Best posts made by surreality

Fuck the cold snap that hit right when I have to work with 'keep all your windows and doors open or work outside (but this is not recommended because shit can fall into your stuff while it's setting)' clear coats and solvents and whatnots.

It is April, motherfuckers, and I'm wearing three shirts and leggings under sweatpants and two pairs of socks with footwarmers between them, and my fingers are shaking badly enough this shit is getting everywhere. Fix the goddamn Bond Villain weather satellite already, secretly-dastardly corporation, fix it now! Use that tax bill to Make April April Again, motherfuckers.

@Prototart said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

i constructively suggest we all try to get their cringey wod fanfic published as soon as we can so they wander off rather than just hope lightning strikes twice

is that better

I really love you a lot today, just sayin'.

@aria I would be tempted to blast the churchiest of church music back at 'em. This is the only proper use of church music, to my reckoning.

Ugh, finally back this morning. First, Rinel, I wouldn't think of you as 'a guy playing a lesbian' for reasons I hope are maybe more obvious today than they may have been yesterday. My issue with the guy-pixie girls is basically what sao mentioned -- it is very much a male fantasy of womanhood that ignores a lot of the real experience of it. (It's not in an over the top way, but one that ignores a lot of things that a transwoman would unfortunately be intimately familiar with also.)

I ultimately don't care what someone plays.

I will however side-eye the shit out of someone playing something like this very badly and crowing about how it shows 'how enlightened' they are, and how 'not like all those other straight white males that play <something not that>' they are.

@insomniac7809 I made a character with the hook 'Manic Pixie Dream Dread Girl' once as a twist on the trope, so I say go for it. Please, smash the shit out of that trope; I will happily hand off the mallet.

@aria That is amazing. I don't know how they do it, but so help me, I think 'Something is Not Quite Right' is a feature of cats, rather than a bug. It's just a bit like a crackerjack prize.

@Highfalutin That is amazing and I'm elated to simply have read it.

This is the kind of accident we used to have in MOO all the time, too. I am now so nostalgic it itches, and I wish I remembered some of the incidents, because... omg, yes, this.

@jibberthehut Your flag asshole reminds me of a horrid wretch of a neighbor we had a handful of years ago. (They moved a few years ago, I hope you didn't inherit them.)

My house is on a corner. This means it's automatically nominated as the school bus stop. For nearly twenty years we've been patient as hell with this, despite no small amount of property damage over the years.

I worked through the night and would sleep around 6am, and often had to be back up by 10am at the time. (If I am very lucky I could snag a 2 hour nap somewhere else during the day, but working from home gets much less flexible when you're working with people all over the dang planet with much less flexible hours due to kids or a second job.)

For two weeks, the 'fun new game while waiting for the bus' -- approximately 7-7:30am -- was 'scream tag'. As in, run all over my property, and if someone touches you, scream like you are being murdered. Right under the bedroom window. I already sleep in earplugs, people, and if something wakes me up, I'm up, because apparently life hates me.

We are evolutionarily fucking hard-wired to respond to the sound of a child's scream; it's part of our survival instinct sampler pack. (A vulnerable member of the tribe is in danger! Fetch your spear, and murder the hungry bear!) This was consistently loud enough to wake my folks in the next house down, also. Our houses are brick and stone and there's plenty of space between everything. We are not talking flimsy drywall or townhouses here.

After two weeks waking up in a dead panic because it sounded like people were murdering children on my lawn, I called my mother to please mention the noise to the mothers outside watching over this escapade as she was heading out to work (and driving right by there) while I got dressed and tried to not look like some extra from The Walking Dead.

My mother may be the person who taught me snark and how to swear, but when it comes to 'anyone outside the family', she is one of the most horrifyingly timid and polite human beings to walk the earth. There is no way she reasonably caused the frenzy of screaming and threats and accusations that blasted through my door when I finally got dressed and got down to it. (Every ridiculous thing from 'your work schedule is unacceptable' to 'I will call the cops on you for making observations of my children without my permission' because apparently waking up to the sound of a scream and rolling over with a pillow on top of your head for two weeks without so much as glancing out the window is stalking someone's children, and all manner of over the top insanity.)

I didn't hesitate. I sent an email to the school district the moment I got back into the house. They apparently confirmed the 'scream tag' game with the bus driver, and hostile behaviors from two of the parents had been mentioned previously, and the district called me within two hours. The neighbors all had a phone call by the end of the day that the bus stop would be moving up over a block (to one of their yards).

