Best posts made by Auspice

In Altered Carbon, adapting to a new sleeve is... hell. The Envoys (and presumably others) have special tactics and training to force it, but even then it's not easy. The consciousness struggles with it.

IRL, people who lose limbs still feel them. There's the whole 'phantom limb' thing for a reason.

There are a lot of reasons that getting cybernetics (esp. full limb and similar) would have a negative impact on the psyche. And you have to consider the audience it was written to. Going into the nuances, providing special roll charts/tables for 'to what extent' it impacts someone is not the roleplay experience most people are looking for. They just want to know 'x + y = z' and 'hey this is gonna fuck your shit up' gives a spectrum to RP within, rather than a) saying it has zero effect (which is disregarding real issues in its own cruel way) or b) saying 'you must RP this in this way and this way only' (which disregards the spectrum in which someone might embrace or not or respond or not).

I was able to pay my rent for another month.

I really really love this right now.

I may not be able to pay it in May unless I find a better job. But right now I have a place to live and that's fucking awesome.

The haunted portrait is fun:

@jibberthehut said in RL things I love:

you need like an 8 inch throat to handle

(#sorrynotsorry I had to)

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

All of this talk about people getting involved in drama about sex makes me think I put off really unapproachable vibes. I've had that happen precisely once, and it wasn't stemming out of organic RP. A friend and I decided to try something and a third party got upset.

Now I just have to figure out whether my unapproachable vibes are of the awesome variety or of the not awesome variety. Am I an imposing tiger or am I stinky cheese

It seems to be like, 50/50 for me.
Some characters get hit on all the time, some don't.
Teagan never gets hit on. Ever. I began thinking it was something about me. And then I made Ephrath and she gets hit on a fair bit (and she usually has a bit of an 'oh no what do I do now' internal panic over it because she's hella shy).

I could not tell you what it is that causes a character to be hit on or not.

Except redheads.
If you play a redhead it is the milkshake that brings all the boys to the yard.

This is an 'RL Thing I Love' with a taste of 'RL Thing That Gives Me Terrible Itchy Anxiety and Horror'

Some of y'all who frequent imgur may have seen the promoted posts from Mikes Hard Lemonade for their giveaway for Mother's Day, offering winners round trip visits to surprise their mom.

...I won one.

I entered because the last time I saw my mom -- the only time I've seen her in a couple years -- was a rushed two days for my grandmother's funeral. We got to talk in snippets. And she was the driving force behind convincing my dad to help pay off the rest of a small loan I'd taken out for school years ago... and when they did, her only ask had been that I get my passport so she could take me on a cruise 'someday.' She misses me. So I entered because it was a pie-in-the-sky 'My mom would appreciate it' thing.

I mean it's not like 'anyone' wins those.

...I did.

And since it's only 3 days and one of my coworkers who I only overlap 2 days of work with has said he's happy to swap days with me whenever I need a weekend off (I'm taking his old shift while he moves to Mon-Fri)... It looks totally doable.

The anxiety comes in with the fact that just last summer, my brother made death threats against me. Part of the prize package is I can accept a hotel room, so I totally will to avoid having to stay in the house where my brother is, but still. I'm really, really terrified of being around him. I miss my other two brothers (who are awesome), but I'm really uncertain about being around him.

I just have to not let the anxiety stop me from submitting the prize winning paperwork/forms on time.

@TNP said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Ganymede said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Ganymede: Great! Now, show me your kitties.

Raise your hand if you read that as titties.

I mean, it was Gany asking to see pussy.

@Rinel said in Good TV:

I don't really feel the Magicians finale fits the trope. I'm going to steal from a reddit comment that summarized how I felt about it much better than I could:

HUGE SPOILERS FOR THE FINALE AND ALSO A LOT OF WORDS:

***SERIOUSLY THESE ARE BIG SPOILERS***

click to show

There is this new found idea that any queer, mentally ill, whatever-isn’t-a-straight-white-absolutely neurotypical-dudebro characters can NEVER die or have anythingtoo bad can happen to them. That’s not how it works and it’s not how it should work. For writers and creators no character should be immortal or untouchable. People have created this notion that “well this character was important to me and I related to them because of this or that so you cannot touch them because now my representation is gone and you’re evil for it”.

