Best posts made by Quinn

I wish my boss would take my complaints seriously. There is one guy on the networking team that is hands down the fucking worst. He is severely under qualified for the job and to make up for it will talk circles around a simple question (making it clear he just doesn't have the answer/has no idea what he's talking about but he will never admit it), will push off things he doesn't know how to do for OVER A YEAR and then when we go with another solution say that was what he was aiming for the whole time, and when presented with how he screwed something up and a request to fix it, will try to get us to move entire platforms because he doesn't actually know how to fix something. Conveniently his idea of moving platforms would be someone else's problem to deal with (usually mine).

I have complained about him multiple times. And in all instances I am basically told that well, changing platforms might not be a bad idea. Or that the end solution we found after a year of him stonewalling us was a better solution than the first one we had anyway.

HE IS NOT DOING HIS JOB! That everyone else has to scramble and make things happen and come up with alternate solutions IS NOT A GOOD THING!

But I'm just being a bitch and not a team player I guess. Also doing most of his job for him and not getting paid for it.

@ortallus It's really encouraging they didn't see anything on an MRI. A friend of mine was having stroke like symptoms, went to the hospital, but talked them out of doing an MRI because he was worried about paying for it (America!). 6 hours after he got discharged he had a stroke that, thank god, wasn't debilitating and didn't kill him but would have totally been seen on an MRI had they done one.

If she's not already writing down her symptoms when she experiences them that can help with diagnosis (and make her feel better). My best friend was in the ER last week and ended up hospitalized over the weekend because she was having heart-attack like symptoms (and had been for months) and everyone was on the edge that she was just about to have a major one but...nothing. So they've sent her home and she's documenting symptoms when they happen as they go through what sounds like an exhausting diagnostic period. But at least for her she feels like she's doing something about it and being proactive by writing things down.

Someone dropped another player's RL name in conversation with me the other day. I don't know the other player and it was a real "yikes" moment. Like I would not feel comfortable if someone did that to me. Thankfully I came up in the days of internet handles, so there's very few people in the mushing world that know my real name. And both of them are Facebook friends!

I couldn't find a better thread than this old one to post this--I am not a huge webcomic (or regular comic) person, but Lore Olympus was recommended to me via this article and I basically read through the whole thing (it's still a work in progress being updated) in two days.

It's a retelling of the Persephone/Hades story (I am a sucker for Greek mythology but especially Persephone/Hades and Psyche/Eros stories) and I love it. It deals with trauma of all kinds, how manipulative abusive relationships can be, how consent and boundaries can work in healthy relationships--it just approaches things in a way you don't often see and warnings are offered at the start of strips that might be triggering for some people. The art is really good, I was annoyed at the scrolling, but the storylines and the depth of the characters, even the side characters, is really worth it. Several of the strips had me in tears.

Anyway, it seemed like something other MUSH people would enjoy so here you go, Lore Olympus!

Can I play the Luggage!?

@silverfox Yeah like @Duntada said treatment is a lot more effective now. Definitely still scary, but my father-in-law is in his 80s, overweight, and diabetic and he got COVID around Christmas last year. He wasn't feeling well and was sent home from his local hospital (in the middle of Kansas where they don't believe COVID is real and very few people wear masks) because they didn't "think" he had pneumonia and whoops two days later it was in both lungs and he tested positive for COVID. He ended up airlifted to a larger, better hospital in January and spent a month there but against all odds he's still alive and just got off home oxygen a couple weeks ago.

He absolutely 200% likely would have died earlier on in the pandemic. At no time did they intubate him and his oxygen dropped to scary, scary levels. I completely credit the hospital change to saving his life. But it really seems like hospitals have figured out how to bring that death rate down at this point so don't lose hope.

But I also get your anger because my sister-in-law who lives near him and had visited him during his contagion period basically stopped speaking to him when he said that he had told the board of health he had been with her for contact tracing reasons. She then got sick, refused to be tested, and of course refused to wear a mask or get a vaccine. It makes me so mad knowing she probably infected a lot of other people.

@Meg said in MU Things I Love:

super well-thought out

Haha, I was scrambling for prizes like twenty minutes before it started and thought I came up with shitty last minute things. But everyone loved them! I was most shocked that the book I threw together, which I was certain would be one of those things where someone just ended up with it rather than picking it, was chosen by the second place person. Whew!

@juniper For years I would fight against things like that and then on reviews be told "I'm hearing a lot of 'that's not my job' and you need to be more of a team player" and when I would say "Why does Jim not get asked to do these things?" They would frown and write down 'hostile rather than helpful.'

The fun flip side of that is being promoted a few times and when you defend your team being told you 'mother' them rather than, you know, being a good manager and standing up for your team.

@Sunny Is unfortunately right. One of my aunts was married to a horribly abusive man. He used to beat the shit out of her then run and when the (useless) cops showed up they'd shrug and say unless they caught him in the act they couldn't do anything. He used to break into her house, the houses of her sisters, everything.

