Posts made by Derp

@ganymede said in Dead Celebrities 2018:

@derp

Don't worry. Zombie. Zombie. Zombie-e-e.

I both love you and hate you right now.

@ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@surreality said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

It is, however, very frightening to think we might have someone in this community who might, in fact, go out and commit necrophilia for the express purpose of harassing someone they did not like on a game, and if it sounds like that may have been the case, yeah, I'm going to want to know about that immediately.

To be fair to anyone who thinks that your interpretation is a bit bizarre, I'll be the first to say that early incarnations of this place did have posters that conceivably may have violated a corpse to make material to post up there.

On the one hand... ew.

On the other... job security...

@ganymede

I managed to get my shit under control and dodge that particular bullet, thankfully.

@coin said in Dead Celebrities 2018:

We begin our year with the death of The Cranberries frontwoman, Dolores O'Riordan.

What?!? No! Goddamit.

@surreality said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Our 'grandpa/ma on the rockin' chair' stories are going to make the boomer tales about Woodstock and whatnot look like a Disney film, and that is absolutely winning.
It may be a ways off yet, but some day, we're going to be those old farts that have their kids covering their kids' ears and going, "MOOOOOOOOOOM!" before the grandkids rush off to whatever replaces whatever replaces google, which will probably run so fast that the moment the words are out of our mouth, a little readout will appear on the contact lens our grandspawn is wearing.
In other words, by the time we horrify our kids, their kids will already be giggling like mad or starting to cry or scheduling their own appointment with a therapist.

Life goals.

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

My mother, a fierce Chinese woman of 5 feet and 100 pounds, is more than happy to tell me how much weight I need to lose every damn time we meet. And then she makes dinner for my family that includes macaroni and cheese and other stuff that is very much not conducive to weight loss.
Bitch.
I love her to bits.

My personal favorite version of this is when my grandmother would gripe about my weight when I was younger, and then insist I eat all the leftovers because she cooked enough to feed twenty people when there were four of us there.

I fucking wonder how that happened, grams.

@SunnyJ

While I appreciate you linking actual research (really, I do, it is a rarity), I'm not sure that this backs up the claim, as almost all of this research was conducted almost 20 years ago. There is not a single article there cited after 2005, while most of them were conducted in the mid 90's.

As @Miss-Demeanor and @Auspice have pointed out, these skills are becoming necessary in the workplace, even when they probably shouldn't be. As a result, more and more people are either learning to do it by either having been immersed in Information Age culture at the advent of personal cell phones and home Internet becoming a commonplace thing, or learning through trial by fire.

At a quick perusal, none of these tests checked to see whether consistent application of those skills resulted in increased efficacy, and most of them seemed to test arbitrary situations wherein the rules of the various games don't apply to real life, or were things we simply would not do normally. They made you do two things you would not normally do, and asked you to do it under a set of strict rules. That is not a very good measure of practical efficiency. It's just really convenient when you need to do the math on it.

It can be done. It can be done effectively, as countless professionals can demonstrate. But it is not a natural talent. It is a skill that has to be trained and utilized to be effective.

Real world peeve bordering on actual anger: people who think that you are being rude because you can split your attention effectively and multi-task.

Sure. Maybe once upon a time this was rude. But then we got into this information age happened where instantaneous communication basically anywhere on the globe became a thing, and then it became a necessity.

Millennials do this by reflex. We learned it as a survival skill in a world that demanded this skill be a thing. We can split our attention between two, three, sometimes even four things at once and keep them all effectively in mind. We have been doing this for ages and ages.

The people who think this automatically means you aren't paying attention to them, and are thus being rude to them, are people who have no comprehension of how this skill works, how it is exercised, or why it is necessary. My generation does this daily. Hell, even most Gen-X-ers are halfway decent at this, because they work in fields where the information you are getting and the information you actually need are different things, and you are expected to be efficient about this. (Paralegals have always fucking rocked this skill.)

I can be listening to you AND looking at some relevant reference material AND writing down questions I need to ask you later, and I can repeat back everything you just said to me. Maybe not verbatim, but the important shit is all there.

I'm sorry that the reality of the world demands that I split my attention. But I can do it just fine. Quit telling me I'm being rude by doing what my bosses, etc., expect me to be doing. And if you think that's rude, then... I dunno? Sorry not sorry.

Not directed at anyone in particular. Just saw a thing about this and, like, needed to get that off my chest.

@arkandel said in The trappings of posing:

General spelling and basic grammar

This one is kind of big for me, but like... not directly? So, good spelling and grammar tend to also be hallmarks of general literacy and education, which also tend to be pretty good predictors of a lot of other things I find important, like creativity and outside-the-box thinking. So I could deal with typos and misspellings if the other stuff is there, but... it so rarely is.

