Posts made by surreality

So, my parents have this thing about making insane and impossible demands, and I live next door to them, so there's little I can do but 'my level best to ignore it'.

I think I'm finally going to get a break, because they're going on vacation this week.

My husband drove them to the airport, in my mother's car.

Doing errands on the way home, he hit some debris and destroyed the back tires and wheels.

Thank gods he's all right, but so much for my vacation from them screaming at me. (Because he won't get screamed at. I definitely will.)

@mietze This is good advice and I'm keeping it to pass along to the husband.

He does this.

The dude who is always cold walks around naked all the time. The girl who is always hot still manages to keep her knickers (and plenty else) on.

Of course, right?

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

For all she knows, I go around naked when she's not here.

(No, I don't, but sometimes I do wander around in a robe before/after I shower.)

Oh, I would be tempted.

Or tempted to leap out of a hallway in some crazy-ass costume, then look stunned that someone is in the house, then scream, and hide back in my room.

Or start loudly singing the most embarrassing off-key show tunes while leaving a vibrator turned on and sitting beside the door to the inside of my room while I started to crack on the high notes.

The possibilities are endless here, but if you don't want guests returning without warning, there are absolutely ways.

Edit: A former roomie of mine (not while he was living in the house I was renting, but before this) guaranteed no one would disturb him in his room, while he was in the military, without knocking or warning by painting a target on the wall opposite the bed, and mixing up some sfx semi-transparent glue he'd layer and splatter it with every so often. Gross, yes. Funny as fuck, hell yes. Effective? EXQUISITELY.

Forgot the more traditional ones:

• Retail, department store, usually jewelry counter (twice)
• Generic temp
• Business counter slave at CompUSA
• Costume library assistant (this wins best job, hands down, no exceptions, for me)
• Xmas elf
• Community Center Counselor

...I swear all of those really are the more traditional jobs. (No, I did not take the phone sex job, people. I did get it, but I didn't take it, I mean, just not able to keep a straight face after the bugling typo.)

I think it is worthwhile to set up a sort of banner exchange thing on a wiki page somewhere, too. I know I planned to do it, if people had a little banner or logo and a blurb. I don't particularly care if anybody else does it reciprocally, but that's pretty simple and all they need to do is send the info along to a staffer with a link to a pic or logo if they have one (edit: or if they are a player on the game, they can just add it from their normal wiki login, no harm no foul).

@Catsmeow said in RL Anger:

When it comes to bacon I"m more worried on the the sodium levels.

I have naturally low blood pressure; it's 'normal' on two pots of coffee and a pack of cigarettes a day as a fat girl. I don't worry too much about the sodium.

Unrelated:

That moment you finally break down and get up the courage to ask about something that, if it is what it looks like, you know you're just going to fucking die a little. And that even asking might end a friendship, but you can't sit on it any more because it's fucking killing you. I've totally just had it and I need to remember how to breathe and will be a total fucking wreck until I know it's either OK, or it's time to start the grieving process for good on an important chapter of life.

I always come back to making jewelry. I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but even in my current 'the world is ending and totally devoid of meaning, why am I even wasting everybody's perfectly good oxygen' state of mind, I am still surprisingly good at it. (Which sort of weirds me out. There's some part of me that feels very much like a whore on this front, in the literal way of 'I am prostituting a part of myself in a mutually exploitative way that is really not OK'.)

I kept saying for ages that I started with that when I was about 12, but recently was reminded I have been doing that since I was 8. (...and I had previously apparently sold little hand-woven coasters made on a table loom when I was four. Four. 4. I don't even remember this, and probably just wondered at the time where all those dollhouse carpets I wove for my Barbies went. And my family wonders why I keep defending this hobby as the one creative thing in my life that I steadfastly refuse to even consider trying to find a way to even try to monetize... )

I've come and gone with it since then. I am now 43. I tend to be so hyper-productive with it that even if I quit for two years or so, there was plenty left to sell in the interim.

I collect odd skills. This is relevant. I learned to weave on a four-harness loom by the time I was four, ffs. (This is simply non-normal, people. ) Pretty much every skill I have demonstrated even the most pathetic proficiency with, my family has pressured me to monetize. I have, as a result, had some pretty weird jobs.

