Posts made by Sunny

I wish you all of the besti; hope and healing for the future.

@greenflashlight

It's an interesting study to be sure, but I'd love to see the same data collected about in-person meetings, and see the comparison of the impacts. Knowing it's harmful is good, but I didn't get a sense that the study touched on whether that's "more harmful" than other ways of doing things, or "less harmful".

I really hope that a bunch of employers don't grab onto that study as proof that WFH is unhealthy and try and move it back to all in person meetings and such.

You are all a blessing to me. Thank you. I am incredibly grateful for the love and support that this community has shown me. It helps.

My partner passed away on Saturday. Sudden. I think at this point everyone who played with him regularly knows; if this is how you're finding out, I apologize, I tried to get everyone. I'm uh, not going to be a great community member for a while. If you see me being a shit, please tell me to go take a nap. I'm TRYING to moderate myself but my brain isn't 100% functional.

Love you. Glad things are improving.

@arkandel

I mean employees are still staging walkouts, and the entire industry isn’t so bad that employees are driven to suicide, but YMMV I guess.

ETA: do they all have a Cosby room, too?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/09/activision-union-strike-fund/ <-- current situation, they are actually on strike RIGHT NOW.

The WSJ released a bombshell report (it's behind a paywall, alas) that Bobby Kotick (whom they have NOT fired, yet) actually knew about the rapes and everything and hid them from the board. Had receipts and everything (emails). It's not hard to find if you don't mind paying the WSJ sub.

@selira said in General Video Game Thread:

@sunny said in General Video Game Thread:

Soooo, how about that queue boss?

(ffxiv)

I have not been getting enough sleep because when I'm able to sign on, I just don't want to sign off.

That said, I finished what I would loosely call Act I, and my god, is this worth fighting that queue boss for.

I got in last night!

But after the day I had and how long it took me, still no dungeon in me. So I went and worked on professions.

I will get there. AAAAAAH it's been worth it so far.

@Misadventure

Nah. FFXIV's login servers are taking a beating right now due to xpac launch; it's almost impossible to manage to get onto the game sometimes. But fixes have been made, and it IS getting better.

Soooo, how about that queue boss?

(ffxiv)

@crawfish

Disney version Friar Tuck, but a cat, for Jayus?? Which months are they gonna be?

@crawfish

oh. um. yeah.

HOW DO WE FEED YOUR MUSE?!?!

@crawfish

AAAAAAAH that is so exciting.

But no rush or anything.

plz can I have some moar?

These are amazing, thank you for sharing.

@arkandel

The Mayfair witches are…I don’t even know how you could turn it into something you can show on television. I cannot imagine suburbia is prepared for this. Like. They’re worse, content wise, than her Sleeping Beauty books. The stories are pretty good! But.

I don't know where this goes, but it's not the Good TV thread, that's for sure.

They're making a Mayfair Witches TV series. Anne Rice.

what the actual fuck.

@macha

Good faith efforts ought to be reserved for people you don't know for sure have been dealing with you in bad faith all along. What if they say "sure!" and then you turn down the other job, and then they say 'oh we didn't actually mean that lol'. That's really...not out of the realm of possibility with these people, based on what you've said so far.

Life stories go on recipe pages with the recipes mixed in because recipes themselves can't be copyrighted (this isn't the right word, I don't think, but the recipe equivalent) and protected from direct copy/paste use by other people on their recipe website, UNLESS they're embedded in text; if they're part of the text, they're much safer. Plus, search engine optimization -- the more key words, the higher it's going to show up in the list when you search for a recipe.

Food bloggers also like to get paid for the work they do.

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

@sunny At that point the Prince (or whoever) should probably not be a regular PC. Make the bit staff-only - a glorified NPC.

Then the issue is solved since when a scene is warranted the character is available. The drawback is making sure staff keep track of what they are doing with that bit to make sure they don't contradict each other when the staff member behind the Prince changes.

I mean yes, but that's an entirely different conversation. The point is that the bottleneck is the problem, and the expectation that the leader PCs have to be available for your trivial bullshit is the problem. You shouldn't need the prince (sheriff, deputy, count, baron) to advance your story, and if your story can't advance because you can't get access to <insert key character here> then that is a design failure, not a failure of <insert key character here>. Whether they're a leader PC or not.