Every character in fiction is going to resonate with you or a group of people somewhere for some reason. The more limitations we put on creators for who they can and cannot kill the less of those characters we are going to get. Think about it seriously. Out of the main group who could they kill without backlash? Stella who is Native American? Hale who is openly queer? Arjun who has dual citizenship in America and India? Summer who is Hispanic and Indian? Jade who is part Israeli? Yes, Quentin was queer and had a romantic relationship with Eliot. That’s canon. The fandom cannot swoon over A Life in the Day and say how beautiful and perfect it was and then when Q dies it’s no longer a good thing- it’s queerbaiting. In the finale the pain between Eliot and Q is the most obvious. Even above Alice! Q is devastated when he see Eliot. It might not be the conclusion you wanted, but it’s a really touching one if you think about it. Bury Your Gays is a little more complicated than what fandom seems to think it means. According to TVTropes.org, Bury Your Gays is, “the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heteronormative counterparts. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances.” Quentin, in no way, is what anyone considered more expendable than the other characters especially because he isn’t the only queer character. So are we not touching anyone because creators cannot kill anyone? We can’t beg and plead for more representation and then have a show with a really diverse cast and then have fandom freak out if one of these diverse characters is killed.

Regarding the mental health issues:

Okay. This is pretty serious. A huge part of who Q is is someone who struggles with mental illness. He’s tried to kill himself, been instituted, meds, therapy, everything. Having him ask Penny40 if he just finally found a way to kill himself was what pissed me of the most. Then I rewatched that scene over and over. Secrets Taken to the Grave is there to let people process all those feelings. Quentin’s ultimate question was “am I a hero or am I just suicidal?” Penny40 takes him to show what a major impact he made on his love ones. He was a mentally ill hero. That’s who Quentin was. He showed us you can be both. Isn’t that amazing? To know that your mental illness doesn’t have to be “cured” for you to be a hero and to have positively changed so many people’s lives? That’s amazing. Another thing I want to touch on with this issue is something I noticed really early on in the series. They are NO JOKE about giving viewers crisis hotlines. 13 Reasons Why is an entire show about suicide and they didn’t put anything about it until there was major backlash. Syfy has handled difficult storylines with the class to put crisis information after many of their episodes. They wouldn’t have done all of that for the past 4 years if they didn’t care about their fans. If you are suffering from any mental health issues, you are valid. You have every right to be affected by anything you consume. Music, books, movies, TV shows, whatever. You do not have to explain or feel bad about it. You can be mentally ill and be a positive force in this world. As someone with Bipolar I and horrible panic attacks, I was actually touched because sometimes I think everything I touch is tainted because how can anything I do be good when I don’t even feel like I’m good enough to be alive?

***=Ok, so, my thoughts in this vein More spoilers for Magicians follow...***

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Short hair and excessive personal grooming were a thing.

They didn't steal women. Women just liked a man who knew how to bathe.

@faraday said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Sad for all the struggles folks have gone through.

Like many adults, I didn't realize I had ADHD until my kids were diagnosed, then I realized that they were struggling with the same things I have my whole life. My parents still don't believe that I have it ("But you were such a good student!") but I'm pretty much the poster girl for adult ADD symptoms, and they've been there for as long as I can remember.

Some coping mechanisms:

• Timers. We have an alexa at home and 90% of my use is to set timers. "Remind me in 60 minutes to change the laundry." "Set a 20 minute timer" (for my kids to stop playing video games). etc.
• Fidgets. I spent my life drumming on tables and destroying straw wrappers. One year I was so bored in meetings I started practicing writing the alphabet left-handed. Nowadays though there are some really cool fidget gizmos. I keep this one in my purse.
• Background Noise. I have a hard time maintaining focus in silence. There has to be some kind of background noise for part of my brain to focus on. Music without words works best, or a movie I've seen 78 times before.
• Visual Cues. I assemble things and put them by the door the night before so I remember them. I'm the queen of post-it notes, all over the house.

Getting accommodations for kids in schools is a PITA.

I do so many of these, too.
I wish Google Home had tags on its timers because I've had multiple ones running before and uh... when ti goes off I don't always remember what I set it for. Oops.

But yes. Laundry. Stuff I'm cooking. Something I need to do (like, uh, leave the house on time).

I have a few fidget spinners, myself. I keep the fidget cube in my purse. I've recently gotten into cardistry and that keeps my hands occupied pretty well (with a side-effect of finally helping stretch out the scar tissue on them from carpal tunnel surgery!).

