Best posts made by surreality

@livia You've gotta love, "WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! THIS IS GOING TO BE AMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZING!!!"

@WTFE Hell, been there, too.

@Tyche Yeah, actually. Brutal honesty? Knowing that we have the 'old style' medicine cabinets (with the razor disposal slots that would drop the blades into the interior of the walls of the house -- gee I wonder why that isn't a trend any more?! o.o) and knowing that we found a pile of them behind one of them when refinishing the bathroom and were too weirded out to touch them, I had to have my husband lock that bathroom door when he'd be out of state for work because it's easy as pie to yank that medicine cabinet out. So, yeah. He got asked to clean them out of there soon after.

As much as I hate to say it, though... guns are frighteningly effective by comparison and offer roughly zero time for reconsideration once the process begins; this is a genuinely important difference.

(FWIW, I have nothing against responsible gun ownership at all and would likely own one myself if I did not share this particular concern. Hell, own a tank if you wanna, so far as I'm concerned. I'm also 100% behind respecting people not wanting guns around them personally, regardless of their reason; this just happens to be an especially valid concern to have to my reckoning.)

Generally: Thing is, this... is not an easy thing for somebody to talk about. Please let's not turn it into a political football. Even as someone who just admitted to being in that same headspace quite often, it's making me uncomfortable to see, and I'm not even the one being quoted. So I'm making a general plea for some human decency and compassion on this point. Showing respect for others isn't a political thing, either, no matter how different the ways people often focus on doing it may be, OK? ...please?

As a quick FYI, 'The Crash Test Dummy' is not an actual archetype available; that's me fussing around with a template structure and some automated list features to help TD out and organize character pages easily for folks going forward, since there are some really unique structural challenges for the wiki (that are frickin' fascinating to solve). It's just the testing sample people can pick apart to see how it's set up.

Since my char is already ded IC and more or less super freaked out to the point of quietly sitting in a corner with the first book she can pull off the shelf the moment she wakes up in Dedsville, I'm hacking through this today.

@WTFE I think she's a Brit, actually. The singing voice (very American blues) and the speaking voice (very not American blues) are drastically different. It's a head-spinner the first time you hear her actually talk.

@goldfish SOOOOOOOOO many edits. I have hit a persnickety glitch and am tryin' to muscle through it at the moment!

@Faceless People confuse cache and cachet a lot. Especially since the 't' is not pronounced at the end of a lot of words we've stolen from French (ballet, etc.).

@Ganymede said:

It doesn't prevent harassment on channel, page, @mail, or otherwise. If you want a quick fix, there are other commands to prevent being communicated at without consent. If you want to address harassment, go to staff; that's their fucking job.

Setting yourself unfindable can, absolutely, avoid triggering the negative behaviors people have described.

Nothing excuses the behavior, and once it has happened, it has happened.

Preventing it from happening again, or involving staff -- which may or may not backfire on you, depending on the staffers in question/any given policy at the game/etc. -- is not going to undo whatever drama has already been dealt in the same way.

@Tyche ...slut-shaming is not unique to women, and never has been.

I've actually been on a MOO that tried to do the 'all code is IC' thing: Cybersphere, way back. No clue if it's still like that these days or not, but they didn't even have a page command for players, though they did have an IC com system.

Obviously enough, everybody used the com system with a ) in front of whatever they said to convey they were using it just like they'd use page anyway, but it's something that places have tried, with... the predictable amount of success, I suppose.

@Ghost OH MY GOD. ...that is kinda amazing.

@sunnyj Surprisingly? Not so much. People are really working their flaws, and being reasonably specific with their areas of specialty.

And more than that, people are really PLAYING their flaws well, and to fun effect. There's no 'winning' mindset going on, really, beyond people scrambling for some kind of temporary solution to buy everyone some time to get away or live on until morning, rather than looking for miracle cures through their combination of stat maxes.

(And, fwiw, The Director is REALLY awesome at turning even those rare wonder rolls into a new complication for everyone to face as a consequence rather than a 'yay, the day is saved, and now nobody has anything else to do!' That is super epic.)

@Auspice "That they needed to make additional films to patch the gaping plotholes in the first, if this was not designed with the intent to be an ongoing series or trilogy where an expectation of this kind might be set up, it only serves to reinforce this point."

@botulism said in Horror MUX:

Activity has advantages.

...and this may sound 'duh', but it's not: the main advantage of activity is... activity.

