Posts made by Derp

I used to be a fairly letter-of-the-law person when it comes to policies.

Now, I'm super not.

Nobody is going to be pleased by every policy. (And for every person that says they won't play because of X, I guarantee you that 3 out of 5 will be there at some point during the game's tenure. It just happens. It's happened for decades. Big social noises are big and then the jones starts and the curiosity takes over.)

Now, I feel like it's better to explain my intention to players, and to let them know that yes, there is gray area here, and that things may change with or without notice in order to facilitate some thing that I'm shooting for.

I do try to be clear about explicitly what I'm shooting for. I don't try, any more, to document every possible violation in some sort of legal codex because it's more trouble than it's worth and just invites people to try and lawyer.

I lawyer enough in RL and I'm not even a real attorney.

Just tell people what you want to create, and why, and let them know that you will be implementing policies and taking actions in pursuit of those goals. Flesh them out a bit, but don't feel like you have to be so specific that every loophole is accounted for.

There are a lot of paranoid voices on these forums, and frankly, from the numbers of the ones that show up anyway, I think a lot of that is just show. Do what makes you comfortable, let people know that up front, make it known that you aren't trying to appeal to everyone under the sun (god help you if you are), and see what happens. The results may surprise you.

That totally awesome feeling when your non-attorney boss comes in to a room full of attorneys that just got done taking a legal training, and wants to do something contrary to the legal training that you just took...

...and you, the non-attorney in the room, are the only one to speak up, so boss takes it as you personally challenging his authority (to... say what the law is, apparently?)

@Sunny said in RL Anger:

@GreenFlashlight

Pretty sure it was someone with chemo brain. I'm not gonna get more than whine upset unless it starts happening a lot.

Solution: Sharpie. Big letters.

@Auspice said in Firefly - Still Flyin':

We reserve the right to:

monitor scenes while invisible if we have reason to believe that foul play may be going on or because we have received complaints about a player’s IC and/or OOC attitude towards others;

This is giving me pause.
Does this include private scenes?
What constitutes a complaint worthy enough of spying on RP?
Would it be a continuous 'sitting in on every scene you have because Jane complained about a thing you said OOC the other day'?

I admit, the idea that everything someone does might be spied on because any complaint was filed makes me hesitant.

I mean, realistically this has been an unspoken policy on every game, thus far. We all know that staff can do this, and we know that staff have done this. Yet we still keep playing.

This wouldn't give me pause. I say kudos to them for being willing to put it on the table in the first place and talk about what steps they are willing to take in a transparent way.

@Auspice said in MSBBC: Jan - Jurassic Park:

My copy arrived yesterday. Gonna be a bit slow to read because I'm trying to finish Caliban's War (book #2 of The Expanse) and I have two books to read for an RL book club.

It goes pretty quick. Honestly, I thought the sequel was better, read-wise, but JP is absolutely one of those good reads that doesn't disappoint.

@Coin said in Good or New Movies Review:

Pretty sure that goes a little counter to the whole idea of something being, ya know, memetic.

Information following an evolutionary pattern does not in any way preclude a careful study of it for viability and longevity.

@Rinel said in What do you eat?:

because a vegan diet will cause fatal B12 deficiency without supplementation that was impossible to provide through vegan means until then.

This is my issue with a lot of this.

I mean, yes, we can cite studies, but frankly, the sheer number of controls that would need to be accounted for and the lack of strict laboratory conditions make me sketchy about their results. There are just too many competing things outside of diet in many of those studies that can account for some of this, and not enough talk about those types of things. Air and water quality, sources of stressors, genetic sensitivities, etc.

But primarily, nobody is ever going to sell me on the idea that human beings, creatures designed to require amino acids and such from animals that we cannot manufacture, is somehow better off eating a completely vegan diet, because it goes against basically everything we know about basic biochemistry. Not to mention the fact that in order to do it long-term and in a healthy way it is extremely cost-ineffective, no matter how much veg you can throw together in a week.

@TheOnceler said in Good or New Movies Review:

I'm not sure if "not sure if trolling or serious" is being used correctly when in reference to someone not recognizing an internet meme no one should really expected to know.

Memes should really go through some kind of quality control standard and then get released as a quarterly journal or something.

@surreality said in Depression Meals:

Star Wars waffle iron

But which Star Wars waffle iron?

ETA: It should totally be this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Pangea-Solo-Carbonite-Waffle-Maker/dp/B07DYDZXNB/ref=sr_1_10?keywords=star+wars+waffle+maker&qid=1578339940&sr=8-10

@saosmash said in Depression Meals:

@surreality I love that meat hammer. I bought a pizza cutter in the shape of the starship Enterprise once. (NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C or D)

I use it for all my dough cutting!