The reason you (general) can't get and keep a good Great Pumpkin player long term is that you make them far, far, far, far, far too responsible for the fun of other people, and there's a community problem with expectations and availability (see: geek social fallacies).

Think of all of the reasons you come up with as to why the Great Pumpkin has to be accessible to more than four people.

Now, think of other ways to address those problems, that don't involve making the Great Pumpkin do things that they're not really into doing, don't make them log in on their vacation, remove their ability to take a break.

NOW, you have begun to address this issue with game design, rather than foisting it off to something that will, 100%, lead to the burnout of the very players you want to keep.

It's completely possible to address this as staff instead of passing the buck, but many mushes absolutely refuse to do this and instead go 'well if they want the benefits of playing one of these characters, they have to deal with the responsibilities, too'.

News flash: if you think playing a leader PC is more benefit than it is a headache for any halfway reasonable, responsible player who is capable of doing a good job? You're dead wrong. The mythical "but you get so much RP! people beat down your door!" seems to completely forget that what you get is twelve peoples' worth of TRANSACTIONAL RP (where they are getting something from you), and it uses up every shred of the time you had, leaving NOTHING for non-transactional RP, let alone PERSONAL RP (do that too much, and people start bitching about your sandwiches).

We have learned on MANY occasions that making rules that punish the GOOD PLAYERS because of the actions of a small minority is a really bad idea. Yet, this is the same thing.

You are burning out or making ineligible the very people who you MOST want to have in these jobs, because they have lives, families, jobs, and things going on in their life that aren't the game. The people who can literally spend 24/7 on the mush are almost always (not always, but almost!) the people that YOU DO NOT WANT in these roles. You want people who take a measured approach OOC, are patient, and have a healthy perspective on just how important pretendy fun time is (see: both vital, and absolutely useless, at the same time).

They don't take the game too seriously. <--- this is key. If you're spending the bulk of your hobby/free time with a mush, with a specific game -- if this is your only outlet for the RPz or your only hobby, you are by the nature of brains going to take it REALLY seriously, and little problems (if you can't explain whatever it is over coffee with a non-RPing friend, it's a little problem) become HUGE.

But stringent activity requirements and rules about leader PCs interacting with the people they're responsible for...self-select AWAY from people who don't take the game seriously.

@arkandel

I mean in a perfect world, the Prince is played by somebody who can only RP once every third month to begin with outside of scheduled 'court' type scenes, anyway -- your vampire sphere is a LOT more healthy without having the head honcho about and engaged. Bad leaders are WAY better for creating RP and conflict than good ones.

Playing with the sheriff for the things the sheriff is assigned to do might not hit as hard, but it's way better for the health of the sphere. If your sphere is designed that it can't function without the head honcho breathing down everyone's necks, your problem isn't them taking a vacation.

There is a wide gulf between "someone in a position of pretendy-fun-time power is not playing with anyone but these four people" and "someone in a position of pretendy-fun-time power is avoiding X and Y specifically" and treating the latter like it's the former does no one any good EXCEPT for that particular breed of abuser who likes to bring the staff hammer down on their victim as a "consequence" for setting boundaries.

@arkandel

It's a problem better solved by game design, in removing situations in which one person specifically needs to be consulted. It doesn't matter WHY Joe is avoiding Jane; he might have good reasons, he might have shitty reasons, and it literally doesn't matter. Joe should be allowed to avoid Jane if he doesn't want to play with her.

If that is going to create a bottleneck or a situation in which Jane can't get something done, change that. Give the second in command the power to handle whatever it is that Jane needed to get addressed. Not only does this help Jane, this helps your entire game.

Nobody should ever be in a position in which the game requires that they deal with a specific individual. No game should ever build into their requirements a bottleneck in which one single person is required to get anything done.

This goes doubly so when you have to start determining whether or not Joe's reason is "good enough" to allow for him to avoid Jane. He wants to avoid Jane. THAT IS GOOD ENOUGH.