Posts made by Quinn

When I was young, but old enough to have newly permanent teeth, my dad took me to a mall dentist who filled almost every single one of my teeth. Badly. Sometimes multiple times. I think I had 14 fillings in three months and would have ended up with more, but one Saturday that dentist was out and the second guy looked at the x-rays where I was supposed to get FIVE more fillings and said "Those aren't cavities, they're just dark spots in her teeth where they're still forming, I'm not going to fill those." We never went back but the damage was done.

Over the years those fillings either fell out, cracked the teeth they were in, or there was a cavity there...that was still there under the filling.

When I was in college I needed a root canal. My usual dentist was out and my dad's insurance routinely would refuse service every time I went for dental work until I faxed them something saying I was still a student, honestly, seriously guys. But the dentist in that day hollowed out my tooth then said my insurance declined the rest and if I didn't fork up teh $700 right then I'd have to go. I was 19 and poor as shit. I left.

Two days later the hollowed out tooth that had a piece of gauze in it shattered. I had to have gum surgery to even get enough tooth to put a crown on it.

That tooth would be my first implant! I have a dentist I love now, but holy shit are my teeth fucked up. Thankfully the front eight are still fine, but I'm not even sure if I have any actual molars left. Most of them are crowns. I broke a tooth over the weekend and spent three hours getting a crown put in yesterday. Thankfully I have very good dental insurance, but that still cost $500 out of pocket.

tldr; fuck bad dentists. At least I never needed braces! I have nice, straight teeth.

I would have rather had braces.

Vaccinations, which usually happen on a child's annual yearly visit and/or on well child visits when they're very small should be free--they shouldn't even be charged a copay if you have insurance.

@Paris I can feel it when they threaten to start sliding now and I immediately stop what I'm doing, put my hand down to stabilize and then sit down for awhile.

I really, really, REALLY hate that feeling. And I should do my PT but uuuuuugh PT.

@Wretched Ugh, I am so sorry. I've dislocated my kneecap three times now, twice in one knee and once in the other. The first time I did it I was in a ballet class, turned and felt my kneecap was suddenly on the side of my right leg. In shock I reached down, grabbed it, and pulled it back in place with a snap that caused everyone nearby to stop and stare at me. Like a moron I was like "I'm fine! This is fine!" and then when the room started to spin I was like "I should sit down."

The ER doctors were pretty impressed and said that usually this is a football injury that requires at least three people to hold the guy down and pop the kneecap back, so I got some cool cred for doing it myself. In my case, my flexible ligaments were good and bad news: good news, it meant that nothing tore! Bad news: it will FUCKING KEEP HAPPENING!

I have nightmares about that bone-on-bone grinding that happens when it slides out. OH GOD I FUCKING HATE IT!

Major, major sympathy.

Me getting into mushing was a complete accident. When I was young I loved the cartoon gargoyles. We're talking first season. And at the end of one episode it said to go on IRC and join the gargoyles chat room! So I used Homer (D'oh!) to get to that....entirely empty room. Eventually a guy joined and was like "no one is in here but we sometimes do gargoyles RP in this DnD room wanna come?" And I was all of thirteen...maybe fourteen and like "I don't know what any of that means but okay!"

And it was...god what was that old comic, elf only inn? It was just like that. I didn't know it was bad, one crazy guy running both the heroes and the villains, but I LOVED the collaborative storytelling aspect and was hooked.

I drifted away from it later high school years, but kept in contact with some of the friends I made there. My best friend emailed me when I was in college to say they were all hanging out at a place called Project Inifinity and I should make a character. I knew very little about superheroes, so I made the most cliched Mary Sue Irish red head imaginable. With fire powers. Who was also half alien because why not. It was bad. But I met more friends and then got dragged to a dice DnD game and thankfully never got stuck in the dumpster fire that Wod seems to be and I stuck with the hobby for...I think ten years? Took a long break then got an email from someone way back in the day while made me nostalgic for the creativity outlet.

I find in my old age I don't have the tolerance for drama that I used to, but I still really love telling stories with people.

