Best posts made by surreality

@Ominous This lines up in no small way with today's irk:

"It's not like you can pick a day that isn't the anniversary of some racist or homophobic attack!"

...really should be all the fucking proof we need that...

"There are no systemic discriminations in the modern society!"

...is complete bullshit.

I mean. Isn't the former proof that the latter is bullshit? I know that old saying about how 'genius is the ability to keep two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time' but I think this is sometimes something that needs to be pointed out as an indication of profound stupidity.

<deep breath calm blue ocean>

@Lithium There's another answer, there, though, and it's the reality answer. It's the actual good fiction answer.

When every struggle is life or death, that cheapens it considerably to the point of making it utterly meaningless.

It should mean something when it happens. It should be dramatic, surprising -- and yes, scary.

That typically and realistically and sanely means it should not be commonplace.

@Rinel If you want interesting tidbits on Gothic churches and their architecture, do a search for 'R. W. Billings' in the various online library collections out there. Some neat stuff. He also did two books examining the geometry behind Gothic windows. They were all published over a century ago and goddammit even the notes for the workbook-style things are really interesting, like how he made an effort to do one of them specifically in a printing method that meant more people could access it and develop their skills and and and and...

Totally not saying that because it's a rabbit hole I fell down a month or so ago, noooooo, not at all, sorry not sorry. (No, really, there's some cool stuff, so it's worth peeking at if you're really interested.)

@Lithium Then, seriously. Please clarify this: "Protagonists who are unwilling to risk character death, aren't fucking protagonists. They're couch warmers." -- because that's FPS mentality, and what I've been responding to.

None of the nuance being described now is remotely present in that statement, y'know?

I have seen how off-putting it is when players are told the only viable contribution they make to a game is when they're not just willing to risk, but are risking, death. I've come an inch from leaving places with that attitude toward the players, and have actually left others.

It has value, but it is far from the only challenge, the only risk, and the only approach. You can probably see why I consider that approach reductive, incredibly limiting, and unrealistic.

Steering very religious conservative family members away from falling into the pit trap that is Qanon is twice as exhausting as it is time-consuming, but I managed to pull it off.

I still wake up tired every morning since.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kestrel

I would be okay with that second meta pose but a lot of people would bristle at it. It's entertaining and probably accurate. If you had posed how you thought he was a jerk but would never say so out loud, you are denying the other player retort to an insult. That is not okay.

Is it different if I use my character's silently-held disdain to explain the atmosphere of the scene? e.g.:

When @Thenomain walks up to Kestrel, she just glares. She thinks he's a jerk, but of course she'd never say that out loud. And so biting back her insult, she grits her teeth and says, "Good day... sir."

This one, if directed at me, wouldn't bother me at all, actually, but YMMV.

Why: the inclusion of 'she thinks he's a jerk' is very different from, say, just 'he's a jerk'; one reflects character opinion, the other is name-calling in editorial commentary. There's definitely a difference between the two. While I may not be able to respond to it IC directly, there's no actual insult being slung in my direction, there's just a character's opinion being presented.

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

@Ganymede

Because if we could turn off our ability to care this would not be an issue.

This is pretty much the shape of my universe these days.

Where do we get that Vampire Diaries universe off switch? Because...

I like the color coded thing someone mentioned above. Not as much in the 'it's showing to the whole room' context, but the idea that you could rapidly and easily separate 'at your place' from 'in the main room' is still quite helpful, I'd think.

Only one antibiotic left after the most recent whee-fun surgery.

They'll need to do more later, much more extensive, but a notable end point to this stopgap slice-and-dice is very welcome.

@Kanye-Qwest I see it less as pre-determining an outcome as I do noting one's personal limits.

For instance, if I'm cranky or aggro that day because life's been crappy, for instance, I will mention something along the lines of what @ThatGuyThere describes: "Sure, we can do a thing, but I'd like to avoid anything openly hostile." This is three-fold:

• if the other player is looking for a fight that day, I'm giving them the chance to find someone else who is going to find that just as much fun as they will;
• I've probably had enough grief for the day and that's not what I'm looking for in my happy fun times;
• I would rather not risk my RL angst bleeding over into RP in ways that would harsh someone else's fun. (While I think I'm usually good at avoiding this, I know I like everyone else am not the best judge of how good at this I actually am.)

Letting someone know what kind of thing I'm looking for -- which isn't usually avoiding conflict, for instance I may be actually seeking one in the form of a rival or adversary or enemy or threat -- gives the other player a chance to nope that right in the bud, too.

It's more a factor of, "I'm looking for this kind of fun today, that sound good to you?" -- and if it does, everybody's more likely to be happy with it. Fun is generally the goal, so this step can be important in that respect.

99% of the time, I don't really have a preference. A scene is a scene and a scene is something that's going to be fun no matter what it contains.

It's that 1% that can sometimes trip shit up.

Today is National Suicide Prevention Day.

We shouldn't need a day to remind us to check in on people, but if there are folks out there you care about that you know are struggling and you haven't heard from them in a while, it's as good an excuse as any to check in on them if you can.

I like this. I like this a lot, actually. Maybe call it 'defining moments'?

@Kanye-Qwest Irony: it's usually exhausted but completely unable to sleep because the brain is zooming and the body is like, 'what?'

The brain looping the body 100x over is augh.

@Chime We were probably there around the same time.

...and if you ever do something with MOO to make it, well, workable? (As in, there's some hint of a clue how to even get it running... ) Oh, gods, please let me know.

