Posts made by surreality

@Catsmeow They started making fantasy creatures and whatnot. This was a case of SHUT UP AND JUST TAKE MY MONEY YOU BASTARDS!!!

I have a doll Anubis lurking in the back of a closet somewhere as a result. And am sad I missed the Bast in broke mode.

...because this is not always a drama flounce thing. Sane space to contain this kind of thing; this is fairly standard on games for a reason these days after all.

Me personally: I'm out to deal with RL. Inspiration to write creatively is out the window, likely for good, and RL is taking up too much of my patience to deal with the usual bullshit in the hobby to do dev or non-artsy things in a hobby when RL's draining as fuck-all. Physical health and work stuff get priority, because (duh) RL is a thing, and time and patience are in limited supply for the time being. Still hanging around here to see if inspiration eventually does strike, and this is where I tend to talk to certain folks most easily. Plus: there's a lot of funny shit here on the regular and that's nice.

People get stuck up about the dumbest things, really.

I was collecting ball-joint dolls for a while, when I had a saner income. There was literally no choice once could make that wouldn't have somebody sneering down their nose at you, which is sort of hilarious, because there's already a serious level of absurdity re: the typical price tags on those things to the extent that it was impossible for me to take this seriously.

Y'all think pets are bad? Wait until you've sat through the third or fourth debate about whether keeping a chunk of resin -- no matter how expensive, no matter how customized (which is fun and creative and why I love the idea of the things personally), no matter how much time you've spent making it something unique and interesting -- in its box under your bed is cruel to the doll.

I can grok that some of the collectors are into certain Shinto and animist concepts, and can respect that well enough in a live and let live sort of way, but it didn't tend to be that crowd that'd go off on the 'you're a cruel doll owner' rants and tangents; these were people who were wholly aware they were talking about a piece of expensive plastic and trying to ascribe rights, gatekeeping minimum standards of everything from 'how much you talk to your doll every day' to 'how you should never forget to dress it in fresh clothes every day' and so on.

Lots of lovely, creative, amazingly talented folks in the group. Lots of perfectly sane folks, too! But, yeah... apply all the pet owner stuff to an object, ramp up the standard price tag, and stir.

@Meg Much empathy, and best of luck. I think we only ever talked here at all and never RPed, but you've always seemed cool, and I hope there's inspiration again some time in your future. Even more than that, I hope that the tough things lighten up on you and give you a break in the (life stuff) way where it counts the most.

@Cupcake I don't know if this is a helpful suggestion or not, but depending on the kind of dremel you're used to... there might be a (relatively newish?) option. I say this 'cause I have tiny creepy child hands, and usually a dremel is just too big for me to successfully handle, and I feel like somebody gave me whatever the hand equivalent of two left feet is when I handle one.

...but there's a new(ish) one. Much smaller. Rechargeable. Under $100 for the kit, I would bet you could find one for $60 tops somewhere. Much smaller. Much, much easier to handle. No cord. It's about the size of the average battery-powered toothbrush, maybe a little fatter around the grip, but not much.

It might be worth checking out in a hardware store; a lot of them will have a demo unboxed to handle and test the feel. I seriously could barely ever use one (despite having to more than a little due to the kind of work I do sometimes) until I got a hold of mine, and despite being the most fumble-fingered creature ever with power tools (and having some fear of them, thanks 80s horror movies... ) I kept finding new things to do just to keep using the thing it was such a night and day difference from what I was used to.

Still might be too scary or might not help, but might be worth checking out to see if it might work out for you.

@Ganymede Amen.

The rescue we got our cats from was being absurd at us despite the fact that they were adult (3-5yrs), and were sisters that had to go together as a pair, and had been with them for over half a year.

We were told the fluffy stupid one was purely decorative. She hates all people, they insisted.

She prances down the hall singing like a flurfy Disney Princess of Cats, and the humans all rush to do her bidding. Which usually means 'sit still enough to be headbonked and trilled and rubbed on constantly'. She insists on hugs, being near us, sleeping sometimes on our heads in bed. Will wake us with a need for snurgles. She sits on the back of my chair at the computer, and randomly interjects chirps, headbonks, and swishes of mop-tail-to-face while purring with epic smugface.

Clearly, she hates the shit out of us people-things. (She is still skittish as fuck around other people, but we are apparently cats now. Or her people. We dunno. We're sure she doesn't know, either.)

