Best posts made by surreality

Though a lot of what's there is what I'd consider 'straight blunt plain talk', more thought went into going that route than might be expected.

It's worth noting at the outset: I don't expect everyone will agree with the conclusions I have come to about it, or the choices I've made because of them, but I will lay that out here.

I went with: "This is how people talk around every gaming table I've ever been sitting at amongst themselves since the 80s, and amongst ourselves at every LARP team I was involved in from in the 90s."

Mostly: talk like people from square one. Set up the expectation that people are going to talk like people in this space. Not like abusive jackasses. Not like humorless robots. Not like customer service asskissers. Like people.

This means that when people talk like people on the game, nobody's suddenly shocked. Nobody is surprised when someone cracks a joke or has to wonder if, 'hey, they cracked a joke, are they making fun of me?'. No one is surprised when someone uses profanity, and thinks this automatically implies hostility or anger. No one has to wonder if there's some extra special meaning, or personal bias, or implied cruelty, or preferential treatment, if someone says, "I love that!" or, "That's shitty, let me see what I can do."

Because people have and do talk like this, and if the expectation has not been established that, yes, people are going to talk like this, the contrast between robotic polite nebulous hard data and normal human interaction with other humans becomes a needlessly uncomfortable question mark that people will read things into to everyone's collective detriment over time.

There is a genuine need for nebulous areas where something either isn't covered already and is a new issue, or is a judgment call. I am not someone who subscribes to the notion of 'don't be a dick' covering all the bases. Some of the reasoning is above, but there's a bigger part of it, too: without at least some foundations of what those behaviors entail, you have three potential problems:

1. Every instance of dickery needs to be a committee discussion before action is taken, at least to some extent. This delays solutions and allows problems to linger. It also leads to less consistency, which is a problem unto itself.

2. Players have less understanding of what they should rightly be bringing to staff attention in the first place. Considering some of the things we do get complaints about that are not actionable and are not dickery -- there's stuff on that, too in there -- it's important for that frame of reference to exist.

3. The more nebulous the policy, the more arbitrary its enforcement is going to appear, and sometimes, actually be. Both of these are big problems in ways that are pretty self-evident.

I would rather lay shit out up front than spend my time arguing every call someone on staff makes re: 'don't be a dick' here because someone doesn't think they were properly informed about what that actually means, or that it was simply arbitrary, or it was unfair because they didn't realize we thought that was dickish and so on. That's such a waste of time and energy, and is quite toxic in its own right.

@Paris Technically, it's worse than that. Even if you never had to seek medical help for it, you have to declare it, or risk fraud.

Like we need another way for abusers and rapists to get a power/control trip rush out of their crimes.

That increase in premiums should be charged to the criminal, dammit.

@Ganymede This is because while not all women are totally into the dick, we can appreciate good balls. You most assuredly have balls (said in the most complimentary of all possible ways), and that is very much awesome.

@Auspice

1. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that is awesome.
2. D'awwwwwwwww! That's good taste in adorbs.

As generic teen soap opera, meh.

As a hilarious mashup of The Vampire Diaries, Teen Wolf, etc.? Oh I would be so there.

@Catsmeow Thank you. People just... suck sometimes. It's just suckiest when they're the people you really thought... didn't.

I seriously miss my courtesan character from ye olden days of forever ago. If I can get out of my funk, I may give that a shot some time in the coming months. I had a concept for one I really adored on KD, but I never got her on grid. May have to look at if that's wiggle-able into something feasible if the swearing off all the things gives way a bit.

@Ganymede Amen.

The rescue we got our cats from was being absurd at us despite the fact that they were adult (3-5yrs), and were sisters that had to go together as a pair, and had been with them for over half a year.

We were told the fluffy stupid one was purely decorative. She hates all people, they insisted.

She prances down the hall singing like a flurfy Disney Princess of Cats, and the humans all rush to do her bidding. Which usually means 'sit still enough to be headbonked and trilled and rubbed on constantly'. She insists on hugs, being near us, sleeping sometimes on our heads in bed. Will wake us with a need for snurgles. She sits on the back of my chair at the computer, and randomly interjects chirps, headbonks, and swishes of mop-tail-to-face while purring with epic smugface.

Clearly, she hates the shit out of us people-things. (She is still skittish as fuck around other people, but we are apparently cats now. Or her people. We dunno. We're sure she doesn't know, either.)

Yep, we store-food-buyin' cat owners are totes the worst.

@Faceless said in MU Things I Love:

@Arkandel said in MU Things I Love:

And they had the nerve to ask me if they could try it! Motherfuckers, once you brought it up I wouldn't have it any other way.

