Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

This is probably a sign of the times but MUDs seemed pretty...not exactly mainstream, but widely known in computing circles in the late 90s/early 00s when I started playing. They were one of the first things I stumbled on when searching very generally for online games as a teenager and were actually covered (very briefly) in a 100-level computer science course I took as a freshman in college. I was drawn to RPGs and the writing part more than the hack and slash part, so me finding MUs at that time seems kind of inevitable.

ETA: I stay because nothing else scratches the same RP fix and, for all my old friends who've cycled out, I meet new fun folks with decent regularity.

I love the book enough that I've watched the entirety of the terrible, TERRIBLE TV movie version from 1980.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEczZOWJ7jU

All on Youtube for our...err...enjoyment.

@coin
Yeah, I'm usually of the same mind about treating the movie version of something as a divorced entity. I just couldn't get there in this case. Or I didn't so much want a "correct" take on the book as an entirely different approach to adapting it. Idk. I feel like I could write a deeply undergrad-y paper on my reaction to it in terms of what audiences bring to movies for good or ill, even if ultimately I wasn't much beyond, "I guess that was pretty OK" with it as a product. Storm Reid was aces, though, and I hope she gets big things out of it.

I also feel like game culture varies pretty drastically, particularly between subgenres (WoD vs the players that populated the BSG games I was on for a long time vs the L&L crowd vs the Pern crowd that used to be bigger...etc). Certain types of RP are common in one that seem like a fucking revelation in another. That letter to Blizzard has some universal components to it but you wouldn't write the same one to Nintendo or Bioware. I feel like the same applies, only moreso, because MUs have more abstract goals bottomline than the kind of focus a corporation needs to have.

This thread didn't start off too bad, honestly. Though it's definitely degraded beyond the point of constructive.

I mean the first Season of Buffy I think is legit bad TV in places. There are reasons for this. Whedon had never run a show before and as I understand it wasn't doing the level of writing that became the norm later, the budgetary limitations weren't managed as well (not that they ever got GREAT but I think they learned to work better within the limitations), it was a shortened season, etc. I think it's an example of a show figuring itself out in interesting ways but those first eps are pretty rough.

ETA: also yeah I just kind of CANNOT EVEN with Xander on rewatch, though 'The Zeppo' all by itself justifies his existence.

What I've wondered about lately, probably more than I wonder about any MUSH-related thing, is if this is actually getting worse. I swear, five years ago it was not as hard as it is today to find people who do shit to play with, and I don't feel like it's strictly a matter of more activity/more games back in the day. Or maybe my rose-colored nostalgia glasses are just getting bigger. I don't know. It frustrates me more than anything else about this hobby.

I actually have read some of the OR forum. It doesn't particularly appeal to me (the person who thought the Rape Enthusiasts thread was the height of pushing-the-envelope humor did not make me want to go back often, but so it goes). I don't h8 it on principle. It doesn't have a ton of content that interests me at the moment (a lot of the threads are things that've been discussed twenty times on boards like this over the decades, same with the articles), but maybe that'll change. I like the idea of text-based gaming enthusiasts doing stuff, very generally, even if I'm meh on some of that stuff.

@rinel said in Who are you?:

The law market is still incredibly saturated from the 2008 financial disaster, and getting jobs in lucrative and/or rare positions remains difficult.

The thing that convinced me not to go to law school was my stint as a temp in the financial industry in 2010-2011ish, after my full-time job had closed up shop and I was between non-contract employment. One of the guys I was temping with had gone to law school after the recession for lack of anything better to do, without clear plans about what he wanted to do with it. He looked at me with this haunted gaze and said DON'T GO TO LAW SCHOOL like he was trying to impart the wisdom of the universe to me.

I gather he is not a unique case.

The MUD sub on reddit gets ok traffic but it's not MUSH specific. Other sources are ancient and poorly maintained.

As the Serenity thread reminded me.

A Firefly MUSH not run by Mal and Inara/broken in many ways would be tops.

@sab
I'm a Poliberto's partisan.

I'm fascinated by the proliferation of 'Bertos for the default name of greasy taco joints for no clear reason. Some of these seem to pre-date Filibertos? IDK, it's a great mystery of life.

My Potato spawns 'work' but they're pretty garbage.

That said I find them basically functional enough to stick with it. I've adapted to the double-input windows to the point where it's hard for me to function without them, and between 256 colors and actual working hyperlinks, this is my life now. I also appreciate that it's at least semi-actively developed and want to support that.

The weekly updates are part of what I was sort of referencing when I said that a lot of the issues @Jeshin seems to be having are, I think, coming from aggressive "sales" tactics. Sales people annoy the hell out of me. They just do. That said, I have done a little studying, back in my media days, of how advertising actually works on the brain. And, sadly, tactics that are annoying as fuck will and do succeed on enough people that the standard sales person considers them entirely worthwhile.

Whether that's the right approach here (reading the earlier pages of this thread compared to the later ones is perhaps instructive in this regard, as I don't think this thread got kinda dumb until later in), idk, but it's advertising.

@sab said in Phoenix, Arizona:

Mesa's Art District is super, super nice, despite always forgetting it exists. There's tons of little specialty shops and street art and exhibits set up in random buildings.

I want to co-sign this because I also always forget it exists except when I go to a show at the Art's Center and am then like 'Oh, this is actually a neat thing that exists in Mesa now.' Major props to the city for investing in it and revitalizing that area.

@BetterNow
This is what I hate about it and I feel like I end up being the one to pose first not-infrequently, just because textual dead-air pushes my anxiety buttons more than opening does. If there's pose order it gives you less to react to/makes it a little harder to play off of what other PCs are doing as the scene rolls along.

Beauty of MU*s is that you can save what you built and maybe reuse it down the line, if you ever get the urge to try again. Doesn't sound like too many bridges were burned, which ain't bad for a game.

@ZombieGenesis said in Dead Celebrities 2019:

I was never a fan but the dude was the epitome of cool when I was a teenager. Luke Perry

Oh man he was so good on Riverdale.

I always enjoyed him as an actor even when the material was lulz. His work on Oz was gr8.

@Joyeuse said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Also a thought: advertising? Are any MU advertised outside of communities that are already heavy into MU*ing?

I see ads for places on the Reddit mud sub not-infrequently but it's a very different and seemingly MUD-centric crowd.

There's a ton of debate on these issues within the MUSH community (whether and what staff should play, how common PC death should be, how combat should be setup and how to automate it/simplify it, etc,), and you'll find tons of games that have implemented them differently. I suspect searching this very site would provide you with many threads where whether or not staff should play on their games is discussed (I think they should, with limits on position, but not everyone thinks that and I'm not shocked fellow MUSHers don't agree with me on all things). It's not a monolith, just like I don't think anyone who's played RPIs would say they're overly monolithic, either (that's the impression from players of them not affiliated with OR who've commented in this thread, at least).