Posts made by Ghost

@Auspice SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” - Marcus Aurelius

2020. Masquerade Bloodlines 2, baby.

PC, Xbone, PS4.

Trailer Link

Corporate management often boasts the need for ethics...unless it involves decisions that might result in people brushing up their resumes.

Didn't get laid off, but one of my major peeves in life are people who require ethics from you that they're not providing in return.

News.

Incoming Labyrinth Tabletop RPG with a GM-less system.

You remind me of the babe...

From what I'm reading it'll be less "D&D" and more "Legacy of Dragonolt" (A choose your own adventure style rpg system with characters, some dice, and adventure paths contained in the book material that walks players through scenes/challenges based on choices offered to them in the narration).

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

Ubisoft and Red Storm is giving the limpest answer on whether or not The Division 2 is making a political statement with its narrative(it is).

WAT???

You mean to tell me there might be an undertone of politics in a game set in a quasi-apocalyptic DC quarantine zone while getting into gunfights in the Lincoln Memorial against a faction of America obsessed good-ole-boys (Called the Lost Sons)?!?!?!?!

I am beside myself with shock. Shock. Absolute shock.

@lordbelh said in Good TV:

But best cop show since The Wire? Just off the top of my head I'd rank both Justified and Southland (tragically cut short) ahead of it, and if I spent a little time thinking about it, I'd find more

Oh I know, I was just joking.

Though Captain Holt has basically shown me how RPing as a Vulcan could be fun.

@Thenomain Install a "Security Copperhead Pit Viper" in your backseat or chain a half-starved honey badger to your undercarriage at night.

@Pandora I like the style of your brain. It has good brain style. There is definitely a story to be told, there.

My SO showed me the pockets in her jeans, once.

Women's pockets are buuuullshit. My man-pants can hold 3x what she can in her lady-jeans.

I empathize with women when it comes to their shitty lot in life when it comes to women's clothing that can't fit a cell phone in them. In fact, the jeans I'm wearing right now have two big back pockets and a sub-pocket next to my right buttcheek that is designed specifically for a smartphone.

A travesty, it is.

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

To the generic crowd that behaves this way: Just stop with this bullshit insistance that anyone who DOES NOT DO THAT is an RL *ist troll. It's divisive garbage behavior. The hobby is not solely composed of extremist SJWs and trolls, full stop. Stop acting like it is.

(Moved deleted post as an edit to my previous one)

I don't disagree with you at all. I personally think people assuming that character selection, or language of said character, is a reflection of the author's secret allegiance to something horrible is a WTF-LEVEL 1984 sanitization that will end up doing more harm than good.

I should be able to write an antagonistic character who does horrible, bigoted things as a counterpoint to a hero (up-to and including writing things like the full n-word) without people accusing me of being a neo-Nazi. I think this steps society in the wrong direction and that kind of fascist over-liberal extremism normalizes fascist thought sanitization and punishment of people who refuse to conform to whichever social dominance claims divine right to do so.

As far as I'm concerned, all of you should go IC with your +2 shinai sticks and call each other n-words and PK each other to your heart's content, then laugh about it and pat each other on the back for writing antagonist characters who made it really satisfying for the PCs to defeat said evil. Go for it. Write things that inspire and horrify you.

Authors and actors can do this so long as their forwards or promotional interviews contain convincing explanations of how horrible they think said antagonists are, give or take a few mentions of stuff like "I had to go to therapy after playing this racist character", "It broadened my understanding of...", or "I couldn't sleep some nights after filming." This is stuff our society expects.

But, in all fairness, some mushers can't survive differences on whether or not characters are monogamous, whether or not initiating combat is a form of harassment, or role-playing without the OOC element being constantly pervasive without near constant accusations and explosions on MSB's hog pit. Too many people use their characters as extensions of themselves to the point of barely separating IC from OOC. Too much is taken too personally.

Choices gotta be made. Are people going to play a game that removes the safety nets and let the chips fall where they may, or are you going to choose which elements need to be avoided to keep the OOC-side issues to a minimum? By all means, choose whatever you want for a game...

...but I can tell you which one would make a MU more successful and draw more of an audience (or end up on the Hog Pit less).

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

The suggestion @Ghost hinted at, period-piece vs historical, might help a little, but I think more folks would simply eye roll at playing on a period-piece game, wondering how much history was thrown out the window even (is that 50s cafe racer place going to involve the main motorcycle person jumping the shark on skiis at some point?).

You know, I think this hobby could use more artistic fuckery in terms of injecting style into period/historic themes.

Like DiCaprio/Danes Romeo + Juliet Montague vs Capulet set to the theme of a quasi Coachella post-apocalyptic Long Beach setting.

Probably a lot of fun room in there to do stuff like THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR in a medieval theme between two rival nations of knights/wizards/LotR style rangers, where the slaves are some kind of underground race of mole people used for mining...but then there is a slant historically where things like graffiti/tagging/underground clubs exist in the "No Man's Land" like some kind of shelled out Bosnia (a la This War of Mine)

Creating themes like these could kill 2 birds with one stone: You can explore historic themes with alternate NOUNS and stylized imagery to retell a story in the era of your choice without the RL social pitfalls.

