@bored said in ITT: Names You Always See:
@Tinuviel said in ITT: Names You Always See:
ITT mostly fairly common Anglophone names...
I raise you a Siobhan.
Oh yes, add Niamh and Aislin/Aisling (which, homg, I heard someone on YouTube today call themselves Aislin EXCEPT PRONOUNCED ENTIRELY WRONG AND I WANTED TO REACH THROUGH THE SCREEN AND STRANGLE THEM)
My cat sleeps on the back of the sofa behind me with one paw out and on my shoulder.
Also: got a call from a recruiter about a job with Google (well with a company they recently-ish acquired). She kept saying how I'm p. much the perfect candidate.
We'll see how this one goes.
What is the responsibility of leaders to check themselves on policy vs opinion?
What is the responsibility of players to call out leaders on bad opinions?
IRL, we clearly have no problem doing this. Particularly for leaders we dislike (hello China, Trump, NKorea...), but even for leaders we like (we would agree with Obama most of the time, but there were decisions he made that we'd go 'hey now, that wasn't cool' and voice our disapproval in public spaces such as Twitter and Facebook). It's part of what we do as society.
However, on MUs, we often don't do this. The need/want to fit in (particularly when a PC leader is seen as a route-to-staff or even a staff alt) causes us to often fall in line, even for things we disagree with.
So often I witness situations in which a PC leader will give an opinion and it gets followed as if it were law, even if PCs would otherwise disagree with it. To give an example:
A Lance Prince (Archbishop!) is sitting around and says: 'You know, I think we really ought not use junkies as herds.'
It's not declared law in the City. It's simply an opinion.
But those sitting with him, knowing he's the Prince, knowing he has sway and power and is OOCly bffs with the Vamp TL ICly go: 'Yeah, totally. We'd never do that!'
Next thing you know, word goes around. 'Don't use junkies as blood bags!'*
And PCs with Herd (Junkies) merits start getting the side eye.
It's not a Law.
There's nothing against it.
OOCly, some people are actually kinda pissed. They've even +requested from Staff and had it clarified: 'There's no rule against it. You're totally fine. This is perfectly acceptable IC. Some people might not like it.'
But ICly, the atmosphere is: this is super bad, you should never do this.
And when those people try to speak up IC: 'Hey, I'm well within my rights, this is fine' they find themselves ICly dogpiled and even ostracized, threatened with being staked, cast out, etc., as if it were a law and suddenly they find themselves facing a decision: do I keep fighting this (because I'm not breaking any rules IC, because I'm within my rights, I'm correct, and I paid for a merit) even though it's exhausting... or do I go with mob rule?
I see this happen often on games. Very, very often.
Hell, I've been on both sides: the side going along with something because I don't wanna be the weed that gets cut down and the side fighting back because goddamnit that was just an opinion not law. And you know what? The latter fucking sucks. It's exhausting.
So what this comes down to is:
*ffs don't argue the semantics of the scenario. I know a proper Lance Prince would be unlikely to give this edict. It's a HYPOTHETICAL you knobs.
@roz said in RL things I love:
@haven said in RL things I love:
@roz said in RL things I love:
@haven said in RL things I love:
@mr-johnson said in RL things I love:
9/10 straight women agree: Happy boners best boner. Angry boners come in at number two, and way at the bottom of the pack, nobodies favorite: Sad boners. Poor, poor sad boners. No body wins with a sad boner. T-T
A sad boner shouldn't even be in this thread. Monsters.
Better take out that Kylo Ren gif, then.
I can't speak to the disposition of his boner. Sadly. SADLY!
The entire personhood of Kylo Ren is a sad boner.
He is like the personification of 15 year old boys in their bedroom playing WoW on a Saturday night.
If that isn't a sad boner, I don't know what is.
@Arkandel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:
Just to be clear, what I meant was things happening IC that are wrong OOC, but which both players involved consent to.
Players have consented to rape scenarios.
This is a whole thing on games like Shang.