Amazing how that shit was never tolerated on their own property.

Needless to say, if there's someone you can mention this issue to, it may help.

I have been like this so long I couldn't even tell you at this point in the ways I consider 'core', really. (Namely, 'creating stories' in some fashion.) This goes back so far that, as a kid, I had trouble falling asleep, so like many moms, mine would read me bedtime stories. But, y'know, I would still sit there staring at the walls and side-eyeing the closet for hours after that, so I'd make up other stories in my head based on whatever she'd read until I was actually asleep. As a little kid, there were the usual 'make believe' games. I remember passing notes to write 'shared stories' back and forth about any given thing with friends going all the way back to second grade. I... really don't remember a time in my life when I was not 'this way' in a way that's instantly recognizable as part of how folks 'do stuff' in the hobby (coming up with plots stories as a creator/st, sharing stories with folks back and forth, etc.)

I am very much that pretentious ass who will cut a fucker who scoffs at that cheesy quote about the universe being made of stories, not atoms. A lot of the genuinely shitty things in my life have been made less shitty because while they may have given me hell, they also gave me stories. (There's another great quote from the Hannibal series about this, but I am not going to butcher it in paraphrase and don't recall it exactly at the moment, dammit.)

The gallstone that nearly killed me was apparently in the shape of a D10, though. So I almost had an ultimate gamer-geek finale?

I still have the set of story books my mother read from -- and they were the ones her mother read to her from when she was tiny. They are still fucking gorgeous and they will never not be considered genuine treasures of the house.

@tyche ...most recent? Sure!

Go ahead and keep trying to have this argument with someone trained in fashion and costume design, it'll be cute.

Most people at my high school had trench coats. This is because -- like most other local regions of this place called 'earth' -- it sometimes rains here.

Many schools already have dress codes, including public schools.

If we're looking for commonalities, aren't the vast majority of these shooters... male? Maybe we should ban anyone male from schools?

Let's put it this way, then:

Would an appropriate response to that statement from the student have been, "Oh, sorry, got my gross student crimes mixed up, I thought you were talking about raping an unconscious girl and posting video of it online, they were all prep jocks, right?"

I'm thinking no.

Keep your grossness to yourself, please. It's fucking disgusting and inappropriate as hell. People in this thread are talking about having lost personal friends -- who were wearing trench coats. Have some goddamned shred of human decency, for fuck's sake.

ETA: I am not even going to engage with this further, actually. Ignore time; the only appropriate response to this level of sheer ignorance.

@WildBaboons said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

7 (7!) subskills for Run may be a little much.

I feel wayyyyyyyy less stupid about the shit I was designing now.

So random, so dorky.

The husband and I collect (usually) totally worthless rocks at a local(ish) beach whenever we need a day of Not In The Fucking House.

There are rocks... every-fucking-where. Or were. They live in buckets outside now, for the most part, but the fuckers were building up again.

Years ago, we got a tumbler to polish some of the little fuckers. Yay. We got a second one for a different process, but it's huge and by the time it arrived, depression had whacked me hard upside the head and while we set it up enough to see that it worked, the other one had turned to concrete, full of stuff we really liked, now a waste of money and favorite rocks, so both were mostly useless.

I caved and ordered a replacement two weeks ago. It now has a place to live, it works, it's running with a pile of stuff. The holy shit big one has a place to live, too, and is no longer worthless provided it didn't break somehow after a few years hiding in the hall closet, and we might eventually get through the 'yard art buckets'. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

On a lark, I tried to see if I could pry open the old concrete one. No joy. Tried again this morning with the steel scrubber brushes and a wrench -- and got it. It wasn't actually concrete! Odds are good what was in it and partly done can be salvaged (which is happy-making because it was the best of our best stuff from back before the buckets went to live outside), even if we lose a few to the concrete-fu.

We might even be able to get the machine to work. Unlikely, but possible. One part will absolutely need to be replaced, but that's still a big plus if I can scrub the rest of the rust off the fucker, which seems entirely feasible.

Either way, I have been scrubbing and wrenching and getting drenched and sneezing through the worst dust ever and running out to get hoses and sprayers since 5am and...

...exhausted is good.

Exhausted and having recovered something we thought was a goner, no matter how trivial, is kinda awesome right now.

