Best posts made by Arkandel

@miss-demeanor said in Good or New Movies Review:

Per Bright:

I felt like the world needed more exposition. I was left with too many questions. Not about the characters, I found I couldn't actually bring myself to care about them... but about the WORLD. There's just so many questions, so much more I want to know about this place! They drop teasers and hints but so much is left up in the air!

If there was any more exposition the movie would last twice as long.

But seriously, I personally don't think having unanswered questions is a bad thing, especially if they were purposefully trying to turn this film into a franchise launching pad. Some mystery is good, leaving us hungry for more is great.

But even if they had decided to give us more information I'm not sure the way they already fed us what they did, often through things everyone in a room would have already known, was handled very well... it just felt pretty clumsy at times.

@magee101 said in Let's talk about TS.:

@arkandel So if I were staff on this situation I would have done the following.

A) Verify that this is possible and that the Mage has neccisary powers.

With Mage the answer is almost always "yes".

B) Grabbed up both players invovled and asled wtf was going on.

There's no need. This isn't an IC issue, it's an OOC one; the primary duty if staff is to protect the game and its players. There wasn't even RP to consider - it was a powerplay by one player toward another, as no poses were exchanged.

It's like an unprovoked telenuke. A telefuck?

C) Told them if they ever bring this shit in front of staff again punishment. Tell female char your choice if it works or not. If creep ball is creeping try ignoring. If continues to harass I will remove him from game.

The 'next time' clause is the problem there. 'Next time' the harassed might not come to staff at all, but either tolerate it because the bullshit worked or just walk out. This guy is just playing the numbers.

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

That reboots/rehashes + diversity casting = the vast majority of the film industry in 2017+1. Come up with some new shit, and just so you know, pandering to progressives by filling your umpteenth overproduced reboot with womyn and non-whites just doesn't qualify.

You really shouldn't have stepped out of the Hog Pit. Also that's a record for racism and sexism in a two-line post.

Goodbye.

@cobaltasaurus said in Let's talk about TS.:

@arkandel It also comes across to me like punishing the victim. @Carex's story made it seem like the chick had no idea it was going to happen and certainly didn't consent to it. So pulling them both in and demanding what the hell is going on, and then telling them they'll be banned for it ... is punishing the victim? I would have just dealt with the guy.

Yeah I mean... if there was extensive RP between them (say they were IC bf/gf and they broke up) and then it kinda looks like it got IC creepy at least I'd talk to the guy - alone - to give him the benefit of a doubt. It's still all over the gray line but maybe I could explain where he went wrong and keep him around.

In this case the motives were pretty clear. Meeting someone for five minutes at a party then trying to inflict character-changing effects on them from a distance is a no-no. That's not someone I'd want on any game I was responsible for.

The Magicians!

@ominous said in Let's talk about TS.:

Let's keep it off of the MU*s, though. Those places are already crazy enough without importing our particular kind of batshit to them.

You think suggesting someone should be removed from a game for trying to force other players to roleplay being pregnant-via-magic is a batshit notion?

I disagree with some of the knee jerk reactions we sometimes put on display here. This isn't one of them.

The Shape of Water.

@surreality said in Let's talk about TS.:

@arkandel 'Where it belongs' and what qualifies is a huge area of disagreement, though.

But it shouldn't be, and staff ought to clarify it if it is.

For example maybe the entire public part of the grid in the game is where it doesn't belong (such as in the theoretical Harry Potter example I gave above), in which case players just can't do that at all.

In a game like TR they can simply institute a "if it's okay for RL it's appropriate in-game too". So a gothy club would be fine, but a bar would probably not be. And then they can clarify for supernatural social places such as Elysium.

But what I had in mind was more than simply what characters are wearing or how they act in public.

For instance let's say General You as staff don't want to have sex on your game for whatever reason - maybe it doesn't fit thematically or you simply don't want to have to deal with it. You ask players to keep it between themselves or else. Then I go and creep Jane's player out after we've already broken the rules like the crazy rebels we are by TSing; does it mean you screwed up because Jane is less likely to come to you since she did something she's not supposed to? Is there a compromise between you having the right to draw the line where you believe it should be to set limits in your own game, and your players being able to come to you even if they violated them because something even more serious might be taking place?

@surreality You know the computer will happily wait in its box even if you need an extra day or more to set it up, right?

