Best posts made by surreality

@HelloProject I am stupid keen on people being able to add 'I had a neat idea!' project areas to the grid. Doesn't have to be their business or something they maintain. Just 'I had a neat idea for a business I'd like to build where my character just hangs out sometimes' or 'it would be neat if there was a secret cave in <place>!' if they want to do it.

I think it would be very cool if people did build things like the business example to list on the wiki for people to 'claim' and so on; 'keep and run it', 'donate to game-owned grid', 'make claimable' as options, essentially. Would be neat. I know I've had, and known plenty of people who have had, highly cool ideas for businesses or areas of a grid that would be unique and interesting, but they don't feel like jumping through the hoops to make a character to run it (especially if they'd just want to be a customer there, or have a place they don't own but where they hang out, etc.) or meeting whatever the IC financial standards are for the build, etc.

Temp rooms get used for this kind of thing a lot, which is handy, sure, but sometimes the locations described would be quite useful or cool, and I'd love to see as permanent additions to the grid. Provided your core of grid rooms is sane, I really see very little harm in this. I 'grew up on' sprawling, immense grids, and always found them interesting. So long as sensible navigation is possible, people adding a park or a cave or a strange hidden garden or a secluded beach or whatever is something I think should be encouraged.

@Derp I legitimately don't know if I love or hate this but I heard two people have a deeply sincere conversation about using the mathematical formulae of fractal generators to more deeply connect with 'universal bee energy' and the mathematical wisdom and awareness of bees we have only now started to understand. I don't mean 'we're only now starting to understand the fractal patterns of nature in bee-created structures', they really and truly meant 'bees math so much better than we do, because they math from their very souls'.

Also, the food at that show is good. Really good.

As my husband put it: "Dinner and a show! Could do worse at $25 for a table."

Am leaning toward 'love', because... yes.

@Ghost That's pretty much it, with a lot of folks. It's, I think, why the fact that she had zero qualms behaving that way with real property and a real home is ultimately so telling.

That, and... really, her tumblr thing pretty much proves the 'not changed one bit' already, but that whole 'time to change' was also 'time to make amends', and zero effort was expended on that front.

I can see why someone might not see the need to do that in regard to virtual property. That she feels the same way about physical property is pretty horrifying.

And if the standard scale of importance differential between RL/VR is applied, the kind of gross things she thinks are perfectly fine to do to people on a game becomes quickly apparent. Even direct parity would be awful, but we're really not that lucky.

@JinShei Empathy virtual hug sent. That's... pretty much my last three months; it used to be 'every so often' but now daily. Fingers crossed it fucks off much, much faster for you!

@Arkandel This is one of the reasons I'm a fan of the 'timeout' temp-ban, actually.

Sometimes, it really does become clear that someone is doing themselves (and often others around them) harm when they're stuck in this kind of position and don't have either the self-awareness or self-control to not log in and just explode everywhere.

At that point, the game environment is genuinely not healthy -- for them and those around them -- and sometimes a couple days to a month of 'forced vacation' is a necessary reality check.

(Also, yeeeeeup, that situation is not improving much. Fingers crossed and all... typically because I'm knitting like a fiend instead of coding wiki shit lately, but I digress.)

@JinShei I find myself weirdly grateful for the new flouf, 'cause I swear she is the only cat on earth that never sleeps. I wake up like somebody dropped a bucket of water on my head, and I get a flouf immediately jumping up onto the bed for all the petting forever. It helps. It really, really helps. I'm still awake, and there's no getting back to sleep, but there is cuteness and d'aww that at least helps bring on the 'slightly less panicky' faster than usual.

@Coin I feel, like, obligated to mention here in the visible space that she has her own thread in the locked-down hog pit for just that reason.

(Because I am a bitch this week especially. I'll totally own that.)

(I would also absolutely start a betting pool re: register a lurk account vs. beg flunkies for screen shots; 'doesn't look' not a a horse in this race at all.)

@Ganymede I you so very much right now. I may have to do that.

Seriously, it isn't even like... sprawly suburbs. It's dinky paved street. Currently, icy paved steep hill street.

(C'mon, gravity, do your thing. We used to live at the bottom of that hill, we remember how many cars ended up in the tree whenever we get weather!)

