Best posts made by Coin

@arkandel said in Good TV:

Who else is watching The Titans? Man, that series is good! It's got its flaws, but I love the way they're basically exploring the DC universe using Dick Grayson as a constant plot device to draw in characters from all corners of the setting.

I mean they just had a full episode of Hawk and Dove. And they drop F-bombs all the time.

Now if they could just somehow get the rights to actually use Batman even as a small cameo now and then...or Bruce, at least. It barely even strains the budget, dammit, he doesn't need special effects to show up and be all grumpy.

Titans is really great so far. I really liked the Hawk and Dove episode, save for a bit of ngh (spoiler), but I can live with it, I guess.

@Arkandel said:

What I want is the freedom to run plot that I find fun (which usually means 'stories I'd have enjoyed if someone else had ran them') without being burdened with being staff.

I just don't particularly enjoy my PCs being a 'staff alt'. That's an unfun label.

So any game that lets me run my stuff - with reasonable supervision, I wouldn't ask or expect carte blanche - is what I prefer.

The best way to not have the "Staff Alt" label is to make sure that Staff are treated the same way as players. If anything, the label should be something that helps people recognize that that person is a-- putting effort into making the game work, and b-- possibly not doing something they might like (maybe they'd like their PC to be in a position of power, but the rules say Staff Alts can't) in order to provide a--.

In my opinion, this hobby needs Storytellers. Badly. Especially skilled ones who are willing to be Staff and take on the challenge of running game-wide plot.

@thenomain said in Good TV:

@coin

Hiss!

Might wanna shed your skin, snakey, it's got pwnage on it. Yuck.

@Arkandel
As far as importance? Yes. But as far as numbers? A game needs more storytellers than it needs coders.

@Ganymede
I did actually say the two can mix and switch; I'm certainly not adverse to it, and have as a player run metaplot and as a staffer run personal plots. So we don't disagree; I just think the default should be that particular division because it makes the most sense when it comes to what sort of responsibility being a player compared to being a staffer entails with regards to plot that affects the entire game.

I had a lot of fun with Aquaman. There's nothing special about the plot or anything, but I thought it had some really nice visuals, and it was super funny and well-paced. Don't @ me.

@Arkandel said:

By the time a new Star Wars MU* goes through the process of development, having a grid built, coded getting a wiki, tested etc it'll be weeks/months. By that time the movie will be relatively old news, at least for the purpose of thrilling players enough to attract them over.

However, by the time it opens there will already be hype for the anthology movie that expands the official canon in a way the main movies never have, which is arguably more important for encouraging a MU.

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

@coin Impulse

Don't ever frownyfase about Impulse.

Bart is a TREASURE aznd he will ALWAYS BE a treasure no matter WHAT and Waid's late 90s/early 00s Flash/Impulse run was the absolute best, period, forever.

@Ganymede said:

@Arkandel said:

I don't see how you don't see the timing issue. I explained it above, how did it fail to meet your criteria?

You could meet the criterion of actually raising a timing issue to start with.

To give an actual example, back on HM I had a couple of players spying on me. I don't know - to this day - just what means they were using but staff asked me a couple of times to detail what my character was doing "between 4 am and 5 am last night". I had no honest idea, so I erred on the side of caution and assumed a scene I actually had two days earlier happened in that time frame so that my answer wouldn't sound like a cop out ('Theo was watching cartoons on the TV').

First, "I'm not sure" is an answer, and a reasonable one. Second, most methods of spying have some sort of resistance or contested roll. Third, the players could have, and should have, come to you first.

In fact, that would have been my approach as staff. Like this:

Spy: I want to spy on Arkandel. I'm using my Goggles of Google to do it. What do I roll?
Me: Did you tell Arkandel that you intended to do so?
Spy: No. I don't want him to know I'm doing it.
Me: Well, not knowing what Arkandel has been doing or what protections he might have against spying, I cannot advise you as to what to roll. Maybe you should talk to him about it first?
Spy: But I don't want him to know!
Me: Too bad. His PC won't know, but you could save yourself time by just going to the source.
Spy: You're missing the point.
Me: No, I'm not. I understand your point. If you don't trust Arkandel to not mix OOC and IC awareness, then what makes you think you can believe anything he tells me about his PC's activities?
Spy: Uhh ...

Like that.

Staffers can also ask Arkandel if he wants to know who is spying on him OOC. He might not want to know for fun's sake. Staff as a middleman can be more than just how to resolve a conflict; it can be a way to uphold immersion or whatever; a barrier between knowing enough and knowing too much (a barrier that is, of course, set in different places for different people).

