Posts made by Arkandel

@mietze The darkest timeline is at my current company which, as good as it is about many other things, is forcing us to wear button-down shirts, proper pants and absolutely no t-shirts.

We don't even ever have clients over here! Whyyy.

Shazam! was fun.

I expected it to be great, though, and it wasn't. I felt a lot of its best, funniest moments were in the trailers.

@Ghost In fairness, if that's your last name why wouldn't you name your son that?

@Auspice What if you are a fruit fly?

Gawd don't be racist.

It's weird reading about all your guys' wonderful families full of nerds. I just can't relate to it at all since my relatives - although they were all wonderful in all the other ways that matter - were and are not nerdy at all.

My mom always rolled her eyes at the "weird dracula movies" I was watching, never knew what games a bunch of us kids were playing on her dining room table and never really knew what I'm doing for a living, either ("he works with computers").

Even today my sister basically refuses to watch Game of Thrones or any sci-fi even though she watches a lot of other stuff. She just... isn't into any of it. My niece on the other hand, who's in her early twenties now and whom I spent hours talking to about Harry Potter when she was a tiny little girl, has been on multiple D&D campaigns already so the circle is finally broken.

@Testament Sturm Brightblade's end... man. That was harsh.

Misplaced posts moved over from the Ad thread.

@Roz So you're like a mutant, unlike the rest of us who had to be bitten by radioactive nerdy spiders.

I was thinking about what I read, watched or even heard of as a kid that got me into this geeky stuff many of us here are into - which I understand is now becoming mainstream but didn't always used to.

So maybe we can discuss what got you to be the person you now are, kind poster! What did you experience in your formative years that made you go "wow, that stuff is different and cool?".

For me it was a few completely separate experiences, many so random that it makes me wonder how things could have turned out if I hadn't had them.

• One of my childhood friends was around the day my parents were dragging me over to my mom's home town for a visit and he joined along (which had never happened before nor did since, usually I was the only kid there and bored as hell). So while we were walking around the empty streets there at mid-day he was telling me about this Conan the Barbarian movie he had watched, and I hadn't, describing all those insanely cool things about the hero falling into a dead king's tomb and fighting monsters - I was fucking hooked. Oh, and Thundercats, he had watched way more episodes than I had, and he made Mumm Ra sound so dangerous and intimidating.

• A different buddy of mine in elementary school - who's now a University professor in BC - lent me the Hobbit. I had no idea what it was but sure, I read it and I liked it. What a weird, different book that was. And then when I brought it back to him he told me there was 'another book' following it up... mind blown, books can have followups? Whaaat? So I read it out of curiosity and, spoiler alert, it was The Fellowship of the Ring which went off like a tactical nuclear bomb in my 12 year old mind. I read it twice, consuming every page like I was starving, and then could barely think of anything else. Nothing ever delivered that kind of awe for me since those first reads.

• So I broke my leg one summer. I was playing with my dog and fell off a wall (don't ask) which led a pre-teen boy being unable to play with his friends all summer long. It was going to be hell! But then again we had just gotten a VCR and my dad would bring anything I told him from the store, he didn't give a shit about ratings... so horror movies it was. How do I know I watched over a hundred of them in those weeks? Because I still have a small notebook where I had written their names since so many sounded very similar and it was confusing. What did the experience do for me? So much, from getting me fluent in a language I didn't speak that well over that small span of time to getting me exposed to all kinds of cult movies, from The Thing to Fright Night.

• For a long time as a teenager I was resisting reading Isaac Asimov. I didn't think I'd like science fiction since I had read some Arthur Clarke and it didn't quite agree with me... but I was bored at a bookstore one day and so I picked I, Robot. What do you mean heroes could rely on their brains? And abhor violence because it was a sign of incompetence? So by the time I read the Foundation series, going from one cliffhanger, logical puzzle, foreshadowed revelation I had completely missed and tied everything together - that stuff affected not just what I liked as a reader or even nerd but who I wanted to be as a person.

Strangely enough starting on MUDs or even AD&D wasn't that 'formative' for me because by then I was aware I was into and actively pursued these things. I do recall quite fondly reading the premise of Vampire: the Masquerade though when I was at university because it was such a compact, cool concept since it tied gameplay and theme in ways I still believe are really brilliant.

What's your nerd origin story?

@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I went through some training shit for this new job I'm due to start soon-ish and they had this lovely section on how everyone in your life is a customer.

Your friends!
Your family!

Actually that sounds like a pyramid scheme.

@Pandora said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Almost any sentence that begins "I'm 'not racist, but'..." is probably fucking RACIST.

Yep. Just like anyone who says "it's not the money, it's the principle"... it's the money.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

Firing someone for looking elsewhere seems like the stupidest thing, to me. If the person is important enough, wouldn't you rather try to tempt them to stay with benefits? And if they're not important enough for that, they're not important enough to fire either.

I'm not gonna defend anyone for this practice on a moral level because it's not defensible but from a bottom-line kind of view it does make sense. Depending on the job position, the first few months of an employee's tenure can and are often a loss - not only are they not yet versed enough in your business flows and their own duties to be efficient but they're also a drain on resources since you have to assign more experienced people to train them, correct their inevitable mistakes, evaluate them, etc.

So if you know someone is leaving in a couple of months you could decide you're not getting enough out of them to be worth it, especially if you have more applicants in the pipeline who might be just as good and they're not planning on leaving.

@Ghost There's a reason I spared that post

I know guys, he's already gone.

@Ghost You already ordered it, didn't you.

@Cupcake I think the issue here isn't work-friends or not, it's having established personal relationships so people know where you're coming from.

For example a work-friend started coming to our basketball games recently but I know him, we char regularly, etc. So when we played I'd give him pointers ("you shouldn't let me get positioned inside for a rebound, push back man!") and I didn't feel it was received as anything than what it was meant to.

But if I went to a guy who had never met me, shoved him out of the way and then 'advised' him on what he 'should' have done... that's a whole different thing.

@dvoraen said in RL things I love:

That feeling of excitement for entertaining stuff coming out despite the fact I know that I will inevitably be tearing my hair out over it (because of other people, and sometimes yours truly). This is also known as an MMO Expansion launch (and raiding).

What's launching?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mattfleming/doublesix-dice-generation-two

This is so utterly stupid it's awesome

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/03/25/the-lord-of-the-rings-gollum-announced-for-release-in-2021

Chinese government burns Call of Cthulhu supplement.