Posts made by fortydeuce

@zarkon >.>
But yeah, I was so glad that everyone was chill OOC, because that was definitely a scene that could have gone off the rails really easily, and we held it together. Go (all four of) us!

Big ups to folks who keep IC antagonism IC and maintain a cheerful OOC environment all round. Fairen/Harlan/new-Grazia@Arx (didn't know old-Grazia!), here's looking at you! It is so much easier to have a scene where characters openly dislike each other when everyone's on the same page about it being strictly IC. Frappuccinos for all! (I would if I could.)

Re. snow: from a teaching perspective (university, granted): it can be unpredictable for us too. I teach tomorrow morning and I know I'll be missing at least a quarter of my classes, because they're still plowing the roads right now. I wish to hell they'd just cancel university when the school districts are closed, but they seem to think it's easier for college students to get to campus. Considering how many of them are commuters, the opposite is actually true.

There have been times where I have canceled class with a note to the students: I'm doing this because I know you won't be there, but we're doing online work instead. Don't tell the administration. because I get yelled at if I don't hold class, regardless of whether I have enough students there to make it worthwhile or not. And if half the class isn't there, there's no way I can run a successful class and I'm just wasting everyone's time anyway.

So from a post-secondary educational perspective, it sucks just as hard for the faculty, too. I'm definitely considering doing the tacit-online-class tomorrow, even as I'm writing this.

@seraphim73 I haven't left but I'm idlish. Part of it is me having trouble getting into the character -- I think he might be coming off as more awkward in my head than he is to people I RP with -- and part of it is that nobody's IC except for plots. If I could log on and find more guaranteed RP, I would. Granted, I haven't banged the drum very hard to find it either, but as far as passive can-I-find-RP-if-I-want-it-without-trying, it's missing.

Also re. the character: I like him! I just don't tend to play space cadets. So it's taken me more than a little to find my footing, and since the bulk of my RP has been PRPs, that sort of social building-up-the-character element has been missing.

@apos Sounds good! It's just I know there are people out there who would have things to hook in to mine, but I'm uncertain where to find those who aren't super-public on grid. And with @rs continuing to have a weird sense of humor (got my first repeat customer on only my fifth @rs!), who knows when I'll encounter them? Something that aligns plots and the like would be pretty cool.

@roz I know that. I'm just bringing up that point as something that may bottleneck down the line as the playerbase shifts here and there.

@pondscum My fellow socializer!

I'd like to think I'm the "high energy, really enthusiastic proactive" newbie player you mentioned, @Apos. I don't think I've had OOC conflict with the older, more-experienced-at-Arx people, but I will note that I feel like there's a whole slew of people I don't know and never see around publicly. Which is okay! But I can see myself, maybe a month or two further down the line, wondering why the PCs I never see on-grid are still never on-grid, and wondering who else to hook into. I've met a lot of the heavy-hitters, to my knowledge, but there are folks out there, in a 300+ character MUSH, that I'm simply never going to meet -- despite my PC having a push to meet everyone (and that being honestly one of the main reasons I took him).

So those private events? I've been to all of one, that I started. If there is a whole bunch of private RP going on that I don't see, then I worry about that potentially bottlenecking. Again, I'm talking out of my hat here, but just thinking this through in terms of "how to encourage interaction between the two sides."

Is there one wherein the text and the quotes are the same size (larger)?

Flatly skin here. As someone with bad eyes, the fact that the quoted text and the actual text are different sizes (and that the actual text has me punching the zoom up to 125 to make it legible) is painful. Not sure if that's a skin issue or something in the base CSS, but it'd be great if that were fixed.

Music.
Music music music.
Playlists everywhere.
(Derovai@Arx would listen to The Shins' whole back catalog if it were IC, basically. Spencer@New Prospect theoretically listens to the Killjoys album from My Chemical Romance -- don't knock it; it's very good. Last PC a few years ago theoretically listened to a lot of Foxy Shazam and The Clash. And so on.)

@quinn You just wait.
(3 years as ABD this spring. IthinkIcanIthinkIcan. PS I hate my committee. More hoops!)

Another Ph.D student (ABD candidate) checking in. Let us talk about the lovely Ph.D stipend of $16k/year, the expectation of teaching two courses and writing a dissertation, the classes that start teaching at 8:45 AM in the snow, the utter lack of useful health insurance, the fact that you are "forbidden" (supposedly) from taking other jobs during the summers...

At $16k.

"But you get summers off and a whole month and a half of winter break!"

That's not a fair trade. And no, we don't really.

Size 4 wide women's shoes (US) here. I'm tiny and my feet and hands are in proportion. I wear kids' gloves and kids' sneakers, but my dress shoes have to be special ordered.

Bra time: I'm a 34D, which can be a needle in a haystack at times (though not to the extent of the above), and I dig the Vanity Fair Comfort 3X bras for everyday. They're T-shirt bras, so not the most stylish, but they're the first ones I've found where I don't want to rip them off at the end of the day. Padded straps, smooth lines, reasonably adjustable (I'm 4'10" so the straps always need to be adjusted).

Mae! Derovai here. Hello!
(I now have enough Small Wpn to maybe hit the dartboard.)

@arkandel My housemate goes to Greece in the winter! She's from there; she's a Ph.D student, and it just was winter break (plus, we're in upstate NY, so just about anywhere in Europe south of, like, the Shetlands will be warmer).

And that's OK! More baklava for me!

I have baklava from Greece, thanks to my Greek housemate who went home for the holidays! Pistachio, almond, and kataif, which is new to me. Google tells me kataif is (more) shredded phyllo dough, in angel hair shape.

i
love
baklava
so
much
youdontevenknow

I went with the same, though I don't care about the sword either! ¯\(ツ)/¯

Guys, please help me stop listening to Elvis Costello's "My Science Fiction Twin" over and over. Between the bassline and the switch into major key with the "and when he calls home with his alibis/the words flew from his mouth/etc." line in the verses and the clinky drumming in the bridge to the chorus... there's so much there to unpack. Time to listen to it over and over and over and...