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

One of my very first conversations with the guy:

@TheOnceler pages: Usually I keep my penis in my front pocket while at work,
but since I'm in the back I'm just wearing a sweatshirt and letting it
hang from my pull-ties. It's a broad-tip so it leaks ink all over the
place and everytime I reached for it I got a big mark on my hand.

@TheOnceler pages: PENS! PENS! PENS!

It still makes me cry laughing when I read it.

Dibs on playing Dawn.

@arkandel said in Potential Buffy Game:

Splitting up the playerbase geographically, especially in niche MU* I'd expect to have fewer logins, is never a good idea in my opinion.

Yeah, you're already going to have the issue where Buffy lends itself to cliques ala the Scooby Gang. Splitting the player base up even more isn't a good idea.

More importantly you need to define how well known the supernatural is for every day play. If you go with all Slayers activated, have they become mainstream? Does everyone know about them and the monsters they fight now? Or did they activate and did such a good job of killing supernatural stuff that they were able to keep it on the down-low from the general populace? Did it cause monsters on the line to cross over into 'I'm not a baby eater (anymore!)' territory? Are there rocky supernatural alliances? Etc.

But that stuff is going to be important for your regular every day PCs that aren't going to app in as a Slayer or a super/monster of some sort. Part of the fun on Devilshire was that things had to be covered up. Lots of PCP gang wars and meth lab explosions and things and it was fun to watch PCs in the know twist themselves into knots trying to explain what happened to a terrified not in the know PC who just got attacked by a blue bumpy faced...bath salt addict? Sure. Let's go with that.

I always argued for no Slayers and no one ever agreed with me

@ixokai I staffed Devilshire for three years. People would stack things (or try) that created ridiculously overpowered characters. We ended up making lots and lots of house rules about it and at one point rewrote a ton of the offered packages. Some of the pre-built demons were ridiculous. People were always finding ways to try to start with Dex 9 or 10. Or have that character that couldn't take damage or be killed. And they were very creative with how they tried to do it! We would think we wrote or ruled out ways to abuse the system and then we'd get another crazy app.

One thing to watch out for, and I think a lot of games run into this not just Buffy settings, is that it's REALLY hard to mesh High School and College. What you're going to see are creepy 14 year olds in relationships with the lone 38 year old that teehee they're totally just friends until that TS page gets maved, and when you try to mesh the plots the older people are going to want to keep the younger ones out/protected which is going to lead to a lot of annoyance for everyone. So then you just end up running things for one or the other and making posts that please no don't sex the high schoolers thank you oh look everyone is now 16+ and it's still creepy please stop.

I'd say either keep it entirely high school or go college+.

If you're doing powers, have people run through your chargen trying to break it. People will come up with the weirdest combos that technically aren't against the rules but are totally broken.

And Monster of the Weeks are always popular, even if there's no monster and everyone just gets to go play a prank on a rival school.

I just made my third frilly little girl dress and I am still just at a loss as to how to attach a gathered skirt to a bodice. I basically just cross my fingers and shove the material through the machine, which is probably not how it's supposed to be done. At least this time I only caught up part of the skirt once and so far as I can see every bit is attached!

"They're fighting over me" has always been an in-joke between my sister and I since forever. I had just fallen down a rabbit hole on Daria episodes thanks to an online article about the series when I discovered this place and I wanted a reason to use this avatar.

"A Rape on Campus" and the subsequent fallout. The implication being that women on campus lie about sexual assault all the time.

I sat in Title IX training with my (terrible) boss once. When they were talking about how if a student makes a complaint, the subject of the complaint is immediately moved from the dorm if they share it, he pulled out his phone, thumbed up the now famous Rolling Stone article and showed it to me.

I reported him

All the graduation ceremonies--including @TheOnceler who graduated yesterday! There's just something so wonderful about seeing all the proud families and the beaming graduates around at this time of year. It's incredibly fulfilling to be able to recognize the names of people called across the stage every year--your teachers remember you! And we're so happy to see you reaching these milestones.

I can't even complain about the extra traffic this time of year causes cause everyone is just so happy!

