Posts made by BetterJudgment

Sure it's art, in the same way that Henry Darger's 15,000 pages of obsessive stories about and collages of little girls with penises is art.

@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.

[deleted because it really belonged in the Hog Pit once the inevitable thread about this game starts]

I dunno. One the one hand, I think that HR is a loudmouthed, self-justifying shitpile. On the other hand, the worst I've seen from him--and he recently here made me as angry as I've been at anybody online since 1996--seemed at some level to be his attempt to trounce some sort of intelligence and life back into a place that has become irretrievably stale. Just like gaming has gotten a lot less fun as people have become increasingly wrapped up in themselves and less able or interested in entertaining others, this forum has gotten a lot less fun and a lot less interesting. Turning what has been several days between checking it to not checking it at all will make no difference in my life.

@Thisnameistaken My god. Won't your dentist see you and then delay filing the claim for the 48 hours needed for things to get fixed? Honestly, if my dentist was going to let me have a broken tooth and exposed nerve for eight hours, much less 48, over some easily verifiable insurance fuck-up that will be resolved, I'd go to a different dentist right away. Either that or I'd get someone at the management company to call the dentist, explain that they fucked up and are fixing it, and assure the dentist that you are covered. It is just inhuman to let bureaucratic bullshit trump someone in pain.

@Thenomain said:

@HelloProject said:

I've always found the MUD side of our hobby to somewhat have the expectation of being like, super ultra professional rather than super casual like in MUSHes and such.

This explains why my first thought to @Jeshin's "a community is a board of directors" language was, "gigglesnort Yes, and I am CEO of my pants."

I still think it's silly, but seeing it in action I'm coming to the conclusion that the people who organize the games feel it's important.

Or feel that they are important. It's all game-playing in one form or another, and this "I'm a professional" schtick is part of the administrator game. It's a business simulator without the risks of running a real business. People who are this serious about it deserve about as much pity (or derision--take your pick) as someone who claims to be a marksman because he spends hours playing a FPS.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

So my college has apparently setup a "public drive" that you can access from any computer on campus, to turn in computer or get special material from your instructor. Neat? Convenient? They insist on calling it DropBox, which is all over the syllabus for any teacher using it. "Assignment list is also in dropbox".

No.

DropBox is an online service that you can access from any computer with the internet. Not one I have to go to the library with a thumbdrive to either give or take crap from.

I can guarantee that if you point out that this is confusing, people will just stare at you uncomprehendingly. Those who lack imagination, experience, and (sometimes) smarts as well frequently don't understand when something is confusing because they pretty much just run on automatic.

I've had this problem with files on games as well. If a nonsensical or ambiguous thing has been that way for ages and everybody has learned to deal with it, when someone comes in and says "Wha?" the problem must be with that person, not with the badly or confusingly named or implemented thing.

@Three-Eyed-Crow Given the number that have tried and failed (five besides the Blither Twins' game, with two essentially stillborn), I don't think it would work. Maybe it's that the ensemble playing necessary for being part of a wacky crew is just too hard to manage.

@Arkandel said:

@BetterJudgment True! Unlike the rest of what we do and talk about here which is guaranteed to pass the test of time with flying colors.

Did I say it was any different?

You all (both champions and detractors) are sure putting a lot of energy into something that within a couple of years will go the way of all such sites and become a cenotaph for its founders' grandiosity.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

@WTFE

That is a bit uncharitable. Texas has some good things. Fields of bluebonnets. Great Tex-Mex. And Shiner Bock.

Good museums, parks, and food in Fort Worth. Hell, if it were possible to put Fort Worth in a decent state (like maybe New Mexico), I'd find a way to move back.

Standards in Texas are continuing to decline, however. Broken clocks there now are only right once a day.

@Ganymede said:

@Luna said:

Um. Thanks federal government for making me mail a notarized letter that says for real my financial aid is for school. What is this I can't even.

Fraud is rampant. That is, fraud committed by the schools is rampant.

It's not schools alone. Along with students who get their financial aid payout and never show up in class (which has been 5% of my class enrollment some semesters), I have students who show up only on the first day so as not to be dropped and for the midterm and final even though those two things only account for 40% of the course grade. Fortunately, our registrar is fine with my marking that those students failed for nonattendance, which means that unless they prove there were extenuating circumstances they have to pay back their aid.

[political] If santorum is the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex, then a cruz is the stiff, crusty hand towel you use to wipe it off. [/political]

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.

