Posts made by Auspice

@Tinuviel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Auspice I hate the word 'optics' more than I really should.

Bad limpid pools.

I've come to hate the term 'bad optics' because for however legitimate it is I feel like half the time it's used in good faith and the other half it's said in a...

...often even by the same people.

It's sort of infuriating because I find myself sometimes sitting here going 'I want to say this is bad optics but I feel as if someone is going to spongebob me in return......'

@Ganymede said in Fandom and entitlement:

Not to derail, but who the fuck bullied you for enjoying sports? As far as I know, if you're into dudes, have breasts, and like sports, you're a fucking unicorn that every man would want to saddle up and take for a ride.

There are plenty of people who hate sports to such an extreme (particularly football) that every winter they will take to Facebook every Sunday to whine and bemoan its mere existence while trying to threaten anyone who dares sully their 'walls' with talk of it.

When I asked one friend about it, his reasoning was: 'Well when I was in school, the jocks bullied me so now it's my turn'

...I was really not happy about that and promptly did not speak to him for quite a while.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

And just when I was considering canceling the Netflix.

@faraday said in Fandom and entitlement:

If somebody likes something that you don't (or vice-versa)

This is a thing that drives me mad.

I have had people literally end friendships with me because I won't like something they do.

Part of why I got rid of my Facebook is I was tired of being bullied for enjoying sports. Which, can I just take a moment to say that I love that we're some super hella nerdy folks around here and I like the fact that we have threads dedicated to sports? It's actually a large part of why I stick around MSB. For all the vitriol we can have sometimes, it's one of the few spaces I've found where I can nerd out but also discuss sportsball.

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

@Auspice Get friends and co-workers who can be the kind of reliable and friendly you want, Model that in front of your family. Clearly they aren't learning from you. And they may never do so. Meanwhile you'd have cool friends and co-workers and less stress.

I am... not so good at these things. For a variety of reasons. Growing up in the environment I did, I didn't have any good models or instructions on how to find the right kind of people. I'm retraining myself.

I was raised in a service environment. A dual-hitting mix of the evangelical of 'you must place yourself in service to others to please God' and 'you are a woman so you must serve others' and I've ended up in that entitled state where I feel desperately so much of the time that I have to constantly give and give and give everything I have to be remotely deserving of any affection or attention. So I often give too much. And often to the wrong people.

I've been doing a good job at learning to detatch myself from all of this and remake myself. I've been adopting this new philosophy that rather than 'treat others as you wish to be treated' (because I'm sorry: people are assholes and few seem to give two shits about anyone else), I am treating myself as I wish to be treated.

But I don't really have any idea how to make friends outside anymore. I've been trying but... local groups I want to meet up with are very much in favor of people who work on a Mon-Fri 9-5 schedule, which I am not. I can't go out to a bar at 6pm on a Wednesday (the brief time I was on 1st shift, I was too poor to do so and now I'll be getting off work at 11pm). There is a knitting group I meet up with sometimes, but they only meet once a month. Same with a board gaming group. So, maybe twice a month (it all depends on funds / where my social anxiety is at) I'm able to go out and see people. But... I've never been able to breech that sort-of-wall past 'I go to these gatherings and see people' into any sort of actual friendships. I don't seem to remember how but I know it's also a two-way street. I don't know if they're interested either.

(But then the group is VERY Facebook oriented. Very. And I don't use Facebook. So I may be missing out because of that.)

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

You've reached out but have you ever actually said as much to your mother? Explicitly? From the sound of it, he's a lost cause but she might be persuadable.

I have not. Partially because my mother is almost never not around my father. The only way I can talk to her 'privately' is via text. My father is... controlling. When I was a teenager, she and I could not go to the grocery store without him calling her just a half hour later 'Where are you?' 'When will you be home?' 'Why is it taking so long?'

The times he DOES have to go out of town for work now (he works from home), he has her go with him.