@Ganymede From what I recall, she's a very kind-hearted person and tends to see the best in everyone in a very legit good person way. Especially people who seem energetic and creative, which Spider certainly does.

While we're not exactly close any more, we played together years ago elsewhere, and I'm going to be pissed if all of her work gets shot to hell by Spider getting up to her old tricks.

And the tumblr post really is a giant red flag to me that absolutely nothing has, or will likely ever, change.

@silentsophia said:

Is your yarn acting up?

http://yarnshaming.tumblr.com/

Oh dear god, that is mad genius.

Now I'm going to wipe all this coffee off the monitor.

@Meg People think I'm joking when I say I have a dude willing to repeat whatever I just said to guys who refuse to accept rulings on or interpretations of mechanics/etc. when they're presented by a female staffer.

I'm not.

Which is my roundabout way of saying, '...yeah, it's important, and sometimes you gotta plan for some of the DUMBEST shit because it is eventually gonna happen.'

@Cobaltasaurus I would absolutely report that. Absolutely. Bullying like that is simply not OK. I am so sorry you had to deal with that.

@Arkandel She didn't force them to do anything.

The collective antics of crazy people did, her included among them.

Go take a look at the Batshit Crazy thread, at the trolling I got, where someone pretended to be my abusive (recent) ex, and insisted they were angry with me for having them banned. (Never did. Never gotten anyone banned from Shang.)

That is one of the people who was fucking with that girl for sport. He has admitted doing exactly this. If he was using similar tactics, and was part of a group doing the same? Yeah, she might not be stable, but people were actually fucking with her in some dark-as-fuck sicker-than-that ways for their amusement, and that is absolutely not OK.

@vanderlylle said in Retail "Horror" Stories:

'if I have to have someone in this area for a few hours, this person is marginally better than a dead body.'

Some days, I wonder if this is how a lot of M* staff jobs get filled on places that require umpteensquillion staffers.

@Paris said in MU and Alternate Channels:

@Z-01 said in MU and Alternate Channels:

@surreality said in MU and Alternate Channels:

@Meg I think in the case you had specifically, I'd call it too few staffers available rather than laziness, but there are some times I've seen lazy as the cause. Sadly, sometimes 'too many' staff creates the same problem, since no one is sure who has the responsibility to do this, so you have lower tier staffers afraid to say anything without approval from on high, and upper tier ones thinking the lower tier staff will handle it.

Sometimes, things really are so black and white there's no conversation to be had. ('Is VASpider/Rex/Jeurg', for instance, at least to me. <cough>)

This can be a pretty complex issue in my experience. One of the biggest reasons I've personally seen that an investigative or preventative conversation might just not happen, or not happen in a timely manner, is that the person who needs to be talked to will inevitably emotionally exhaust you in the course of the conversation. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, and people just aren't very understanding of it when you try to draw boundaries with these people because it's easy to portray it as just clubbing whoever you're trying to handle.

You deal with that enough times and you stop wanting to try to engage people like this if you can avoid it.

You just kind of do it anyway, and make sure there's at least a second person on staff to handle it if it's either on a day that you can't, or it involves you, so you shouldn't. It's just an inevitable part of staffing anything, from a shop to a mush to whatever.

This, exactly, is why I tapped @Coin to be my second if I ever run a thing. Because I know he can communicate with me effectively, and has zero qualms telling me to simmer down when I'm being ridiculous.

He could double as 'a person with testicles' in a pinch, too, but really, the other friend is looking forward to that job if/when I decide to pick up the project again.

@wanderer To be fair, sleep paralysis is a thing. It's an understood thing, even.

That is not to say all the things people attribute to being sleep paralysis are actually that.

I've had it on and off through my life. I've also had a distinct, different-but-similar experience that people love to ascribe to it that was, uh, I will just say, "having the actual experiential basis for comparison, these things were very much not the same".

Considering the experience, I really, really wish I could believe it was 'just sleep paralysis' (which in itself is awful and Very Much Not Fun).

