Posts made by surreality

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

@surreality The healthcare problem is seriously what has me the most anxious about moving to the US. The rest we can work on (we being... Americans, I guess. Since I'll be living there eventually.) but basic medical services - or rather what I'm used to having as the 'basic' - are so, so important. If I had to pay market rate for any of my medications I'd be bankrupted within six months.

The idea of not having that kind of a safety net is so alien to me, so I'm sorry if my understanding of both of your arguments isn't really there. Cutting funding to our health service would be (and has been) political suicide. I guess it's just a cultural thing, somehow.

Under our current imperfect system, I was able to get insurance for the first time in over 12 years. It is not great insurance. Not by a long shot.

Literally five days after it kicked in, I was in the hospital, and they did not know if they could get me into surgery fast enough to prevent me from dying right there.

I was in the hospital for about two weeks. All of the testing/medications/the literally dozens of doctors I saw/the three surgical procedures/catscans/x-rays/MRI -- all of it. Some things, multiple times. Thousands of dollars in blood testing from four to eight times daily, throughout.

At the end of the day, we owe roughly $6k, because for the first time, acquiring insurance was possible. We may, actually, not even owe that, because we're right near the income line at which the hospital, under current policy, says, "Nope, we've got this, we understand you're poor folks." We'll find that out when we do our taxes to find out the exact number, because we're literally that close to the line. (This is entirely aside from the 'actually still alive' thing.)

The actual itemized bill for all of this was well over a quarter of a million dollars.

So I get scared. I get that being incredibly daunting. But seriously: look at that, and tell me that ain't better than dead or owing more money than I will likely earn in my lifetime, because those were the previous options available.

@Shiggy First: there is a politics forum for a reason and this really ain't it.

When you find in the party platform the bit about screeching at you for being a straight white man, do please post it there. I will even join that part of the forum to read it.

Also, I am the last person you want to get into an abortion debate with.

Frankly, I am still pissed Uncle Joe got discouraged from running, and it's not just because he's the home town hero in these parts. The ability to talk to people as people and exercise common sense and moderation and compromise are pretty fucking essential, and the more either party screams about gatekeeper issue 'test cases' and similar, the more ridiculous shit gets. Everything becomes an 'alternative fact' when no one is paying real attention to what anyone not within their own echo chamber is saying, which is a fundamentally dangerous situation for all of the people trying to live under such conditions. Namely, all of us.

@Shiggy said in RL Anger:

But please, reign in the rhetoric about how I'm an evil white man when I say "but we should also try to balance the fucking budget."

And the day I do that, go on with all the ranting you want.

Edit: I am a stereotypical libra, registered independent, and have no qualms voting a split ticket based on the actual human beings who are on it at the time, because I have the good fortune of living in a reasonably moderate state in which party politics have historically been less dramatic than in others, and until the days of the Tea Party, politics were sane here. I live in the land of Christine O'Donnell, man. Where we were all -- irrelevant of party -- looking forward to voting for Mike Castle until he got kicked off the ticket in the primary. Go on back and look into that one. So you can seriously blow me with that assumption.

@Tinuviel Not arguing that.

Without the thing he's screaming about sucking so badly, I would actually be dead right now. Full stop. There's not a question, an 'if', or 'maybe' there.

Yes, it is terrible we won't likely see it in our lifetimes.

This horrible disaster that had finally gotten here? Is the only reason I'm still sitting here writing this now. So shitting on it for being so awful? We all suck so badly at this, there's no perfect answer, but even due to the flawed one, I'm still breathing.

And yes, it's true that with the changes likely coming? That will no longer be true. It doesn't change the fact that the imperfect answer saved the lives of a pile of folks, and most of us are not so foolish as to not be grateful for an imperfect answer that means we're still here at all, even if we're back to being shit out of luck in the coming soon.

If we had waited for a 'the perfect is the enemy of the good' approach to succeed here, we'd have more dead people than we do, and I would be one of them.

So be mad that it ain't perfect all you want, and be mad that you don't get to see the perfect. Acting like the good didn't do any? Yeah, no. We're all so bad at this I'm not invisibly scattered on a beach somewhere in New Jersey right now.