I have:

• made jewelry•
• dyed yarn
• made little woven coasters
• made skins and other textures for Poser• (no really, one of my skins is on the box for Poser Pro 2010)
• made designer doll clothes for a living•
• made theater costumes
• worked as a performer at the ren faire
• designed and made formalwear
• embroidered•
• designed web sites
• designed graphics

I went to college for fashion design, theater costume design, and illustration at various schools over time. I do not have a degree. I shamelessly squandered what money my parents were willing to spend on an education not to get a piece of paper that said I knew my shit, but to go to a new place, learn all the things I wanted to learn that they were willing to teach, and fuck off to the next place to repeat the process, which is really not smart? But in the fields I thrive in, it isn't the paper that proves a damned thing, it's a portfolio. (This is why I've somehow managed to end up forced to take Art History no less than four times. If I see another photo of the Hagia Sophia or the Venus of Willendorf, I take no responsibility for the murder spree that will ensue.)

Things marked with an • are things I've won awards for and in some cases had the work published, sometimes within the first year -- and in the case of the embroidery, the first actual time -- I'd done the thing. (Which you'd really think would give a girl even a jot of self-esteem, but no. )

Though there's a story worth telling here, in spite of the general downer streak I'm on, and it's a good one, I promise. It is the best advice I ever got, and while I didn't follow it forever, I did listen, and I did take it genuinely to heart in spirit, if not specifics, and I have found, over time, that it makes a difference in a way that I cannot quantify, but that has made a substantial difference in the real quality of my life.

When I was a kid, I made clothes for my dolls. It's the main reason, other than a phobia re: moray eels, I didn't just go off and become a marine biologist like I wanted to when I was tiny. It's more or less why I went into design. Whenever I was sick, feeling like crap, or otherwise useless re: actual productivity (which as noted has been demanded since I was 8, ffs) I would make doll clothes.

At the last college I bothered with -- a new school, local, first year it was open, studying commercial illustration -- we had a fantastic teacher. No, really, this man is one of my idols. He is, in a word, an amazing human being and I admire not just his work, but him. (And no, not just because he had the prettiest green eyes any of us college-age girls had ever seen, ahem. Didn't hurt, though?) Because it had been drilled into me since forever, and probably because I was about 5-6 years older than most of the other students who were fresh out of high school, my standards for my own work were much, much higher. I am not trying to talk myself up here; this was actually something pretty painful to me, because I am someone who really wants people to embrace their creativity, do the best they can, and express themselves and feel good doing so. I'd put something up on the crit wall, and see people take their pieces down rather than be compared (and frankly my shit for that class was not super good since we had so little time from week to week to complete a thing) -- and instead of being an ego boost, it was crushing. It hurt. It made me sad, and feel horribly guilty. Needless to say, much as I loved that teacher -- and why will be clear in a moment -- I hated that he used me as a yardstick to point out to others that just grinding something out was not how someone made art, even commercial illustration. I don't particularly give a shit that that's true, I just hated being the example. Talk about awkward and uncomfortable!

I got a concussion during our '3D illustration' project period. I was out for three weeks. I could come up with nothing that was worth doing, nothing I had done, when it came time for end of year portfolio review to take up that slot. All I had was this crappy doll dress I'd made while sick, because I was simply incapable of anything else.

I was so embarrassed when I took this silly doll in a simple little 1930s dress out of the portfolio. I was expecting my teacher to laugh. I was expecting the 'are you fucking kidding me?' look.

It wasn't what I got.

He looked at me calmly, and when I handed him this silly doll, he smiled. (Did I mention the eyes? Yeah, the smile was even better.)

He tells me, "You're my best illustration student this year. Including Pratt. (Which we were not.) But you should be doing this."

And he handed me back the doll.

I just squinted a little, and shook my head, and I couldn't help but ask: "...why?"

He said the one thing that is probably the most educational and human thing I ever learned in college:

"This is the only thing you have ever handed me, smiling."

...and he's right. It matters.

I think the courtesy thing is a good point, definitely.

I will almost always tell people if I need to AFK, for instance, even if I know I will only be gone for a minute or two. I don't expect others to be that anal-retentive on courtesy, but if someone is fucking off for an hour to do something else, if they don't tell me, I am not going to be the happiest of biscuits.

