Thanks for the input all. Seems like so far we're reaching a consensus, but I'm interested to hear from Xizoh and Dulae.
@Alaina, no worries. Hope you're getting an adequate amount of sleep amidst the chaos (I say seeing that timestamp).
Out of curiosity, what is it you do in that freezer? There seem to be some reasonable jobs in the LA area in web development and/or software support if you're into coding.
IT helpdesk. Unfortunately, LA area wouldn't work for me. Lack of transportation options to get that far.
In my field we refer to you as 'wizards'. And fair enough, the LA Metro certainly leaves something to be desired.
Also, I think I discovered the merits of working in a freezer this morning. I had the occasion to wear a suit jacket and I just about melted into a puddle. (Granted, carrying the kiddie pool of science across campus beforehand probably didn't help.)
(Granted, carrying the kiddie pool of science across campus beforehand probably didn't help.)
I love everything about this visual
Praise the wizard! (I feel for you. I've been running on 4-6 hours of sleep a week night.
Any who, I feel 3 is the best option. It allows to still explore our characters and their interactions without dragging the pacing of the game to a halt. And I really want this game to survive, which so far it has done so quite well in my opinion. Maybe we can use 2 to continue conversations after dialogue has been sparked?
I love everything about this visual
It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like, and probably even more amusing. (The pool becomes spacetime, which looks something like this.)
This morning I entertained about 70 nine-year-old girls at a summer STEM camp on campus (physics is cool, you should do it, lasers, spacetime, black holes, etc. etc.). They were all delightful, but one in particular (who will in a likelihood grow up to be a stupendous badass) referred to gravity as ‘The Force’. A third my age and already awesome. I begin to see why people choose to reproduce.
@Xizoh, I agree on all counts. (Although I think if I got 4 hours sleep more than a few nights in a row I'd lose all ability to form coherent sentences. Or use words.) You had mentioned finals at some point - what are you up to over the summer?
This morning I entertained about 70 nine-year-old girls at a summer STEM camp on campus (physics is cool, you should do it, lasers, spacetime, black holes, etc. etc.). They were all delightful, but one in particular (who will in a likelihood grow up to be a stupendous badass) referred to gravity as ‘The Force’. A third my age and already awesome. I begin to see why people choose to reproduce.
Physics is cool! I do do it, daily! Except mine is probably a bit different than yours. Mine is more or less getting people back to obeying physics in appropriate ways in relation to how they use their bodies. However, I must draw the line at choosing to reproduce...I cannot do this. I might eat them or something horrific like that when I can't tolerate the bad parts of tiny monsters running around the house :)
I vote for a mix of 2 and 3 like everyone else - more leaning towards three however.
One thing we could do to help move things along is to put when we're good to go in an ooc tag so that people know not to wait.
I vote for a mix of 2 and 3 like everyone else - more leaning towards three however.
One thing we could do to help move things along is to put when we're good to go in an ooc tag so that people know not to wait.
That's a great idea! I know there's tons of times in PbP games where I'm checking many times a day, but I don't have more to say on the topic at hand just waiting for things to move along. I'm sure everyone gets that some times.
And happily for me, a consensus is reached. 2 & 3 it is.
I also like Dulae's suggestion a lot. I don't want to rush or railroad you, and I can have a tough time reading if you guys have more to say to one another (or an NPC) or if you're ready to move on.
So let's try:
- PCs note in if you're 'good to go' during a conversation (or alternatively, if you have something further to ask/say) so others can play off of that. The discussion would work for this too. When I see five signals you're ready, I'll port you to the next interesting point.
- GM will keep a medium-low threshold for 'interesting' to start. (Not everything you observe will be hostile, and this will give you an opportunity to interact with or comment on things as you travel. If you're all good to go, we'll move on, and if not we can assume you're walking and talking. (Or hiking and talking, as it were.))
If that works well, awesome. If you want to try something else at any point (including now), let's do it.
I think the OOC tags method will work great, personally. It'll help curve those awkward trail-offs that happen in regular conversations.