There have only been a handful of event scenes, but there are a lot of scenes being roleplayed. The latter -- like any game -- is the bulk of the RP occurring.

Doing something means you're getting to do something. It's not some mysterious formula to crack, nobody has to invite you, you don't need to sacrifice a goat to Baal. Really. Honest. Grab somebody idling and available and say, "Hey, let's find a thing to do!" and odds are pretty good that your characters or one of your SRs has some means of connecting up somewhere to do something. It may not be world-altering, no, but most of the things going on that 'the "lucky/favored/blessed" people' are doing aren't world-altering. They're having conversations, they're going out for drinks, they're -- gasp, horror -- engaging in BaRP. All things any hypothetical you can do, too.

Seriously, if anybody out there is envious of BaRP, I have a ridiculous flirt bot that will be happy to keep you company and talk serious philosophy with you while not being able to turn off her Jessica Rabbit programming for a hot second while the WTF compounds by the second. (Alas, not a stripper ninja. Sorry if this disappoints.) Want a chance to audition for the casino stage? Hit me up! Wanna throw a drink on a notorious jerk who let most of a colony mission die? Poke me; that SR's suits are still too clean, and if you're W-Y seeking a living, breathing cautionary tale to talk to to try to warn you away from impending disaster (to no avail)? He'd love to talk to you. Need a mousy wandering tech geek? Page at will. Plain-spoken grumpy cat in leather? Same deal. Want to philosophize about synths at arcane length? All the to you, please page!

If this is what you're missing -- and it is the bulk of what's going on when there's not a large event scene being run for a group -- I will happily be your huckleberry if I'm available.

I only bite on the forum.

I can spot the chain, too, on that one. I'm not on the spectrum but have ADD, and the 'keep things in mental buckets' would have 'Chaucer' and 'A Knight's Tale' in a mental bucket (cool characters in guilty pleasure movies I love); 'Chaucer' and 'Shakespeare' would also be together in their own mental bucket (English authors of ye olden days), so you'd probably get an overlap with me, too. It'd likely also give Will a tenuous place in the Entertaining Instances of Anachronisms Included mental bucket, with things like A Knight's Tale and The Princess Bride and Blackadder so on.

@Insomnia said:

Yeah, but people also had a tendency to blow up every little thing into toe ring of doom proportions too, sometimes the paranoia was absolutely justified.

Exactly that.

It's not like we've exactly run out of WTF, but there's little major WTF enough that it needn't comprise the entire purpose of a place any more by far.

Which is kinda awesome. That likely has less to do with WORA having an impact than a lot of people just growing up over the past 15 or so years it was around in some form or another.

@Gingerlily It is honestly amazing how dismissive people are of some things. I'm heavy, I smoke, I've been in car accidents. 95% of the health issues I have now, I had for years before any of the above. This has not stopped every doctor ever from ascribing the problem to one or all of those things.

I still thank gods for the surgeon I dealt with earlier this year, who initially was mentally going down those roads, but when the testing came back that proved no, she is really not having this problem because she's a fat person, all of her numbers are 100% ideal from cholesterol to blood sugar to high end of normal blood pressure at the worst even with this infection that is trying to kill her, so we need to intervene now and not put this off and tell her to eat less and move around more, again.

@salty-secrets In other words, it's promoting exactly the sort of attitude that the first iteration of WORA was aimed at putting a stop to, even if it used an endless series of four-letter-words to do it.

Seriously, proof positive intent actually fucking matters.

@Derp That is horrible. I'm so sorry. Will keep a candle lit for you and your partner, and hope like hell things get better.

@haven In fairness, it can be scary! Though it's not like... edgelordy gorefest, IMHO. If you peek at some of the logs, it should give you a good idea of the range.

@Ghost Sounds like elder abuse to me.

I sincerely hate it when academics try to discuss these subjects in a mixed audience of fellow academics and those who are not. There are certain bits of phrasing -- like the 'all white people are racist' one -- that are conversational shorthand to the people who study the same subject, and the theory is actually entirely reasonable and it isn't even hard to understand. Unfortunately, that shorthand? Unless they already know the underlying theory, the shorthand is so jarring/insulting/off-putting that most people will immediately shut the fuck down and will have absolutely zero interest in what you have to say.

Do not even get me started on 'all heterosexual sex is rape', which is another excellent example of this frustrating failure to communicate in action.