I, too, end up with post-its everywhere. I've actually considered putting up some of the whiteboard paper I have (...esp. after the cat clawed down the last one) in a vertical orientation in the hallway just so I can leave lists there. But it's not uncommon for me to have a post-it by the door of 'Remember: <list>' and I have a big alligator clip on the wall next to the door to pin things under, too.

For any trips I take, I have a pre-made, color-coded spreadsheet to fill out. It has columns for: to pack, laptop bag, what to wear, toiletries, and a to-do list.

@saosmash said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Auspice Man, I live in the pacific northwest and every single time I have tried out chicken with waffles it has had a motherfucking bone in it. This knowledge you are sharing that it is supposed to be a boneless chicken tender makes the whole thing make so much more sense.

That was where I tried it. I JUST MISSED MY SOUTHERN FOOD. Yeah, the PNW is fucking it up.

It's not supposed to have a bone in it!

Imagine those long chicken tenders (some places call 'em chicken fingers) instead. That's what you should have with chicken and waffles.

There's a taco place here in TX called Torchy's and every month they have a taco of the month and one month they did a chicken and waffles taco.... It was a flour tortilla topped with a waffle topped with bacon topped with a fried egg topped with a chicken tender and then syrup over top and I honestly dream of that thing sometimes.

@Cobaltasaurus

No.shit.

That's why I got so fucking annoyed at the crowd outside the theater loudly shouting "No spoilers!"

Everyone departing was talking quietly, bent heads. And mostly in vague terms, like: "It went by so fast!"
"It was such a good send off."
"It was even better than I expected."

Those were the sort of things I managed to overhear. But everyone was being really respectful leaving the theater.....only to still have a crowd screaming in their face.

Which is why I was so fucking tempted to spoil shit for them. Because they were being dicks.

Telling you I enjoyed a movie isn't a fucking spoiler.

I for one always call in a GM to help me end my TS.

1pm: I should probably eat today.
(Got distracted by YouTube.)

2pm: I should probably eat today.
(Went to kitchen, decided to refill cat food, ultimately ended up vacuuming and cleaning bedroom)

3pm (now): Jesus why do I feel like I'm gonna pass o- oh. I never actually ate did I?

Bonus round: while writing this I realized I left the cat food bowls on the kitchen counter. I'm gonna get home to some unhappy kitties.

@Wretched said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@Tinuviel Dices

Deese.

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

@Auspice Your dad is inconsiderate.

Pretty much.

I just can't ever voice this fact because he'll go in about how I'm whining and making a big deal out of 'nothing' or I'm being selfish... He puts his kids (and often his wife because he has done this sort of thing to my mother before, too) last and if we ever show how much it hurts us, we're the selfish ones.

I just keep telling myself this trip is for my mom. This will make her happy and mean a lot to her.

I like both. Pure RP and games with Other Stuff.

It's why there's always this little bit in the back of my brain that's like 'go bring back CrystalMUSH' (I mean it'd be super easy I just tell my friend I game with multiple days a week 'hey boot up CM for me and gimme Admin'). There was tons to do in 'off' hours and when I played, I had insomnia heckin bad so I was often the only one on late at night. Not that it was a 'dead game' but there's just times no one is around. Or you wanna do shit but you're working so you need passive stuff (lot of people can MU at work but not MMO after all; I've totally joined MUDs to fill downtime at work before).

CM's systems were nice tho in that they pushed you to interact with others. If you're a singer, you had to interact with other people. Sled broke? Gotta talk to a sledtech. Cutter broke? Gotta talk to a cuttertech. Injured? Gotta deal with those sadistic medics. And yes, you could just leave a note and they'd do it when they were around if times didn't sync up, but the impetus to RP was there.

(Tuner was prob the best role to Do Shit while not interacting with anyone. Which was half the reason there were so few Tuners. The other half was because you had to have the skills (OOC) of a Singer and Sorter both so it was one of the hardest roles.)

WNOHGB was another game where I loved the systems in place, but it only really worked when it was a highly populated game. I fuckin' loved having my Indie company to do space trucking with and hey, when insomnia hit, I'd just setup marketing runs to occupy myself and make us mad bank.

