Posts made by surreality

@ganymede My mother basically lives off the Kool-Aid of the fluffiest of all possible reads of Catholicism.

As an example, one of our biggest arguments in recent years involved her gushing wildly about a martyr. Apparently, said martyr was a princess, and some evil king wanted to marry her. She had 'promised herself to God', however, and even as this dude and his army plowed her country and her people into the dirt and killed many over this, 'isn't she an inspiring role model'.

No. No, she's really not an inspiring role model to me. Gross as it may be, back then, 'is a princess' means she had one job: marry some asshole for a political alliance. "Nah, I'll just let thousands of people I'm responsible for die because I'm way into this Jesus dude," being 'totally cool and inspiring' kinda overlooks those thousands of dead people who didn't get a say in any of this, and that's seriously horrifying to me.

"Well, they died for God!" does not make that shit OK.

She was egregiously offended and defensive that I even noticed the thousands of dead people in this tale, let alone considered them relevant in any way.

That's the level of 'fluff' and denial that's in every one of these convos. It's literally no different from talking to the people I used to know from a LARP group who were 1000% sure about the fairy realm and how they really belonged there, where everything was 'perfect'.

@ganymede Faraday isn't at all -- I'm just agreeing with that chunk of her post 1000%.

A few other folks are discussing the necessity of this, however.

This is so not a peeve, this is real anger.

So help me, I adore my mother, but she drives me crazy. She's well meaning. She is. Her intentions are good.

She just 100% lives for all of her church things in ways that are worrisome. She talks about things she reads in her bible study group and similar in the same way exactly, and with the same passion, as the people I knew back when -- and there was more than one group -- who were convinced they were the reincarnation of King Arthur's Court.

Religion is her escapism. Listening to her talk about it is like listening to the people in this hobby who are far, far too into whatever game they're playing because they can't handle reality for whatever reason. It is deeply upsetting. If she reads it in a book and it's about this or that saint, it's just plain true and such an amazing story! And she sounds like a giddy thirteen year old, not a rational adult.

I have a lot of weird as fuck beliefs. I do. But somehow I manage to keep that shit more or less to myself. I know she doesn't feel the same way about the universe as we know it, so I don't throw it in her face ever. But every conversation with this woman is like Sunday School. It's horrible.

I get it. That's her social circle. That's what she's used to, conversationally. I'm used to talking about MU* theory and yarn and jewelry and seashells. Somehow, I am able to not mention the things on that list she's not interested in around her.

Just, no, Mom. I don't want to hear about the recent adventures of your friend who goes to scream at women entering Planned Parenthood or hear her brag about how she made teenage girls cry with a smug fucking smile. I don't. I think your friend is gross and horrible. Somehow, I manage to keep that to myself, so just... yeesh, enough.

@faraday said in A new platform?:

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

lthough my preference is for something that generally looks like a traditional MUSH client (an input line at the bottom, a main window for poses) with all of the additional UI elements added to it(a Hangouts-like chat list on a retractable sidebar on the right that you can hide, tabs for 'channels', etc) or on demand. Do I want to send you a mail? I right click on your name, pick that from a context menu and do so.

Yeah that all sounds great, but here we run into some practical issues. We want to have a game server that:

• Is easy to install with very little technical experience.
• Is easily extensible for whatever custom systems a game wants to add on.
• Supports a hybrid interface with multiple inputs.
• Has a really kick-butt user interface with all kinds of fancy UI elements.

Many of those goals are mutually-exclusive. The fancier you make something, the more complex it gets. The more moving parts you add, the harder it is to install. And so forth.

I think we have to be a bit realistic with our expectations.

(If only I could upvote something more than once.)

@Ashen-Shugar had a very important point earlier about this also: the kinds of things people are talking about needing and that are somehow and for some reason required so we don't all die oh no are equivalent to things that entire full time paid teams develop over a period of years.

That is not even a little bit realistic. If someone wants to try to take that on, more power to them, but stop stating it as a requirement for anyone to ever be interested in the hobby. It's not.

Again, of course all the people who used to be around all the time when they were in college don't have that kind of time now. Full time jobs and mortgages take precedence to pretendy fun time games for most adults. Maybe it will all go up in smoke when we collectively die. Maybe it'll all see a resurgence when the older farts retire and miss ye olden golden days of pretendy fun time land. Who knows?

