Posts made by Wizz

I really, really appreciate the advice and the offers. That is so ridiculously kind of y'all. I am trying not to cry into my lunch.

Well, that is that, my trusty laptop is officially dead. Thought it was maybe the battery, so I replaced it and tried all the fixes I could find when it wouldn't power on, but no luck. Something vital is most likely fried.

I am so frustrated but at the same time so resigned to it that I just sat there for like five minutes after closing everything back up.

Can't afford a new laptop right now, so I just straight up don't have a computer. Thus, can't take the coding courses I was hoping to take, can't study, etc etc etc.

It's just one more shitty thing this year on a pile of them so I can't even work up the energy to be truly upset about it.

Holy fuck, Shang-Chi was great. My kiddo gave it "100 out of 5."

@ghost said in Project Gridlock (Temp Name) Matrix style mush:

I would recommend a theme other than "normal people who connect to an online gaming session that hosts an exhaustively huge WoD base set in New England 4.0"

Not that what you presented wasn't painful and amusing, but he has already clarified that he wasn't intending this to be some sort of wacky isekai setup but literally a mashup of urban fantasy/horror and the setting of the Matrix films.

@mr-johnson said in Project Gridlock (Temp Name) Matrix style mush:

My main focus is on the Matrix theme with people having supernatural powers as a sign of breakdowns in the simulation.

I guess I am just personally struggling to parse this part of your desired theme. Glitches in the Matrix are already a thing without any sort of like, Old World supernatural monster factor.

I mean, there is that one part in the second film I guess, where it's like...vampires and werewolves were deliberately designed as programs in older alpha versions of the Matrix for some reason? But that is honestly the weirdest and most inexplicable part of that particular movie especially because there's zero impact or follow up whatsoever. The Merovingian's wife is just like, "oh these guys exist btw, but whatever fuck it, you just have to shoot them in the head with silver bullets." And that's it. Blink and you miss it, they might as well be regular goons for as much as it matters.

So my question is, what's the appeal in having that as part of the game when supernatural beings are ultimately meaningless, and other forms of extra normal ability (rogue humans and programs bending or breaking the coded physical laws of the simulation through willpower or design) are already part of the setting?

So an Ares game about the Matrix only it's also about oWoD but with nWoD mechanics.

I really am not intending to say this to be hurtful or overly critical, but I feel like that is a concept that is so niche, it's going to have most people scratching their heads and lead to a lot of confusion. There just isn't a lot of overlap in those two properties.

If it's a game where you are expected to focus on supernatural life and society as in WoD...why include the Matrix element, which is largely about escaping that reality? If it's about the Matrix, why muddy the waters with all these extra unnecessary elements that just distract from the overarching conflict with the Machines?

@pyrephox said in Online friends:

There's actually a phenomenon called the Online Disinhibition Effect

YAY I LEARNED SOMETHING TODAY

It's 2021, I doubt anyone (especially here) is going to say online friends aren't "real."

@arkandel said in Online friends:

Where do you draw the line, if you do?

This the more interesting question to me. I've definitely gone too far in online friendships, and I strongly suspect most of us could say they relate.

I tend to be more reserved now, but I still don't know exactly where the line should be. There does seem to be a point where you're giving and accepting so little that I would personally find it really difficult to call that relationship what I consider friendship -- instead of just like, an acquaintance I guess? Gaming buddy? -- and it seems like that arm's length is actually where I've found most MU people keep most other MU people.

What factors make y'all decide to move further? Is it solely just time and trust?

@tinuviel

(ETA: I MEAN, that is not what I was saying. But I couldn't resist the reaction gif.)

@tinuviel

It's great and works when the majority of the playerbase buys in to those themes. And that's not impossible or even super rare? But it's my experience that it's more common for the average MU player to want to play what is essentially a "good guys triumph" story even in those settings. You tend to be fighting the tide on that one, unless staff is completely dedicated to the premise and make it part of the culture.

@derp said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

Why do the "good guys" have to win? Plenty of pretty remarkable stories end with the good guys losing.

Because these aren't novels? There's a person behind every single character whose bottom line at the end of the day is a little wish fulfillment, and for a lot of people that means saving the day and riding off into the sunset. Not always literally, and not in every scene, or plot, but in the grand scheme.

That's just...it is what it is. If you find a group of people that actually wants to tell the other side where everything ends in misery, more power to you, but it isn't the norm. Accepting that has still lead to great stories and a lot of fun for me. ‍️

@carma said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

I'm probably the exact person you'd want as a antagonist, since I enjoy playing to lose.

Frankly, this is the only mindset that actually works for antagonist PCs, in my experience.

It's fun to play a villain, but if you're not ultimately there to serve the story in the long run and give the "good guys" the big win in the end, things tend to go pretty sour pretty quickly. What losing actually looks like can turn out to be surprisingly negotiable if you're easy to get along with and liberally share the fun, but that you will lose is kind of accepted as inevitable by the other players anyway, so bitching and complaining when you do is just going to spoil it for everyone, yourself included.

