Best posts made by surreality

@tinuviel said in RL things I love:

Exceptions, of cause, for when I cook pasta. Over three decades on this planet and I still have no idea how to accurately judge pasta when cooking it... so I cook it all.

I was raised by my Italian granny for the most part. I swear to you, this was how she did it, too. And not because she was often feeding a pile of people, either. (It did not hurt that her cooking was so good that the leftovers never lasted long, if we're being real about it all here.)

That woman taught me how to improv the shit out of a decent meal from random things around the kitchen on the fly and make some damned fine sauce, but so help me... the whole box, every time. There was a time I would, say, eyeball it on a third of the box or half the box, but then the box would sit there partially used for weeks and start going off, and just no. No, it's pasta all week, motherfuckers, if I'm cooking pasta.

It helps that my husband's nickname amongst his friends is 'the furnace that walks' for how much his miraculously-not-at-all-fat self eats. It gets us down to pasta for half a week, motherfuckers, and I can totally live with that.

@ganymede To some extent, I'm willing to work with that, personally. Depends on how strong the aversion is. I'll play an 'eh' scene once in a while to get to a 'ooh shiny!' scene without much worry.

I won't play a 'fuck no' scene no matter how shiny the 'trade'.

The last line in this exchange can easily be:

Me: Because I'm really not interested in that subject, know I will not enjoy it, and it would make me uncomfortable. We can do something else together, but I'm not going to play that scene with you. If you want to play that scene, I'm sure you can find someone who will enjoy it with you fully.

I don't really consider that being an asshole at all, but my sensors may be off.

@faceless I seriously am going to wrap the rest of them up in a big box in shiny paper and ribbons for Xmas so we don't go through this next year, for real.

(She uses 2/year when we go to Florida, to keep her fancy tiny shells in.)

Bonus facepalm factor:

• This 'crisis' emerged a full month before the trip.
• We drive down with all the stuff, and she flies. Yes, she gave the floss boxes back to us to take down with us in the car.

ETA:
Bri: <squints> Are those the motherfucking floss boxes on top of her gluten free stuff?
Me: <deadpan> People drown in the ocean all the time, that's all I'm sayin'.

Entirely variable. Speed and number of folks present are a factor. Whether there's system crunching afoot is another.

I'd say 2.5-4 hours, since I tend toward long and folks I write with tend toward long. Not always, but the random novella happens all around.

The more people in the scene, the more time it tends to take to get anywhere.

That said, that's more my metric: does it feel like there's some purpose to the scene -- and I'm defining this very loosely here, because I'd count 'an idle trade of ideas or characters sharing a joke' to be things that potentially have purpose in the context of storytelling and character building. That point may hit after less than a half an hour. It may never get there after six, eight, or twenty-four.

@kanye-qwest I agree re: 'people may pose back' being a valid thing. There's downsides to this, too, though: if they're idling to just idle, which a lot of folks do these days, that's a grid room other people can't use without an audience, and not everybody wants one. (I find it a little creepy if I'm RPing and someone is just sitting in the room to watch and not engaging in any way.[1])

I'm more likely to grab someone from an OOC room to start a scene. In part, this is due to being burned by the approach above more times than I care to admit; approaching a totally unknown entity on grid is a crapshoot and my luck is pretty notoriously awful. I can usually get a general feel for someone if I've seen them chat a bit OOC, and let's be honest, this is also usually pretty telling re: who to avoid vs. who one's likely to get along with fairly well. Everyone has their own take on this, but I'll probably avoid someone constantly engaging in giggly-grabass, or constantly bragging about their giant stats, etc.

1. And yet, weirdly, I love the broadcast scenes on HorrorMU, as participant or observer. Thing is, you know that going in, and it's a group activity rather than a random stranger camping a room. You know there's an active crowd, and they're usually interacting over the public channel about what's going on, as well, with the participants.

...that moment I finally get the css and wiki templates to more or less behave.

Oh, hell, YES!

I now need a cigarette, damn.

( ...four days of wrestling this crap, fuck me to tears.)

@Ghost said in When To Stop Listening To Those Voices:

You're not entirely off. There are a lot of people in the hobby who harbor long-term opinions on players, but if you can't jar an actual scene out of someone, then you don't really need to pry it out of them; people role play with people they want to RP with. Period.

Even with this said, there are folks out there who aren't going to let their personal dislikes or grudgewank get in the way of the RP experience, so you don't even necessarily have to give up on these people.

There are folks who rub me the wrong way, or I am wary of for whatever reason. If the opportunity presents itself for me to help them -- answering a question, offering ideas if they ask people all to brainstorm stuff, finding something cool that reminded me of their character that I think they'd like to see? -- I will still do this, without hesitation, and in good faith.

Mostly because... why not? If it helps them out in some way, cool. I don't expect it to change their opinion of me, and it may not change my opinion of them, but if it's something that helps them have more fun on the game, that fun (ideally) spreads to other people having more fun with them, and so on. Little things count. Little bits of thoughtfulness count, even if they're taken for granted or never actually recognized as being that at all, and the more we do these little things across the board, the better everyone's experience becomes after a while.

...yeeeeeeeeeeah, that was the read I had on it, too, and if the critter is not suffering and miserable, 'put it out of its misery so I won't be bothered by people who need to learn manners' is just not the kind of solution that works for me, because goddamn.

