Posts made by GangOfDolls

@Arkandel said in Roleplaying writing styles:

What's your favorite 'roleplaying writing style'? Do you have any biases either way? Do you consider yourself an elitist?

I like some hint at the PC's personality and world view in poses, which is often the most effective in meta. But meta is a tricky balance to strike and not everyone does it well. I have no idea if I do it well but I do go for the meta narrative.

I don't know if I consider myself elitist but I don't have a lot of patience for two types of posing:

The first:

Enormous fucking paragraphs that go on and on and on without line breaks. I don't know what it was about Dark Spires specifically that seemed to really be into this kind of pose style but there were multiple people there that would just go bananas with huge fucking paragraphs.

Like for real, I don't care if you're just told me the secret truth of all the universe - I am for real not going to waste my time having to read that because there's so much in there, I can't respond to. any. of. it.

On the contrary I've learned to associate brevity with subpar roleplay.

This is my second. There are people who are great at writing with effective brevity but often, this is not the case. And it tends to follow for me too that I also associate this with the other side of the bad RP coin. If the pose is super flat and too short, it tends to signal to me that the other person isn't paying attention/doesn't give a shit.

So, how do you like to pose? What's your preferred style in your partners?

I just want a little personality and hype in the words but that's so subjective sometimes. I struggle with RPing up against what feels like flat poses, where the writing feels kind of limp, lifeless, and ho hum.

High School:
Summer Camp Counselor - I and everyone that I was friends with should have never been hired as we were legitimately fucking terrible at our jobs. We would literally leave our kids unattended in the middle of the night once a week to smoke a shit ton of weed in the hay barn near the horse stalls. No one ever caught on because they kept rehiring us.

College:
School Year: Bartending & Work Study Desk Jobs on Campus
Summers: Industrial Equipment Auction Service - transcribing records of all the random shit they bought for resale like combines and industrial bakery ovens

1L/First Year of Law School:
Cocktail waitress/bartender at a strip club

Not Law School Graduate School:
Research Assistant
Payroll Department

Now:
Data Scientist/Python DB Dev

The return of Twin Peaks.

@Lithium I quit when they made the decision to let a player back on the game who had been kicked off for sexually harassing female players because he claimed he had medical issue that caused him to do that. And if that's actually true, I was still pretty grossed out by the staff decision to prioritize someone who might or might not have a medical issue that causes them to be sexually inappropriate towards female players as more important than protecting female players from being harassed.

Thanks! It's working now for me!

Dark Spires is still around, though I'm not sure how active. I quit some time ago but still have a friend that plays. The last thing they've said about it is that there's a lot of alts but not a lot of players, pretty slow overall, and not a lot of interesting plot. So, ymmv, I guess but there you go.

So, a helpful advisory from Google shows that someone tried to log into the email account tied to this account here from somewhere in Poland.

I am def not in Poland.

So now I'm going through and resetting passwords, to be on the safe side.

When I went to request a password reset at the log in screen, I get the following error: Unprocessable Entity.

I get this same error across all three browsers: Chrome, Firebox, and even Bing. So, I'm not quite sure what that's about but password reset seems to be broken, if only for me. Help!

@Sparks

Someone in my immediate family is ill. Unfortunately, its terminal but chronic until that point. They also have taken a similar approach. They don't want to discuss it. Presence is enough. And really for everyone involved, I think its better this way. The end can't be changed, so it just feels like dwelling.

Everyone deals differently.

Apologies if I'm rechurning what someone else has already said. I did read through the thread which prompted me to think about this but I may have not committed every comment to memory.

I guess my issue with villains in any game or story setting- PC or NPC- is that its such a binary concept. Good vs bad. Nice vs mean. Grace vs. evil.

And that's not wrong. But.

It's a concept that presumes that your character is in the default position of being in the right and the villain is the default position of being in the wrong. And their actions are supposed to be a staircase to your good PC achieving a state of grace through their act of evil.

