Posts made by surreality

As a quick (maybe more optimistic in some ways?) update...

I have been informed by my doctor that I have a month or two in which I must remain ass in chair or ass in bed, and don't you dare lift anything over 5lbs goddammit.

So while I won't be on games, I'll probably peek in here more(ish) than I had planned to when I figured I'd be heading back into hammering metal and sloshing dye and/or paint and/or patinas around (and the perpetual cleaning and sorting of The Art Lair... ).

There are a couple of kinda in-depth things I have wanted to write for a longass time about some principles game design I think may or may not work, which tends to be stuff I ramble about, but I never get around to explaining because it's even more frickin' wordy. So I'm going to make myself sit down and do that, and if I get through any of them, I'll post 'em here so they can get the scrutiny they deserve. (Read: people point out where it's stupid so it can be adjusted as needed.)

Ideally, I'd like to make them a resource for folks, like a lot of the stuff I cobble together for wiki, and I'd really like to finish all that stuff off to be able to share with folks, too. Kinda seems dumb to have put so much time in and leave it unfinished, and if I have two months of chair time, there really is only so much Netflix, y'know?

If I can actually get it all working, ideally -- ideally -- I will set up a blank droplet on DigitalOcean (all the templates and such but no specific game setting data) with a wiki set with all the extensions and templates so on that someone would need if folks like the ideas and so on, and that droplet could be cloned and sent to people to set up their own thing from without having to copy pages or really install much of anything at all on the wiki itself, just start adding your data.

That's ultimately been the plan for a while, and I really do want to still do that if I can. Whether I'm playing on them or not, I do think Coin's principle of 'more games is better' is a very real thing, and it's a way I think I can help make it easier for people to make that happen.

If I am really lucky, I will have figured out some more of the basic code to pull things from the MUX over to the game -- I have a little and between Theno and Glitch's additions it's made it a lot easier -- it may be able to have a basic setup for that on a blank MUX core, but less than zero promises on that. (Because while it works, my pathetic attempt at coding is -- I will not be tactful here and call it 'less than elegant' -- a hot mess.)

tl;dr: Surrbrain went: finish your tools an' shit, bitch, you ain't going anywhere for at least a month, better make some goddamn coffee.

It's an update I never really wanted to be making, but I think some folks have probably seen it coming.

I'm out for a while. Probably for good, but I know better than to say the 'n' word. (Read: never.)

I'd like to apologize to the folks who have been looking forward to the projects I have had puttering along, because your patience has been pretty legendary with my slow ass. I'm sorry I didn't get further with them. I may pick them up again some day and just go full world-builder or something.

I'll check PMs over the next few days if anyone wants to keep in touch; just provide contact info if so. I'm not on skype much, mostly gmail, but every once in a while the phone's on so skype again becomes a thing.

Be well, everybody. I sincerely hope for the very best for all of you, whether we've played together somewhere across the 20+ years I've been doing this or not, whether we agree on all the things or fight like cats and dogs.

To the folks starting games, may they draw the right crowd and generate fun, may the drama never drive you bonkers. I offer only this one random piece of parting advice: savor the creativity your players share with you; every bit of imagination and creativity, no matter whether it fits your vision or not, is a precious thing. Never take that for granted, and figure out, somehow, how to be both proud and humbled by the fact that you had the ability to inspire.

It isn't really anger. It's more... sad, I guess.

What seems like a really long time ago now, a late night diner coffee friend of mine and I had this long-standing argument about the myth of Pandora's Box, and more specifically, Hope.

For those not familiar with the myth -- which I'd more or less assume is nobody here, but you never know -- the box contained "all the evils of the world", and when it was opened, they escaped to plague mankind. Urged to close the box, Pandora started to do so, only to find Hope still at the bottom, struggling its way out into the world.

We argued about that myth for what must have been four years, on and off -- on road trips to the beach, over coffee as the sun rose, walking along abandoned railroad tracks in the middle of the night looking for a cave someone told us about that they swore was haunted -- and it seemed like almost any conversation touched on it, somehow, somewhere along the line, until it was more of an in-joke than an argument.

While it may be hard to believe, I was always the optimist, of the two of us. My take on the myth was simply that without any evil in the world, we didn't need Hope, either.

He always shook his head, and insisted: Hell, no. Hope? The heaviest, slowest, most horrible evil of anything that could ever have been in the box, and the cause of more pain and frustration than all the rest put together.

It's been years now since he and I talked, having had a spectacular falling out after he started dating one of my other friends and I got the 'you can only be friends with one of us!' ultimatum when they split, but I still think back on that long-running exchange every once in a while.

It's been more than every once in a while, lately, and in regard to a specific situation that really, actually, pretty profoundly meant something big to me, that I'm finding myself on his side of the argument instead of mine.

And I really, really fucking hate it.

