Best posts made by surreality

FWIW, we did talk this out privately. Things are good. Also, re: Skydive, pretty sure that's not a sock.

That moment when, after watching a fat guy in a red suit with a big white beard measuring your side yard and holding up blueprints for a stable with a squint, you realize you are still not getting that pony you asked Santa for when you were five.

@Admiral Look. I am not a ray of warm fuzzy sunshine on my best day. I haven't exactly been knocking it out of the park on unruffled chill since all my medical shit came rolling down the pike, either. I had a part in this, too, and even if I kept mum on names until the other day, I've been bitching and griping about this for a fucking month now.

I'm going to put this as simply as I can: sometimes, shit goes wrong. Sometimes even very wrong. There is a point, when you're brutally honest with yourself about things, when you realize, 'know what? The good shit that folks want to get back to is way better than being mad about this is ever gonna be'.

Shit went wrong. We got mad at each other. And then we got over it.

(Theno: I meant... Skydive is not a sock puppet.)

It sounds like the place isn't just a guy's private home, either, but some kind of small apartment complex or shared home with tenants. That means it isn't just his personal concerns he has to keep in mind, but all those of the people paying to live there. Also means it's a lot harder to determine if it's someone who should be there or not -- it wouldn't just be his guests there, but his tenants' guests, and a lot of places keep security logs of that if it's in certain areas. (I know one building I lived in when I was in Los Angeles sure as hell did.)

I'm mostly horrified by the people insisting the guy is a douche for not letting people on his property like he's the jerk. Who is going to get sued if they get hurt there? Him. Who is gonna get sued if one of his tenants gets hurt because of people trespassing? Him. Who is gonna have to pay for the damages of people tromping through/extra groundskeeping/having to clean up when even less thoughtful people litter/etc.? Him.

I kinda can't help but empathize with this guy. We have two empty house lots (that now need to stay that way, thanks nature! Long story.) that we used to let the neighborhood kids play in for over thirty years, because that was just being neighborly. Until a whole lot of entitled parents decided it wasn't their fault when the kids broke my folks' windows playing, ripped up stuff my mom had spent hundreds of dollars planting, and started insisting the folks improve/add shit to the field to make it safer for their kids to play there. Yeah. People who wouldn't even fix the shit they broke were demanding the people who were being generous and nice should be the ones to lay out more money so they could continue to be taken advantage of. Like my retired, elderly, broke-ass parents are going to walk the property every two days looking for gopher holes to fill or pay a landscaper to fix so their kids can play on it and continue ripping the place up? I don't think so. (You would have loved the looks on people's faces when my father -- who is admittedly clueless -- suggested, "Why don't you just have the kids tell us if they find a hole, or one of the older kids can fill it in before they start playing?" You would think he'd suggested filling the hole with one of the little kids' dismembered bodies.)

...when a seriously awesome scene feels like playing chicken with the box of sniffle-tissues.

@BetterJudgment Well, better than there being an angry, flailing spider there, at least? (I'm an arachnophobe, anything is better than an angry flailing spider.)

For today's rage bait: There is a show on television called The Rich Kids of Instagram. And here I thought the whole Kim K-clan thing was stupid shit no one should ever give the first casual damn about. This... just wow.

@Arkandel I think a number of the things you're discussing actually are handled pretty well, even if it is in a less obvious way.

There's continuity and a persistent character in the meta-story that's genuinely fascinating, for example.

There are power imbalances of a sort, and it is marginally keyed to activity: the more you do, the more you tend to know, and that's useful in the game -- it just isn't represented in the form of XP to be spent on stat increases that would often be implausible in a scaled-down system that rarely has a storyline that lasts for more than a handful of IC months.

Information, role (today's leader is tomorrow's janitor and vice versa), and connections are 'soft power' and both are important to the story, the characters, and what those characters are able to do in a particular scenario. Sometimes this results in positive or negative modifiers if and when relevant.

Activity also earns a character 'genre points' that can be used in the current story for special actions and effects.

They key here is that they are also not permanent. This is a great reward for activity, without hamstringing people who can't be around as often for a month -- it gives them a chance to be on an even footing again the next time, when the people who were more active today may have the busy RL month instead. It is the most mind-bogglingly fair approach to the 'active players vs. passive dinos' debate I've seen to date. Just because numbers on a sheet don't swell over time or with bursts of activity, it doesn't mean the idea of power imbalances IC are erased.

