@Alzie said:
@HelloRaptor said:
@Alzie said:
Windows 10: For when you just don't think the NSA has enough tools to spy on you and you want to give them more.
Not using Windows 10 to 'make things harder on the NSA' is like emptying your pockets of change so you don't 'make things harder on your car'.
There are plenty of things you can do to protect yourself. Linux is a good s tart.
I could just give up on computers and the internet, too, but that's not really a good solution either.
@Coin said:
@tragedyjones said:
Newest POI Guest Star: Keith Mars.
Oh, you poor spring chicken.
I had to look that up real quick because I wasn't sure I was matching the name to the face, and I actually full on lol'd hard enough my mother in law who's visiting ducked around the corner to ask if I was alright. >_>
@Insomnia said:
@ThatOneDude That's fine, as long as it stops assuming my laptop screen is a touchpad. I could have gotten one like that, but I already have a tablet.
I want to put things on my desktop, dammit.
I want to turn off the swooping thing when I use the touchpad.I do like that it's easy to make a backup, though I didn't like that I had to buy a USB drive to do it, rather than get disks. They're cheap, sure. But argh!
Download Classic Shell, install, hit the 'Dekstop' on the stupid start menu thing and then click on the Start button there and it'll take you through the options. You can do with the automatic ones it sets up, or you can poke through it and check for things you want to tweak. The default is to revert you to essentially 98% Windows 7 setup.
If you want a start button that looks like the win7 one, I can send you the image file with the various button pictures so you can pick the one sized right for your screen.
Also, I think there's an option in there to do it, but you can also just right-click on your taskbar, select Properties, go to Navigation, and remove the 'Corner Navigation' checkboxes to disable the irritating charms/etc menus when using your touchpad.
My windows 8.1 is virtually indistinguishable from Win7 unless you really know what you're looking for. A couple of things took getting used to, like where to find the things now lumped under PC Settings, but I'm pretty much completely free of the features that made Windows 8.1 such a total trainwreck. And a lot of stuff that people think won't install on it will install on it just fine, it just won't run through the Start screen and its ridiculous 'Apps' bullshit.
I recently put it on my laptop, and that shit starts up soooooo much faster/smoother than even a stripped down win7 did.
Windows 10 is going to make most of this shit the default (desktop mode, disabling touch controls unless it detects a touchscreen, and even then you can shut it off, etc).
what with users circa 2003 cracking jokes about "no girls on Internet"
People still do that in 2015, and it boggles my mind.
Look, I'm not racist, there's brown people in my ancestory.
Is there some kind of percentage of brown people you need to have in your ancestry before it's okay to say shit that only sounds racist if you're white?
@TNP said:
I liked oWoD a lot more than nWoD. The latter seems very bland.
It is. Very, very bland. I mean, Mage basically dumped consensual reality and '6 billion people believe this, you believe that, see who's right.' for a bunch of bullies thousands of years ago kicked sand in the face of everybody else and...meh?
@Tempest
I'm not sure how things like can't or "need* come into it. You don't need a PB with blue eyes, even if your character has blue eyes. You could just mention it somewhere. But people still photoshop blue eyes onto the PB they want to use. Or whatever other details.
Presumably if they're going out of their way to use pictures, they're meant to evoke something about the character, whether it's direct appearance or a suggestion of behavior/demeanor.
Hell, people don't need a PB pic at all. Or if they do, they don't need more than one, but plenty of people (myself included) certainly seem to like having a gallery.
If you don't like sexually suggestive pictures on people's wiki pages, more power to you. I don't think that makes you a prude at all, just someone who'd prefer it was otherwise. But criticizing wiki picture choices by saying they just can't do without or that they don't need to be one way or another is pretty presumptuous.
DISCLAIMER: I once had a shirtless pb pic. 
I am not so quietly gnashing my teeth over all the FF8 love. Not that it was a terrible game, but it's the least-Final Fantasy game of the entire line. I don't really agree that it broke the mold so much as was just never poured into the mold in the first place. It feels about as much like a Final Fantasy game as the Spirits Within movie, which is to say it just had the label slapped onto it.
That said, I don't think I would have batted an eyelash or had any problem with it if it had been titled under a different name. Maybe Chrono Something Or Other.
