Best posts made by Lotherio

Archive came out last year I think, I finally saw it.

I like this movie for the aesthetics. But I really like it for the five minute scene where he does into town and interacts with basically a fixer/street samurai type. For everyone who's gone wired up street samurai with about as much essence as you can give away before being no longer human, this is what you should look like (skin looks mostly dead, a few flashing lights like a walking hard drive). This scene and its aesthetics where the best part for me in what is a good film already in my view.

Ending is good too.

I am not real, nor do I have friends But I am real friendly.

I like slow cookers and instant pot, so here is a quick sheet pan bake that doesn't take long to make. I got it a few years back on one of those ad-heavy recipe sights, not sure if this is how they recommended it for measurements, this is about what I do. Sorry I don't exactly measure while cooking, I wing it.

Chicken thighs and cabbage

1 cabbage roll/head/thing
1 bunch carrots
a few tablespoons of oil, and some salt

Cut cabbage into wedges ~1" at the widest, spread on the sheet pan. Cut the carrots into quarter strips, sprinkle on cabbage. Sprinkle oil (I use olive, but use your fav), then salt on the cabbage and carrots.

a few pounds of boneless chicken thighs (8+ is what I cook up).

Marinade thighs:

1/4 cup oil
1-2 table spoons soy sauce
1 table spoon honey
3 tsp garlic (powder, a few cloves of fresh if you like)
2-3 table spoons five-spice powder

Whirl the marinade together, toss the thighs in it, throw the chicken atop the cabbage and carrots, pour the rest of the marinade over the thighs and veggies.

Cook for 35'ish minutes at like 375'ish. The cabbage and chicken will brown on the top, chicken will brown from the marinade, but wait for the cabbage to start going too.

The longest part is wedging the cabbage and cutting the carrots, about 10 minutes prep.

@faraday I can go with branding. You should, I feel, I need. I feel invalidated due to my concept, I need to accept terminology and vernacular change and I have to accept that too.

The small computer I hold in my hands can be called a smart phone I suppose though I don't use it as a phone. I'll have to accept I'm old and the more customizable (via softcode for me) thing I'm used to can be old timey text box telnet game. It can be on my shelf of games still played on telnet like freechess.org (yes, I know I can play FICS with a browser, I still telnet).

No one has said it, so I'll throw it out there.

Shadowrun was cyberpunk with fantasy to me. What made it 'Shadowrun' (trademark) was the connection to Earthdawn.

It was Earth moving into 6th age, while players know the story of 4th age. They knew magic came/went in the ages. They all knew there was this really big story there, something happened in the 4th age, the horrors never truly left, and they thought there may be answers in the 6th age. It left it open for 5th age stories, which could be any modern dark fantasy genre; the horrors were still there.

It had a great history. All the shadow running, bucking the system, sticking it to the man, was great, but it was part of the whole continuity.

@ninjakitten said in Online friends:

how I know they're not secretly axe murderers. (Why was it always 'axe murderer [in the 90s]'?

I have no idea why

Oh, if its what I want to see in Shadowrun: Modern .... T'skrang awakened ....

@hedgehog said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@lotherio

I've got the perfect soundtrack:

https://rhysfulber.bandcamp.com/album/your-dystopia-my-utopia

Oh, that was a good song and very fitting to the concept even without lyrics heh. Usually I don't vibe with other folks music they recommend. That was both good and spot on, then saw he was with old Front Line Assembly which brought up some memories. That was great.

@Vorpal said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

Pascal's wager, although one of the more respectable arguments assembled in favor of belief, has some serious flaws. Blaise was, of course, a Christian, so he framed his argument for it to accommodate to the Christian god. It assumes there is only one valid religion, God, or belief system to choose from, that of Christianity. Well that just isn’t so. If we can make the wager about the Christian god, then the same argument can be equally applied to the thousands or millions of deities out there from the beginning of time. Zeus, Brahma, Azhura Mazda, Allah, Cher (some say she is a goddess), etc. If you take Pascal's wager as a serious philosophical proposition then you have to apply it to its logical end- an end that, ironically, Blaise the monotheist didn't really anticipate.

