Best posts made by WTFE

@Misadventure said in The 100: The Mush:

So you have a hot button.

You assume something, and won't change that assumption if told otherwise?

That's on you, not the English language.

It very much is the English language.

"I'm sorry that you took it that way" is very obviously blame-shifting. Parse the fucking grammar, dude: It starts with "I'm sorry", sure, but then the subject shifts: to "you". After that it's all on "you". This is almost canonical blame-shifting that is so obvious that I suspect my former ESL students would spot it, and they're fucking incompetents grammatically speaking!

If you want to actually express regret for a reaction, there's a myriad of non-blame-shifting ways to do it. For example:

• I'm sorry, I didn't intend to be offensive.
• I'm sorry, I didn't realize this would offend.
• I'm sorry, my wording was clumsy.
• I'm sorry, I probably didn't word that right.

I'm sure I'm coming across as condescending right now. I'm sorry you can't understand fundamental human interaction.

This thread is the reason why we can't have nice things.

Also, anybody who apologizes in a public forum is practically begging for the ensuing dogpile given the current cultural climate.

Keep your criticisms and your apologies in private where they belong.

Things I should have learned sooner: there's a reason they're called "dark" secrets. You're not meant to reveal them. Like my dark secret that I actually enjoy a lot of Adam Sandler flicks. Absolutely not a thing that should ever be spoken aloud in polite company or admitted to on a MU*ing bitch board.

When the GM has absolutely, positively had enough of your fucking crap.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Arkandel
Ouch you have my sympathies, that is almost worse then mixing up Star Wars and Star Trek.

What's the difference? I mean one's in Hogwart's the other's in Middle Earth but they're basically the same thing, right?

My idiot son just scored top tier in a nationwide combined prize examination for maths, Chinese, and English.

Maybe he's not quite the idiot I thought he was….

If my "IC" action would detract from the enjoyment of game players, I change my "IC" action. It's that simple.

Answering your more subtle point about not enjoying playing with PC X's player (for whatever reason) -- well, I'm a player. I didn't say "other game players" above.

It's not the site. It's the people talking. They're so incoherent they're responding to things that haven't been said yet.

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

The only truly democratic process of our alleged democratic elections are what are called the "Primaries". This is when the two-party system (Democrats and Republicans) field a number of prospective candidates per party as options to vote for.

You have two parties? I thought you had only the one (Plutocrats) who had two ever so slightly different branch offices ("Democrats" and "Republicans").

@Admiral said:

It's easier to be an asshole and apologize later than to not be an asshole.

You know what's even easier? Recognizing that every human being who has ever lived and ever will live has been and/or will be an asshole at some point or another. Your message here being a case in point. (And mine, for that matter.)

I love my wife dearly. Mother of my child. Partner of my life.

Doesn't mean I can't occasionally frequently get the urge to shake her by the throat.

One of those frequent times I get that urge is when the topic of presents comes up. She wants gifts. She likes gifts. She appreciates gifts. BUT SHE IS MOTHERFUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO BUY GIFTS FOR! This is because she doesn't like to ask for things. Where "ask for" includes "leaving any kind of a clue of any sort as to what she really wants".

So year after year in our marriage I've had to struggle, sweat, and strain to just buy her a fucking birthday present, often getting that bland "that's nice" smile for my efforts. (Note: she doesn't come out and complain about any of the presents I buy she doesn't really like. It's just obvious in short order that the present was not something she was interested in.)

Enter this year. Where I have a spy. My son is old enough and (barely) smart enough to act as my agent, see. So I told him to watch what mommy's gaze lingers on when she takes him shopping and report back to me. Last week I struck paydirt: my wife took my son out to look at things and along the way got distracted by a jade exposition. And very nearly purchased something.

My son nearly had a joygasm at being useful (for a change) and could hardly wait to tell me about it. We then took a stealth trip out to the exposition so I could see the specific things my wife was looking at. The prices at the exposition were stupidly high, but I saw the general kinds of things my wife was looking at and started searching for options.

Meet my wife's new birthday present:

"Sensitive aspects" = "sources of conflict".

In any dramatic (and even comedic) setting, the grist for the mill is conflict. If you don't have conflict, specifically conflict (eventually) resolved, you don't have a story.