Not judging either -- though I will say I have seen this taken to extremes that sometimes make me a little sad. (Not saying you or anyone here do/does in any way, @Admiral, this just reminded me of a case of it that had me head-scratching some.)

I remember seeing people scream about The Forest, the premise of which actually was dumb American with no goddamn clue goes into a part of Japan that people who have no goddamn clue should seriously not fucking go or they will end horribly, which sorta falls apart if it's not how it was cast, or it would at least be a totally different movie/story. It's... the premise, since a Japanese person would know the lore/not be that dumbass. If somebody wanted to make that totally different story with an all Japanese cast, I would be all over watching it, too, it would just be a very different story, and I'd want to see that made with an all Japanese cast, too.

...going half an hour away to the hospital to have the staples removed, only to find the appointment had been rescheduled to next week and the husband forgot to pass along the message, because he has the flu.

Also, sleeping in shifts not because of the usual snorefest, but because you can't be within 20 feet of your spouse because you're post-surgery and all vulnerable to everything under the sun, and he has the flu.

...and he sleeps for-fucking-ever. And you have to sit up somehow while on painkillers that whisper 'sleeeeeeeep' to you in a soothing, sleep-sheep-laden lullabye voice almost 24/7.

And and and you know he probably got the flu from staying over at the hospital with you, sleeping in a chair, so even if it's the manliest man cold ever, you feel totally guilty as hell.

Today is that day my mother felt we were both so damned pathetic she decided she's cooking for the two of us until the weekend's over, we're just that laughably useless that even soup is simply beyond either of us to do anything but order for delivery. (And then argue about who has to limp-shamble downstairs to get the door to get it. Whoever moans the most woefully wins the right to remain on their butt in the chair or in bed.)

@Ganymede said in RL things I love:

It's good for strengthening up your lower and mid-back muscles.

<takes notes for when she's allowed to lift things over 15lbs again> Innnnnnnteresting...

@Meg I'm going to have to disagree here about the 'fairness' factor.

I am speaking broadly here, and I am also speaking as someone who will absolutely fight tooth and nail for people and projects I believe in. (Read: I empathize strongly with the drive you are describing.)

I'm one of of those people who hates the use of ANSI in descs and truly loathes ASCII art on M*s. Despise it. Hate it with all of the hatey hate hateface I can muster. I've banned it by policy on my projects because I find it unpleasantly distracting and inappropriate for a descriptive text medium, and often enough, have run across people who have more serious (visual problems) issues with it than my primarily taste-based and philosophical ones. Do I have anything against folks who enjoy it or think there's something wrong with them? Not in the least. Different tastes, different strokes for different folks, etc. -- life goes on either way. (I would consider something like an art gallery or bboard or similar thing for this specific purpose fair game for something like this, admittedly, and think that could actually be pretty neat.)

I felt no need to comment about it in regard to a game I don't play on. It is in no way my business in that case and frankly, I have very little energy to bother with most things lately. However, that will rarely stop anyone from commenting about something on the forums, for better or worse. (Lord knows I've commented plenty re: random things on games I don't and wouldn't play on, usually with why, would expect the same on threads for my stuff and have seen precisely that -- and I consider that entirely reasonable for people to do.)

There are reasonable times to rush in to defense. There are also considerably less reasonable ones. I'd call this the latter, for one reason: "Ugh, I don't like <whatever>!" is not a demand that something be considered wrongfun -- and to insist that it is so is to declare something wrongthink, which I, personally, find considerably more distressing on a number of levels. People are allowed to not like a thing just as they are allowed to like it, or you are not simply going for 'live and let live, leave people alone to enjoy their kind of fun' (which is a positive goal) and hedging much closer to 'how dare you state your dislike for something other people like, you're bad and you should feel bad! It's now all right for someone to jump in your face and attack you!'.

Not everyone is going to enjoy everything, and that is also OK. In an ideal world, people would be polite in conveying their lack of interest or dislike, but that's not how things tend to go down all the time (or even often, really). When it looks like somebody can't handle that without exploding into a frothy attack dog? I don't think I'm the only one who notices, and it's (unfortunately) not the good kind of notice.

It also comes across as being entirely closed to criticism from where I sit -- and I don't actually believe that's true of any of the people involved here, so that's something I consider a bit worrying. Does it look that way? Sadly -- no snark intended, it's distressing to say so, especially since I hold @Apos in fairly high regard -- it is coming across that way at the moment. Which I don't think is intended. And it's precisely because I don't think it's intended that I'm saying anything at all. (I wouldn't bother if I thought y'all gave none fucks. I know you do, and that a great deal of work has gone into this. That has big respect from me and I don't want to see that effort hindered by something this dumb.)

All in all, someone can have a two dozen kickass qualities and still have two or three that, to put it as tactfully as possible, could use some work. (That's something that is doubtless true of absolutely everyone on these forums and I do not exempt myself at all.)

