Best posts made by eye8urcake

@Derp said

Chargen 'Rooms' - Similarly, chargen and advancement can often be completed via a command that starts some kind of program, or possibly teleports you to some predefined area in which you can do the chargen thing. Is there really a need for a chargen room itself, if the chargen command comes with help files?

I love chargen rooms. I especially love the system or program ones that spread it out so you only have to process one part of the sheet at a time, with direct references in the rooms to helpfiles I might need so I don't have to flail around with syntax and the like. Even better when they're quiet rooms with no channels but page/tell and the overall newbie/help/info channels.

I also love that most, if not all, the games I've seen and used this on have an 'advanced' option for those who don't need a hermetically sealed environment to figure all their shit out to skip it.

I'm a pretty 50/50 bisexual female and a vast majority of my PCs have been bisexual females. I just can't call it pansexual, I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too old but I accept an all-inclusive meaning and like how @Pandora explained it - attraction is about the person, not their genitalia, for me.

The one time I ever made a serious attempt to play a male PC, it came from the idea that maybe by doing so I could buy myself a break, some space, something. At the time, playing my female PC was claustrophobic and suffocating because of the way people were acting around her, to her, and about her, but seemingly never with her, if that makes any sense at all.

Within five minutes of stepping onto the grid, a pair of female PCs tried to waylay my middle-aged, wedding-ringed man into the forest with a really overdone sexy scantily clad damsels in distress scene that just... ugh. Within a week, multiple female PCs mine had interacted with in the same fashion as male PCs had staked 'claims' to my guy and were doing the same awful stuff to each other I watched them do to each other from my female PC. It was horrible. I'd thought it was bad to observe as a female, but it was a hundred times worse when it was AT me.

The apparently straight male PCs were actually really pleasant to him, as I saw no overt or possibly passive-aggressive signs of jealousy or the weird alpha posturing stuff some guys do in these games, and they'd always emote back at me, have conversations with me, buy rounds, roleplay poker, billiards, whatever... the whole building blocks to deeper IC trust and involvement.

I never met any gay or openly bisexual males that I'm aware of, i.e. no males ever made obvious passes or showed any iota of interest in him other than friendly dude joe bro type stuff. This was awesome. I got to see better writing and roleplay from quite a few of these guys than I ever got to see on any female PC I'd interacted with them on, which... actually, kind of sucked, in hindsight, but was really fun at the time.

Another time I rolled in an openly bisexual guy to help another player I respected try to get an organization off the ground and... well, that very same person more or less ignored me andmy once he'd figured it out, and I ended up shelving the PC over it. Never hit on him. Never came up ICly or OOCly in any conversations, but the mere act of making and playing a man who wasn't particularly traditionally masculine and with variable sexuality pretty much killed a friendship for me. That was pretty wrenching.

I never really figured out how to parse or process this. I still haven't. I guess this post is stupid long, but the intersectionality/mu*sectionality threads and debates really got me thinking about my experiences in this regard and since I'm following the threads I figured I'd share.

@reimesu said in Good TV:

Netflix's Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. I'm only partway through the first episode and I am COMPLETELY bowled over. The production values are flawless and I am loving the characterizations, it's just...wow.

I CAME HERE TO SAY JUST THIS VERY SAME THING!!! I'm waaaaaay further than that and falling in love with it more and more as it goes on.

@surreality said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora My main concern is that -- while it's private on the player level?

I have encountered one too many staff members over time that would, with access to such a list, behave in what I could call a questionable manner at best.

A page or so back someone, I forget who, said something about possibly getting a group of people who have had boundary issues in the past and/or who are uncomfortable/anxious about dealing with reporting directly to staff to chime in on this. This particular part of the last post @surreality made has nudged me into speaking up a bit.