Yep, we store-food-buyin' cat owners are totes the worst.

@Cupcake Oddly, I see this more from volunteer rescues than even from vets. Especially when the volunteer is not an animal trainer or a professional in an animal-related field.

Part of it comes from just 'loving the animals' (not in any creepy way) and that often enough includes a lot of extra spoiling that is often very costly for a minimal, if not outright questionable, benefit.

For instance, the rescue we got our cats from years ago 'recommended' a cat food that was over $50/bag and it'd last at most 2 weeks. Even our vet called this complete and utter bullshit, and recommended healthy options that would be much better for our cats by far that was less than half that.

Try not to take the snobbery to heart, which I know is easier said than done. A lot of people will (often uselessly or counterproductively) spoil their pets, especially rescues that may have been poorly treated by their former owners, as some sort of 'who loves their baby more' competition, or as a way to sling some shade at or render a condemnation of the previous owner's poor treatment or abandonment of the pet. This all leads to a whole lot of incredibly silly behavior, in the end.

I can only offer some weird advice from a former creative professional in a variety of... well, a variety of weird things.

If it's what you love most, consider not doing it for a living. This is strange advice, since most people will tell you to pursue that because you'll love what you're doing, but as @Meg mentions, a lot of what you're doing in that thing you love will absolutely not be something you love about it. It makes it real easy to kill your love for that thing.

It is better to pick something you are already decent at, and really like. The thing you love will break your heart eventually, somehow. It sucks, but it's the truth. It is very hard for things to not get really personal when it's something you love. Something you like and enjoy doing is a much better choice, because you're just not emotionally invested in the same way.

Second, make sure you have a hobby. I realize this is something stupid to say on a board literally dedicated to a hobby, where for the most part we all share the commonality of current or former participation in it, but it matters. Have something you love as a hobby but have as little work or responsibility in as possible. If it becomes more work and responsibility than enjoyment, it's no longer really a hobby in the way a hobby is ultimately a healthy thing to have. Your hobby should be a release valve, not a source of stress and frustration.

Do not let people try to pressure you into doing something professionally that you want to keep as a hobby for enjoyment alone. I cannot overstate this enough. As a fellow creative person, who has done a lot of 'this looks like it would be fun to try' creative things, more of them have ended up as 'jobs' than I ever wanted any of them to be. This was due to pressure from my family to monetize literally every single thing I have done even passably well since childhood. I have learned the very hard way that there is nothing that will kill a happy passtime faster than someone strong-arming you into trying to make a buck off it, especially when you're still just trying to learn the ins and outs of it, because they don't know what it entails and aren't interested in hearing anything about how you don't feel qualified, skilled, or ready to take such a step.

As for how to find something to motivate and do? I wish I could be more help, sincerely. I just know the pitfalls above, know most of them far too well, and would rather not see anybody else fall into them if it can be avoided.

@Auspice I offer you all the hugs in the world, I really do. Bluntly: shit needs to be less hard on a lot of us lately, and I wish like hell it was so. If there's anything I can do to help, feel free to poke.

The thing I was working on was called Pantheogenesis. That was based on the original world it was created for, but it worked as a generic name, too, since it was intended to allow for people to create their own worlds with their own structures and beliefs and whatnot.

It had a broad array of attributes, specifically, in clusters. There were 7 clusters of 3 attributes each, for a total of 21 core character attributes, attributes being defined as 'things everyone and every being in the universe has in some measure', unlike skills, or special traits. To me, this worked nicely for an online environment because of the disparity between the number of players common to a tabletop RPG vs. a LARP or especially a MUX, and the general desire of players to have something 'special' systemically that distinguished them from someone else in ways the systems I see used more often, especially WoD, do not accomplish as successfully or with as much specificity as I would have liked.

@Auspice I am going to be a hypocrite right now in a huge way, because if anybody gets the 'this one person whose opinion matters is shitting all over me' misery, well... <raises her hand> ...I feel you.

But don't do it. Let me be a cautionary tale, here, if nothing else.

Yes, there's a risk due to the pass/fail, but ffs, her logic is straight up insane. (And she has clearly never met my mother, who thinks every new idea I have is a bad idea, even in circumstances soooooo less dramatic than that.)

