Posts made by Sparks

@arkandel I think the idea is that a lot of the "negative reviews" around here tend to boil down not to what's wrong with the game but what's wrong with the staff, which is a) probably not strictly "constructive", and b) probably going to end up coming across as a personal attack.

So I suspect the fear is that, based on all past experiences on this forum, the following sort of exchange will happen:

Admin: Come play at Game X, we have churros for everyone!

Potential Player: Ooh. I like churros. Tell me more!

Former Player: Game X? That game is terrible. You only get whipped cream with your churros if you're one of Admin's TS buddies, and everyone else has to get the dregs.

Admin: What? That's a blatant lie. Whipped cream is available for anyone who runs a plot for other people.

Former Player: [screed about how they never got whipped cream despite running two plots early on]

Admin: [rant about how the whipped-cream-for-GMs rule post-dated those two plots, and besides, Former Player got banned for Egregious Churro Hoarding anyway]

Random MSB Poster: [gif of eating popcorn]

Former Player: [profanity-laden response boiling down to "No, you", and also how the churros weren't even very good]

Moderator: Okay, this thread is off into the Hog Pit if it's turning into this much negativity and attacks.

Edit: And apparently @Faraday and I went to the same place, only I had more churros.

@auspice said in Magic, The Earth Way:

@admiral said in Magic, The Earth Way:

That would be a really cool idea for a story.

Mathmagic. Castin' mathic. Theorem-slingers. Quantifying -faces-.

This actually is sort of part of the magic in the world of Grossman's Magicians novels. Mages have to be geniuses to manage all the math and shit required to be able to do magic to begin with.

It's not just math, but it factors heavily into it. It's part of why I love those books.

It's also arguably the idea behind Charles Stross' Laundry Files, where applied mathematics have an unfortunate tendency to alter reality, and thus computer science and math grad students have an unfortunate tendency to nearly be eaten by otherworldly Lovecraftian entities. This is also why you have things like "Applied Computational Demonology" in those books.

(It is also more or less the premise of Margaret Ball's tongue-in-cheek Mathemagics—originally a short story called "Career Day" in Esther Friesner's Chicks in Chainmail, later a whole novel.)

It's a fun concept to play with!

@ganymede said in POLL: Vampire Requiem 2E Settings/Theme:

The absence of any tangible activity reward also did not slow BSG:U or Fifth Kingdom.

Never played Fifth Kingdom, but I'd argue BSGU has activity rewards. They're just in the form of Ace status and other IC awards you can earn for actions in combat.

@apu said in Dead Celebrities: 2017 Edition:

I might be remembering incorrectly, but didn't he also provide the voice of KITT in Knight Rider?

I thought that was William Daniels. (John Adams from 1776.)

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Conversely, some of the posters here are staff on various games, and I suspend they wouldn't have tolerated neither the tone or degree of criticism applied they are themselves showing. Nor is it easy to shrug off being told you are complete shit at what you do publicly, then come back and word a polite response back from that.

For whatever it's worth, I don't think the mods are "complete shit" at what you do. I do think you guys kind of dropped the ball on this one. That can be written off as growing pains, a misunderstanding compounded with ill-advised pre-coffee posting, but it was a dropped ball nonetheless.

However, we have a community here who are, to some degree, conditioned to descend like a pack of starving wolverines on any perceived bad staffing, who consider it a sacred mission to warn others about such incidents. Be it favoritism, turning a blind eye to the faults of fellow staffers, general injustice against players, or whatever.

You say there are staffers here who wouldn't shrug off this type of criticism, but I suspect almost every staffer on here has been chewed on by the wolverines at least a few times. And the community has not historically been terribly forgiving of replies to criticism there, either.

And staff will always fall short on occasion; people are human, they make mistakes, and so on. No one is perfect, and no one's going to make the right decision 100% of the time—be it as staff or otherwise.

This incident was, I think, a mistake rather than malice. But given the fact that this is a community seemingly founded in literal part to call out bad staffing, I feel like it probably shouldn't be any real surprise that when an incident viewed as bad staffing happens, there are suddenly wolverines trying to gnaw on your liver.