That means you would end up believing in every deity, just to be safe... and if the beliefs are contradictory? You'll still have to believe all of them because you never know. In fact, you would have to end up believing in different versions of the same deity, in cases where pantheon origins are a little muddy, which adds a whole layer of trouble. Then, if we apply it to the supernatural and paranormal in general, you would basically have to believe every claim made- fairies, dragons, werewolves, otherkin, la llorona, the chupacabras, conspiracy theories, slenderman, etcetera.

At the end, you'll be an enormous self-contradictory mess, or the most gullible person on earth. Neither of which is an ideal state to be in.

(thank you for the hugs, @surreality - it's been a day like you wouldn't believe)

That's a slippery slope. Let me apologize, I didn't mean it in his complete context, I didn't mean to go religious. Just that it's okay to believe in things that others do not, simply because, if in the end it doesn't exist, no one is hurt.

@hedgehog said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@lotherio

He is, in fact, back with FLA. And I blame Al Jourgenson for ruining our going out to lunch on the 24th. Because he had to run off and deal with the fact that his phone was blowing up because FLA and Helmet had just unceremoniously (and without warning or discussion) gotten chucked off the tour they were supposed to be doing with Ministry.

I really fucking hate Uncle Al.

You can hate. The rest of us can imagine being jealous or something. I enjoy some good industrial. Somehow still enjoy the synth pop sort in the end. Glad you shared the Rhys track.

@surreality said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

@Lotherio referenced a quote, suggesting 'believing in a thing harms no one'.

I did amend, the belief itself is of no harm, acting out on the belief when one things they're in opposition may be harmful yes.

Not to derail the topic towards belief in general as yes, it goes right into religion. Believing Lake Champlagne has a big fish in it that looks like a giant eel that some people call a dragon or something is not hurting anyone. Seriously, its not.

On the other hand, since we're hinting at it, yes, believing that vaccines cause down syndrome is harmful to the children not being inoculated.

But there is a big difference, one hand is a belief in the paranormal, the other is an attempt to disbelieve western science and empirical evidence.

We're on to proofs here. Science has proven medicine, and the vaccine example, the down syndrome nonsense has already been proven to be false with the scientists coming forward to say evidence was fabricated in agreement with the many other studies that already discredited it.

Science proves there are no large animals in Lake Champlagne, but is it hurting for others to rationalize there is a giant squid in it? I could see an argument, the money folks muster to fund research on lake monsters could be better spent on feeding starving families in America. I counter, how much is spent on lake monster research opposed to how much is spent on political advertising?

Which is more harmful?

@macha said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@lotherio No splitting up the Corvids.

It was the dream, I didn't do it but ...

@hedgehog said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@macha I dunno... splitting the corvids here seems very Church of England/Catholicism to me, somehow? I'm more curious if the inhabitants peacefully coexist, or if it's a point of conflict.

Makes it interestingly curious. I think its a point of conflict between the groups. I didn't think of Church of England / Catholicism after the dream but that seems really fitting.

And Amber is priceless resource, I think it ties into faith/magic, but going to the beach to hunt some up is a dangerous endeavor. I think its near the Baltic Sea cause of this and amber ties in, in its own way, to the saps and such they pull from the mutated toxic fruits/plants/seeds/etc.

That thematic music is pretty fitting, it inspires me to ponder more of this strange world, wish I could dream up some more.

Pokémon, I'm a trainer. I catch them in pokeballs and take them to gyms. I will be the best trainer there ever was ... oh wait, that's from the show, its not me.

@arkandel said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

Which original TV series would actually make for a good MU*? How would you set it up?

I'm conflicted on this and probably outside the norm. Something from a series I feel would be too involved. If I didn't watch all 5 seasons, I would be lost as a new player or feel out of sorts trying to get involved. I still remember folks harping on someone here for saying Lego in a Battlestar Galactica game - basically making fun of someone wanting to have fun and not using a theme appropriate equivalent. I'm already not so interested in canon theme games.

If I picked one it would be one without much lore that could be added onto. I'd like to see something like the Protector. Mortal bloodline person can use magic items to fight off immortals. Sort of like WoD but not western themed or poorly depicted other culture. The immortals in there are sort of like Jann (genie). The series is set up for one guy to fight them with a network of loyalist mortals that support the fight with resources and such. It could be broadened to more fighters with items fighting immortal Jann trying to destroy the world basically.

