Posts made by Arkandel

@Roz

Who else were they gonna name him after? If they had gone with Anakin only to see the damn kid fall to the Dark Side again... well, then they'd have been asking for it, wouldn't they?

@Coin said:

Also, your mom.

Fuck you!

@Coin said:

@Arkandel said:

When I was playing on a MUD it was simply called mudsex.

Which makes way more sex than the hilariously named "tinysex", I mean... come on!

Yes. It makes tons of sex.

Fuck you!

When I was playing on a MUD it was simply called mudsex.

Which makes way more sex than the hilariously named "tinysex", I mean... come on!

I smell fanfic coming up in 5...!

Some men just want to watch the world burn, eh?

The biggest ever XBox games sale.

@Tempest said:

I have nothing but for you both, but that is the flakiest headstaff combo possible.

Somethingsomething or your money back.

IMHO, no. Well, not at a significantly higher chance of success than before the new movie.

Basically MU* success as defined in terms of activity and popularity (there are other metrics but they're unquantifiable) is largely a matter of momentum; a large number of players create at once, thus generating things to do for each other. For that to exist a critical number of gamers must exist first for such activity to self-perpetuate.

By the time a new Star Wars MU* goes through the process of development, having a grid built, coded getting a wiki, tested etc it'll be weeks/months. By that time the movie will be relatively old news, at least for the purpose of thrilling players enough to attract them over.

None of these things means I wouldn't give it a try, though.

I believe most of the phenomena and paradigms above can be broken down to the fact we're losing more players than we're getting. Roleplay in MU* unlike what we find on table-top is largely dependent on - usually a small minority of - players who are able to create, as opposed to carrying on and expanding, plot threads which can then be picked up by others.

For each such person who burns out, has been caught up by real life or simply moved on it's increasingly difficult to replace them simply because one of the main factors in being able to do what such flagship players do is experience; so as the number of folks who've been playing for years and have the ability to do so diminishes newer ones with the potential and talent to replace them never find the same circumstances and opportunities which existed, say, in the late nineties or early 2000's.

There's a chance we're on a slow downward spiral. Another way to see it though is that we're going through a slum until the paradigm changes to allow for our hobby's resurgence.

@Griatch Thanks! I'll take a look at it as soon as my workload allows it. The holidays are almost upon us.

Here's some background from a certain point of view.

After the Roman Empire was split into two, the Easter Roman Empire had Constantinople as its capital whose name was derived from Constantine the Great. For most of that reign it was simply referred to as The City ("Η Πόλις").

After that point, and over time, it was increasingly 'roman' in only name - the Empire's official language was greek and its culture was a hybrid between hellenic and latin. It didn't quite experience the Dark Ages in the same way western Europe (arts and letters were still alive for a vast duration of its nearly thousand-year reign) did although it was still really brutal; if anyone feels like it, take a look at [the Nika riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots. Few shits were given about slaughtering a few thousands of their own citizens.

During its decline Constantinople was sacked twice; once in 1204 by Christians during the Crusade (who did far more damage to christian artifacts by carrying off and melting treasures to sell their gold than muslim Turks ever did later on - they famously brought mules into the Hagia Sofia to carry precious murals and heavy pieces of art out) although it was reclaimed by the remnants of Byzantium's Empire, although in a severely weakened state until it finally fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.

As for the current name, "Istambul" is derived from the Greek phrase "Εις Την Πόλιν" ('in the City') which is how citizens referred to it.

This is from Reddit, not my own words.

"When you get into armed martial arts (especially something developed for agility and speed) like WuShu or the various Shao Lin Kung Fu forms, one of your major strategies is to go blade to blade, because your opponent will be using their similar speed and agility (swinging from cables non withstanding) to block In a way that enables them to instantly counter attack agressively. You go blade to blade in a very practiced routine to try to work your opponent's blade into a position to attack, without the counter attack. Also to work your opponents center of gravity over their heels.

If you do that you throw off their center of balance, and this takes away some of your opponent's agility and strength, because they have to use those resources to keep their feet. Especially if two opponents know each other and each others combat styles strengths and weaknesses, even in a competitive environment it can look choreographed.
So those kinds of scenes actually fit the prequels quite well.