I go with "I don't share that information," on that one, personally.

I have heard both the "What's your email?" and the "Would you like to sign up for <stuff> with your email?" and other permutations. It's similar to the way a lot of places would ask for a phone number, and the answer was the same then: "I don't share that information."

They used to ask the latter (phone number) regularly at one place we shopped a fair bit, and asked: "So... why are we constantly being asked this? It's invasive." The salesperson sighed and nodded and actually knew what they were using the info for at the time, for their store, and she told us. They send out mailers regularly, and before they had custom UPCs that would mark which address that particular mailer was being sent to (which they apparently do now, similar to the custom 'text it to yourself' coupon things some retailers use now on websites), they used that information to geographically track which local areas had the highest customer concentration. The end result in that case is relatively harmless, but once they have that information, they can do anything in the world with it -- it's not like they get rid of it, so even if they only use it for that focused and harmless purpose today, tomorrow might be different.

We're seeing the email tracking now in part due to the volume of mobile phone use, which makes geographical tracking by phone number a lot less reliable. (My husband and his mother share an account; they both have New Jersey numbers while he lives in DE and she lives in FL, for instance, and a fair number of the folks I know have mobile numbers in a similar position if they've moved and kept the number, etc., which a lot of folks do.)

@Ghost Meanwhile, I am still all kinds of sad we never got our Paul Bettany (per A Knight's Tale) Bravo. (Our current one kicks ass, though! <3)

@Auspice Time for that random road tour of Pennsylvania, I guess.

Are we about to have the 'anyone playing someone who is a bigot regardless of context just wants to get their secret RL bigotry wank fodder' conversation again? Because it feels like we are. If that's on the menu, someone please confirm, so I can ignore this thread.

....my actual favorite is in Virginia.

I can only imagine that this town is chock full of wankers.

@krmbm said in MU Things I Love:

Seeing a community start to form around something that came out of bored spit-balling about

...literally any example, I love this. I love it when games encourage this rather than stomp it by default, too.

@Insomnia ...and possibly cold fire!

@Groth said in Cyberrun:

he keeps making the option available based on some kind of freedom of expression grounds

There's some things I feel quite free expressing I would rather people not so freely express, this being one of them.

That moment you finally finish a thing! ...only to have it not work properly due to a software limitation designed to 'help'. <grumble-mutter>

And then you fix it! And it's awesome 'cause it's a problem you've been beating your head against for almost two years! <cheering begins>

...and then you remember you now have to go back and redo all the shit you just 'finished' because now it needs tweaking.

I'm still torn as to whether this was a win or a loss on the whole. We need a love-hate thread, for real. If there's one thing we all know, it's 'aggravated/frustrated celebration'.

Working on methods. Will poke when viable and functional! (Still working on prefs things, it just now works... )

@Arkandel We also have a 'this cat, she hates/is terrified of people' cat.

She is the biggest cuddleslut in the world with us, and hides from everyone else.

We adopted her and her sister at 3-5 years old (even the shelter wasn't sure). Nobody could get near the fluffbutt for the months and months they had them. (No one wanted older cats, let alone older cats in a pair, but we saw them and immediately said: "Nope, those are our cats, we'll take 'em!")

...the fluffbutt trills at us, headbonks the hell out of us constantly, and cannot be away from cuddle distance for more than a few hours without wailing piteously and seeking out her people.

Yep. That cat sure hates people all right. (Well, she does. Just not her people. Or maybe she thinks we're also cats; she's cute, but not... especially bright.)

@Thenomain Amusingly enough, only when I read that did I realize one of the things I can safely say I've evolved a different response to.

Namely, I have less patience for people who will throw 'it's just a game, get over it!' at anyone who has an issue with their behavior, but will pitch an unholy fit any time something even seems to be going other than their preferred way. (Or explode when someone says this to them.)

Basically, my patience for 'But that's different!!!' when the only functional difference is that it's them rather than anyone else has an expiration date. (This is fairly broad-ranging, but this situational example works well.) I'll only engage with these people with full empathy for so long before I begin to distance myself from them unless they seem to be cluing in.

A good cause that gives me warm fuzzies (pun not intended) on the whole, but worth watching this clip even if you don't care about what she's talking about for the wolf tummy rubs throughout.

As a former werestaffer, wolf tummy rubs make me inordinately derpy-happy, even when sick enough I can barely even think straight. Because grar-so-fierce.