Posts made by Derp

@ganymede said in Critters!:

@derp

Can you catch and scan for a chip?

I don't have a scanner. And bringing him in to go get him scanned still runs into the aforementioned problems.

There is a doggo in my neighborhood. He is a young pittie, probably not even a year old. He has a collar, so he is owned, but I have not seen his people. He's been around for a few days now, looking fed but thin.

He followed me and the old man for awhile today. He's skittish. I've tried to get him to come up to us, but can't get him closer than a few feet away.

I want nothing more in life than to go find this good boy and bring him inside and give him a bath and some food and try to find his people. But I also know that I just don't have the resources for that. I don't even really have the resources for the Old Man, but the death of the family member he was staying with forced that situation.

But god, it's so tearing me up inside that I can't help him. Part of me wants to call a shelter but I don't trust the shelters here, especially with his breed.

Here is hoping he finds his people. Or people in a better position to help him.

@macha Goodest boi!

@sunny said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

@arkandel

The Mayfair witches are…I don’t even know how you could turn it into something you can show on television. I cannot imagine suburbia is prepared for this. Like. They’re worse, content wise, than her Sleeping Beauty books. The stories are pretty good! But.

I remember reading at least the actual trilogy, but not the crossover stuff. I’m not sure I would characterize it this way? The VC books I remember being very racy and we got through those just fine. Lasher and Taltos and such were, iirc, relatively mild in comparison.

It is entirely possible I am somehow misremembering but I was a very horny teenager when reading them and I feel like I would remember this.

@ganymede said in The Work Thread:

@derp

I gotcha.

I was just hinting that I may be moving to another job myself.

That’s all.

I don't know shit about Ohio law.

But if you move over here and need some paralegals I got some good people I can send you!

@ganymede said in The Work Thread:

@derp

That’s true.

But the sign of a good employer, like a good sports team, is being able to weather the highs and lows of business as talent comes and goes.

So, I hope my firm does just fine.

I mean, I'm sure it will? I wasn't really using your situation as the example. More commenting on Ark's thing about mistreating employees. Your partner doesn't seem to have great time management skills, but it didn't sound like he was mistreating you so much as being myopic and annoying. Not really what I had in mind with Ark's example, which is more the 'actively tearing down of certain staffers' like what Macha is facing, and how that didn't seem to be very logical.

My point was that it could be perfectly logical, and even profitable, in a fucked up human political kind of way. But it makes sense well enough if you step back and look at more than just the organization itself, and look at the ecosystem it lives in.

@ganymede said in The Work Thread:

@derp

If your employees leave to compete with you, then you aren’t giving them an incentive to stay.

Maybe.

Sometimes, though, you can't incentivize them to stay. Or the cost to incentivize them to stay is too high.

Jane is Wally's new daughter-in-law, and getting her to stay would cost an enormous amount of money.

Jack and John have serious personality conflicts. They're both brilliant, but Jack says he will leave if John stays employed. John is by far the more valuable member of that team to your daily operations.

Calculations get made. Employees are gonna leave, one way or another.

@arkandel said in The Work Thread:

It's absolutely baffling to me how some companies and teams mistreat their employees. Even from a purely effectiveness point of view they destroy resources which can be valuable and waste the money (and time, which translates to money) spent locating, interviewing and training them in the process.

Is it, though?

I've never understood this mentality. This view of business assumes, incorrectly, that you are the sole maker of widgets and have been awarded a monopoly on the widget factory and that all of your employees are your property forever.

This isn't the case.

Businesses have to do a number of calculations. Do you train your employees to be the best makers of widgets in the universe? Then what do you do when they leave to go make Widgets for Wally's company, and not yours?

And if you're the chief engineer of Wally's Widgets, how do you keep Wendy, the best widget-maker in the world, from taking your job until you're ready to leave it?

There is always a balancing interest between competence and control, and when you factor those into the equation, it's absolutely profitable to keep your employees firmly under heel until you need them to have just a little more freedom. The analysis becomes refreshingly straightforward.

@ganymede said in The Work Thread:

Scenes from a Law Firm before a Massacre

Act III, Scene i

Partner: One of my clients needs to have a commercial deal closed by December 1.
Me: Okay. It's November 11, so I doubt that's going to happen.
Partner: He thinks otherwise, so here's the title company he wants to use but has not called yet and a copy of the purchase agreement.
Me: Can I talk to him?
Partner: Not unless it's absolutely necessary. Can you get it done?
Me: No.
Partner: Well, try your best.

Act III, Scene ii

Partner: It's November 12. What's the status?
Me: I called the title company and left an e-mail. Can't really close without them, so I'm waiting for a response.

Act III, Scene iii

Partner: It's November 13. What's the status?
Me: Same as yesterday.
Partner: Did you call them?
Me: Yes. I called them yesterday. And left an e-mail. I'm waiting for a response.

Act III, Scene iv

Partner: It's November 14. What's the status?
Me: Look, how about I just tell you when I have the title company on board?