I don't mind if somebody multi-scenes on me if people are giving equal attention to both scenes, or if sometimes that one is busier and sometimes mine is -- but if I think someone is constantly phoning it in with me while lavishing tons of attention elsewhere, eventually, I am going to get very tired of that, in the same way that I'd feel similarly put off on someone (and a little offended if not a lot offended) if the moment their current shiny object logs in, I simply cease to exist and don't event warrant an, "I'm sorry, I need to go, the thing I'd rather be doing just came along." I mean, damn, people, what's with that? The honest approach is still shitty but the 'you don't even warrant being told you don't matter worth a damn' is shittier by a factor of umpteensquillion.

I cannot, personally, multi. Not unless it's something like OOC chat, running something for others, or basic staff work on one window, personal character RP in another. I admire people who can multi effectively among multiple character, I just can't. I'm too ADD.

I put a lot of 'how does my character think?' into my writing, and to some extent, that means tweaking my thought patterns a bit toward 'how I think they would think re: what is occurring'. That's already two heads to be in; that's my personal maximum.

Once I split off further from there, the characters will start crossing over into each other in ways I dislike. Others may not notice -- though sometimes I would hear something like 'huh, she's acting kinda weird, are you OK?' or similar -- but it falls below my personal standard of what I want to be able to 'give' in a scene, so I avoid it at all costs. It isn't just a matter of the attention paid to the scene or the other players in it, since I'm usually watching something or working between poses, it's a matter of 'the other people here are giving me the gift of their time, time and attention are something to be valued and not taken for granted, they deserve the best that I can give in return.'

It probably sounds a bit much, but it's how I try to approach everything. I don't like doing a half-ass job if I can help it -- even if that means I end up whole-assing something else (like a scene that needs to be postponed to another day on an alt, or limiting myself in terms of opportunities to do more things) -- in the process. If something is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right -- and I'd rather give up twenty things done in a half-assed fashion or that aren't up to my personal standards (which are so much higher for myself than they are for anybody else, believe it or not) than have something slapdash and crappy out there, unless that's really the best I can do. (At which point, criticize and think I'm crappy away, really -- at least I know I did my best.)

@Arkandel Wellll... it's been 8.5 years since I met the control freak ex who didn't let me play with anyone, and there was a year between running into him and when I stopped playing back then, so...

...it started more than ten years ago, since all the chaos there was over a year in the crazy with the faction and all. <point-laughs> Welcome to being old like the rest of us. Pull up a rocker, your shotgun to chase the kids off the lawn can be picked up around back in the ominous, dusty old shed.

@Arkandel Yeah, MOO had that, too -- a pose command that you'd .verb at <target> with that never bugged me. Games that have that coded, the coded versions are just what the code is. I don't fault people for that. Those things still fucked with my 'no, no, it isn't me, it's a character'-ness and broke headspace some, but were much less invasive than longer stuff -- especially if it was particularly emotive, involved sexual anything, or was something traumatic like torture or something.

In OOC I don't mind it for casual stuff or from people I know -- like, if some friend was like "Bob waves at you," or "Jane hugs you!" one on one (provided I didn't mind Jane being huggy... ) is no worry. But I am that person that gets pages like "Creepy Asian Lesbian Schoolgirl wonders what you taste like... " when they're probably talking about my character but are using the 'you' and I'm all the fuck no to that, just as a 'excuse me?!' Nothing will get me to nope out of interacting with someone than something like that.

And you were all third person from what I recall of the time! For what it's worth. (OMG that was... 10 years ago now, I think?)

@Thenomain It's also worth noting that I always think of 'grid rooms' as a sort of nexus point. There may be additional 'game owned' builds with a handful of rooms sprawling off of them, like a park with a few rooms, or a forest, a series of caves, etc. that I don't think of as 'grid rooms' in quite the same way, but a lot of people consider these 'grid rooms' and count them in their totals, too.

For me:

• Small: Under 20 main grid rooms, this can be divided over multiple zones/regions/areas.
• Medium: 21-60 or so main grid rooms, this can be divided over multiple zones/regions/areas.
• Large: ...more than that.

Edit: My 'sweet spot' for design is around 35 combined over multiple zones/areas.

I think, also, it might be good to give some examples of what 'big' and 'small' mean here.

The games I 'grew up on' typically had base grids consisting of hundredS of rooms. I'd call them large, and I doubt anyone would disagree.

