Best posts made by Sundown

Dark Matter makes me think a TV producer looked at Firefly, then tried to rip off everything they thought was appealing about it, and make a mish-mash hoping for similar success. FFS, they have a Jayne and a River-Kaylee hybrid. Even the episodes seem to have similar themes.

That's not necessarily such a bad thing, I just can't unsee it.

Also, the setting is that typical mesh-metal-corridor, ominous and dark, like in the lamest big budget SF movies. I dislike that the most.

I did like the episode with the android.

Edit: As for good TV lately, I gotta recommend Mr Robot and Deutschland 83.

A lords and ladies game with BDSM, sacred prostitution and very low supernatural content. Courtesans are basically priestesses in the setting. Alternate-rennaisance based in France / Europe.

Funny enough, Kushiel games are where I started RPing, all those many years ago. The very first such game was home to one nasty clique, as I recall.

This might be exactly what I'd be interested in. We'll see if I'll have the time.

@Ide said:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-procrastination-equation/201012/procrastination-and-the-perfectionism-myth

As best as we can figure, task anxiety will just as likely get you to start early as to start late. That is, worrying about a deadline will make you procrastinate more if you are impulsive, the sort of person to whom avoiding a dreaded task or blocking it from your awareness makes perfect sense from a short-term perspective. If you aren't impulsive, anxiety is a cue that you should get cracking—and, as a result, you actually start earlier. The real culprit is impulsiveness, not anxiety. (But you can't be expected to discern this effect through personal reflection; relying only on your own experiences, you will never know that anxiety decreases procrastination for many others.)
The myth that perfectionism creates procrastination makes even less sense. What traits do you associate with procrastination? A) Being messy and disorganized or B) Being neat and orderly? If you choose option A, good for you; you are right. Perfectionists best fit description B, being neat and orderly, and unsurprisingly, they don't tend to procrastinate. The research—from Robert Slaney, who developed the Almost Perfect Scale to measure perfectionism, to my own meta-analytical research article, The Nature of Procrastination—shows this clearly.

What a load of bullcrap. I mean, thank you for sharing it, I just think it completely misunderstands the issue.

I identify with the fear of failure that @Hazmat described. I also do housework/chores as a way to prep for work, like @SG.

It's a careful balance for creative work of any kind. I'd say habit is important, work ethics is important, but if you're really not feeling it, you're better off taking a walk or playing a videogame. Of course inspiration isn't something you wait for endlessly, but working without any inspiration is fruitless.

For writing I have to work myself into it. If I've been RPing a lot, I find that my writing gets more fluid and passionate because I get into the groove. Then writing anything else is easier. So it's about habit building, but also inspiration building. If I'm reading something cool on the side while writing, and letting the style of it influence my RP, anything I write after is going to feel pretty good. So I have to actively build up a creative mindset with lots of juice and fluidity, immerse my mind in it, and then inspiration is right there.

So building work habits is important, but building an inspirational mindset matters just as much.

Caustic as he is, HR is not someone I'd call stupid. He's usually fairly insightful.

A big aspect of RP is escapism. We can argue on the degree of that escapism but it's an intrinsic quality of RP.

'Playing in a game' is escaping the real world to spend time doing something else.

The nerd in me is cracking up with silly joy at this, even though I have no idea how it'd work.

@Misadventure Well, it certainly depends on what kind of writing you're doing. I don't really see the importance of any such divide, especially as I also stress the importance of work habits.

If you're writing an article for a magazine, then the inspiration-building process is through research and reading related stuff. But you can't jumpstart yourself from a vacuum of some nebulous emotion like "I need to write now." Sure you can if you've already built that habit, but you'll go through the same process in your head anyway. It just might come faster.

Tidy is better. I found the previews confusing at a glance, and instead just bookmarked the "Unread" posts link.

Kushiel MUX was the first game, the head staffer was Metatron (poor dude, I want to apologize to him for all the mess that happened on that game), and the nasty clique was led by Athenais? I think. The game had an awesome coder who built a tesseract house and had the weirdest stories. I also had a secret passage that she built me in my mansion, it was so cool.

Then a bunch of us total green newbs went on to make Terre d'Ange, which had a much more pleasant atmosphere but was floundering 'cause we had no idea how to run a game or even a plot. Mind you, for most of us it was our second game ever.

Then after that there was a bunch of other Kushiel games but I never knew anything about them, I'd gone off to play Serenity MUSH (oh god).

Edit: the first Kushiel game was around 10 years ago.

Something bothers me about that divide between writing as art and writing as a craft/profession.

As someone who's gone through the process of breaking into creative work, my experience tells me differently. You can't separate it like that.

If you want to be good, you have to work on developing it for the majority of your waking time. That will not work out as well if your full-time job is completely unrelated to the field in which you'd like to do "art." You will be wasting most of your productive time not advancing your basic skills, and will be too drained and tired to do that after.

