Best posts made by Solstice

Well, I see this as an absolute win.

@kay said in Returning to MU*ing, looking for recommendations:

I remembered Arx and checked it out, but it looks like they don't allow original character creation atm which made it not an option for me.

Agh, total pity. I would have been in the same boat, I hope it reopens for you soon.

If that's a thing, I really hope they give it a full treatment. The translation work was pretty dodgy, and I'd like to see them give it a second pass of polish.

That and Suikoden II's translation.

I would die a happy Solstice if they retranslated and re-released that. But knowing Konami, they shall just make a pachinko machine instead.

I feel like every single thing I get in life anymore is chronic, and just has doctors shrugging and being like, "Oh well, that's your life now."

Makes it hard not to despair.

@testament

Well, yeah.

I'm not sure I would trust any remake of Trigger at this point. Difficult to improve upon it. Cross, as an early 3D game, has plenty of edges that could be smoothed.

Yesterday, I decided to see a new therapist. I wasn't gelling all that well with my previous one, and so I figured now might be as good a time as any. Got off to a good start, laid out some pretty vulnerable stuff - then we started talking about my relationships.

I bemoaned the fact that someone I'm seeing is deeply depressed and isn't getting the help they need, and the help they are getting is woefully inadequate - just someone who's punching in and not asking questions and kicking the ball down the road and 'see you again in two months'.

Talked about my dog a lot, my job a lot. Just ice-breaky stuff.

When we got to the real meat and potatoes though, she didn't seem helpful at all. Didn't interrogate much. Kept kicking the ball down the road. Suggested we see eachother again in two months. Felt utterly dismissed by a lot of the things she said to the point that after the call was over, I had to just sit in my car and cry for awhile.

...

So, I went inside and talked to the person I'm seeing, and GUESS WHO BOTH HAVE THE SAME THERAPIST APPARENTLY.

"...well, she probably didn't put it together. Unless you talked about me, your dog, or something."

"...I did. A lot."

"Oh."

This puts into perspective why she sounded frostier towards the end of the call, and now I am absolutely dying of embarrassment. Fortunately, the fact that she made me cry with how useless she was is more of a sign to switch psychiatrists anyhow. And puts into perspective the complaints I was hearing from the person I'm seeing.

The actual content of how badly she botched this is a smidge too raw to share on MSB, but I just had to share the absolute groan-fest of accidentally grousing about a bad psychiatrist... to the same psychiatrist. Cringing just thinking about it again.

@derp

I am very fine with that, too. Especially if it has a fully fleshed out Disc 2 with 100% fewer chairs.

@greenflashlight

I don't like accidentally shit-talking someone to their face and outing the fact that someone I'm seeing is unhappy with their therapist. If I want to blast someone, I will, but I don't like doing it accidentally.

That being said, she should be utterly ashamed of herself. Her only advice for anxiety:

"Have you tried using logic to overcome your panic?"
"Have you tried focusing on your breathing?"
"Eesh, yeah. Sounds like you've hit a brick wall. I don't think talking will help. Probably just see if the medication works."
"I don't think I'll be able to help you. I'm trying to think if anyone can. Yeah, no one's coming to mind."

And that's not even going into her saying, out loud, that attraction to the same gender might be obsessive compulsive anxiety reactions.

Dropped.

@wizz

This encapsulates it well. The Sonic fandom is basically a slow-burn of the brony thing that burned fast and hot.

I loved MLP before the fanbase turned me off of it, and I loved Sonic AM, but the fandoms for both are rather inarguably a cut above the standard when it comes to the fervor of their fanbases, both for good and for ill. Both attract lots of creators, and both attract lots of ... creators. A lot of parallels, either way.

SonicAM has a pretty fun concept for a game, but the fandom it would attract would be tricky to manage properly.

@testament

What a weird point in time where I think, "Ooh, Microsoft bought a company. I bet that will improve the quality of their games and their workplace culture."

I hope it gets Bobby out of the industry, even if it's on a golden parachute.

@greenflashlight

Nope. Bisexual and out. She latched on to it as soon as I mentioned that. Super uncomfortable.

And I shall boo! I shall boo relentlessly!

... I mean, not really, but I think Rosters are a clerical boon but are one of my least favorite ideas in MU*.

