Cobra Kai was unexpectedly good. It's a sequel (30-something years later) of the original Karate Kid, with Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence's actors back at it.
It's not amazing and the budget is as low as it gets, but it's endearing and nostalgic... and many times, funny. There are even karate montages in it! Lots of them! And as much 80s music as you'd expect.
@cupcake If there are no Brits involved something has clearly gone horribly wrong.
@ominous said in Happy Mother's Day MU Mommies!:
@arkandel The way society makes children such a burden in modern society, I expect us to go the route of Japan and experience a massive population downturn.
I think that depends on where one lives, but either way... celebrating motherhood is still an awesome thing to do. 
But more seriously, happy Mother's day to all you mommies out there!
@horrorhound said in As an ST..:
..as an ST, how do you balance for yourself, your group, your sphere, your game, the stories that are on a grand-scale vs. personal?
Usually when a story is set to be personal it starts out that way. A pack wants something ran, for example, so there isn't that much need to balance it out; they are the stars. At that point it's pretty similar to being a table-top DM/ST, with the main difference being you can't blow up the city in the process.
Otherwise my PrP series are launched from a neutral place exactly so that I can fit personal storytelling in them later on. That's tricky - and potentially unwanted - to plan for; sometimes characters I want to buy in don't, and others I didn't expected show up big time. There's no control over this since OOC factors play in the mix (RL schedules, players already having too much on their plate, etc) so I read the room and respond accordingly.
So to answer the OP's question I balance things dynamically because there's no one-size-fits-all approach here. Stories just need to stay flexible to accommodate newcomers, emerging ideas and approaches, even for interactions with other plots ran at the same time.
The one thing that isn't flexible is my own time. I have what I have, and I'm available when I'm available. Everything else has to work based on that or else it won't work at all, so my responsibility here is to make it clear from the start and stick to it as much as life allows.
@bobotron It still beats not being on the air at all, right?
@bored said in Valorous Dominion:
If that's not some nasty ass bitchy vague-shade, I don't know what it is.
This is not the Hog Pit. Please behave and do not attack other posters. Thank you.
I just want Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to get renewed.
The last season and the first half of this one were really good.
Basically the average for the entire run other than the first half of the first season is pretty high, yet most people stopped watching right at that point. After Winter Soldier that show really took off.
I was thinking of dipping my toes somewhere. Is there anything out there with an Arkandel-shaped hole in it?
(cue the memes)
@thenomain said in Character 'types':
I think this might not be a good example. Shang is a...is there a game version of Shit-Posting? It's a place where it's just as likely someone is doing it for the irony as the wish-fulfillment, though I honestly believe it's far more the latter.
If someone played a slaver on a game where there's an entire faction of slavers, I'd be more concerned that I'd be encouraged to RP themes I wouldn't want to, but this is a factor of the game pushing those themes. I can't really blame someone for playing themes presented.
On Shang there is an entire faction of slavers though. It's pretty popular, too, although many kinds of unconventional concepts are there.
At least from my personal experience although it's been a while since I was on the grid there there was no correlation between the players and the characters - in fact the ones you kind of had to watch out for were the independents, sandboxing most of their RP, and not those who held membership in one of the various in-game organizations and who were subject to more oversight by staff and fellow players.
Obviously in this YMMV though.
So, MSBites! Do you have a character "type"?
Is there a kind of personality you choose for your PCs? Do you mostly play military folks? Clever people? Seducers? Jokesters? Do you quip with most of your characters? Are they typically polite or rough around the edges?
Do most of your characters fall within a certain range between 'good' and 'morally gray'?
And for two more - this time controversial - bonus points!
Do you judge others either for the types of PCs they usually play? As in, do you ever roll your eyes and go "pft, that @Arkandel rolled a snarky hipster in his early twenties again. Is that all he knows how to play?"
And finally... do you judge others for the type of character they are playing and if so do you associate the player's views with the character? For example if someone played a Slaver on Shang, or a racist on a nWoD game.
In these cases above let's exclude cases where people are being actual OOC jerks. Obviously most of us would judge someone who's being an asshole as a player, but that's outside this thread's scope.
@thatguythere said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
But racist, sexist and other crap like that that effects games not at all should not be around. Hell even if you want to tear someone a new asshole verbally there are far better and more creative ways to do that.
In many cases what it comes down is one of two things, IMHO:
Trolling. Just trying to get a rise out of people, and it's easier when you hit those big red buttons to see who bites. That's in fact the usual case here.
Trying to normalize someone's preconceptions. If I'm a racist then it's more convenient to try and argue everyone who's not is a politically correct outlier since the majority are just like me, than to willingly concede the point that well, I'm a racist and there's no but involved.
Either way though the rules are the same.
@apotheosis Oh, there you are. Goodbye Felicia.
@apotheosis said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
I can't accuse you of having ignoble intent but I can tell you that you're making a mistake.
It wouldn't be the first mistake I've made, and it definitely won't be the last. But if I'm wrong I'd rather it was about not tolerating open bigotry in a medium I'm the caretaker of.
Do you really think your ban button can protect you, or for that matter, anybody else?
It doesn't have to protect anyone. I just don't have any interest in running a forum protecting hate speech.
@apotheosis said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
It would lower the workload for administrators, allow for the Hog Pit to serve its purpose, and also create a reasonable mandate of civility in other forums.
Our workload isn't the primary consideration. We also need to feel good about what we do here, and administrating an even partially racist, homophobic, etc forum isn't something I'd be interested in doing.
@bobotron Either way I don't care as long as both of them are in the movie. They have great chemistry and they were great at their roles.
I just don't want this comic book thing to be carried over to movies, where for a character's mantle to be passed we have to be rid of the predecessor, like it's a zero sum game and there can only be one.
@jennkryst said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist Game:
Every time this updates I think it is a Mistborn thing.
Which I'd want to play the hell out of.
@cobaltasaurus said in Darkwater: The Return:
We're done, I'm not going to keep dragging the ghost around anymore.
I'm sorry to all the folks I let down.
It's better to have Darkwatered and shut down than never to have Darkwatered at all.
(I think, I never actually Darkwatered, but I've heard good things from people who did)
@apu said in Spoilers:
It's not as difficult as it might seem to avoid spoilers.
One particular event in Infinity War was spoiled for me by a title of a link automatically aggregated into my Google feed, which I see when I first launch Chrome on my Pixel 2 phone.
So basically this guy made an article titled "Why did Dumbledore had to die!"-type post, giving me no option to not get spoiled. Just seeing it in a list did the trick.
Those are the true assholes.
No, wait, the really true asshole was this professional movie reviewer years ago. That guy can just go fuck himself forever. So what happened is I was reading a newspaper (as I said, years ago ) and ran across a review for Million Dollar Baby which I had tickets to see that night in the theater. In it, without any warning or spoiler alert, he basically had a whole section on "is euthanasia ethical?".
Fuck you, guy.