Posts made by Auspice

@rook said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@auspice I think your interviewer was multi-mushing, if the interview scene got so slow and distracted. You should have said something OOC and bailed. Rewarding that sort of distracted play is a waste of your time. You should raise a complaint to the staff of the place. Do they have a +gripe command?

He did apologize for it, so he realized he was distracted. We were also two introverts in a room alone (they usually have 2 interviewers, but... skeleton crew due to holiday). Part of the interview was 'how do you integrate with a new team?' and I admitted that I'm a big introvert, but explained how I work to overcome that and what tools/methods I've found work. He said he is too and that he did struggle to integrate. So I think it just hit that usual point that two introverts do: we were both out of steam, we'd run past our commonalities, aaaaaand... neither of us are good closers, apparently.

But I'm hoping it doesn't fall back on me that he got distracted (I specifically did my best to keep angled away from the glass windows so it didn't happen to me, ha!).

@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@auspice If you hear back on new year's day then they want you baaad.

Well, I mean, they did a Skype interview and tech screening last week and an in-person interview this week. I'd say they're pretty interested as it is.

@kdraygo said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

Find more time to play.

Plz. I miss your face.

So. I mean. I dunno. Second part of interview seemed to be going great but then the interviewer got distracted by people outside the room (glass windows), lost his train of thought, and it sort of lost steam and I'm not sure he knew how to wrap it up. We had good rapport overall... But I wasn't able to get it back on track or really bring it to a close myself and I'm afraid that I blew it as a result.

Meh.

Supposed to hear back today or Monday.

I've said before the reasons why, but people think I'm just some evil horrible wrong person who is wrong.

It's not the format. It's largely how we play. If you look at a lot of those places, their play style is vastly different from ours. They don't roleplay like we do, at all. I've tried a few of those. Hell, I had to moderate one of the forums, for my job, for a handful of years. I was neck-deep in it 5 days a week. I know those kids. Very well. Back on Livejournal days someone tried to drag me into that realm... It's a completely different mentality.

It's not a matter of 'ditch telnet and you get dozens if not hundreds of new players!' ... it's ditch sheets, ditch +roll, ditch our entire culture for theirs because it's a whole other world. The 'app' style, the pose style, the resolution style. Most of those forums, tumblrs, and so on? Are full of power posing and that's just the way they play. They pose what they do to you and your reaction and you just go with it. It's like the twinked out kids on 90s games all over again except... these kids like it that way. What's cringe-worthy to us is their fun.

But it's not us. We are 'old school.' If we really want them... we're gonna have to shed a lot of what we do, culturally.

Gonna submit a complaint on this bus operator. Wouldn't let a couple girls on because he'd "already closed the doors." He wasn't even moving because the light was red and he was still at the stop!

I fucking hate some of these drivers.

@admiral said in Random links:

@auspice ...wasn't U2 one of the first rock bands to lack any masculinity whatsoever?

I mean, modern rock is basically the U2ification of rock. Bland, processed garbage without a hint of real emotion or struggle in it.

...it's a bit like shitting the bed and then complaining about the shit in the bed.

Pretty much. U2 is about as bland as it fucking comes.

I mean, I already hated Bono, but oh look- he's openly a whiny, sexist manchild now.

(I mean, really, 'no outlets for male anger'? We need specific space for that in music? And only rap/hip-hop? Does he not know about this entire genre called METAL?!)

@derp said in Good or New Movies Review:

Re: exposition in Bright -- be careful here. We are a group of nerds that already know what sorts of complicated social histories we can expect to see from the various races, how they interact, what place they would hold in society, etc.

Your average non-gamer Tolkien-illiterate 'what the hell is DnD/Warcraft' viewer will not.

You believe there was too much exposition perhaps because you are pretty much saturated in it. Me, I had to spend a good twenty minutes explaining to David why they didn't expand upon it more, since it was run of the mill nerd mythology.

I think what @Miss-Demeanor, @Arkandel, and I are getting as is the way they did their exposition. It was so painfully awkward. It was all through poorly written dialogue.

You know what would have been better? A few vignettes in the world itself. Let us live through some of the characters. Have some of the cops (maybe Jakoby and Ward, maybe some of the others) out on the beat seeing "the life." The start of Jakoby and Ward's beat did a bit of this and that gave more of the world (setting) than anything else in the movie. It certainly did for the elves.

Maybe start the movie, rather than with the flashback and 'Ward at home' with a flashback to the historical war (even if that'd be a bit too Night Watch, few enough people have seen that I imagine) and then a few clips here and there 'over the years.'

