Posts made by surreality

If you get one of their smaller bottles of base -- you can use gloss or matte, it just has to be one of the clear ones -- and put about 2 teaspoons of the Martha Stewart glitter in it, you're mostly done. (You may need to pour off a small amount of the base into another container, depends on how full the bottle is.)

It's just that that mix needs to sit for a few months to bleed like whoa. It'll come out as a glazy mucky grey with flecks of glitter in opaque black and weird greenish-orange clear, and it will look horrible and scary -- but that's exactly what you want.

All you do when it reaches that point is squirt some of the holo liquid into the bottle. You need less of it than you'll think. It'll give you enough to last the rest of your life (or as gifts for friends, since that's way more than a bottle's worth).

It won't be completely opaque, but if you put it over a single basecoat of black (even a normally streaky black), it will be.

I ended up getting a pyrex measuring cup to use to mix, since they're easy to clean, and a 'paint stirrer' for model paint that's essentially for mixing up paints in the tiny glass bottles miniature painters use. The upside to that is that you can use it to stick right into their base bottles to mix in-bottle, too, if you're not getting too crazy with it. Bonus: they're cheap and fast! I usually just use the pyrex if I need to mix a variety of pigments first/also.

I'm sometimes bad, though -- I also have picked up some glitters designed for custom car mods that work. They're one of the only other solvent-resistant glitters around. It's just sold as 'metal flake' when it is... glitter. Seriously, it's glitter. It's exactly glitter.

They can't say they're safe for cosmetics because technically speaking, by law, NO glitter is in the US. Even though it's everywhere, in everything. (It's a long-winded bag of bull about particle size, and why some companies tell people to never use glitter around their eyes because that's the actual relevant risk.)

If I can find the link to the place on ebay I used to nab those from in small quantities, I'll pass it along. There's a few good solvent-resistant glitter vendors on etsy, too.

Most glitter just melts and bleeds dye into the solution. I got a bunch of tester bottles and dropped some base and some of the various crafty ones I had around to check, and pretty much all of them bled. I let them sit for six months and reviewed, and yep... bleed. Though some bled in a way that made a really nice tint with silver glitter, so if you're willing to experiment, some of those can be potentially useful, too, if you don't mind the soak-and-bleed time. (There was a black like that from Martha Stewart -- it's a black and greenish sparkle -- that mixed amazingly with the holo, for instance for a black rainbow.)

You'd probably want to add 'private' and 'invite-only' to the list, for things like the family events or private scenes somebody needs to schedule and keep the reminders for.

I always found the 'private events' going up on the event board to be in slightly poor taste, but I understand their purpose and there seemed to be plenty of them.

Being me, I'd probably use the heck out of a 'humor' or 'comedy' or 'campy' tag.

'competition' might be a good one for the general category, also. It could cover anything from beauty pageants to jousts.

THB Trading -- http://www.tkbtrading.com/ (safe link, I swear!) There are a couple of other sites as well, but that one had the best selection, IMHO.

Beware, though. That site is dangerously easy to spend a fortune on. They even have holo mixers.

EVIL, I tell you. EVIL.

The 'travel to... ' pigments are the chameleons. Not cheap, but oooooh, shiny.

...dammit, they have flakies now. facepalm I had to look, I just had to, and... siiiiigh.

@BetterJudgment said:

I like big, well-written grids with places that are described as actual places. I even like grids whose rooms have hidden exits and are intentionally linked in ways that turn them into mazes. However, the only places I've seen with grids like that are ones that have been around more than a decade.

I started out on a place like that, and still really enjoy that grid style, also.

I keep pondering if there's some means of assembling a grid that combines that with hub area rooms for the ease factor, but I have the horrible, sinking feeling that it's the kind of thing that would require kicking it around on a server to accomplish, since it can be harder to plot that out effectively on paper.

@Darinelle said:

Don't get me started on nail polish. Srsly.

...thirded. I even got the stuff to mix custom colors, and blew an entire paycheck on chameleon pigments to that end once. Nail polish is a serious addiction.

@HelloRaptor said:

@surreality said:

A series that is funny, and almost no one has heard of: Ghost Stories.

There's a catch, though: you have to watch the dub,

Does not compute.

I understand what you're saying, but I've yet to hear more than a couple of English voice actors for anime who haven't made me want to drill into my ears to make it stop.

It's totally unwatchable as itself. It's just that dry boring horrible.