I think 'code toys' can/should serve two purposes:

1- Encourage people to RP with one another (such as in the CrystalMUSH example). The best way to do this is like they did: don't allow people to do All The Things. In my personal opinion, I think this is where a lot of games break down these days. They want people to have fun so they open the door so everyone can do everything (see: Arx & Investigations) and in the end, people no longer NEED to reach out to someone else. They can do it in a vacuum. Which is fine! If that's your model. It does let everyone do and be what they want, but it doesn't encourage interactivity. In the Arx example: since you can use any stat/skill on an investigation (and it isn't mental-focused), you can just spin whatever story to use your best combo and throw a bunch of silver and resources at it and boom. A clue without having to include anyone else. You can pop almost a clue a week this way. Again, not knocking it: it has let my non-mental alts still poke at stuff that I might be unsure about and not ready to share. But on the other side of the coin, it'd be cool if my primary char (Teagan) who is a Mental char had more to do. I'd love if people came to me and went 'hey can you help me look into...'

2- They give people something to do when they don't have opportunity to RP. Maybe they're too busy IRL to RP, but can still be online. Maybe they're on at a time other people aren't. The number one goal of any game is 'keep people here/coming back.' If you give people something to do even when they don't/can't RP, you're keeping them around and they'll be present to see and create RP opportunities.

All that said:
Code toys do not suit every game/concept. Kingsmouth did well with it, but I personally wouldn't want code toys in my WoD. I played Pern for many years without and even today, if I added any, it'd be automated threadfall since gdi we all wanna do threadfall but no one ever wanted to run it, it seemed. But Star Trek, Star Wars, Crystal Singer, certain styles of fantasy game (Arx, Firan, anything with a complex econ system) all support the idea of coded gamification very well.

But like @faraday said: capability is also a huge thing. I've had ideas for years that I am not remotely capable of making happen. So I stick to the non-code-toy concepts.

@surreality said in RL Anger:

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

but then I remember the one time a prof out of Indiana U called us to investigate a thing and it was.......... well let's just say it has been plot fodder for years.

...share this story? Please? All curious now.

I'll share it sort of in brief because when I try to share the whole story it gets... rambly because I'll begin remembering other parts in fits and starts.

I joined an established group where the members were across Cincinnati and Dayton (mostly Dayton, so I had a bit of a haul when I'd do stuff with them since I was in Cincinnati). A lot of what we did early on was just plan weekend events going out to 'known' haunted sites to see what we could find, if anything. Lot of disproving at first. Basically spending all night out around this haunted bridge or that haunted burned down spot and coming back with nada and the people running the group would post up out findings and go 'nope. nothing here.' Which was part of why I dug it. There wasn't that level of 'THESE DUST MOTES ARE TOTALLY...'

But then this prof calls us and says he had a family reach out to him, begging him for help with their son. Reports of all this 'activity' around him. Well, the prof had found out about us (these people lived on the Indiana/Ohio border) and asked if we could go check it out.

It was a long drive into the middle of nowhere. Their place is miles from anyone else, double-wide trailer on a large plot of land, backing up to a tree covered hill (fuck that hill... it still shows up in nightmares...). Redneck family. Nice enough family, but just sort of what you'd expect in hill country. The four of us who went introduce ourselves, interview the family. This kid is... 10, 11 and he's being tormented by something and it's started to affect the family too (father, mother, sister). We check out the house and... parents seem like maybe they do some drugs but not enough to see any signs that are worrying. The house is clean. The kids are clean, well-fed, well-clothed. Everyone just seems ... worried. Anxious.

But this kid was troubled. And not like, kid-gone-bad type troubled. Like something was affecting him sort of troubled. And overall it was just feeling... off. This wasn't feeling like a haunting deal.

The guy who ran the group decides he wants to check out the woods behind the house. And I'd just had increasingly bad feelings about them. I'm not a 'scared of the woods' type, either. I love the woods. I love hiking, camping, trails...

This is where my memory gets fuzzy. I don't have clear memories of what happened when I tried walking up that hill. The fourth person stayed at the house. Our leader was totally fine on the hill. The other woman who tried walking up with me barely got a handful of feet in before she felt it, too, and had to flee. I got nauseated. Dizzy. The trees just sort of... moved, blended together. It was ... sometimes I think I saw things through them. I don't know. It might have been that it was late by then and I was dizzy. It might also be because of the recurring dreams I've had every so often since. I just know that it was a struggle leaving and it felt wrong. I've never had a place feel as wrong as that hill did.

