Best posts made by BetterJudgment

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.

I don't live in fucking Alaska or fucking Antarctica, and it is fucking snowing so hard that it is almost a fucking blizzard. It is May, and it is fucking snowing. Fuck.

@Bobotron said:

Also cheated and looked at possible rings for my partner and I (this July is the 14 year anniversary, I think it's sentimental mostly but I really want to do it, even if we can't legally get married here in Kentucky).

I think you will be able to soon, and that's something I didn't think five years ago.

My partner and I went to Iowa in March to get married back in 2011 after 22 years together. Our rings are simple titanium bands; mine only comes off if I'm putting on hand salve. Don't knock sentimentality, especially when it combines love, a shared life, and asserting your rights.

I love our older cat, a dilute orange tabby who walked in the front door of our rural house as a scrawny and wormy 10-week-old kitten over 14 years ago and promptly took over. As well as being elegant with a hint of goofiness, he is strong-willed, personable, loving, and wholly individual.

We nearly lost him to acute renal failure at age four, then managed the disease successfully for over a decade. However, as our vet told me on Monday when I took him in, kidney disease has finally caught up. We may be able to get him back on his feet and living comfortably for a bit more with IV fluids followed by further treatment. If we can't (and it doesn't look hopeful right now), he'll still have lived much longer than he might have, and every second of that has been a joy.

An 'ignore' function would be nice about now.

@Jeshin said:

Sometimes players get scared though. They get overly attached. They become complacent. They need a helping hand. It is here that coded systems can really assist them by giving feedback and stimulus outside their own thoughts which they can seize onto and run with. Oh I made a mistake and a buck gored me... What can I do roleplay wise with this unfortunate turn of evenets? Oh I accidentally bought to many mugs of beer. Hey there's a dude over there, I'll give one to him and chat him up. Oh traveling from this city to the next city over is codedly very dangerous. Let me plan ahead and possibly hire other people to escort me and interact with them.

That sounds good (if paternalistic), but from my experience on SoI, Shadow Siege, Harshlands, and Armageddon, here is some of what code typically does on RPI MUDs:

• Force players involved in a 45-minute long real-time conversation have their characters eat twice because the game is running at 6:1 speed and code is nagging them that they're hungry.
• Present characters with a table covered with 45 food objects because someone was doing "solo RP" by practicing crafting. (A practice defended by game staff because "people need to practice" when I complained about how unrealistic and spammy this was.)
• Employ the clumsiest, least natural, and most restrictive syntax possible for the most important element of "telling a story": having your character speak and describing your character's expression and movement.
• Encourage munchkins. Read the SoI reboot's forums if you don't believe me.

Another thing that RPI MUDs have also been doing well for over a decade is trumpeting themselves as the most advanced and immersive text-based RP games and the salvation of text gaming. They're not; they're just another way of playing Let's Pretend.

Earlier this week, I had a college student who, three weeks into the course, still does not have the textbook (i.e. who ordered it at the end of the first week of class online and didn't pay for expedited shipping instead of getting the list of books that was available over a month before class started and ordering it then) assume that he could take the announced quiz over this week's chapter at a later date because he doesn't yet have the book. It took all of my considerable professionalism not to stare at him and say, "That'll happen when monkeys fly out of my ass."

The very first thing I thought of while reading this was a guy in a bathrobe, carrying a towel.

@Cobaltasaurus There's so much else worth reading in Plato that I'm vicariously pissed off at your idiot of an instructor for making you hate him. Please, trash this instructor in a level-headed, detailed, and specific manner on the end of semester evaluation, because if what you are describing is what's going on, that instructor is being lazy as hell. And I say that as someone who regularly gets trashed on evaluations, although for things like, "History is boring," "I hate having to take this general education class," and "This was too hard because I don't want to read and write outside of class and just want to take multiple choice tests that you tell me the answers to in advance."

Lotherio, I teach medieval history, and even I got lost in that background explanation. I think you need to make this a lot simpler to understand or very few people will bother to look at it.

I don't think the reputation system adds much, and having people begin to focus on it (and to crow about their negative reputation) reminds me of Bane.