See if there's someone you can appeal to about this. Do it proactively. Do it now. Her personal views on parenting have nothing to do with the subject she's teaching, and they are in no way even remotely representative of the real world.

@Groth I know it's possible to integrate mediawiki with TinyMUX in some interesting ways, and there are forum extensions for it, but that unfortunately doesn't allow for things like private forums for job archiving or similar, so far as I know, due to basic mediawiki limitations. (Read: almost everything is public.) Also just not sure how it would handle the extension or read it, unfortunately.

@Sparks That is highly neat. I know there was something (TR, I think?) that allowed +jobs to get archived to a BBoard of some kind, but I don't know how current it is or how reproducible it ever is/was.

I'd be curious to know how possible (or not) this would be with TinyMUX, but at this point it's really just idle curiosity.

@Catsmeow Thank you. People just... suck sometimes. It's just suckiest when they're the people you really thought... didn't.

@Catsmeow Sorry. Dude just plays someone Cajun. The story, however, involves RL bullshit, and that can't be shared.

@Catsmeow ...that's apt on a certain level, at least virtually-speaking.

That moment you just completely lose the last shred of faith you had in somebody you cared about... really kinda a lot.

Really hate that moment.

<Clerks>I'm not even supposed to be here today.</Clerks>

@Sammi That's what SUVs are for. When we were doing more art shows -- and we're some sedentary sad sacks -- my mother bought a RAV4. We find we need/use it for a lot more than what we ever expected. Sure, it's not my car (I don't have one, my husband has a small sedan), but if it wasn't, something like it would have had to be our car. He does a ton of cons, I do a pile of shows, and we road trip halfway down the coast once a year (and shorter distances with some regularity).

Since she bought it a handful of years ago, the only week we didn't need to collectively use it for something a car would not have worked for without extraordinary hassle was one of the two I was in the hospital -- and that's just us, my folks use it all the more heavily. They live next door; we steal her car rather a lot.

I am a lard lump, barely eat, live on coffee, and make no bones about it. When I can be assed to move around and do things other than glower at yarn, and pretend there's no such thing as carbs, I drop weight like it's going out of style. The husband works out at least twice a week and is out on his bike all the time and works as a massage therapist, on his feet and working with his arms all day, 4 days per week. Despite having one of those 'I could eat the whole cow and still be skin and bones' metabolisms in his youth, he's got a small belly now, despite otherwise being pretty damn solid and having some ridiculous muscle tone. The die+t that makes me lose weight while being a lazy ass makes him fat while he's active, while he doesn't gain an ounce while living on twinkies and taco bell with the same activity level. (Yes, some days I hate him just a littte. )

Find a thing that works for you. There will be something. Don't get obsessed with it. It's best if it fits neatly into your life in general, you enjoy it, and don't look toward it as drudgery.

@Thenomain I know this advice is probably moonspeak, but find something physical that you just like to do.

The husband and I love beachcombing and rock collecting. We would do it more often if we could, but simply doing that 'walking on sand' thing once every 1-2 weeks (far less now, post-surgery and suicidal depression still blows) was/is a helpful thing. It's a hike of a drive to get to places to do this or we'd do it more often, too.

Whenever I'm working with the yarn -- winding, dyeing, wringing, etc. -- it is also a lot more physical than most people would think. (Anyone who doesn't think you're lifting weights when that 1lb skein of yarn is suddenly saturated in water to be 10x the weight, and you're lifting and wringing and rinsing it a dozen times before moving on to the next, is fooling themselves.)

So there are things. They make it less a thing you feel you have to do, and more a matter of more fully engaging with things you already do, and possibly even really like to do. You can technically just do more of one of those things, in some cases.

There is one thing worth mention, re: TS: be very clear where your lines are drawn and write it out.

If it's OK for characters to be sexually involved off-screen, and this is implied or mentioned in play, but 'the action' is not permitted, say so. If not, say that, too.

Define what you mean, too. If it's just intercourse (including oral) being written out that's a problem, say so. Be aware that many people expand 'TS' to include any form of physical affection beyond hand-holding or a kiss, and let folks know where your line is as clearly as you can. If a swat on the butt, or passionately pinning somebody to a wall to kiss them until their toes curl goes against the intended spirit of the rule you want, make that clear to your players.

Regardless, best of luck. I'm not an anime game fan, but it looks like you've put a lot of thought into the ideas and such here, and that's very cool.