Posts made by BetterJudgment

@tek said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

@BetterJudgment ...Second Life is still a thing?

I think it's still around. I last stuck my head in about two years ago, saw the same sorts of problems, figured out that they still hadn't managed to turn it into a workable platform for virtual classrooms (which is what I was idly curious about), and left. I still have an account and an all-black, featureless avatar that minces, mainly as a comment on all the "paper doll hooker" avatars as was my previous one, a small, dumpy, middle-aged woman in a burqa--yes, I got hit on.

@Wizz said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

@tek said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

What is a MU* baby?

The fictional spawn of two PCs. I don't know how common taking it to that extreme actually is but I've run into it a few times on different games.

In Second Life, there is a whole industry dedicated to virtual babies, including virtual baby bumps that thought-spams local chat with things like "Monica's baby tummy giggles. That fizzy drink tickles! Wheeee!"

Admittedly, it was five years ago (about the last time I was in SL) when I saw that, but it still stands out as the kind of thing that puts you at risk for snapping and running rampant with a machete, screaming "Everyone must die!."

Serenity MUSH was also coded so that every single fucking time anyone entered or exited a room, the MUSH emitted three messages.

Can this game have a deadly space virus that forces people to typo every other word and demand to be repeatedly kidnapped, preferably while having crippling bouts of diarrhea? It could be called Bricenbrooke flu.

Long dead, but appropriate once again.

@Cupcake said in RL Anger:

Dear Company I Really Want To Be Hired By,

You've got those open jobs up on your website and I've applied for two of them. One I applied for a week before you refreshed the notice, the other a week after. And yet, my application's status is still listed as "New" for both positions. I've even called to ask if there was someone I could speak to in order to get my application reviewed. Even if your answer is "no, thanks" I'd appreciate some kind of feedback so I know what's going on because...I actually REALLY want to work for you. Crush my dreams or make my fantasy a reality, but please stop making me live in limbo.

If I went back through my job search materials for 2011 - 2015, I bet I would identify more than a dozen schools that have yet to respond to my application. At least some of these still have the application listed as "new" on their HR sites. This doesn't count the schools that sent rejection letters over a year after someone else was hired, those that sent me a rejection letter months after I formally withdrew from consideration after taking my current position, or the one that rejected me with a generic email after paying to bring me to campus and put me up in a hotel for two nights. Job searches are just all-around shitty.

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

Christ, this makes me despair for humanity. (And how about that guy's fandom, huh?) I mean, I've long said that I'd never get a tattoo because the only thing I could think of that I would want on my body for the rest of my life is Sam Elliott's. If I ever saw the man in person, though, I'd a) blush furiously, which is embarrassing when you're a guy in his 50s, and b) not approach him unless he were sitting at a table and signing autographs because getting in someone's face otherwise is simply rude.

I know it's my fault for thinking that others do and should behave like I do, but how can you objectify someone so much that you'd do the things these links describe? People that do this must be fundamentally fucked in the head to the point that they totally lack empathy and don't recognize others' humanity. At least maybe it's mildly a good thing that the Internet makes it easier to spot the sociopaths, although I still think that branding them on the face isn't a bad idea.

Given that I am, objectively, the biggest fuck-up in my immediate family,* it is really not fair to any of the others that I should be its last surviving member--which, as of about an hour ago when my sister died of cancer, I am. Life's not fair, though, is it?

Ignore this. I'll get my ticket booked as soon as I find out when the funeral is, then go to bed, get up in the morning, and at least look like I have it together.

*Being the drunk, the pot-head, and the neurotic and chronically irresponsible dickhead who couldn't manage to finish college until his 50s because he was too busy whining to get his shit together. Yep, that's me. No surprise there.

@dontpanda I went back inside once the guy was clearly walking away so that I could get my shit together while my partner called after him, "Doing something like that is what gets people shot." Understand, if the guy had swung at me, I was screwed. I've never been in a fight in my life, and while my partner looks intimidating, he's also 75.

The asshat apparently lives two doors south in the one house on the cul-de-sac that is run down. It may be a multi-family house, but I've seen him with the young woman who herds eight four- to six-year-old kids around the neighborhood. I'm thinking of calling the city and asking if there is a licensed day care operation there. (I would be a better man if I wasn't vindictive, but oh, well.)

My partner just got back from a day-long ride and left his motorcycle in front of the house with the key in--a bad idea, but he had just ridden 700 miles and wanted to come in and use his own bathroom right away. A few minutes later, I heard the bike revving, looked out, and saw some lowlife scumbag sitting on it after having started it and revving the engine. (It's a BMW sport bike.)