Having to take my own cat to that final appointment a few years ago still has me caught in the sniffles once a week after a couple of years now, she was such a beloved member of the family, and she probably would have fallen over on her own a day or so later she was deteriorating from out of nowhere so damned fast, losing over half her bodyweight in a week and going from hopping on the back of the chair to being unable to move.

There's compassionate euthanasia, and then there's 'kill someone's beloved pet so you won't be inconvenienced by rude people once in a blue', which is a really ugly sort of callous even as a fucking joke.

@saosmash ^ This. I take cymbalta now to handle depression and anxiety and my perma-aches-and-pains. There's xanax for immediate panic attack crises as they emerge. The former has made a world of difference, but it isn't a magic bullet. It doesn't prevent every instance of these feelings or anxieties.

It does, however, help. Immensely.

If you (and I mean generic you reading this thread because you have these same feelings in your life) haven't looked into something like this and the option is available to you, please do so. I'm not saying this from a position of 'go fix yourself, you're broken', but from here: I am so grateful these things have helped me and I hope that if you need help with the same kind of problems, you may be able to find an option that helps you, too.

Just on the whole:

2016: I'mma kill all your darlings, break your heart, completely demolish your self-esteem, horrify you about the potential future of your country, scrag all manner of shit in your business, and fuck you over six ways to Sunday while the people you care about most betray you in the most hurtful ways possible in a sustained assault on your ability to survive it.

2017: Hold my beer.

2018: ???

So, this is a step aside from the few preceding posts, and is not in reference to them. Just want to be clear about that before addressing something that's tricksy to put into words, and -- well, I hope it's not as depressing as it may initially seem. That isn't the intention here.

Whenever I start to think about these issues, and I think about them more often than I'd like, there's a quote that comes to mind.

It isn't a happy quote. It is still one of the truest things I have ever seen put into words.

It's this:

There are a few quotes, poems, songs, bits of art and similar that I come back to pondering often, for one reason or another. This is one of them. It's what I'd call a 'frequent companion' when these specific feelings emerge.

For a long time, I looked at it as commiseration. It was, at least, a reminder that I am not alone in having these feelings.

My thoughts and feelings about it have evolved considerably since, without losing the bits that were useful before.

The second realization it helped me internalize was that: this is natural, normal, and human. We don't have to have a mental disorder or illness to experience this. It's part of life for all of us. Nobody has a perfect record of victory in this regard, no matter who they are. That does not make any of us lesser in some way, and it's important to remember that. We talk a lot in this hobby about the opportunities provided by failure in the course of a story, or for a character, and we liken it to life as a nod to 'realism'. And then we promptly forget that when it comes to our own failures much of the time, because those monsters and ghosts are very, very loud, and they speak our language like little else ever will.

So we're up to: you're not alone in this, and this is part of being human; it does not make you broken, sub-par, or lesser. It's the third one that's big, and it's the third one that's -- cliche as it may sound -- the charm.

Sometimes they win.

It isn't going to be every time. Not unless you give up trying. It is so important to remember that.

This came in my snail mail once. I keep forgetting if I have shared it or not.

If I still have it somewhere and it's not mangled or something, I should really frame it, because wow.

Character pages are still in the works, but coming sooooooon. Basics should be in over the weekend, and I'll let folks know when it's safe to poke them.

They won't have all the planned bells and whistles to start, but the planned bells and whistles are pretty involved, and there are oodles of them. (Some of it's pretty neat, or at least I think so.) We'll see how many of 'em we can make happen, and I'll keep folks updated on the new stuff going in when it's ready over time.

Mac and cheese. Because everything in the world feels better with mac and cheese for some reason.

@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@thenomain said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I referenced goatse today when 'weird internet shit' came up at work. (The younger guys were talking about when they were first shown 2girls1cup.)

A coworker said 'I don't want to know about that crazy shit from back in your day.'

You know what this means?

That the Internet is as deviant as it can ever get. We made it to the top of that hill before anyone else. Everyone after our generation will be following in our footsteps.

We won.

It's true. When they're wigged out by 2girls1cup and some minor BMEzine stuff and you're thinking something along the lines of "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.."

Our 'grandpa/ma on the rockin' chair' stories are going to make the boomer tales about Woodstock and whatnot look like a Disney film, and that is absolutely winning.

It may be a ways off yet, but some day, we're going to be those old farts that have their kids covering their kids' ears and going, "MOOOOOOOOOOM!" before the grandkids rush off to whatever replaces whatever replaces google, which will probably run so fast that the moment the words are out of our mouth, a little readout will appear on the contact lens our grandspawn is wearing.

In other words, by the time we horrify our kids, their kids will already be giggling like mad or starting to cry or scheduling their own appointment with a therapist.

@cupcake @FirePuff I'm not disagreeing with you about that. It's gross, not cool, and is not being diminished or defended. Duh.

It is, however, very frightening to think we might have someone in this community who might, in fact, go out and commit necrophilia for the express purpose of harassing someone they did not like on a game, and if it sounds like that may have been the case, yeah, I'm going to want to know about that immediately.

And I don't see why I'm getting my shit jumped for asking for that clarification.

We live in an era where SWATting is a thing. That someone in this community may have not just crossed the 'disgusting posts on the internet for harassment' line, but the 'engaged in violent threatening real world flesh and blood behavior' line as well, is something I would want to know about.