Also, I have to agree with Cel, I definitely draw the line at reproducing. I do not like children that much and like time and money too much to give that up :P no hate on people that do, of course, they're the ones keeping our race alive. I just don't have a job or any maturity at all.
I'm also inclined to agree with you and Cel, at least for the time being. I'm pretty sure the amount of noise small children produce per unit mass defies the laws of physics. (It's probably also telling that I'd have similar commentary for small dogs.)
But I think I'm starting to see the appeal of the end goal. (Which feels... different.)
Well, I guess I'm the oddball out. When I'm in the right situation, I'd love to have a few kids.
@GM Mikkel Eh, I've had worse weeks for sleep. (The record was a half hour for 4 days ina row -_-.) In regards to my summer I've got a job, which is part of why my posting schedule is far misaligned from everyone elses, and trying to wrangle together my senior project. Also, small dogs must have been selectively bred to produce as much noise as possible. Ours barks all the time, even as I'm writing this. Quiet creature!
Henri is right that somebody has to make more humans, and thus far it seems that falls to you, Xizoh. (From your sleep schedule I might wonder if you are already training for parenthood.) Go forth and teach them to play RPGs.
What are you studying? (I am obviously rooting for physics, although I get the feeling you would've mentioned that.)
Nah, the sleep thing is natural. My children shall all know the sweet taste of nat 20 and the bitter fragrance of nat 1's. And why wizards did all the things.
I actually do love physics, but it's beyond my feeble mind. I plan to study chemistry/biochemistry.
Feels odd to bat for another science team, but chem/biochem is a great life choice. (Just promise you won't work for Martin Shkreli.)
I'm not as in tune with the chem job market today, but some friends of mine from college did get decent jobs straight away (and the economy was pretty tanked back then).
Also, hey wow, we are at least 5/6 in STEM fields. (You don't happen to be a mathematician, do you Henri? That'd round us out pretty well.)
HAH
Hahahahahahah
no.
I AM A DIGITAL ARTS MAJOR. I will be jobless in my field forever. Honestly I'll be lucky if I can get a job outside of the service industry at this point -_-
Well, I know there's a bit of a push to expand the STEM focus to STEAM focus in schools to include the arts since, you know, one of the major indicators of the downfall of societies or the inability for societies to flourish in history has been when the arts are neglected. So, I say it counts!
Indeed. We shall be STEAM then, which is unquestionably superior to STEM.
@Henri - there are some cool opportunities to do art for science. We had a big paper come out a few months ago and a fleet of artists made digital graphics and movies to illustrate the experiment and the findings for us. I'm not sure how one gets into that kind of work, but I could look into it, if you'd like.
There's certainly a lot of room for improvement in terms of plot colors, but I'm not sure how well it pays. (Save us from jet!)
You might team up with some programmers to develop an app. (Speaking from experience coders are pretty terrible with making things visually appealing.) Or maybe a whole website, that would be badass.
I wouldn't mind kids except for everything about having kids, if that makes sense. My sister and a good friend just had babies, and I am horrified by both the process of having them and taking care of them afterwards. Also, while the rest of my family seems to instinctualy know what to do with them, I kind of just look at them in terror and promise to teach them strategy games in 6 years or so. Practice runs however I fully, one might even say enthusiastically, support.
Small loud dogs... *shudder* I have fish. I want cats, who will attempt to eat/torture my fish and look adorable doing so, but I don't live somewhere that accepts such intelligent renters.
I'm a physics graduate student myself - hence the lack of sunlight and general depression. Mikkel and I were undergraduates together - I remember we used to do demos for the local highschool kids where we would fill a kiddie pool with Oobleck and have them walk/bounce on 'water'. Now you've left me for spacetime. Sadness!
Also I push for STEAMM, as I think musical education is a must.
Ahh, graduate school. Nothing like motivation in the form of good old-fashioned fear and self-loathing. When I did middle school outreach my final year I weirdly enjoyed the looks of shock and horror when I told the kids I was in the 22nd grade. (Although it just now strikes me that I'd been in school twice as long as they'd been alive. Huh.)
