Posts made by Paris

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

What's more likely is if there is no OOC room (hell, even if there is) people would go idle in their own, locked apartment. The chance of anyone walking in there is pretty slim.

This was basically the case on just about every pernMUSH, along with quite a few games that let you have your own room, because there was no OOC room. It was called 'ledge-sitting' and the most notorious were 'ledge vultures'.

People are acting like the issues mentioned here are relatively new and before, sans ooc rooms, everyone was waiting in public. They were not. They were camping their ledges and their bedrooms and talking to the handful of people in their clique.

The rest of us hung out on channels and then went IC.

I don't see OOC rooms as changing much of this. If a game has a busy OOC room but an empty grid, imo, the issue is that the game is no longer engaging the players. To play the staff card (as it was by someone else earlier), I've been on plenty of games with OOC rooms and active grids, it was just that the players were into the game, and so the proportion of idlers and chatters to RPers was never out of balance.

@lisse24 I find that they're useful for folks to chat, and then RP, with folks they might not have approached otherwise-- if your OOC community on that game is friendly.

Fortunately horrormux is, so it works out fine.

One recurring issue on the part of the players that I have seen on many games (not so much on my current one) is that players tend to like scenes that are dropped in their lap but rarely do a lot of follow-up.

Specifically relating to that, detective-style plots, which I think a lot of STs lean on (and that I personally do like), seem to not be as popular nowadays as I think they used to be, except for on specific games (Arx seems to be doing ok with them) where I think the player base self-selects toward it.

@meg said in Ruins of Pern:

@paris Yeah, but they introduced that /he/ was like, super into her and jealous of Sebell in Masterharper. Iirc. Which, yeah, a young girl having a crush on a mentor isn't that odd, and in DragonSinger it was played pretty well with Robinton being like, look at this guy here. But the reverse is skeevy, tbh.

Only skeevy IMO if he did something about it, which he didn't.

@meg She had a crush from day one, it was pretty obvious. Sebell was his age-appropriate stand-in that she was aware that he was throwing at her.

Sure, her characterisation basically became paper once her two books ended, but that dynamic was always there.

Running combat scene boot camp on F&L was pretty helpful, as a number of folks were happy to run plots but terrified of fucking up potential combat scenes. So we ran folks through scenarios and explained step by step how to do this and what that meant and so on. It helped push some folks past that initial nervousness and hesitation.

@silverfox Yeah!

@admiral Since this is Vegas and tangenting to the service dog discussion, she even got accosted by a dude in a taco bell hot sauce costume as we were heading somewhere. She was NOT enthusiastic about this (he jumped at her and waved his arms) and she slammed on the brakes and stared in horror at him. I had to yell at him that she's clearly a service dog and wtf was he thinking?

So even the weirdos are being weird.

@silverfox said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@paris Ugh, this makes me so mad!

It drives me mad when adults/teens stare at my brother (he's a quadraplegic with no use of his hands and wrists, and some limited use of his arma) but don't bother to actually try to speak to him.

Mm-hmm. Just that dead-eyed staaaare. Bot and I have learned to not let our assistants stay right beside us when we're speaking at an event/signing anything/etc because people will talk to them and not us about us and our book/etc.

It also bothers me when they go to pet his service dog despite the vest that asks them politely not to. Even worse is when he asks them to stop they then DON'T look at him or apologize or anything. It's like he isn't even there.

This, so much this. Our service dog now barks when someone touches her without being introduced. We have not discouraged this. And folks get so outraged about it! Fortunately security is always understanding when we say WHY she made noise (usually one big bark): she's on a leash, so in order for that interaction to happen, the other person had to come over.

Otoh, she is now jumpy when people pass close behind her (when we're sat at a restaurant), so we usually ask to be sat where she can be against a wall or tucked back against a pillar or directly between B and I.

Worst of all is when kids come and are completely enthralled by him and his service dog WANT to talk to my brother, but their parents pull them away and whisper for them to leave my brother alone but don't speak to him themselves. Brother LOVES answering every question for every kid that wants to ask. He video chats into my classroom every year to speak to my kids about having disabilities and it's the highlight of his year. Adults can be serious jerks though.