It's the improv and insanity that makes it a thing of hilarious beauty.

@Coin said:

@surreality
Can you point a foreign pirate in the vague direction of where he may find this particular booty, lass?

I'm not sure where to find it now -- the roomie got a pile of promo discs of it to show at an anime room -- but I'll ask him when he's back home. He'll definitely know. Netflix has it, though they're apparently missing one of the discs.

A series that is funny, and almost no one has heard of: Ghost Stories.

There's a catch, though: you have to watch the dub, and you have to have your political correctness switch turned very securely off. The disclaimers get increasingly insane, and they even worked additional weirdness into one of the English subtitle tracks.

This is a short series that came with a package of other titles when the distributors picked up a pile of things from some studio or another, and it's garbage on its own, as written. Garbage enough they simply handed it off to the voice actors and shrugged and let them do more or less whatever they wanted with it. (Not guessing, this was actually confirmed by someone the roomie knows who worked on the project.)

It's a pretty glorious pile of WTF that feels like most of it was given a 'What's Up, Tiger Lily?' treatment by a group of voice actors jotting down ideas on bar napkins, and that's more or less exactly what it is.

Not screenshot, but really?

YOU THINK YOUR CHARACTER IS COOL? MY CHARACTER IS A FUCKING
FUSSY TIEFLING SORCERER FROM A SLAVE OWNING CITY WHO HATES TO BE TOUCHED
THAT SOUNDS FUCKING TERRIBLE

...I totally know where I can play that! Everyone, quickly! To Shang!

Edit: Wait, wait... I have actually met this one there, I think. Lots of this one.

SOULLESS TIEFLING DRUID FROM AN AFFLUENT UPBRINGING WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF POLITENESS

@silentsophia said:

Yeah, I love both versions. I'm doing the half hat to get used to wrangling the angry porcupine (double pointed needles). I'm using Cascade Sunseeker yarn for it (Deep blue with darkish/anglerfish green sparkles). The patterns are free, unless you want to donate to charity.

That hat is a joy.

Sadly, it doesn't look like it would convert to magic loop well; I've been alternately stabbing myself in the hands porcupine wrestling and flopping cords all over the desk trying to learn socks. I empathize with the self-stabbing.

...this would be so much easier if my feet were not apparently mutant feet.

(Speaking of which, someone convinced me I have to learn needle felting this year because it's essentially 'creative stabbing'. This sounds bizarre and wonderful.)

@Thenomain said:

Again, what do we do? Almost all of this is cultural to Mu*ers. I think the most important thing is that we're aware of it, that we encourage the "character first" mentality you're espousing, Sess, and kindly dissuade the "game mechanics first". WoD is not designed for the latter. It says it's not designed for the latter. It's said it's not designed for the latter since the first printing of the first Vampire book.

Maybe it's just less fun to follow some of those rules.

I would say yes and no on this one. The game also steers people very hard to combat-centric characters, or at least those very capable of violence in some form.

Even things like crafters for mystical objects? The 'best' or most potent sources of power for them, thematically, in WoD are all tied to violence and negativity, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense for the object itself. (Not all objects are weapons, after all -- you're going to get a magic healing widget powered up in theme faster from some relatively mundane horror show than you are from the surgeon's kit that saved thousands of lives in a crisis.) It's a built-in bit of conceptual railroading, from my perspective, in ways 'it's a dark world' doesn't cover well enough to pass a laugh test; one would imagine that the most powerful lights in a dark world would have equal strength (if not greater, being so rare) but thematically, they do not and cannot.

To even make a character focused in those areas, you either need to be a badass yourself, or surround yourself with them to get those things for you. It skews things up somewhat, to say the least.

@Thenomain said:

I think, @surreality (& others), my question in response to those is: Whose responsibility is it that your character be useful in a scene? A lot of people take it upon themselves to make sure that their character is useful for the game, though they still want to role-play a character with different traits.

I think this is why you ultimately get two things: First, the people who cripple their socials and mentals for combat, then still play as if they have high social and mental stats (which is rightly called 'cheating', really). The second is 'we need ridiculous levels of XP' because people want not just to be able to do things, but to be able to do all the things, and do all the things well.