Thing is, some all conflicts will turn someone off somewhere. All of them. No exceptions. (For example, I'm entirely uninterested in the inner conflicts of a man stuck in a woman's body or vice versa. A theme predicated on such a conflict will bore me to tears. I'm similarly uninterested in conflicts between two schools of cooking. Conflict predicated upon rape goes a step farther: I will actively avoid anybody involved in that shit and think worse of them as human beings.) There is not a single source of conflict that will not in some way, shape, or form upset or bore to tears some element of your prospective audience. This means making a game that doesn't offend/bother/bore anybody is literally impossible.

So…

When you make a game you have to decide what conflicts to include knowing that whatever your choice you'll twist some undies into a reef knot. It's thus a matter of picking which subset of prospective players you want to cater to and which you'll politely nod at when they whine about the subset you chose.

That being said, if you introduce a conflict that you don't plan on actually using you're an idiot. Here I side with @GangOfDolls. If you're putting in an element in a setting that is off-putting to some of your target audience and then saying "but don't worry, you won't have to ever deal with it" at this point you're selecting something that's going to turn off prospective players for no story gain. You might as well take it out entirely. If, however, you're going to use that source of conflict to generate stories in your setting, by all means leave it in. Just know that you will offend/squick/bore-to-tears some subset of your target audience.

Fucking customers.

I just fired a couple of customers today who had a really free-and-loose interpretation of what "payment" and "fees" and such actually meant. First they "forgot" what my actual rate was, misremembering it downward by 25%. Then, a week into the work, I've been paid half of what I should have gotten even from the "misremembered" price. So when I remind them that I actually work for money, and reminded them of how much, they got all offended at my "tone" and at the notion that you're actually, in the absence of a specific contract to the contrary, supposed to pay in advance of receipt of a service or good.

When I pointed out that every other business they used, ranging from small shops outside their homes to schools and online behemoths, requires payment up-front, "well, that's different".

Fuck, it feels good to fire asshats like that.

[edited to add]
Not only did I manage to fire them, I scared them enough that they paid up in full—the correct rate even!

Ok, Imgur has (almost, but not quite) stopped sucking ass for now, so the photo-essay has been completed (minus a single image that fucking Imgur won't let me annotate for any reason).

There's a lot of verbiage and a lot of photos, so I've decided to take out the two photos (as yet unseen) that summarize the trip for me:

In today's lesson @Derp learns the difference between "friends" and "acquaintances who use the word 'friend' too loosely".

@Nietzsche said in RL Anger:

Basically, I get no respect because I'm a Millennial and therefore my outlook is invalid. I swear I'll never turn into these people.

It is positively hilarious to hear a Millennial complain about having their outlook invalidated based solely on their generation.

It's absolutely sublime to have it happen while in the same message 40+-year olds are dismissed as being out of touch.

THE IRONY! IT BURNS! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

Whenever designing a system, it is best to consider:

1. What problem am I trying to solve?
2. Will this system solve that problem without causing more?
3. Is this problem even worth worrying about?

(In my experience, #3 is the one people tend to overlook. This is why so many systems are such utter shit.)

In the specific world of coding (any kind of coding!) there is a precursor question which must be asked instead:

0. Why do I want to write this system?

If, as is so commonly the case in software, the answer to this question is "because I can" or "because it seems like a cool challenge" then stop right the fuck there and do something else. If it is more along the lines of "it is intended to solve <insert problem>" then go ahead and proceed with questions #1 through #3.

So, @Hexagon, please answer these questions:

0. Why do you want to implement this system?

If your answer isn't some variant of "it would be cool" then:

1. What actual problem are you trying to solve?
2. Will this system solve that problem without causing more?
3. Is this problem even worth worrying about?

Be honest (with yourself at least), because if you're not, trust me, the feedback from MSB will be brutally so.

I have no dog in this fight. I don't didn't play on The 100 and I don't didn't play on The Fifth World. I did play for a brief time on The Fifth Wave which, IIRC, was run by the same people, but time zones interfered with any hope of meaningful RP so I dropped it. I don't know the game runners of any of these games from @Ganymede.