Yeah, parents are often weird about it. Kids do sometimes ask rude and annoying questions, but they're kids; it's when the parents ask that it's a problem.

What I don't like is kids just grabbing my dog and the parents being ok with it. She's a service dog, so yes, she's socialised, but this has happened so often that she really does not like it and gets very edgy, and they completely ignore her attempts to back away. Then the parents get offended when I intercede.

They never did this to my other service dogs, but she's small (she's 55 lbs but she looks half that size) and has very big expressive eyes, so it seems to compound the 'aww I need to pet her' even when her vest very clearly says 'do not pet'.

We rarely have a problem with introducing her properly, but so few people ask.

I suspect that she'd get less attention if she did NOT have a service dog vest. I wonder if the increasing awareness about service dogs from facebook videos and stuff has made this worse.

@admiral I live in Vegas and people do that (and plenty more) here, too.

And they probably would in Austin, I have never been invisible anywhere I've been. Bot can back this up, folks have always beelined for me when I am in public, even before the wheelchair. Usually I don't mind, but yesterday was excessively weird. Maybe it was meth day or something.

And yes, I can be standing in the midst of a bunch of crazily-clad street performers and still get accosted/stared at/grabbed/etc, it's happened repeatedly on the Strip.

I deffo have the old White Wolf flaw 'eerie presence' and the attendant attracting of strangeness that it causes.

@gangofdolls What sweetener did you use? I've also had to cut way back on sugar and carbs-- not for the weight loss, but to try to get my blood sugar under control again, since hammering away at it with insulin has only helped so much. (I have been incrementally losing weight, but goddamn the steroids from chemo fucked me up.)

I am never invisible, even in a city where to be a freak is to be invisible in a sea of other freaks.

I swear to god I almost started asking rando asshats, who decided to stop and stare yesterday at me as I tried to do my groceries, if they wanted me to do a trick? Because having my way repeatedly blocked by slack-jawed assholes is pretty annoying.

I'm just some disabled dude in a wheelchair and a leather jacket, really not on the weirdo priority list. I even asked Bot if I looked sicker than usual or something and she's like, 'Not more than usual, but there's been a weird creepy vibe out here all morning.'

We were in our old neighborhood doing errands. I am used to being approached/accosted/grabbed/whatever and I always have been, but the stopping-staring-blocking my way was kinda new and getting REALLY disconcerting, like half the folks out there were zombies.

It's not like there's an epidemic of 'tide pod challenge' or 'bird box challenge' stuff so much as the kids just trolling stodgy alarmist media and stories, who react by freaking out more. Folks did the same with 'may as well drink bleach' and other silly stuff like that-- joking about doing the stupid thing because present society is dumb and self-destructive memes are a way to cope. Yes, there are a couple idiots who will actually do the thing because they don't grasp nuance, but it's not a thing. It's just a meme.

I'm too old to be cool and even I know this.

@thenomain Gosh.

I used to RP for up to a day at a time, one scene bleeding into another as players overlapped and came and went, but now I can only manage a few hours before I need to pass out. :<

@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I love these little (or big) steps forward.

https://www.popsci.com/impossible-burger-2-taste-test-ces-2018#page-3

I'm not a vegetarian but knowing how animals are treated to produce the meat I love so much makes it hard to not feelbe a hypocrite about it. The more choices we have toward 'ethical' foods the better, whether they're made in a lab or put together from soy and such.

I'd love to eat this, but they went from wheat to soy. Which knocks out gluten sensitivities and I get wanting to fix that, but one bite of soy protein and I get agonising abdominal pain and bleeding. So they really are impossible for me (and quite a few others, which is why a lot of formely soy-protein using companies have switched to pea protein).

I agree, MU* (and player if folks are uploading their OWN profiles) pages should only be editable by their creators, or people they select. There's just too much opportunity for trolling, and in my direct experience, a subset of MUers will happily take to non-MU platforms to keep dragging on games and folks upon which they're fixated.

Art of Tea has a really good selection of oolongs. I usually get their Iron Goddess (the green one) and the Crimson Oolong, and neither have ever let me down.

Valentin, the year he passed away, still a glorious floof at 11 years of age. He was not the heaviest of Pyrs (about 120lbs) but he was very tall, easily waist-height on most people.