I've played on multiple games where the actions and words of staff in response to being asked to mediate in these types of situations have ensured I would never go to them if/when things happened to me in their games. I've played on at least one game where the main bad actor in regards to my issues with speaking up when my boundaries were slapped, beaten, tied and torched was staff. I've seen conversations in Discord that are absolutely the thing of @surreality's nightmares, where complaints made to staff about even heavy-duty 'against policy' OOC shit like sexual harassment and blackmail were fed to the game's server by the staff member that's supposed to adjudicate them for shits and giggles and to mock the people making the complaints with the people that were being reported. I prefer to play without any OOC communication whatsoever, even for consent negotiations because of the sheer number of assholes who think it's somehow okay to perve on me via these channels simply because our stories in a fictional textual game have crossed in some sexual form or other.

If there was a 'tool' that the guidelines of a game called for using de rigeur that let me not have to page/tell to someone who was already making my teeth itch, or not have to interact with, for example, the only staffer online at that moment who happened to be an asshole I knew considered the whole of the playerbase to be on his wank bank's menu, I'd use the hell out of it. I like the idea of a consent command tool better than a rape command tool insofar as normalizing this type of 'checking in' or 'marking' on admin logs because it seems less gross somehow and it seems like it would foster 'consent' becoming habitual within that particular community, with 'rape' being the aberration but beyond this... I've got nothing to add in terms of useful suggestions.

The one thing that gets old in these conversations is the sheer number of people who shrug these things off and want the players who get fucked over to shut the fuck up and go the fuck away simply because they don't ever have these interactions or they, as game runners, don't care to expend more of their precious free time in dealing with them - which is fair, but also why I just don't even try so many of the games I see advertised bc those are the people in charge of them. I'd also postulate that in some cases, at least, this kind of attitude might just be a visible symptom of a greater problem with said games' cultures and why they either dry up and die or end up with a few die hards who get off on doing shitty things to each other enough to suck it up and deal with the shitty things done to them so they can keep their fixes coming.

Before the 'Type quit and close your client then, you whiny bitch,' brigade gets going, I'm going to own that in hindsight, yes, I see that this was definitely what should have been done on those occasions. At the time, though, on each occasion I was playing a PC that I'd put hundreds of hours into, PCs that had leadership roles, PCs that had metaplot/story resting on them with enough weight that at no time did my 'Should I quit, or no?' decision ever feel like it affected me/my game and only me/my game and so, sure, hindsight is 20/20 and I should've just said 'Fuck this shit (and them), I'm out,' but I didn't. I'm not sure I would recognize that I was blundering into the same shit today if I'd put enough time and effort into a game and/or had enough responsibility in my role(s) to other people.

I've always had issues with pre-menstrual symptoms, but once upon a time I could reliably count on the fact that any given month's wildcard special guest symptoms would come and go over the course of a week. My issues vary, anything from light cramps and heavy mood swings to an overwhelming need to devour a Mount Everest-sized salty <anything as long as it's 90% salt, really> to being unable to stay awake when weird, heavy waves of exhaustion just permeate the entire core of my being.

Over the past year or two, however, this has changed and whatever goes awry goes awry for literally two weeks before and two weeks after the main event. It's just... all the time, it seems.

Right now, what is going awry is pain. It's not the most intense pain I've ever been in at all, but it's constant and fluctuating and I am always aware of it and it's like my bones are just LEACHING it into every part of my body. Even as I type this, I can't sit still. I have to squirm or press the soles of my feet hard onto the floor or alternate massaging one hand with the other, or some other stupid little (but for some reason EXHAUSTING) thing that sort of works the ache out of some small part of me for a few seconds of faux-relief.

I can't go to the doctor, I'm uninsured and broke for umpteen reasons, and apt to be that way for the foreseeable future but I'm just so fucking tired of every waking moment being one part pain, one part figuring out how to do all the shit that has to be done around this pain so I figured I'd throw myself a bit of a pity party in this thread. Thanks for giving me the space to do so.

@Kestrel said in Model Policies?:

Be Excellent To One Another is honestly a policy I don't at all care for. Not because it's a bad policy, but because it's cliche. What does excellent mean? Whose excellent are we talking here? Be specific.

Just want to upvote the hell out of this, with 'Whose excellent are we talking about here?' emphasized to high heaven. When I've played under that policy, it's always an indicator of, at the least, an uneven approach to multiple issues. I also find that the admin I've seen make the biggest public drama about it and about just how awful it is to them that their players are so terrible tend toward awful in-game behaviors themselves.

