Posts made by Arkandel

I thought of putting this in the Random Links thread but it irks me enough.

https://wiki.tfes.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions

WAKE UP SHEEPLES

(like, holy shit)

@sg said in Make it fun for Me!:

For sure. I've had people flip out at me because my pose style usually includes snippets of backstory and narrative to explain some of the references I use, but some people are very firmly into the only write physical actions that poeple would see and hear and nothing else.

That's what bugs me. The only legitimate reason to complain to someone is if they are actually doing something bad - meaning they are harassing others or trying to metagame or cheat or whatever. That's it, there's no other good reason to do it.

I have lots of peeves. We all do - I don't think you can MUSH for a long time without being irked at some particular gamestyle, or even all of them except for your own thing, and there's nothing particularly wrong with it.

For example I love flowery purple prose, but I'm well aware that's not for everyone; if I choose to not play with (generic) you very often because you prefer short prose that's completely my choice and we don't need to be mortal enemies! It's just... a thing. On WoW if you like raiding and I'm a PvPer we can still be in the same guild, or maybe do a 5-man together once in a while - no big deal.

If however I make a point of frowning at you for posing like that then I'm just an asshole.

@ixokai said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

@arkandel Really? I don't know a lot about 5E, but what I've seen of it... I don't exactly know that I like. If I had partners I'd probably code the hell out of Pathfinder, but what's it about 5E for you that does it?

So many things, some of which would probably apply to everyone and some that might not.

To get the latter out of the way, I grew up on AD&D, and I read a shitload of novels in the 90s. Nostalgia is huge, and I'd love to adventure on Krynn or in Waterdeep or wherever.

But for 5E in particular, it's so well balanced despite having many classes and toolkits to pick from. Combat is very streamlined, easy to follow and fast to resolve, and theoretically since it's pretty popular finding resources online is so easy - anything from character generators to long treatises on its mechanics is available with one google search.

They did a hell of a job with this one, and I'm not even someone who likes systems in general - I'm quite happy playing without mechanics, but these ones aren't in the way but rather they enhance gameplay.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/michael-osgood-special-victims-commander-harvey-weinstein.html

@zombiegenesis said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

I'd also love to see a D&D 5E game.

I'd play the shit out of 5E.

To me it's pretty simple; not everyone's playstyle is everyone else's favorite. Some of us like and prioritize some things (combat, mystery and horror, romantic/sexual tropes, writing styles and responsiveness, etc) different than others do.

In fact we've discussed most of those in great length in other threads right here.

As such we'll indeed go and find some fun playing with those whose strengths are in the same areas we enjoy. There's nothing wrong with any of this as long as we also don't go out of our way to be assholes to folks who just like different playing styles.

You'd think that's a low bar but it's not. How many times have we seen someone complain here that other people are locked in rooms together, heavily implying they are having teh tee-es, and being annoyed about it? How many times have we seen others shit all over a canon character out of entitlement? How dare they play Batgirl as a happy-go-lucky crime-fighter instead of a brooding uber-hacker? It's ruining everything!

It's a big hobby. Many different interpretations of fun fit within it, and maybe we just need to back off others, stop worrying as much about what entertains them and concern ourselves with our own sense of enjoyment.

Awesome read.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/

@roz They probably had a reason. His family will probably die in Infinity War, which could explain his absence from all movie-related promotions.

... I am not saying it's a good reason either way, though.

@thenomain Why must a future (or alien) civilization be stagnant and monolithic?

Just because our friendly alien friends have ascended to light wave forms it doesn't mean that has to be the end of the road for their evolution, or that their society has reached its final form or... anything.

@the-sands said in Good TV:

I think most people know Captain America's real name is Steve Rogers.

Quite likely since he was basically a war hero considered dead for decades. There was no point withholding his real name before he was fished out of the ocean.

@coin said in Life... in outer space!:

Gosh, guess it's time to define "civilization". XD

All I know about civilization is I'm always one more turn away from playing just one more turn and it's 3 am and I have to work tomorrow and shit.

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.

@coin Hrm? Linear doesn't only mean something is sequential, but also that it extends along a straight line.

So on a X/Y graph plotting advancement over time, human progress is anything but linear. It'd be full of long flat plateaus, raising now and then, going down a couple of times and there'd be a few spikes in the mix as well.

Edit: Look at this shit!

Did you guys try different skins or themes? Does the problem persist?

Edit: I just saw Sunny did. Hrm.

https://lifehacker.com/the-best-web-sites-to-get-your-retro-gaming-fix-1823765757

@coin said in Life... in outer space!:

Humans today might seem as incomprehensibly basic to those future "humans" as ants seem to us now.

Also let's keep in mind that although time is (probably...) linear, advancement isn't. The human species has been around for roughly 200,000 years according to earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans, which is a tiny bleep in the range of time, but consider how much more we've progressed technologically within say, the last 200 years of those? If you lived in 1100AD and in 1300Ad, other than for political changes your lifestyle would be more or less the same, but if you took a person from the 1800's and plugged them into today they'd barely know how to use the toilet or get out on the street without hurting themselves.

Now consider where, given this rate of advancement and all the things in our actual, current short term horizon (anything from self-driving cars, automation putting a potential end to work-for-a-living, 3D printing with the potential to change our lives again, gene editing which can change our biology, etc) our rate of advancement is accelerating.

Assuming there is life Out There relatively tiny timeline changes can make enormous differences. A thousand years is absolutely nothing on the cosmic scale, but we can't fathom what life will be like on earth a thousand years from now - we can't even really imagine what it will be like in fifty!

So a different civilization that just got that little bit of a head start on us? Maybe we wouldn't be like ants in comparison, but who knows.

@nemesis Please stop the he-said she-said. Basically everyone stop.

Either talk about identity theft on the internet or don't talk here. I won't ask again.

@bored said in Life... in outer space!:

@arkandel I have some issues with the anthill thing. Human explorers may not have stopped to talk to ants, but they knew that they were there, alive, and in some way part of the same existence. Fast forward only a very short while, and we sure try talking to apes, whales... dogs, cats (and some entomologist, probably, yes, ants).

That's kind of the point though. To an alien life form capable of reaching out to us in the first place we would be the ants in that scenario, not the apes or dogs and cats.

At the same time, we scrutinize every grain of dust we recover within our own solar system. We're not just looking for ants, but microbes.

I would say the chance is very high that we might miss a theoretical life form when we first (or second or third...) encounter it because we are looking for a paradigm similar to our own. It could be anything - and as for any communication, a good example from that OP article was taking ten years to say 'hello'; to us it would sound like white noise.

I wouldn't so much expect hot blue chicks Kirk would approve of as much as some kind of self-aware wave length or whatever the fuck. Good luck figuring that out, or for the scientist who does, proving to everyone else that he's right about that self awareness.

@ganymede Time is the Cavs' issue; Kevin Love is still out, more than half the roster wasn't even wearing the same jerseys a month ago... and there are a dozen games left to play.

They need to gel, and they won't have time to. So the question becomes to what extent they manage to do so before shit gets serious in the playoffs.

And the Defenders! Although Mr. Rand might need a new writing team.