Posts made by il-volpe

@derp said in Critters!:

@silverfox you have the best cat stories

Good cat story:

I had a 55 gallon planted aquarium with this big home-made light-box/hood on it. The light box got nicely warm. My cat liked to sleep up there. One day I was cleaning tanks and she was up there, so I picked her up, said, "Sorry, you gotta find something else to do," set her down and proceeded to take the light-box and lid off and do the cleaning.

I had just finished, topped up the water in tank, and was about to put the lid and lights back on when my mom dropped by. So I was standing there by the open aquarium, talking with my mom when the cat walked back into the room. She, the cat, gave me a distinct, 'Fuck you, I do what I want' side-eye look and jumped from the floor into the aquarium. Same jump she made daily to sleep up there, but the lid not being on she dunked herself completely, then levitated out and ran off to escape the gales of laughter.

She never jumped casually to that spot again, but would pause and look carefully.

@misadventure This is a very useful image for social media:

@faraday

... is the best explanation we can hope for.

Two litters. I am surprised, I thought last year it was just one 'Queen Mousie' having litter after litter.

Mum #2:

Older bebe:

Older bebe, cross about being handled:

Infink:

People who just occupy shared resources. Send a print job, go to the room where the printer is, find somebody's stacked a shitload of crap in front of and on top of it, so I need to clear shit from in front of it to get close enough to the printer to find that having an object on its output tray has jammed it, and then must clear the shit off the top of it so I can open it to unjam it, and then send the job again.

@misadventure I've encouraged people to do async scenes in +jobs when scheduling is rough. I find it more fun to RP a round of poses every day or two than to wait for three weeks. This is particularly appropriate for debriefings, Q&A sessions and reconnaissance trips that aren't too likely to get action-packed -- some scenes are really more fun to RP about after than they are to RP.

The suggestion didn't fly recently, but I was being jerked around. It's worked fine for me as a GM and allowed me to include people whose timezones don't mesh with mine.

@faraday Ares is so darn good. I like line graphs better, but hey.

Yeah, people staying logged in skew it. Ideally activity charts would start to ignore you after 20 minutes inactivity, would record OOC activity separately, and would allow you to view them both separately and overlapping.

It's not really that big a deal, though, because the game's prime time is at least in part set by gamerunners. Just overtly stating something like, "We schedule all open GMed events for between 5 and 11 pm EST Sunday-Thursday and between 3 and 11 Saturdays, and we post them at least 3 days before," seems to help both reduce FOMO-anxiety for players and bump the prime time activity numbers up.

I do kinda fancy the idea of at least seeing how it goes to run a MU that you literally turn off except for its normal running hours, but this also seems likely to be contrary to the building-a-happy-community goal.

No game is really 24/7. Some of these problems are fixed if you just lean in to that fact.

MUs have a prime time. Or two. Often it corresponds to tee-vee prime times.

It's really a pity about MUDstats no longer adding new games, because its charts showed you when a game's prime time was.

Schedule stuff. During prime time. Don't do major events without scheduling, it drives people to wonder if they're missing out. Do not piss people about with scheduling; if you scheduled it, do it. If you do random events and cancel scheduled ones last minute you are probably going to give the impression that you think players are or should just be hanging about the game all the time. Make it possible to participate without having to hang out waiting for opportunities. Make it clear that odds are enormously against anything world-shaking happening at 9:45 am on a Wednesday, and that checking up at that time is not necessary.

@ganymede They do have tiny sex a lot in springtime.

But they spend all their XP on whatever stats it takes to dive headfirst down that long vertical tube and catch oneself from freefall at the chosen entry.

Some MU people knew of and were a little invested about this thing. There is a new litter of tiny hairless pathetic little mousies in it as of yesterday.

These Peromyscus leucopus mousies try to move into my house every fall, and so I seasonally set traps. I have some live-traps because they also try to move into my car and I kept sticking my hand in snap-traps when I set them under the seat. Because 2020 was horrible enough, that year I used the live traps exclusively and would drive the cute little bastards a few miles and let them go near this abandoned barn. After giving them a rest and a meal in one of these cages. Then one day I caught four and it was snowing. So I ended up keeping them and buying a couple of boxes of loads of second-hand 'critter trail' cages and parts, and ended up with this. They had some babies over the summer and now there are ten.

It's pretty crazy entertaining at night when they all run about.

Frequentlies:

You know those cages are terrible, right?

Yeah, they're too small for hamsters, but these mice are small. They're also semi-arboreal, so this kind of cage is actually behaviorally appropriate.

Isn't it a huge pain to clean?

Well, yeah, but mostly they poop in the little flying-saucer and loft 'room' parts, so I just dump those out and rinse them. It takes a long time for it to get whiffy.

This is my 4th grade fantasy.

Isn't it though.

Can you hold them?

Not really. They are tame and take food from my hands, but they do not seem to be very capable of holding still.

@arkandel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ZoiJeFgRg

@hella Yeah. My reaction tends not to be "Waaah, I wish you liked me as much as you like Theno," but "Waaah, I wish you liked me enough to invite me to join that table too," and I still feel that this is legit, especially if the "table" I was at is rendered empty or near-empty by your shifting to Theno-table.

