Tempe really was awesome. We have to stay in Vegas for work and we love it, but we miss Tempe a lot. Shame it's gentrifying, it had a great vibe and affordability.
If you can buy, this is a good time. I could get a decent condo for something in the $150k range, in the area where I want to live. Given the way the area's going, I feel like I need to do it within the next couple of years, though. I am saving toward a down payment!
@Thenomain AGREED.
Here in Az, the area around Arizona State University in Tempe used to have affordable apartments ($800/mo for a 2BR around 2005) around the campus. Since then, those apartments have all been bought out and replaced.
Thst's a shame. I lived about a block behind Mill because it was actually affordable for a young couple to rent there, unlike Mesa, and there was always something to do even if you were mostly broke.
I'm in Tempe still. Which I love, but it's a different world than when I was going to ASU back in early 00s. I live far enough off the college area that my rent isn't crushing, but it keeps creeping up year by year. I'm trying to save up enough to buy just because, at this point, a mortgage on a decent condo would not be more money than I'm paying in rent each month (and might actually save me bank in a year or two the way things are going). Also, I might as well buy now, because even if I work outside the area I'll clearly never permanently LEAVE (I moved back 'for awhile' like 10 years ago). I need to accept that I cannot quit you, Tempe.
FTL: Faster Than Light has an Ipad/Iphone version. Which I've never played, not being an Apple person, but I hear good things. It's also an A+ time-waster on a laptop and can be played with touchpad decently.
ABC's new version of Dirty Dancing was a complete piece of unnecessary eat my shit pie, but I'm also doubly irritated that they white-washed the Housemans and the Kellermans into painfully WASP-y versions of themselves.
Wait.
Is replacing white actors with white actors whitewashing now?
The movie paid a decent amount of service to the characters actually being Jewish, which...I am super unclear if they are on the show (and it is bad so I won't continue to watch it). I don't know if the term for that is white-washing or not, but I did notice it.
If you want a single-focus game, you have to be pretty hardcore about telling players to app within that focus (I have learned this lesson from frustrating past experience). I personally don't see this as limiting. It's being clear about the kind of stories you'd like to tell and what you'd like to provide for players. I don't actually like games that try to be ALL THE THINGS and, unless they have a huge playerbase, I feel like that attitude becomes self-defeating.
@The-Sands said in State of Things:
@ArmedCarp said in State of Things:
@Three-Eyed-Crow Hold up... there are Indians, honest to God ones from India, living on Indian reservations in America, like Native Americans?
No (well, maybe a few but not enough to be statistically significant in any sense) but what happens is that that image occurs in both locations.
There actually were random Sikh golf course developers there doing various projects while I was working in those parts (oh, Parker, Arizona. At random times, I miss you). But, yeah, I meant that the image is found commonly in both places (and in East Asia, which I had less awareness of).
@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:
I can't really understand the mindset of like, I don't know, just doing a lot of poisonous shit and then just not feeling bad about it.
I can't either, but people like this certainly exist. My grandmother's what I can only call a sociopath (I understand this is a term that's really hard to use clinically, but there is no other word for it). I'm not using this term hyperbolically. She is a person who seems entirely lacking in empathy and who is consistently toxic and emotionally abusive to everyone in our family, while expecting them to cater to anything she might want at a given moment. It's never enough, and it will never change. I'm thankfully removed enough from her that my contact with her has been minimal, but the destructive impact she's had on my mother's life and the lives of her siblings is pretty staggering if you were to step back and dissect it. These people don't "get better" and there's no way to deal with them except cutting off contact where possible (in our family, it isn't at this point, so we manage it to as much of a degree as it can be managed).
These people are also exceeding rare and I think it's really important to draw a distinction between consistently destructive personalities and people who...I don't know, just did stupid shit and were assholes about something. I've done stupid shit and been an asshole on occasion, I'm sure. Most days, though, I think I'm OK. Most of the people I meet through these games are pretty OK most days, even if on some days they're lulzy and dumb, or have problems that make them tough to deal with for a little while. It takes a lot for me to totally cut somebody off, and I don't think random assholery is really what cases like VASpider and Custodius are about.
@juke said in Good writin'.:
I don't wanna derail this conversation because I eat this kind of discussion up honestly, but I was sorta hoping some people might have a few game names to toss out based on their own personal, subjective thoughts about solid writing, cos' I have a mighty hankering to find one.
You might have more luck with this if you show us a pose or log you think is well-written. There may be a pose somewhere all of us will objectively think is good, but I sure as hell can't think of what it'd be. I consistently have scenes on Arx and BSU (the only two games I'm active on at the moment) which I think are "good," or I wouldn't continue to play there. But that means nothing beyond that I subjectively had fun for a few hours one time, and to me it's more about engagement with other players and how our characters click than the prose itself (I know lots of perfectly good fiction writers who I consider terrible RPers. I view them as different skill-sets). But games culturally do encourage certain styles, and if there's a style you like, it'd be easier to present examples.
At a certain point, you need to own your shit. These are, for better or worse, social games, and how you treat other players matters. If you consistently manipulate people, emotionally abuse them OOC, cheat, and lie, I am not going to have time for you in my pretendy funtime hobby. I do not see how this is mean. I do not see how this is unfair. I am perfectly willing to give people second chances if they show long-term evidence they have changed and own up to their mistakes. I 100% believe people can change, but I also 100% believe real internal change is about the hardest thing a person can do. It takes brutal emotional inventory that most people do not want to sit down and do. So I'll forgive readily, forget nothing, and take people as I find them, but with the full understanding that sometimes you find very shitty people.
