It's Personal...

erik · Post by **erik** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 6:16 am

+1 to pretty much everything Amethyst said on texting, except in my household we don't even have smart phones so that's an extra strike against it.

Furthermore, there has never to date been an instance where I would have preferred someone texted me rather than talked to me. Likewise, I never would have preferred to have texted someone rather than talked to them. I can and do totally have a 30 second phone call and be fine with that.

I find the people who use texting usually use it to a fault, and I have no intention of encouraging or joining them in that flavor of idiocy. I prefer my own flavor of idiocy. I don't mind the obtrusiveness of being called because if I don't want to talk at that moment I will just silence my phone.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:39 am

I would rather text than talk. I find everyone to be mind-numbingly long-winded and wish they'd get to the fucking point when they are speaking to me. I like it that they are restricted to 160 characters and can't waste time on mindless blather.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 4:02 pm

I don't always remember to get in contact with someone later so I'll text someone if I know they are driving or likely to be asleep. I'll also text someone if I need to communicate an address or number, or something else they will look at repeatedly.

And when I say I don't always remember, I mean my mid-term memory can be terrible. Rather than calling someone to ask something, then calling them back again and possibly once more to remind me what their answer was, I'd rather get a text I can look at again and again.

Amethyst_Butterfly · Post by **Amethyst_Butterfly** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 4:41 pm

erik wrote:except in my household we don't even have smart phones so that's an extra strike against it.

We only have mine for business purposes. If not for that, I'd have probably the most basic POS you can get! Husband's is basic, but it's damn near indestructible.

Parthenon wrote: I'll also text someone if I need to communicate an address or number, or something else they will look at repeatedly.

And when I say I don't always remember, I mean my mid-term memory can be terrible. Rather than calling someone to ask something, then calling them back again and possibly once more to remind me what their answer was, I'd rather get a text I can look at again and again.

This is why my e-mail seriously looks like a box of post-it notes most of the time. I'm always e-mailing myself little reminders, addresses, to-do lists, whatever. I use my phone for that almost as much as i do for regular business stuff!

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Jul 13, 2012 12:07 am

My family has been cultivating the "wild" blackberry vines in our backyard for something like 20+ years now, but only now have I realized how much a stepladder can help with harvesting. The vines grow over fences and a few fruit tree saplings, and the thorns are sharp enough that you really don't want to overextend yourself while picking.

An extra 2 feet from partially climbing the ladder makes a lot of difference.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Fri Jul 13, 2012 5:41 pm

I don't generally drink non-milk (soy, almond, rice) - mostly because I never found much of a purpose for the real thing (I was allergic to it). My mom introduced me to Silk's vanilla almond milk, though, and now I'm totally addicted. At first, I couldn't find any around here so I tried a bunch of other brands. They're OK, but not anything spectacular. And then I found some [relatively] ultra-cheap and it hasn't left the house. In addition to tasting great straight from the carton, it makes super awesome chai, coffee, and popsicles.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Fri Jul 13, 2012 7:55 pm

Rice and almond milk are awesome. Making it at home doesn't give it the same taste as Silk or any of the other brands.

Costco sold almond milk for a while under their Kirkland brand but they discontinued it because nobody bought it...except me.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Fri Jul 13, 2012 9:10 pm

So frustrated with these student loan assholes lately. I wish I could go punch any person in the face that told me "Oh, they'll work with you!". No. No they will not.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 2:07 am

they'll work with you, as long as you pay your loan on time, every month.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 2:20 am

Yeah, when they demand nearly half my monthly income that ain't happening.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:54 am

Ted the Flayer wrote:Yeah, when they demand nearly half my monthly income that ain't happening.

Maybe you could call them and get them to go down on the minimum payment? I mean, mine is 50 bucks a month, but I only had a little over $3,000 in loans.

I'm not sure how that works, but maybe you could make a bargain, as long as you get it to where you can make regular payments.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 8:30 am

I got them to knock off about $60 a few months back, but percentage-wise that doesn't actually help me much.

Hopefully, the move to a more prosperous area with a better job market will help with that.

On a different note, I learned that you can go on an antarctic cruise for about $6k-$10k, plus however much it takes to fly to the southern hemisphere from here. When I get this nastiness taken care of, I'm going!

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 2:18 pm

Ted the Flayer wrote:I got them to knock off about $60 a few months back, but percentage-wise that doesn't actually help me much.

Hopefully, the move to a more prosperous area with a better job market will help with that.

On a different note, I learned that you can go on an antarctic cruise for about $6k-$10k, plus however much it takes to fly to the southern hemisphere from here. When I get this nastiness taken care of, I'm going!

Wrap up warm.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 1:54 am

I love the concept of the soulknife. It's just that everytime I look at the actual class compared to other classes, it makes me sad.