It's where 'small' and 'medium' come in that gets tricky. I'm sure we could all agree that 'small' is a game with, say, 10 or fewer main grid rooms, but to me, a base grid of 20-30 grid rooms is still 'small' due to the style of grid I 'grew up on'. Meanwhile, that same 20-30 grid rooms may be monstrously enormous to someone else (and have heard as much).

I have always tended to stick to roughly around the length others are using in the scene. Sometimes I'll get a little longer. Some people I can't keep up with on length.

Not being able to keep up is an issue for me in two ways: if I am going to address any one thing with anything more than a half-assed hand-wave of attention, crowds are hard. Similarly, someone who has a long-ass pose that is full of ten different things going on at once (often when someone is posing for themselves and NPCs also doing things and the environment needing some kind of response), I will burn out on a scene at record speed. It's an embarrassment of riches kind of problem, but like too few hooks to respond to, too many is also incredibly difficult, because I no longer feel I am writing creatively at all, but going down a checklist to address everything that's being flung at me, and that's pure response -- it doesn't feel like I'm adding anything back after a point, or able to provide hooks in return, because I'm drowning in the deluge. I can deal with boring and hook-less far better, because I tend to be creative enough to come up with something someone will be interested in responding to sooner or later, and usually it isn't terribly hard.

I cannot stand second person ("you") posing. I know some perfectly lovely people do this, but it feels incredibly personally invasive. I cannot quite grasp why, when the typical standard otherwise is to use third person, people skip right into this without even asking.

I will pose out of a scene if someone does this without checking/asking at this point because it's become so much of a discomfort factor when people suddenly thrust this in my face (because it feels like they are thrusting something in my face, not my character's) and it's too jarring for me to be able to remain in my character's head at that point. It doesn't matter who the person is, friend or foe, great writer or awful. It is an instant '...and just like that you've lost me', which isn't a factor of elitism, but a factor of... you just knocked me right out of my character's brain and back into mine. Like any other distraction, it takes me a while to recover from that, and the less comfortable I am about something? Yeah, the less likely it is that headspace is going to recover with any speed at all. And, you know? If I am playing a character, I probably don't feel like being entirely in my own head right now, thanks. It's called escapism for a reason.

I tend toward longer and flowery with weird details. (Or... did. Maybe I will again some time, but nothing current.) By the same token? I don't believe in endless self-aggrandizing purple prose bullshit text masturbation. While I don't keep some one for one checklist about such things, if I'm going to mention a noteworthy trait of my char in a pose, I am going to try to make sure it's: 1. relevant; 2. I remark somehow on a noteworthy trait of someone(s) else in the scene as well. I played on Shang far too long to not be burned out on the 'I am going to spend half of my pose telling you how gorgeous my character is' style of posing, which is a huge ball of bleah to me. If you're going to masturbate to the sound of your own ego, I do not feel like being the audience to the display of thesaurus-flogging; it is not my kink.

I am also bitter as hell lately, so take tone with a grain of salt, please. My filters are kinda off, so tact has left the building. <cough>

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

It's unfortunate in Mush that we need 'help' and '+help', but is the only exception I can think of to these rules.

I'm scrapping +help as much as I can in favor of +game, which pulls up the equivalent of news and +help. The original commands have 'Ahem, use +game please' or something on them. The first game I played on (a MOO) did this, and I found it helpful, so I stole it shamelessly, as it made sense at the time and still does: 'these are the files that you need to play the game', pretty much.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

I'm overweight. And almost every doctor I've had in the past and told 'Yeah, I haven't been able to really eat much' (such as when my gallbladder was failing) would come back with something along the lines of 'Well you could do to miss a few meals.'

God, this. I barely eat. Seriously. I barely eat. My husband, while way more active than me, is average size and so help me, he eats easily 6x per day what I do -- easily. I am that person who has a slice of pizza, or 1/3 of a normal sized sandwich when we eat out, and farm the rest out for leftovers.

Yet my ass, it is large. No, it is not because I just eat pizza and crap. (We do that about once every 2 months.) I drop weight like mad on Atkins, but that shit's expensive even if you're cooking everything yourself and getting less fancy meat and whatnot. (Hilariously, the week on that I had huge amounts of bacon daily I lost 12 pounds and it stayed off for six months... somebody has to explain that shit to me because seriously that's freaky.)