And I want to be clear that I'm not knocking stories that have this sort of push/pull. There are people who want to unpack them for a number of very valid reasons. But the reason they're operating through this lens is because they're presented from a point of view that polarizes these actions that favors the 'good' because the intention is usually for good to win. The result is that triumphing actions are treated with virtue and the behavior of the villain is generally termed as having an antagonism. And I think we're conditioned to accept virtue on its merits even when there's little logic or actual supporting evidence that what's happening is actually good and the behavior of the villain is slanted for cause, wherein we're given within reach ideas about why this is bad.

I'd like to see the whole dynamic re-examined, I guess and step out of this frame work. So much of what we understand as conflict on a global scale is deemed as complicated and the argument about who is wrong vs. who is right is a thing steeped in relativism. That's definitely not the case in binary villain v. hero motifs most of the time and I wonder if purposefully framing it in the notion of who did what to whom is steeped in relativism would actually take the pressure off who needs to win.

Every. Fucking. Thing. About. Today.

...Today.

(Except the steak I had for dinner which I ate with my hands like a goddamn savage)

@TwoGunBob I like Taboo a lot but I'm struggling with two things.

I generally think Tom Hardy is excellent. His character in Peaky Blinders is reason enough to watch that series and Bronson is one of my favorite movies about ever. I mean, it's Bane for god's sake. But... his accent is awful.

Sometimes its Welsh, sometimes... its supposed to be British East Indies? Or something? Or? I often find myself super distracted by how its so inconsistent.

I don't find his relationship to Oona Chaplin's character interesting. I haven't seen this week's episode but so far, they haven't given that character anything to do but wear cute Regency era dresses and mope. If all that exposition about why they're what they are to each other weren't going on, I'd have no idea why she was in this story much less why he cares about her being there.

I take Xanax but only because I have a serious fear of flying but have to fly alot for my job and getting turnt on an airplane to cope is a bad plan.

Otherwise, on flights where I am not medicated or sauced - I am a fucking basketcase.

One of my long running concerns about Xanax is how well it works with me and I can easily see myself taking it when ever I went to drop in and drop out on my life. So, I basically treat it as the special treat I get to have only when strapped into a metal tube hurdling through the air. Otherwise, its made of poison.

Else, I'd be swallowing it by the wee fistfull all the time.

Helpfully or not, I've found that memory foam mattresses have a short shelf life. Short is relative when the average mattress is supposed to last 7-10 years but so on this scale, I'm talking like 2-3 years or less depending on the manufacturer, how violent of a sleeper you are, how many hours of the day you're on it, etc.

All memory foam mattresses (as in not all of them but the ones that constructed just out of layers of various foam materials) sort of lose their memory and stop becoming load bearing. So you end up sinking and wake up basically on your base/slats or you get weird dips and valleys. This is less annoying if you sleep by yourself but more annoying if you share your bed as you both end up sort of in the middle of a depression by morning.

For some people, this is an acceptable flaw in the technology and just commit to having to replace more frequently. Or depending on the manufacturer, you might get a warranty that will just keep replacing them.

So something to be aware of.

My view is that the writing of cultural analogues has to keep two things in mind:

1. Does it make sense in the game theme without having to argue a lot of justification?
2. If you were the worst player and not the best player, how would you interpret this information?

To the first, if you have to really work at explaining how it works in a theme then it probably doesn't. Some things slot well into a game theme but if it feels like its a lot of work to bolt it on, then its probably not a good fit to start with.

To the second, I think you do have to think several moves down the line about how someone who isn't going to spend any time googling things much less think critically about a nuanced culture scheme is going to do with it. They usually do the opposite: boil it down to its most reductive and offensive tropes. And they're not being trolls, they're just drawing from what they don't know and filling in the blanks and the result is your highly considered theme gets reduced to a pile of eugenics and racism without any one realizing that's what they're actually doing.

Also, I don't play on Arx but so I'm lacking context but I'm not sure what added value this culture would provide to the game as a whole? Another culture option? Just something new? Something else?

@tyche

I am well aware of the federal structure with regard to seeking development permissions. This is maneuvering to have access to resources (relatively few to land mass and location) and resource transport (Keystone, etc.) without having to be challenged by Indian people for it.