In today's PrP-Driven scenarios, where is there a place for a dwarf who works at Baskin Robbins and takes care of his invalid mother? Where in WoD does it tell you that it's okay for your Eternal Spring 2 (Heal Everyone) to be powered by a mere Medicine 2? Would your average Mu*er go to you, or go to Tammy Twinkery who tho her character concept is "flower girl" has Medicine 5?

I think the answer is actually simpler: if you can explain and justify the why, stat what you can effectively for what you want to be and what you want to do. To address @Bennie as well, there's nothing especially 'pure RPer' or 'pure Rules Lawyer' about it, from my perspective. It could be argued that the 'pure RPer' isn't bothering to flesh out their mental and social stats because 'I'm just going to RP that, not roll it' as much as the 'pure RPer' in the example would stat up the things they RP without dice and then have no points left over for physical stats, for instance. The 'pure Rules Lawyer' may argue that you can't RP being charming when you have manipulation 1 on your sheet as easily as they might insist that 'who cares how you got Manipulation 4, you totally need that to use PowerX really well, so buy it.' Most players are a mix of most of those things, really.

Use specialties, and use them a lot, if that healer flower girl's medical skills are not broad-based, but uniquely tied to that one permutation of 'medicine' that comes from using that power. It's a realistic reflection of the circumstance: she doesn't know All The Things about medicine, but she may know the ins-and-outs and conditionals of using that application of it like the back of her hand, and there's a way to reflect this in the stats without needing medicine 5/intelligence 5. When there's a mechanism to do this that doesn't require the huge core stats, it also means there's less XP required to effectively create that more realistic character build. On games that don't allow or limit spec stacking, you'll see more XP bloat desired because the stats have to go up instead; sadly you can't exactly put it in place later in the game once the bloat occurs, because then people will just do both to an unintended extreme.

Also, the 'bestest baker of cakes' (old example that serves well in this case) might suck in a fight, but their skills are, realistically speaking, survival skills in an abstract sense. When you see a zombie going after that guy who made you the best birthday cake ever vs. a random stranger, you're probably going to remember that chocolately goodness and come to the baker's aid faster. Weird, roundabout, but still realistic in that on some level, we're selfish creatures: we like baker dude more than we like random stranger. (Swap out 'somebody we're screwing' for the baker, and it becomes more obvious, it just needn't be the actual case.)

Also, if going for a 'less obviously useful' character type: if you're going to show up for a plot that doesn't involve your specific skills, you must think creatively. 'I'm going to gun the engine and ram it with my car', 'While they investigate the trap in the tomb, I'm going to see if there are spirits in the area and ask them if they've seen anything strange or know how to disarm the traps', etc. Sometimes, there's not a lot you can effectively do. Sometimes, 'run away' is a real option! It's entirely valid. It adds story to the scene if nothing else, and while some folks won't enjoy that, others will. Just let the ST know in advance, if they're limiting player quantity in the scene especially: "I'm not a fighter, Joe the Baker might just run for it if it looks too hairy, but I'd like to be there to become involved with the plot this scene is a part of in whatever way I can, even if that means having seen what horrors my buddies faced and making them a good meal after the fight to get their strength back up and talk with them about what happened as everyone gathers their thoughts after the conflict." Depending on the game, that can be a real niche for a character to fill.

I have no answer, but the waters are very muddy, and the games we play tend to force us to have the maximum stat for our power stat possible. Maybe if WoD wasn't designed to do that, or if we didn't have XP coming out of the ground in fountains.

My general impression is that the scale is not quite what or where it was intended to be. While I'm the worst person to comment on anybody else's math, HR's point about what WW pegs as their 'professional' level of a skill (3) always seemed off to me, generally for the reason cited: the chances of success at that 'professional' level wouldn't keep an actual professional in their job for very long in the real world. I'd call 3 'apprentice', 4 'professional', and 5 'expert' -- but that's just me. It's a small scale that needs to cover a very broad range, which in itself is difficult and limiting.

@HelloRaptor said:

Towards the main topic, I'd generally prefer that peoples sheets are maximized to describe the character they want to play, wherever on the scale of ability that falls. I can handle folks who want to be the best at everything, or the best at what they do, etc. What infuriates me are folks who can't be bothered to play with the system enough to be as good at the things their character does as they think they should be, and then complain, because they don't feel like they should 'have to min-max', when in truth they just don't feel like they should have to learn the system at all, just put dots where they fit their imagination and POOF it should all work out.