...again, I do know I should give up, but it's hard. I think once I do find an actual group of friends locally, it'll be easier. I'm just finally through my 'finding myself' stage and getting my shit together in my head and now I wanna be 'external' and do things and be around people and... I'm floundering because I've forgotten how. Years of an abusive, controlling husband who dictated our social life and then having to spend so much time processing my own shit... it's like a muscle that I forgot how to use.

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

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

And every. single. time. they seem to think I'm on-call to help them with this 'brilliant plan' of theirs and my fucking god I am sick of it.

As it seems clear to me that your family doesn't give a shit about your emotional needs and well-being, I am still at a loss as to why you bother to even respond to them.

Honestly?

The hope, desperation, and wish to have... some sort of familial connection.

I'm jealous of people who do. I'm jealous of people who have parents or siblings they can rely upon, they can reach out to, they can talk to and enjoy spending time with. And it's just a sort of continued desperate hope that someday maybe things will be better. It seems every 5, 10 years roughly things do improve a bit.

But I very much want that kind of thing. As I watch, from afar, my sister do those terrible, idiotic things some teenagers do, I keep hoping: maybe in a few years she'll start to smarten up and we can be sisters.

I want these things. So I keep reaching out and I hope someday they'll be able to do so in return. Maybe.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

I'm really enjoying Lucifer more than I thought I would.

The guy I worked with on weekends (yesterday was our last day working together) recently finished binge watching that show. He is... young and so very much a BRO, but it was sort of fun watching him get SO INTO IT and SO UPSET at times over the romantic interest.

...but also it'd get us talking about theology sometimes and that was fun, too, just watching his mind expand as he'd piece things together when I'd discuss biblical references and he'd go '...yeah, yeah...YEAH! OKAY! I GET THAT NOW.'

My parents go through these fits where they obsess over eBay and the supposed magical land of IT WILL GET US MONEY (like 'we'll buy something really cheap from one person and then TURN IT AROUND AND RESELL IT HA HA HA' sort of behavior that never actually works).

And every. single. time. they seem to think I'm on-call to help them with this 'brilliant plan' of theirs and my fucking god I am sick of it. It never works. They end up with more crap taking up space in their house and I end up with long strings of text messages and phone calls wanting me to answer questions about stuff I don't even know about or to set up listings with poorly taken photos and...

...I don't ebay. I've never ebay'd (except like, once in a blue moon when hey, this thing I want is more readily available there).

I hate it. I am sick of it. And I hope this time the mood passes quickly.

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.

@surreality said in The Crafting Thread:

@Auspice Like... not top down center, but center? Brave!

I am not 100% sure. I haven't pored over the pattern ITSELF yet because I don't wanna make myself too sad at not being able to start it (I have that whole deal where whenever I get it in my head to do a new craft I wanna start RIGHT THE FUCK NOW), but from the pattern page:

This shawl has a very strong Scottish background, as the Unicorn is the national animal of Scotland and the Thistle is the national flower. It makes a grand entrance for a new shawl technique that uses a center cast on to show off those vibrant gradient yarns to full effect.

@surreality said in The Crafting Thread:

@Auspice Double-knitting isn't too evil, I swear. The idea of doing it while shaping even a basic triangle is making my brain hurt, I will admit, but you should be able to nail this one.

If you can tell there, this pattern starts from the center. Which kind of hurts my brain ALSO but.
I have succeeded every pattern that has been a brand new 'level' of difficulty where I have just straight dove in.

@Scorn said in The Crafting Thread:

@Auspice - That is beyond gorgeous. Seriously.

Tania Richter's stuff is just amaaaaazing. I do budget for the $1/mo to back her Patreon just to make sure I do not EVER MISS ANOTHER KAL. She does super geeky themed ones (like they are RPG themed! As in you MAKE WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY A CHARACTER SHEET AND IT DICTATES HOW YOUR KAL GOES) and I have missed every single damn one. So I have decreed I shall never miss another.