@deadculture said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

As you mentioned, my latest foray into the MOO had two characters meet an abrupt end by a guy I have described (and I did point this out to a staffer as to why I thought it wasn't a right fit for me) as an elementary school bully with an automatic shotgun. And this guy monopolizes a lot of the game resources and can easily outlast most other people except other veterans.

Not exactly conducive to new players.

^ That. That kind of behavior wasn't tolerated quite as much 'back when'. It's the kind of thing that'd guarantee I wouldn't bother further with a place, too.

@GangOfDolls said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

people who RPed the shit out of their goofy as fuck PCs

This reminds me of someone whose name I sadly forget, but dammit, they were just too cool. Many late night conversations about tarot imagery and Clive Barker were had.

Dammit, random stranger, you were fucking elegant as hell.

@Autumn said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

I heard several people express that they just weren't clear on how they should behave IC, not just in terms of attitudes that people find awkward or uncomfortable today but in terms of everyday language and behavior. "How are we supposed to talk?" is a pretty basic question, and if people don't have an answer they feel comfortable with it's going to be problematic.

Having peeked some at KD's wiki, I think borrowing a page from their policy (at least in part?) may help here.

1. They have a PILE of resource information about the world/setting available.

2. They have a policy that notes, summarizesd, "Don't be a nit-picking dick about people making unintentional IC faux pas based on the trivia, and don't passive-aggressively 'correct' people on these points". (At least that's the read of it I got.)

This is good stuff, and they are an excellent example to follow for settings outside everyday experience. Lay out some basics for the alternate history, throw in some links to important current events in real history if you're keeping them, and encourage people to explore this -- but encourage them to do so without the fear of someone being a self-righteous windbag getting in their face about it if they goof.

That last bit really is pretty huge. People are a lot more willing to try new things if they are aware that the environment does not coddle mean-spirited pedantry flung at them if they make an error.

Think of it in terms of learning a new language. If all the native speakers sneered and started mocking you when you flubbed a word, sure, you might learn that word -- but what you really learned is that all the native speakers are assholes.

@crawfish I have no idea about the characters these are inspired by, but they're so nifty I don't care. I'm sure they'd be twice as awesome if I knew, but even not knowing, they still kick all the ass.

@Arkandel said in New Player Onboarding:

For example the very first part of doing anything on a game...CGen. Anyone who's played an RPG could fill out a character sheet and over the web you can actually show them a character sheet then have them click on the dots or whatever they're increasing and it's all visual right there on a page. On a MU* they need a collection of arcane-looking commands, sifting through help files and asking on channels, right at a time when they might (and most likely) never have used either a command-line interface, know how to look at help files or know how to use channels.

Oh, and graphics. Making things actually pretty to look at. I don't need to tell you why that's important to gaining new users for a service. Have you seen some of the wikis folks like @surreality have been making? They look pretty damn neat - but they can't do much to improve the black screens with un-enriched text on them.

I'm actually working on something that's a wiki-based CG-ish thing. I can't directly integrate it with the MUX right now, but I can make a form for CG, similar to the forms used for BITN's player pages. It can output a pretty sheet for character pages, and a CG-'paste me into the MUX' script for staff to use on the MUX itself. It needs a lot of debugging, and most importantly due to limitations with mediawiki itself it can only be used for games going open sheet, but it is something that, in very limited form, is not totally outside the realms of possibility.

If/when it's possible to integrate that with a game directly? WIN. But there are at least some things that can be done, though they still need human eyes on them to check for pre-reqs and such as there's only so much of that it's feasible to do from the wiki side.

(Also, thank you. I try!)

@Luna If we had a bayou it'd make a lot more sense -- it's entirely practical in that case.

What kills me is that there's a huge park that allows the use of ATVs about 2 blocks from here, and another area that's perfect for it (and has no car traffic) that's literally the next development block over and is also 100% open to public use.

But nope. Up and down the hill for hours at a time. Just up and down the hill, gunning the motor as inefficiently as possible to create as much noise as the already noisy thing can manage.

It's very much a case of "I am a teenager trying to make everybody look at me and my toy" attention whoring, which would make sense maybe if there were many other teens around to be impressed by it. The hill? All old farts. Literally 'we just lost the 99-year old' level of 'old farts'.

The mind boggles.

@Kestrel I am thoroughly aware that I'm being bitchy as fuck to you, because your faux superiority and 'poor me I'm a victim' behavior when someone so much as questions you (which you then use for justifications to whine and bang on and hand-wring and behave nastily yourself) makes my eyes roll so hard there's a cramp forming.

Was that not abundantly clear? I'm sorry, let me clarify: I think you're exactly the sort of hypocrite that needs a long look in the mirror.

See, in your self-righteous ramble (which was corrected, I notice you didn't respond to being wrong or making all manner of crazy assumptions anywhere) you claim:

@Kestrel said in The Shame Game:

But I think it pays, when you feel the need to shame someone, to try and connect with them as a person, first.

...and yet, repeatedly, it is so blazingly obvious that you aren't even reading what you're responding to, for content or otherwise, that you couldn't connect with what's being said if someone hooked a USB port to the back of your skull and downloaded it directly, let alone with anyone else's point of view.

Is that an exceptionally cunty way to put it? Sure is.

Is it inaccurate? Nope.

Your intended barb thus sailed right past and stuck in the wall behind me; you're transparent enough I could see it coming ten miles away.