However, I'd like to point there are few recognized tribes relative to the whole of us that have anything worth developing. PacNW tribes have negotiated resource treaties which as worked out well for them and there are some tribes in Maine and the mid-Atlantic who also have resources that they can manage and financially draw from. The key here though is these tribes didn't endure the disruptive reach of forced relocation.

The rest of us? We have nothing. My tribe spans the Canada/US border. The Alberta side has resource access due to the energy boom in Alberta. The US side doesn't have dick and for most relocated tribes, that's also the situation. The coal plant you reference is on tribal land that on the whole spans 4 states. Most of the Navajo nation has nothing, the distribution of wealth from that plant has definitely not been evenly distributed. Most Nation members live at or below the poverty line.

Most BLM land is land that no one wants for a reason- no matter how resource rich it may be, it's so far away from population centers. The resource draws have to be enough to make it worthwhile to invest in an infrastructure system to extract and most tribes lack that start-up.

In the mean time, there are other benefits that we lose by having our sovereignty revoked. Given the poverty, rates of addiction, and lacking access to education, these are lifelines to Indian people in an already bad situation. There is likely no transition plan to deal with these disruptions, so while I understand that this is a resources game - people's lives depend on recognition.

@Ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@GangOfDolls

Might want to think of eating not-chicken and not-fish meat. I'm not joking.

See if your doctor will put you on trazodone.

I surmise you have probably tried melatonin.

Hmmm. Like some sort of iron issue?

@Derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@GangOfDolls said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Ambien works on me, for sure but I'm also of the number that does things that I shouldn't do and can't remember: eating, cooking, fucking, buying $200 worth of the same goddamn digital album on Amazon.

My s/o is like this too. He got so bad that he walked to his dad's, took his dad's truck, wrecked his dad's truck, and didn'the remember any of it. Ambien is kind of the devil for some people. He hasn'the found a good alternative, either, so if one works for you, let me know! I'd kind of like him to be able to sleep again.

Holy christ, I'm lucky that I've never tried to drive on ambien but I wouldn't put it past my asleep self. I'm glad it didn't end up much worse for you guys.

I'm going through the most severe bought of insomnia that I think I've had in my adult life. It's bad enough that this morning I was a little concerned that I might fall asleep while driving to work.

Valerian and other herbal remedies don't work great or at all. I have positional vertigo that's attributed to a head injury I got in high school and Valerian specifically sets it off super bad and I get the barfy room spins. Super hot.

Ambien works on me, for sure but I'm also of the number that does things that I shouldn't do and can't remember: eating, cooking, fucking, buying $200 worth of the same goddamn digital album on Amazon. My GP put me on Doxepin after my last badish bought, which is a very sedating early generation anti-depressant that they just give to people to help you sleepy now as I guess it makes you so sleep you don't have time to think about being sad. This knocks me out but then I'm a drooling, non-functional mess while the half-life works its way out of me and that takes days. Nyquil and OTC sleep stuff puts me out for a couple hours and then I'm wide fucking awake.

My lifestyle in general: I work out a couple times a week and I eat a fairly healthy diet. I'm an unintentional vegetarian, I eat some chicken and fish. I don't like the texture of meat and I don't like deserts or chocolate except in small portions. I will however dump a salt shaker into my open maw if you let me, but I'm pretty good about not inhaling fried shit. I drink socially but only rarely outside of work. I travel/interface with clients a fair amount and there's a lot of social drinking in my job so when I'm on my own, I don't drink much at all. I have a caffeine problem (coffee/tea only, I cut out soda some years ago and I rarely drink it if ever) but I'm impervious to coffee after 4 p.m. as a thing that might keep me awake without trying.

So, does anyone have anything they'd recommend that I have not tried?

@Thenomain

Charming Potato is what made that song worthwhile.

My high school had both Home Economics and Family Planning as separate courses.

Home Economics was mostly a lot of baking because our teacher didn't give a shit and didn't really try. I took the class because I didn't give a shit and didn't want to try but was interested in making brownies. Symbosis.

Family Planning was taught by a former nun who had ten kids and was the wife of a perish deacon. It was more about how to have ten kids and not avoid how to have ten kids.