Non-newtonian fluid is the f*cking BEST. (Although it is a b*tch to clean up.) Spacetime has been very good to me, but you'll always be my first kiddie pool of science Dulae.
I also like STEAMM. Fun fact: Dulae plays the trombone. (Actually surprisingly well.)
After all that lead-up I still need to finish up a few things after work, so check back in ~4 hours.
@Alaina, hope things are improved regarding your wizardly duties IRL.
This is a good time to talk about rules for maps. I'm a fan of drawing asymmetric features that don't necessarily align with a grid, which has some pros and cons.
I propose the following rules for maps:
- If you can’t fit your entire marker in the square, it’s not a viable place to stand (i.e. end your move), but if you can fit 50% in, you can move through it. (And so can similarly-sized enemies. I'd plan to be a lenient arbiter for both PCs and hostiles.)
- No cover: you can draw a straight line from any point on the edge of a marker to any point on the edge of another
- Partial cover: if there is at least one straight line from the edge of one marker to the edge of another
- Full cover: if there is no straight line from any edge of one marker to any edge of another
- For ranged attacks please draw a line from PC to target. (Enemies would do the same.)
- For area of effect, please mark the affected squares. (A circle would do fine.)
What do you all think?
Also, if I did something that makes a map unusable (like put the grid over the PC markers, d'oh) let me know.
So, I bought a new game on Steam called Star Command Galaxies. It's in alpha right now, but it's pretty good. Anyway, the first captain I made was Alaina and named her ship Iron Wolf. She didn't last very long. :(
I think that all sounds fine to me, Mikkel! Sometimes the grid can be demanding of cartographers, I tend to draw a lot of circles in my games.
On the job thing, as much as I'd appreaciate anyone anywhere looking into a job in my field, I'd have to put it out there that I am actually not great at digital art from a skill perspective - most of my time in school was spent in video and creative writing, as well as gaining design sensibilities :V
Star Command Galaxies - I can tell already Dulae would love this game. Farewell Captain Alaina, you had an awesome namesake.
@Henri - It may be me being jaded, but I'd say you have a leg up over a huge number of recent college grads in exactly those skills: writing and communicating. (I've graded many a paper and thought something along the lines of "This is like a random word/punctuation generator. How are you in college??" (Also, per instruction to me, none of them failed those papers unless they copied chunks directly from wikipedia (true story), which still irritates me to this day.))
Can't hurt to check into it. I'm just a postdoc at my institution, so it's not like I have any sway whatsoever in hiring, but if I can find something out that's one more thing you'd have a sense is out there at least.
Definitely :P I mean I don't know much about the hiring opportunities, I just go to a bunch of different websites and search for creative-type jobs. And I am only good at writing because I wrote at least a dozen papers for every class that wasn't in the arts. Seriously, I was a part of the honors college and they do not let you get out of there without being semi-proficient at writing a 5-page essay.
And then, of course, there was my thesis, which I wrote on horror film (which I love to say because it is the project that I am second most proud of in my college career).
Has anyone played Xcom, here? XCOM 2 just came out with a new DLC, and I always like to put RPG characters into the mix whenever I play so I may throw all of the characters here into a party since I have to start a new game now.
I love XCOM 2. What Mods do you run?
Why? Why would you go and show me an excellent looking game like that?! I have lab work to avoid... Also: This one is pretty sweet - every update is rock solid stable, but they only come out once every six months or so.
Also, I just started playing XCOM:EU about a week ago (it was free, so I thought why not) and am hooked! Absolutely fantastic, though I lost my original lady badass sniper (along with everything else, but I don't care about that) to not realizing that the game does not automatically save when exiting from the main base.
I would start a new game on impossible and put our party in, but then I would become depressed when I get them all slaughtered.
I remember Mikkel wrote an excellent paper (like 50 pages?) on pirates in disney movies and their implied sexuality. I believe I drunkenly contributed to that paper as well?
If you like XCOM:EU, then you'd love XCOM 2, it's so much better.
