I just looked at the character roster, and I see characters who are adults--experienced, realistic adults. That may be a first.

@Bobotron said in RL things I love:

On the note of marriage, finally finding the perfect ring, and going to surprise my partner of 15 years and, finally get a ring and actually ask him to get married, when our anniversary comes up next month. Now that we can legally do it and all. Not like 15 years come July isn't already hitched anyway.

Congratulations! My partner and I had been together 22 years when we went to Iowa to be legally married. This year we celebrated our fifth legal and twenty-seventh actual anniversary.

@Kestrel said in The 100: The Mush:

I honestly do see what you're saying, @GangOfDolls, and I play a totally terrible person. There has to be give and take. Playing a bad guy is not just about playing a bad guy, but about engaging the people you're 'bad' to, making them feel special, relevant, and offering them the chance for a solution, not just a problem.

A simpler way of putting it is that at least some players of antagonistic characters simply aren't very good at role playing. They fire off monologues rather than interact, and they expect both you and your character to do nothing but react to them. Dealing with this can really be a pain, especially when the antagonists' characters are cartoonish, incoherent, and no fun for anyone but the person playing them and maybe a small circle of buddies who all approach RP as if it were YouTube comments. Unfortunately, some people believe that being antagonistic can only mean being a narrowly oppositional dick (i.e., "No, you!"), so that's all they have to bring to the table.

There is a line of tall, multi-branched shrubs with small silvery-green leaves and tiny yellow flowers about five feet away from the double set of window next to my computer. It not only obscures my view of the alley, but also is a hangout place for at least four different varieties of small birds.

Because this is the peeve thread and not the "Jesus God, I want to tear down the fucking Confederate flag and and its flagpole from South Carolina's 'Confederate War Memorial' and make Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley recreate the 'ass to ass' scene from Requiem for a Dream with it" thread, I'll just say that I wish I didn't ruin cooking good food by eating too much of it. Especially the last bit, where I chomped down on a nearly whole Thai pepper.

@Luna, I nearly read that as:

I had great sex. Ed in high school.

(No, I've never stopped being 14 years old.)

@TNP said:

5 Supreme Court Justices.

Adding to that: now, everywhere I go in the U.S., I'm still married.

On a professional board I belong to, someone who reports having well-controlled but nonetheless serious mental health issues has asked very appropriately for advice about how to put support systems in place so that if he/she does have a psychotic break, he/she can recover quickly and with as little career impact as possible. (That's a solid concern when you're in a career where it can take years to find something other than multiple part-time positions or a one-year contract with no guarantee or even possibility of renewal.)

People who know about these things from professional, administrative, and personal points of view replied with what looks like solid, supportive advice... and then some chronic asshole posts, "Why do you do a job if it makes you unhappy? You're not doing anyone any favors. You should quit. I quit my job because I didn't like it and did something else for a while."

Sometimes, the only appropriate thing to say is, "Go die in a fucking fire." Since I can't say that there, I'm saying it here.

The forum is lot less usable now. The new theme forces the user icons to the left edge of the window and the Reply button to the right edge, and it sizes the window so that there's a constant horizontal scroll bar even at full screen. Font sizes are all over the place: tiny in new posts, larger in quoted material, even larger in messages like "Replying to 'New forum version'," which is twice the size of the text in the composing window. On top of all that, it's ugly; it looks like it was designed by someone who has never seen a forum before.

Linda Antonsson and Elio García are skilled and energetic. They are überfans, and they seem to be more dedicated to GRRM's books than at times he has been himself. Unfortunately, they are also grandiose and deluded enough to think that their MU* characters' descriptions are copyrightable intellectual property and to pressure service providers to shut down sites that they think impinge on that property. This isn't about respecting GRRM's work or about serving a community of fans. Every time they've written about this, they make it clear that this is about their rights as mediators of this work. If you want to play on this game, do it knowing what you're feeding.

@Ganymede said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Have a code-bit that creates a "transit room" for players to enter that represents their ship in travel when a trip is initiated, and essentially locks it down for a period of time equal to the "real time" travel time.