UPDATED! And some Grayson should go steal the amazing bookcase in Sabella's room while they have the chance. Just saying!

1. Your real world identity - meaning anything past your first name, including your general geographical location (city, State, etc). Please remember if you e-mail or share documents using your e-mail accounts those often include that name!

INCREDIBLY. And I was not always very good at this. It is very, very easy to forget that the people you might talk to every day on the internet are strangers. That what you post on the internet is forever and that shit can come back to haunt you. I was on a forum for a decade or more that was targeted by gamergators. They basically came after mainly women posters who had "ideas" about video games/gaming. This lead to people's families being threatened, people seriously doxxing them to find their home address and telephone number, and a few people had some of their posts where they talked about work sent to their workplaces.

Since that's happened I try very hard not to give out very identifiable information online just in general. @Ghost raised some excellent, excellent points that your average person just does not think about when it comes to how much of your information is getting out there. If you are not watching yourself, you should. I've been around since usenet/IRC days when people would joke about axe murderers, but I still went to plenty of meetups, traded pictures with people, gave my phone number out, and way, way over shared. And we were all super assholes back then, but no one I knew (or knew of) would go to the extent of trying to hunt down someone's real life home address to send them threats or trying to get them fired because they had an opinion they disagreed with.

2. This is a subset of the above but I wanted to isolate it... what about your gender, family status, religion, etc? That is, stuff about your social status.

It fucking sucks to be a woman on the internet. When I am going somewhere new, I pick a handle that would be hard to pin a gender on. Most people will automatically assume you're a guy if you're talking about video games or gaming. You don't get the rape threats until they figure out you're a woman.

There are a select few MUSHers that I am Facebook friends with, some of which I've "known" since I was 15. They're good people. I'd say the vast majority of MUSHers are nice people. But one crazy fucker that has you talking to your boss about potential RL blowback because you thought there were issues with representation in something can really sober you up quickly to the realities of how dangerous sharing online can be. And it can be really, really hard not to share. I'm a very social person. I want to talk about how cute my kids are. I want everyone to know how great they are!

But see how easy that is? Okay, now you know I'm a parent. I've got more than one kid. So, if you wanted to start stalking me and trying to figure out who I was, that's a nice clue to have.

3. Your 'physical' digintal footprint; for example sharing pictures of yourself, but also even being on a voicechat with others; do you only do it with trusted few or go on general channels?

I don't do it anymore, but I DID do it a lot back when I was a teenager/early 20s. Now my shit is locked down and I do not share stuff like that with strangers i.e. anyone not on my very short Facebook friends list.

4. Your e-mail address or other online traces of your identity outside of gaming.

I have so many damn email accounts, all for different aspects of my life.

5. Your identity on games - are you at all concerned about people figuring out your alts, or who you play on other games, including non-MU*? What about the room you are in, or who you are RPing with?

I took a seven year break from MUSHing so I'd be pretty impressed if anyone could figure out who I was. I often got lumped into whatever nonsense @TheOnceler was up to, regardless of whether or not I was aware/contributing to it, so that's the only thing I even slightly worry about. It is very frustrating to always be treated like an extension of your partner/spouse/roommate/whatever, but it happens just about everywhere on the internet when a pair of people are posting/playing. And MUSHers have looooong memories. So I don't advertise that I'm me where I'm playing or talk about past games until I've established myself. And then the conversation always goes like this:

Me: I'm so and so and played here.
Them: Ooooh I remember you! I hated you then!
Me: Yeah, we all took things very seriously back then didn't we.
Them: Haha, yeah, god we were stupid kids. Want to RP?

Fin.

Otherwise, I don't care if people know who my alts are, where I am, or who I'm RPing with. If I'm on a game, I'll RP with anyone and everyone from the guy people think is problematic to the most popular kid in the room.

tldr: If you are not being careful online YOU SHOULD BE CAREFUL! If you are being careful, BE MORE CAREFUL! It is god damn terrifying to have someone you don't know and don't even remember having a conversation with sending you a personal email that's not associated with a forum and start saying how they could really fuck things up for you if X learned about this post you made ten years ago.