Accepting the existence of the not-so-awesome things does not diminish the genuine quality of the kickass ones, and turning a blind eye to the traits any given person has that could use some work serves no one's best interest. The bad isn't a disqualifier -- but the good doesn't make the bad a non-issue, either. The bad still needs examination and probably some work, and the good still deserves praise and encouragement.

People have been more than fair to @Kanye-Qwest on these forums, just like they've been fair to me when I've gone attack dog defense mode in a very similar way. Actually being fair does not mean it gets hand-waved into nothingness or not called out for what it is. Ultimately, that does someone an enormous disservice, especially in the long run.

Double post, oh, well.

I know the role RP serves in terms of my mental health. Mostly, it's a chance to get out of my own head for a little while -- something that I consider more or less essential once in a while.

My head is not a particularly happy place to be. I won't go into specifics on the reasons why.

One of my brain's oh so fun quirks, however, is problem-solving. I rely on pattern recognition a lot, for better or worse. Sometimes, this comes in really handy. Other times? Not so much. If something breaks the pattern or doesn't make sense, my brain will pick at it -- and pick at it, and pick at it, and pick at it -- while approaching it from just about every possible angle until it's more or less driving me bonkers. It may be something major, it may be something completely trivial, but either way, I end up stuck in that particular loop, and go around and around and around until I'm dizzy and usually frustrated as hell. It's like a computer getting stuck in a loop and consuming more and more processes until it eventually crashes.

Not fun.

RP lets me step out of my own brain and into someone else's for a very short while. This? Handy. It helps break the head-loop thanks to the perspective shift, no matter how brief.

This is pretty amazingly helpful. And, weirdly enough, incredibly healthy for me at least, in moderate doses.

It also means that if real life is spectacularly horrible, RP is a bad idea, because stepping back into my head again becomes scary as hell. So when it could arguably be the most useful, I've had to learn to avoid it, lest the 'brief vacation from my brain's badly wired processes to hit the reset button' become 'I would much rather live here now k thx because this imaginary hidey hole that doesn't really matter in the long run is way better'.

I harp on self-awareness a lot. This is partly why. I know that if I'm not careful, and not paying attention, it's easy enough to fall down the 'I'll just hide here' rabbit hole, and focus on problems that aren't remotely important because in the end, the stakes are so incredibly small compared to more or less anything in the real world and even if everything goes totally wrong, it's pretend wrong/important/etc., no matter how important it might seem.

I still fuck up on the self-awareness sometimes. I try not to, but it still happens. Either way, though, if things are less than grand RL, I know to stick as much to solo project problem-solving stuff toward the same ends, and to the very tiny handful of folks I know very well if I RP at all, since they know me well enough to be able to say: check yourself (without me flipping out on them/feeling WTF about it and knowing they're looking after my best interests).

It will probably be a while before I'm playing much anywhere, if at all, for the above reasons. (And that was before almost dying twice and the tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills that preventing a round three of that has looming for us now -- not a great thing for people who don't make much money; it's super fucking scary, actually, and it's going to take something just shy of an actual miracle to handle it. I have no idea how we're going to pull this off.) I'm OK with this, though -- the not playing part, anyway -- since I know my limits enough to know it's for the best.

@Catsmeow I will applaud, because that's better than I can do! I have less than zero upper body strength.

FWIW, I have known Thenomain for a fairly long while on and off. We argue a lot and agree on... well, not a heck of a lot, sometimes. In all that time, though, I have never known him to blow smoke up someone's ass or issue a false compliment, or one meant to undercut someone else.

@Ganymede I have been in that headspace from time to time. It isn't always easy to recognize -- so many kudos for spotting it. (No, really. It's one of the easiest to overlook because there's not a 'something majorly wrong' you can readily point to.) It can be incredibly hard to shake off, because a major aspect of it is inertia. Not that nothing's going on -- just that nothing's particularly different from day to day.

For what it's worth, travel can help, if that is an option. Physically being in a new space, even for a week, can break the routine enough to be a major help. I'm lucky in that with art-work-from-home I can do that if there's $ for it (which there never is, really) and feel kinda like an asshat in that it's kinda the opposite for you most likely (likely have the $ to travel within a sane budget, but scheduling/time off is a nightmare), but if you can do it, I really can vouch for it being a big help. We do an annual drive to Florida to collect shells and just hang out NOT working ourselves to death (trip is fairly cheap, mellow as all hell, pretty, meditative, lots of tasty places in the area, etc. -- in all seriousness if this sounds like fun to anybody ever/at all PM and I can give info about a good where and when and such) and it does a good job of staving this off.