What I do know is this: the people whining about The 100 right now are making me think that they, not the people who run the various aforementioned games, are fucking morons. Or fucking obsessed. Or fucking obsessed morons. Or fucking moronic obsessives. Or some other such similarly denigrating set of adjectives and descriptive nouns. If the game runners of The 100, The Fifth World, and (maybe) The Fifth Wave are bad people (again, I have no opinion either way since I've never knowingly interacted with any of them) their purported badness is being grossly outweighed by the fucking idiocy of their critics.

If you have legit beefs, I'd suggest perhaps dialing it back a notch or ten thousand and trying not to come across as a bunch of thundering twats best left in the bozo bin, m'kay?

Question 1

• Setting (I fucking refuse to use the term "theme" as it is grotesquely misapplied in MU*dom!). I'd like enough detail that I can get oriented, but not so much that it's stifling to characters and actions. Even if it's from a published source (Game <spit> of Thrones, for example), novels aren't good reference materials for settings. Knuckle down and write something useful.
• Rules, both social and game-play. If you're using established game rules, just name them (but be sure to also carefully state any exceptions and/or modifications). If you're using a home-brew, well, you now have to write rules that can be understood--get this--by people who aren't you. It's probably easier to go with established rules...
• This is an important one that a lot of games miss: what characters are expected to do. So many games have rich, detailed settings and a bunch of people in the OOC room scared to set foot out because they have no idea what role player characters are supposed to have in the setting. Are they the big movers and shakers who forge the destiny of nations? Are they the small fry trying to eke out an existence in the cracks between powers interacting beyond their reach? Is the focus political? Combative? Looting and murdering? Some guidance for expected activity goes a long way toward making a comfortable game.

Question 2

I'm going to come down on an unpopular side, I suspect. MU* servers are UTTERLY FUCKING TERRIBLE for navigating complicated or lengthy information. If the only "news" entry is "our web site at address http://foo.bar/baz contains all game information we have" then I'd be absolutely ecstatic (presuming it's an actual web site and not just "news"-style files hastily wrapped in <html></html> headers).

That being said, the advantages of web sites are lost if you don't make use of their advantages. Inline topical links (not links at the bottom where in news it would say "see also news foo, news bar, news baz") are vital. As is, unlike MU*-oriented information, not chunking the information at arbitrary levels. (That's what "paragraphs" are for, not entirely new pages.)

Question 3

Original settings need more information to make them accessible. Original game systems need, well, properly-written, complete, and coherent rules. Settings based on published works can assume a certain degree of familiarity. Rules based on published rules can assume that the user has access to the rulebooks.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in RL Anger:

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

@Cupcake

I wouldn't have told her. I'd have just told Douchebag 'Maybe you should buy them instead.'

I dunno why people bitch about free food.
I fuckin' love free food. Free food is the best food.

The amount of terrible back-biting and entitlement free food brings out in people around an office boggles my mind. It's made me cease to participate in or partake in pot-lucks because I CANNOT deal (I also get guilted for that, but I'm not eating so they can stuff it).

When I worked at Entrust the Tech Bubble (v1.0) was in full swing so any company who wanted to keep staff had to wear kid gloves. One of the things Entrust did was the Friday pizza lunch where they ordered in enough pizza in a bewildering variety of crusts and toppings to feed a company of 300 or so people about five times over.

Seriously, local pizzerias were getting to dread Fridays because of us.

They tried to cater to everybody: wheat-free crusts on some, cheeseless on some, tomato-free on some, vegan on some, etc. And keep in mind, just in case the point is being lost here, THESE ARE FREE FUCKING PIZZAS WE'RE TALKING ABOUT and not freezer pizza from the grocery store either.

And yet…

The whining began almost immediately. "What about those of us who want a cheeseless, wheat-free, vegan pizza?" (What? You, you mean? 'Cause nobody else is asking for that shit.) "What about…?" "What about…?" "What about…?" "What about…?" "What about…?"

Every week the whining got louder, more strident, and more ridiculously specialized. The weekly event that was supposed to bring us all together in one room having a good time and good food turned into bitter contests of who could be the most oppressed. (Yes, we had the Oppression Olympics in the '90s. And it was just as ludicrous as it is now.)

So the company cut the free pizzas.

Which brought on even more whining.

If I ever wind up in management in a company, free food is not on the plate. People are complete assholes as soon as free food enters the picture.