My own favorite example of this in action was playing a vampire on a Buffy game. I accepted from the get go that he was going to get dusted eventually, and that trying to kill every white hat just because "vampires are evil" was going to be fucking miserable OOC. So I found constant excuses to be foiled, let PCs escape, etc. In the end, he was captured and asploded. He didn't "win," but I sure did. It is still one of the best and most memorable times I have ever had on a MU, and I have nothing but fond memories of the players I "opposed."

Back to school night, and maybe one in ten of us were masked up. A couple of unmasked fathers in line in front of us before the doors opened were loudly scoffing about counties that had mandated it and a few other maskless parents were generally being passhole aggressholes and making snide remarks juuuust loud enough to hear.

You know, in the middle of a big uptick in cases in the state and the wildfire spread of the Delta variant.

Boy, am I excited for this school year.

@wretched said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@wizz If it helps, my wife and i got engaged like 5 months into our relationship, and married the same year. I moved in with her like...3 weeks after meeting her? This year will be our 15th anniversary.

I'm totally aware that there are relationships that work out like that (happy upcoming anniversary BTW!) but like...frankly that's just a pretty dramatic roll of the dice as to whether it will, if you have that little experience with someone. ‍️

And given how young my sis is, how completely skewed her values and priorities have been re: previous relationships thanks to a lot of trauma and culty religious stuff, and how little she and we actually know this dude (aside from an episode where he lost his mind at her and was very verbally abusive in a way that just seemed absolutely bonkers)...I am stressed out about it and have very little faith things will go well.

We'll see.

My youngest sister -- about a 14 year age gap, who at times in our lives actually has felt more like my daughter than my little sister -- decided spontaneously that she had to get married to this guy that she's been seeing for a little less than three months. Three months.

I've met him all of twice, and on the day of their "civil ceremony" (not what they consider their "actual" wedding for a long list of reasons that are all related to ultra-religious Mormon stuff too impenetrable to dive into here) I had a near-panic attack when I realized that a) if you lined up a bunch of blonde twenty year old dudes, I would not be able to pick him out and b) moments before I was going to greet them I literally could not remember his name.

I am trying my best to be a good big brother and show my love and support, and I absolutely did openly express my honest concern and doubts about this whirlwind marriage to her (along with our other sibs), but she pulled the trigger anyway and boy oh boy do I feel like she's made an enormous mistake, and it really hurts. I feel like there's going to be a lot of pain and regret in their future, especially because we've already seen some big shiny red flags with this dude, but I have to just smile through it right now.

I hate this a lot, but...people have to live their own lives, I guess.

@sunny

That was the theme of the second season finale, and the fourth season finale. And arguably a few episodes in between? I don't think it's a new element to the show, the writers have always made it pretty clear Rick is a piece of shit and not always able to stay ahead of the consequences of his own selfishness.

The new season of Rick and Morty just isn't doing it for me. I am having a really hard time pinning down why; I think there's been a fairly steady decline in quality since the second season, but even though there were still some rough gems in the third and fourth seasons, I haven't even cracked a smile in the last few episodes. Maybe it's just run its course for me, I dunno.

Masters of the Universe is okay so far. It's not fantastic, not terrible, just...meh. Relies a little too heavily on nostalgia for the characters and campy writing of the original, the former of which made it a little impenetrable for a newcomer like me and robbed a lot of dramatic moments of any real weight.

Definitely nothing revolutionary or special, but the animation is cool and the action sequences are fun to watch. Dunno that I feel any real motivation to finish it when the rest of the episodes are released, tho. ‍️

On the subject of MU*s to not-make:

Oubliette. I'm actually a little surprised I haven't seen a MU* or even discussion here about it, it's such a fun and bizarre setting.

Imagine a place that is sort of between Heaven and Hell, where all forgotten souls, creatures, cultures, and even gods wind up after they disappear from the world of the living. Everyone has a living body but is basically immortal, and even if slain they simply appear again in a new body some time later -- but because the sheer scale of time in this place is so immense, many of the inhabitants are "broken" after eons of existence, and simply wander mindlessly or lay in piles on the streets.

The realm is enormous and made up of a strange mix of locations all contained within a boundary that is essentially impossible to escape, and includes vast deserts, hostile jungles, bizarre cities, a vast underground, etc. that is constantly changing, breaking down, and reforming. The whole is referred to as Castle Oubliette.

Because time is "a plate of worms" in the Castle instead of strictly linear, you could meet someone who died in 1346 and someone else who died in 1982 and have lunch with them, though more likely you'd all be working for the vampires who rule one of the districts, or running from goblins in a Labyrinth, or fighting for the honor of a mad god, or a million other things.

There's politics and adventure and horror and simple slice of life stuff all in a zany Purgatory place and you can play anything from a mutated rat all the way up to the living concept of hate, and boy I sure do love it.

@derp

To each their own GARBAGE TELEVISION I guess

Eta: I kid I kid it is not garbage. On a technical level it was actually really good and that kept me watching. Just too bleak for me overall.