Posts made by Arkandel

People who won't hang up the phone in general! "Okay, alright. Well... Alright. Yes, well, okay we'll talk.... Heh, alright. So. I'll talk to you..."

These are signs that suggest I would very much like this conversation to be over!

<sob>

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/30/george-rr-martin-the-winds-of-winter-publication

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

If a color e-ink equivalent existed that was big enough to read a comic or RPG book on, I would be the first in line to buy it. I suspect the market for it is even smaller than the market for e-readers, though, so I'm not holding out much hope for something like that.

The 10 inch Galaxy Tab S my wife got me for Christmas is a comic-book reading dream.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

This is why I love my e-reader but have zero need for a tablet. I need to get away from my laptop/work PC glare at the end of the day. E-ink is specifically designed not to cause eye strain. It does feel, to me at least, comparable to reading printed text. I still like the tactile nature of a printed book, but an e-ink reader works fine as a substitute and keeps my home library from swelling beyond the one wall-length shelf. The idea of reading on an Ipad or similar device for long periods of time, I cannot fathom, but it's a very different experience.

Yeah, reading on a tablet sucks. The battery life alone makes it not worth it.

I can't get comfortable with paper-books any more, I think it's as much a matter of habit as anything else. With the exception of material designed in a format that makes ebook readers a bad fit (say, technical manuals with diagrams, non-free flowing text with set columns, large page layouts like RPG books etc) I wouldn't go back even without the other advantages you mention.

The only time I remember hating my Kobo was during a commute back from work (i.e. in the train and about to get really bored). The bloody thing froze, something which happens very rarely but which actually requires a hardware reset - and that needs you to push a needle into a tiny hole to press the button. I of course had no such thing handy - normal books don't tend to stop working on you.

@Luna said:

A lot of your $20/month accounting SaaS is by businesses themselves. It's the promised land to owners who think Xero is going to be a sweet and easy DIY solution. Then they end up having to hire someone to fix what they fucked up.

When someone pays $20 then they get $20's worth. So yes, when things are working it's all good and you are getting a great deal. For regular users where you don't care about 24/7 availability with data redundancies built in (such as say, when I use Google Drive for my RP logs) it's all good.

However when shit hits the fan they're also going to get $20's worth of service though. If the hosting company's data center has issues that accounting firm's needs will be pretty damn near the end of the queue while some poor sysadmin runs around to bring up more critical systems (which are paid for quite a bit more handsomely).

@Luna said:

Even the IRS is paperless. Entire accounting firms are moving to not only paperless systems but to the cloud as well.

While the definition of 'cloud' is most often 'someone else's servers' I have to wonder if those firms really know what they're doing. I'm sure most do but the ones signing themselves up for that $20/month packages are in for such a rude awakening when things start to go boom.

Ruby, one of my dogs, is the most submissive, mild-mannered and non-aggressive creatures imaginable. On the contrary Izzie, my cat, is the kind of bully who takes advantage of such weaknesses so for years now every time she gets pissed off for any reason (say, if I kick her off my lap because I need to get up and go to the bathroom) she's been known to run over to Ruby and beat her up out of the blue to vent.

Over the years Ruby has been getting braver. Yesterday though it was hilarious and horrifying at the same time when the cat, freshly rejected from sitting in front of me while I was watching TV, went over to smack the poor dog while she was actually asleep, got snarled at and chased off the couch by a suddenly enraged dog whose primal instincts of fuck-off-dammit were finally activated after years of abuse-tolerant inertia.

It didn't last long, she got scared of her own rage and stopped within seconds then just looked confused (... 'what just happened?') but to see her actually baring her teeth like that was a revelation. I didn't know that bitch had it in her.

The Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne is a seriously good series. 2/3 books are now out. Solid politics, a great story, strong both female and male characters, plenty of action.

I've watched Breaking Bad. Checks out. Never cross a chemist.

@HelloRaptor said:

I consider 'a steady influx of new people' to be a design flaw, though.

What's the sane alternative?

@HelloRaptor said:

When it comes to XP though here's what's interesting: Most players will detest being unable to ever catch up in the power curve; everyone wants to be special. However players also detest when everyone catches up in the power curve; that's when no one is special.

The first of those grates on my nerves far more than the latter, which is more or less understandable when talking about games where there being a power curve is part of the setting.

