Participating in my first event in Arx and not only being able to follow, roll when appropriate(ish), and function, but also thoroughly enjoying myself doing all those things.
Thanks to a great batch of people for making this fun and painless and I'm looking forward to more.
You're a really good writer who makes incredibly realistic and enjoyable to interact with PCs. I'm glad to see you've found a new home.
@Sunny said in What do you eat?:
As politely as possible, it is not a misconception that it is privileged. That video in no way changes the reality of inner city living, or even, say, the assumption that people can stream YouTube videos. It requires special attention to diet that requires an education about nutrients that the body needs to avoid getting sick from malnutrition and all.of that shit. There is way way way way way way way more to it than 'you can buy enough not meat to eat for a week for cheap SOMEWHERE'. Irresponsible.
Or RURAL living, weirdly enough. You can't even special order a lot of the things you need to have an animal-free diet where I live. Buying by Internet is not something my budget can sustain, so yeah, have to second @Sunny here in that it really does matter where you are and how much you can spend, because good fucking luck getting the more specialized stuff when your stores don't even manage to keep BROCCOLI on the shelves with any consistency.
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.
@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.
@Tyche I have two other grandkids and one more on the way. I am a Platinum Old Fart, lol, and in good company.
Thanks for the well-wishes!
Update: This hospital is part of the Children's Miracle network so I guess scuffed and dinged neonates are a specialty. Their NICU has a camera on each unit that the parents get login info for so they can see their babies even when they can't be there. This is really cool and has really made my daughter and son-in-law feel a lot better about taking care of other things, like their older child.
I'm someone who cringes about the proliferation of surveillance like... everywhere but, wow, if there's a good use, I feel like this is definitely one.
@RightMeow said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
If she is born before 12:01 on the 1st, it counts towards 2019 even if it is 11:59pm.
I hope that everything is going well with her and that all things go good. I will keep them in my thoughts.
@RightMeow Thank you, I was hoping. It's the difference between $5k and $15k for them at this point. Thank you for best wishes, too.
We're working on getting everybody setup down the hill so they can be closer to the hospital and avoid being snowed in up here and so hubs and I can get back to our place. Our son's going to check on things but I still worry.
Thank you for best wishes. They're very appreciated rn. Or any now, really, but rn especially.
I was hoping to have good well better I guess news to post here but...
Baby Isla was born at 159p Pacific time on 12/31. She had managed to pass some stool before, during or shortly after birth (right in the middle of birth South Lake Tahoe lost Internet and cell service for hours and hours so I aged 20 years stressing on WHAT IS HAPPENING and lots of other stuff happened so I'm not 100% on which which apparently makes a huge difference) so they were hopeful about her intestines at first.
Then my daughter fed her and it didn't go so well and rush imaging showed there's definitely a blockage so they've taken the baby to NICU and put her on IV and some kind of stomach vaccuum to get the stuff she ate out (so the obstruction doesn't grow) in preparation for surgery.
If all goes well she may be sorted out and healed enough to be home by February.
Does anybody know if (hospital in NV, residence in CA, if it matters) since she was born before 1/1 the deduction starts over or if it's on the 2019 one?
Lived through Xmas and the baby shower, and now my daughter's in labor. Fingers crossed it goes well.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@Derp IDK, it seems like semantics to me because typing chargen to teleport IS a dedicated exit, isn't it? So we agree in principle with the idea of letting people choose to sequester themselves to do it or just type it in?
I tried a few games that used the OOC room as point of origin to go into chargen, and also to buy things you earned through roleplaying like perks or whatever and you could go in or out of it from anywhere, IIRC. While I've never been into the OOC room as a general rule (I have an incredibly hard time going OOC at all, even for the most important things) this setup was actually one of the better I've seen.
I also come from MUD origins, and the idea of a tiny OOC Town area where all that stuff was always seemed to make sense intrinsically to me, so perhaps it's one of those weird little differences in culture more than anything else.
@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.
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 
@Pandora said in Model Policies?:
@BlondeBot said in Model Policies?:
I'd say limit what can or can't be said on channels is a good one. Keep the guidelines clear and the consequences consistent. For instance:
No social justice
GTFO. I'm not playing anywhere with a policy that says if someone is being a misogynistic toad on a channel & I decide to get froggy about it, someone else has the right to scoff and say SJW like that means I'm the one being unreasonable.
This isn't far-fetched at all, either. I feel like what happened to me in the Star Wars game I'd tried to get back into and ended up ranting about on here slots uncomfortably neatly into this.
@Macha We smoke a lot and this is the first year we've managed to grow enough to not have to buy it, which has been a blessing. That painkiller resistance you both have seems to extend even to marijuana, but there is the bonus of him being able to get to sleep even when he's in pain that's a huge benefit - he's pretty hard to knock down and he's been on some terrifying cocktails.
He's more worried about sleep than pain relief, in terms of the hierarchy of shit that sucks in his life, mostly because lack of sleep makes his hypomania worse, so we're kind of always on the prowl for those things; 1) sleep, 2) some kind of relief from pain, with managing 1 giving us more time to figure out what will help with 2 at any given time, which varies wildly and sometimes is absolutely nothing.
@Auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
I am KIND OF JEALOUS of people for whom pain drugs work. It'd be nice to take something now and then. Instead I'll just keep fighting for weed to be legalized countrywide since it actually works.
My husband is like you. Notably, he takes/has taken many more varieties of drug over his lifetime than I have, but I'm not entirely convinced that entirely accounts for 4 of pill A doing nothing for him while 1 of pill A takes me out of the loop for 4 days, for example.
Tramadol is one of those drugs, too, though I chalk this up to how much harder it is to do much for chronic pain as a result of damage to the spine and the nerves therein + shingles (him) versus how easy it tends to be to find something that works for someone who gets their dumb ass lost in the woods on a hiking trip at the base of a volcano and the tramadol she got 2 days later was the only painkiller she'd been near in a decade (me).
I can smoke him under the table, though. (No pun intended). So weird.
From Discord:
"hey I wrote the devil equivalent's name 5 times backwards and then signed it with my blood"