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

Thanks, assholes. Now I'm going to die without seeing the USA join the civilized world and have socialized medicine. Fuck you very much. Fuck you in the ear with a rusty chainsaw.

Speaking as someone who would have actually died about three months back without what little we do have, as much as I love ya, hearing you rant about how we all suck so badly at getting the rest of it done that you won't get to see it happen, wow, man. Wow.

@Glitch It should, yeah -- but there's something borked in their one click droplet the last few times I've used it -- that doesn't actually set the permissions for administrator/etc. on that account, even though you go through the steps to set it up. I had to dig up the workaround above a few times to adjust for that.

There's another line I needed to make sure to include also that normally should be there on creation by default, but I cannot for the life of me recall which/what it is/was.

@SG Oh crap. OK. Is this on digitalocean? Because their latest install does this. And it is a pain in the ass.

What you are going to need to do:

ssh into your account and edit your local settings file (LocalSettings.php)

You are going to want to do something that you never want to ever, ever, EVER do under any other circumstances.

Add this line:

$wgGroupPermissions['user']['userrights'] = true;

Save your work to LocalSettings.php and go back to your wiki immediately. You will now be able to change your account to the proper administrator/bureaucrat options.

THE MOMENT YOU DO SO, GO BACK TO LOCALSETTINGS.PHP ON YOUR SERVER AND DELETE THAT LINE OF CODE YOU ADDED ABOVE.

Save LocalSettings.php again (without that line in it), and you should be fixed.

Is this a crappy workaround? Ayep. Still have had to do it twice now. Which is a giant pain in the arse, but it works.

I don't know kitty, either, to give you the specifics you need for the editing, but you'd do those edits however you've been editing your LocalSettings.php file any other time.

@Auspice An instructor telling me to to do that would have me demanding to see their portfolio and qualifications to be teaching that course, because wow.

This has been an ongoing project as part of the bigger project, as a resource for folks newer to the hobby or just in general. @Auspice's poll inspires the post, in part, 'cause I'm a forgetful hag that forgets to post inquiries like this.

What terms can you think of that you've run across that are unique to the hobby? Any that have been particularly opaque? Any you've heard used a lot?

There's actually a reason for this -- some terms get used in different places in different ways, and that's pretty relevant. For instance, games I've played, sanctioning a player means punishment of some kind has been administered; in other RP communities, the same word means the character has been approved for play. That's a pretty huge difference that could easily trip people up.

This project may or may not be completely stupid, and I'm doing it either way and don't really care much if people think it's stupid. If you want to argue that, by all means, have at -- but I'm a lot more interested in what terms you think are useful or should be included on such a list (preferably with the definition you've associated with it, which is especially useful, since like the sanction example above, the different meanings can be included and if that unconfuses so much as half a dozen people from freaking out about a term with such contradictory meanings, well, it's not like I have other things to do with my time at the moment).

I've heard both versions used rather a lot, though usually 'dump stat' being the 'in the dumpster' stat (it sucks, because you more or less wish you could just dump it entirely and not have to put anything there) and 'dumping points into a stat' as the one that costs you dearly because you spent too much on it.

@Sunny On the plus side, if people are picking at something that's really just not reasonable to pick at (I'm thinking of the Flights n' Tights one here), people will call that out pretty quickly, too.

@WTFE True enough, and somehow all the more tragic for it.

Next up on Corp: The Drudgening: Who stole Sally's peanut butter from the employee's lounge fridge? It had her name on it and everything!!!

@WTFE In fairness, when the best thing you think your game has to offer is literally a dumpster fire, you might need some therapeutic ribbing. Just sayin'.

@Arkandel said in Politics etc.:

@Gingerlily said in Politics etc.:

The trick of it seems to be finding a system that isn't too cumbersome/doesn't feel like a grind, and yet also fosters all of those things people seemed to love so much. Balance etc, but it's not yet clear to me where that balance lies.

I mean the system absolutely helps. But there's a... relationship between the MUSH, the mechanics and staff that helps shapes the culture, and there's nothing more important than that.