Then again, if someone altered it to make it more playable as a Mu* some folks would dislike it for deviation from the canon - like the lego thing. People be picky, makes me veer away from something codified in another sources canon (movie/tv series/book).

In high school (late 80s) my friends and I called it the dumboning (ala highlander the summoning) in which people were just dumbing down, becoming more base (like grammer and moving from more fun to funner).

The best example is when the movie Idiocracy came out (Terry Crews was a hilarious President who made fun of his citizens, less funny when RL mirrors this). Lego movie joked about the state of affairs ... The best sitcom is 'Where's My Pants'. Jeff Bridges said it best from American perspective as Will McAvoy sums it up in the America Is Not the Greatest County Anymore monologue.

That and we're getting old.

My daughter's generation is more environmentally aware than any generation has been, even more than the birth of conservationists and national parks movement. They're more aware of social and behavioral conditions. The news is more sensational.

Crime is compared to the 50s. Crime is up sense then, but trending down since peeks in 70s and 80s. What the 50s never reported, and thus is not a good comparison to today, domestic crimes were left in the family and not reported. Hate and race crimes were overlooked far more in the 50s than today. The still happen, they're still atrocious, but much less of Billie Holidays strange fruit today than in the 50s.

Things look bad sometimes, half probably from our own maturity, but as always there is hope.

@bear_necessities said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@il-volpe I think those games tend to be hard to run for longer than a few months, just because you have so many different factions and not enough people willing to tell stories for them. And then if you stick to one trope (like General Hospital or Chicago Med) then you end up telling the same stories over and over eventually.

It's not really hard to build a game like that, it's just difficult to keep people engaged and buying into the concept. Those types of games just too easily turn into sandbox mode, IMO.

If it stuck to one thing and kept going, it'd be like any other show and jump the shark pretty quick. Like Grey's Anatomy, how many mass causality tragic events can occur in Seattle - Last week a tidal wave crashed an entire cruise ship, now two planes full of vacationers crashed into one of the interns houses.

I think folks have expectation that things need to keep happening on that scale, bigger and bigger. Myself, I could have fun doing like hotshots (the really good wild fire firefighters) but only doing occasionally fire fighting and the rest slice of life drama, whereas others would expect new bigger fires or something. I did start doing a serial once on City of Hope with a few mortal folks where we'd do a fire every couple of weeks. A forest fire one week, every does their WoD drama or whatever, then a warehouse fire a couple weeks later, then a house fire, etc.

More like a small play group I guess. I'm just rambling now.

Outer Range - no clue where its going but the vibe of modern ranch horror (or sci fi?) is pretty good.

A good set up for a modern ranch mu-slice of life/small player base. Two large ranches battling over land/etc, one has money/resources, the other is a more established family in the valley/area. Various dramas ensue between the families.

@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

The fact is that running plots means opening yourself up to a fair bit of stress and drama,

And potential criticism. That may fall under drama but wanted to be more specific.

I'm still down about Fred Ward, but Rosmarie Trapp has passed at 93. The last real Trapp member made famous by the movie Sound of Music.

@faraday said in Finding roleplay:

But that's the thing... even back in 1996 we had TPs run by players. On some games (Maddock) it was free-for-all where you could run whatever you wanted, and on other games (B5) there was a +tpview system where everything had to be submitted and approved and it tied into a events notification system if there was a scheduled date... did I miss the "good old days" somehow?

Ah, I do remember back then when TPs needed to be submitted, so when we ran something, we (I) used PrP to distinguish between whether or it had staff approval. At that time (96) I was on original Dragonlance Mux, where staff never approved ideas so we just ran as we pleased, and on original Shadowrun (Before Denver was introduced with the newer edition), where I still ran things without approval.

I've always been daytime player too, even using TP code to schedule, I was SOL lots because no one was around. I've always been better suited to finding a few folks at my time of day and playing with them as we pleased I guess.

So, alternatively, yes it was a hoot on Realms that a big grip was 'there is never anything in evenings' despite most plots happening in the evening. The real jab funny part coming from over 20 years of playing with nothing ever offered during daytime hours, ever, and no staff willing to listen to a gripe about daytime folks not getting anything because staff can't make that time of day. This probably lead to my view of what is a PrP?