(I.e. They call the mole people Snouts which is a pseudo-reference to the N-word, and the King in the West has outlawed their slavery and integrated the mole people into their society. Popular mole-person activist uses music radioed across the battle lines to give hidden messages (SLAVERY underground railroad songs) to give them hints on how to escape...)

^^ This is also the method Neil Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley used science fiction to tell stories about the horrors of South African Apartheid through Alive in Joburg, which later became District 9.

@Arkandel But this is where it gets weird and makes me go...

There are all these rules and bylaws, societal norms, socio-political fads per country that vary from person to person...

Like:

If it's socially acceptable for people of a certain skin color to use certain words, and my character fits that wheelhouse, is it okay for me to use those words ICly? Does it more or less matter if I'm not that ethnicity OOCly? Does my OOC ethnicity even matter and why should I even disclose that? Does that make it okay for men to RP as women...?

...but what if I'm a man RPing as a woman and avoiding themes central to women's issues? Is it okay for someone who has suffered discrimination as their OOC nonwhite ethnicity to RP as a racist white person? Is it stupid to declare your ethnicity/gender on an OOC scale? Would doing so cause more issues than good?

INTERNAL SCREAMING INTENSIFIES

Minefield. MIIIIIINEFIELD

(And no, please, let's not turn the conversation to this, or if you want to create another thread. I was just trying to outline the number of mines in the field should anyone allow racism/bigotry into a Historical MU. Or, at least, was trying to outline how fragile the yellow tape is when it comes to maintaining peace OOCly when it comes to these topics)

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

@Cupcake said in Historical MUSHes:

female Indian medical doctor

Susan "Bright Eyes" La Flesche Picotte

Yes, the term Bright Eyes was appropriated by a white band that included @ghost's favorite Omaha personality.

Wow.

I genuinely thank you for providing me another new entry into my MAAAAAAN FUCK THAT GUY notebook.

@Arkandel said in Historical MUSHes:

... But that's a very big if unfortunately. And while The Pianist is a static work of art that narrates events within a specific context and tells a specific tale. MU* simply don't work like that due to their interactive nature.

I agree with this 100%.

Take these movies about racism, etc. Will Poulter played a racist who said a lot of nasty stuff in Detroit, but he was hired to do so and part of a production company that had lunch with him, took breaks with him, and there had to be trust between actors. He wasn't calling people those names off-camera.

I don't see mushing surviving these concepts unless at the very least it's an invite-only MU where everyone knows going in that some players will be dropping N-bombs, but there's enough OOC love that the other players are well aware that it's a role and not covert racism spank-banking.

On an open door cattle-call mush, not so much.

@Cupcake said in Historical MUSHes:

Like, I'm okay with my Victorian era female Indian medical doctor (shut up, @Ghost) being held in contempt by the white people around her and not wanting to utilize her services. But I wouldn't be okay with my Wild West Jewish seamstress being called "kike", etc. There's societal disdain and then there's overt abuse, and the last does not contribute to a fun rp experience.

WATIDO?!?!

Nuttin for me to shaddap about. Play what ya want.

What you really really want.

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

@A-Meowley said in Historical MUSHes:

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

I think it would be ridiculous to say that staff allows what I've described because of an inherent desire to be sexist/racist/ableist/homophobic/etc. RL.

Good thing nobody's said that!

Except that they have. Just not in this particular thread.

Wow. Totally forgot about that thread.

The way I see it is this: You can't have it both ways.

If you have a historical mush without also incorporating both the negatives and positives of the era, then it's really not historical but more a period-piece with adapted/selected themes.

But if you role play an idealized version of a specific era (I.e. a good example is the movie Overlord, which had Bokeem Woodbine playing a black NCO over white troops in the invasion of Normandy, which never happened historically), you can still enjoy the game, but it's technically not historically accurate.

Sure, some covert assholes are gonna be like "Hey I wanna drop n-bombs (not because I'm racist but because it's HISTORICALLY ACCURATE AND THIS IS THE LACK OF HISTORIC ACCURACY I ZERO IN ON)", but implementing modern themes for OOC comfort to avoid negativity TECHNICALLY detracts from the purpose of roleplaying out a historical era.

I guess philosophy-wise, the whole point of history (or revisiting it in fiction) is to acknowledge the good and bad of the era and to write a story that is fictitious but could have happened in the era. Doing so allows us to revisit the setting and use the negativity of the era as a constant antagonist to the protagonist.

In short: Adrian Brody in THE PIANIST would mean little without the theme of racist, fascist Nazis sacking Poland.

I can see both sides of the argument. My preference would be to actually bind to actual historic accuracy but mandate the themes of expected PCs and leave the racism/bigotry to NPCs/enemies controlled by staff who will do so with dignity.

ETA: You can RP a game in an era where people owned slaves or women had no right to vote, but you keep the game manageable by simply requiring that all PCs are not those who believe in said bigotry. They could want to abstain from the topic, outright DISLIKE the bigotry, or ignore it altogether and focus on other themes, but never be a proponent of.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the best cop show since the Wire. Fight me.

Also, I am aching to make a WoD hunter/police crew based on the show*.

ETA: *in a tabletop game.