Posts made by surreality

@ashen-shugar I would swear that is our old black cat. He had that magic power of being everywhere at once and five times as loud as any cat ever.

@bobotron HeaderTabs: so useful (seriously), and SO DEFAULT UGLY. And holy shit do they ever nest the crap out of a million ways of making them a nightmare.

...I have managed to strip them down to just neat and tidy words in the same style used for the collapsible sidebar sections, so people know they perform some kind of magic that I can position more or less wherever the hell I like.

This pleases me.

(It was necessary because I'm living dangerously, with a left-side infoboxy-thing setup. Only wiki people will understand why this is 'living dangerously'.)

@bobotron So help me, unfucking Vector and HeaderTabs default css...

<seeks out vodka>

@auspice I do not know what the hell is with people.

I get that a lot from little kids because my hair is, well, neon green, and that's magically weird to little kids. I'm OK with that... from little kids. (Or from happy spacey old people obviously so out of fucks left to give that they may as well be little kids again, y'all know the type.)

If someone's above age 6 and has all of their mental faculties, though...

...where did I leave that box-cutter ankh...

@auspice Augh, kill him with fire.

I mean, uh. Actually, no, I mean kill him with fire. Don't actually, but. Definitely look at him like you're about to.

...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.)

@thatguythere The really depressing thing? Most of the people playing it still don't know it. I mean, how many times is everything slowed up because somebody has to look something up...

I think it's more a case of 'people know how to CG it (potentially with help) than 'people actually know it'.

@auspice I am still convinced Dilaudid is Satan in pill form.

Yes, it makes the physical pain stop.

It also makes me exhausted 24/7 but unable to get anything resembling restful sleep, makes me irritable to the point of actually violent, and totally dizzy and disoriented (yes, the clinical interpretation of 'disoriented') the whole time.

Cannot even begin to express the hate for that stuff.

@thatguythere Yeah, I realize this, but I think the idea of standardizing WoD to the hobby this way is pretty horrible. It's just not a good fit.

Learning a complex setting is no less work as it is, and unlearning all the things that require HRs and so on is actually more work than anything else. (Learning something simple and new is way easier than unlearning things you've known forever, or learning all of the endless adaptations required -- which tend to amount to more than 'a new system' in the end.)

@duckula said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

Or Indiana Jones-ish. Or Maybe WW1-WW2.

^ This. I don't care if it's WoD, in fact most of these things I would prefer as not WoD, but I would love to see a classic pulp adventure game like this. (No slight intended on Gany's original post/concept, just... I would really like to see this hobby get away from being so WoD-focused, since I don't think it's super ideal for M*, rather than just trying to make it do more things it may or may not be designed for, stretching things even further.)

@derp I actually might work it into a piece of fiction I had been poking at a few months ago in a very, very roundabout way. It's actually... pretty tragic, actually.

There was an intervening tenant, so this did not happen immediately before I moved in -- but the landlord showed it to me before she moved out, and made the mistake of asking her what she was paying (which was like... HALF what anything else we looked at at the time had been) and bear in mind, this apartment, while not immense, was amazing. Most of what we'd seen had been one room studios with a hotplate and a closet you couldn't fit a single trench coat in -- and I mean that literally; most of the closets didn't have a bar across, but a bar of hooks to hang a few items. This? Was a two story apartment in a courtyard with a locked gate, which had been the former servant's quarters of the house that had been subdivided. It had real wood paneling. It had colored glass windowpanes. Did I mention it was two stories?! It had a small, but full, kitchen. It had multiple closets. It was fucking gorgeous.

So we knew there had to be a story, and there was. Apparently, before the woman before me moved in, it had been vacant for about 2 years. ?!?!?!, right? In a college town where a shitty garret with no heat was going for $800/month at the time?!

WELP. The woman before her had some mental issues for which she had to be medicated. And she started having a relationship with a local pharmacist -- who was married. She wanted him to leave his wife or call things off. He wanted to keep things precisely as they were. So... he started swapping around her prescriptions, as in, filling them with the wrong things, in a way that messed her up pretty badly (caused massive depression/dependency/etc.) and, well. She found out.

