Best posts made by juke

A lot of things play into this aptitude (or lack of). How we spend our time, what we use our brains for, compounds weaknesses and strengths a great deal. I read a fascinating book not long ago called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf about how transitioning from a society that reads 'deeply' -- with books -- into a society that consumes a larger quantity of digital information in other formats has very literally changed how we think, in the same way that the emergence of written language changed how our brains worked when that became a thing. That won't surprise anybody with any layperson understanding of neuroscience, but it's a thing we don't talk about or consider.

Which is not to say that I think aphantasia is down to 'did you read books as a kid, and/or are you of an age that consumes media very differently' or anything so reductive as that. It's always much more complicated than that. It just makes me wonder what patterns or commonalities you would find, if you were able to profile people who did or did not have aphantasia (which would require even knowing which factors to look at in the first place).

I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to have aphantasia -- somewhat ironically, I guess, since the thing that makes it hard is that I have a vivid and really sensory, detail-oriented imagination. Heh.

@Ghost said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

I think the general assumption of people being shitty is somewhat telling of some of these mentalities, to be honest. People are very willing to suddenly believe that everyone is bigoted or ugly before asking for clarification.

I honestly didn't see anyone assume anything untoward about the policy-makers. There was just discussion of the policy itself. And it wasn't like a building wave of rhetoric in opposition to a counterpoint, it was people chiming in with feelings and opinions about the thing under discussion. I actually saw people more than once say they didn't feel it was malicious, just that the policy itself gave them weird feelings, which is more than fair.

These are very different things. MSB does enough actual dogpiling and conflation of opinions with people's identities as it is, it probably doesn't need people to assume that's happening when it's (for once) actually not.

My ADHD isn't going to let me read all 20 pages of this (lol), but I wanted to mention How To ADHD in case nobody has yet. It's a youtube channel, and she also has a Patreon, along with a Discord that has a supportive community of people who have not only ADD/ADHD, but often all sorts of comorbid combinations of things (depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and so on). There are a lot of resources there and a lot of support. I can't pay attention to that throughout the day either, but it's nice to have.

I'm all for people trying for testing. I just wanted to mention that there is sometimes a possible downside to taking the tests. Outside of observing your actual brain activity, the currently available tests are a pretty poor measurement of need for some people, and taking a test and being told you do not have ADHD can actually make it more difficult to get a reassessment and diagnosis. I would very probably not show up as ADHD with most tests available, but adding concerta to my meds has made a phenomenal difference in my life.

It's pretty easy to tell whether or not you need the medications, anyway. If you don't, you will know right away, because you'll probably feel like you're about to blast off into low orbit, instead of suddenly able to focus. Some doctors can be reluctant to try them without testing, but often, at low doses, they aren't. It can be worth asking, depending on how you feel about medications in general, your current needs/stability, etc.

@Ghost said in Incentives for RP:

judgmental

Rather than quote both posts I just figured I'd address this bit.

Maybe it's just me, but honestly I have not found that the Hog Pit is an accurate depiction of what people are like on actual games. It's just...not. Maybe those opinions are held and meant in the moment, or hell, maybe even in perpetuity, but tbh the gripes and peeves thread is reliably a place where people are annoyed with one specific thing, post to generalize about it and commiserate, and participate in that ongoing conversation. Maybe someone prefers short or minimal poses to purple or longer ones (please for the love of god I'm only using this as an example can we not rehash this here thx), but I would bet you one bajillion dollars that if they met someone who wrote longer, flowery poses who in every way made them feel valued and gave them great story, it would become the exception to the rule.

People are performatively judgemental when they're in social groups because it becomes a part of the culture. Get them on their own, individually, and their compassion and tolerances are usually much longer than you would think. At least, this has been my experience.

I can definitely see how it would make new/inexperienced STs intimidated. It does take a very real kind of human courage to throw yourself out there creatively, even if it's just for a dumb mushgame. But I would say:

Everybody likes fun. Not everybody has the same idea of what 'fun' is, but somebody super into cronchy stats judging me for liking more narrative-based RP doesn't phase me because I like what I like, and that's all there is to that. Plots are sort of the same kinda deal. Maybe I wouldn't find a given plot fun, but if people are playing in it and having a good time and it's not screwing over the rest of the PB -- more power to them. Judging that is sort of fruitless and hollow. Own your fun! It's fun for you and yours, so...fuck it.

