Best posts made by WTFE

While I wait for Imgur to stop sucking ass (could be a LONG wait!), I thought I'd post the photo most representative of my corporate retreat experience that has thus far actually made it up:

One of my students gave me a birthday present on Sunday. It included these:

Some mandarin oranges. The ruler was absolutely necessary for scale, yes.

Some honey from her grandfather's apiary.

Some rambutans (a.k.a. "the product of mating a lychee with one of the nastier breeds of spider").

Sometimes it's nice being a teacher here, even if it is only part-time in a rented classroom.

@Auspice The sense of entitlement many employers (most?) have is sometimes truly shocking, or would be if it weren't so comical. Some highlights from my past:

1. A colleague of mine and I worked in our spare time: evenings, weekends, lunch hours, on bringing the product line's core architecture into the 20th century. At the time we were a single-vendor shop, but the industry in question was exploding and interoperability was becoming a major thing with standards (note the plural) developing for mixing and matching disparate components into systems. We knew it would only be a matter of time before that bit us, so we decided to take the lead on fixing the architectural errors that made us almost militantly a stovepipe shop. In one of our lunchtime bull sessions the boss came in, asked us what we were doing, demanded a demonstration of what we'd done thus far and pronounced it "useless" and "a waste of time". So we stopped, reasoning that working on something the boss thought was useless wasn't a good use of our meagre spare time.
   Months later the inevitable we predicted happened: a major sale hinged on our ability to incorporate an additional device into our support. The sale didn't happen because we couldn't. "But what about your fancy new architecture?" "We stopped working on it." "Why?" "You said it was a useless waste of time." "I said no such thing!" He was genuinely put out that we'd stopped using our own unpaid, free time working on something that he himself said he didn't need. He was actually pondering firing us over not continuing to work for free on a skunkworks project that he had killed.
2. The very first school I worked for in China was run by a real piece of work. I could write entire novels about this place, but I'll restrict myself to a single representative anecdote. The two foreign teachers in the school had, single-handedly (O.K. dual-handedly) taken the pro forma (but do-nothing) "English Club" on campus and turned it into a major activity centre. We'd organized the students into organizing their own "English Corner" (I will not be trying to explain this concept because it hurts my brain) and we'd marshalled the necessary resources and relationships to make an English Conversation Lounge happen, after which we handed it over to the student club again to run. We'd easily spent an extra 15-20 hours a week on top of a full time teaching job (how full time? -- one teacher once asked me how many teaching hours I had and was shocked; she had 2/3 that number and was complaining about being treated as a "teaching machine") setting this up, participating in the activities, and generally keeping the students engaged and interested. All this in the face of leader ennui and active disinterest.
   And the effort paid off. Our school's English Corner attracted English students from literally every other school in the city (as well as a dozen or so local businesses trying to up their game). Our English Conversation Lounge was written up in an education ministry newsletter. This latter point proved the school's undoing. One of the leaders of the school was interviewed in local media about the programs and he lost face publicly when it became increasingly obvious over the course of the interview that he had no fucking clue whatsoever what he was being interviewed about.
   So the leadership swung into action in the inimitable corporate way: the bosses swept in and started ordering gratuitous changes. Like moving English Corner from Thursdays to Wednesdays. For reasons. And here's where the thing went sour for them really quickly. First, other activities all over the campus had been organized around the existing English Corner schedule. The English Corner was the 900 pound gorilla of school activities, augmented by the fact that a lot of outside influence was involved as well. NOBODY but the leadership wanted to change what was already working just fine, but you're not a "leader" if you're not telling people what to do, right? So they ordered the change. And we said that our English Corner would be held on Thursday.
   The students (and outsiders) came to ours, not theirs.
   So they tried to order us to go to the Wednesday one because we were their employees. To which we pointed out that we were contractors and had done all our work for free as a gift, but if the gift was going to be stepped on and spit upon like that we'd be withdrawing our gift. Instead we would treat it as contracted labour, present our bill for services rendered thus far and negotiate our payment for the extra work.
   Suddenly the leaders magnanimously ordered English Corner to be held on Thursdays again, but in private they were very distressed that we'd dared to threaten removing our unpaid labour on something they'd not given a shit about for over a year while we worked ourselves into exhaustion.
   To them a "thank you" was "we won't fire you for gross insubordination in threatening to withhold unpaid labour". And they couldn't figure out why none of their by-then six foreign teachers after that point ever wanted to do anything for the school any longer. And why all six bailed at the end of their contract. And why all six left word in every major expat teaching circle that their school was to be avoided.
3. A bottom-feeding consulting company I worked for refused to ever pay overtime (but would CHARGE customers overtime!). Even worse, they were claiming R&D tax credits for my overtime. And they couldn't understand why I left my job without even giving two weeks' notice. (In my resignation letter I said I'd be taking two weeks' vacation in lieu of overtime. They still didn't get it.) Nor could they understand why they lost all their consultants inside of six weeks. They called us "disloyal" for wanting to move to employers who actually paid us.
4. Another company I worked for survived only because three people put in superhuman effort for about three months. I'm talking the degree of effort where a 75 hour work week was us taking it easy. More normal was 96. It impacted the health, both mental and physical, of the three people in question and this herculean effort literally saved the company (AND literally prevented the company owner from being rendered homeless!).
   The company moved from the brink of bankruptcy (at one point, right at the very end of the period, there was a high degree of probability that the next paycheques would bounce; only the fact that we finally got the product finished and made a few big sales of it saved us) to wild profitability to being purchase bait. And someone took the bait, making the company owner a multi-millionaire. And his response to being made a millionaire on the backs of the health and labour of three key individuals? Two bonuses of $10,000 and one bonus of $15,000.
   We'd literally saved the motherfucker from being homeless and he thought an ample reward was a "bonus" that was a fraction of what he'd have had to pay in just plain overtime for our efforts. (A quick thumbnail calculation says that's about 20% of what he'd have had to pay in overtime.) And he was shocked to his core when every one of us was so "ungrateful" that we left our jobs inside of six weeks. And that within six months he'd suffered an almost 80% turnover in his company as those who left found jobs with the place they'd moved to for those who'd been left behind. And he had to explain to his new owners (part of the terms of the purchase were that he had to keep running the company for three years, and there was a profitability clause as well whose details I don't fully know) why the people who made the product all quit.
   And he blamed "disloyalty" of course. The motherfucker.