I salute you. It's always great to reward players who...use their head.

This post deserves ten upvotes (and one whap to the back of the head for the pun).

@Cupcake I don't know if this is a helpful suggestion or not, but depending on the kind of dremel you're used to... there might be a (relatively newish?) option. I say this 'cause I have tiny creepy child hands, and usually a dremel is just too big for me to successfully handle, and I feel like somebody gave me whatever the hand equivalent of two left feet is when I handle one.

...but there's a new(ish) one. Much smaller. Rechargeable. Under $100 for the kit, I would bet you could find one for $60 tops somewhere. Much smaller. Much, much easier to handle. No cord. It's about the size of the average battery-powered toothbrush, maybe a little fatter around the grip, but not much.

It might be worth checking out in a hardware store; a lot of them will have a demo unboxed to handle and test the feel. I seriously could barely ever use one (despite having to more than a little due to the kind of work I do sometimes) until I got a hold of mine, and despite being the most fumble-fingered creature ever with power tools (and having some fear of them, thanks 80s horror movies... ) I kept finding new things to do just to keep using the thing it was such a night and day difference from what I was used to.

Still might be too scary or might not help, but might be worth checking out to see if it might work out for you.

I don't use mobile if I can help it. I have logged in from the tablet while traveling, as I have no laptop, if I have staff responsibilities somewhere. I gave it a shot twice for RP and just found it non-possible; either the connection kept dropping or the typing was just too much of a pain in the ass since I can't text very quickly or effectively, let alone write creatively.

People get stuck up about the dumbest things, really.

I was collecting ball-joint dolls for a while, when I had a saner income. There was literally no choice once could make that wouldn't have somebody sneering down their nose at you, which is sort of hilarious, because there's already a serious level of absurdity re: the typical price tags on those things to the extent that it was impossible for me to take this seriously.

Y'all think pets are bad? Wait until you've sat through the third or fourth debate about whether keeping a chunk of resin -- no matter how expensive, no matter how customized (which is fun and creative and why I love the idea of the things personally), no matter how much time you've spent making it something unique and interesting -- in its box under your bed is cruel to the doll.

I can grok that some of the collectors are into certain Shinto and animist concepts, and can respect that well enough in a live and let live sort of way, but it didn't tend to be that crowd that'd go off on the 'you're a cruel doll owner' rants and tangents; these were people who were wholly aware they were talking about a piece of expensive plastic and trying to ascribe rights, gatekeeping minimum standards of everything from 'how much you talk to your doll every day' to 'how you should never forget to dress it in fresh clothes every day' and so on.

Lots of lovely, creative, amazingly talented folks in the group. Lots of perfectly sane folks, too! But, yeah... apply all the pet owner stuff to an object, ramp up the standard price tag, and stir.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I am sorta lucky in that regard. The new mac keyboard (the 'magic' keyboard) is a wireless bluetooth one. It's slightly longer than my tablet but not by too much, and can pair with my tablet (or even phone) as easily as it does with the desktop. It fits in a purse about as well as the tablet does.

Technically, I can just take the desktop keyboard with me -- so there's not even a 'change the keyboard scale awkward typing period' -- but I find I didn't really use it unless I specifically was setting up to use it and knew from the jump that I would need to, because there's still some fuss to set stuff up, and if I'm out and about and doing things that have me out of the house, 'I'm going to set up to go do RP things' is generally pretty far down on the priority list. I don't travel often (we do one vacation once a year for a little over a week), though, so YMMV, and I could see people who travel more often or travel for work finding that pretty handy.

@Catsmeow They started making fantasy creatures and whatnot. This was a case of SHUT UP AND JUST TAKE MY MONEY YOU BASTARDS!!!

I have a doll Anubis lurking in the back of a closet somewhere as a result. And am sad I missed the Bast in broke mode.

I have always tended to stick to roughly around the length others are using in the scene. Sometimes I'll get a little longer. Some people I can't keep up with on length.

Not being able to keep up is an issue for me in two ways: if I am going to address any one thing with anything more than a half-assed hand-wave of attention, crowds are hard. Similarly, someone who has a long-ass pose that is full of ten different things going on at once (often when someone is posing for themselves and NPCs also doing things and the environment needing some kind of response), I will burn out on a scene at record speed. It's an embarrassment of riches kind of problem, but like too few hooks to respond to, too many is also incredibly difficult, because I no longer feel I am writing creatively at all, but going down a checklist to address everything that's being flung at me, and that's pure response -- it doesn't feel like I'm adding anything back after a point, or able to provide hooks in return, because I'm drowning in the deluge. I can deal with boring and hook-less far better, because I tend to be creative enough to come up with something someone will be interested in responding to sooner or later, and usually it isn't terribly hard.