Policy and how things get done staff-side is as much a system of mechanics as any RPG mechanics are, and all of these things need to work hand in hand to foster the whole. Otherwise, you end up with policies that hobble game mechanics, or code that makes the policy impossible, etc. A good implementation considers all of these things as part of a whole, as interconnected systems that necessarily must work together to support one another.

I keep sayin' this and people call me bonkers for it, but, essentially: yes, this, a hundred times, this.

@Auspice That works, yeah. I am totally screwed on this front because I live next door to my mother, and she also does a ton of craft things. We're rarely doing the same things at the same time, but there's always a little overlap.

This means entire herds of boxen of craft supplies have made the trek back and forth between the same two houses more times than anyone cares to ever admit.

We got to the point on fiber-related things alone (after sewing machines and two looms and a drum carder for felting and and and and and... ) that there was a saying for roughly 20 years: "No, we don't do all the things! Nobody spins! So long as nobody spins, we're good!"

...then I learned to spin.

The next rule was: "NO TORCHES IN THE HOUSES EVER EVER EVER." Which is a sane rule, let's be honest, considering that when it was made they all involved tanks and crazy gear and huge increases to homeowner's insurance. I don't have the heart to tell her I have one now, though it's admittedly just a little dremel hand-held soldering/torch combo thing that runs off a mini butane lighter tank. (I admittedly haven't used it yet.)

We are hopeless. Truly fucking hopeless.

Edit: The one thing we definitely will never do is glass bead making/lampwork. We both tried it. She hated it, and my body mechanics simply don't allow for it. It wasn't enough fun/enjoyable/wasn't good enough at it to figure out a workaround for that, and it's a huge investment to start properly. Giant boobs + short little t-rex arms + balancing constantly moving glass and metal rods over a bunsen burner on steroids is just not in the cards for me, to put it mildly.

@Auspice The year the yarn (and/or other craft supplies) get nominated, that is the year this tradition will end. Trust me on this.

Otherwise, this is brilliant.

@SG said in Where's your RP at?:

I have zero interest in making a disposable character for a 'hard core' GM

I was thinking about a system for using rostered yet still disposable NPCs for high mortality cutscenes and dangerous events so that my doomed colony campaign would at least have a core of skills available for certain crisis. This way, players can rp with danger while keeping their hipster bartenders in space safe to make mix tapes and mixed drinks.

I'm actually going to be doing this almost exactly. There's a lot of great potential uses for 'extras' like this -- from canon fodder in battles to angry mobs to fill-in partygoers. Also a big boon for people to be able to play in things their main character(s) wouldn't necessarily get involved in, but looks like it could be fun once in a while for the player. It's an 'everybody wins' in big ways.

@Goyim I heard we also masturbate with spray cheese instead of lube.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

@surreality I don't see why we're being held to a higher standard than you're holding yourself, or others, to.

Let's see... because the dozen times I said 'maybe looking at the extreme cases is a useless prospect because neither one addresses the real issues that crop up 95% of the time' half a dozen times and y'all kept banging on screaming hyperbolic bullshit like this is a black and white issue? Because that's totally fucking reasonable behavior, right? That isn't even an accurate assessment of the fucking problem here.

Because respecting anybody else's play style as 'live and let live' is simply not something either you or @Ghost was bothering for a hot second earlier on•, we have @Gilette chiming in with the consent-twinking shade, and then we have the very notion of a character being removed from play by the actions of someone else as an issue brushed aside with reference to people playing selfish bullshit head games thrown into the mix that is a readily solved non-problem of its own, and watching a pile of people resorting to crazy-ass tangents and side smear-issues in ways I have not seen people not into this do has officially expended my patience with this narrow-minded only-my-view-is-valid behavior. For instance, nobody here who isn't keen on 'any death is cool for any reason at any time' has made the claim that you, personally, because you're ok with this, are the kind of player who would have a shitty day RL and decide to go after the proverbial schoolbus full of PC nuns to make everyone else as miserable as you are RL. Yet, for some reason, y'all have zero fucking qualms insisting that anyone not keen on the same thing you are 'just doesn't want anything bad ever happening to their character', that they aren't interested in playing a game, and a whole shedload of other shit that isn't even suitable to fertilize a mushroom field.

