@testament These thoughts are natural. Guilt is part of grief - what if is a nasty way we torment ourselves as we deal with loss.
You did your best to look after your cat. And he had a good life and a good friend in you. He went out loved, and knew it.
@Warma-Sheen It's also about playing games though. Something about them makes people go from "it's only a game" to "these people are only players, and thus part of the game so who cares". I can't quite explain it.
And it's not just video games, not at all. At my old job I was playing basketball with these guys... you couldn't find nicer people. Family men with kids, long-time professionals, polite to others, considerate, well educated - a bunch of us were MScs and PhDs... the works. Then we'd go play pick-up games (or worse, real games in a stupid league for businesses) and you'd see them turn into these crybabies whining about every call, disputing fouls, throwing balls around in disgust (one smashed his phone on the floor, his wife wasn't greatly pleased about that)... it was really bizarre.
Couple that with some anonymity, unaccountability and the fact people who're quite shy and uncharismatic in real life can be the center of attention like they always craved and weird things happen online.
@aria If 699 people had fun, felt included, participated and appreciated the celebration but one person did not, that's still a 99.85% success rate. 
@derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
I don't even mind this part. I don't mind never quite feeling off the clock because I also know that, at the end of the day, I'm expected to produce eight hours of work. And if that means that I'm never off the clock, I get to do it at whatever pace I damn well please.
Due to my role this means I am always checking the second monitor for inbound messages on our corporate communication tool. Am I playing Magic? Chatting on Discord? Just YouTube? It doesn't matter - every few minutes I look at Slack to see if anything is going on.
And there sometimes is. Sure I could ignore it and let it go to the on-call, but if it's serious enough it will come back to me anyway... later. Engaging for half an hour at 8pm means not being in a meeting with multiple Directors and VPs the next day, for longer than that, going over the RCA.
To be honest this works for me (to the extent that it does) for a simple reason: I don't have kids. I can't imagine doing this if I had responsibilities I can't simply get out at a moment's notice.
TIL twitter is the medium of choice for great writers.
Silly @Misadventure.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was excellent.
I'd put it second only to Endgame, and even that just because the latter was the cultivation of and payoff to multiple movies and character arcs. Otherwise Spider-man was on the same tier as Winter Soldier, Civil War and Thor: Ragnarok for me.
That movie had a heart, and showed it.
If I don't want to adhere to a roll's result I won't ask for it.
@Rook said:
Maybe 'half' was too generalized, and I didn't put much thought into the percentage implied there. Research would establish a more realistic number, I am sure, but I don't have the sources in front of me just now.
So what you're saying is that we boil everything into a snippet and then bandy that snippet around as standpoint and understanding? That, in itself is a generalization (har har) but I want to ensure I understand what you are saying there. I agree with it. I, too, hate that we are so 'modern' that we cannot have meaningful commentary about this or that, we just throw out the proverbial one-liners and move on with our day.
I guess I'm trying to make two arguments here.
That for the somewhat younger generations TV's newscasting can no longer be the scapegoat it once was. Sure its credibility has taken a nosedive as the major news outlets serve commercial interests in a more blatant fashion than they used to but we have and actually use sources online for so much more about just about everything.
With the disclaimer that I don't want in any way to cheapen tragedies taking place near us since when innocent people are killed to make a point it's just as bad no matter where it is, we seem to give a whole less of a shit about them when they're happening somewhere in Asia. Or Israel/Pakistan. Or the Middle East. "That's how things are over there" seems to sum it up. I mean look at this list! Just to single out one incident from there (but holy crap, look at that list) -- "six to ten gunmen associated with the Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabaab open fired at the Garissa University in Kenya. Christians were their main target of the attack, with the Islamic extremists separating the Muslims from Christians before executing them. Up to three hundred students are unaccounted for. One hundred and forty-seven students were reported killed, with fears the toll will rise, along with seventy-nine wounded."
Can you imagine the shitstorm if any of these things had happened in a western country? Just think if 6-10 people had invaded a University, separated one religious group from another then executed hundreds from the one they disagreed with in Germany or Canada. Yet I remember seeing that on yahoo at the time, it was up there... for a day. It's not like anyone hid it from us.
We just didn't give a shit so the media moved on.
@Thenomain said:
Holy shit, those are a lot of guidelines. Can we summarize down to:
- Play in context of the game, theme, character, and scene, in that order.
- Play for those around you.
While it is a lot of guidelines, I think the OP's intention was to demonstrate 'how' and 'why' rather than just 'what'.
If you don't know how to 'play for those around you' then the general principle isn't sufficient. How do you put that into practice, what does it mean? What do you actually do?
@Coin said:
P.S. I think that commas are important; that the Oxford Comma gets a bad rap; and that you should always, always use a semi-colon to separate items in a list if that list is in the form of a sentence and one of those items contains a comma in it, even if those commas are helping something superfluous, such as word repetition for emphatization or the explanation of something pointless in an overly long sentence that didn't need to exist in the first place and that no one really wants to read anyway.
Double post: I'm terrible about my use of commas and semi colons. It's empirical if anything, and I use it when it ... feels... right.
Which is one of the reasons monsters like you get to correct me, and why I don't correct others unless it's really getting out of hand. I'd use the fact english is not my first language as a defense but it's not yours either, so you're making me look bad, so fuck you.
@Apu If it makes it any different claims to badassery are pretty common online as well. It's just an easy thing to say, particularly if someone's self esteem isn't that rock-solid.
If I had an internet penny for each time some guy on a MU* would talk about how he's a fifth degree black belt or go on and on about his detailed knowledge of firearms - on public channels if course, just so everyone gets to witness it - I could have bought an internet pizza by now. With extra cheese.
@Sanguine said:
@HelloRaptor I will allow you to be the first person I launch a grizzly bear from a catapult at.
What did that bear ever do to you. 
It makes me sad to talk with people who, in more than ten years in our industry, hadn't heard someone tell them they did a good job before.
My standing theory is that while some people who take part in a hobby as nerdy as this and sink many hours of their weeks into a MUSH still detest being perceived as nerds. So this is their way of differentiating between themselves and regular monitor jockeys.
I'm neither amused nor annoyed unless it gets in the way or goes too far at least for my tastes. For instance I found it frustrating on TR that to play a cop you had to know the jargon and use it extensively, including emergency codes, badge numbers and the such. That was too much, and as silly as requiring a working knowledge of nmap to play a hacker.
Basically I generally don't care who is what out there until it interferes with my pretendy funtimes. Otherwise if someone happens to be a real-life biker badass motherfucker who's also a sixth dan judoka hey, more power to them.
@Kanye-Qwest said:
I don't think anyone likes losing a character unexpectedly, and that's understandable. But I think you're going to the extreme other end of the spectrum. Not every PC can be the protagonist, but that doesn't mean every PC is an extra. Running with that analogy I would liken PCs to an ensemble cast, like in the Avengers or LOTR, etc.
It's not always fun for everyone involved, but good stories contain risk, and danger, and it's hard to really FEEL those things if they aren't...real.
I think what @Ghost was saying is it's different to know there's a potentially tense situation ahead which you decide to become involved, and - for example - an +event advertised as a social event in which the ST gets a PC casually carved to pieces by the Prince simply to drive home the point of how impulsive, powerful and unpredictable the Prince is without any warning, previous build-up or reason to expect such a thing might be in the works.
Gameplay is a very important consideration for, you know, games.
Sometimes I wish more people wanted to take over the stage. It's more often that I get tired of having to do something to get things moving than I am worried about someone else doing too much.
The sole exception to this is relationship RP. That just seems to happen no matter what.