@Miss-Demeanor said:

@Coin Dude, if I get haunted by Dick Van Patten, I will have SO MANY questions for him!

But he won't answer them. And that will be how he haunts you.

@Arkandel said:

@Warma-Sheen said:

A lot of time you wait for someone else to pose and they crap out some rushed line because like the younger people their attention had been elsewhere and a 20 minute wait was spent with 19 minutes of it focused elsewhere and 1 minute to bang out a pose.

This bugs me so much. I honestly don't mind waiting because someone's got a RL emergency (or if they state in advance they're slow due to RL reasons). Fine. I don't mind waiting 15 minutes for a great pose, although my arbitrary threshold is around 10.

But waiting for more than that for a 2-liner is going to deplete my interest real fast because obviously you're distracted between three windows and five chats.

Yes, some people will claim their two sentences are better than "a paragraph's worth of flowery stuff" - well, different tastes and all. Give me more detail, facial expressions, set up the atmosphere and make the scene come alive with your pose and I will return the favor to the best of my ability. Don't... and well, more power to you, but we won't be playing much.

</elitistrant>

Sometimes I do spend those ten or fifteen minutes on those two sentences. Sometimes I sit there and wonder about the right adjective to use; is it a rictus or is it a moue? Is my character showing contempt or not? How do I inject immediacy into this scene as bruskly and sharply as possible? Often, it takes me longer to write something concise and poignant than it does to write something long and full of adjectives that I vaguely recall meaning the things I want them to mean within certain contexts that may or may not be the one I'm currently using them in.

TL;DR: Sometimes my writing is important to me, and when it's good, it takes me a while, even if it takes you half a second to read it.

</counter rant>

@arkandel said in Good TV:

@coin said in Good TV:

I mean, it was only a matter of time.

It's also short sighted. The biggest hurdle to piracy is always convenience, and piracy is absolutely the biggest threat to content providers, especially the ones relying on very expensive content to draw people to their service.

So for example let's say you're Netflix and you spend $$$ to make Stranger Things. That's the kind of show you expect subscribers to be lured by, and then stay for the rest of your stuff. Finding this show online is very easy but it's still easier and more convenient to have a Netflix app on your phone and the content is just waiting for you, keeps track of where you left off, suggests similar shows based on your watch habits, etc. Same thing as Game of Thrones, Westworld, etc.

If it becomes too expensive or annoying to have 5 different apps to watch all your stuff then Android Box or your torrent client becomes a more attractive option, and given the budget of these productions they can't afford to miss out on subscribers. Even reduced subscriber growth (let alone loss) can be disastrous when you spend that much money on a small number of shows.

I mean, sure, but even with piracy, these companies make money hand-over-fist. I mean fuuuuuuck, Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in history and they're still spending exorbitant amounts of money on it.

@Arkandel
Yes, but I was replying specifically to the bit where you mention "some people might say their two lines are better than..." and then stated you prefer the latter.

Yes, some people will claim their two sentences are better than "a paragraph's worth of flowery stuff" - well, different tastes and all.

Yeah, because "alien who looks exactly like a human but gains god-like powers upon contact with our atmosphere and the yellow sun's rays" is super easy to swallow compared to "DNA-data encryption from the same alien species".

<.<

@Cirno said:

@Coin said:

@Cirno said:

@Coin said:

I get just as annoyed with people who make me wait fifteen minutes for a very long pose that I have to actually read and which contains absolutely nothing of note.

Just page-roleplay with other people during the 15 minutes. Or keep a book handy. Or watch something on YouTube. Or vape some weed. I do all of the above.

These people don't bother me at all. I enjoy having lots of time to consider what I'm going to do next, as well.

You're missing the point, though (or you're trolling). Let me be even more explicit:

I get just as annoyed with people who make me wait fifteen minutes for a very long pose that I have to actually read and which contains absolutely nothing of note.

It's not the wait, it's that the wait is worthless. At least in @Arkandel's case, his wait finalizes in a short pose he can read in a few seconds. If I have to read two paragraphs of nothing of note, then it's considerably more annoying.

No, I don't even care about that. Because, like I said, I'm usually doing other things while MU* ing, or, at least, I did when I used to MU* .

I am actually more annoyed with people who harass me nonstop with rapid-fire poses, to be honest.

You mean we have different preferences and your solution and attitudes to things are not always applicable to things I experience and vice-versa? Gasp, it's almost like this very same thing has happened with you involved in this very same thread..!

