Posts made by il-volpe

As Into The Garden Elizabeth Ran
by A. E. Housman

As into the garden Elizabeth ran,
Pursued by the just indignation of Ann,
she trod on an object that lay in her road,
She trod on an object that looked like a toad.

It looked like a toad, and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was;
And after supporting Elizabeth's tread
It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.

Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind,
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind,
And Ann in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive.

She was heard to arrive, for the firmament rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang,
As her breath on the breezes she broadly bestowed
And fainted away on Elizabeth's toad.

Elizabeth, saved by the soul of her boot,
Escaped her insensible sister's pursuit;
And if ever hereafter she irritates Ann,
She will tread on a toad if she possibly can.

Hmmm, sounds fun.

@chibichibi Fulcrum will have mage. I don't know about CoD games.

I still want to do 'The Magicians' with FS3, which would be like Mage (+imagination +gay +jewish -ascension war -pretention whores) or so.

@chibichibi Yep, it's Sheltering Skies runners' latest. So, Metro 4, new setting. I think it's Minneapolis/St. Paul.

I am guessing that it has all the same Shel flaws, though I had a lot of fun there until they announced the closing/reboot and people started bailing on the game or going off the rails.

@chibichibi Liberation and Fulcrum for your oWoD jam.

@chibichibi

Eh, people still MU.

It appears to have become too risky to talk about it, though, with on-MU repercussions and people leaping to claim personal attack.

What are you looking to play?

Businesses or similar who've got the notion that their logo will do in place of a written name. I cannot Google 'unparsable symbol, a steeply rising curve, slanted and with a couple of little twiddly-doopers on top' and have your organization come up. It's also really hard to pronounce. Further, if I'm looking for, for example 'The Flying J' and see said symbol, there are pretty good odds I'm gonna miss the turn into your place before I realize that's what it's supposed to mean. And that's an easy one, since it actually follows old-timey cattle brand rules.

@faraday I've always found the "we don't allow concept Y because we can't think of a reason such a person would be in our setting" to be, eh, arrogant. As if game-runner being unable to think of a reason for a woman to be at Guadalcanal means that nobody can possibly think of one.

@Nymeria Ehh, I won't stand corrected. It may well be that you have no rule barring characters of colour per se. However, scrutinizing them such that they're nigh impossible to get approved (on a game with a very laborious application process at that) amounts to the same thing.

I doubt lot of people are super keen to play PCs of colour on a game where they are strongly discouraged by a headwiz who's notorious for saying racist things on social media.

@hobos I getcha. I wondered about it myself -- not only is GoT a typical white fantasy setting, the notion of family resemblance, and specifically in terms of hair-colour, is a major plot point. More than once.

I didn't do or say anything about it. Game of Bones had PCs of colour. I even actively encouraged them. But players, all on their own, kept their Lannisters blonde, their Baratheons black-haired, etc. "Not Overtly Forbidden" does not mean "Inevitable".

I did not have problems with PCs of colour having a reason to be in the setting. Because, one, every character needs a reason to be in the specific setting of a game, and players all come up with one. I simply didn't require PoC to have a good and compelling one while white PCs were there for the beer, all characters were allowed to be there for stupid reasons. It's realistic. Also, the Narrow Sea separating Westeros from Essos is narrow. People have been sailing back and forth for somewhere between two and six thousand years. It's just not much of a barrier in the books, so it seems a stretch to be all oh nooooes how could you possibly be there?! on a MU.

@Misadventure Pointless info-dump-esque thing. Ned Stark doesn't understand genetics and it's quite likely that George R. R. Martin doesn't either, but Jon actually works out fine -- some primates on Planetos, Valyrian humans notably, have the equivalent of a "dominant white" mutation. In the real world humans don't have this, but a lot of other creatures do. Horses have lots of different ones. So Rhaegar had one copy of the Valyrian white-hair gene and thus the phenotype. Lyanna Stark didn't have the gene, and Jon happened not to get it from Rhaegar, so Jon's brown or black haired depending on your show/book preferences. Interesting, in real world animals having two copies of a dominant white gene often results in neurological dysfunction. Which would explain why Targaryans are often batshit. Dominant white mutations are also often what coat-colour-genetics people call 'leaky', meaning that whatever colour the creature would be without the white gene covering it shows through -- you want a snowy white chicken, you breed recessive white because dominant white is likely to give you a brassy white or a ticked white. If Valyrian white acts that way with blonde, it would explain how generations of Lannisters could 'carry' it and be 'golden' rather than white blonde.

Probably coincidental, but amusing thoughts to me.

@Ghost Lindaaaaa Antonsson did try to take legal action about being on the 'Tasteless Descs' section of WORA.

I don't think she, or Elio, have actually done anything to shut down other 'A Song of Ice and Fire' MUs, besides say that their having GRRM's explicit permission means that he doesn't want anyone else doing it, and that he cares enough to object.

Lindaaa says racist stuff on twitter and only white characters are allowed on her game. The twitting has been noticed in GRRM fandom and rightly condemned for years.

By Fleda Brown

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

• Without the "great equalizer" of PC death, player disenfranchisement grows as players will never be able to compete with older characters.

This isn't actually a problem unless plot-runners allow it to be.

A table-top GM may need to find ways to prevent the barbarian from bashing in every locked door before the rogue can have a go at it, and that same GM is doing a poor job of it if it's all straightforward combat all the time and the wizard has naught to do but run away.

And y'know, if it's difficult to come up with in-story complications to achieve this, you do have the option of putting 'This event/plotline is for PCs with n XP or less' on the announcement. I can't possibly count the number of times I've been told some plot that my PC would notice and care about and reasonably be involved in is simply not for me because of 'sphere' distinctions, leaving me to come up with the reason he didn't act. This is fine. I could do the same in keeping my nose out of stuff meant for lower or higher power-levels.