Just please stop stating this as a requirement for survival because new college students don't think it's shiny enough or think something else is more fun for them these days. Whatever that thing is will go the same way this has in time. Those people may like some of the same things we do but wouldn't enjoy others, and as a result, the differing community expectations would not suit them at all no matter how many bells and whistles and WYSIWYG buttons and forms and contextual menus are available.

@lotherio It's just really hideous design. There are definitely ways to do something similar that doesn't look like... well, that. It seriously looks like someone just slapped a bunch of different banner ads from the late 90s/early 00s for ninja classes or something onto a page with a text window and just... oh gods, no. There would be classier ways of wrangling such a design that would be slightly less 'hot mess'.

Like, I get people being turned off by the text window if that's the first time they're seeing it, but it's almost the least of that GUI design's sins. (The big ASCII block in the middle of it is simply baffling, for instance.)

@cupcake "It's really amazing, too, you know? It's like there's so much pain, the body says, 'I'm just gonna grow myself some reachy-things so if this happens again, they can just duck in there and yank the lil sucker out right quick!' And that's the real reason we ladyfolk say it's easier the second time around... "

That screenshot is giving my inner design geek hives.

No. No, I think she just ran into a hornet's nest. Full of the angriest of angry hornets. With rabies.

@rizbunz While she and I don't see eye to eye on a great many things, Kanye Quest posted a link to an article (that of course I can't find right now... ) about the power of the phrase 'We don't do that here.'

It's the right answer if you're running the joint and those people show up.

@thenomain said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

oWoD was stronger on the tongue-in-cheek. People didn't like each other's tongue-in-cheek so things got more serious. I think more tongue-in-cheek, as long as it's thematic, would be a very good move.

Seconding this. Part of what I like more about oWoD than nWoD/CoD is its 'sense of fun'. nWoD/CoD's darkness vibes too hard on the soul-crushing depressing drudgery.

In part, I think in trying to make failure an interesting part of the game, they went a bit overboard. This is common; any time something's new and intended to be a point of emphasis, it often ends up as something over the top in a way that goes a little too far. Depression and drudgery aren't interesting RP for me. Failure absolutely can be and very often is. The directions they went shifted the D from Darkness to Don't Bother, There's No Point for me, and with less of the goofy stuff and humor and wackiness, the combination just ends up feeling completely soulless and boringly bleak to me.

@arkandel The mysql password isn't blank on digitalocean.

In the intro message, it has the location of the default password they set up.

You are encouraged to run 'mysql_secure_installation' to ready your server for
production. The passwords for MySQL have been saved to:
/root/.digitalocean_password

^That.

So you can type:
nano /root/.digitalocean_password
...from your root login to the server itself (which is different) to find it.

@packrat It could be worse. Never let a cat near broccoli.

Ancient Cat, when she was a kitten, once leapt up on the table, snarled at us like a mighty lion, while we were all eating Chinese food.

We expected her to snag a piece of beef and run off, which... we just couldn't be mad. Tiny ball of puff, grar!

At which point, she snags a piece of broccoli, narrows her eyes at us, daring us to try to take it away, growls again, and hops down to eat it.

Repeat this two more times as we're dying with laughter.

Oh, we were so wrong to laugh. So very wrong.

Little did we know our darling puff was preparing a chemical weapon the Geneva convention surely outlaws by now. My gods, nothing is more horrifying than kitten broccoli gas, no matter how goddamned adorable seeing a teensyflouf steal broccoli is. (And it is pretty goddamned adorable, I have to say.)

My roommates and I had to flee the house for air more than once over the next three days, so help me gods.

@bored said in A new platform?:

I think the 'the syntax has to be completely the same or the oldbies will rebel' is... exaggeration by the oldies for the sake of hating change (like most people do). Push come to shove, I do think people will play where they can play, so long as its achieving the functionality they desire.

Seconding this. As it stands, with almost nothing 'standardized' across the board, we're already accustomed to having to learn a thing or three with each new game we try. It's not that fundamentally different in many respects.

I'm another of those people that'd find it weird to click a link in a browser window vs. type a command, but really, it's not the end of the world.

@jennkryst That one isn't as easy to solve, since not all games have a uniform list of what they need.