HEY. HEY. Don't you diss the D.

@Ghost said in Depression Meals:

@Auspice said in Depression Meals:

I'm still so glad I broke myself of buffets years ago.

Too many days in my early twenties of getting stoned AF and going to Cici's or a chinese buffet.

Indian buffets are pretty unfair, IMO.

If you go to an Indian restaurant/buffet, then you can have everything you want (biryani, naan, etc) for $12 and unlimited plates. But if you want ONE meal (say, just Chicken Korma) then they unleash this weird TIERED PRICING payment thing that results in it coming to around $17.

Curry chicken? Yes.
With rice? Yes (cash register sound)
With naan? Yes (cash register sound)
One naan or two? OMGFUCKOFF.

Me, but with egg rolls.

Re: Aglio e olio --

I make this a lot. Like, a LOT a lot. Because it's yummy.

While the recipe above is good, I do a few things differently.

First, don't crush the garlic. The point isn't to have an even distribution, the point is to have slices of blonded garlic in the pasta for a lovely hit of it when you bit into a garlic slice. You just slide them into the oil long enough for them to just start changing color, and voila, lovely garlic.

Second, you should add both garlic and red pepper flakes to the oil. Maybe not much, but you want a bit of heat in it.

You can go crazy on the parsley or not, but the earthly flavor of the parsley offsets the citrus from the lemon and the spice from the red pepper and the garlic.

When you're only working with like six or seven ingredients (pasta, oil, parsley, red pepper, lemon, garlic, maybe some parm or romano cheese though I don't think it needs it) leaving one out can drastically change the composition of the dish.

@Arkandel said in Daily Routines:

soccer

@Darren said in Legends of the Old Republic - In Progress Star Wars Game:

Don't know if you are aware, but there is a pretty complete Savage Star Wars game on the net. I used it as the basis for the Chargen I worked on for my scrapped New Republic era game.

That looks pretty cool actually. I might have to learn Savage Worlds just so I can figure out what's going on here.

@Waller said in Dead Celebrities 2019:

Jack Sheldon passed away 12/27/19. He was a jazz musician who would probably be best known to most here as the lead singer for the Schoolhouse Rock songs "I'm Just A Bill" and "Conjunction Junction".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/01/entertainment/jack-sheldon-dead/index.html

Oh noes.

@JinShei said in The Crafting Thread:

Because dummies don't go to my size, my daughter and I made a bodyform to go over it in her size today.. .using duct tape.

I legit thought that was some kind of superhero costume.

A QUIET PLACE PART 2?!?!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEMwSdne6UE

@Arkandel said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

So does the existence of PvP/PK and/or a +warn mechanism relate to whether the power curve is normalized (and where) on a game?

It does, actually. I mean, I'm not sure that I can answer specifically your original question because I'm not -- entirely sure that it can actually be answered in any meaningful and systematic way.

But the existence of PvP/PK absolutely does relate to the power curve on a game. For starters, if you're looking for any sort of indicator of mechanical superiority, it's that. Whoever wins the most fights in a series of statistically relevant battles is the superior.

Perhaps more importantly, the increase of PC death/casualties that can come with PvP/PK pretty much ensures that eventually you have some kind of standard distributed spread going on, as higher-level characters will be more rare by sheer virtue of having picked each other off early.

The lack of it means that you will have a much flatter curve on that one, with everyone having much more parity with each other as many of the consequences of interacting with the game's inhabitants get pared down.

I'm still not sure that there is such a thing as an 'ideal power level' in a game. It's too broad and too situational, as has been discussed here already.. There isn't a formula that you can plug numbers into and go 'this is the universal answer'. So this is about as close to 'on topic' as we can really stay.

@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

may be opinionated, but IMO IC PVP/PK is a tool/lost art that never should have been completely taken off of the table.

Preach.

@Auspice said in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo:

@lordbelh said in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo:

@Auspice said in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo:

I've been swapping between it and the second Expanse novel and I've all but forgotten about the Expanse book for the moment.

I'm the opposite. I started reading Ninth House, while also reading a bit of the Expanse, and I ended up dropping Ninth House for the time being. Not that it was bad, it's just that I got totally engrossed with the Expanse. I'm almost done with the series, tho, so I'll soon be returning to Ninth House.

I'm only on book 2 of Expanse and I feel like I need to just sit down and devote a few hours to it vs my fits and bursts of bus reading.

I haven't read those, I just saw the first season of the show, but I want to read them so bad. I need to get through The Dark Defiles first though.