So you have to sell out. Some examples:

I wanted to be a painter and do cool graphics work. Instead of goofing off on it as a hobby in my spare time, I got into 3D graphics, found out what pays and built up freelance work. Does it mean I'm not doing art if I'm working on arch viz #349857345? I'm still building aesthetic skills and other abilities while doing that "boring" assignment. This will help when I go on to make something creative.

I wanted to be a musician. So I'm playing gigs at clubs, doing covers of songs I might not have touched otherwise because I have taste. Yet it all advances my musical skills and abilities, so playing those few songs that I hate means I'll eventually be much better when I play the ones I love, or when I work on my own stuff.

You need to work on your craft/profession if you want to do it as an art/vocation, is what I'm saying. You can't separate it, it's like building a house without the foundation. Gotta do the sellout gruntwork without grumbling.

It ties into procrastination because it is all about delayed gratification. We don't want to start working because the payoff is so far away on the finish line. So I don't want to practice playing Jolene, but if I keep that long-term goal in my head, that makes it easier.

@Arkandel said:

1. As long as there's no clear separation between "I lose" and "my character loses" it's impossible for someone to even understand their behavior is an issue. It doesn't help some people are just hypocrites. I've literally seen someone complain that people are afraid of losing on WORA while on Skype they were trying to rally OOC support to help their PC avoid losing.

Hahahha, joke's on them. The consensus in my circle is, if you post on WORA, you've already lost!

Edit: WAIT. I just woke up and apparently can't read. facepalm

Stress exacerbates the problem, not only by kicking you out of a healthy routine but by adding in cortisol and other physiologically unhelpful stuff. If you live a life that's in any way complicated, it's hard to keep up.

Haha, I meant it as a figure of speech. But yeah, you got me.

EDITS!!!!!

@Hardwired said:

hardware design, call me weird but i love doing it.

That's a good kind of weird.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

As someone who has been to Arab countries, lived amongst Arabs, speaking their language, eating their food, and observed their culture, I have come to realize it is an ademocratic culture. They respect authority. They honor strength. They are tribal. Individual rights generally aren't respected.

Which is why toppling their strong leaders threw the region into chaos, destabilizing and crippling it. Which is why I rolled my eyes at all the cheering for the "Arab Spring," because I knew exactly what would happen, and it did. I would bet it was intentionally caused.

The thing to take very seriously is that their culture is alien to us. There's an intrinsic human tendency to perceive things through the prism of our own culture, and it makes people interpret theirs as if it were the same, only a bit charmingly backward. That is a foolish mistake.

There are no good solutions here. There will be serious wars eventually. Solutions which would let the Western world remain the "good guys" in their own eyes, and maintain their efforts for tolerance, are doomed to fail.

For me, it's people who feel the need for excessive greetings on IM and Skype. I treat those as constantly open channels of communication. When you have something to say, you just say it. No need to 'open' and 'close' every time, especially not if we're going to be talking again in five minutes or so. It's usually newbies who do it, people who aren't used to the internet so much. It's still grating! We could be talking about interesting stuff instead! Or I could be moving on to some other multitasking thing.

@silentsophia said:

Eh. You didn't wish I'd die of AIDS on Christmas. I think working a call center has smashed my soul and sense of self worth.

I worked tech support once, and only once. Naively, I thought that my slight phone-related anxiety would resolve this way. No. I just got call after horrible call, effectively adding to the trauma. The way to resolve the anxiety would've been to get many good calls with positive conclusions, not reaffirm your psychological instinct that PHONE BAD.

@silentsophia said:

@ThatOneDude Hahahaha. I love it, but I'm a sucker for silly memes.

It just felt so awkward. Lady, I'm so mentally ill, they're OFFERING to help me with disability. That's not light grade stuff and I certainly don't think 'just praying' is gonna help someone when suicidal. If someone is suicidal and acting on it, they need to be in a hospital or supervised environment where they can be kept safe.

I would've probably started laughing at the woman and her suggestion, and inadvertently offended her. I once had a lady Jehova's Witness try to talk to me. She asked me what I thought of the Bible. It's such a neutral question, I bet everyone says something nice just out of politeness. Well I was honest. I said "It's a harmful book that has outdated, primitive ideas which actually end up hurting a lot of people. I think everyone should stay away from it." She didn't have much to say in response to that. I gotta say it's tempting to feel like THE SMARTER ONE (a condescending jerk) in such a situation, but it's also very satisfying to just be honest, just say exactly what I think about it. Politely and nicely but clearly.

Seems like there's a computer flu season or something. My monitor just decided to die on me. Weird yellow stripes all over the entire screen. At first I thought it was the graphics card, then I spent the day troubleshooting and trying to figure out HOW in the name of all that is holy I'm gonna manage to replace it. In the evening a friend came by and I plugged in the monitor just to check... It worked. Just fine. Like nothing happened. Aside from feeling relieved, I also felt majorly trolled.

The mindset shift where it's suddenly supposed to be a good thing is revolting.

I agree we should not ostracize or bully people, because who of us is without shitty problems they're not on top of? Fat people already feel horrible about it, even if they claim they're not, they're lying.

But to change the truth of a thing in order to coddle people's egos? I don't think that helps anyone.