The other thing, if time allows, is a 'challenge hobby'. I joke about collecting too many weird and usually useless skills; this is partly why I do it (and why I am not really joking about that). It can be a collection of something, too, not necessarily a skill. I tend to pick stuff that's at least marginally related to other skills so they can enhance each other, but it doesn't have to be. Next in the useless skills queue, for instance, is needle-felting, which, when I tried it a ways back, I realized was 'creatively applied repetitive stabbing'. (That can't be bad for stress at least, right?!) Broadly speaking, learning a new thing helps the brain create new pathways. This is good, 'cause it helps break some of the inertia.

While it's still in a limited fashion, I love that the work I do is something I can actually do while in recovery, rather than having to take a month off that I definitely can't afford. Very grateful for this particular perk of working from home.

Can we maybe go back to keeping politics in the politics section, maybe? Because really, we have one for that purpose.

@Coin I seriously miss the ignore feature.

I know she doesn't come here now, but if someone can pass along this tidbit, it'd be appreciated. (Is also something to keep in mind, y'all.)

Even if you walk away from an accident like this (thank goodness!!!) please take it easy on yourself for a few days. Please. Sometimes, a few days later, the body has a way of rebelling the moment it realizes: no longer in immediate peril and yes, this can take a few days.

Please take it easy on yourself for a while, even if you think you're OK. I've got chronic pain from not listening to this advice from a similar accident in college, and I don't want to see that happen to anybody, especially anyone around here. Please take care of yourselves. It really is important.

@Arkandel @Ganymede It is weird that I agree with both of you at once on a subject that you're on opposite ends of... again, I suppose.

I think there's a difference between constructive criticism and outright bashing that is relevant here, though -- and they aren't really the same thing. Yeah, you can dig through the bashing to try to find something useful, but it isn't always there.

A lot of folks seem to expect that if so much as a single question is asked, suddenly it's design-by-committee on the whole. (And no one on the committee agrees about 95% of anything.) They're also generally only working from the one question without much comprehension of the whole. That makes the criticism a little less useful, too.

(Speaking of which, I need to revive a thread when this damn painkiller wears off a tad and I'm not typing in a brain fog. )

@Thenomain At least. One of the Tales of the Weird Wing• of the Hospital involves a woman stalking the halls for hours beginning at 4am wailing about Obama and FEMA camps. Fun times. I am eternally grateful for the amount of morphine that was in my system at the time because it more or less hazed out to how all the straight white people were going to be exterminated in death camps so the gov't could seize their land and give it to settlers from Syria.

•Shit, the stories. Figures I'd end up in the 'trauma cases from the ER and people we don't have psych paperwork back on yet' wing, right? <rubs face>

@Arkandel said in RL things I love:

I realize I'm referring to the media and not the press but I'm getting really sick and tired of attacks on Trump over the stupidest, most inane things. For instance take this bizarre story of Trump’s plagiarized inauguration cake.

What this means is when an actual journalist actually nails him on something meaningful and important we'll all have been completely desensitized to it.

This kind of story is not remotely new. We had them about the Clintons, the Bushes, and the Obamas, too, and I'm sure it stretches back far beyond that. Expecting this to stop at all is to think we're going to evolve dramatically as a species to not be petty snarky assholes who love gossipy nonsense. That is not the kind of thing that's going to happen in 4 years, or 40, or probably even 400.

@Thenomain What I find the most sad and frightening is that my father was a journalist. Yeah. Really. He sees nothing wrong with things like the push for 'I think suppressing any story that isn't flattering regardless of any truth behind it, and that suing people for writing anything that is unflattering is something we need to be doing even if every word is true'.

...yeah.

Edit: They also watch FOX news literally all day unless my mother is watching something on HGTV or my father isn't watching Playboy. (Yeah, feel the burn on all that irony.) So I'm not holding out much hope on the press getting to them even if it does generally remove cranium from anus.

@Arkandel said in RL things I love:

There are people across the world, too many of them, who are simply marginalized. They've nothing to lose, and it shows. Why would they show empathy for others for a potential disaster when they perceive - rightly or not - none coming their way for their own presently dire situation?

There are also people who feel marginalized and slighted due to a lack of perspective.

My parents, retired, have a combined retirement income of roughly $100k/year. They are also not always the most responsible people and they consider many of what anyone outside the US would consider luxuries to be essentials. (Satellite TV with all the channels, each has a car, they both have good health insurance and care, etc.)

They have, however, bought into the lie of 'welfare queens', violent and lazy minorities, and abusers of the system like it was the world's most epic, awesome trend ever. They fervently believe anyone not like them is undeserving of any sort of help whatsoever, and resent that so much as a penny of their tax income would go to people they are convinced will waste and abuse it, living in the lap of luxury, while they worked hard all of their lives for what they (wrongly) perceive to be 'just barely getting by'. (They really did, too. There's a reason I grew up as something of a workaholic who freaks out when I'm not productive enough and my 'enough' is not sanely scaled.)