Purebread cat.

@Pandora said in RL Anger:

Fake apologies are kind of like fake tits, they look nice but they feel fake. Who has the time?

Have you tried a genuine apology?

Oh, right. I forget who I'm talking with. (Hint: I didn't forget.) Of fucking course the thought that you might make a genuine apology never crossed your mind.

@Auspice said in The Apology Thread:

Can we mention apologies we want?

I want an apology from the guy who, many years ago, tried to lecture me on proper use of it's/its and did so incorrectly. He was a snotty bastard about his improper use of grammar.

(Yes, I am being utterly facetious here. :P)

Aw, shit man! I SAID I was sorry dozens of times since. Now you have to make it public!?

Republic of Rome.

So even after the Rasheem meltdown in which not having off-site backups was a problem, no off-site backups of the site were kept? Lovely. That's what we call "learning from the past".

Oh, Christ. That piece of shit.

I hope you burned the disk after viewing it.

Here are the issues I see with this poll:

1. Clicking "yes, I totally prefer a small, focused setting" is easy. Does this convert into actual players playing, though? I've seen lots of games that were, in effect, "designed by WORA" and ... success has been "mixed" to put it politely. Because it's easier to babble on a forum than it is to get boots on the ground in the game.
2. The thing with small, focused settings is that they have small, focused appeals. So you put the foot down and make it Gotham-only focused on the Bat Family and associates vs. the various Gothamite villains. And I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in Gotham and Goathamite RP. So yes, I agree (hypothetically--I will not say which way I voted) that a small, limited, focused roster in a subset of a larger setting is my preference. Just not the one you chose. I want X-Men vs. Brotherhood. Or Justice League. Or My Little Pony. Or whatever. Which reduces your pool.

At some point I think that any tightly-focused game like you're proposing will have a problem of keeping a player base.

Nah, this is just the "irritating tick" variety of hyperbolic stalker.

Personally, I view the "block" buttons as a tool for reducing the clutter in my feeds (wherever they happen to be). When I've identified someone as 1) a person I'm unlikely to ever have anything resembling a productive conversation with, and 2) someone who has the sorts of proclivities that make them omnipresent (like, say, inserting themselves into every conversation in a desperate attempt to make it be about them) I hit the block button.

Note the use of "and" above. It's important.

Basically I view the block buttons as the social equivalent of ad blockers: a tool to eliminate the irritating and repetitive from your digital experience.

@surreality What a coincidence! The image I've selected for the tag involves something that's reallllllly hard as well!

Given how poorly socialized MU*ers[1] are, social stats are kind of worthless. The players don't understand what's being simulated so, naturally, they will misapply any mechanics you supply. Short of somehow encapsulating all of psychology and sociology into a die-rolling mechanism any social stats are going to be a grotesque caricature of real human interaction. Just face the truth and ditch social mechanics entirely; let people play "social" scenes the way they imagine in their head that people interact.

