Kasimir

I'm going to invite you to re-read this again

Bro. Am I. Did I. Did I screw up my RP this badly :| Mira is his daughter bro >>

That's what I'm here for, Shuffle Squat Bro :eyes: I die so you don't have to :eyes: Falch ydy ni i drochu Traed o flaen i'r Annwn Mewn y gwybodaeth fe godwn ni.

Coming from the guy who prepared to die after wringing maximum value from the Tyrian Falls Village in the form of intel for his team, extreme-distanced with Illwei, and then managed to Not Die- Well I can say that eight years after, you were right Not being so uptight and embracing death has given me a better appreciation for how you play.

Please stop, I'm just trying to offer realistic strategic assessments here, Evil Bro :|

I can think of certain situations in which me dying would lead to much value for an Elim team. Some of them are extremely kayana but nobody's perfect Sometimes you just have to make the trade, because it makes the most strategic sense to do so. No matter who the player is. Even if they're your team's power role. Beginning with the obvious, which is that my being rusty, out of practice, and ill-suited for being Evil means that my death is a win-win proposition especially if bussed

Since when do I have a sense of self-preservation? I go into games expecting to die - the real question is how to extract maximum value from my death for the Village. Oh, sorry - I guess in this game, I should say, 'for my team.' Urgh. Seven years man :|

This did not need to be used, but on N3, I was preparing for death and to embrace death, which probably says a lot about how into the wincon I am. Kas Death RP submission: Submitted this to Striker and Experience; fortunately or otherwise this did not need to be used.

I was prepared to go that high for a protect item, so... But...Khas has a copy of the gambit jacket now? Reflecting how kasyana he plays apparently?

To be fair, I wanted to go eight to ten but my teammates were already a bit unnerved by five and I didn't have the heart to tell them I wanted more >>;;

Oof, some variability in the Sendtric timer, so maybe not. Will have to work out why it gives different results in different windows, RIP everyone :|

Well, wait for Exp, then after Exp, you get clear on whether you want to or not, and then if both of you are saying no, I'll work out whether to run the anon Tyrian+ or this other game I have which should clear very fast Eh you know what I'll pre-clear the anon via the Committee first, just in case.

Yeah, to be fair, my #1 rule for this game was to do whatever made me happy. As it turned out, serious analysis so soon after the MR and AG8 did not make me happy so I have to admit with no guilt at all I just did everything in PMs and off-the-cuff. 100% genuine low effort attempts. No backreading (minus the Bip re-eval, which was fast because it was just checking what Archer said), no link analysis, light vote analysis, without bothering to look too much at progression. The spreadsheet did take work but I needed the practice anyway and as a non-Villager, I could afford to get bogged down in item mysteries, though it did make Bip and Karn look more sus so that was good I don't think I even had reads lists at that point besides a one-off attempt: the running tally in my head was always a coarse-grained sus/not-sus binary.

Fair enough, I will add you to my list Thanks for the fun PM and DM, Ash, and yes, the etiquette is that it's okay - we don't stop living-dead players from having OOG PMs, but you have to be really careful about what you say in them. I've had one or two living-living ones continue as well, but in those cases, we absolutely Do Not Talk About The Game. You're right that this is the right game to RP and chill in but I just found myself incapable of doing nothing but that. I was really bored and disengaged. Probably doesn't help I'm still suffering from a lot of a creativity block at the moment, spanning...three years by this point. So I just said I was going to solve since solving made me happy.