Edit: PsyWar has a 1st level power called Call Weaponry, they can call any kind of weapon for a power point, and it lasts for 1 minute per level. So, basically, there's little reason to have the soulknife class.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 4:31 am

I liked the concept of that class, too. I remember writing a new version up for 3.0 that I thought was pretty wicked.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 5:57 am

I one time tinkered with combining the Psychic Warrior with the Soulknife and full BAB.

But I'm in agreement--forming objects and weaponry out of psychic energy is cool.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 6:32 am

So Ess and I teach Sunday school, and we have about ten 9-10 year olds in our class. Completely on a whim, we made up a roleplaying game with the specific design goal of being completed - from chargen to end of the story - in 45 minutes. Given the wrinkles we encountered the first day, we didn't think that the kids would ever want to play again, but every single one of them - even the two visitors we had that day - said that we should bring it back.

Ahh... Corrupting innocent children from the inside.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 9:16 am

Dreamscarred did a decent hack of just making a bunch of feats for making weapons from psionic energy, and boosting a soulknife's BAB and saying "you can make any weapon you're proficient in" would make me pretty happy overall.

On the subject of classes that make me sad, I really like the warlock conceptually. Too bad it's not really anywhere near as good as my meatspace associates seem to think (they actually think it's broken...). The two big problems are 1) lack of versatility at early levels, they need at least two invocations to start with, and 2) eldritch blast is usable 1/turn, not as many times as you can attack, which makes a rogue with a crossbow pretty infinitely better.

Korgan0 · Post by **Korgan0** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 10:48 am

That's adorable. I'm probably going to end up running the DnD club at my college, if we have enough people for one, so I'm curious as to the rules, as it might work for getting in people who've never played an RPG before.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 10:54 am

For people who've never played, I'd almost recommend handing them a few premade barbarian, fire mage, warlock type characters and running a very simple "you meet in a tavern, here are npc actions, react" game and let them run wild with their simple but fun to play characters. They'll probably start a bar fight, and a couple may die, or they'll burn down the town, but they should have fun and get hooked.

Korgan0 · Post by **Korgan0** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 11:34 am

That could work, but only if there are a couple experienced people to lead by example, as it were, as I've found that a lot of newbies (at least in my neck of the woods) have trouble taking initiative and figuring out what to do, even if they have a basic understanding of the rules. I might not even have that, as a a bunch of people are leaving or transferring out. This probably isn't the thread for it, but can anyone think of a good rules-light system that would work for this kind of thing?

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 5:47 pm

When we need a rules light system, we toss newbie [adult] RPGers into Everway.

The system that we made up, though, is really basic (it's for kids, so what do you expect?).

There are no stats or levels so far. The kids pick their gender, name, and a title (Bobby the Incredibly Cute, or Jen of the Golden Prairie, or whatever). These things are the superficial details.

There are three cities - Spellborough, Cleverton, and Athletica. You pick where your character is from, and that's essentially your character class (ie: you cast spells, strategize and outwit, or use physical strength and dexterity to overcome the challenges). The kids can make up whatever flavor for their characters they want - it doesn't really matter. Adventures are largely map-based (I cobbled together something based on a map I got from fantasymapmaker.com), though we have storylines with quest items and bosses, too. Here's our map:

Each challenge they come up against is "graded" - easy, medium, hard - based on their city (so one challenge might be easy for a clever person, medium for an athletic person, and hard for a spell person - it varies based on encounter). This is because we have dice from a game called "Toss Up" that have three green sides, two yellow, and one red. If you have an easy challenge, roll green. Medium - roll yellow. Hard - roll red.

Only one person has to succeed at the challenge for the party to pass. The DM makes up flavor text for failure - because we're dealing with kids, they tend to be incapacitated rather than killed (the dying didn't go over well the first time it happened).

The big boss fight is a little different - it's hard for everyone. So everyone has to roll red. The boss has "hit points" (like five), so the kids have to roll five reds to kill it. If a round goes by (a round is when each person has had a chance to roll their die) with no red, random bad stuff happens - at the DM's discretion.

All this takes about 45 minutes with the ability to toss encounters in and out as time allows.

Korgan0 · Post by **Korgan0** » Mon Jul 16, 2012 11:04 am

Okay, thanks. Everway sounds really interesting, I'll give it a look.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 9:28 am

So, first day of work today at my new job (volunteering as IT Tech Support at the high school I used to go to 10 years ago). The school has changed a lot and become a lot more high-tech, so it's pretty interesting. And the team is pretty relaxed and easygoing, I think they're grateful for the help. So I'll be 3-4 days a week, 10AM to around 3PM, and with Wednesdays definitely free (so I can still run Disgaeagame to its conclusion, and then after that, ???). It'll be good to get into a routine again, and the job involves enough different things all over the place that it shouldn't get boring too quickly.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 2:50 am

My cat is EXTREMELY sick. I don't know if she'll survive one day, or pull through and live another 10 years. I know that I REALLY wish I had the $600 to get the operation she needs to feel better...