do with the Marvel MCU and was like "Wait wtf?!"

I lowkey love that villain.

Kudos to Tehom, a feature request I put in was implemented within an hour... that's pretty responsive.

The issue in particular was that I had a private +event in (which don't show up on +events for anyone except those invited) but someone else put a big political +event later on (with possible ties to the metaplot) an hour before mine. Although "there's too many things to do!" is a really nice problem to have, it still sucks for players to have to choose which one to attend one day and have none the next.

@moth said in Random funny:

It's even better with John Cena's theme music.

He has his own theme?

(Screw you, Gany!)

@Sunny said in Game Concept: Paying for rare things:

@Arkandel

Most lords and ladies games do actually charge for title. Or, well, everywhere I've played. Usually it's in the form of an XP bonus for a commoner, though sometimes the title itself costs. Or something associated with it does.

The problem with this is that the cost is (typically) an one-off; you get a fixed amount of XP in CGen and that's it. But the benefits from playing a noble are permanent - and very difficult to quantify. How much XP is the privilege of birthright worth, for example?

Another issue with having special stuff is players try to find ways out of what could/should be severe social consequences simply because they aren't played out. For instance a popular player decides to go with a 'former Seer' but no one shuns them because of it, and staff is too busy to run plot for him (or it's the kind of plot which essentially showers them with more attention than drawbacks). Or, and this is pretty common, a PC from a restricted faction with special stuff befriends/is sleeping with a 'normal' character and shares some of those special toys with them - but as it's done in secret there is no fallout.

That's why I proposed just biting the bullet and have staff hand-pick their best players for stuff they're interested in playing or just plain having the roles wide open. Make a choice - either sacrifice rarity or accept the allegation of favoritism - and run the best game you can, or you'll spend all your time trying to quantify the unquantifiable or trying to play whack'a'mole with players cheating the system. The only way to win that game is to not play.