If you don't care about something that someone else finds annoying, then solutions you think work for you are probably not going to address their problem.

Probably because Kryptonians aren't the only alien race that pretty much looks exactly like humans and that would open up a huge can of worms. I, myself, like the Star Trek explanation of 'precursors seeded worlds with what would later be humanoids, but environments changed them as time went on'.

When I ran a Marvel/DC MU, I wanted to make the Kree an off-shoot of Kryptonians who left the planet during its early space-exploration phase, and after a few hundred thousand years, have had some physiological changes (including skin color). They aren't as strong as pure kryptonians because their atmosphere/sun is much more like Earth's (or whatever), but they've kept similar naming conventions (Noh-Varr, Mar-Vell; Kal-El, Lor-Zod).

I had a whole thing written out, and I even had a great link-up for The Supreme Intelligence to be a bio-organic precursor to Brainiac.

(And now that I think about it, Kreeptonian. Ugh. It's so easy.)

If someone dies in my scene it's typically because they saw danger, identified it as danger, and then ran right into it--or deliberately near it--with little to no preparation.

Or ignored me saying: guys, this course of action could end super badly for you.

Or both.

@theonceler said in Good TV:

The Orville has been great this season with a lot of character focused episodes.

That said, I wouldn't mind them getting back to missions and away teams and such.

I can't remember the last time a show so challenged its audience the way the porn addiction episode did. That was a lot of beefy alien on beefy alien action and I wonder how many people turned it off.

Also, I finally caught up on last season of Legends of Tomorrow. While I really hated the dumb Nazi crossover* I loved the rest of the season. It one hundred percent embraced how fucking dumb and goofy these shows are. And no matter how many times they bring him back and overuse him, I'll never get tired of Neil McDonough's genial psychopath Damien Darhk. Also, also, also CW I love Matt Ryan as Constantine please make him a regular part of the crew next season and then give him his own show or at least do a sort of JL Dark show with him as the lead!

The best tweet on CW shows:

https://twitter.com/statuses/1027079474951544837

"I’ve seen a lot of people knock the acting on the CW like any of you know how to convincingly cry on cue looking at a greenscreen wizard that’s also your dead mom from the future while delivering an earnest endorsement of Bing."

"Literally everyone who has said “Gorilla Grodd” without breaking deserves an Emmy. Fuck You guys. I couldn’t do it."

That said, no desire to watch any of the other CW shows except maybe Black Lightning. I'll watch the crossovers, but I really don't need a full season (much less two) of the Grim Adventures of Ollie and Barry.

The Good Place continues to be amazing, but Superstore continues to be one of the most underrated shows on TV.

*Guys, we're in the future where the Nazis won, ALSO they did a bad job of realizing the evil versions of the characters, and it was hard to believe that the good Supergirl, good Arrow, good Flash plus a dozen other superheroes would have a hard time with the bad version of Arrow, the bad version of Supergirl and the bad version of the Flash. Like, that's three evenly matched people, but then the good side also had Firestorm, Killer Frost, Vibe, Arrow's dumb team, White Canary, Steel, Atom and, though they keep sending him away, a SECOND good Flash.

Constantine is a full member of the cast this latest season.

The truth is, until someone runs a yes-game in which they are willing to transparently say no and it becomes commonplace enough that when a "no " is issued, it's seen as reasonable and all right, then the utopic yes-game will never see favor.

In other words, like most things, you need to deliberately fight past preconceived notions and rhetoric in order to make something uncommon commonplace. The only way to make something common is to make the first one, the second one, the third one, the seventy-fifth one--

There's a reason so many games have gone sandboxy: one did it, and then another did it, and now people expect it, for good or ill.

@aria said in Good TV:

@coin Yeah, I give a lot of credit to Penn Badgley for responding to people that liked is portrayal of Joe with basically what amounts to "He killed four people. What else is there to say?" when a lot of actors would probably just enjoy the attention.

Penn was good casting for multiple reasons, first and foremost his usual calm and collected manner of facing inappropriate fans, and second, the whole thematic Gossip Girl connection which had me rollin'.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

@Coin Ehhhhhhhhh... homogenization has too many definitions. And I mean that literally. It has four definitions. The first definition wouldn't be far off, though I'm still more partial to giving it a negative connotation as I firmly believe that 99% of the time its done through conscious decision and effort.

Homogenization can be plenty negative, especially within a society that claims to sponsor, support, and encourage individuality.