If all the players involved are OK with it, go for it.
I mean, for fuck's sake, I've had a werewolf bring live animals to her vampire lover so they could kill them and fuck in the warm blood and guts. I imagine there are vegans/PETA types who would be utterly appalled by that even if I find it kind of amazing to think about in that part of my mind that loves horror.
@Ghost said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:
We had some good times. Success story. High five. Zero RL tension. Hooray for writing fucking stories.
That story, btw, ended up exactly where I hoped. Like, it's rare you can pull that kind of thing off on games. So many 'romance' stories just go 'RP a few weeks, forever in love, cuddle on couch and fuck everyday.' I love that they got into some rough times, one went off to cheat, they had a HUGE FIGHT DESTROYING A CABANA and had to figure out how to get back on track over the course of months. It was perfect. It's why I miss it.
@cobaltasaurus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
"Y'all did amazing yesterday! ...so we're turning the heat up! Do better tomorrow!"
This is actually the core of everything Verizon is built around. Like no shit, their motto internally is 'Today we did good, tomorrow we'll do better.'
So it never matter how good a job you do... they expect tomorrow you'll do better. AND THEY THINK THAT'S JUST SWELL.
Which is why you meet so many ex-Verizon employees who suffered the same mental break I did when I worked there. The "We were told we were #1 in the <region/city/country/etc>, but it wasn't good enough" spiel. It's legit what went down with me: #1 team in tech support in the country at the time (that quarter), but every weekly stand up meeting we had, we were being berated that it wasn't good enough and we can do better
and one day I just couldn't leave my house. I just snapped. It took two months, then extensive therapy, then baby steps (walks, short trips to nearby stores, and I'm still p fucking hermity)... to be able to go outside again.
And I know a lot of people like that.
Yet companies keep fucking do it and it just makes me really fucking angry.
No. You reward your employees with shit like pizza parties or company outings or even shit so simple as goddamn company merch ('cause we know it's never with PTO or raises). Not more work while you, upper management, cut out early and/or give yourself a raise.
@Herja said in MU Things I Love:
@Auspice You haven't even TSed me yet, tho.
This is true.
Everyone get in line so I can decide who is best.
(lemme stretch first tho.)
My company avoids raises by having wage transparency.....for everyone below Project Manager status. So team leads, tier two types, employee, contractor... All wage transparency.
Thus: "we don't see the need for raises when there's wage transparency!"
Everyone else? "Salary dependent on experience"
And if the way below market or cost of living wages comes up in the office, management will laugh and go "we barely make enough to live either!
Except almost every single one of them have taken roughly 2-3 weeks of paid time off each since October. No one who isn't salary gets even paid sick leave. Don't work? Don't get paid. Sick? You'll get forced to stay home (so that the office doesn't get sick). I mean sure, no one wants to be sick. But I kind of like being able to pay my bills and affording groceries, which I can't unless I work every single hour and beg for the occasional overtime.
The company has been around 10 years. I've been with them for 7. The furthest I've made it is team lead.
I've never gotten any recognition. Never a bonus. Never any acknowledgement but verbal from my project managers. I've never had any disciplinary action taken against me.
Most companies, after 7 years, you're getting time in service raises, an extra week of vacation, etc.
I have nothing.
When I got asked, after my interview on Friday, if I need to give a full 2 weeks because they're starting their next class on the 23rd (if they decide to hire me)... I thought for a moment (because I usually do) and finally decided: No. No I don't.
After all... TX is a right to work state and my current job has done absolutely nothing to earn my loyalty. My current project just lost two people. After cutting hours and letting people go. My PM is panicking over filling those hours.
I am more than ready to hit them where it hurts. I am the only person closing that office five nights a week.
Fucking bring it.
So I didn't get the job I was aiming for, which sucked.
But things will improve a bit. I'd put in for a new position at my current company. I got in today to find out I got it.
