Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@TNP said in Universal Basic Income:

It would eliminate the need for Medicaid, Food Stamps and other subsistence level aid programs. That alone with save a ton of money.

This is the conservative argument for it (the most serious investigation of this as an economic option in the US was back during the Nixon administration as an alternative to expanding welfare programs). There are liberal arguments I'm more personally sympathetic to, but it's the kind of thing that pulls economists from pretty disparate ideological viewpoints out of the woodwork in favor of it.

I don't think we'll see it pursued seriously anytime soon, but maybe in 10 or 20 years. What I think might be more viable short-term is experiments in individuals cities, which I think some places are exploring.

In theory I like it a lot. I think it has potential both to simplify government programs and raise living standards.

In practice I'd like to see how it works long-term on a large scale before getting too excited about it, but it's one of those economic ideas I'm surprised there isn't more chatter about.

@Coin said in RL Anger:

People who "were all Paris", but aren't Ecuador (just to pick one instance of each out of random). I hate this facebook trend, and some of my good friends do it and I know they're doing it from a place of empathy but it still chafes.

I try not to be cynical when I see my friends doing this. I know it comes from the very human place of wanting to do something. Though just quietly donating or posting a donation link on your FB would also be doing something and come with a sentiment I'm less meh about but idk. I get why this grates, even if I try not to hate on it too much.

@Coin said:

lulz, articles by Milo Yannoupolous on Breitbart. Excellent source.

/s

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah, sigh.

For awhile there I was like, 'Wow, @Tyche isn't nearly as bad here as he was on WORA."

Then again, I though the same thing about Cirno.

And it's still probably true in both cases, which makes me look back in horror.

Yeah, sadly, I didn't find that part of that story all that shocking, because I've been the teenage girl in the creepy-ass gaming store, and I suspect a lot of us have. Nothing terrible happened to me, but men who behave in radically different ways around women who are by themselves (particularly very young women) than they ever would in mixed company aren't people you can ID until they're doing something awful. Granted, this isn't a gaming culture thing as I see it, but more a thing that happens in small business settings where the owner and his employees aren't really accountable to anyone but themselves.

I often wonder if there actually is more of a gender balance on MUs, or if the women are just more visible. By which I mean, on the average MU people talk, even if it's to a minimal degree, about who they are OOCly in ways that aren't really remarkable. It just comes up in casual conversation that's not directly related to me being a woman or feminist or whatever. Less so other places I've interacted online. It's easy to assume a forum is male-dominated if the loudest and most frequent posters are men, which creates a circle-jerk when topics like GamerGate come up that can make an environment really toxic to interact with if you're female, so you default to lurking because who the fuck wants to deal with the aggravation.

But this is just a theory I have no way to prove, because you can't measure non-participation or the reasons for it.

Whether this is anecdotal or not I've no idea, but a difference in MU*s and a lot of other online interaction I've had (around gaming stuff in particularly) is that the male/female ratio tends to be more evenly split on the games I've played. Or even female-majority on some games. I've certainly been creepily harassed, and I have friends who have horror stories of more active stalkers, but it's not really comparable to how uncomfortable I've been in other corners of the Internet, where the level of vitriol seems actively designed to make women not participate at all.

@Kanye-Qwest said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow
... ok I don't know what PHB is supposed to be, either.

Psycho-Hose Beast. Which is from the movie Wayne's World, though I also first read it on WORA (or one of the even older WORA-like boadrs) to refer to a particular type of terrible staffer.

I rarely stop to think about how random the MU* lexicon is. I think the WORA Wiki had a quasi-dictionary at one point, but it's lost to the mists of time.

I feel like the term originated on WORA a couple years ago as a catch-all for these kinds of games and now people just kinda use it. Like PHB.

I always feel like a lot of the problems I have with these games (the incestuousness of IC politics/alliances in particular) would be solved by an alt cap of, like, 3 or so. This is another way I think I'm out of sync with the players who're super into the L&L genre, though, since it seems to attract quite a few (or, at least, more players than average) who want a half-dozen alts.

A buddy of mine plays on Dreamwidth and mentioned her game had like 100 players now. I'm curious what that equates to or if it's even really comparable (since I'm guessing the volume of posting is a lot lower than the amount of RP we consider 100 unique players would generate on a MU*), but it was an interesting snap-shot of that community.

I'd be more interested in Dreamwidth RP if Dreamwidth wasn't one of the zillion websites my workplace blocked (and yet, I can still access Livejournal. Oh, fickle screening software). My main attraction to it is the ability to play in my downtime, but when I get home I'm less interested in focusing on forum posts (like this place, I read mostly at the office between assignments).

Tumblr seems to have a huge RP community.

I occasionally try to read it and want to gouge my eyes out (I'm sure decent RP threads exist but I've yet to find them), but it does seem huge.