Your character is yours. If you leave, that character goes away. If any one character is important enough to grind the entire game to a standstill if they left or vanished, you've found your actual problem.

@redjellybean

There is a lot of doing things on your own as you work your way through the story, but when the game does 'force' you to do a dungeon or a boss, the community is extremely generous toward people that are new.

The game puts a little "I'm new" icon over your head until you've been playing for quite some time (Looks like a plant sprouting, so if people call you a sprout, it's not an insult) and the community is extremely tolerant of any errors committed by a sprout, and far more tolerant of mistakes in general. Unless you're raiding (which is optional and has no bearing on the story except for one), it's expected that your level of performance doesn't matter much. You'll still get the occasional jerk, but they're a rarity rather than a rule.

@ominous

Odd Taxi is definitely strange, and a breath of fresh air. I'm really enjoying To Your Eternity so far, granted we're only a couple of episodes in, it was so strong out of the gate that I'm captivated.

Laughably simplified elevator pitch: Imagine John Carpenter's The Thing, except the alien is super wholesome.

I hate the Roster system because very frequently, the character has been dropped for a reason. So if you get re-involved with whoever picks it up next, you finally get them up to speed with your character beats and how you two got along, and then it gets dropped again. And you get re-involved, and you finally get them back up to speed, and then it gets dropped again.

It's like endlessly playing reruns of the same episode of Doctor Who, except each time with a different Doctor.

So then the next time the Roster comes up, you're too exhausted with it to even send an @mail that you had anything to do with them at all.

...I hates it.

I think of min-maxing your character's specialization as a pretty organic way of telling a given character's story. I'm not going to say that no one is interested in a story where a character works really hard to improve themselves, and then gets killed by a gnoll because of a really bad series of botched dice throws, because... well, come on, that's funny.

But it's less funny in the context of a story-rich game where you've spent literal years building up a character. The specter of possible death is a good motivating force, and the dice won't always be on your side, but I can say that on slow-burn games, having a bad dice day on something your character is supposed to be good at can feel gutwrenching.

"Aw, man, I only get to do this maybe once a year, and I failed every roll."

So people tend to drift towards trying to mitigate that feeling. This is especially true for combat stats, I feel, because they tend to directly impact whether you're killed. Failing a seduction roll isn't quite the same stakes (usually) as failing a roll to see whether the fragment of meteorite that just fell on your head kills you or not.

This is all completely mitigated when playing with a trusted GM, who knows that what's funny isn't always fun, and what's realistic isn't always preferable. I can and have fudged the numbers in campaigns so that my crew can get through by the skin of their teeth rather than having two of them get killed by a random mob at the start of a dungeon. Permadeath is scary, yo.

I think it's extra difficult for players to feel safe with that rapport on a game where you don't know who's GMing for you, especially when you're a new player. Thus, min/maxing is a pretty natural outcome. Sometimes the people who have the highest stats in something aren't trying to be master of the blade, they're just trying to not suck when it matters most.

But yeah, I side-eye people who want to be good at everything, and drift through scenes with perfect poise. If it's fun for them, cool. But goodness is it stale to react to as a player or a scenerunner.

ETA: In short, It's complicated. I think the best-intentioned min/max categories are people wanting their character to survive (or other bad-luck protections), and people will do this in environments where they don't feel super duper safe for any number of valid (or perceived) reasons.

3, hands-down. I appreciate the visual short-hand and dynamism that art can convey far more than 'Oh look, it's someone else who likes Benedict Cumberbatch.'

@aria said in Good TV:

I would actually appreciate some solid recommendations, @Solstice. There is some great anime out there, I'm sure, but I definitely grew up in the late 90s/early 00s when it was taking the general nerd world by storm, complete with overzealous fans who insisted that all anime was great and fantastic and must-watch and and and purely based on the fact that it was anime, without any regard for whether or not it was actually good. That put me off it for some time (with the exception of Miyazaki, who is beautiful and charming and I adore everything he does) as those sorts of fanbases often do.

I was literally in the same boat. What yanked me out of it was someone I liked dragging me along to a convention, and I stumbled upon shows I independently decided I liked, and they became a good gateway drug. The scene has exploded with much better shows and movies, now. I'll throw something together and post it!