In the originals we have a different situation. Yoda and Obi-Wan are teaching Luke to be a weapon, not a martial artist. Kind of like the difference between Bruce Lee (absolutely a lethal guy) and a samurai warrior. In fact the sword master hired for the originals based lightsaber combat on single katana combat. It's more direct and designed for single hit kill. Extremely fast but very aggressive and linear moving.

Both kinds of fighting, martial arts and combat, are just as lethal but they're very different.

This kind of combat fits Obi-Wan, Vader and Luke very well. Vader is wearing heavy (Saber resistant) armor. Obi-Wan is not only older and less agile (the force could make up for that though) but Vader is a very different opponent now, and his strategy is to survive long enough for Luke to witness his sacrifice. Now he needs to stop each potentially lethal attack as they happen. Luke is almost on a suicide mission against a titan, and needs to get the upper hand fast. He needs to win at Street Fighter, not chess. Two hand Katana fits these movies with these characters perfectly.
It also makes sense because it keeps the blade in a very tight controlled area, with most of the moves keeping your own blade (made out of magnetically contained plasma) as far from you as possible for most of the fight.

So now we have TFA. Kylo Ren is using what essentially boils down to a German or Scottish bastard sword. I used to do SCA tournament combat, and what Ren is doing looks very similar to 11th or 12th century German. He has a lot of flourish though. It's for camera so there's going to be telegraphing. European medieval combat was both for duels and for on field warfare, and this is where we find Ren. Vader comes to a battle, leads and single targets. Ren leads and is in the middle of the battle.

Fin is opportunistically striking, he's not a highly trained martial combatant, and Rey is an efficient street brawler. She only gains an upper hand by calming herself into the force and using its potential.

All of these styles were chosen for their era in the Star Wars timeline and fit very well."

Another thing I liked was the way power levels fluctuated throughout the movie. Kylo Ren, for all that he lost like a chump at the end, was incredibly powerful - the guy stopped blasters in mid-air, that's pretty impressive. He did things with the Force we haven't seen in the movies so far.

Then he went down to Rey which made him look bad since she's completely untrained and only figured out how to do half this stuff about an hour before their fight) even though he was wounded at the time.

It's hard to say yet if this trilogy is about Ben's redemption or if it'll be dedicated to the rise of the Jedi but I think it's more of the former, especially given how some tropes are being replayed from the original trilogy so far. The lone orphan on a desert planet finding a droid containing the information leading to the last Jedi in the galady, the ending where a small ragtag team infiltrates and destroys a planet-killing machine, etc.

At this point though I think the galaxy would be safer if they just sterilized every damn Skywalker around. Man do they have a tendency to get a lot of people murdered until they figure their shit out.

Also, apparently there's some controversy about Rey and whether she's too perfect or not feminist enough.

Pah.

I loved it in every conceivable way. My only tiny reservation was at the very end -- Chewie is right there when they find Luke, and he doesn't go up to see one of his oldest friends in the world but instead they send a girl he's never met? It didn't make sense.

Yes, I'm nitpicking.

Han died. Wow. I guess Harrison Ford got his wish - if anyone feels like it, this is a kickass interview he gave to Rolling Stone. The guy is really smart and completely candid about his feelings on film-making and people in general.

Also, I loved Rey. They got a female action heroine right; she's not written as a man with boobs, she's an interesting character who happens to kick ass. And wields a mean lightsaber. Awesome.

A thread to discuss The Force Awakens.

This will be full of spoilers.

...

...

So, how good was it?

Sure, sounds good.

There are three cases here.

1. Fixed groups would require permanent channels. Say, you have a coterie of vampires - you don't want to have to check who's on just to chat with the other members, all you want is do something like "co Hey all!" and whoever's logged on sees it.

2. Occasional groups such as when a Storyteller running a scheduled event is trying to coordinate with the players who showed up for it. There's no need for this one to be permanent as long as it's easy for one person to add/remove players from the participants' list instead of every person having to edit their recipients individually.

3. Very crowded rooms need an equivalent of MUSH 'places'. Then instead of everyone having to endure everyone else's spam RP can be broken down into circles ('booth in the corner', 'at the bar', etc) for both IC and OOC communication.