I cannot stand second person ("you") posing. I know some perfectly lovely people do this, but it feels incredibly personally invasive. I cannot quite grasp why, when the typical standard otherwise is to use third person, people skip right into this without even asking.

I will pose out of a scene if someone does this without checking/asking at this point because it's become so much of a discomfort factor when people suddenly thrust this in my face (because it feels like they are thrusting something in my face, not my character's) and it's too jarring for me to be able to remain in my character's head at that point. It doesn't matter who the person is, friend or foe, great writer or awful. It is an instant '...and just like that you've lost me', which isn't a factor of elitism, but a factor of... you just knocked me right out of my character's brain and back into mine. Like any other distraction, it takes me a while to recover from that, and the less comfortable I am about something? Yeah, the less likely it is that headspace is going to recover with any speed at all. And, you know? If I am playing a character, I probably don't feel like being entirely in my own head right now, thanks. It's called escapism for a reason.

I tend toward longer and flowery with weird details. (Or... did. Maybe I will again some time, but nothing current.) By the same token? I don't believe in endless self-aggrandizing purple prose bullshit text masturbation. While I don't keep some one for one checklist about such things, if I'm going to mention a noteworthy trait of my char in a pose, I am going to try to make sure it's: 1. relevant; 2. I remark somehow on a noteworthy trait of someone(s) else in the scene as well. I played on Shang far too long to not be burned out on the 'I am going to spend half of my pose telling you how gorgeous my character is' style of posing, which is a huge ball of bleah to me. If you're going to masturbate to the sound of your own ego, I do not feel like being the audience to the display of thesaurus-flogging; it is not my kink.

I am also bitter as hell lately, so take tone with a grain of salt, please. My filters are kinda off, so tact has left the building. <cough>

@Monogram Knitting. It is a wonderfully meditative fidget activity. I have more patterns I will never make than ones I will, but I collect because their ooh shiny factor is high.

@HelloRaptor said:

Unrelated to the life's blood thing, I don't really like Conditions. I find them more or less a huge hodge podge of often unrelated rules that can't decide if they're fluff or system, which vary wildly in severity, involve often contradictory ideas of what constitutes resolution, and too many of them play into one of the worst relics of the older system which is the XP abyss that is Integrity.

I can see the seed of a good idea, but every time I find myself wanting to play with them I just sort of balk at how shit they collectively are in implementation.

From this perspective, while I don't share it personally, it's at least 'contained'. Crappy ones can be revised or removed, other effects can be applied, etc.

I'd rather have these things in a contained list I can edit and adjust as needed than, say, deal with overly complicated combat rules that have all the tilts worked into their core material in a way you need to memorize beyond the current 'if x, apply an applicable tilt'. There's a good versatility there to tailor something to the scene without an excess of potentially overkill trivia to memorize.

@Auspice This post is made of gold. It does not need to be bronzed, it needs to be gilded. For real.

I have spent the past 3 years skidding from one RL 'holy shit wtf where the hell did that come from' disaster to another, all occurring while working on whatever I was working on for 12-16 hours/day, with little time to spare for downtime or fun. (The folks who I played with here and there over the past couple years can verify how impossibly hard it tended to be to pin me down to times for anything without triple-checking the schedule, and then being prepared for some new catastrophe to arise, 'cause something always did.)

Burnout is real. So damn real. Living primarily in 'nothing but work and crisis control' mode for a period of years will fuck you up but good. (Hello, my name is Dee and I'll be your cautionary tale for the evening, how may I be of assistance?)

Seriously. Do not guilt yourself over time spent on fun. You don't get hours of your life back to catch up on enjoyment you missed because you were trying to be as productive as possible or handle a crisis, because there's always going to be work waiting to be done or a crisis looming in the future. Fun/chill time is important. It's essential to keep life in balance, and once that balance gets screwed up, it's really easy to crash and burn way beyond the level of burnout.

@Ghost More twisted: make it an NPC 'target' -- maybe a couple of them, though, 'cause not errybody on earth is bi.

Goal: figure out which NPCs it is IC.

@Auspice That, exactly. That's even the most recent instance. Made a shawl for my mother for mother's day; instant pressure to make clones of it for sale.

First, no can do, not my pattern. (Law is law is law is whew thank gods there's an out.)

Second... holy shit. I dyed the raw fiber for that, carded and blended it, spun the damn yarn, then knit the shawl.

People don't just 'do' that like it's a nothing to sell for $25 at a frickin' craft fair.