Please don't take this as criticism of anyone, but it might help to imagine this whole exchange on a MUSH instead of this forum.

Imagine the game has one of those 'unmoderated' free-for-all channels (the closest equivalent I can think of to the Hog Pit). Someone on that channel shares a story during a discussion, and a staffer—on their staff-bit, the same one they do administration from—remarks, "Maybe this isn't the time and place for that story."

Their intent notwithstanding, I think a lot of players would assume the staffer was speaking as staff.

Now, that's just a misunderstanding, and can be cleared up. But imagine instead their response was, "I thought you were all intelligent enough adults to know when I was using staff voice and when I wasn't. But apparently you're all idiots."

If someone then replied with "Wait, what? No, you're the idiot for thinking that was clear!" and another staffer came in and said "Hey, no personal attacks; leave Staffer 1 alone!" I think we'd very shortly see a thread about the entire exchange in the Hog Pit.

And if they raised a fuss and staff closed ranks, saying, "We'll discuss this internally, everybody please drop the topic", that thread in the Hog Pit would be howling about how staff on this hypothetical game are just defending each other and calls for more transparency or logs of the discussions.

I'm not going to judge whether that's right or wrong—I often feel uncomfortable with the 'attack dog' mentality people seem to adopt in the Hog Pit—but that's irrelevant to the fact that it kind of is what MSB is.

The community likes to talk—a lot—about how staffers need to hold themselves to a higher standard than players, because they have more power and more is expected of them. Like it or not, our mods are now in that position. Even when you're posting as 'just Auspice' or 'just Ganymede', it's going to be seen as a moderator speaking.

Realistically, I think if the mods act like 'just other posters' most of the time, it's just going to lead to pain—the same way that a staffer can't act like 'just one of the players' on a game. By accepting the responsibility of active moderation of the board, you've to some extent given up the ability to act as just another poster; anything you say has the implicit weight of the moderator flag behind it, especially when said as your moderator login.

@arkandel said in RL things I love:

I haven't seen a thread about this already, so... the Incel subreddit was banned.

Apparently the final drop in the bucket was a discussion where when a member complained his roommate had a girlfriend, others chipped in with detailed instructions about how to castrate him.

What bothers me is that they had years of threatening violence to women, but when they threaten to castrate a guy that's a bridge too far.

Glad the group is gone, depressed at what it took before that happened.

@derp said in RL Anger:

One per pay period? Where do you work?!? What do you do? More importantly, can I come work with you?

I work at a product development firm; we engineer products for other companies. For instance, a company comes to us and goes "we want to build X, but we don't know how to make that work," and we help them do that. Or a company comes to us and goes "we have X, but it needs to Y, and it doesn't, please help" and we help make it work.

It's nice because we get to work on all kinds of different projects: wearable technology, mechanical engineering for civil projects, virtual reality, etc. You don't end up stuck quite so much in a rut as at some companies, where you're working on the same thing endlessly.

It's a good company.

@kanye-qwest said in RL Anger:

@sparks That's awful, I'm so sorry. I had to use a week's vacation to recover (ha) from my foot surgery, and I was salty about it.

I do at least accrue at a rate of 8 hours per pay period, so I'll have one day again on Friday, another in two weeks, etc. But still, it makes me sad.

I'm so sorry you had to burn through vacation too.

@auspice said in Writing Feedback:

@sparks said in Writing Feedback:

@auspice is this the one you sent me that I've been horrible about actually reading, or a different one? If the former, I'm so sorry; work ate me alive and I forgot.

Different one. The other one is that which will be published by the end of this month!

This one was written just a few weeks ago.

Yay! I will still read the first one, but I'll happily read the second one this weekend too. I just need to dig out from under writing documentation at work this week.

I have used up my entire allotment of PTO on migraine-related doctor's appointments and migraine sick days.

This makes me very sad. It is not what I would have liked to use my PTO hours on.

@auspice is this the one you sent me that I've been horrible about actually reading, or a different one? If the former, I'm so sorry; work ate me alive and I forgot.