Still no benefits like PTO, but it will come with a raise. Enough of one to negate my commuting costs. So I'll be able to actually start paying off debt, getting this car shit taken care of, etc. (Maybe buy a desk so I can play games again?) slowly, but yeah.
Monday through Friday schedule. Hours during the week flexible: put in forty and I'm good.
And it'll be more properly tier 2. Less direct customer interaction.
Also working with a product that will look really nice on my resume in the IT world.
@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:
I put together a general privacy article for Ares games if anyone's interested. (Feel free to send me any comments on things I've missed, explained poorly, etc.)
In the next patch it'll be available on the games themselves in 'help privacy'.
stop being so proactive and making the rest of us lazy bastards look bad.
@kay said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@auspice That's... There's got to be someone who can make heads roll because of that. That's not acceptable. I'm so sorry. And what shitty timing too.
I've been sick of this guy for a while.
He takes full advantage of being on salary by almost never being in the office. His training for new people is usually just '<handwave> here read some stuff' and the rest of us have to desperately fill in and help.
He still owes me a reimbursement for something from two months ago.
So yeah, I've got an official fucking complaint filed on this and I am making it my goddamn mission now to get his ass fired.
If I could afford to quit, I'd just do that, but I'd be homeless if I did.
@mietze said in Staff’s Job?:
Why would I want someone who doesnt want the job to take that role? Why would reluctance to do the job qualify someone to take on that role?
I'm not sure it's reluctance so much as...
I think the answer might lie somewhere in the middle.
I love running SGM because I have stories to tell there and it's a game I've wanted to see for a while. It's been fun to experiment, to learn even more what's under the hood with Ares, etc.
But I recall something I often ran into when I was considering a Magicians game:
I had a few people come to me expressing an interest in Staffing. They really really wanted to Staff!
And my first question was always: 'Will you ST? At least once a month? Staffing (approving apps, answering +jobs, etc.) is pretty easy on Ares. Unless the game gets really big, it can reasonably be done by a single person (as Faraday has proven). What I really need are STs.'
Every single person, to the last, ducked out.
What that told me was: they wanted to staff for the sake of staffing more than actively contributing to the needs of the game.
And I think that may be where Arkandel is coming from. And I get it, 100%. I want people who are enthusiastic for the game and what it needs... not people who are enthusiastic just for the staff title. The latter often end up hanging out just to hang out and don't even do the busy work, causing the rest of staff to end up shouldering the burden anyway.
Now, does every game need all Staff to ST? Heck no. WoD games, for example, need job monkeys, app staff, etc. (ETA: and again, unless the person coming in cares about what they're hired to do, they often just sit around. I see a lot of 'job monkey' people who will touch a couple jobs a month but spend the rest of their time just hanging out in the staff lounge chatting).
My game concept didn't need 'job monkeys;' most Ares games start out a lot smaller than WoD games.
@arkandel said in Favorite music streaming service?:
@admiral said in Favorite music streaming service?:
But you can shape and grow your playlists as you go.
I just hate having to do the work.
Downloading MP3s is definitely the way I'd want to do it, but my Pixel 2 has no SD card slot and 'only' 64 GB... most of which have gone to apps and data as it is. So I can't have my stuff on the go unless I want to listen to the same stuff a lot.
I tend to curate my own music very specifically because I always have (I used to build my MP3 collection not by the album or artist, but by the song). However, Spotify's 'radio' option (right-click on a song, select 'Go to radio') is pretty good. I find it curates really well based on that.
It's not an artist radio, but it plays songs similar to the one selected. If you go to Browse, you can go through Charts, Genres, even Moods. I love the Moods section. Music for relaxation? Studying? Workouts? etc.? I actually find those collections to be awesome and some have been folded into my saved library.
Spotify has also started adding audiobooks, podcasts, etc., to their library.
It works great with both my Google Home and Alexa (yes, I have both; former in my living room, latter in my bedroom). I'm able to move flawlessly on it from my laptop to my phone to both devices. I only wish it had Roku integration since I just got one of those. I know it used to, but I think they have a deal with Amazon right now, unfortunately.
