Best posts made by Sunny

I am officially on work from home until further notice, as a medically frail person. My office takes care of their people. I am so, so, so sad for my compatriots in other places whose employers do not care. I hate that this pandemic is going to devastate lives and families because of the stupid lack of paid sick leave. If people weren’t so fucking ignorant and selfish in this country we would have solved this problem 20 years ago and the virus would STOP here, rather than being the nation that ducking explodes it (which is what is about to happen because of our minimum wage workers and their relationship to healthcare).

This is what “socialism is a bad word” gets us.

Folks, if you are in Washington and get sick, look into the new family leave stuff. It will not help in an immediate sense, the wait is already like MONTHS, but they are working through the backlog and the aim is to get it down to two weeks. It is there, at least. Idk what you poor fuckers who live elsewhere will do.

@Warma-Sheen

Yeah, for sure. But making something a priority (everyone's enjoyment) over continuity does not mean I don't/can't recognize someone taking advantage of that, and it doesn't mean that I don't take my own fun into consideration as part of that. If someone is unreasonable at me, I don't prioritize them. It's a general philosophy/pov, not a mandate from heaven. I sure as hell am not going to bother with A through Q, I'm probably going to stop at C, maybe D if I'm feeling really generous.

It just means that I think that 'enjoyment' has more weight than 'continuity' or even 'consistency'. All are still important to me, and there's a scale.

Shared language is important for these things:

Setting: Where/when the game takes place. The world.
Story/Metaplot: The backdrop of the game; the larger happenings that characters interact with and smaller plotlines are built on.
Theme: Elements that tie all of the stories (see above) together
Scope: How big is the story; are you focusing as a game runner on the individuals, their neighborhood, the city, the country, the world, the solar system?

These don't cover everything, nor even the most important (imnsho) question in game building, mind:
What are the players going to do with their time in game?

ETA: Luna is the best. fite me.

@Kestrel

I agree that speaking up to help out is good.

I think that 'white knighting' in specific is not done to do the thing -- it's not being done to be helpful. It's being done to get something from either you, or someone else looking on. Like 'okay I defended you now you have to sleep with me' nice guy crap. White knighting is a specific sort of BS, rather than any sort of sticking-up-for (but that doesn't stop any accusations of white knighting whenever anybody speaks up in defense, of course, because the people who are trying to shut that down are quite successful with tarnishing 'help' as a bad thing).

I do want to caution against using 'some players got it' as proof that you weren't being vague and/or unclear. This was a HUGE issue with the pf crowd -- since some people had Way More Access to the people in charge, they had a way easier time understanding what the ST meant/was looking for, and it was used as proof that they were not being too obscure/etc. So it's really important to also pay attention to who it is that is picking up the clues. If it's the same few people every time, it might be worthwhile to look at it for fairness' sake.

My mom got worried about the feral cats in our area and started feeding them, on the downlow so it wouldn't make my dad mad. He found out about it. He went out, bought giant bag of cat food, and took over feeding them. We talked about eventually doing catch/spayorneuter/release when we can, and it sounds like my mom is going to get the stuff setup for beds that will let us do that with as little trauma for them as possible.

When they left to go camping, my mom told me to feed them once in the morning only because otherwise the racoons get into the food. He pulled me aside and asked if I could also feed them some before dinner time, early enough that the racoons won't come.

I went out this morning to feed them and some of them came running. None of them came anywhere NEAR close, but they def realized I was feeding them and swooped in as soon as I left. Yaaaaaaaay.

@Pandora said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

@Sunny said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

Asking if someone is ok is not branding someone a creep.

Yeah, in a perfect world that doesn't exist on the internet.

I am going to continue to act like the people around me are capable of being adults, and a page conversation of 'p name=you ok?' 'name pages you: yeah, I'm fine!' 'p name=OK!' is just a thing that can happen without a whole lot of issue to that. Thankfully, I've seen this play out more this way more times than I've seen the worst case scenarios play out.

It's Robin Williams's birthday today. He's been gone 6 years in August. I think about him a lot.