I always assumed the reputation stuff was meaningless, except in Winning The Internet ways. There have definitely been posters with negative reputation scores before and it hasn't seemed to stop them, but who knows (the admins, probably).

I've honestly had very few experience I'd term out-and-out bad with MU staff, despite doing this off-and-on for 15ish years. This might be because I peace-out on games where I don't trust the administration pretty fast. I realize there are plenty of players who can just play with their friends and ignore the larger game, but I've never been one of them. I feel like cases of outright abuse and cheating are rarer than we often talk like they are (though they certainly happen now and then). Stupidity, bad judgment, and putting your faith in the wrong people because they're your friends? Sure, happens all the time and can be hugely damaging to a game, but at the end of the day that's the price of doing business with human beings. These are story games, and I'm not particularly interested in automating a story, so I'll never get away from dealing with flawed humans if I want to keep playing. I'm very grateful to anyone who takes the time to GM for me and work with me OOC on something, and I hope I generally show that to the folks I play with.

I've staffed off and on in the past and have come to the conclusion I'll probably never do it again, which makes me somewhat sad. But the last time I did, was stunned by how much I just fundamentally did not enjoy it. In a different way than, 'This is a bitch amount of work.' It became draining to log on in a way I'd never really experienced before, even on games where I had a higher work-load. I can call a couple of specific players out as contributors, but at the end of the day it's a me issue and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's age and my tolerance bottoming out. I keep hoping I'll feel differently as more time passes, as there are parts of storytelling and wider story arc construction I miss very much. It's stupidly stressful and involves more cat-herding than it should, but parts of it were very rewarding at its best.

@Lotherio said:

But literally less than a week after the move .... my co-head staff that helped spur the idea to try the place, helped build stuff on the wiki ... the same one that get me going to give password for the god bit and get the right db back up to the new head staff was removed from royalty and locked in the freezer for no apparent reason when they were still trying to help?

This sucks and, even if you're done with the place, it's awful to think you've left something you created in the hands of people you can't trust.

The only poster I ever down-vote stalked was @Anonymous. So no regrets.

@Thenomain said:

@Jaded

Because John Goodman is great in everything he does. He was great even in The Flintstones, even if the movie itself wasn't. I didn't see King Ralph, but I bet Goodman was great in that as well.

The numbers do not lie.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/john-goodman-is-americas-greatest-supporting-actor/

He's one of the many reasons "Roseanne" is a show I will always, always watch if I catch a random re-run.

@mietze said:

I totally agree on having open IC hangouts. Though I do think that people need to remember that there's a variety of "cultures" when it comes to joining a scene in a public place. I had my ass handed to me once when I showed up at a public coffeehouse (I did not see that anyone was in there actually) because I dared come in there when other people had started to RP before I did (and I didn't have a chance to oocly say hey there, can I join before getting yelled at). It shocked me, because I'd always come from a culture that if someone doesn't want people wandering into a public gridspace then it's on them to leave to a private room; but obviously other people come from the opposite! So even if you have visible hangouts, some folks may feel like they can't go there if there's already people there because that would be rude--or people who assume that they're always welcome in a clearly marked Come Hang Out Here place may get a 'welcome' that kind of shoves them away from wanting to risk it at all.

I also came up largely on games where Public Room=Public Scene, and I always found these super-intimate scenes that took place in random bars and coffee shops super-awkward. In a way, it was worse when the players involved did gymnastics to include me than if they bitched, because I still couldn't integrate properly and they turned their intimate scene into a surface-y 'Hi there!' thing that wasn't fun for anybody.

I find I kind of prefer games where the culture is just to ask before joining anything. The one thing I haven't quite figured out is how to get regular 3-4 person scenes that are often some of my favorite types of random RP.

@Apos
Possibly. I always wonder, with these games, if it's a cultural question of what the players want (which is quite different than what I want) more than anything else. These games always get an influx of population that, while not massive, is bigger than the standard non-WoD MU*, so there's an audience that likes playing a half-dozen alts in the Game of Marriages to some degree. If it's that, I don't see a way of overcoming it, though I do agree it's encouraged by other MU* factors. But at the bottom of it might be a constant uphill battle for staff against what a portion of very active players will always want to play, whatever else you give them.

I think all these factors sort of feed upon themselves.

There's definitely a lot of Ls are Awesome masturbation happening, but I think @Apos hit on something important in that the structure of MU*s kind of feeds this. These games are typically set up so most of what you can do without ST staff is play The Game of Marriages and do petty, rumor-y "politics" that doesn't lead to much game-wide. I think there is an audience of players who is really into this (and it becomes very easy, in my experience, for them to completely dominate RP), but I also think more structure would keep all RP from drifting toward it. It's the kind of thing where staff has to work constantly to keep other stuff going on, though (or enlist players to keep other stuff going on).