I hate it break it to you but my trust of you was operative The whole time I felt certain that it was a Hazekiller or Drake got cadmiumed but I just didn't see any Day signs of a Hazekiller. It's just that if you were Evil, the Village was screwed anyway and there was nothing I could do, so I decided to operatively trust you. In other words, for most of the game, my view was, "TJ could be Evil, but if he is Evil, whatever, can't do much about it." My trust of Wyrm was affective, so that was a betrayal Being neutral was hard, and I'm tired and I just want to be a Villager again guys Please... Edited to add: Ethics, thoughts of how to play neutral, how I wanted to run this, suspicions, and so on. Probably random rambling for some cycles when I felt really down and tired, and traded some thoughts with Devo. 20/10 recommend, Devo best IM and interesting conversations. A lot about what I said in thread - it's just very hard to maintain an interest in the game once you've secured your item sidequest. Which is the Alexander wept (Hans Gruber version) problem for a neutral in a nutshell. Siding with the Elims was a no-no for me so it was only how overtly or covertly I wanted to help the Village, and solving gave me a reason to stick around. Thanks for the PMs, @|TJ|, @Amanuensis, @Araris Valerian, @DrakeMarshall, @_Stick_, @Fifth Scholar, @Matrim's Dice @Orlok Tsubodai, @Haelbarde- They were entertaining and kept me involved in the game when I might have headed out. As Araris correctly noted, I was not very subtle about siding with the Village. Part of this came from watching the Village screw the pooh on D2 discussion when I finally couldn't take it anymore. Part of this came from the fact that I talked to Devo about how I wanted to approach this game and if it was legal. I didn't want to play a faction manipulating neutral - I wanted to play a straightforward, chill neutral, who won by being chill bros with both factions, initially. That died when I could not take sitting back and chilling. I just felt increasingly disengaged from the game and if the game is getting you to think maybe you shouldn't sign in at all, that's not a good place to be in. So I revised my strategy. I wanted to be straightforward still, and to keep my word when given, and to be direct with each faction about what I would and would not do. There was a very small chance I'd have been open to cutting a non-aggression or even outright offer-to-help deal with the Elims if they had approached me early with the right player, but as it turns out, they had only two players on their team who could have potentially talked me into taking their side more out of personal loyalty rather than anything else in particular, so that was a non-starter. (Note that Orlok, Fifth, Bev'ika, and potentially Aman would've gotten very good results, but fortunately they were Village.) Basically that was the line I took. I more or less openly committed to being Village, more or less firmly told Bort what I was not down for, and then nearly died when Mat approached me with the scan results in the same cycle Bort outed himself and sent craptonnes of PMs to Devo and to Elan panicking about the ethics. And then again when Karn asked me to hold fire. And then again... Bloody hell. I can say this was not the easiest path to walk. And I wanted to do it because I wanted to show/remind SE players that there's a lot of ample space for neutrals to play in without having to go for manipulative play. Was my style unnecessarily rigid? Possibly. Trying to be the game's Ned Stark usually gets you killed. But I think it was a line I was happy to uphold, and it was something that kept me engaged with the game and in a positive way. Thanks for running this game, @StrikerEZ, @Experience, thanks for the enlightening strategic and ethical conversations, @Devotary of Spontaneity, and congrats to the Elim team for winning and thanks for not killing me as I'm not very good at survival wincons and said as much the second I saw my GM PM Good job, Village, it didn't work out in the end I guess But I did my best and I have no regrets. And did I mention how good it was to not feel ML guilt?

I am okay with running mine but concerned about player numbers - ideally I'd like a minimum of twenty for the anon game. But will see if Ash or Exp or Wilson/El wants it first. If not, I can probably trade this slot with another LG I have and run that first instead. I don't know, does anyone think I can realistically hit the minimum for the anon game?

Double-posting to see if this works. Blast from the SE past: [removed because it broke] This should count down to when sign-ups end and the game starts. No more annoying timezone conversions!