There's plenty of ways they could have done the exposition that wouldn't have been nearly as poorly written.

So I had a recruiter get in touch with me last week and had a Skype interview... for Atlassian. Tech types may know the name. These are the guys behind Jira. Bitbucket. Confluence. A lot of things. They're kind of a big name out there. Just getting your foot in their door is a big deal.

It'd be a 6 month contract with possibility to hire. I'm antsy about contracts, but just their name on my resume would open doors.

I had to do a tech screen... which pulled on knowledge I haven't had to use in about a decade. I was sure I'd bombed it.

Nope. They wanna interview me on Friday.

I'm scared to even begin to get hopeful here.

@miss-demeanor said in Good or New Movies Review:

@arkandel Agreed. It almost feels like he was doing the movie against his will or something. He just put zero effort into the character.

He may have been. Sometimes actors have to do a movie they don't want to be able to do a movie they do want. So if he or one of his kids show up in something that's clearly a 'passion project' soon... you have your answer.

He may have had to do Bright (so it had an A-list actor behind it) to get the green light on something else.

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

It was deeply flawed. There was way too much exposition for the plot, the jokes were welll written but didn't come naturally - there may have been some chemistry issues between the leads, or possibly the direction accounted for the wooden acting - and its action scenes were often cringe-worthy.

I really feel like they needed more table reads or at least the writer should have had some people sit around and read the dialogue aloud. It was just stilted at times. The daughter (at the beginning) didn't talk like a little girl. The exposition made me cringe. The story/plot was good. It flowed (from scene-to-scene) well with good timing, but the dialogue, man. It needed work.

@insomnia said in General Video Game Thread:

It's one of the few games I've gotten perfect on. >.>

I feel like I've prob. missed an anomaly or two, but I don't wanna look online to see if I have. Augh!

MU*-wise, I'm in that pool of people who plan to learn Python, tho it's not specifically for MU*ing. I want to learn to code. I've always intended to and Python seems a good place to start. It's just delayed until I'm done with school. I graduate in May, so I'll probably start then.

Sooner then that, I have a little project I wanna do. This probably won't interest anyone else, but... one of the Stoics, Seneca, was alive during the time of Jesus. Seneca's brother, Gallio, is actually referenced in the book of Acts. Two very different (Jesus and Seneca) men with different philosophies. It just fascinates me, I suppose. And I've been doing a fair bit of reading on stoicism over the past handful of months.

So I want to take some of Seneca's texts (this and this likely) along with this particular translation of the New Testament and just do my own philosophical study on it all.

Knowing me, I'll get distracted partway through, but it just seems an interesting venture. No, I'm not religious, but I've always liked studying the tenants and mythologies of the various religions.

Oxenfree is only $5 right now and @Misadventure was kind enough to gift it to me. I've been wanting to play it for a while and it has not disappointed. I played it for 7 hours off and on today while I did chores and I've peeled myself away.... an hour after I'd usually have made my way towards bed.

It's really, really good. The story/gameplay (in how you interact with characters and solve puzzles) reminds me of Life is Strange, but more platformer style visually. It's also delightfully creepy and just enough horror elements to not be too much for night time play.

For all the friends I have on Steam, I'm sad only a few own/have played it. @Insomnia has at least!

@faceless

Looks like a Union fella to me.

Is anyone else unable to login or just me?

I've had a really rough day. Insanely rough. I blame some of it on it having been my 6th straight day of work. More of it on the fact that I'm fairly sure my anti-depressant needs adjusting (I talk to a doctor about that tomorrow).

A friend got a windfall she didn't expect and sent me some of the money as a gift.

I spent a bit crying. Like, ugly crying. It's the only real good news I've had in days.

I'm going to do my damndest to just set it aside and save it towards something nice for myself rather than using it on bills or something. Maybe start saving for that PS4 I've been wanting.

@redjellybean said in Um...What?:

@emmahsue I was just thinking the same thing. He mentions getting a mystery package, then doesn't update everyone on what it is!

His post did list 'in transit' as of December 23rd. @Thenomain probably hasn't received it yet!

So I watched Bright and while it wasn't bad and I enjoyed it, I think I can see why critics disliked it.

The dialogue was rough. Like, really rough. In some parts, I just wanted to smack the script writer and whoever edited it with him (if anyone). The exposition was painful at times ('Boss, wanna unpack this for me' - I mean really? That whole scene made me cringe.)

So the story was good. It was fun. But the dialogue needed a few more passes in the editing stage and that's probably where it lost the biggest points with the critics.