Unless your fun is unethical or hyper offensive, or something. Maybe don't own that.

@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Motivation.

Good pick!!

So many of those videos helped me to feel validated about things I struggle with, like @Kanye-Qwest described, with her diagnosis. Community definitely helps me to stave off the impulse to beat myself up for things that aren't really under my control, and it's hard to measure the difference that can make!

@Auspice said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

I believe NPCs should be Staff Property - playable by any member of Staff 'as needed' - for a plot scene, for a scene with PCs (a leader discussing disciplinary action, handing out a quest, etc etc), and so on. Their plot, their progress (such as sheets), and major actions should be tracked and shared (potentially discussed depending on scale) with the rest of Staff. Things like GDoc are great for this.

Once an NPC is being played by a Staffer on a regular basis in casual, day-to-day RP and is exclusively played by them (particularly if they are playing in personal, intimate friendships and relationships) they are no longer, IMO, an NPC and become a PC and should then be governed by the same rules as PCs.

I don't like this.

There are definitely cases in which this is useful: major comic book villains, etc. The kind of big-bads that are on-screen almost never. But I still prefer NPCs to be the specific responsibility of one person for many, many reasons. It's not just about consistency of tone, it's also about that person knowing everything the character has been involved in. You can say that it's staff's responsibility to share every interaction and keep everyone else up to date about all of the happenings, but even if you share the bulletpoints of it, things still get lost. Perspectives differ. A nuance that was important in a scene between a PC and an important NPC can utterly fail to register as important to someone else, or even be a thing they're just not capable of doing well in RP.

Plus, as a storyteller, when I make an NPC I make them with very specific thoughts in mind about what they're like, what they want, where their boundaries are. I make them in relation to my thoughts, feelings, and intuition concerning the characters they're likely to be interacting with. They have a specific flavor. If they exist to breathe life into the world, that core identity matters.

It doesn't matter how well someone else knows the other characters involved, or me -- they're never going to be consistent enough that they won't do something with my NPC that I look at and go 'eugh, not how I would have done that,' and then some of the magic is gone.

YMMV, of course. For some people this is definitely not an issue. It gives me hives, though.

TBH, I can't say I've seen this thing under discussion personally, though.

Like, I've seen staff favoritism become problematic. I've seen staff manipulate player behaviors and loyalties with the promise of more attention or rewards. Even more than that, I've seen staff PCs treat whole games like their personal playground, and all of the players around them as props.

Maybe it's just that I don't frequent the games in question, but I cannot for the life of me remember a staffer just straight-up refusing to run plot for boring people who make an effort and aren't also in some way total assholes.

@GirlCalledBlu said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

Every time he calls Faraday, "Lynn," it creeps me out.

Then it's working as he intended.

Making it personal, erasing conventionally polite buffer zones -- these things are the equivalent of getting into someone's personal space uninvited. It can feel threatening and still be plausibly deniable, and that gap is where these assgoblins try to live, and unfortunately where they thrive. They want to make people uncomfortable to create a power imbalance and they'll do it however they can. The number of attempts to control how you feel in the thing you pasted is absurd.

Good on you guys for protecting your players. I'd block any communications you get going forward, and keep the banhammer ready. Maybe he'll get bored eventually.

Kinda random and on impulse, but this guy once very kindly ran a werewolf arc for me, the logs of which I randomly discovered in dropbox recently during a cleaning-out. I'm pretty sure there was an effort to stay in touch all that time ago, but that was over ten years and several email accounts ago!

So long ago I feel like this is a long-shot. Plus, I seem to remember the player being MU*-lite, not heavily into it. Curiosity's got the better of me, though. Anybody know if they're still kicking around?

I've always written. It's where I excelled, and I enjoyed it. I mean...my early writing is trash, but that's true of 99.999999% of mere mortals who take on a new pursuit, because you have to start somewhere, right?

And I still write trash. All the time. It's a better class of trash than it used to be, but you never stop writing garbage. Photographers take hundreds of photos and might pluck one golden image out of the lot. Fine artists draw and paint a lot of studies and sketches they'd never show anyone, in and around their finished works.

I think some people find different aspects of the creative process easier than others, and it can come more naturally for some, but I get uncomfortable with phrases like 'can creativity be taught,' because a lot of what people call 'creativity' is actually just 'work.' Like...the head down, butt-in-chair, wringing-blood-from-a-stone, frustrating, self-doubting, out-of-love-with-everything slog that you can't even objectively evaluate for yourself because all you know is that you're not satisfied with it and it isn't singing for you.

