Posts made by surreality

@Sunny said:

I love you guys, thanks. I know it's just a signal of where I am right now, but reading all y'all saying horrible things about them is rather cathartic, and CERTAINLY makes me feel vindicated. I totally got a laugh out of it, too.

See, we can all be mean for you in this instance. Many of us are quite good at it!

Fresh peeve: Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy does everything seem to break at once? Seriously, I think my bathroom just decided to disassemble itself practically overnight. First the shelf with the bajillion makeup pencils collapsed in an explosion of chaos, then the tub rack whined in that oh-so-special metallic way before collapsing on me (in the tub, grr-clonk), and the roomie decided to start shuffling things randomly from the hall into the (tiny! house built in the 40s...) marginal floor space.

Obstacle courses can be fun, but not in bathrooms.

@Sunny said:

@WTFE said:

Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.

Oh, it gets way better than this.

My dad PHYSICALLY MADE THE RING for her.

Just... oh my god. I am so sorry.

My cousins were very much like this when my grandmother (who I lived with most of my life) passed, and... oh, do I ever understand.

There is an extra special circle of hell for people like this. Just... wow. That's just so utterly awful.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

@HelloRaptor said:

There comes a point where you need to bite the fucking bullet and move up. The number of times I've talked to companies that have perfectly viable (maybe not perfectly, but still viable) modern alternatives but don't want to spend the money or time to train people to use them, is just infuriating.

My first job was at a weekly newspaper that still used dial-up Internet service. I used to beg to go back to my apartment to do anything online, where I could use my cable modem.

I don't have the heart to tell you how long my father used the really old school modems that looked like giant phone suction cups to send stories in when he was working for our local paper.

It was longer than one would ever have imagined; safely into the mid/late-90s.

When he saw my first laptop, his first words were: "HA! That thing is pathetic! It's so small!" And then I opened it, and the screen was bigger than the one he was working on with his briefcase-sized monster.

And then he saw it was in color, and I swear I saw that man die a little inside.

I didn't have the heart to tell him about the modem for at least a year after that, I just couldn't.

@Coin said:

and I want someone, anyone, to kick Reno into gear with some consistent plot.

It exists, at least for weresphere. At this point, it exists in rough notes and my brain, though, which is non-helpful. I am however a lone staffer dealing with a sphere of 50 or so characters, so that is also kinda a thing at the moment that isn't helping while time's already hugely limited by RL concerns.

Things have been run in relation to it already when there's time and people actually show up -- it's just subtle. Some more subtle than others, but pretty much anything I run is tied together and tied into that core Thing Going On In The Background Consistently. Not many people seem interested in connecting the dots yet, but I'm optimistic it can and will happen?

Please don't pop my little optimism bubble, it's awfully shiny and junk!

@Insomnia said:

Yeah, but people also had a tendency to blow up every little thing into toe ring of doom proportions too, sometimes the paranoia was absolutely justified.

Exactly that.

It's not like we've exactly run out of WTF, but there's little major WTF enough that it needn't comprise the entire purpose of a place any more by far.

Which is kinda awesome. That likely has less to do with WORA having an impact than a lot of people just growing up over the past 15 or so years it was around in some form or another.

@Thenomain said:

Designed to, no. Ended up being, more like. I think a lot of us were tired of Wora, even when we were defending it.

To be fair, the expansiveness of the abusive bullshit was more broad than it is these days, partly because of WORA, which is good.

The paranoia it created among decent folks that they'd be seen as the next Storm for some tiny nonsense thing? Not so great.

We may not be entirely out of toe rings, but they seem to be appropriately rare these days.

Have links to the pics? That could help.

I know a lot of folks just wiki it these days more than desc, and I've been guilty of putting a generalized 'this is her general style, here's a link to the specific outfit' kind of desc lately if someone wears something that would be fairly complicated to describe without getting too florid or going on at length about princess seams or bias cuts or... anything else that probably just makes people's eyes glaze right over.

Poke as needed -- I am kinda in and out with work as ever but I can make a point of being around.

I've actually been on a MOO that tried to do the 'all code is IC' thing: Cybersphere, way back. No clue if it's still like that these days or not, but they didn't even have a page command for players, though they did have an IC com system.

Obviously enough, everybody used the com system with a ) in front of whatever they said to convey they were using it just like they'd use page anyway, but it's something that places have tried, with... the predictable amount of success, I suppose.

@Coin said:

I'd rather sit the offending player down and be like, 'Look, this attitude is not cool.'

This is the cultural change we need in the hobby -- not just in staff, but also people internalizing that message.

Too few staff are willing to do this, thinking it inconsequential, or just not wanting to get involved in any potential drama themselves.

Seriously, more people need to do this and be willing to do this.

@Ganymede said:

It doesn't prevent harassment on channel, page, @mail, or otherwise. If you want a quick fix, there are other commands to prevent being communicated at without consent. If you want to address harassment, go to staff; that's their fucking job.

Setting yourself unfindable can, absolutely, avoid triggering the negative behaviors people have described.

Nothing excuses the behavior, and once it has happened, it has happened.

Preventing it from happening again, or involving staff -- which may or may not backfire on you, depending on the staffers in question/any given policy at the game/etc. -- is not going to undo whatever drama has already been dealt in the same way.