@cupcake said in RL Anger:

Apparently he also asked another pregnant lady, "Do pregnant women use hormones as an excuse to be dramatic?" some time ago.

"Some might, but it's hard to imagine it's anywhere near the number of people that use a woman's pregnancy as an excuse to ask her rude, absurd, invasive, and disgustingly stupid questions."

(I work from home for a reason.)

Completely random, but: it occurred to me that a potentially fun idea for a short-term game 'over all theme' would be something like... 'changing channels'. Completely different setting and story every so often, but with the same 'cast'.

Could be done in a self-aware fashion as 'this same group of people ends up roving around Sliders style', or in an 'ensemble cast' style, in which the basic look and feel of a character persists, but it's more the way an actor might take a different role for each iteration of a series. (Think 'American Horror Story' and similar.) For the latter, a list of available roles could be posted in advance and claimed, etc. by the 'cast' through whatever mechanism people want to use.

The latter could potentially be weirdly fun. Be someone's teacher in one season, their mother in the next, their employee in the next, their commanding officer in the next, and so on, while keeping some core traits and story elements in each scenario, or evolving through some of them.

My inner improv geek would find it fun, anyway, and if a certain season or theme doesn't appeal to someone, they can wait for the next to come along, etc.

@packrat Double d'awww! I have always had pairs, and almost always there's 'the dignified one and the derpy one', and somehow, that's just so completely awesome. Our giant flurfmonster is our derpcat to end all derpcats, but we love our derpcat a lot. (We now sorta have 'the whiny one and the derpy one'. Our dignified one was Ancient Cat.)

@packrat D'awwwwww. So much personality in that pic, too.

"I am a noble, wise, and dignified creature."
"Heeeeyyyyyy, what's dignified meeeeeeannnnnnnnnnnnnn? (Love me!) Hiiiiiiii... "

Completely adorable.

@admiral I don't own this house to have final say, or I'd consider it again. (Once Spider did $25k damage, well, "NO WAY IN HELL!" became a thing for anyone they also haven't known personally for more than a year.)

Sadly, at this point we really don't have space. 22+ years of two art packrats living in the same small house (about the size of a small two bedroom townhouse or decent sized 2br apartment) with my 'job' workspace thrown in sorta fucks everything up re: anything resembling a sane floorplan.

@auspice This is what always gave me the hives whenever my folks would gripe about me allowing other people to stay here. (Pre-Spider, nobody had ever done any damage or harm. After Spider? Yeah, I get the reluctance.)

While they're the most Fox News watchin'-est pair imaginable -- literally all day every day -- they go on often and at length about 'Catholic virtues of charity'. (Unless it might benefit somebody not white or straight or also Christian, but... <pained sigh to end all pained sighs>)

They finally shut up (until Spider) with: "I don't have cash to give, but I have space to spare, and I know people who need it, so get over it."

We've had folks moving cross-country looking for work and new homes, we've had someone fleeing an abusive marriage and a looking to start a new life, we've had people thrown out by their own families for reasons of different faiths or coming out as bi or recovering from a permanent injury -- the list goes on. Some folks brought people I barely knew or never knew before, so that crowd does include total strangers.

As a result, I just can't get the NIMBY attitude, since we've even had people crashing in the B that stands for Bedroom sometimes, not Back Yard.

@auspice said in The Makeup Thread:

Are they really worth it?

FUCK YES.

(And I am a broke-ass idjit.)

The pair I have now replaced an older pair... but I've had these for 7+ years now, and they're the needle-nose tiny points type. They replaced another pair I'd also had for years. (Someone else used them to unwedge an ingrown hair -- without permission or even asking, no less. I'm sorry, but fucking hell no motherfucker, those things were instantly dead to me, and I'm queasy just thinking about whatever of my eyebrow germs they impaled themselves with, gods-know-where. <turns a vivid shade of green>)

I have way too much Italian ancestry to not use them regularly, either, so it's not like they just sit somewhere gathering dust for months at a time. They're good, solid, though eyeball the little sleeve thing real closely, because I did once encounter a pair that weren't perfectly aligned, and they tended to nip off/snap a hair rather than pluck it.

Have had their needle nose, flat nose, and angled varieties over the years for various things and splurged on a travel set I <3'd them so very much.