@faraday

I think she's interested in discussing solutions to the problem; your contribution seems to boil down to, 'it's not a problem for me'. That's fine and dandy, but as she has reiterated several times now, she is interested in discussing potential solutions to the problem. That's hard to do without acknowledgment that there is a problem to begin with.

My big worry with this is as someone who does not want players d ok wn the road not get to do this sort of rp for their houses, because that would suck. 'Sorry guys, we decided there was a limit on that kind of fun and we used it all up.'

@de-villefort

You forgot the gore warning.

Invincible NEEDS a gore warning. Love the show like woah, but it is one of the goriest things on TV right now.

I am really fond of having a TMI channel, if people MUST have an outlet of sorts on the game. You can go talk details of your sickness or your kinks or your politics there where everyone wants to hear the dirty little details. Then you can just go TMI TMI TMi if people start getting into non-game-related-general-chat ick territory.

ETA: My actual preference is that public/general chat be limited to GAME TALK ONLY, and all channels are things relevant to the game alone. You don't have to weigh harm or make judgment calls or have to stress about appropriateness, you just don't do non-game stuff on the game. You don't actually HAVE to have an off topic section. Is it about the game? No! Stop talking about it in a public game forum then thx.

ETA2: Personal game-related channels (for factions/orgs/families/packs/coteries/motleys/whatever) are a different story; I like engaging with the people I'm playing with directly/regularly OOC, to learn details about them and chat about lives and everything. Just not game-wide public spaces. Personal spaces good. Public spaces bad.

Yeah, that is a big reason I don't get on voice chat on MMOs anymore and always claim to be male unless I am playing with people I know from elsewhere. Always. It fucks everything up if you admit to being female. Suddenly you're judged on entirely different standards and to keep your tank/healer/whatever status, you have to be better - not as good as, but better - than your male counterparts. I don't have the energy to fight this anymore. I used to, and I did, but I got tired.

That whole 'well they aren't REAL game developers' attitude is precisely why.

@GreenFlashlight said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

Still. It's the kind of day where I need to hold on to the good feelings rather than the fear, so I'm gonna do that for now.

There are people in the community these days that ARE safe, that do hear us, and that are willing to do the work and have done the work, and walk the talk they've talked. There are games I feel safe on. We saw evidence here in this thread of that with TSS. Real solid progress right there. There's definitely good for you to hold onto. We're not where we'd like to be, but I do very much believe that there's been a LOT of progress in the last 5 years or so.

My battery on my car is dead. I put a thing on Facebook. A co-worker saw it and took it upon herself to find a solution for me to get through until payday, at some considerable effort on her part. Asking around and stuff. I am now okay, because she went out of her way to be kind.

I work with the best people.

@Groth

Nobody is making light of a disability.

ETA: Expressing shared frustration, even if you don't feel like somebody has a right to that feeling, is not making light of something.

@ganymede

CONGRATULATIONS. I hope you have a good time, and I hope you get some time to genuinely relax.

@Xetetic

Coming in cold in the hobby these years is almost impossible, regardless of game. If you don't know anybody at all it requires LOTS of luck to just stumble into something by happenstance, and that just...doesn't happen. No matter where. No matter what tools are in place.

HOWEVER.

Use tools like this place, or staff, or -- Facebook, or Google, or -- to find people first. "I am interested in playing X on Y, I know nobody, would anyone be interested in being a contact / go to person for me? Can I play something in somebody's group that they're looking for?" -- it may not end up being a character you stick with long term or whatever, right? However, what it will do is start you from a position of knowing that you have a person (or people) that have straight out agreed to help you meet other people / etc. -- and it keeps it from being a cold start.

Will you always get a bite or whatever to reaching out like that? Nope. But these years, 'I am out of the loop and am looking for a volunteer to hook me back in' is probably the most effective thing you could do.

ETA: If you already have a specific game in mind, hop onto it, look at the wanted board, and page people up front. 'Hey I see your post wanting X, I'm interested, but caveat I'm a new player to the game and know no one, and would need a bit of extra help. What do you think?'

ETA2: Contact old friends who also quit mushing. DRAG THEM BACK KICKING AND SCREAMING. (spoiler: this is what I did.)