She then blew off his head with a shotgun, then sat down at the bottom of the steps and just sat there for something like three days while the cops surrounded the place, trying to get her to put down the gun and come out and so they could collect the body.

They had a hard time renting it after that.

@bobotron Pretty sure some kind of variant ghoul or thrall could be worked up for the footsoldier type without too much trouble, really.

@jennkryst Oh, dear gods. There are two of us in Dull...uh...where? (I'm there now... born here, flitted about for college, landed here again and am planted. This place is a vortex, no lie. NO ESCAPING!)

I sortakinda loved parts of living in WC. It's lovely. It is. (I lucked into a crazy wonderful apartment complete with low rent due to a WTF history.) Parking? Not so much. Fuck parking there a wholllllllle lot.

@jennkryst Some day, I may do the parody game. Some day. Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Chester,_Pennsylvania and tell me that isn't 'the NOT southern Vampire Diaries town'. It barely requires a tweak. Random street faires? Check. Old timey pretty buildings and upscale cafes running up and down all the main streets?
Check. Sprawl of ZOMG expensive mcMansions (and real mansions) dotting the hillsides? CHECK. It's... kinda perfect. Lived there a little over a year, and... yeeeeeeeeeah. It's almost funny.

This is not the same as the Chester mentioned above for a more serious oWoD setting. Not... even hardly close.

@aria What's really interesting about this? ...the old maps from oooooooooooooooooold oWoD had Philly as a Sabbat stronghold right standing out in the midst of woof country (to the west) and Camarilla Like Whoa (DE state line and down) territory, while NJ immediately across the river may as well have just been named Pentexville.

I thus have a long-standing case of the sads that there was never a regional game more or less planted smack dab in the middle of that region, with Chester as neutral ground (aka 'occasionally the DMZ') with radiating regions as their respective strongholds.

Edit: P. S. If I ever do the parody game, I'm basing the 'May as well be Vampire Diaries North'-ville on Westchester, around the college. Because.. oh, god, it just is.

@royal You are killin' me here. The husband just bought Demolition Man on blu-ray and is hiding it from me until Xmas. Damn thing is eerily prescient; something new every dang time. Last watch, it was the appearance of a 'Scott Peterson' in the list of cryo-criminals right in the midst of that case while it was on the news...

@royal That sounds sorta like the 'Van Helsing' Syfy series. I haven't seen much of it, but what I did see... yep, more or less that. Might be worth a look if you're thinking about trying it.

@ashen-shugar It sounds interesting enough that I'd want to read the findings (and ideally implement whatever security things it uncovers that would be within my power to implement), but I definitely do not have the brains to even guess at where or how to break things or defend them, really.

While that sounds like it'd make me an ideal candidate for a team, I don't... know if that's the most effective team composition to have to learn from it, which I am guessing is the ostensible goal?

Hugs offered in spirit to both @Lisse24 and @Cupcake.

Lisse: I'm not a parent, so I don't fully get it; at the same time, will keep all the fingers and toes crossed for you and yours.

Cupcake: ...yeah, that. Absolutely that. It has less to do with what the other person is saying, and more to do with what the voice in the back of the skull is relating through the translation software.

Taking compliments is actually learned behavior; if you don't really get many or don't get them during certain formative periods, it's really easy for them to become this to the brain: 'uh... attention! Attention is usually bad! Time to dive under the desk and hope the potential threat goes away!'

Lazy House Meat Option:

Chicken thighs (preferably boneless for lazy factor), rosemary, sea salt, pepper, chicken broth. (Other seasonings if you like -- I forget which others we sometimes add in, it varies.)

Throw in thighs in layers as flat as you can, apply layer of seasonings, continue until mostly full. Pour in broth. Slow cook whilst at work. Come home to a week's worth of awesome protein. (That's with our slow cooker, which is big-ish, but my husband eats like he's trying to power a fusion reactor, so it kinda balances out.)

You will be tempted to use some other cut of chicken for this, because chicken thighs in a big pack are often cheap enough to look seriously shady on principle (they're almost always on sale everywhere). Don't. Seriously. It's just not as good with chicken breasts or a mix, and you will have spent more to get there.