Posts made by Autumn

@icanbeyourmuse Nagah. @Jennkryst is trying to get you to play Let Freedom Ring, I think!

In the small, dark places of my heart, I wonder if someone, on some game somewhere, has ever changed their @name in some small and unlikely to be recognized way, before paging someone that they're in the process of harassing. So that, if and when the victim ever brings it to staff as evidence, the perpetrator can then point to the log and say, "But look! My character's name is typoed at such and such points! This is clearly a doctored log and <victim's name> should be thrown off the game for trying to get me in trouble!"

Then I go mix myself a drink and play with my dog for a while, because after that I don't really want to be around people.

@tnp said in FCs on Comic MUs:

A female Cap would be problematic since women combatants were not a thing in WWII and would certainly not be the subject of super soldier experiments. If possible at all, there would need to be a lot of consultation with staff on how that would work.

This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like a female Cap would be totally in line with the story of Captain America. After all, Steve Rogers doesn't become Captain America because he's totally suited to be a heroic American super-soldier; he gets to be the guinea pig because he's completely unsuited to it. Pre-Super Soldier Serum, he's 4F. It's not just that if he didn't get picked by Dr. Erskine, he'd be one more grunt with a helmet and a rifle; absent the experiments he doesn't get to be in the Army at all.

And I don't think it would even be a challenge to draw a straight line from that idea, to having a female Captain America, and making it a compelling idea in the process. Stephanie Rogers wants to fight the Nazis, too, and she's at least as brave as any of the men lining up to enlist, but she'll never be allowed to -- partly because she's a weak and sickly young woman, but mostly because she's a woman. So when Dr. Erskine needs a test subject for his dangerous, and possibly fatal, experiments, she's quick to volunteer, and he's quick to accept. Because if his experiments kill someone who wasn't going to fight anyway, it doesn't hurt the fight against the Nazis -- and if his experiment works, then they'll be cranking out battalions of super soldiers in no time, and the marginal cost of having tested it on a non-combatant is pretty close to zero.

And she knows it, too. She doesn't expect to be anything other than a guinea pig, but she's willing to risk her life, because if this is the only way her country will allow her to help beat fascism, then by God that's what she's going to do. When it works, and she turns out to be the only one there'll ever be, she's going to have a very similar experience to Movie Cap, where the Army just wants to send her on morale tours and raise money selling war bonds and she has to defy her own government to punch out the SS.

I think it would totally work. And kick ass.

@prototart said in X-Men Game:

as somebody who's done them, imo with comedy chars (and tho it hasn't been brought up I think it's also valid for horror chars just for different reasons) there's a p thin line between, like, actually contributing to stuff/adding comedic elements to scenes where they're appropriate and just, idk, laughing at your own jokes/jacking yourself off in a room where literally nobody wants any part of it

Comedy characters work best when their player is focused on entertaining the rest of the game -- unfortunately most comedy characters seem to end up played by people focused on entertaining themselves.

@bored said in X-Men Game:

I do like the idea of just having one or the other, as @Bobotron gets at, and wouldn't mind Rachel instead. Overall, this is just examples of what I mean by saying you have to think about the storyline and the characters versus just smooshing everything in. Show a tiny bit of restraint, focus on the story you want to tell, etc.

I'd be fine with that, but then I always preferred Rachel to Jean anyway (as is probably obvious) :).

@bored Rachel was a much more interesting character when she was tightly tied to the Days of Future Past era (and, yes, before that era got completely played out). She's still a reflection of Jean, yes, but a reflection in a broken mirror. But the further away you get from that, and the more she becomes just a normal well-adjusted X-person who happens to have an odd backstory that never really comes up, the more pointless it becomes to have her around.

In the comics that's obviously a problem because having angsty flashback trauma Rachel all the time gets old in about 36 issues (give or take a few). And then, apparently, it's required that she start dressing in tarty outfits, as required by law, and become a massive flirt (because fuck female characters who are too damaged to show off their bodies, gotta keep the teenage boys reading!)

