@Rinel noooo I'm sad.
Posts made by saosmash
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RE: Accounting for gender imbalances
@Rinel I do all my criminal work that isn't government contracted on flat fee. That way I'm eating the risk of everything going pearshaped and taking all my time rather than subjecting my clients -- who are almost always low income -- to financial pressure to settle their constitutional rights.
I calculate my flat fees based on a.) other fees I hear about in my jurisdiction and b.) a time estimate of how many hours a case will cost me times my billable rate, which I keep comparable to other attorneys in my area.
It works for me as a solo. YMMV, I guess.
Now back to the not-derailed part of this conversation, sorry.
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RE: Accounting for gender imbalances
@Ganymede She sounds like a badass.
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RE: MU Things I Love
I'm pretty sure I've done at least one RS that was just "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"
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RE: General Video Game Thread
Honestly, Steam Guard is the most effective thing ever at protecting me from myself. My phone is all the way over THERE so I guess I'm not looking at sales.
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RE: How to Escape the OOC Game
I don't hide my identity and I'm not going to. I can't even alt-hide. I don't have the attention span, frankly, and honestly I'm prepared to own my shit, y'know? If I said something that pissed you off here and that impacts how you interact with me on a game, that's fine. It's how reality works, actions have consequences.
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RE: Through which lens...
It cracks me up whenever Gany writes a concurring opinion.
I rememberon SL an event at one point where we were supposed to play up the gratuitous cheesecake angle like we were on a WB show or something and ... my posing did not noticeably change.
... oops?
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RE: Poll: Do I enjoy this hobby more than I don't?
@Lemon-Fox Probably to explain to the person who was suggesting you do this why their idea was not acceptable under these circumstances.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@juke Yeah there are definitely NPCs I wouldn't share. There are also NPCs that I wouldn't be comfortable stepping into the shoes of because that is someone else's NPC and I don't think I could do their NPC voice justice. I think that existing in the list is awk, but I understand that its presence in the list combined with those other factors is problematic.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@faraday THEY'RE OUT THERE I SWEAR.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@Ghost I mean me either!
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@Caryatid said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
I hate the extremes we fall into in discussions here. I hate that the distinction becomes "those who get NPC time and plot shenanigans are more fun to play with!" and "those who don't are boring and if they complain they're jealous".
Ugh. This thread. U g h.
One of the reasons I upvoted this is because like--
It really ISN'T that clear cut. Sometimes you don't get a lot of NPC time because you're too paralyzingly nervous to put yourself forward, or you're hyperconscious of how much story you've already gotten elsewhere, or you get eaten by RL and you come back to the story like 'wait, what is going on?', or because there just aren't enough hours in the day.
Or like, there are people who are perfectly fine to RP with when I have enough energy for them but when I'm worn out I'm like auuuuugh how many paragraphs do you neeeeeeed or like fuck sometimes I am a BRILLIANT RP PARTNER and HILARiOUS and VITAL and other times I barely put together three sentences and oh God how did I manage to use the word 'slight' three times in three sentences, also what even is chemistry and how do I hook again?
IDK man IDK.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
Like, I've literally been doing this for 20 years and have consistently been able to have sex RP with sane partners who didn't get weird OOC about it, but to pretend it is impossible for people to RP sexually themed stuff without being weird OOC is every bit as absurd as you are attempting to cast this entire argument as.
No one is pretending this doesn't happen. Literally no one. To pretend that is the argument is to create a laughable strawman you can tear down, to which I have to say only this:
The point was the issue is the shitty behavior from people behaving shittily is what should be addressed, not the theoretical position where shitty behavior could potentially arise but also potentially not arise.
While I recognize the rational position from which a blanket ban on NPC sexytimes is based, I believe this hobby as a whole has a problem with creating standards that are based on the worst behaviors we want to prevent rather than creating standards based on good behaviors we want to foster. If we, as a community, were better at recognizing and excising the leaking pustules of humanity that ooze their bodily fluids all over the barrel when they first begin to stink, rather than giving their toxicity time to spread, we would have no need for blanket bans on this kind of conduct.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@bear_necessities OK, but once you've done that, what then? Like, what does equality of access mean in this context? If anyone can request a NPC scene, and both players do, and both get one NPC scene, and one player's NPC scene is stultifyingly boring for the staffer and ends up dead ending because the player lacks initiative or doesn't know how to RP in an engaging way, while the other player's NPC scene results in developing story and plot hooks that the player runs with and ultimately ends up leading to something expanded with future NPC contact because the story goes somewhere -- is the NPCer doing something wrong at that point?
Like, I've NPCed for years. If a character engages with my NPC, and develops that connection, they're ... going to have more access to that NPC in future because they have put in the work to develop that connection. I've had a player do this with a NPC who then had a larger NPC role in the ongoing story because of the connection that developed, and it shaped the future shape of the story in a way that neither I nor the players expected initially.
Or, like, I used to have a staff NPC who I would put out on the RP channel on a game and say, "Hello would anyone like to have an interaction with this NPC!" and mostly the players ignored this but one player took me up on it a couple of times and that led to that player having more scenes with that NPC. Does that mean that that player was a staff favorite? Nah. I mean, it was fine RP. Did those scenes go anywhere? No, not really, I was just trying to be accessible.
Like, what exactly are you expecting from your STs?
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@Ghost Of course they CAN involve OOC titillation, the point is that if you're writing with someone whose opinion about it is compatible with yours there's no problem. If people want to fap together by themselves in a corner who cares? Not me.
It's when people who want mutual masturbation and people who want to write stories with sexual themes get their wires crossed that conflict is created. So like...
If a staffer wants to jerk off and isn't planning on using the connection to create story, then yes, it is inappropriate to do that with a NPC. That's not what NPCs are for. And yes, if someone is mutually masturbating with the staffer and creating that kind of for-bennies relationship, that is also not cool. That's why Sunny was making the distinction earlier about ethical staffers. No one is making the argument that this never happens, because we're not all morons.
But if a staffer wants to create sexually themed story, there's nothing at all wrong with that, and assuming that all scenarios in which sex happens with a staff NPC are in that category is bullshit. Pretending that this is what is always happening does a disservice to like... everyone.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@Ghost Oh, no, it's not purely about writing capability. It is also about 'person I have assessed to be trustworthy enough to write this with without them getting all weird and sexual about it'.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@Thenomain Consider your words in the context of the discussion and what it means to dismiss anyone's point on the basis that you believe they are "getting emotional", and understand why so many people are reacting to this with "wow," "yikes," and etc.
Your longstanding feud with KQ is really, really not the issue.
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RE: Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?
@Wretched I have also been MUing for decades and yet I still retain the opinion that I can write sex with people who are not masturbating while we do so, and in fact, have written sex with at least 15 people who I would lay odds have never masturbated while we wrote sex together no matter how explicit the poses are or were.