Posts made by Sundown

Not every game is the Reach, and not every game should be.

TR was a very fragmented, sandboxy free-for-all. Not every game aspires to that goal, and especially in a smaller game you won't have the same culture. The standards established there aren't necessarily the best way to run every game.

A major difference from TR is that on KM, the headstaffer is as approachable as any player. She'll give you input and advice, or just plain stop by to chat and make friends. That was my biggest culture shock on Kingsmouth.

There isn't as much sandbox distance as on other games, everything is much more tightly knit.

Here's my recent example. I've just returned from an unexpected two-week, three week long hiatus which protracted to a month of less-than-active play. I'd suddenly gotten a huge project and didn't have time to sleep or eat, let alone come to a mush and explain why I wasn't around. I didn't dare connect, actually, because I knew I'd get pulled into a scene and just could not risk screwing this up. I only let the game know through skype friends and the grapevine, in bursts of "I'm ok! I have RL! I will return!" I just had to say, fuck it, RL takes priority here.

I didn't get freezered or even considered inactive. I think I only managed to post an OOC apology after two weeks, when I managed to get up for air. Yes, in the third week I got an angry mail or two about abandoning a pretty intensive political position, but I still had my territory waiting for me, and everything was fine when I returned. Some things required patching up, and not everything is perfect, but I did /not/ get killed off.

What I'm trying to say is, even if the rule isn't formulated in a lawyer-perfect way, it doesn't mean it will be automatically forced on you. Sure, on TR nobody gives a shit if you're gone. There are too many players to care for any individual one. On Kingsmouth, there's no reason to apply the rule in such a cold, literal way, because it's not that kind of culture.

I see a lot of criticism levied on Kingsmouth which is completely misplaced, because it's a different kind of game in many aspects. There is actual criticism that I could give, that applies to the game from the perspective of someone who's actually playing it. Recently they've taken on some new staffers that I'm not so sure about. Apologies to them if they turn out to be awesome - which is quite possible, and I hope it goes that way.

Anyway, I don't understand the knee-jerk response to something just because it's different. Not every game has to adhere to all the same standards to be good.

Also, from what I've seen, the club13 rule seemed to fizzle out with nothing much coming of it. I haven't seen it applied, maybe I missed it, but I doubt it.

I feel that this is a good experiment to try and develop a more understanding player culture. It's kinda good to see dark staffers connected, that way you know there's people working on the game. But it also keeps dark staffers accountable, because they know people can see it.

@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

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.

@Luna said:

Fun fact, morbid obesity starts for a 5'4" woman at 235. Let that sink in a minute. That is not the person we usually picture to be morbidly obese just yet.

Around 150 lbs is where I start to feel nasty fat and feel horrible about myself. Funny thing is, I've seen people lose weight and that would be their "achievement" weight loss point. I didn't know whether to feel good about myself, or just scratch my head at how bad it can get. 125 lbs is the weight where I feel best. Due to various stress-things, I haven't been there in years. I think these figures are very distorted nowadays, especially in the USA.

@Ganymede Yeah, yeah, I noticed the ribbing before. I'd say more of his message gets buried under his, uh, cockfight-ready attitude. With a bit of acid spit. More like a zergling than a cock, then. But it's often very spot on because he probably has no life and has spent most of it on MUshes unlike such plebes as myself.

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.

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.

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.

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

@Olsson Yeah, it is confusing. Personally I'd say high Occult RL people would be: a priest who has done exorcisms, a practitioner of reiki or some other sort of healing, a practitioner of satanism who does the actual rituals, a yogi who lives as a tantrika and eats meat from the burial pires, a practitioner of astral projection or even lucid dreaming, a wiccan who does rituals. So everyone who has hands-on experience, whether you buy into that stuff or not. If you've tried doing it and worked on it for years, then you get occult points in them. Not just for knowing a lot about it, even though that factors in, too. In WoD it seems that knowledge is more of a factor for the stat, or perhaps exposure to the supernatural.