"Medicine 3 implies a 'Professional level of skill' but my character isn't a preofessional, so I'll only take 1 or 2, but WAH why am I reliably rolling for shit on Medicine rolls, it's so unfair!"

Pretty much this.

I end up useless in a whole lot of events and PrPs because the characters I make tend to reflect what they actually do -- which means a lot of dancers and artists and sometimes a medic or occultist of some sort. The medics and occultists are almost useful and naturally I seem to play them them least often, because I'm a derp like that. The rest? Yeeeeeeeah, not so good in a fight. But at least it's honestly what I planned to make at the time, even if that character isn't the most useful character in combat, and if I'm playing them as what they actually are, I'm having the fun I want to have and all's well.

Why do I get the impression the price of malpractice insurance in WoD with their 'professional level of skill' is even scarier than it is in the real world? Because... yeah.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

But on the positive, thank god there are no emoticons!

We have an emoticon for a love hotel now, apparently.

I'm calmly waiting for the day it's relevant, because some day, knowing this crowd (collectively, generically, maybe both), it will be.

It may even be the kind of thing that stands with no other comment necessary, if another Shang drama thread kicks off some day!

A girl can dream!

He was Kin on TR, who had formerly been 'Decados'. Supposedly he used that name a variety of places, if it sparks any other recollections.

I know I heard a lot of horror stories flowing in about similar "BE PREGGERS PLZ!" requests from other chicks on TR in pages once people figured out who I was there, so I'm pretty sure there are other stories out there.

eyetic This was the dude who got hyper-possessive (after being told there would be no relationship or TS, full stop) of a character of mine on TR.

Then asked me if maybe could she please just be pregnant? He was told hell no, not ever.

Then he went on to try to force-feed her a dinner he made until she had a mock-pregnancy belly from overeating to satisfy the above fetish he'd been told NO to in a different fashion.

He was very clingy OOC, was pretty invasive, and kept pushing for things long after being told it was never going to happen, IC and OOC.

He always had endless disasters because his life was so traumatic, for which he was obviously trolling for pity and attention.

He always had a list of increasingly improbable accomplishments -- from working in porn (god, why would anyone even care?!) to random crazy ninja shit -- for which he was obviously trolling for admiration and attention.

@October said:

I may as well list all the crafts I DONT do rather than do, but school and moving has are my face so it's all boxed up.

...this. So much this. My house is art supplies holding hands. Seriously. There is an antique four-harness loom on the porch the size of a four-poster queen bed that no one has touched in 20 years but by gods, we have one.

I knit (passably).
I crochet (badly).
I dye yarn (now professionally, apparently... nothing like a job you didn't expect to have three weeks before you had it and RL giving you dots in a mentor who is surprisingly kickass and wouldn't be out of place in WoD for a second).

I went to college for costume design and can sew, make patterns, and do a disturbing number of techniques of surface embellishment when I can be bothered to touch any of it at all. (And if I can ever be bothered to sew these days, I can be bothered to embellish.)

I bead like a crazy person. Branched fringe and 15/0s all over the place. I may or may not have actually started salivating while on vacation and I found a shop with anodized titanium-plated hematite; you weren't there, you can't prove it! Nobody saw that!

I used to draw/watercolor/pen&ink passably well, but haven't touched it in so long because...
...I love to dick around in photoshop too much, and for a while have been doing skins for 3D models. That's been slacking over the past year because my house has been eaten by yarn and skein winders. (If you ever wondered if THAT bitchy surreality is THIS bitchy surreality, the answer is... uh, yes, actually, since I know some of y'all seem to use the software it's all designed for.)

All of this was still totally OK because 'I don't spin' because it's not insanity until then, we're all safe because see there's a still thing nobody in the family does yet...
...until about a year ago, when I started spinning. There's usually a little motorized spinning 'wheel'/machine about the size of a toaster on the desk. I spin between poses at times and people now get to think that is a euphemism instead of the knitting between poses.

@Chime said:

Mushers being mushers, I suspect that making it legal, accepted, and normal would probably decrease the amount of wolf-on-wolf TS.

There's a "when nothing is furbidden... " joke to be made here, but pretty much that.

Their reasons for changing it were sound, and it's something I support wholeheartedly, whether it results in more wolf-on-wolf action or not.

Personally, I can't really be bothered to care about anybody else's TS, so rules that make it less likely that anyone is supposed to stress about this on some thematic level? Pretty huge boon to werespheres everywhere, player and staff.