Changing the World Takes Time, Gentle Readers
by Judith Martin, Nicholas Ivor Martin and Jacobina Martin
Miss Manners | August 4th, 2022

GENTLE READERS: There is a disturbing trend in Miss Manners' correspondence that she wishes to address, lest Gentle Readers give up hope of a more polite future. It concerns letters that begin:

-- "When did it become OK to ...?"

-- "Am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned or ...?"

-- "Am I being too sensitive when ...?"

What follows is an example of something that was never OK. Miss Manners' field is external behavior, not internal squirming, but her concern is the implication that the victim has, or should have, given up hope of improving society.

A fourth type of letter underscores the point: It seeks a polite response to a slight, real or imagined, that the Gentle Reader already answered with a taunting rejoinder, a rude gesture or worse.

Miss Manners does, on occasion, supply responses which, though faultlessly polite, cause an offender to explode in a burst of mortification and apology. But she more often counsels more subtle responses, which, even had the reader known them when the event occurred, would not have required a fire extinguisher.

This is because the goal is not to strike someone who struck you first -- the goal is not to get hit in the first place.

This should be apparent, as even Miss Manners' most caustic advice is too late to touch a driver who has long since sped away, a line-cutter who is off offending new people out of reach of the Gentle Reader, or everyone else who has long forgotten what happened at that date, luncheon, meeting or class reunion.

It takes time to improve the world -- or even, truth be known, one's friends and relations. This is not because there are no solutions to rude behavior or because one must either accept rudeness or be rude oneself. Nor is it because the solutions proposed do not work.

True, Miss Manners' approach does not always provide the instant gratification of smacking our fellow citizens under the guise of good manners. She realizes this runs counter to a world that is impatient when the package just ordered is not already at the door. What she advises used to be known as solving the problem, an activity that Miss Manners accepts is old-fashioned, even if it is the only one that ever worked.

And just because we do not see the offenders shrivel up in front of us does not mean we have not succeeded. Who knows but that, having been shown a better way, they have not spent a sleepless night repenting?

@Misadventure

Yep. It'd amount to the same thing as 'XP is awarded at a diminishing rate' or as 'Advancement costs in XP increase with the total number of XP you have earned'.

I just think it'd be easier on people to frame it as this two types of points thing. You wouldn't have to figure out how much a stat increase is for you, the table would stay the same. If +votes are still used, you wouldn't want them to decrease in, eh, visible value. Because they're also a measure (not a great one, but hey) of how much fun you're creating for other players, and you might go 'fuck, what am I doing wrong?' if you can't see how many +votes you got (and it's a reasonable call to hide that info, as some games do) and your XP earnings drop.

I don't mean any slow transformation.

I'd base the rate on the individual character's XP total, but that's 'cause I'm thinking of slowing advancement, not about trying to keep all the PCs closer in power level. I don't think I want to do that, but I don't think it'd be a bad thing to do.

I like FS3's slow steady as well. It seems fair and does not further disadvantage those who play less.

I don't like caps, because I feel that advancing one's character is an important (but not fully necessary) part of the fun.

I don't like time intervals/wait periods, because supposedly the time it takes to earn the XP represents that.

I don't like 'justification' because it leaves a lot of room for unfairness or feelings of unfairness. It also makes some things hard to advance, since watercolour painting and the like are seldom on-camera activities.

What I'd like to see is a sliding scale. (Or rather, MUs doubling up on the sliding scale, since RPG systems invariably have a deal where higher levels take more XP to reach.) Say you have earned XP and spendable XP. For the first twenty points (or whatever the game-runners decide) it's one-to-one. After that, an earned XP is worth only a portion of a spendable XP. The next twenty EXP are only worth ten SXP or whatever. And so on, so by the time you're getting close to where the gamerunners think an overall cap would be appropriate, it takes you half a year to earn enough EXP to have the SXP required to advance.

BAZONKA
by
Spike Milligan

Say 'Bazonka' every day
That's what my grandma used to say
It keeps at bay the Asian Flu'
And both your elbows free from glue.
So say Bazonka every day
That's what my grandma used to say

Don't say it if your socks are dry!
Or when the sun is in your eye!
Never say it in the dark
The word you see emits a spark
Only say it in the day
That's what my grandma used to say

Young Tiny Tim took her advice
He said it once, he said it twice
He said it till the day he died
And even after that he tried
To say Bazonka! every day
Just like my grandma used to say.

Now folks around declare it's true
That every night at half past two
If you'll stand upon your head
And shout Bazonka! from your bed
You'll hear the word as clear as day
Just like my grandma used to say!

The end

Chris Clarke's Coyote Crossing is amazing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190121200835/http://coyot.es/crossing/2008/07/19/coyote-crossing/

Somebody reading Ethan Coen's You Want Spooky?

https://youtu.be/HpL5tGY9Ycs

"I knelt beside a stream which was manifesting on a polished wooden floor in an apartment above Central Park. A feathered shield was fastened to my left forearm. A feathered helmet was lowered on my head. I was invested with a duty to protect the orphan and the widow. This made me feel so good I climbed on Alexandra's double bed and wept in a general way for the fate of men. Then I followed her into the bathroom. She appeared to turn gold. She stood before me as huge as the guardian of the harbour. How had I ever thought of mastering her? With a hand of chrome and an immense Gauloise cigarette she suggested that I give up and worship her, which I did for ten years. Thus began the obscene silence of my career as a lady's man."

-- Leonard Cohen

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

— Frank O’Hara