Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@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.

@ninjakitten said in Poll: Are MU* video games?:

By my lights, they're games, but no, they're not video games. Computer games, I'd say yes -- like the old Infocom-style text adventures, which are also computer games but not video games IMO, but which also fit into more of the definitions of 'game' than a MU* does. Online games, certainly -- you could still argue 'game', but 'online' is pretty definite.

This is kind of where I'm at, though I think it's a really fine line. They meet some pedantic definitions of "video games" but I feel like only in the sense of "all computer games are video games."

My initial reaction is 'No' but it gets more complicated if you're grouping MUSHes in the same category as MUDs, some of which have graphical capabilities, or even something like Storium if you're ruling out non-narrative games. There's a Venn diagram that encompasses all these things and I don't think the straight-up MUSH circle overlaps with the straight-up video game circle, but they have overlapping cousins.

I also talk about them as interactive stories or something comparable to an online tabletop game when interfacing with the norms, though.

There are more decent-looking games I want to play than I have time and brain for them. It's a great 'problem' to have.

@tinuviel
I think this is a great point, though maybe one for another thread. A lot of it depends on player temperament. I'm someone who just likes the idea that I'm telling a story that'll have an end, and that's probably mostly due to positive experiences with close-ended projects. I'm coming off involvement in an alpha-testing phase of a game a friend of mine ran as a live campaign, and it's been incredibly rewarding to play largely because it was compressed character development that I knew would have a pay-off of some kind. It sucks to come in during the middle of end of something like that, though, and short, tight campaigns are bad if you're idle for even a week, so it has its pros and cons.

@mietze said in How would you format a log for publishing?:

However, I would never play on a mush that would take my writing pieces and then publish them to make money for someone else and that would give the rights away in that format to a third party publisher. I am not knocking people that would. However, because I do write for my own pleasure, and sometimes elements of what I'm writing influence my RP or vice versa, I would not want the challenges/entanglements should I ever get up the guts to seek to publish any of my personal work in the future.

Yeah, I'll admit my first reaction to this is 'god there are a billion rights issues once you involve money and publishing beyond a game site that I would never, ever want to touch, including informing all players and staffers upfront of what you wanted to do and getting their permission' etc etc.

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.

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

It's free.

I don't know if this is what keeps me on MUs but it's definitely the reason I never got sucked into MMOs.

As for MUs, I enjoy the dynamism you get in real-time rp and the persistent, shared environment. For text I still don't think anything does what this style of game does as well.

@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Without answering that, the prestige list will not matter to people, and houses will go back to "no, you can't have money for clothes or jewelry, we need to keep the funds for weaponry" (which is what happened before).

Can't staff make it clear this isn't cool and punish people who do it when they are reported?

ETA: I'm a person who thinks that the org head who spends their House's entire income on refining their personal weapon should face social consequences and be considered a bad ruler. Maybe I'm mean.

@sparks
I can only speak for myself but the amount I care about prestige and the players who are loud about it is...comments that belong in the Hogpit about my fellow players. So oh well.

I'd like it to be balanced and to not be tied particularly closely to House stuff like income, but am deeply...feelings about my fellow players that belong in the Hogpit...over work on it replacing fun story things.

@apos
Whenever I've seen staff talk about their intentions behind a system, you guys do seem to be putting these things out with the hope they'll foster rp/story rather than ooc casino grinding. I appreciate that and it's what makes me continue to engage with the game, even though I'm a player who prefers more lightly-coded environments. I am super curious how domain is going to be balanced/what steps you guys have in mind to keep it from being a deep dive into accounting for any minister position, but it shall be what it shall be.

@pyrephox
Yeah, work is leaps and bounds better than the old task system, which felt like it actively abused RP, so I don't want to complain. There's also really no other way to buy yourself things if you aren't rolling in crafter riches/deeply invested in the haggling system. Still, I eye it with a thoughtful and perturbed expression for what it might do down the line when domains are live.

I don't concern myself much with the Arx economy because it seems so ephemeral right now, and I kind of expect MU/MMO economies to be bloated and broken to some degree. I am kinda eyeing it apprehensively with an eye to how it'll impact whatever domain systems are put into place, though. Is your House going to be impoverished and your peasants miserable because you aren't sufficiently grinding the mini-game? I doubt it, as that's not the ooc mentality I've encountered from staff, but I feel a little guilty on the weeks I can't invest grind on my noble as it is, with the impacts as only what they are.

Co-sign the love for Unbreakable. I think it wasn't what people expected after Sixth Sense but is a really good film. It bought me years of goodwill that didn't totally die until The Happening. I'm stoked for Glass.

@scar
I mean, I've frozen myself out of plots that involved people I simply did not enjoy RPing with. Which isn't great, but I feel like it's all I could've done in those situations. Harmed no one. Not even me. There were other plots, I was a happier person, life went on. Faction heads and staffers have different considerations. Ideally, there's someone they can delegate to as a pressure valve, but it's incumbent on the game environment to make that work.

@mietze said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

2. you do not need to give your same time commitment to people you dislike as you do with people you do like, and in fact if you try to do this you are probably going to end up being needlessly mean or impatient with them because nobody hides their genuine dislike of someone as well as they think they do

I feel like this is big. It's OK to just not enjoy dealing with someone, make your peace with that internally, and go your own way. I've bent my RP circles a little bit just to be a happier person OOC. This is generally far more pleasant for both people involved, since there is no way dealing with a person that dislikes you is anymore fun than dealing with someone you dislike.

@thenomain
They do so many hard turns that it's tough to gauge how the season's going until the end. I was a bit low on Season 3 comparatively until Jeremy Bearimy. I think they're building toward something really interesting, though. I enjoy it on the level I enjoy a lot of sci-fi series, and the indictment of the afterlife/possibility of tearing it all down fills me with glee.

Heeeeeeeey bebe.

@ganymede said in Good TV:

I hear that the Bad Place has pie.

Also butthole spiders. I'm unsure if this is incentive or not, though.

@sockmonkey
I LOVE THE GOOD PLACE SO MUCH.

It might have supplanted Parks & Rec in my heart, as sacrilege as that is to say.