Pose length and detail

Honestly, I tend to like shorter things as long as there is something there to keep the conversation going. "Oh yeah? I can't imagine that went well." Perfectly acceptable. And easier. For both. Just don't let it stagnate.

Tempo - posing regularly at whatever time interval you prefer

Eh. I can go either way. We are all busy people, and I have a million other things I can be doing in between screen flashes. It's not like I'm sitting there pining while I stare at the blackness of the screen. Substance and timing go hand in hand. If it is one line with little new substance? Seriously, that takes less than a minute. If you make me wait 15 minutes for "I can't imagine that went well," I will choke you. 15 minutes when important questions are asked, or alternatives considered? Cool.

Personal peeves (wiki codes, %t tabs, whatever they might be)

Tabs. They look great on screen. And they fuck up wiki logs. They have to be stripped out. Don't make me do more work than necessary, man. Just leave them out. Double carriage returns for the win. Wiki loves them, and they still keep things clean.

Pose ordering such as not using (or using) three-pose rule over round-robin, etc

There are times when I wish it flowed more like a book. Two or three characters exchange short ideas in sequence.

Suzie: Where have you been?
Jim: We met the queen.
Joe: It didn't go well.
Jim: I wouldn't say that. She only tried to kill us twice.
Joe: She ate the horses. Saddles and all. I got hit with a hoof.
Suzie: Shit, dude. Okay, Plan B.

Give everyone a chance to react. Don't be a dick. But don't be afraid to throw in quick reacts as appropriate, and don't be married to the idea that everyone is just going to keep talking in the same order.

I think that people are reading things a bit too narrowly. Leadership doesn't necessarily mean position. Leadership can be leading by example, or grassroots type stuff. I think it's more of a force of personality mechanic than a 'you get the Crown by default because you're hot' mechanic. There's a lot of ways that you can slice this.

And your Seeming has kind of always been dominated by your personality anyway, in one form or another. Whatever purpose you were put to is more often than not whatever your Keeper thought you would be good for based on what they observed. It might be a twisted version, but it's not exactly completely out of bounds, either.

I've seen this complaint about the other 2E gamelines, too, where people are like 'argh they changed this and now I hate it'. Except often, that thing has always been there, it's just never been at the forefront. It's always been in the text somewhere, but not as highlighted. I think that most of the stuff I read in Changeling so far backs up those same basic principles.

Those basic principles are often just ignored on MUs to the point where people think they aren't the norm, when they really were supposed to be all along, so re-reading them has a certain level of shock factor.

@arkandel said in RL Anger:

Everyone in my company is using whitespace instead of tabs. They are monsters, and I am surrounded by them.

Plz send help.

Doesn't python call for two whitespace indentation? Aren't you not supposed to use tabs?

@misadventure

According to Forbes, it's $14k per individual, with a lifetime maximum of 5.49 million.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2016/10/25/irs-announces-2017-estate-and-gift-tax-limits-the-11-million-tax-break/#1dc3fe433b70

Only 14 states + DC have state gift taxes, and some of them (like mine) have even abolished inheritance tax.

@thenomain said in Shout for Help:

So you hit up Google and end it with site:musoapbox.net

You know, I've been kind of tempted to write a 'How to Google Like a Champ' thing for awhile now. Maybe this will get me the motivation to finally do that.

@cobaltasaurus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Tip your goddamned delivery drivers and waitstaff

@aria said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Dear Coworker

I read this as "Dead Coworker" which caused immediate and prolonged confusion as I continued. Time for new contacts.

@ganymede said in Um...What?:

There is horror outside of the U.S. that many people do not understand, and this is why I am strongly considering public office.

I'll cross the state border and vote for you!

@saosmash said in RL Anger:

@ganymede Well, I'm ... licensed in Washington State?

I'm closer to @Ganymede than I am to you, I think, and my network of useful contacts doesn't extent that far. I'll see if anyone I know has an ear to the ground out there. Best of luck though!

Is this IC or OOC things?

If it's IC, then my playgroup already has done some silly things, just for the lolz. On a game I'm currently playing, we send the local NPC gossip reporter 'Care Packages' full of random sundries ranging from candy to sex toys, depending on the mood and what she's been writing about. She was writing about cows and pirate strip clubs lately, and has a healthy interest in everyone's love life, so we sent her a whole leather-and-lace BDSM pirate stripper outfit with fun post-it notes explaining the contents in tongue-in-cheek ways.

@auspice said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

I'm guessing it was one of you (it didn't list a name!) who sent me the bundle. thank you.

I'm collecting things so that once I finish this degree, I can sit down and begin the programming venture and Python is where I've decided to begin. My Ideas re: MU*ing are just the toys I've decided to begin with to keep my ADD brain focused and engaged.

Bundles are nice! Wait, what kind of bundle? Is it a nice bundle? It sounds like a nice bundle.

@Thenomain
+1 to all of that stuff up there that I'm not going to quote because holy crap that's a lot of quote to +1.