In a game it's much less of a problem, because by the time Rachel goes through her character arc and becomes sort of well adjusted again, either the game has probably disintegrated, or the player has gotten bored and moved on.

@arkandel said in X-Men Game:

So if you had nothing else going on, Cyclops could always meet up with Bob the Melter to give them a lecture about leadership or... something.

On an almost completely unrelated topic, I thought the new Melter was a great character.

@arkandel Sure, sure. Why, when you get sendmail set up and running properly* on a 386 running Slackware -- that's as good as it gets! Crack open a Zima and toast a job well done.

[*]: to the extent that sendmail ever runs properly, that is.

@arkandel said in Transfer of MSB tonight: 7:30 EST:

sendmail

Well, geez, no wonder it wasn't working! The Clinton Administration called, they want their MTA of choice back.

( )

@ghost I think Zero Punctuation once referred to the facehugger as "nature's communion wafer", apropos of people in a game taking roughly that same worshipful attitude.

@ghost "Every facehugger is sacred, every facehugger is great; if a facehugger is wasted, the Queen gets quite irate ..."

@thenomain I'd be fine if they just made another Wonder Woman movie with some cameos from Jason Momoa and called it "Justice League."

@saosmash When you don't want to give back the money, any reason you can think of will do, whether it makes any sense or not.

"What's that? You want to pay for something online? No problem at all! We'll instantly debit your card so you won't have to endure the sight of that money on your balance a moment longer than necessary."

"Oh, you're getting a refund? Sorry, it'll be 3-5 business days before your funds are available. Maybe more! But usually 3-5. Have a nice day!"

Used bookstores. Not that I don't love bookstores of any kind, but there's just a special place in my cold, dark, shriveled little heart for crowded shelves full of books that range from well-loved to never-read. And then I find something really obscure that I totally love and it's like I'm looking across the book at the previous owner and putting a finger to my lips like, "Ssh! It'll just be our secret."

@Gingerlily I feel like The X-Files is a great example here.

• The metaplot of The X-Files is, loosely stated, the efforts of a small cabal of FBI agents to uncover the truth about extraterrestrial influence on Earth, and, where that influence would have negative effects on humanity, to prevent or at least minimize its effects.

• Episodes that advance that overarching plotline are associated with the metaplot, but are not, themselves, metaplots. For instance, when Mulder finds out about a truck carrying a dead alien (in "E.B.E.") and attempts to track it down and obtain evidence, that is not itself a metaplot, but it's a part of the overall story of uncovering alien influence.

It's worth adding: there can be more than one metaplot going on at a time. One metaplot can be a sublevel of another, or they can be totally independent. Mulder's search for the fate of his sister is a sub-metaplot of the alien metaplot. Some episodes deal with both -- if Samantha's disappearance is involved, then by extension the alien search is also involved, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. An episode might deal only with the alien part, and while his sister may be referenced or mentioned, his search isn't part of those particular episodes.

• Any episode that doesn't involve the alien "thing" (for lack of a better word) is neither part of the overall metaplot, nor itself a metaplot (generally), but can still be perfectly appropriate. When Mulder and Scully search for cryptids in the Pine Barrens, that has nothing to do with aliens, but it's still fine because the series has established that they investigate all sorts of paranormal cases, rather than just alien cases.

@Arkandel A long, long time ago I went to a showing of Baz Luhrman's "Romeo + Juliet." As the credits were rolling, one of the teenagers a few rows ahead of me said in a tone of horrified surprise: "I didn't know they died at the end."

Try to connect to the game from the server it's running on (e.g., "telnet 127.0.0.1 <port>"), rather than from elsewhere. If you haven't done so already.

Also, check the TinyMUX log files and look for errors.

I don't see any errors there, it looks like it ran to completion with just a few warnings. cd to the "game" directory and run ./Startmux -- what happens?