We have always been at war with Eastasia, I see Hi Village, honestly tonight's plans boil down to: grab anything not Bronze and go for it It's not a good plan, but it has the distinct advantage of being a plan, that is to say, better than nothing. -Love, Your Friendly Village Neutral. Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum Aman, Ash, Mat, JNV, Bev'ika, Stick, Walin, Fifth, Tani. The names he carried with him grew longer and more numerous as he recited them, daily, the way he was supposed to, the way they read out the names of the fallen each morning back when he fought with Clan Aral. Kavar knew their weight: it was a familiar one, and against them, he set the two names, heavy like two stones in his chest: Mira, Ailys. They were not dead, but they may as well have been. He felt the old ache well up within him. He'd made his own choices, and his share of mistakes. Ailys had left first. After that, it was Mira who had walked out of his life. With Mira, it was no sudden decision, though perhaps it had not even been sudden with Ailys: it had been hurried nights, between deployments, it had been arguments swiftly hushed when Mir'ika came into the kitchen, it'd been a thousand and one signs he should have read as clearly as the star-clad sky above his hometown, as trail signs laid down by Aral scouts for the main force to follow. With Mira, it had been distant transmission after distant transmission, growing briefer, colder; his own transmissions sometimes hitting the answering service or going unanswered altogether. He knew she was slipping through his fingers and maybe that was the point, he thought. You gave your children life but you could not live it for them, and Mira'd decided she was better off without her buir in her life. And the knowledge still cut him, like a knife: the knowledge that maybe there was no way to make things right, that Mira'd made her own choice, just as Ailys had, so many years ago. Kad'ika. He was a knife, had always been. Maybe that was the problem. He'd been a knife first, and a father and a husband a distant third. "I can't do this," he slurs, so long ago, slumping on that stool in that old run-down bar in the worst part of Elendel. Maybe he'd just wanted to numb his brain with enough alcohol. Or maybe he'd wanted a fight. Sometimes Kavar can't tell the difference. "Shab', Wyhe, I can't." And then, terribly, unutterably terribly, Wyhe gives him hope. "No one knows how to be a father, Kav. You just do your best." "And if that's not enough?" "How hard can it be?" Wyhe wants to know. "Shab' Kav, you just love them more than air and water and light. From there, everything else comes naturally." And he had. And he had. And it wasn't enough. And he didn't know what he'd done wrong, but part of him desperately hoped that it wasn't too late. Always one last mission, always some last task that needed his attention before he resigned and went to seek Mira. Went to—discover what had become of her, to gaze upon her, one last time, and to learn if she needed her buir gone from her life, and— —and it ached like the rasping of a glass knife against bone, but of course, if that was what she wanted, that was what Kavar would do. But for now, there were traitors to hunt. He closed his eyes and breathed in the dark, holding his breath for the ten-count and then releasing it. The knife was still tucked away in his boot. He supposed it was always good to have an ace up your sleeve in case you needed one. He'd carried it to war for the first time when Ailys had given it to him, but it'd saved his life nearly a dozen times, and by now, Kavar'd come to regard it as a good luck charm of sorts. He'd found the caches and destroyed them. But the crew of the Survivor was fragmenting. "Live," Sergeant Vahn said, and glared at him when Kavar opened his mouth to argue. "The last cache you destroyed contained a transmitter. Can't break the encryption, but expect it to be Rosharan." "We knew it, though. The saboteurs were meant to derail the mission before it began." "The mission," Vahn snapped. "Not your mission." Their mission is mine, Kavar'd wanted to say, but that was not what an operative could afford. Not sentimentality. Not entanglement. And yet, he had. Because something about the plight of the squads, of Kranvar, of the many others on the Survivor had reminded him of himself on his first deployments, and the instinct had been to guide, to protect, to teach. Even when he was no longer working for the same branch of the Confederacy as they were. He'd reminded himself not to get attached, even when they made his cover and inserted him into Pyrehawk, with Vahn as his handler. But old habits died hard. Good soldiers follow orders, said Bralor, so long ago. Vahn's eyes did not soften. He held out a secure bag, with a faint bulge inside. Kavar took it, weighed it. "The transmitter. Some other critical pieces of intel from the Survivor. The ship is lost, Aral. Best you see to getting off before the mutiny begins and take it to Confederacy SIGINT. They'll be able to crack it, no doubt." "And you?" Vahn snorted. "Today, I'm a soldier," he said, and walked away before Kavar could shout at him for forcing Kavar to survive, for just walking away like this, for going against standard operating procedure, even though that was the same thing Kavar had badly wanted to do, to try to stand with the last of the Survivor's crew and brace for the final onslaught. He kept the bag in his kit and secured it to be certain. He drew a deep breath and went out to meet the others. Later, he told himself. He had his orders. But they wouldn't have sent him to the Survivor if they hadn't expected him to use his best judgement. And in Kavar's estimation, the crew was losing, but he'd be damned if he just lay down and surrendered. There was always another day to die. And as the old saying went: Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur.

This game before I, Aman, and Illwei signed up: Might have a slight language warning but it should not be anything beyond PG-13.

I'm fine with shorter days as well. Edited to add: Agree with prowler assessment. This puts us at (likely) currently 5-4; tonight will bring us to parity 4-4 and then probably a ML. If they can't succeed by D7, I don't know what to say.

Essentially, you want to be looking at pens like the Pilot Parallel, which aren't exactly fountain pens but are good for that purpose. Italic nibs and stub nibs are good for line variation—a Pilot 78G+ Broad nib would fall within your range and is cheap. Ditto for a TWSBI Eco 1.1mm Stub. Italic nibs are sharper and stubs more forgiving. If you feel fancier, PenBBS now sells calligraphy nibs to be mounted on their pens. Each calligraphy nib has different properties so that needs more research than I can give you at this hour. Very value-for-money. The one thing I want to caution you against is getting a flex nib pen. A number of sites sell modified Jinhaos with a Zebra flex nib (dip pen) at a 3x to 5x markup. You don't need that. At your price point, if you want a flex nib, you are better off looking at the steel flex nibs from Kanwrite—Noodlers has some good and affordable flex pens too but their nibs sometimes seem to require a gym membership so caveat emptor.

What's your budget, and what sort of calligraphy do you do?

Oh? Do you have a particular pen or nib in mind?

I don't know - it could, but I feel there's a different element of discussion, e.g. why does Exp have 8 votes, what is Exp up to, is this a gambit, and so on that this promotes. Essentially I'm usually of the belief that stifling discussion is on the Village. Bid numbers would also work, I think - players then have the option to claim if they want to.

P.S. @Matrim's Dice - What you did not see was the amount of expletives in my GM PM.