Also, the 'Discover Weekly' (a new list generated every Monday with suggestions based on what you listen to) is a lot of fun. I set aside time every week to listen through mine.
@Ganymede said in MU Things I Love:
@RightMeow said in MU Things I Love:
So I had a horrible day yesterday. I'm not going into it because no one cares (I'm totally okay with that btw). However, I pulled myself out for RP. I camped down and the people made me laugh so much. It made my day better. They didn't even know I was having a bad one.
I usually have nothing but hate for people who idle in the OOC Lounge waiting for RP to come to them.
But I have come to realize in my old age that many folks are idling there and not waiting for RP to come for the reasons you mention above.
Some people are just damn funny over channels, and laughing at them can be therapeutic.
some days (a lot of them lately thanks to work) I just don't have the energy for RP, but I need to chill and relax in those few hours before I ptfo.
And getting to just bs around with people and have fun? It makes up for the hard day.
Got an interview lined up tomorrow with an uncertain company. I think they're one of those who advertise for marketing and then it's a "whoops! Haha! We're actually in store sales teams!" but the job description doesn't list that and is a higher salary than those usually pay.
So meh. They're only a couple miles from my apartment and it's a meet and greet sort of interview. So I'll hear it out.
But! I also got contacted by a recruiter at Dell about a position on their Alienware / gaming team for social media management. Pay there would be almost twice what I'm making. So imma push for that one really hard.
@bored said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:
HOWEVER (and this is a big however), someone pointed out upthread that OOC-creep and IC-creep poses look different and that is a HUGE big thing to acknowledge.
'Purely IC' is a definition that expands a bit beyond 'this was in a pose/emit' vs this was <OOC> text/page.' OOC can and very often does bleed into poses, and there's nothing wrong with applying our experience and human judgment to these things (and in fact it's a bit willfully oblivious not to). We do it easily for the 'obviously butthurt snarky metapose' shit, and I tend to find that OOC-creepery in posed/emitted form is just as obvious and cringe. We engage with one of these pretty aggressively, so leaving out the other is clearly a bit of a willful blind-spot.
Now, some percentage of creepery may slip through from much more skillful writers/manipulators but I think most of this is going to be under the public radar vs. something 3rd parties are casual witnesses to. Most of the serial, problematic, frequent creeps are kind of shit and easy to pick out, and it's fine to narrow in on that behavior sooner rather than later.
I was one of those who made that point and that was, largely, the purpose of this thread.
What I witnessed (and I don't want to go back through logs and find it just so everyone can nitpick over it because that scenario was not the point of this, but the concept of it was) flagged for this reason.
It wasn't 'oh hey this person is being an IC creep' it was 'these poses feel manipulative and like they are forcing a specific response' - in, yes, a similar vein as 'metapose snark' is trying to specifically target someone without 'allowing' a response.
Sure, it MIGHT just be IC and it MIGHT be someone who is just bad at writing out the way the character is. But in reading it, I felt 'woah, this person is trying to force a specific response out of this other individual and that feels grody and weird to me: if I was on the receiving end, I'd be booking it.'
So I think, in the future, I probably will do a quick, polite page to make sure the recipient is OK.
@Ghost said in Empire State Heroes Mush:
@Auspice said in Empire State Heroes Mush:
LOOK WE ALL WANT TO DO BEDROOM STUFF TO MARISA TOMEI AUNT MAY
Whoa whoa. Watch that use of all. I kinda prefer My Cousin Vinnie or The Wrestler Marisa Tomei.
LOOK WE ALL WANT TO DO BEDROOM STUFF TO MARISA TOMEI
BETTER?!
@cobaltasaurus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Don’t order delivery ten minutes before the store closes! That is cleaning time >_<
This happens in the restaurant world, too.
5 min from closing, kitchen is almost clean, everyone's wrapping up.........
Big party walks through the door.
You can bet there's a raging kitchen staff when you do that. Don't be those people.