Something like this was done on Elendor so that groups could travel from one culture to another on their gigantic grid where travel times were strictly enforced and where intercultural contact happened almost entirely through staff-run plots. The object used was a "tent." When you set out, everyone got in the tent, which was taken by the person leading the plot. That person would then drop the tent in rooms on the grid along the route throughout the period of travel, which could last for a week OOC.

Characters could leave the tent, RP in that location, then get back in the tent. (Or be transported to the right spot the next time they logged in if they forgot to get back in.) Things could be planned along the way. Once you got to the destination, everyone would RP there for the duration of the event, then get back in the tent for the return journey. Want to go traveling but can't be there when everyone sets out two evenings hence? Just log out in the tent, which is set up in a public room, before the departure.

Maybe this is dead ordinary, but I always thought it worked well in that particularly restrictive setting.

I think that the Firefly "'verse" could be a very good game setting, in part because it's like it was sketched on a cocktail napkin. Space with no aliens, people who talk like Hollywood cowboys, cannibals, anti-establishment fantasies, lots of cool Chinese slang that's easy to use because nobody ever said it right to begin with... you could spend an afternoon watching the shows, and you got it. All you have to do is to not add in stupid things like pirates and staffers playing perpetual kidnap/rape plots.

I've thought about making a character, but I realize that when I go on the game, I find myself asking things that basically boil down to, "Are you all still mired in bad craziness?" That's a fair question in one way, but in another way it's something that is really unfair of me to ask current staff and players. If I don't trust them, then I shouldn't be asking them to convince me that I can. Nobody has time for that.

@surreality said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

@Pandora I think it's more a case of 'of all the databases to steal, why steal one that you know has a zillion errors in it?'

Yep. This was also the DB that at one point managed to emit three messages every time an object negotiated an exit. So, if you were playing in a public room and someone came in one exit and left via another, the characters in the room would see three variations of "X enters from up the street" in a row, followed by three variations of "X leaves down the street." It was hilarious in a way, but I ended up gagging @odrop messages in my client to get some peace.

@Pandora said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

@Alzie said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

...Most of the staff and players who were considered part of that, are no longer around on the game.

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

Fanty's in charge now.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm, willful ignorance or a statement of the belief Fanty's specific type of corruption was A-Ok.

Tell us more.

I have the vaguest of recollections that there were accusations at some point of a staffer stealing the DB. I'm not sure why anyone would bother; SerenityMUSH is the only game I've ever seen that had a notice in the login room announcing you would get a minor OOC reward for finding and reporting the many typos the head wiz made while descing objects.

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

Mal and Inara have left.

That's the key information.

@Wretched Corn starch baby powder. Really. A sprinkle a day helps keep itching away.

@Pacha I don't know what they're doing now. I followed them briefly when they revived the game, but I'm not interested in their approach to games or their system being applied to Tolkien's legendarium. If I want to deal with complex series of commands and mobs and whatnot, I'll play on HellMOO and have much more fun.

@Pacha – I'm a gay man and also played on Shadows of Isildur. That game was and is fucked on many levels, and that certainly was one of them.

I'm back casually playing again, and I only play gay or adamantly asexual male characters. I'm neither an actor nor a writer, so I can't really go too far outside. Really, the most comfortable character for me, and the one who I probably played best, was a Silvan Elf on Elendor who was as elvish (i.e. non-human) and non-sexual as possible. Too bad that there was someone else playing there who kept wanting to involve their very unthematic "elf child" character in hurt/cuddle/comfort RP with mine (ick).

@lithium said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

The only C&D letter I recall actually being a thing in MU*'dom was either from Kevin Siembieda cuz he's a fiend about his system not being automated and people not needing the books, and Steve Jackson, cuz, Steve Jackson.

Those were a long time ago though when MU'ing was /much/ bigger.

Shadows of Isildur, which was a large Lord of the Rings MU*, was hit with a C&D letter from Saul Zaentz Company around 2004 (?) and had to shut down for a month or so while the owner negotiated with the company. By my memory, the main issue was that the game's site might have made some money from Google ads.

@WTFE said in But Wait, There's More!:

@Admiral said in But Wait, There's More!:

Darn, and here I was wanting the responsibility and power of the board so I could...

...well shit. How does one abuse their power on a small, niche internet bbs again?

Ask Rasheem.

Who?