Oh, geez. A lot, a LOT of mods. Most of them are non-gameplay effecting mods, though, I just like having a bunch of different voices and armor and stuff. I think I may have a couple of classes and the extended timer mods though, because the default timers are too tuff 4 me.
I do miss the MECs from EW, though, these new fully robotic droids just don't do it for me.
As for space exploration games, FTL and Elite Dangerous soak up more than enough of my time. (Also Subnautica, though that's just one watery planet)
Totally reading, totally paying attention, but so much clinic work!! Just wanted to say I'm not neglecting the conversation, just not a ton of time to put together posts. Love XCOM, map looks good, all rule stuff sounds great to me, etc.
FTL too! I've put I think over 1000 hours into that game.
I hate Reaper Leviathans. They always nearly give me a heart attack when they pop out of nowhere.
@Henri - I can't help but wonder, what is the project you are most proud of? Horror film is infinitely more interesting than my undergrad thesis project (a giant acoustic wave guide that does very little except go 'pew!') What was the thesis premise?
@Dulae - if by 'excellent' you mean used semi-coherent sentences and was exactly what the professor wanted to hear, then yes, excellent. Something something freedom, or maybe it was rebellion. (And your drunken observation about cross-dressing pirates did indeed make it in there.)
@Cel - thanks for the reply during a busy work day.
@All - apparently I should take up computer games. (I definitely should not do that.)
It was some really basic analysis, basically discussing America's cultural antagonists and themes within horror film and how that subject has degraded to sort of a lowest common denominator situation where, as a genre, horror keeps focusing on the same themes and ideas. I went over the top grossing and top rated movies from every decade and did a thorough discussion of each of them to show how varied and well-liked they were.
My most proud project was a really terrible TV series that I wrote, produced, directed, and edited to the tune of 8-10 minutes every 2 weeks over a single term. It was absolutely the most difficult project I have ever been a part of, and even though the final product is rife with errors, it's still something I made despite about a million external factors that made it waaaay more difficult than it should have been.
My favourite story to tell from that production was when the producers of the program (basically there were a bunch of teams producing these segments and I was one of them) made a remark about how there was too much cursing in the segments (earlier I had asked, and they said some cursing was fine as long as it was censored, but apparently the little I had put in was too much), and asked the producers to cut back.
Well, of course, I was insulted. Cursing was key to my story! I had a lot of violence and fight scenes, and DAMN IT I was going to have cursing. So, for the next episode, I literally wrote more curses than the rest of the other episodes combined, and then waited until the last minute to turn it in so that they couldn't ask for changes. All censored, of course. It was a great time.
...
@Dulae - if by 'excellent' you mean used semi-coherent sentences and was exactly what the professor wanted to hear, then yes, excellent. Something something freedom, or maybe it was rebellion. (And your drunken observation about cross-dressing pirates did indeed make it in there.)
...
I mean, thats what passes for excellent from that class, right?
I love XCOM:EU and Elite Dangerous, but as I am a console plebeian I have not even gotten a chance at XCOM 2.
Also, I apologize for the gap in my posting. Trying to keep a dozen highschoolers cleaning and not breaking stuff is hard, especially when you can't pull the age card on them.
Gah, why do all of you have to be so intelligent? ;-;
@Henri - very interesting. Many questions, but for now I'll limit them to: Did you cover the influence of Japanese horror (I'm thinking of The Ring and The Grudge in particular)? Also, what's your take on Cabin in the Woods?
@Dulae - I regret nothing.
@Xizoh - I expect we're in good company with you, Xizoh. And you've stumbled upon five diverse and worldly mentors, that may come in handy for you. (Also, everyone is still well above the 10 post per week goal I had in mind. No worries.)
As for Cabin in the Woods, personally I love that movie - but a satire of a genre still exists within the genre, and it is still a movie about punishment (which was pretty explicitly stated, because of the satire). Still, it did a better job subverting the tropes of the genre than Scream, which was a lot more muddled in its satire and was opposed to the slasher genre rather than celebrating it in the way CitW did.
I'm also a big fan of Cabin in the Woods (I might actually give it another watch this weekend now that I'm thinking of it. It's a lot of fun.) Btw, the TV tropes page for CitW is great (particularly the 'You Bastard' entry).