@Thenomain Will do when it comes time to replace this one. I tend to kill a keyboard at least once a year, so it's always good to know about good options, thank you!

@Three-Eyed-Crow I am sorta lucky in that regard. The new mac keyboard (the 'magic' keyboard) is a wireless bluetooth one. It's slightly longer than my tablet but not by too much, and can pair with my tablet (or even phone) as easily as it does with the desktop. It fits in a purse about as well as the tablet does.

Technically, I can just take the desktop keyboard with me -- so there's not even a 'change the keyboard scale awkward typing period' -- but I find I didn't really use it unless I specifically was setting up to use it and knew from the jump that I would need to, because there's still some fuss to set stuff up, and if I'm out and about and doing things that have me out of the house, 'I'm going to set up to go do RP things' is generally pretty far down on the priority list. I don't travel often (we do one vacation once a year for a little over a week), though, so YMMV, and I could see people who travel more often or travel for work finding that pretty handy.

I don't use mobile if I can help it. I have logged in from the tablet while traveling, as I have no laptop, if I have staff responsibilities somewhere. I gave it a shot twice for RP and just found it non-possible; either the connection kept dropping or the typing was just too much of a pain in the ass since I can't text very quickly or effectively, let alone write creatively.

@Three-Eyed-Crow The other big thing with this, for me, is that you get to see who came up with 'that thing you like'. It may be a custom power or a cool business on the grid or a rules change or piece of code that makes everything easier for everyone. It's a positive reminder that even if the IC of a place is heavy duty PvP (and there aren't a lot of those out there), the OOC side of things is a collaborative effort. I also really like to know who created that cool thing that made me go, "Oh, wow, I wish I had thought of that!" because I am that person who will page them and say, well, exactly that, and I know there are a lot of other folks who do the same. So something with crediting/etc. on that end can be so big, so dang big.

Also, so many games share content these days that it means you know who to ask if you may, since not everyone has a github, or a wiki of their crap with a 'use whatever templates you like' note or similar. I know I like to know if something helps somebody out, and wouldn't touch something I didn't have direct permission to use (or isn't up for public distribution with a notice to that end), but that's really a sideline. It is cool to know an idea was liked enough that it isn't just immediately helpful at that moment, but is helpful even outside its original context.

I like the +badges, which is such a trivial thing but is good fun and positivity. (I may beg some day for someone to post this code somewhere so more games can use it, or may try a wiki/game hybrid thing with this idea.)

I'm using a lot of incremental XP awards in some of the stuff I've been kicking around for a few years, but also looking at some other things that are a bit more ephemeral. I know @Sunny had some ideas that were XP-linked or similar that were used for something other than buying stats (but could be put toward special goals) that I hope she'll chime in with here as well.

Something I think might be really nice? Something that stores the +reccs (or whatever system a game is using along these lines) someone has rec'd by others, and can display them -- the text of them. This may be, code-wise, too huge a bear to do, but being about to +recc/list <name> and see what good things others have said and given thanks for is something I know I want to figure out how to do and would love to see more of on games in general. A lot of times, people who put a lot of effort into things do so somewhat invisibly -- or they feel these efforts are not really even known about, seen, or appreciated. Being able to list one's own would help to counter the latter a little, and this would also make it possible for others to see: hey, this is a player who regularly goes out of their way for others, that's really cool!

Recognition for someone's contributions, no matter who they are or how big or small that contribution is, is something I'm big on.

Cautions: I know that some of the things I'm looking at, I still need to hyper-scrutinize in terms of scale. Since I'm gonna guess you're asking for things to implement on FC, scale's a huge factor as is a game just starting vs. a game that's been running for a couple of years. Something that'd be great on a game from day one might be easy to implement if you do it later on a small game with a dozen players and mayeb 30 total characters, but it'll be harder to tuck in to a game with 20-35 players with 2-3 chars each and starts to take a lot of work and time. (Reno1 was like this, with the 1E -> 2E werewolf conversion. Ask me about my eyetic! Or don't, please? It's embarrassing. ) Similarly, some stuff will be easy on a small game where everyone can talk to staff about some custom thing or another in depth, and cook up something unique for them. Some things are just too big to really do past a certain point without it becoming more trouble than it's worth.