We interviewed the family again at length and that's when it came out that the phenomena around the kid would stop happening there and pick up at his grandmother's whenever he'd go to visit her. That was the ah-ha moment. It was tied to him. We sort of came through that and what all else we put together that this was not a haunting or 'spirit' in the sense of what we dealt with and we felt it more fell in the realm of, well, the church. We ended up passing it back to the prof and recommended he speak to the church to have them step in and handle the rest.

...and well, see, even wanting to 'nutshell' it I still rambled. I can't help it. It's sort of scarred itself into me. And I know a lot of it is just like, 'Auspice, dude, that's totally just a plot scene come on' but it wasn't. And before that I was totally a skeptic who had just watched so much Ghosthunters shit that I wanted to run around cool abandoned places and record things and be that person disproving everything. But after that night I wanna be a legendtripper and disprove more so I can find the things that are real. ...even if I end up with a few more mental scars.

I used to just go the RP route and hope for the best path... and went years without ever having any IC relationships. Which, I don't RP for the sake of RP'd relationships, but sometimes it'd be nice to have them.

Few years back, I saw the potential for a great relationship between my PC and someone else's. Swallowed the fear, paged and let them know essentially, 'Hey, I think our characters could be great together.' Said person is now one of my best friends and favorite people to RP with.

I do use my tendency to no engage regularly in TS as a sort of litmus test. I'll be up front: 'Hey, I rarely TS unless it has some impact on the story.' If they bail right then and there, I know they weren't in it for he reasons that I am (good story and char dev).

Also, I mean, morning after scenes are almost always far superior to the TS scene itself.

I try to keep that out of my writers’ offices as much as possible—don’t start a pitch or a conversation in the story room by saying, “I was reading this fan reaction on Twitter where the fans don’t like this, or the fans do like that.” Again, it’s not a democracy. I don’t give a shit. Like, what do we think is the best? We’re being paid to use our creative instincts and our creative ideas. We’re not being paid to do a survey and try to marry our material to what we think the Twitterverse is interested in.

He's right.

I'm only now well and truly working on a novel. I've had fits and starts. I've had two I've finished and shelved (well, one is shelved-ish as it's the backstory for a world and thus it's a novel for me). Part of why it has taken so long is that having been in MUs as long as I have, I've been very, very close to the 'fan culture.' There is a reason I do not play on games where 'canon characters' are allowed play anymore (comic games are different: comic characters get rebooted and reimagined so many times over that they are their own beasts IMO and I am setting them aside for the purposes of this discussion).

I hate fan fiction.

There, I said it.

For years I have looked at things I have written and been working on and had this utter terror of 'how much would it crush and destroy me if I had some sniveling asshole come up to me and say 'I think that these two characters who you wrote as hating one another are secretly in love and I wrote five fanfics about their affair''

It has taken me years to overcome that discomfort. And I think some showrunners, some authors (I believe some of Rowling's, ah, behavior on Twitter can be attributed to this same breed of anxiety) never quite get past it. Your creation is your brain child. It is yours. I personally did not like the direction that GoT-the-Show went at all starting around season 2. I stopped watching. The books are 'my fandom' as it were. However, I respect what the showrunners did. They were given the Extreme Cliffnotes by GRRM and had to work within it. THAT IS HARD SHIT. GRRM has it all in his mind, he has every nitty-gritty detail and on top of that in the books you get a first-person view and you know every single motivation for these characters as a result. You know their personalities, their motivations, their...

The anger and frustration that people have and have had at TV shows is both upsetting (to creators) and flattering and I think Moore understands it well and I think he has a very healthy approach to it.

It's flattering because it shows just how deeply your work has touched people. It's upsetting because my fucking god people can be so entitled. They think they are owed, they think things like 'THIS ENTIRE SEASON NEEDS TO BE COMPLETELY REDONE TO OUR WHIMS AND WHIMSY' (most examples of a creator providing to a fan's 'desire' has backfired terribly because you cannot please everyone).

Moore is right: this is not a democracy.

You will enjoy it or you won't.

I, for one, realized I was not enjoying GoT-the-Show so I stepped away. I've never minded when people want to talk to me about it because they clearly enjoy it. But in the end, I do still respect the showrunners and writers. They put a lot of work and effort into something that clearly meant a lot to them and was clearly very impactful for them. You need only view behind-the-scenes clips to see that so much of themselves went into it. They didn't approach it flippantly or without respect.

I think, as a whole, 'fandom culture' needs to take a big ol' chill pill and respect the creators more and respect the work they are putting into what they are giving us.