The same exact argument, reversed, has been getting thrown up here over and over again as to why games that allow non-consent PC death (whether by pvp or NPC) should be avoided or not allowed.

Please cite who said the bolded bit and where. I'll be waiting, because I haven't seen a single person say these games should not be allowed to exist, or that people should avoid them. Individual people have said they would personally avoid such games, but if there is so much as a single instance of someone saying what you're claiming here, I sure as fuck missed it.

I'm being told that because I like a game that has a risk of character death, that I am obviously advocating for PVP and PKing and that I want everyone's character to die.

Except you're not. You are explicitly not having that said about you -- at least not by me. In fact, let's go back a few pages... <time machine noises>

@surreality said in Where's your RP at?:

I think this is a mindset thing. For instance -- think about the backgrounds thing. You prefer to go in light and evolve things. It's not so much of an up front investment -- and I think that should be supported as a play style.

By the same token, others do things with a lot of work going in, which is also an approach that deserves respect -- or at least enough respect to not dismiss it was 'being so attached to one character they can't stand to see them go', which is rarely the case.

Essentially, it's just a different approach to the game, and probably a little bit of 'wanting something different from the play experience'. Dismissing the folks who do a lot of prep and get disappointed if their work is ended in a footnote as being overly attached and unable to let go is, to me, as inappropriate as it would be to suggest that you 'just don't feel like doing the work and writing an elaborate multi-step background thing'. That isn't the case at all -- in both of these instances -- and unless the game in question is designed to support one of these general approaches exclusively, it's a space that people of both mindsets are going to have to share. The first step to doing that effectively is by listening to what someone is saying and not instantly diminishing/dismissing it as being indicative of one of the red flags in the hobby like 'overly attached' and 'doesn't feel like putting in the effort' both are, and both are not often accurately attributed at all.

Oh shit, ain't that inconvenient as hell to your current narrative?

I never told anyone they had to play on that game. I never suggested that if you don't want your character to die that you should play there anyways. I'm actively saying, if you don't want that to happen, then don't play on a game where that can happen. I'm questioning why people that don't want character death to be a thing will play on a game where character death is a thing.

Most games include death as a possibility, including full consent games. Every game will have pros and cons to any given player. There aren't endless games around any more. In each case, you have to weigh the pros and cons.

Look, maybe you weren't around in the days of Darkmetal's roving PK mobs or headshots for stealing a bar stool. Maybe you didn't see a group of people throwing pages around about how they were having a shitty day and decided to off a bunch of PCs to make themselves feel better for the flimsiest of reasons -- behavior these days we'd call complete bullshit, but was ardently supported up until the earliest days of MSB post-WORA by some very vocal folk. Maybe you missed all the conversations about how if somebody wanted to get their rocks off OOC by fucking up somebody else's day OOC by screwing with their character and making them upset or being a vengeful ass after getting shot down for TS meant it was time to start threatening PK as completely and totally valid ways of enjoying a game, but I didn't, and I've seen all of the above first hand, seen it championed as super cool gamer behavior, and that's just fucking crazytown bunk. It is behavior as horrible and immature as all of the pretty snowflake princesses who can't bear to break a nail and will flail and pout and scream OOC the moment they don't get their way in the exact way they want to get it.

Both of these player types? Frankly, they can fuck right off and I'd have zero qualms banning the shit out of either extreme, having no patience for either. The problems as they exist in reality are not with these extremes, however -- now we seem to be smart enough, collectively, to show these idiots the door, whichever side of this particular argument we're on, because it seems to be recognized, finally, that both of these extremes are examples of toxic player behavior that will eventually poison a game if permitted to take root.

• And I still love you both but, jesus, you're being rabid in this thread.

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

@surreality said in Where's your RP at?:

@Ghost, you're sliding down the slope here on the unplayable thing, too, using the worst examples as an excuse to discount all of them. Knock it the fuck off, please. You're smarter than that shit.

I said sometimes. Not all cases. I said it should be kept an eye out for. I don't see where I suggested that the worst case is some kind of constant?

Then why bring it up at all? The answer to the problem of that kind of player is known, and quite simple and straightforward.