As I've told @EmmahSue before, I would like the concept of "every player is a ST" in the same way as I like "regular PrPs" in general. It'd be great - and it won't happen.

It's simple - most players aren't like that. That's not to say the average person isn't a good roleplayer, far from it - but the average person is not proactive in any sense of the word. The poses' quality can be good, even great, but they'll be responsive to what's already in place, or in extension of it and they will not try to come up with a fresh of circumstances to kick-start new things.

I would have zero issues with someone introducing new elements to a scene we're all already part of but I wouldn't hold my breath. I bring PrPs up because at least they can be systemically encouraged - you can talk about trading them, incentivizing them, advertising them, hyping them. There are things staff (and other players) can do to make sure more of them happen.

Again from Reddit:

When I was maybe 12, my parents found porn on the family computer and confronted me about it. Now, here's several parts to the story, you decide the worst:

Looking through a series of impressively graphic porn images with my parents.

Seeing the list of keywords used by my mom in the Windows search history to find any hidden porn. (big vagina, boobies, naked girls, butts, breasts, penis, etc. Penis? Really, mom?)

Being told what porn and masturbation does to boys and how much it hurts families when porn addiction enters the household.

Having to discuss masturbation with my youth pastor as a result.

Talking with my father one-on-one about how sorry he was that mom had found his porn collection.

@sunny said in MU Things I Love:

I think that it's just that most people are not the awful beasts we make them out to be a lot of the time, and if you have high expectations, people tend to meet them.

It's also observational bias. The people who get pointed at are the bad ones, but they are not typical cases.

Also most people fly under the radar anyway. I don't just mean on forums like this (although there are way more active lurkers than posters) but in general.

When I was playing A Moment in Tyme at some point I ran into this player and discovered she had been there longer than I had... and I had been there for years, I was staff, part of some of the same guilds as her characters... it's just that our paths simply never crossed until then.

So not only do we not hear about good people but in some cases we only hear about the bad ones, which can form unfair - and incorrect - expectations.

I'd never go to someone and offer unsolicited advice about their health or diet, but I'm happy to help when I'm asked. I'm now starting to reconsider the latter part of this policy.

A friend of mine at work has been getting progressively heavier so he came over to ask for help. I gave him some pointers (basically the URL to the /r/loseit FAQ and a TL;DR explanation of what a caloric deficit is and what getting there generally entails), then went over as an example what I include in my diet, including protein shakes.

For some reason whenever I go over this part people's ears perk up (this isn't my first rodeo). Something about protein shakes seems to be looked at as the secret to controlling one's weight, as if they are magic potions instead of food. That's what they fucking are, which I stressed out as well - it's a convenient way to meet a higher daily protein requirement at a cheap caloric 'price'... and if done right, a cheap real price as well. But no, magic.

So he comes back a couple of days later and starts telling me the shakes contain a lot of cholesterol, man. And isn't the sodium high? Because he spoke to another guy in the company about it too who pointed out these things. Also isn't intermittent fasting better?

<sigh>

Dude, until last week 80% of your diet came in McDonalds and Tim Horton's bags. Do we seriously need to have that conversation? Stay the course for a couple of months, see if it works, and then decide. Or don't!

@tnp said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

The advantage is having first choice of FCs. Naturally, this applies only to games that actually have FCs such as comics games and those with roster characters.

Think of it as hosts at a party setting out a buffet of chocolates but they and their friends eat all the caramels and nut clusters and leave only the icky raspberry cremes.

Any game that has a pure FIFO approach to important/critical FCs is asking for trouble. If you're running a DC game then having Superman shouldn't be a function of who gets to type +request FC=I WANT SUPES!!11 faster than everyone else, not if the character is expected to have the canonical impact he would in the comics.

The principle applies to everything else. Imagine if L&L handed the King out to whoever happened to throw in a +job. Madness.

What I dislike about Facebook in regards to privacy concerns, and their CEO admitted it in yesterday's hearing so it's on the record, is that the application is aware of the sites you visit in other tabs on your web browser.

That is a no-no. If I volunteer my data to Facebook and check in at my favorite restaurant to show off the pulled pork that's my choice, and I can't bitch them out when they target me for BBQ sauce ads later on. But if I open a tab to a Nintendo Switch site, and I've never said a word about Nintendo on FB, they should not have access to it.

This isn't quite about game development but I wanted to post under this forum's umbrella anyway just to signal the fact the thread's content needs to remain constructive.