@arkandel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

what if the choice that takes a PC mostly off the table is OOC? For instance if you stop being active on my PC's spouse to play an alt with Theno's PC. Do I have the moral high ground to get pissed off?

Moral? Eeeh.

Is it likely that you'll be upset? Obviously. Imagine we meet at the gaming store for table-top. You stop showing up for our game, but I see you across the room, playing with Theno at another table. I was enjoying our game, you dropped it because you enjoy playing with Theno more than with me. I am going to have feels about that.

When you're talking about WoD it's not magic vs no-magic, it's freeform magic (Mage) vs spell-based magic (everybody else.)

Freeform magic systems are not inherently more powerful than spell-based ones. There are a couple things going on:

1: They require more creative effort from players, so they're harder.

2: They are more vague. So they're more open to GM interpretation. It's quite possible to love Mage in general but hate it on FooMU because, goddamnit, every fucking time you try to do magic, FooMU staff tells you it doesn't work that way. Getting the strong impression that your staffer 'trusts' Abelard to cast 'correctly' and hand-waves it while carefully examining your attempts for flaws (and of course, finding them) is a common occurrence.

The oft-mentioned overpoweredness of Mage probably has to do with point 2, not the game system itself.

PLUS, when you're talking about a MU, "balance" and "overpowered" mean something different than a tabletop game, and/or what the game designers anticipated.

Unless you don't let characters advance, or you give everybody an XP when anybody earns one, a MU can't be balanced like a table-top game (such as the system was designed for). The way to achieve balance on a MU is not to have all PCs equally capable. It's to provide plotlines/adventures/events that cater to Camille's strengths and interests, and to contrive ways to keep Abelard out of them if he happens to share Camille's strengths +2.

@derp said in Something Completely Different:

To steal a quote from someone else: "MSB follows WORA's spirit still. It is a safe place where MUSHers can post criticism of games without fear of reprisal from the game owners. It was a place to call out the bullshit of games and players under the anonymity of another identity."

It wasn't very anonymous.

It wasn't very serious either. It was for hyperbole and ranting and picking fights for no reason except that you felt like telling somebody off. It was roughhousing.

It wasn't so much anonymity that protected posters from reprisals, it was that WORA would roast you for a PHB if you backflowed the vitriol.

@macha "Fine Needle Aspirate Biopsy" -- sounds like they need to use the ultrasound to see what they're doing to get the needle into a mass near or in his bladder. They take an empty syringe, stick the needle in the mass and pull back on the plunger, then spray the little bit of stuff they pulled out onto a microscope slide, stain it, look for cancer.

It sounds like the mass needs to come out regardless, and that'll be painfully expensive, but don't let your heart break yet; them pibble-types are lumpy bois and get a lot of dumb 'benign' tumors that aren't a problem unless they're in an inconvenient spot, like pressing on the bladder and making it hard to pee or something.

<Sympathetic internet gesture, like a hug but without the potential creepy>

@derp Some interesting thoughts.

I am gonna blether 'cause I think it's interesting and think you might also.

There's this theory that the reason we experience the "Uncanny Valley" effect is that 50k years ago and such, we did have contact with other Homo-genus hominins, and most of the time they were dangerous af.

I am much amused by the one about islanders in Oceania having legends of scary little people who would eat you, but who also kidnapped older children, who would easily escape because the scary little people were not clever. The scary little people would try to force them, the kidnapped children, to teach them, the scary little people, how to cook, but were unable to learn the skill. This whole thing is probably made up by cryptid-fans, who say the scary little people were Homo floresiensis.

It sometimes sends people who aren't into taxonomy 'round the twist, because it's contrary with what they teach in basic schoolkid bio, but species is a difficult concept - 'broadest group that can still create fertile offspring' doesn't cut it. Sometimes hybrids that are normally not fertile are fertile, sometimes fertile hybrids are possible but never happen in nature, often fertile hybrids are possible and happen regularly.

"Species complex" is a term for a group of species where the edges are unclear. Canids of the genus Canis are a good example. Domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, golden jackals, Ethiopian wolves, Red wolves, African golden wolves, and dingos are all (usually) classed as different species (sometimes with dogs, wolves and dingoes lumped) but they can all interbreed and create fertile offspring. They don't seem to have much problem communicating with one another, though there are some pretty marked species-specific behavioral differences.

I think the classic D&D "races" make for interesting speculative fiction about what it might be like if humans were part of a species complex. I kinda like to include this notion that one of the morphological differences is in vocal apparatus -- the "goodly races" have type 1, and the "goblinoid races" have another, it's physically impossible for a human to speak orcish or goblin properly and vice versa, (almost) only orcs or half-orcs can do both, much stupidity has resulted.

Also, endless details of culture and cross-cultural relationships. Excessive world-building vs racism, I guess.

I think that happens to everybody and is largely par the course for RPGs. Doesn't seem very bad unless you insist on lying about it.

@quinn Lead isn't really bioavailable to plants, so if you wash your vegetables well it's almost certainly fine. Chuck a lot of phosphorous-bearing fertilizers in that soil and and it'll bind the lead to stable, insoluble.

Probably those chipmunks dug up your tulip bulbs and ate them before they even came up. Happens to me with squirrels. Then I'd find a tulip blooming in a random spot in the woods nearby.