It was just so very clear when you observed what some people who played on both HM and TR complained about. I mean crystal clear. In HM it was about being unable to catch up to the dinosaurs; in TR that everyone was at the same point.

The obvious and really, only conclusion here is that what many people want is to play in whatever system they, themselves, are ahead of others. That's about it.

And some staff just have a specific kind of game in mind. If you have (what you consider) a great idea for a Vampire sphere with its politics and metaplot, you might not want to dilute that by adding Werewolf on top of it.

But yeah, some splats work better in multi-sphere environments than others.

There is something I've long been fascinated by about the way power correlates to MU* and the reasons it makes designing one so difficult if you try to appeal to as many players as possible.

Players invest time into PCs on these games, a great deal more than an average table-top campaign. An average character on a MU* is played several times a week for sessions which often run for 2+ hours each; most dedicated roleplayers outside such settings don't invest more than a fraction of that.This means, in many cases, they want a return for that investment. It's a human thing; you put in time and effort and you'd like to see something back. Yes the fun you derive from playing should be it; no it's not enough. It is for some, it is not for the majority. In that way power and respect tend to be looked at as potential returns.

I won't discuss respect. It's not a rewardable trait.

When it comes to XP though here's what's interesting: Most players will detest being unable to ever catch up in the power curve; everyone wants to be special. However players also detest when everyone catches up in the power curve; that's when no one is special.

So we are sometimes urged to design games with conflicting design goals, either by allowing only some specific category of players to catch up (usually highly active ones) which alienates the coveted casual people with lives or by patching their approach in ways which conflict with the original plan - take TR for instance, where there were specific XP caps which got overridden in different amounts by things like Tier-ed characters, arcane XP bonuses and the like.

I don't think there's a universal solution out of this, games have to pick their poison. But it's still an interesting problem to tackle.

I don't know there's a 'best solution' per se since different people want different things.

My more or less ideal system is one where people get XP per week based on activity then no one lags less than a reasonable but substantial amount of % behind the leader. So if ES leads with 500 XP everyone else has to have at least 80% of that. Then add delay-spending to avoid overnight triple-Masters and you're good to go.

It lets the people ahead have their extra toys but they're still within range of others catching up if they stay more active. It's an approach that works best if one can define 'activity' in a satisfactory manner.

And even then obviously there are people who'd disagree it's a better system than the one they have in mind. We'll never get a consensus out of that, which is probably a good thing.

94% of bike riders wait at red lights, study finds

I cycle whenever the weather permits it, I logged four digits in km over the summer. But no, cyclists are nightmares; for starters many don't have a driving license at all, and they obviously consider themselves some sort of pedestrian/vehicle hybrid.

I've seen people do truly crazy stunts like take sharp diagonal left turns in front of coming traffic in the middle of a busy road just because, I guess, they figure they'll make it. Or not. Whichever. Or my favorite, keep riding through the red light to the zebra crossing where they go right through the crowd of pedestrians, get on the other side, then get on the road again. No shits given.

I love cyclists but I do feel there should be at least a driving test involved. Even just a written one. Something.

@mouse said:

Both, but I find many games becoming lazy and simply going the PrP only route.

I don't know that it's lazy as opposed to making a choice.

Staff normally needs to be marked as staff in order to fulfil their duties. When you type +jobs you're looking at a bunch more things than normal, you can go dark to avoid interruptions or catch policy violations such as harassment, you can teleport across the grid at will so you can build, etc.

A "staff ST" can't do anything inherently more than what a player can. You have access to the same commands.

Now consider that each time you add to staff you're adding to a certain overhead; you have to administrate one more person whose actions reflect on your game, they are given access to exclusive decision-making or information you might not want them to have. So unless you have a good reason for it why do so?

The answer to the question is probably somewhere in this thread. I'm not saying there's no good reason, just that it's not a given, and not necessarily the product of laziness.

@Coin Dammit, then my dreams of becoming rich (but hopefully not famous) through my elite TSing skills are crushed.

Back to the 9-5.

@RDC

Sounds like Geist on SHH. Except for the open part.

Come on, you don't think a large part of their client base doesn't ever intend to show these messages to anyone else?

I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of lonely people out there subscribing to this service. Hell, or its sexting equivalents.

... Damn, we need to pull our best TSers from these forums and form a sexting corporation. Finally, a niche for such skills! All those years roleplaying hot and steamy but dysfunctional relationships over text are about to pay off.

I suppose it's a way to monetize roleplaying.