And this was a freebie she did this month (it's like, $8? on Ravelry usually) as a kind of apology for recent radio silence. She is one talented lady with so so so many patterns that us geeky types can fall in love with.

https://www.ravelry.com/designers/tania-richter

So soon as I can afford the yarn (might be a good few months as it'll cost me roughly $65 and I am broke-ass-broke rn) I have the next pattern I wish to try (Tania Richter was giving it away the other day <3):

I may have mentioned in the past that I do not wear shawls but I love to knit them because I find them fascinating and a fantastic challenge. It would be my first attempt at double-knitting also. I am ready for the challenge and while I know I will probably get angry and fail a lot (because I am bad at charts), I am excited.

As much as I may argue when I am on here... when I am not, I don't really think about you lot. And as @Ghost-like (love you, man) a response that may be, it is one that comes from the philosophy I've been trying to adopt on life. I place my values in important places. (Important to me, personally, that is.)

I play on games I enjoy. If I stop enjoying them, I leave. And while this has caused me to step away from games I wish I could enjoy (really, I wanted to get into that Altered Carbon game so bad but I just wasn't jiving with it so it just wasn't for me, y'know?), it's been for the best. I'm happier, the people around me are happier. I find I'm engaging in my play in a more joyful, present fashion.

Are there people I miss playing with because we simply aren't on the same games right now? Yes, a resounding hell yes. But our day will come again, I know it. I wouldn't want them or me to play on a game that makes us unhappy 'just because' it's a place to play together. That way lies frustration (and worse).

@Tinuviel said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

one can't expect everyone to be expressing outpourings of love,

especially from people like you who are incapable of such.

@Wretched said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Ghost Obligatory 'Why are you even here man?!'

He wants our lumps.

@Ghost

I mean, I talk to y'all more than family but none of ya have threatened to kill me yet.

...but there's always tomorrow.

@Ghost said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Back before I hung up the hobby, I outright roleplayed with people I had bad OOC history/communication with because I realized that everyone is coming to these games for the same reason: to be creative.

I mean, at the time you and I weren't doing so great and you were RPing with me just fine. I remember being kinda like 'huh this is weird' but I also just rooooooll with shit a lot and the game was hella fun at the time. You done did good.

@Sparks said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

But if you are running a game in your house, you are not running it on behalf of anyone else. You do not have to sign anything before you sit down to run a game, not even if you post an open invite on the board at the gaming shop and allow people you don't even know to come.

But this isn't running a game in your house. I'd liken that to being a player and running a PRP for your friends.

This is a game full of people, many of which you don't know. It is more like being DM for D&D Adventures. Because there's a whole host of people and when you put up that +event, you might get 4 people you don't know and 1 you do.

We want it to be like a Friday night with our buddies, but when we Staff, that ain't it. When we Staff, we are Staffing for the entire game and the bigger the game, the better the chances that we are doing so for people we don't know.

Fred, the unengaging boring guy who just treats an NPC like a quarter gumball machine of plot might be new enough to the hobby that he doesn't really know how it works and if you just avoid him, how is he to ever know better? Only by playing with him and taking the time to feel out whether he's 'just that way' or maybe still green enough to just need a guiding hand will you know.

Maybe Sally who fusses over feeling like she's always left out between the first +event and the resolution (while you think 'Well, Sally, maybe if you'd actually move your butt!') doesn't know she can put in +requests to do legwork or reach out and ask questions. Maybe she thought every single step of the way was gonna be another public +event and felt like she must have missed some along the way (I've seen this happen! People new to genres or transferring over from MUD to MUSH or MOO to MUSH etc).

MU is unique. Yes it has similarities to TT but it is not TT. TT is a very small, controlled environment. It is just a handful of people and most often the same handful of people week to week. MU is anywhere from a dozen to maybe hundreds (on certain games) of people. You can't know them all, but when you have ones who want to interact with NPCs or plots or spheres you control you can try rather than this tendency that exists to just write them off because they're 'annoying' in some way.