Posts made by surreality

@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

It's a great setting. Everybody matters so long as they have an X-gene. They are all at stake.

I would actually love to see this happen, but yes, mostly if not entirely with OCs and FCs being plot fodder/available for use in scenes as NPCs by anybody in most cases, despite the 'not my bag as a genre' vote.

Part of my lack of love for the genre is PC FCs, historically speaking. I am just not a rosters or FCs allowed for PCs kind of girl, and never have been. Just never could get into the head of somebody else that somebody else created very well. (Compound that with the occasional superfan of FC X who knows all the things and either expects you to know them as well the moment they log in on FC X, or worse, jumps your shit for not playing FC X according to their personal and sometimes wacky interpretation of FC X... it's just two specific kinds of aggravation I just never had a lot of patience for in pretendy fun time. After accidentally using a name somewhere that I thought I made up and was apparently used in some game or another that I'd never heard of on a non-adult MUX and getting no less than three people paging to tell me how much they'd masturbated to that character growing up, I just... yeah.)

This is just harder to do since you probably have to get pretty fine-grained in examining powers and what they do, if they're going to all be more or less custom to each OC.

@Thenomain There's real truth in that. Suddenly popularity can crush a tiny company working by the skin of their teeth on the margins fast.

When you have space and skilled personnel who can produce X per year, just getting $$$$$ more for materials isn't going to get you space to make more faster, or more people who know what they're doing. This gets all the more true the larger the items you make are, or how specific the skillset is to produce the desired item. Some things, the money can help with. Others, unless you're really damned good at allocating it well, will end up eating up money you never expected to be spending.

This actually happens a lot with tiny businesses.

It gets worse when you're working on a very thin profit margin, since the impulse is to reinvest. The above is how I nearly ended up bankrupt due to someone else's clerical error on a business that was well-received and seemed destined to keep growing somewhat faster than I could have predicted. The error was just big enough to prevent the purchases that would have allowed that business to keep going with materials needed for production, and the over all loss just enough to put me within $200 or so of bankruptcy that year.

It sucks, and it sucks hard, and money absolutely should be returned to anybody who put a deposit down for companies that operate with a pre-payment/deposit like this, but it is a thing that happens more than one might think.

'You seem to be doing really well with this!' is not always something people plan for the right way, or with enough of a buffer in case of emergency. (For instance, I'd picked up a pile of materials to keep going... but the error caused not just the inability to turn a profit, but to ensure I couldn't get the other half of the stuff req'd to actually produce anything from that point forward. I did dyework; I had and have a pile of things to be dyed. That's hard to do without the required dyes and processing chemicals, however, which is $2k I simply haven't had handy since.)

@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.).

@Cupcake Hey, there was that goat unicorn thing from National Geographic, too! And, come on, it's National Geographic!

(I, too, may have encountered this experience... <shifty-eyes> ...nuns apparently really dislike unicorns.)

@Carex You just reminded me of this: https://youtu.be/TgnIjJexut4 -- Hellsing Abridged.

There are multiple eps of it after this. I'm pretty sure most people have seen this, but if you haven't become aware of this yet, it may just be the laugh you need today.

Violence/language/political-correctness-not-remotely-in-evidence warning for anyone tempted to view at work or easily grossed out or offended.

@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.

Look, a subject change!

I hate the ER. Holy shit.

I also hate that I can't figure out how to get the snippet of video I got of the clock in our ER cubicle out of skype on the computer to preserve and share it somewhere, because holy crap that thing weirded me out more than the endless parade of needles. <eyetic>

This clock's second hand would just... freeze. Then skip ahead a ways. Freeze again. Skip ahead a ways. Freeze... repeat. Not even in the same places each time. At first I thought it was fever, 'cause there were no weird painkillers or anything involved here. So I point it out to my mother, who leaps in her chair as though she saw a spider when she sees it doing this, too, and I'm suddenly relieved that it's not just that my brain has decided to boil or something.

No, really. For some reason, this was one of the creepiest things I have ever seen in utterly mundane life. It was like somebody slipped a glitch into reality or something.

@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?

To be fair, as good as the series is, that specific ep was a little 'omg wtf' for a number of folks I know in ways and for reasons none of the others were or have been, to the extent that I've heard at least half a dozen people comment on it, specifically, to that end by now.

Or maybe it's just as simple as being uncomfortable knowing there are guns in the house when you're not sure that in a moment of crisis, you wouldn't turn it on yourself, and you would be relieved if the gun was not so readily available to you because you have the self-awareness to recognize that you experience these moments of crisis in your life and want to stay away from things that could make it very easy to make impulsive and irreversible decisions in ways many other things do not allow for with such relative ease. (And you probably don't want those other things around much, either, for the same reason.)