I mean, that's why there's no mechanics for sex in sane games, right?[2]

[3]

[1] Note: I am a MU*er.
[2] This may be a joke. May.
[3] Actually this whole response may be a joke. "Ha ha, only serious."

I know I criticized an ad here before. I laughed at an ad designed to generate interest in a plot happening on a game where the "interesting" event was a ... trash bin fire.

You will get people commenting--in varying degrees of acidity--on the efficacy of your advertising approach (especially if the ad is terrible like that one). And if your ad is filled with spelling errors or formatted in ways that make eyes bleed that will be dumped on as well.

If you're advertising someone else's game might I recommend clearing it with them first, though?

@Paris said in RL Anger:

Also, don't let anons comment on you or your shit, it's always drama.

Anybody who thinks you get "honesty" from anonymity where "honesty" is defined as "an exercise in releasing the inner shitheel that was never really all that deeply buried in the first place" gets what they deserve.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

Putting it as a continuum suggests that you can't have or want both. I do. I value good writing, I value good mechanics. I value good story, I value good game. It's entirely possible to do both.

It's possible where the two do not clash. At issue is how to react when, inevitably, the two clash.

Let me use an extreme example by climbing into the Wayback Machine as we witness an actual event that happened to me. Many, many, many years ago there was a college professor who ran RPGs: started with D&D, switched to C&S (after I introduced him to it), switched for a while to Traveller:2300/2300AD, then switched to Rolemaster. He was in most circumstances not merely a good GM but a great one. His worlds lived and breathed. His NPCs were alive. He had one niggling little flaw, however, which was highlighted by how his 2300AD phase ended.

In the 2300AD game he had us hitting a world that was under invasion as part of the Alberta Farming Cooperative relief mission. The system the world was in was contested and the place the relief supplies had to get to was under enemy watch. We had to penetrate their defences with the relief shuttle. It was a risk and we all understood the risk, both IC and OOC.

Down went the shuttle, desperately evading the enemy missile fire.

Oops. We failed. The shuttle gets hit. Fair enough, we knew this was a possibility. (Probability: ~20% cumulative over the die rolls that we had to make.) Time to bail out. This required a task roll of each of us, naturally.

Oops. We failed to bail out. Every single motherfucking one of us. And the task wasn't even particularly difficult. By the odds, of the eight characters (!) six should have succeeded. But the dummy fucking dice decided to get obstinate that day and seven characters were just obliterated before they could even get to the bail-out pods and the eighth sustained injuries on crash-landing that killed her.

And there we were. Sitting there facing a legit TPK. And this is where the prof's single flaw as a GM shone forth: he went by the rules. Period. The rules said everybody was dead, so everybody was dead. Characters we'd built up and invested in for almost eight months of twice-weekly gaming were gone in a flash. There was about six more weeks of gaming left before exams (and the end of this year's campaign) and we were expected to make eight new characters and continue the "story" with a complete, 100% break. Characters who had no IC investment in the relief mission because they didn't have the history that led to it were suddenly going to be our new avatars in the relief mission.

It didn't work.

The story that had been told up to that point, a story filled with intrigue, danger, nail-biting tension at points (there was one space battle that had us literally at the edge of our seats as we desperately evaded enemy forces that got within a hairsbreadth of finding our main convoy body) had its heart ripped out AND its spine broken by the dummy dice. The dice and mechanics clashed in a very big way with having a satisfying (even if tragic) narrative.

And I maintain to this day that the GM reacted incorrectly to that happening; that by letting the mechanics win out over a satisfying narrative he left a bad taste in everybody's mouth (ironically including his own). Two players dropped out after that session, never to return. By the end of the term there were only three players left. At the beginning of the next term only one player (me) came back. The superior way to handle this would be at the very least to reroll the exit rolls so that some characters survived. Then that satisfying, dangerous, thrilling narrative could continue with the survivors mourning those lost even while they were struggling hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines and trying to get to friendly (friendlier?) territory.

This would be an extreme example of "roll-playing" fucking up "role-play" and the kind of thing that makes me leery of anybody who wants to stick to the game's mechanics at all costs.

I'm wondering, @Balerion: can you be more pompous or is this as grandiloquent as it gets from you? I mean don't get me wrong: that was amazingly fustian. (It probably helps that I'm hearing it in the exaggerated "received pronunciation" voice of a 19th century grammarian pedant.) I'm just wondering if you're going all out, balls-to-the-wall with your pomposity or if you've got that little bit extra left over for the guitar solo?

It wasn't even a dumpster. It was like an office's circular file. This was supposed to be a big, intriguing mystery: "WHO STARTED THE FIRE AND WHY!?"