I'm glad my pants didn't fall down when I ran outside, grabbed the clown's shirt, and started yelling for him to get the fuck off the bike, and I"m also glad that I barely maintained enough sense to take my hands off him once he did. I'm sure I didn't endear myself to our new neighbors (I just bought this house in a charming 1920s cul-de-sac) by screaming at the guy as he backed away down the street, especially when about every third word I yelled was "motherfucker."

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.

@tce said in Historical MU*s:

@Cupcake Here's the blurb from the wiki, which is also at grimwood.wikidot.com/start

Welcome to Grimwood, pardner.

Colorado, 1861.

Civil unrest is boiling into civil war. Union and Confederate armies posture and threaten, both Native Americans and Mexican landowners feel the pressure in an increasingly unfriendly area.

The young town of Grimwood endures, founded in a gold rush this burgeoning town now supplies itself from nearby ranches and farms, trade and travelers provided by the railroad at Grimwood Terminus.

But there's always trouble on the frontier, armies are about to clash, there are bandits in the hills, it's almost noon and someone called you yeller.

Keep your hand near your iron, cowboy.

I've looked at the game. At least they're up-front about its not being set in any one real place so that people can do things like name their own local "injuns." Tribes that are hundreds of miles away from Colorado in the 1860s are raiding the area around the town as a result, but it doesn't really matter because it's all the generic Wild West. I think--the game hasn't posted any theme files. So, not really historical.

@Bobotron said in RL things I love:

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them trailer

Give the board's rotten font size handing and my eyesight, I of course read that as "Fantastic Breasts" and wondered if people were still talking about going to the gym.

@surreality said in RL Anger:

A better scenario is, uh, maybe they were just passing through and left a strand. I don't think they turn off the faucet so much, so it leaves a trail behind more or less everywhere they go.

Yeah, I'm sure that repeatedly having the sticky effluence of an incontinent spider adhere to your face and hair is a much better scenario.

Like about everyone else, I think more in terms of what doesn't interest me. I've looked at WoD enough to know that it and horror in general don't turn me on; of course, having been exposed here to the worst hijinks of WoD games and their players hasn't helped. I don't want to play a teenager, and I wouldn't like being around people playing teenagers. Furries/anthropomorphic animals... no. Angst and romance don't interest me as overall themes, although as parts of the whole of the game they're fine. Other than that, Tolkien (always first), science fiction and fantasy in general, historical, cyberpunk, and post-apocalyptic are all fine.

I'm at the core a simulationist with some narrativist characteristics, and I am interested in games where the environment is a major protagonist or antagonist and where that environment is carefully crafted. However, I don't want characters to be forced to react in set ways to that environment, so MUD-like games with lots of coding and NPC don't appeal to me as role-playing games even though I think that well done ones are lots of fun.

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.

Strength to you and yours, @Vorpal. If you don't have a support network yet, talk to the hospital or the American Cancer Society (http://www.cancer.org/treatment/index).

Mine's much more minor and is really irritation rather than anger, but after having two difficult molars extracted yesterday afternoon (my jawbone apparently is nice and dense, so it took over an hour) I'm sitting here gingerly chewing some cheese in violation of the post-op treatment because I simply can't go another moment eating nothing but soup and oatmeal.

@Pandora said in Character Rosters:

... there's nothing quite like a character with no plot hooks or ties to other characters or organizations to cause a new player to never log back in again. There are obviously going to be exceptions to this rule because people are individuals, but by and large, you want to draw new people in, not set them adrift on an open sea and hope they wash up on the shore of an uncharted island of exciting RP.

Pandora's entire post goes to what @icanbeyourmuse said in the OP was the goal of roster characters and why they won't work without other systems backing them up, but this final paragraph is one that needs to be made into a sticker and slapped on the mirror of anyone running a game.

Here's a left-field suggestion: have rostered "starting" characters, but ask those who take them to post a public player biography. Most of us realize that we're playing with other people and that it's the other people that make the character fun and interesting. I've never LARPed, but I would guess that someone (as @DnvnQuinn described) who showed up and took a rostered character would be introduced to the group--"Everybody, this is Donna's friend Amber, and she's taking The Archaeologist. Make sure to welcome her and help her character get involved." I think you could encourage the same sort of thing on a MU*. It's hard for me to see any downside to encouraging people to think, "I am no my character, and Amber isn't her character, either."