It's in response to this:

@lisse24 said in San Francisco.:

@arkandel said in San Francisco.:

'Silencing' doesn't happen very often here - moderation is pretty damn light. I've had to give a couple of warnings for personal attacks in non-Hogpit threads, and booted that one guy who was trolling every thread.

I just want to point out that no matter how much, how little, or what sort of speech you moderate someone is going to be silenced. If you go full-SJW, you may end up silencing some people who have controversial views, or just those who are scared of speaking up for fear they'll say something wrong. If you let the classic internet "bro-mentality" rule, you sideline PoC, LGBTQ folk, and women, creating a hostile environment that effectively silences them. If you refuse to stamp out inflammatory speech, the people who like fights and drama for drama's sake will rule the day, and anyone who wants a reasonable discussion on an important topic will end up silenced and marginalized. I know I'm posting this in the hogpit and the decision about which type of speech to allow here was decided long ago, but the idea that no moderation means everyone gets to be heard is BS.

And that's a fair point so I wanted us to discuss it.

For starters a disclaimer; MSB has only two actual rules about moderation. You can't attack a person outside of the Hog Pit (attacking opinions is fine) and you can't be blatantly racist, misogynistic, etc.

The general idea is to avoid going too far with sanitizing language, so for an actual 'formal' offense to happen there needs to be no question the rules were violated; it's the difference between "kill all Jews!" and "I don't like dealing with female staff". The first will get you into our shortlist for removal, the second makes you sound idiotic but unless it's persistent and it looks intentional (which is usually the case, as troll bait) we wouldn't intervene as administrators.

This has at least a few effects:

1. Just because you are permitted to be ignorant it doesn't mean ignorance is protected. In the scenario above, for example, you are going to get flamed... and you'll deserve it.

2. Sometimes people use this clause to derail conversations just to be, well, shits. Slapping the comment in the middle of an otherwise tense but ongoing debate in the Mildly Constructive section, for instance, is pretty much guaranteed to move the thread to the Hog Pit within a few pages.

3. The lines aren't always clear. There's a fair question about just how SJW-y we want this forum to be, especially as the mention of some words triggers people to different degrees; the easy example would be "bitch" or "cunt" used as insults. As it stands my inclination is to leave it in the 'endangered zone' area above; it can get you yelled at by posters, but unless you're doing it on purpose just to pick on people, it's not going to get you banned.

4. Dealing in absolutes isn't just for the Sith; it also lets MSB admins moderate without requiring all of us to develop advanced groupthink. What I think is offensive and my life experiences and biases differ from @Auspice's or @Ganymede's as we look at a gray area, yet all three of us would nuke from orbit someone who promoted domestic violence. Do keep in mind administrators are also posters; just because we are rolling our eyes at you it doesn't mean you're in trouble (and it's on us to make the distinction clear).

I'd like your opinions on this. Please remember to stay civil, if only to escape the meta-irony of a thread specifically meant to discuss it devolving into its own discussion material.

@auspice said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

Forum is not a game.

Citation needed.

Every Friday evening we run basketball runs at a court near work paid by the company, where coworkers and friends participate. Although we're all nerds some of those guys are pretty fit, and several are 10+ years younger than me, around the same height - some taller, some shorter... all good there.

Over the last few weeks I've been finding the game was getting easier. I can switch and defend any of these guys, get to my spots on offense to shoot or post people up more or less at will, to the point where I'm passing out of double teams so I don't feel I'm monopolizing the ball. Sometimes matchups are harder but it'd gotten to the point where I was wondering why they are letting me get away with so much since they don't take it easy with anyone else.

This week we were hanging out after the game, and during the conversation it occurred to me... these guys aren't letting me do anything. I'm doing it. And since I'd never been in that situation before, it really hadn't occurred to me.

feelsgoodman.gif

@deadculture said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

I believe that speech should always be unmoderated and that social admonishment will take care of course correction, if necessary.

That's my expectation. However it comes with a caveat; if a person is attacked in the process of applying the admonishment they won't get 'bailed out' by the administrators, especially in the Hog Pit.

So if General You gets triggered by a word and decides to correct the poster but they push back we won't jump to your rescue - at least not from a moderation point of view - since it's not against the rules per se.

It's up to the community to regulate itself, which I'm hoping we can do, but which also puts everyone at the relative mercy of cliques. I might agree with General You and I can even post to that effect, but I won't save you from the people grouping up.