He eventually went to jail for attempted murder of ANOTHER aunt--who was home with his wife when he broke in. He broke a chair over her face and left her for dead. The only reason they survived was that a family friend showed up, wrestled him, and held him down until the police arrived.

He never served any time for anything he did to his wife. This was awhile ago, but the system hasn't really changed. The judge used to call my aunt and her sisters "hysterical women" and if she just stayed out of his way (he was breaking in??) none of this would be an issue.

Some states have outright banned remote learning. The department of education has done that here. It will not count as 'in school hours' even though some classrooms have set up streams since there are kids that are out for extended periods because of COVID. This means that during the current spike even though most of the teachers in the district WANTED to go remote for at least the week after vacation everyone had to go back. Districts have basically been left on their own once again to scramble trying to do...well, anything. There is no leadership coming from above. Or above the above. Hell my daughter's kindergarten teacher was all set to come in Monday from vacation but decided to go get one of the completely voluntary tests the school was offering that Sunday and whoops, she was positive.

She otherwise would have been in class Monday and Tuesday--a class where the kids aren't the best at wearing masks judging by the pictures we get every day from school--because she didn't actually start having symptoms until that Wednesday.

It is maddening to me that employers and school administrations are just pushing for back to 'normal' when normal can kill people or leave them with long-term health issues. We're asking teachers to risk their lives once again while severely under compensating them. Or having plans in place to keep them safe. It drives me crazy that we are not innovating here and I have written lots and lots of emails to the heads of just everything I can get my hands on to try to get someone to listen.

Sabella:

Korka:

I'm annoyed there wasn't a smile that wasn't super creepy!

Thanks-A-Lot were the best and I'm mad they got rid of them.

I've always liked the peanut butter patties/tagalongs though. Just a good ratio of cookie to chocolate to peanut butter.

My kids do a taste test video every year so if anyone doesn't have a local cookie provider hit me up. They do online ordering and delivery these days and barring snow storms, shipping has been super fast even in COVID times.

Their favorite is the lemonades. My oldest says they have a 'sour lemon' taste but she likes the yellow chocolate on the bottom to balance it.

@tinuviel said in Meshing Groups:

Oh, another thought: Why are these people in particular here? Come up with a reason for why these specific individuals are involved in the story you're telling. Give each something that only they can do, so that everyone is useful/helpful but won't really succeed without the other people.

This is what I try to do--find that little something that a PC might not get to play or mention all the time that would be cool to include that can build off another little something another PC has, etc. And yeah some people will still shrug and only be interested in what they're doing, but most of the time you'll get a couple people to hit it off and EVERYONE is going to love it if you allow them to use the random skill they picked up for fun instead of the main standard ones that always get pulled out. Let that guy who picked up a couple ranks in geology find a safe place when rocks fall. Have the person with points in fashion know that an NPC of that level would never be caught dead in those shoes, etc.

This is obviously easier for staff to do on places where sheets are hidden, but if you're doing a player run plot and don't have access to people's sheets you can also just straight up ask them if there's something they'd like to highlight. More often than not you'll find SOME overlap that can link people who don't really know each other together. I think we've all had things on our sheets at some point we wished we could actively use that just never come up.

But in a group of 5-7, I'd say if you can get even just 2 people that didn't know each other before to really engage together that's a win and anything above it is a bonus.

@fortydeuce Oh, it was the one with rosters. Cause I had some CRAZY shit in my relationships that me and another character (Meg?) ended up arguing with staff to remove from both of us because it made ZERO SENSE for either character based on our backgrounds. Which was why we'd picked them from the roster!

Apparently people did get plots and get to do things on there? But it wasn't us. So, we went a little space-crazy.

It wouldn't be dramatic of you, but depending on how close you are to her, it could just play into what I will assume is his "woe is me" play where he has to deal with his crazy ex and no one understands him blah blah but now SHE sees what he has to deal with and hey, drinks on him?

Speaking from someone who has been there, done that, got the "I should have listened to you" speech after he did turn out to be the total abusive asshole I tried to warn them away from.

Maybe we all need to agree on the steps that we usually see/take:

1. Event gets posted/shouted, people sign up/show interest.
2. Event gets run, people show up and play!
3. Players RP amongst themselves about things. Perhaps put in +requests for more information and followup (?)
4. Another scene is run either because players have followed up, or plot runner has more to move it forward to try to get people involved (?)
5. Repeat of steps 3-4 as necessary until plot runner gets burned out / until plot is finished (?)

So, is question how to keep that momentum going or how to inspire people who only want to do steps 1 and 2 to move onto later steps? Or both?

Adora always appreciated Raymesin because he wasn't chatty!

@fortydeuce You just reminded me I need to renew my library books. Again. And yeah, it's amazing how my committee went from "we want to get you through this as fast as possible!" To "let me nitpick this to death and suggest something to push you back a year, that's cool right? Cool."

I think it's older than that. That typo is old enough to vote these days.