I do not know crap about Dresden or FATE, but with that inspiration, I would be tempted to try it. Am up to my eyeballs in too many projects to help much with things right now, but if basic wiki stuff is needed, and can wait after the holiday, I'm willing to help out there however I can.
@Lithium Have you replied to the job to say, 'hey, I set this note, could I please have an update?'
@Apocalycious said in Shadows Over Reno:
I have been tempted to offer to help out temporarily with some of the drudgery like updating news files/room descs/wiki pages/etc, but I really don't want to staff permanently, and I'm not sure how useful or desired a week or two of part-time help would be.
I actually did offer -- since their wereperson is out for a while (or permanently? I can't exactly tell?) and I did it before, so it's fairly easy and I know the explanations of the new systems that seem to work (and the ones that don't), but haven't heard anything back about it. Would not take it on full time though, no. Until permanent person was back to pinch hit? Pfft, saw no reason to not offer, since it's just a couple of weeks per the last post about it.
I've pointed this out before and will again: there is always a crush of apps in the beginning. By the first or second idle reap, often about 1/3 of that population seems to drop out. This is because people are willing to give a new place, or a rebooted place, a chance.
It means the doorbuster opening is a huge stressful workload on staff -- which would be great if it meant things calm down after that initial wave of people who are willing to give it a shot thins out as the people who like what they find stay, and those who do not, idle out.
Unfortunately, instead of looking at that pattern we've all seen on a zillion M*s by now and recognizing for what it is, when the people who decided it simply wasn't for them fade off, as they always do, instead of people realizing: hey, this is a thing that always happens, not every game is for everyone, the people who remain instead put even more pressure on staff because "OMG PEOPLE ARE LEAVING! THE GAME IS DYING! YOU ARE NOT DOING GOOD ENOUGH! YOU NEED TO FIX THIS!" which is shitty, and ultimately incredibly unfair to the staff and remaining players who are endeavoring to contribute in whatever ways they are able.
@Auspice This thankfully didn't happen to me but to one of my neighbors years ago. She was walking down a street in the middle of nowhere and this car stops at the side of the road. The driver calmly goes to the back seat, takes his dog out, puts him down, gets back into the car and drives away... while the dog chases the car, excited at first because I guess it was a game, and then panicked when the realization hit that it was not until it was exhausted and just had to stop.
How you can do that to a creature who loves you utterly is beyond me. I don't have words for it. I get sometimes people must give pets up because they can't afford them or whatever and that sucks but it's understandable; doing it because they become an inconvenience, or to trade up makes me think thoughts I'd rather avoid.
What frankly terrifies me more is how often people essentially do the same thing to people.
That day when this is you, because I know I am not the only one who has this day:
"Self, you have been way too down and negative lately."
"Have you thought about being positive for a bit and seeing if that improves things?"
"Give it a shot, it's important to work toward this goal."
<approaches something she does every day just a mite more positively>
<shit explodes in face enormously with paranoia and suspicion and borderline accusations being flung at her out of nowhere>
"Whoa... stay calm, approach this with purely rational chill and just basic info and it'll be all right... "
<tries that, it is apparently zero help>
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"That's why."
Am working on -- I build slow, OK? -- a venue for up-and-coming, small time, or weird performer character concepts. This is not a glitzy showplace for the fame 3 crowd; it's more like a crazy vaudeville/sideshow/circus acts/burlesque• joint full of kitsch and quirky weirdness, in a more 'dinner theater' club layout than a traditional theater with assigned seating. Pretty much everything from musicians to singers to sword-swallowers to acrobats to magicians to fan dancers and---
...I think y'all get the idea.
There are always a handful of characters like this around and sometimes it's not real easy to find a place to do your thing, so I'm working on a place for all the creative kooks to be made welcome to do their thing.
This is basically a zero obligation gig -- no minimum requirements for being around/etc. -- just a place to perform if you're in the mood to do it, when you wanna do it. The character running the place is a vamp, but she's fuzzball/mortal-friendly and I have no intention of making the place a vamp-only sort of thing; everybody's welcome to join in to whatever extent they'd like, no required thrallings and no casting couch. If there are enough folks interested, events of whatever type are definitely on the table as an option.
Hopefully it'll be done relatively soon. Poke Anais (alias: Ana) on game if interested. Stage hands/bartenders/bouncers/etc. also welcome.
• NO full nude, it is not a modern strip joint -- think Dita von Teese (youtube it but not from work if you aren't familiar), classic showgirl burlesque, bellydancing, and the people who do acrobatic pole-dancing here as the furthest extreme in that direction.
@Derp said in Dead Celebrity Thread:
In reading this list, I have become aware of the death of Miss Cleo. How the hell did I miss that?
...how did she not see that one coming?
@Cobaltasaurus I still have a few tweaks to put in for fussy little bits, but shouldn't take long. I can remove anything you want gone pretty easily -- just need to know what stays and what goes. 
I'm kinda in the middle on this one.
I am crazy private in that I don't post things publicly as much as I can avoid it; I am even super paranoid about sharing alts/etc.
People I get along with over time, I will share what information I feel comfortable sharing, privately.