@kanye-qwest said in Incentives for Doom:

I personally really love playing short term antagonists, or doomed whatevers. I wouldn't even need XP

This. It's so much fun when you know there's an expiration date!

@auspice said in NaNoWriMo:

@sparks said in NaNoWriMo:

I remember the Seattle group being pretty good about three or four years ago, but I haven't really involved myself in the bigger NaNo community the past couple of years. I just haven't had the time or the energy for the bigger meetups. I'm sad that you had bad experiences with them.

It seemed to be run by a few bffs around college age. All write-ins / meetups were downtown and their opinion on non-downtown gatherings were 'you can plan it but we won't put it on our calendar or help you get the word out in any way because it's not OFFICIAL'.

Oh, yeah, no. A few years ago whoever was running it was making a point to have usually 3-4 write-ins going at a time, at different coffeeshops and such, all on the calendar. On the grounds that smaller neighborhood-focused write-ins were probably more manageable than single big ones. (The exception being the November 1 midnight write-in which was usually huge and done somewhere like Southcenter.)

That's super unfortunate.

My biggest piece of writing advice: stop in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. I've found it does wonders for me. I don't write until the 'thought' (as it were) is done but I stop while I still have ideas. It gives me a place to dive in the next day without hemming and hawing over 'what' to write. Once you're in the groove, it's easier to keep going.

I learned this from one of the classic authors. I forget which, tho. But it totally works.

I do often try that. I've also been using some of what I picked up from Mary Robinette Kowal at SIWC this year, about how to deal with writer's block. So far it seems to have helped.

(Also, if you want my SIWC notes, btw, as a fellow writer, feel free to peruse them. Some of the workshops, the notes haven't been great, but for some of them they've been pretty useful. SIWC'17: Diagnosing Story Problems are my notes from Kowal's workshop on writer's block and editing.)

@auspice said in NaNoWriMo:

I'm in the 'cheerleader' boat (I'm writing/polishing a spec script this month; not conducive to NaNo). Austin's NaNo crowd is great!

Far better than Seattle's, tbh. I didn't participate last year because of school, but the year before I didn't because the Seattle NaNo group was so unwelcoming.

I remember the Seattle group being pretty good about three or four years ago, but I haven't really involved myself in the bigger NaNo community the past couple of years. I just haven't had the time or the energy for the bigger meetups. I'm sad that you had bad experiences with them.

I'm using NaNo this year as an excuse to try some new writing habits out—writing first thing in the morning before work, etc.—and so far it seems to be working. I'm 17,000 words in by day 7, which is a far better pace than I've ever set before. I don't think it's a maintainable pace—today I've only written like 600 words before work, so probably will write my remaining 1400 (I target 2000 a day) at lunch.

But it's taught me that if I set a goal like "write at least two sentences on your story every day before work, and two sentences at lunch" I will probably be more productive than "try to write something after work every day" (where I get home and I'm tired and just want to futz around online).

Okay, who else is engaged in this particular insanity this year?

@roz said in RL Anger:

Still struggling several months into my new job, and now my WORK WIFE IS LEAVING. ;________;

Oh, man, losing workspouse is one of the worst things. I'm so sorry, Roz.

@arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:

Then once I got a PC, I still remember the original Wing Commander on my VGA which was like... 11 floppies? But I had a hard drive to copy it to, guys! All 40 MB of it ("what are you going to do with all that space man? That's for professional computers" the person at the store had counselled me) and my friends were marvelling at the graphics. One of them went, "holy shit, it looks just like Star Wars!".

I still love the Wing Commander theme. There's so many great iconic video game theme songs and soundtracks from that era.

I still have a Roland MT-32, and man, sometimes booting up old DOSBox games with MT-32 support... I mean, the MT-32 version of the Monkey Island 2 soundtrack still holds up well.

This thread is full of books I love.

I would also note I'm very fond of the (very strange) Machineries of Empire books; right now that's Ninefox Gambit and Raven Strategem, both by Yoon Ha Lee. The third and final book is due out in June.

@roz said in General Video Game Thread:

DRAGON AGE 2 IS MY PERFECT BABY AND IT IS PERFECT

holds up sign saying "REMEMBER THE CAVES"