That 30 seconds I hear strange male voices coming from the back room of my house at close to midnight before I find out the cat that lives in that back room has just turned on the YouTube 'fixing weird shit on a car' video my husband was watching earlier.

Fucking Smudge just absorbed an extra life from me

@Arkandel said in Model Policies?:

@eye8urcake That's one of the reasons having detailed policies isn't worth it.

I disagree with this statement in that I believe the only way you can really quantify the performance of staff is by whether/how policies are implemented. If they aren't detailed enough, then it's all wiggle room and in my experience, that leads to players being ignored when they try to present evidence and information to lead or head admin when their subordinates are being dodgy.

I don't disagree that not all minutiae needs to be etched in stone in said policies, but I want more than 'be excellent to each other' so I know whether or not to expect, for example, admin-played PCs/NPCs to be pursuing player characters for TS or relationships or how player-run plot submissions are judged or what evidence is required/enough to actually get them to investigate a complaint for harassment.

@Auspice said in The Work Thread:

I don't know about you, but I am remarkably glad people can't look at the revision history of an email like they can a wiki page.

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Model Policies?:

Honestly, nothing is more depressing to me than the thought I have to provide adults with a detailed guide on how not to be assholes to each other.

Playing in a place where being 'excellent' is left up to a motley assortment of, say, Trumpy types and SJW types to interpret is pretty fucking depressing, too.

Pringles. Any flavor, many cans.

I have no idea why, but they're magnetic to me when I cycle down. I can p much lay on the couch with a random cat on my hip staring at the television and sustain myself on them with a minimum of... well, everything, really, including motion.

Chance meetings that have my PC and another PC bashing into each other over, for example, my constant inability to master mechanics in the games I play, that then turn into OMGYES level RP tangents.

Also, the fact that the latest one of these I've been fortunate enough to get to dig my teeth into has set long-standing biases I have about certain 'types' of PC on their ears. I've always hated the way most timeswept are played, along with most kidchars and this scene absolutely ended up making me step back from those opinions to give them another look.

All you people out there who put crazy time and effort into these intricate, layered backgrounds and making sure they gel with the theme and setting of the game you're on, and are patient with people like me who take hours of RP to suss them all out?

Stay fucking gold, Ponyboy. You are loved.

This has probably been said to death by others, but I'm really enjoying 'The Expanse'. Thanks to @Sunny for pointing it out to me.

Hot sauce in my NOSE.

I could have Captain Trips incubating in my sinuses and I bet this OMG MY FACE IS ON FIRE burn would probably kill it.

@Derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@eye8urcake said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

The baby (Isla) has 2 bad genes, so cystic fibrosis. They told my daughter and her husband, at their very first newborn 'well-baby' appointment that their child wouldn't live past 40 so that was fun.

It seems incredibly weird that they would say this. As someone who has been in a long-term relationship with a CFer that still has basically full lung function and almost no organ issues, along with his various family members that have it, and the people in the CF wing that have it in the rare event he gets a sniffle and they want to pump him full of kidney-killing drugs for two weeks -- this seems inaccurate. Especially if it's Delta F508, which it's statistically likely to be, since they have some kickass new drugs for that.

That seems like a doom and gloom prognostication since I know plenty of CFers over 40 and doing decent.

Right? Also, it wasn't until today, four days later, when they went in to do the sweat test that they even explained to them that the main aggravating factor for inducing the damage is getting sick, and gave them all this information, literature, people to call, etc. to help lay the groundwork for her not getting sick, for her eating right before her pancreas has problems, and other things.

I'm going to blame it on that first appointment being the old doctor, and this appointment being in the CF center of the hospital with the people who, like... actually know their shit. I just got off the phone with her and they sound SO MUCH LESS DOOMED, it's unreal.

It also helps that my daughter, who has a condition called D-MER, has really been struggling with breastfeeding and has felt really attacked by the old doctor and nurses regarding her issues with it, but today's appointment had Isla at proper weight maintenance with eating 2.5 times as much as they expected. They really gave her a pat on the back for the effort, and now the baby's on enzymes and vitamins that are supposed to help with that even more.