A lot of people -- especially kids whose schools haven't taught it properly -- think freedom of speech means 'I can say whatever I want whenever I want and no one can stop me.'
It should shock precisely no one that I have a 'don't be a dick' footnote just for this somewhere.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Everyone knows what we're getting at, here. Everyone has experienced the completely clueless idiot -- and that is, without question, what they are -- who rails about FREE SPEECH!!! the moment someone tells them to behave like something other than a shrieking howler monkey on a MUX.
I hate to break it to them, but the owner of the site and the person making the rules is not a member of congress. (I know, shocking, isn't it?) That, alone, makes their entire argument invalid.
But wait, there's more! ...the MUX is also private property, and is not a government or public resource to which one is entitled access under law. So that's two strikes against this being in any way relevant.
We're not going to have this argument.Don't even go there.
It's one of the subjects on which I feel entirely justified in being thoroughly snarky as fuck to preemptively shut that shit right the hell down.
@saosmash said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I love @randomscene for breaking me out of established rp patterns. Adding new pcs to the list to specifically reward players for hunting down newbies and pinning them to the nearest butterfly board was smart as hell.
Can you elaborate on what this is? It sounds like a great idea and I would like to know what it is.
@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Juerg was quite nice to me, for instance.
You do not have a vagina. This is relevant.
@Cupcake That has been me on pretty much everything I've tried to run with for the past... year? Two? Anywhere. If I had any good answer as to how to deal with it, I'd share. 
Gina Torres remains an utter goddess, though, so so far as I'm concerned, s'all good.
@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I guess when I asked "should people be banned on games for past behavior elsewhere?" I was really merely showing off my prophetic powers.
Seriously.
Though 'being a pompous asshat' is not enough to warrant a ban, IMHO, let alone a pre-ban. That tale is just passed along as a reference to something that is a bit brow-arch-worthy that's more recent than @WTFE's accounts of douchebaggery.
@Thenomain In the old days, I wrote a lot of it, but never really worried about people spying on it. Mostly because my writing was slow as molasses and anyone trying to whack off to it would most assuredly lose their boner between the poses. It would have been like trying to get off to porn that only showed five seconds of hardcore action, followed by five minutes of black screen, on endless repeat, for hours.
Thinking about it now, I sort of... pity anyone who tried more than I could ever be mad about it, personally.
(Apologies for this tangent.)
@Tinuviel I was taking AP American History that year, too -- so our teacher (who had long been one of the people on the team that actually constructs the test for the whole country at that time, no less) literally dropped our curriculum, told us, "Just read the book for the test, we are going to talk about this until everyone is out of questions and discussion for the next few weeks, this is more important than the test, and not as your teacher, but as a historian, it's on me to make sure you know why."
Dude was awesome. We lurved him. He was more interested in us understanding history than teaching to the test. ("Read that study guide, I wrote it, dammit!" <-- really.) He did things at random, like an extra credit pop quiz to get an idea of what people knew already early on in the year and what he still needed to go over more in depth with us on, by saying, "Take the class and write what you know about any of the lyric lines in this, which had come out and dominated the radio for ages, line by line, and for each line of the song or incident mentioned you can write a solid essay style paragraph about, you can buy back a lost point on a test for the rest of the year."
I repeat: dude was awesome. Everybody needs a that guy.
I handled his app when Firan went poof and he was migrating to TR.
As chirpy overworked OMG HOW MANY APPS ARE IN THE QUEUE?! admin lass at the time, you would think not a thing in the world could possibly stand out because there were a pile of people totally new to the system to help out, and set up.
Dude stood out.
Boy, did he ever. While pretty much everyone else was grateful for the help, eager to learn, and otherwise open to listening to what they needed to look for/set up (which I was usually happy to do for people), he was... special.
He'd made a character that was born amidst a number of cold war conflicts, I forget if it was in Eastern Europe or Western Russia -- either way, he had a (for TR) medium length BG going on about what he was doing throughout that time.
And then he asked for help with it, and if it was all right. I read it over, said it looked fine, it was already more than most people write by a large margin so he didn't need to worry about the length.
At which point he tells me I should be grateful and thank him for the history lesson I got while reading it, shouldn't I.
Excuse me?
I was alive then. I am an old cow. I was in the latter half of high school when the wall came down, grew up during the Cold War, and was old enough to be well aware of the news, politics, and the state of hostilities at the time. One of my gaming buds was a low level US Army intel guy at a listening post out there back then and we've all heard the stories he's told us (the ones he's allowed to pass along, obvs) who managed to hear a thing to make sure he got leave to be there on site when that shit happened, because that was going to be the party to end all parties for anyone in his age range especially, being in his mid-20s at the time. Fuck, I've even been to a handful of the actual places in Russia and Eastern Europe he listed in the background RL.
If this pompous little bitchboy thought he was schooling me on anything, he had another think coming. The phrasing was incredibly insulting and condescending; it was pretty glaring as a bullshit negging-style attempt to assert dominance over what he must have considered a 'friendly and helpful must mean stupid' female staffer -- and this was just 2 or 3 years ago.
He got a very polite but firm, "I am well aware of the history described in your background, having been alive and old enough at the time to understand the situation."
So there's a more current warning, y'all.