Goddamn, people. That is in no fucking way political.

Maybe have the class and human decency to not take it there, please.

@TNP I think theirs was through USAA. (I remembered how to google finally, because coffee.) But yeah, there's a bunch of these.

@Misadventure There are a number of insurance companies that handle veterans exclusively, so it's not just the VA. I forget which company my folks had prior to medicare, or if they still have their supplemental coverage through it or not, but it was a something with a special program for veterans or special rates.

@PuppyBreath Was going to offer just the same, actually. We may not know each other well, but frankly, there are those weird hours sometimes in the middle of the night when shit gets dark in a totally different sort of way than the sun going down. (In all seriousness... if anybody sees me around and posting and whatnot and is in that position, please don't hesitate to PM, poke me on skype, whatever works.)

My folks were the same on the ACA stuff, and were former military, too. I ended up almost dying a handful of days after finally getting insurance (through husband's work) for the first time in over a decade, and... welp. That hospital bill, had we not been able to get it, was more than my folks' house is worth. What we still owe is non-fun, but $6k-ish vs. a quarter-frickin'-million? Yeah, you'd think they'd be happier about this than they are. Nope, they just bitch about how we must feel so slighted by the gov't that we owe $6k. Uhm... (All the sigh. All the sigh in the world.)

@PuppyBreath The reason you're glad you don't have a gun in the house is the same as mine, and I feel you on that one.

My folks do the same thing. They are similarly head-fucked into thinking they have a corner on discernment re: who is and isn't 'deserving', and their take on health care is 'why the fuck should we care about health care being accessible to anybody else, fuck this socialist bullshit, we have medicare now and don't have to care'.

There really are days I wish the irony fairy was an actual thing that'd show up and sparkle the shit out of somebody's face for a few seconds when something like that escapes their mouths.

@Cupcake The husband had to be summoned before I could watch this, as he introduced me to both. He sends alllllll the cookies for that one. (Also, 'cause it means he found out it'll be coming out on his birthday, which is awesome. )

That is truly a thing of beauty.

I have a very weird sense of humor.

Whose Line is fun, but not 100%. (Having done improv training ages back for faire, it's funnier to me than it might be otherwise? Nostalgia is a thing.)

I've veered away from comedy in general -- and it takes some major badgering to get me to watch any of it at all sometimes -- because a lot of it is grossout or very... dumb comedy, going back for the past twenty years or so? I dunno. Somewhere around Ace Ventura the genre pretty much lost me in the race to the lowest common denominator 12 year old boy demographic.

There's some current stuff I do like. Archer, for one. The humor in Preacher typically has me cackling, and I would consider that in at least a hybrid comedy category somewhere. (Action comedy, maybe? For that, The Big Hit, Kingsman, etc. tend to be win.) Ben Stiller stuff tends to work. Older stuff, Blackadder was always fun.

Can't think of a current live sitcom I can struggle through so much as an episode of without my teeth grinding. Was never much into them growing up, either, though.

This is probably really weird to people who actually did RP with me at some point because I love non-fishmalky humor in RP, but ah, well.

@Ghost As much as I used to joke that I would have sworn that Ancient Cat understood English, I...

...she demanded to be referred to only as THE IMPERIAL OVERLORD.

What? She literally would not respond to anything else, like most cats. 'Your Majestic Imperial Overlord' and swear to gods that creature would start to purr like a motor before deigning to look at whoever had said it. It was like, 'yes, supplicant, that will suffice to warrant my attention, you may proceed to address me further'.

@Sparks Angry at the world is entirely OK right now. I am so sorry to hear this.

I watch the thing because I am a costume whore. I like some of the characters, haven't read the books.

Anger thing: I don't really read the same kinds of books I once practically consumed, due to time constraints. I'm too on myself to be productive in some way all the time to really do leisure time normally. So reading is reserved for soaking in the tub. On the up side, it means lots of good short stories now and then, since one story per soak tends to work out about right on time.

@Faceless I've actually had a few dreams over the years that led to cool scenes. Usually just some odd mental image that pops up in the dream and hits the right '...that would be cool, I'm gonna run with that!' nerve. Rare, but very much fun cool the times it happened.

More or less this conversation has happened more than once:

"Where'd that come from?"
"Dreamed it."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
"That's cool! ...dork. :P"
"You liked it, too! Dork. :P"
<RP resumes as normal>