@Auspice said in Identifying Major Issues:
However, I had a class that went in depth on studying the whole 'Digital Immigrant' vs 'Digital Native' and there's a sort of 'Bridge' Generation between the two as well, which is where I think I fall. Most true Millennials just sort of accept a lot more (like spam mail) than the rest of us. And then you get the even younger kids (think the toddlers) who just expect every 'screen' to be a touch screen now. It's wild shit.
I really enjoyed the first Serial podcast in large part because so much of that murder investigation hinged on 'Bridge' generation tech no one who didn't go to high school in a fairly narrow window in the 90s would have much if any acquaintance with. Cell phones so shitty you also had a pager! Pagers as a thing high school students had at all! Oh, those times.
@Ganymede said in Identifying Major Issues:
If your game requires the e-mail address for functions to work, that's fine. For the wiki? Cool. But if anyone thinks that the e-mail address will provide some sort of security against harassment, hacking, or whatever, it really won't.
This is my feeling on it. I'm fine with creating a gmail account specifically for MU use, particularly for wiki access, though there are other ease-of-use features (password retention that @faraday mentioned, and Arx's character creation was done via registering the session you're cg'ing from to an email, rather than creating a bit on-game). But for security, it's a joke. I do get annoyed when that's trotted out as a rational, which is pretty common, even though I think there are a lot of decent reasons to exchange an email with a staffer.
@deadculture said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Three-Eyed-Crow Nevertheless, people should be pointing others to this thread and the other on the down-low, because it helps to be informed.
Oh, I agree. I was familiar with Custodius' reputation, but wouldn't have known he was Max without this thread. It's helped me in how I approach the game and made his shenanigans more obvious, and I am grateful for the community here in that. Forewarned is forearmed. It's just incredibly frustrating to see so many players, many of whom (frankly) are simply less jaded and more willing to give people second/third/fourth/umpteen chances than I am drawn into his web of manipulative bullshit.
Max/Custodius is VERY dedicated about working newbies and people unaware of his reputation. There's only so much avoidance can do on a game that size with the amount of players from other mediums (like RPIs and forums/journals) it draws.
@Arkandel
It reads a little like a potential 'Gotcha!' And while I'd trust those on smaller games and there are plenty of players on Arx itself I'd be cool with it from? I have encountered some people on Arx where just...Nope. That includes strangers, unfortunately. So this might be a cultural thing as much as anything else.
@Arkandel said in Identifying Major Issues:
The third type is basically a no-go. Unless I'm dealing with specific people I know, if a scene requires any kind of buy-in it's really hard to find people willing to invest a few minutes to figure out why their characters would be eligible for it, offer requests or additional details or... anything, really.
Gonna admit. On a game like Arx where there's so little knowledge of other players OOC and trust is a bit difficult to build due to how the game's structured? I wouldn't have responded to the third option, either. Not that way that post describes it, at least. Other two, sure!
@SG
Yeah, I keep getting a little less excited. A new Star Trek show with Bryan Fuller...not really involved because he's busy with American Gods...that's going to be locked away on CBS' subscription service that should not exist...that's going to be pre-Kirk instead of post-Voyager...
Oh well. I am a Trekkie. It's maybe the one fandom I'm most attached to. This is a thing I will watch. I enjoyed Enterprise, even with its legion of flaws.
Oh, oh! And Stranger Things. Goddamn Stranger Things.
I love how the persistent nature of Netflix means people discover things at different times. One of my cube-neighbors at work came in yesterday just raving about how much he'd loved Stranger Things after inhaling it over a weekend.
Have you ever played XCOM? It pissed the shit out of me when I would have a stated 85% to succeed, and then didn't. Because, fuck, really?
Had one of my snipers miss a 96% shot last time I rolled up a game. Haunts my goddamn dreams.
And yet, it's probably my favorite video game of all fucking time. Which says a lot about my psychology as a player, I guess.
I am surprised by how much I like Arx's messenger system, and the YOU CANNOT MISS THAT YOU HAVE MESSENGERS of it all does seem to make people more prompt about replying.
I wish Arx's @mail code itself sucked a bit less (why can't I proof a mail before sending it whyyyyyyy?), but I assume a lot of that's due to having to build the Evennia features from the ground up. And IC messengers make the issues with it less noticeable.
- Having had a bad experience on a game. As @Three-Eyed-Crow pointed out, there have been some pretty weird FS3 setups out there. Giant "Action Skill" lists, bizarrely low chargen point limits, befuddling rating limits, imbalanced combats, trying to graft on superpowers... the list goes on. Some of that is on me for not providing good enough guidance on how to use the system effectively. But even the guidance I did provide was often ignored. So. Meh. Perils of making an open toolkit I guess.
On the other hand, this customization can also be rather great. @Tat at X-Factor really dug into the code, streamlined a lot of the commands, and made it workable for a mutant/super-powered setting. AresMUSH being more coder-newb friendly presents more opportunities for stuff like this. And more opportunities for randos with bizarre 50-long lists of action skills, but the internet is full of bizarre randos who'd probably f up any system. I view the malleability of it as a feature, not a bug.