As with everything, some good, some bad but I'm going to go ahead and share your post with her so she can see what you've said about how life might be for her. Thank you, @Derp.

My daughter's boyfriend/fiance, someone we all love and think so highly of killed himself yesterday morning after a brief struggle over a firearm during which my daughter tried to disarm him and failed. He was very important to all of us, but obviously she's utterly shattered right now and his mother my heart literally breaks for given their whole story. This is making me take stock of pretty much everything in my life and I'm stepping back from a lot of things to do that, especially online.

I don't usually do big 'I hope you miss me, farewell, cruel world' type posts, even in games/communities I've been super active in for a super long time but I'm kind of making one right now not because I want attention and to make sure people miss me, but because I want to leave expressing my gratitude to this community for having helped provide discussion, debate, and anecdotes to me time and time again that have helped me analyze, decide and deal with things.

I see a lot of people here referring to this WORA thing, and making comments about how horrible and toxic it was and how this place is in some measure that place, but that's not been my experience here and I didn't want to go without saying that. I'm hoping this doesn't sound stupid, but so many of you are so open about communicating your thoughts and feelings about things and I wanted you all to know that someone appreciates it and feels that, overall, being a part of this community has been beneficial to me.

Thank you for that. I'm not someone who asks for help very easily, and I'm the person in my closest circle who is always expected to have the answers, and act, and be the impetus for everybody else acting, and appropriately, in crises and having people here who have been willing to share what they learned from having been in the same or similar situations has been absolutely cathartic and invaluable to me on the times when I had to come here to talk about those things.

That said, it's time for me to go, for reasons, and I'm going to leave on the above positive note with a public request to Ganymede to please ban me.

@ganymede said in Organix banned:

@tinuviel said in Organix banned:

As a resident mentally ill person: Mental illness isn't a reason to be lenient.

I don't see it as a reason for leniency; I see it as a potential explanation for some behavior.

This guy has fallen back on that shit for half a decade that I'm aware of, at this point. Then, if you bat that excuse away, it's his meds. Then, it's his military service.

This guy is such a fucking jackass that my PC blew up at him ICly for sounding 'ESL' and he went completely batshit in Tells (until I turned those off) and Notes (until I put his whole account on ignore) about what a racist piece of shit I am OOCly bc somehow I supposedly knew magically that he's Latino and I was clearly exhibiting OOC bigotry toward him.

Sure, maybe, but not racist bigotry - intellectually elite bigotry at yet another idiot who can't write shitting up a fucking writing game.

This is really cool.

@de-villefort said in Thundergulch:

@citation said in Thundergulch:

Women aren't relegated to traditional women's roles. They can be any position.

Well, there goes my interest in the game...

***Terrible truths below...***

click to show

I kid! I kid! Westerns don't really show women of the period properly.
If you read history books a lot of towns were run by women.
From the whore houses to the banks, women ruled the west.
Men weren't trusted with money.
It was considered uncouth and desperate for a man to take a loan from another man but not to take out a loan from a woman.

@Auspice said in Good Music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7DfQMPmJRI

The new Tool single (/title track), Fear Inoculum, dropped today.

(And holy shit that CD: 'Tri-fold Softpack Video Brochure featuring: CD (79 minutes of music), 4” HD rechargeable screen with exclusive video footage, charging cable, 2 watt speaker, 36 page book + MP3 code (89 minutes of music).'

This made me so happy in what has been a very, very trying month.

I'm super grateful I can stream their music finally, although I do own at least one copy of everything they've ever put out - and two of the Salival box set thanks to installing chatrooms on their website in the late 90s getting me a freebie I was way too poor to buy on my own and a sympathy card sent to Adam's then-wife when their dog died earning a second, SIGNED set (pause to squee here, as if I'd just gotten it anew). Definitely love the cover of 'You Lied' by Peach (Justin's first band) you can only find there.

I'm very happy with the new album and very happy TOOL as usual goes that extra mile to make fans want to purchase their hard copies. Working on their band sites, art sites and fanart sites made me really appreciate what a whole package they are, audio-visually and now I'll STFU with my fangirling and crawl back under my rock.