I still secretly pine for the idea of the old rag-tag traveling space carnival game that was half FF, half Carnivale. Grid being the caravan of ships, and the 'worlds' on the fringes of settlements and colonies they visit to perform changing every so often as bare-bones spaces and mostly temprooms.

https://www.wbshop.com/collections/clearance-cp-merch/products/superman-backpack-buddy

My husband sent me this link with the words: "Gee, I wonder why this lil' gem is on clearance?!"

He won't clean the coffee off my monitor, because he's a jerk.

@Ghost I agree 100% with the point of the post.

THAT SAID, there is a game design stupid there, too, in not having a reasonable continuum of options there in many cases. WoD being a prime example. There's not really 'everybody is a blur without your glasses and forget becoming a sniper' (which is a notable impediment in the game world) or similar options, there's only 'totally normal vision' or 'LIGHT ALL THE WAY OUT'.

I try not to quibble too hard about lack of realism, but that's a fairly substantial design issue.

In some instances you can probably do something where you have an equipment item that helps ameliorate the penalty somewhat in WoD. However, you gotta be prepared to lose that thing and deal with the full penalty. (Ex: a hit to the head knocks the implants offline or similar.)

ETA: I think the lack of these reasonable levels in the middle is where some of the less bad-intentioned 'ignore it' conditionals may stem from. Essentially, the system doesn't recognize what they're trying to do.

@packrat It could be worse. Never let a cat near broccoli.

Ancient Cat, when she was a kitten, once leapt up on the table, snarled at us like a mighty lion, while we were all eating Chinese food.

We expected her to snag a piece of beef and run off, which... we just couldn't be mad. Tiny ball of puff, grar!

At which point, she snags a piece of broccoli, narrows her eyes at us, daring us to try to take it away, growls again, and hops down to eat it.

Repeat this two more times as we're dying with laughter.

Oh, we were so wrong to laugh. So very wrong.

Little did we know our darling puff was preparing a chemical weapon the Geneva convention surely outlaws by now. My gods, nothing is more horrifying than kitten broccoli gas, no matter how goddamned adorable seeing a teensyflouf steal broccoli is. (And it is pretty goddamned adorable, I have to say.)

My roommates and I had to flee the house for air more than once over the next three days, so help me gods.

I'm not sure where I stand on perks. In a lot of ways, it depends on the perk. Also, I don't inherently agree with the the examples listed. (Example: Only in very few cases have I ever had an ability to run NPCs in a way that players were not also permitted to do so, and I don't recall ever using this permission when I had it.)

Faraday is also spot-on re: entitlement. Odds are high that even if there is a perk I could get, I'd probably turn it down due to the inevitable drama. (Likely, only to get accused of benefiting from it anyway, which leads me to not want them to exist.)

This is because people don't see the work. They don't understand that it's work, or don't grasp how long it takes, etc. Even some fellow staffers don't necessarily recognize it, and think it's some instant magical power rather than the slow, pick-everything-apart line-by-line debugging process it actually is, and that you can't typically just glance at someone and know what's wrong and how to fix it.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Its a safe bet they weren't made with a woman's contours in mind. But if you want to shave your legs with it, feel free. Let me know how that turns out for you.

...especially when you get to those areas you can't necessarily see very easily without becoming a contortionist.

Add me to the sensitive skin coarse hair club. Except on my head -- of course. There it is hopelessly wispy-as-fuck. At least it's rainbow green now?

I went with 'epilator', because it costs as much as a full body wax does around here. They do not disclose the ongoing cost in screams on the box, though, and the instruction manual needs to include: when the endorphins kick in so hard your hands are shaking, put the damn thing down and wait until later. No, later than that, too. Maybe tomorrow. Or next Thursday.

@faraday The sad bit is, many of the folks I have staffed for would consider that a horribly unreasonable perk -- and that staff should instead wait for players to choose what they want before being allowed to choose for themselves, and give the role up to a player if at any point a player expresses interest. We see a lot of folks clamoring for staff to not even be permitted to play on the game at all with some regularity, still, for instance, so this isn't as extreme as it may sound.

@insomnia It's times like that I wish I had the van from Ant-Man, with its very special horn. Because I'd punch that thing about five times in a row.

@Auspice ...and omg the day 'staff duties' involve 'TS dispenser'/'efucks on demand', I am fucking something, all right: the hell out of this hobby, with speed.