I also agree that my attributes wouldn't be that high. My life experiences and skills would be all over the place though, and they'd be very eyeroll-worthy in a MU character.

Edit: Uhh, I slightly misaddressed the point here. I think I'd put it like this: if you've seen the Medusa, then it's Occult knowledge. If you've read about it from reputable sources, it's Academics?

Most of us, if we apped in as ourselves, would be weird and outlandish concepts.

To an extent, I think we're supposed to play cliches on MUshes. Or rather, archetypes. Pared down concepts, like a sketch of the real thing. It's something about art, being able to take the significant essence of a thing and represent it. Like minimalism which takes it to an extreme, where you can read a Raymond Carver story and learn a whole family situation from just a few sparse lines. Or a Zen painting, with just a few easy lines that totally convey the essence of a thing.

So we get the whole gamut from hamfisted stereotype and cliche, to well-played archetype.

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.

@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.

Critical thinking is what they should be about, I agree, and developing your own views. In respect to that, I will say that my professors were fair and supportive. No matter how scathing my essays were about a certain author, I usually supported it with good arguments. They would give me good grades and praise the critical approach. When I'd ask logical questions instead of regurgitating what one might think the professor wants to hear, I'd also get a positive response.

I feel that something gets lost in mass-education. Mass-education, mass-religion, mass-anything turns into mediocrity or worse. There's huge inertia and things are very slow to change. On one hand, it's a production line for degree-holders. On the other hand, most students are kids who have no idea what they're doing, and the system has to make something useful out of them. Eh.

I always say that alternative modes of education aren't for every kid, but they would've been a godsend for me.

At least with a boss, you're being paid for it. And I'd rather have my education focused on actual knowledge, not some sort of obedience training seminar.

I kinda resent this comment from earlier upthread:

@Admiral

It's educated folks who try to find meaning in bullshit that makes uneducated folks believe that education is pointless.

What if it's educated folks determining that the academia is spewing glorified bullshit? I agree that something complex can seem like bullshit on the surface if you don't know enough about it. However, in my estimation, a large percentage of humanities-related academia (my field of interest) was utter crap. If you tried to portray me as uneducated, I could tell you things that'd make me seem like a Mary Sue RP concept. I agree that sometimes those who don't understand things deride them out of insecurity, but sometimes they are derided because they deserve it.

Academia is the place where true progress and invention go to die. It's the place of regurgitation and Kafkaesque meaninglessness. It's sad because it's supposed to be the exact opposite. (Referring to the humanities fields.)

The major knowledge that I value from my years at uni is De Saussures linguistic theory and an insight into Victorian literature and the difference in their perspective from today's mindset. Perhaps some other bits here and there, but enough to count on the fingers of my hands. That should not be it. What have I gained from Barthes' mismatched puzzles? From post-modernist prattle? A harshly critical view of the academia, I suppose.

@Arkandel said:

What I don't get is how people can ride their bicycles to work in weather this cold. It makes me feel like some kinda lame wimp when I don't just because it's -23C outside and I don't go around pedalin' away at 7:30 in the morning.

But they do. I don't know if I should hate them or be in awe of them. Bastards. Glorious crazy bastards.

I tried riding my bike in cold weather. Every time I did it, I'd wake up sick the next morning. Maybe some people build up their resistance, I clearly haven't managed to. When temperatures are around 10C or above, I can ride the bike. Anything below that and I risk getting sick. I think it's because of sweating during the ride, and then that sweat cooling off rapidly on the body. Not sure.

@cobaltasaurus

Welcome to why I dropped out. Fucking academia bullshit.

(For me it was Roland Barthes trying to shoehorn De Saussure's linguistic theories so they fit in the completely unrelated area of myth. A whole bunch of mismatched bullshit posing as the ultimate in intellectual achievement. The emperor has no clothes. Barthes died from being hit by a truck, it warms my heart to know this.)

I don't have a vendetta against spammers, that would be silly. I have a spam filter! Usually.

@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.

Yes please. Please give us ignore.