FFIV and FFVI are def the best of the early games in terms of their stories. FFVII is a classic, but the giant polygons can be kind of immersion breaking for folks used to newer games. IX is probably the best of the modern (post-7) games, though unlike some I really liked FFX. IX definately has one of the best protagonists, in that he's a cheerful dude and not some emo asshole. 
FFXII is easily my favorite , and I hope it gets a PC port, though I'm not holding out hope. FFXIII is kind of an abomination for many of the same reasons 8 is, but adds 95% of the game taking place in linear corridors as a truly terrible offense. FFXIII-2 more than makes up for this and is a pretty fantastic Final Fantasy game, but nobody really gives it a chance since it's a direct continuation of FFXIII.
I realize not all of these are on PC, I'm just rambling about Final Fantasy.
Also, caveat: If Kingdom Hearts ever gets PC ports, I will squee for life. >_<
What? No, this sounds perfect. I think I did play that character somewhere/anywhere/everywhere.
I think that the level of awkwardness regarding inserting your own character in a scene you're running is almost entirely to do with the level of comfort and trust that the other players are willing to put in you, and how you present yourself as a storyteller and a player.
That's such a bullshit sidestep. Why do we not allow staff to do their own xp spends, set their own notes, make rule calls about situations their PCs are involved in right then, etc? Why, if Bob and Joe just got in a huge OOC screaming fight at one another on the channels, do we generally not let Bob's staffbit respond to a PK situation Joe is in with somebody immediately after?
Because no matter how much we might trust those people 99% of the time, no matter how much we believe they would absolutely try not to let their conflict of interest interfere, people make mistakes. If Joe dies as a result of the scene, is it ever going to be possible to say that Bob's fight with him didn't slant any of the rulings against him? If Joe survives but the opposing character dies, is an accusation that a shitty call was the result of him overreacting to trying not to penalize Bob and going too far ever going to be answered without reasonable doubts?
While you're correct that the issues some people have can stem from a lack of trust, we can trust someone to do their best and not deliberately make calls or decisions based on their PC being in the scene, while still being uncomfortable with the situation because of uncertainty over the unintentional weight it puts on those calls or decisions. Did Bob get taken out of play because you kept your PC back when it could have intervened, because you didn't want to take the spotlight and thought someone else would do it? How about because you rolled a random number for attack of all PCs present, and Bob got hit because your PC added to the count, when otherwise it would have hit Joe instead who would definately have survived? The awareness that the only reason he went down was because the random outcome was influenced by your PC being present has nothing to do with trust in you and everything to do with the easily focused frustration that your PC being present provides, because getting upset with a randomly generated number isn't very satisfying.
You can think it's horseshit all you want, but on TR the complaints about people STing scenes where their own character was present was fucking rampant, and was almost never about them grandstanding or stealing focus or anything of the sort. It was about bullshit randomness that was easily blamed on them, or how they didn't step in to do the thing everybody knew they could, but nobody felt like they could take them to task IC since people OOCly understood they were trying to not be That Guy/Gal. Or bitching about some PC gaining IC benefit from the outcome of the scene that his player ST'd for his own pack/coterie/etc. How far does trust go when there's a pretty direct line of benefit from Bob running a scene for his pack and Bob's PC also reaping the rewards they bring back?
Meh. I've no doubt there are people who don't give a fuck one way or another, but let's try not to pretend it's not an entirely reasonable issue that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with trust.
@Coin said:
@HelloRaptor said:
I'm more than a little weirded out by the fact you seem to think that softcore pics of a sexual PC are ok if the player is going to engage in TS, but not if they aren't.
Srsly.
It just reads like "How dare you get my hopes up and then not follow through on my expectations!" 
If you haven't, and like action games (or can put up with them for Disney+Final Fantasy), play the Kingdom Hearts series. There's a couple of places where you get to fight Squall and just beat the shit out of him.
It's super cathartic. 
Ah ha, written by a white woman. Makes sense. White people have notoriously bad senses of humor.
Frankly, the code has come far enough that unless you have access to God and the server itself, cheating is next to impossible. With everything backed up through SQL and such, not stored on the game itself, it's next to literally impossible to cheat with things like xp. Staffers could do their own xp jobs just with other staffers occasionally peeking at their xp/log.
I needed a good laugh. Way to go, I appreciate it.
@tragedyjones said:
I don't know Lost very well, but I love me some Ogres. They have layers.