@Arkandel said:

Woke up with no internet connection. It's like the light has gone out of the world. The ISP's tier 1 support (good people otherwise) insisted the problem was with my ethernet cables (both of them?) until I pointed out the cable modem's error logs.

So now I'm at work, thinking tonight is gonna suck. Hopefully they won't need to mail me a new modem.

Check to make sure no one accidentally chainsawed the cable line.

Me: "I think the guy accidentally cut the cable line, guys."
Everyone else: "That seriously cannot be it, you are an idiot, allow us to come up with 20 different ways that this is completely impossible."
Me: tech support forever
Tech Support: "There's a problem with the line, we'll send somebody out."
Tech: "Looks like somebody cut the cable out here... "
Everyone else: "Would you believe it, when the guy was cutting the ivy, he chainsawed the cable!"
Me:

I speak from recent experience.

@Silver Especially if it's a guy. Seriously, epilator + lemon juice has been my go-to solution should I ever have the need to do a Jack Bauer impression.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Its a safe bet they weren't made with a woman's contours in mind. But if you want to shave your legs with it, feel free. Let me know how that turns out for you.

...especially when you get to those areas you can't necessarily see very easily without becoming a contortionist.

Add me to the sensitive skin coarse hair club. Except on my head -- of course. There it is hopelessly wispy-as-fuck. At least it's rainbow green now?

I went with 'epilator', because it costs as much as a full body wax does around here. They do not disclose the ongoing cost in screams on the box, though, and the instruction manual needs to include: when the endorphins kick in so hard your hands are shaking, put the damn thing down and wait until later. No, later than that, too. Maybe tomorrow. Or next Thursday.

Interesting.

I knew Darkmetal has had an difficult rep over the years, but when I was playing (and we're talking the 90s here) it was fun regardless of any issues. Maybe I had better luck side-stepping that sort of thing back then than I do now -- but the game size probably helped. I'd really like to see how the new approach works, since it incorporates a lot of things people seem to have been discussing here, and seeing it in practice would be pretty awesome.

I'd definitely be willing to check it out if time opens up. I owe a (finally!) completed chargen already elsewhere (damn you, real life taking actual time in my old age), but if that and current stuff allows...

...my memories of the place tended to be good ones. It sounds like it would be worth a real shot.

(Totally not just saying this because I miss the Tzimisce like crazy, swear.)

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I've found that as I've gotten older, physical appearance has become less important. Not that I don't have my preferences (I do), but I would much rather date someone that I can actually enjoy spending time with over someone that's a total hardbody but that makes me want to smother them with a pillow every third word.

Though crude as hell, a friend of mine had an answer to this one that would generally ensure at least that person never asked/commented to that end again: "That guy can give me an orgasm any time I buy a new pack of batteries. If he isn't good for anything else, I don't need him."

Her parent-friendly version of this was, "If I just wanted something pretty to look at, I'd buy a painting."

I'm in the oWoD forevah camp as well. I like some aspects of nWoD, but oWoD was the thing when I was in my maximum RPG gamer point in life. I was in tabletop, I MUSHed, I was in LARPs...

Somewhere between the two is probably the most perfect setting ever. No two people will ever agree on what that is, so I don't recommend trying to find it unless you want to lose all of your hair and hate everyone forever, but the point stands.

oWoD was messy, it wasn't always the most enlightened thing in the world (yay understatement!), and the system wasn't relatively uniform in structure across the board, but that was good. nWoD is only mostly cookie-cutter column-A, column-B the way @TNP describes, which only seems to make things even more confusing when that's really just surface and everything under the surface is just as messy and different, but it's then wedged into the structure for that appearance of sameness that's pretty deceptive in the end... but with potential sacrifices made to wedge it into that sameness. If shit's going to be different in the end anyway, just let it be, and let it be what it wants to be.

This is not accurate to real world reality -- which I know for a fact -- but it's the best impression I can give of the differences between the two: oWoD was a bunch of idealistic creators who didn't know everything and stepped on land-mines while creating because the creating was a lot more wild and crazy. Essentially, a bunch of crazy college kids on a road trip in which they get into a shit-ton of trouble but also pull off some wild adventures on the way that are the stories they'll be telling all the way to the nursing home. nWoD was written by the same people after they had been stuck working in an office for the next twenty years, had kids to support, and at least one boss they really hated that was fond of too much paperwork.

...for what it's worth, every single member of the staff gives a damn about preventing infestations of the passionately stupid.

We may not be able to accomplish that, but a fuck is officially given to that end.

Uh, not literally a fuck, because that would be a completely different sort of game. But the point remains, I hope (in the grip of sleep dep of epic proportions).

The folks on Reno are pretty much pure awesome, and I would be evangelizing a lot more if I felt like watching it all go to hell over someone who can't not treat the drama llama like an epic mount.

Quietly so. Not something I really discuss, 'cause stalker issues are a thing. I tend not to talk about where I play here until I'm gone.

It isn't that I don't 99% of you. It's the 1% that enjoys turning my life into a cavalcade of chaotic stress and bullshit I try to steer clear of. (RL is a giant ball of messy thing right now in big ways, so it'd be a really not good time to add to the nnnngh factor.)