@Ghost I think we're probably stuck with the forum for that, unfortunately. While it's kinda slapdash and definitely random, some kind of database/permanent record sort of thing in any more formalized fashion has three potential pitfalls I can foresee:

• It wouldn't be as visible as the forum as a resource re: 'as a new game runner, where would I look for data?'
• It wouldn't be as easy to add data to the pile as quoting a log into a post that collects the data, and people may refrain from reporting if there are extra hoops to jump through or it's more formalized somehow
• ...though I hate bringing this part up, it could potentially be legally iffy to formally compile data like this as an endeavor more organized than what we've got now, whether it's in terms of stalking, cyberbullying, etc. -- and considering how much most of the problem children love to play the victim, this would be a concern for me personally, at least. (I am one broke bitch. All I'd need is some jackass suing me.)

@wanderer I've had the very mundane version somewhat often, probably because I just never have slept very well over my life; it really is pretty mundane. The first few times I can recall it happening? Were very scary -- and so I can see how some folks might attribute more alarming things to the wake-up lag effect and would be terrified by it.

The other, uh... yeeeeeeeah, we'll just say the house I grew up in was special. (Not actually my house, but my grandmother's house; she lived next door and babysat me when I was tiny and then I moved in there as a teen, etc.) Lots of weird things went down there with stunning frequency, enough that a lot of things that would flip out my friends never really phased me since I grew up with it.

I tend to be reasonably good at sending bad things packing off to somewhere else. (Ironic, considering how bad at it I am on games!) No real idea why, and there are some times I'm pretty dubious, but I've had friends ask me to come tell things to go away for them, and I see precisely zero harm in it even if it's one of the situations in which I am somewhat skeptical of what they're telling me. (Even if it's the placebo effect in those instances? That can still help them out. I'm OK with this.)

But needless to say, that isn't the kind of thing you do for very long without pissing something nasty off enough to sneak in and whallop you one. I'd apparently noped the house long enough that it happened. (I woke up after the 'this was different' with finger bruises on my wrists, the ward ripped off my door and physically broken, and aching like I'd been stretched on the rack. It was not fun.) I would have been real happy convincing myself that one was a dream or something else, but nope; I kinda count myself lucky it only ever happened the once, really. Was definitely a different thing than the medical stuff people describe as the body is trying to shake off REM sleep.

One of the things I was looking at, generally, included a number of pools derived from character attributes. One was physical, one social, and one mental.

The reason I mention this is that some of what you're describing I wouldn't necessarily call 'social', but mental -- argument and debate would fall in there to me, as would things like mind control and similar if the game has things like that. Social things are more emotionally-based in terms of how I was looking at things.

...and each of these can technically influence or enhance the others. For instance, a successful appeal to emotion may provide a modifier to a mental challenge, just as a good logical approach might tamp down soaring tempers or a physical threat may cause emotional distress. In other words, I look at it more as a trinity than as a binary; this is one thing I do think WoD got right in terms of core divisions.

Edit: One of the attributes in the game is 'Identity'. It's essentially a social manipulation resist trait, in some respects. It is 'how well does the character know their own mind/understand their own core motivations'. Each point of Identity also allows the player to define one 'core motivation', which is something like 'I will not betray my team' or 'I will not kill' or 'I will not turn down the chance to make a profit' (not all of these things are necessarily moral; they're the character's essential drives).

If a challenge would impact one of those core motivations, it grants a +/- modifier in one direction or the other; talking someone into something they already want to do is easier, trying to make them go against a deeply held belief is harder. This is something that allows a player to define their character in a way I think is highly cool, and also allows for that 'wandering personal modifier' issue that comes up so often. Plenty of people claim those as an excuse, but the system here makes them actually choose them and decide which ones are really, actually going to count.

@Ganymede said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

@somasatori said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

It is very paranoid to think that we're watched all the time by spirits of the dead/floaty beings/whatever. I think people have guilty consciences about what they do, and they manifest those thoughts as belief in angels, demons, ghosts, and whatnot. Like I said, I've seen some weird shit, but in hindsight, it was probably all of the drugs and booze.

“People * * * like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”

God, I love Andrzej Sapkowski.

This is the double-edged sword I'm talking about, though.

The same logic applies thus: we don't want to believe in anything we don't understand or can't immediately explain, because then it is a danger to us. So we dismiss things, because we're afraid of the unknown. Knowing is power, and not knowing? We're not as comfortable with that, and even the wrong explanation can make us feel better, because it is an explanation.

We can't really claim that only one side of this particular coin exists.