Act III, Scene v

Me: Well, they called back. They can handle the deal, but they don't think they can close by December 1.
Partner: Why not?
Me: Thanksgiving, mostly. We need a title report finished and a policy issued. We need a legal description of the parcel. We need other documents too.
Partner: So when will it close?
Me: Not on December 1.
Partner: Why not?

Act III, Scene vi

Opposing Counsel: I know it is November 30, but here are the documents for closing.
Me: This easement won't work. We need to revise it.
Opposing Counsel: Okay.
Partner: So when will the deal close?
Me: Not tomorrow.
Partner: Why not?

Act III, Scene vii

Opposing Counsel: It is December 1. What's the status?

(Stage explodes into violence.)

FIN

And this is how the law came to be controlled by Lawcatbot, our bloody but disinterested overlord.

@arkandel said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

The third is that there are some kinda shenanigans goin' on to artificially inflate the ratings.

Given the whole idea of the War on Christmas, you will always have a few that rate it highly just for “daring” to say Christmas.

@alamias said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

@ganymede ^^^^^^ This.

Yeah, exactly that

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

This would be relevant if "getting to the top" in this context meant "occupying the top position" rather than "getting chances to personally ingratiate myself to my betters, or fuck up trying to do so." Maybe "getting at the top" would better serve.

You keep moving the goalposts.

And I mean, I guess this is the place to talk about things you want as an ideal, desired experience, but -- I think the experience that you're looking for doesn't necessarily match up with what you're going to be able to find, on a couple of different levels now.

But it's good to get that kind of thing out there. Maybe there's a pocket out there with like-minded folks, but I think your desired experience is the outlier in this situation.

@tinuviel said in The Desired Experience:

@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

I think when you have the non-available prince and their supposedly available PC proxy, the proxy gets bored of having all the bother while being too pawn-like, and PCs still wish they could worm their way closer and closer to the Prince's ear without getting stopped by the OOC consideration of the prince not really being an 'on-screen' character.

I think the above scenario is an example of (1) how stupid Vampire players' expectations often are; and (2) how infrequently staff actually instill the spirit of the game into the MUSH.

FFS, you're supposed to spend a lot of time not getting crushed.

Agreed. Vampire is a long game. "Getting to the top" takes hundreds of years. The best a player coterie can hope for is a rather thin slice of the influence and territory pie.

@greenflashlight said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

I don't think I'm being reflexively negative here. I don't go to movies looking for a bad time. I'm a big fan of the attitude that it's more fun to like movies than to dislike them. I really do think that if this hadn't been a Ghostbusters sequel, if it had been Stranger Things vs. Cthulhu or something, then I'd have been all about it. I just can't get my head around putting that story in this franchise.

I mean, I've been watching this franchise since I was a child and I can say with certainty that I absolutely do not take from it what you apparently take from it. So I can see why you might be having a bad time, if that's the way you really see those movies, but I think that you may be something of an outlier.

I mean, you're not like -- wrong, or anything, but if that's the frame you choose to view the franchise through then -- I mean, I'm not sure how but yeah, I could see why this one wouldn't fit with your view.

@ganymede said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

I hated Seinfeld.

Quoting for solidarity.

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

@derp said in The Desired Experience:

Why should vampires, or anyone else, expect more access?

Because Vampire is supposedly a game where the win friends and influence people element is important, and specific MUs often advertise that this is what the faction play is focused on. You can't lick asses that aren't there.

And you think that the way to do that is to go directly to the top? Like it's some kind of democracy where you can hold the guy at the top accountable, and he doesn't just skin you semi-alive for being annoying and leave you staked in the sun?

I think that's more a failure of imagination, rather than a failure of availability.

How often do you engage with royalty?

Why should vampires, or anyone else, expect more access?

There are well established protocols and traditions and chains of command for exactly this kind of thing. Your NPC leaders should be distant and have an unassailable aura and plenty of clout. Knocking over the damn king should be difficult, even if they are bad. It is not a democracy. It is a story boundary, and an important one to keep under staff control.

@arkandel

Frankly I think this is a symptom of toxic people rather than the model itself. It's a perfectly human trait to want to be included, play mostly with your friends or like-minded individuals, etc. But leveraging that to exert pressure on other players to get your way or exclude specific others is a whole different ball game.

And yet we have dozens of people in this hobby that these rules apply to all the time, and we never bat an eye. We even encourage it. VaSpider. Custodious. A handful of others it doesn’t take much effort to find on these boards. And they were not always in the out group. Spider in particular never tends to be, and was almost always a concern for a relative minority of players.

Saying this behavior is toxic is hugely unfair. It is almost always warranted in some way, based on the very real experiences of people who have clashed badly enough to break off contact entirely and be very wary of possible avenues of crossover.

@arkandel said in The Wheel of Time:

@popes said in The Wheel of Time:

My only complaint so far is from the first episode. That bow Rand was using sure as shit was not a Two Rivers Longbow. I WAS ROBBED.

Apparently there's some online outrage because the ROOFS were not THATCHED either.

@arkandel

What happened to the shawls?

I personally think that the show is better without either. Both seemed gaudy in my mind’s eye.