@Thenomain said:

That is not "not antagonistic". That is, I think, pretty clearly antagonistic. It just is how it is.

Honestly, I haven't felt that it's that way on an institutional level, although I certainly have run across antagonistic individuals. That may be because, when I came in, some old-timers were adamant about keeping sectarian religion out of the rooms. People are more lax now, so that you can hear all sorts of New Age happy-thought and Evangelical cant without anyone batting an eye or, more likely, giving you the stink-eye and rasping out, "What the hell does that horseshit have to do with not taking a drink today?"

Also, congratulations,

Thanks, but it's not that important. It mainly just means I've stayed alive to fuck up all sorts of other things without being able to blame being wasted.

@Thenomain said:

There needs to be an addictive help group that is not antagonistic towards athiests.

From my experience, it is possible to get along in A.A. or N.A. by having a sponsor or other confidant who is also atheist or agnostic and by being carefully noncommittal when sharing in meetings. It can even be useful to be in a situation where everyone is ideally expected to tolerate each others' understanding of deity, including understanding that there is no deity and that it's possible to stay clean without one.

The problem is that when you're first in, sick, and hurting, you don't need to deal with other people's god-shit. A few people will understand that, but more than a few won't. Moreover, despite the benefits of attending meetings, even after you've been around for a while it can be more trouble than it's worth. My partner, who is essentially atheistic, has been clean for 29 years and still goes to at least one meeting a day. I've been clean for coming up on 31 years, and I haven't attended meetings regularly since 1999.

@HelloRaptor said:

@silentsophia

It wasn't even a funny joke. It was more an outright insult.

As @Ganymede said, I can't control how people choose to react. Whether or not it was funny, it was intended to be, if only mildly. I'm honestly not sure how anyone could read it as an insult (veiled or outright), but again, I've got no say in what you read into it.

If a topic upsets someone and it's known, why provoke them?

Maybe this just relates to the other shit you were talking about, but to be clear, if there was some post at some point by @Usekh saying "Hey guys I'm super sensitive about this so please no jokes, even little dumb ones, that use me and cancer as a framework." or anything of the kind, I never saw it. If there was, and if I had, I wouldn't have made the joke.

The response to 'dude, wtf' wasn't very good, either.

My response to what really were outright insults, you mean? YMMV, I guess. I felt they were pretty measured given what I wanted to type. I didn't even throw in any cancer jokes in my response to him. Almost as if once he'd made it clear they actually upset him, I didn't use them to provoke him. That didn't get him a get out of jail free card for how he framed his response, though. New depths? Really?

I'm not surprised that you're so practiced at excusing yourself. However, along with claiming that it's all someone else's fault because you meant to be funny, bear no responsibility for hurting or angering others, are supported by someone (@Ganymede) who people actually respect, and weren't specifically told that you shouldn't say dickish things about other people's terminal disease, you forgot to assert that it is all O.K. because you've said worse things in the past. However, you did drive your defense home by forcefully stating that your anger at what others say to you is righteous, while their anger at what you say to them is petty and unjustified.

@Arkandel said:

@BetterJudgment said:

That can sort of work if everyone agrees to it, but it has repercussions. On Elendor, there were actually "tent" objects that you'd put your character in, and an admin would move those objects to locations on the enormous grid depending on travel time and dramatic incidents along the way. So, when you logged in, you'd be in a particular place, and that's where you played. I saw this work pretty well once. At other times, though, RP would peter out along the way and back in the home area, and I'd bet that just added to the slow bleed of RP that eventually killed the game.

Good grief. That's one of those ideas which sound great on paper and are probably horrible in practice. For a smaller playerbase it's utter death to finding someone to play with.

That's especially true because "casual" cross-culture RP was forbidden by policy and essentially impossible by structure. It probably did work well enough when Elendor had a huge influx of players following the release of the first of Peter Jackson's films in 2001 and (from what I was told) had to scramble to create policies to address that. Unfortunately, they kept those same policies when the number players declined.

@Arkandel said:

(I mean, the alternative is that you don't play for days/weeks at a time while travelling, which is absurd so I won't discuss it )

That can sort of work if everyone agrees to it, but it has repercussions. On Elendor, there were actually "tent" objects that you'd put your character in, and an admin would move those objects to locations on the enormous grid depending on travel time and dramatic incidents along the way. So, when you logged in, you'd be in a particular place, and that's where you played. I saw this work pretty well once. At other times, though, RP would peter out along the way and back in the home area, and I'd bet that just added to the slow bleed of RP that eventually killed the game.

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.