Generally, is punishment in American horror more original sin or morality tale? And do you think the audience is meant to empathize with the victim less if they didn't achieve perfection? (If so, why is that? Seems like it'd be less scary if you're disassociated from the victim.)
Along the lines of punishment and perfection, I'd be very interested to hear how gender played into your analysis. Or any character that's not a straight white male for that matter. (Is there any truth to the trope that minorities die off first in a slasher?)
As for the gender question, I didn't explore too deeply into that end, but yeah, I'd say there was some truth to it in early slashers - though modern horror often simply chooses not to include people of color as opposed to killing them off first (which may have been a controversy thing, but obviously it's not really a good direction for the genre to take). While in rare cases in modern horror, there are female heroes (yet another reason why Alien is probably my favorite horror movie), it is interesting to note that often females were portrayed as the villains in early works (Freaks, Cat People, even Psycho to a degree). In most cases, the "other" of the film was some kind of monster (Freankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, War of the Worlds), but in the times that it was human, it was often a woman.
In most cases, the "other" of the film was some kind of monster (Freankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, War of the Worlds), but in the times that it was human, it was often a woman.
Huh, that never occurred to me before, but you're right. Do you think popular horror literature diverges from this much? (I'm thinking of the white guy villains used by Stephen King and Garth Nix, although the latter is more fantasy-adventure-horror.)
Either way, what's your take on the literature's influence on horror films? (And how would you classify World War Z to that end?)
Out of curiosity, are 'torture porns' actually more popular by metrics of gross sales (weighted by inflation, I guess) and/or ratings? Related morbid curiosity: how popular was the Human Centipede? I cannot fathom spending two hours of my life watching that myself, and I am still astonished it was greenlit.
Also, I'm definitely doing CitW today. This is going to happen.
In other news, this made me laugh.
Just FYI, I'm a bit hit and miss this weekend what with the holiday and all. I should still be able to post at least once a day, though. Just may be more narrow times spans.
Roger Cel. Happy 4th of July weekend everyone.
As for World War Z, seriously, FUUUUCK that movie, I loved the book so much and it hurt to see all of that potential wasted. From a strictly critical perspective, forgetting the book, it is much more of an action film - and really shows how strapped for ideas big studios are, when given something that could be truly horrifying, the combination of a horror movie AND a war documentary, they have to move out of genre to show any hint of innovation that the source material had.
I think Saw was high up, but it's more a prevalence of income vs. risk than popularity - it has a guaranteed fanbase, and will reach a guaranteed gross, so they heave a budget at them and end it. As for human centipede, it wasn't really on my radar (I watched it, but I watched a lot of awful horror movies and would not recommend it or its sequel to anyone, ever), most of the stuff I wrote about was high grossing and highly rated, of which human centipede was neither.
Very interesting. It's logical that the studios would choose the "sure bet" money over taking a risk with something new that could range from wildly successful to a total dud. (At least capitalism-wise.)
Do you think the consolidation of movie studios along with the rest of American media is responsible for this strategy, or would we be seeing data-mined, analytics-driven, focus-group-steered scripts regardless of the number of independent studios?
I ask because it's interesting that the fraction of "derivative" movies (remakes, sequels, rehashes, etc) over the last few decades seems to mirror the corporatization and consolidation of journalistic media, banks, and health care. (Probably among other things.)
Relatedly, if drawing from literature doesn't seem to help, would indie films have any hope of injecting innovation and creativity into mainstream horror films? And if the indie budgets are to low to be able to produce and market even a fantastic film, would the bigger studios would take note and follow suit or just the cannibalize the idea for their formulae (a la World War Z)?
Southern California question for Alaina - tell me if this rings any bells: creepy-crawlie 2-3 inches long, very quick to scatter in the light, and blends in astonishingly well with light tan carpet. (Please don't say house centipede. I thought I might have escaped those out west.)
The only things that come to mind are: Cockroach or Earwig.
Does it have two stinger-like things on its @$$?