CHANGELING THE LOST SECOND EDITION: OGRES
http://theonyxpath.com/changeling-the-lost-second-edition-ogres/
"Tattoos are a popular option."
Cue all the whiners who bitch about people having tattoos signifying their supernatural allegiances, despite every wod book since the dawn of time saying characters do so, depicting characters doing so, etc.
@Glitch , go read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.
It will totally change your life.
Bonus points if you read The Second Chronicles, and The Last Chronicles.
You will never be the same.
@Derp
The swastika is a symbol of good fortune in various belief systems, not specifically a tribute to the murder of millions of Jews, but it's still probably a safe bet that if you run into a bald guy with a swastika stamped on his skin or clothes he's probably not a Greek history afficianado or a follower of Jainism.
It's entirely possible the guy in the pickup with the stars and bars splashed along its side is in fact merely showing off his southern pride and his discontent over government crackdowns on gun control and other things he views as his personal liberties, but it's also fair to say that he still qualifies for @The-Tree-of-Woe's list whether he understands the reaction his choice of symbolism provokes or not.
On the subject of the American civil war, it may have been about states' rights, but a prominent one of those rights (and the one most people care about now, frankly) was slavery, and everybody involved knew it. The north might not have officially gone to war to end slavery, but the south was absolutely fighting to keep it, so pretending the flag flown towards that end has nothing to do with it is exactly the sort of bullshit white-washing that has been talked about here.
@Thenomain said:
@Ganymede said:
The term "accuracy" in context refers to whether the opinion is a fact.
I'm not so sure; let's discuss this theory.
I'm sure there's no shortage of possibilities! But there are still fewer than there were in 1E, and to me that's a strange revision to make.
Absent the Dual Kith merit or super high power stat, I found the exact opposite to be true about 1e.
Lots of communal creatures- wolves, rabbits, ants, whatever- might love the idea of finding people they can trust and pledge with, except that mechanically they're not allowed to do that.
What? From the Beast reference document: "A Beast can, of her own free will, enter into a Contract or Pledge or other more intimate acts of binding, but it chuffs her more than the average Lost."
There is mechanically nothing preventing a Beast from trusting or Pleding with folks. They don't even suffer a penalty. At worst there's flavor text suggesting you're 'more chuffed than the average Lost', which is meaningless since there's no set value for how 'chuffed' the 'average Lost' is.
The only mechanical imposition is "Forced confinement, especially the physical kind, is too much for her. Escaping bonds requires three Glamour instead of one. Once per story, if a Beast is confined or imprisoned, she suffers a Clarity breaking point.", which is not at all what you described.
While I find your objection to the Fairest changes much more reasonable, and understandable, than most others (in that they are quite different than 1e Fairest, not that they're now Sidhe, which is not at all the case), your Beast example doesn't really make any sense.
Maybe I want to play, for instance, a spider ling as a genteel, refined housekeeper inviting people into her parlor, a woman who's nothing but civilized and refined, except that mechanically is a punished concept basically.
How is this punished? Are you somehow equating having a house with confinement? One of the example blurbs is a stock broker, isn't it?
The character creation specifically calls out that not all beasts are pulse pounding brutes, and that more cerebral beasts exist as well. I see nothing to suggest that your spider example doesn't work. It's just not called out specifically as a concept, but jesus, there was so much ground to cover that not EVERY kind of Beast was going to get its honorable mention in a first draft. If your beast's particular passion involves the trappings of civility and social refinement than that is what they'll focus on to exactly the extreme the Beast writeup suggests.
It's like you're deliberately choosing to interpret this shit in the worst possible way so that it affirms your fears. "It doesn't say I can, so I can't." is a terrible way to read the basics of a character archetype.
Pooka were usually the most popular splat on oWoD Changeling games, due to all the variety of animals you could build. Except... whatever animal type you made, you were pretty strong corralled by the mechanics and flavor to make a silly shit-stirring trickster type.
To be fair, they fixed that officially when the Pooka book came out and what constituted 'lying'. It'd been unofficially clarified almost after the Changeling book come out, but the fact was that the majority of folkes seemed to want to play a silly, shit-stirring trickster.
Yeah, I've done a lot of things in my life that I should feel bad for, but that's one of the few I really regret. Nobody deserves that. 