Muses aren't real. If you only ever produce work on days when you're feeling inspired, you won't get very far.

That is the scenic route to get to what I want to say, which is that I think anybody can get into anything. The limiting factor is how much of the work they're willing to do. Somebody for whom writing comes naturally can be paralyzed by their own dissatisfaction with their work, and never finish anything; their neighbor might struggle to put one word after another, but invest enough butt-in-chair time to be published first. Prolific, even. They say 90% of writing is editing, anyway, but if you never get the first draft down, it doesn't matter.

And as @GreenFlashlight said above (and other people probably said elsewhere in the thread), getting the work down means being able to accept failure. Which is, in turn, partly because there are more Slog Work days than inspired ones.

As an RP-related side note, I don't think much anymore about how RP helps or hinders my writing. I try not to think about RP at all when I write outside of it. What matters infinitely more than that is what I'm reading. If I'm not reading, and I mean reading widely, outside of specific genres and voices, my writing gets cramped. My language stagnates. I don't have ideas, because I'm not putting fresh, diverse thoughts into my head and letting them roll around in there and bump into each other in unexpected ways.

I know for a fact this kind of thing, with this person, goes back to before 2010. He got booted from a game then for indiscretions that carried over into Real Ass Life.

It ain't changing anytime soon.

@kestrel said in What Is Missing For You?:

Cyberpunk.

Sci-fi.

Spy-fi. (Easily combined with Noir.)

If anyone can recommend a good Noir setting, by the by, you can have a kidney of your choice.

Stay tuned.

I'm not saying I don't understand it. People want a diverse game. But I'm with @Kaiju, personally. This issue is the source of weird feelings because it turns something that is a fact of life for many people into a character gimmick/bulletpoint/angle/accessory/niche/whatever other words were used for it above, and it's effing weird for people to be territorial about something like that. Being an amputee isn't a plot point in a story that belongs to one person, it's a thing that happens to people.

The big-picture concern (I assume) is, 'but what do I do if half of my game's PCs are suddenly amputees' and that sort of cascades into the conversation about whether or not 'uncommon' concepts should be restricted in PC populations (example: Force Users on a Star Wars game). Some people say yes. Some people say no. (I am in the 'no' camp, because I like fun, but ymmv.) I am sure MSB could do 50 pages of circular arguing on the point, though. I think an individual character's relationship to their own circumstances, physical and emotional and otherwise, is what makes them come to life. The variables just give them framework.

Gray Harbor does seem to exist on the edge of a hell mouth full of monsters or something, anyway. A couple of people missing limbs would definitely not surprise me. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

@faraday said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

They don't (generally? hopefully?) continue to show up to session after session demanding that the GM somehow figure out how to entertain them despite the fact that they can't stand most of the other players at the table.

Yet that's basically what MU players ask for.

In the 'maybe someday you'll rp' (whatever the title was) thread, I said that I think part of the reason things have changed is that people are less time-rich or whatever else, and they pick and choose how to spend their time -- and that a lot of us have developed boundaries for behaviors we used to tolerate. I think this is part of it, and also part of why players who are willing to go out and stir up the RP they want do well, while people less driven to make up the scenarios, chat people, schedule stuff, etc., wind up having trouble getting the RP they want.

On the other far extreme, though, you get people who are so picky they don't get RP, either, and I'd like to think that eventually both groups are self-solving issues because they'll drift off from lack of interest or activity eventually.

...I am still waiting for the evidence of that hypothesis to arrive, but, y'know. lol.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

It's still worth it to let him have that satisfaction, though, if it means that the various games don't have to deal with the fall-out of each having to go through 2-3 harassment cases before the jig is up. Any harassment case avoided is a good one.

That was me, and I 100% agree with you. Now people can keep an eye out and a banhammer at the ready. It's just good not to engage beyond that if at all possible.

@Groth I tend to agree with you on the latter half of what you're saying, though a banlist only goes so far, because harasser MO tends to be to use workarounds and try to sneak under the radar.

The first part definitely doesn't apply here, though. These are well understood abusive behaviors, and they're not even a little bit subtle. That slim margin of doubt is what people like this rely on, which is why there's a strong negative reaction to that line of discussion -- it's why they're able to do what they do for so long, and why it often takes so long to ID and oust them. Alas.