Claincy

When you create a poll there's a check-box at the top for choosing whether votes are made publicly or not

Heh, someday, somehow, we have got to all get in the same country for a game

No he doesn't. But if he thinks your in a bad mood at the moment he probably figures he's more likely to get positive attention from someone else right now. Regardless though, 1 instance of something happening is not a good indicator of who a pup loves more. Puppies generally love everyone they know who isn't mean to them. If you being angry scared him slightly, well ok, but how many times has your mum been angry at you in front of him?

EDIT: Just a quick note to make sure this is clear: I have not spoken to a professional psychologist about any of this (though I probably should have at some point) and all the advice and thoughts I have to offer are based on my own experience, not any professional knowledge. Others have already said most of what I have to say but I would like to share my thoughts on this bit. But first for a bit of context I'll briefly mention a little about myself so you know where I'm coming from I have fairly severe social anxiety, not as bad as some people but pretty bad and it used to be worse. I also used to have more general anxiety (though to a significantly lesser degree) but I've largely squashed that. I have also had some relatively mild depression in the past and still have days every now and then where I lapse into it a bit. I've asked myself the same questions in the past as you are, wondering if I was just weak and pathetic for struggling as I did/do. I believe that I have a very good understanding of myself now, I think I know where most of my problems come from and I understand my underlying motives and feelings quite well. But of course that wasn't always the case. I have a pretty good idea of the events that caused my social anxiety which is, I think, a good thing. But at one point it just added the question of if I was weak for letting what to another person might have been a number of relatively minor events have such a major negative impact on my mental health. The conclusion I eventually came to was that it doesn't matter if other people find things I struggle with easy or wouldn't have been effected like I was by certain events. That isn't a matter of being weak/strong it's a product of your own experiences and brain chemistry. Whatever it may be to other people it is a real issue for you and your strength lies in how you react to it. Struggling with something or being afraid of something doesn't make you weak or strong but persevering against that struggle does. That you are reaching out for professional help and openly talking about what you struggle with shows true strength of character. Have you heard of a book called "Rowan of Rin" by Emily Rodda? It's a children's book but of all the books I've read it is still the one that springs to mind when I think about true courage and strength. It isn't very long and it's well worth a read if you haven't read it before. I have no idea if this is a good way of dealing with anxiety or if it could help you at all but instead of avoiding, fighting or ignoring that pessimistic voice in my head I sometimes stop and really think about what would happen if what I'm getting anxiety about did happen and I take it far enough that even with my anxiety I emotionally think it's ridiculous. This can accomplish two things: 1) Sometimes it makes me, not so much realise as I already was logically aware of it, but emotionally understand more that what my anxiety was telling me was stupid. 2) Sometimes I can look at that worst case scenario, consider it, and realise that I could survive that. Life would go on and most of the time it wouldn't actually seriously harm any of the things I really care about. It doesn't stop the anxiety and I don't know if it's a good method but it does sometimes make it easier to deal with. I find it mostly helps in the lead up to something when I'm trying to convince myself to go. I personally find that at least 80-90% of the time I have significantly less anxiety once I'm in the moment than in the lead up to it.

That popped up on my facebook feed earlier today, it's now part of my internal canon for star wars, it's too perfect not to be.

Don't be so hard on yourself Making people laugh is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor and by doing so you provide a valuable contribution to the community. I don't think anyone here wishes those threads never existed, just that the rep balanced more. Heh, once upon a time I would have cared. But I've been largely maintaining a low level of activity here for around a year and a half and I was genuinely surprised I hadn't been displaced much sooner.

Ooh, this was fun last time Glad to see it return.

To add my opinion to the mix: I don't think there is much of a case for arguing that individual upvotes haven't been drastically devalued over the last couple of years. When jokes and memes that took a few moments to create garner ten+ upvotes the value of an individual upvote is clearly less than when each one was a hard earned recognition of effort/achievement. That said, to what degree this does or doesn't devalue the reputation system as a whole is far less clear cut. I think it's important to acknowledge and consider how the site and community has changed over the years. When I joined 17s was primarily a theory crafting board. General discussion, roleplaying and other parts of the forum were pretty empty. The theory crafting parts of the site are still very significant but other parts of the forum have grown massively. The culture of the site has always remained friendly and inviting but other aspects of it have shifted considerably and while I think a harsh rep quota might have a positive impact on the theory-crafting boards and encourage more careful crafted theories over idle speculation I am concerned that it might have some degree of a negative impact (at least in the short term) on some of the more social parts of the site. To be clear, I personally preferred it when upvotes were hard-earned. I don't at all mind them being handed out for things other than theory crafting as there are plenty of other significant ways to contribute but I did prefer it when they held more individual significance. That said, I think a reply is always better than an upvote unless all that reply would have is a smiley or "this" or "I agree" or the like. Two years ago I would have been rather unhappy to hear that by this point in time there would be posts with over 100 rep and that only 1 of them would be by Brandon. In my opinion none of those posts (including my own ) deserve near that many rep points. With all that said. I don't think it's possible to go back to the way things once were, or that we should try to do so. I'm concerned that the potential benefit in slowing exponential rep gain from having a low quota won't match up to the frustration it will cause. I'm also not excited by the idea of coming across more posts that consist of a statement about how they're sad that they can't upvote someone along with an animal gif/pony pic. I would prefer an excess of upvotes to that kind of clutter. To be clear, I'm not attacking anyone who's made those kind of posts, especially if it was in random stuff, but I don't really like the idea of seeing that kind of post in more serious topics where it doesn't contribute anything to the actual topic and just takes up space to say what an upvote could have said just as well. But maybe that wouldn't/won't happen and I'm being concerned about nothing, we shall see. Just to make my personal biases clear: The quota of 10 doesn't directly effect me as the way I hand out rep hasn't changed all that much in the past couple of years. You can call me stingy if you want but I only upvote when I think a post really deserves it and hasn't already received more upvotes than I think it warrants. I don't downvote posts because I think they have too many but that's personal preference. That said I'm trying to think of how it will effect the community in general, not how it will effect me I'd be totally fine with a system where overall rep was hidden but it still existed for individual posts and an award system was reintroduced. I do enjoy the silly ranks but I suppose they could be covered pretty well by the awards anyway. Truthfully though I'm ok with whatever decision is made so long as a clear statement of the intention of whatever changes/system is made and that it's something that you're confident you will continue to be largely satisfied with and that probably won't go through any major changes again 6 months down the line. I think there is always going to be some negative consequences to any change made to these kind of systems, some people who will be unhappy about it, and the longer a system has been in place the worse those consequences are likely to be.

Saw that I've marked it down as -9000 based on the posts

Short answer: I like dice, I really like mistborn and these are cool mistborn dice. Long answer: It's a group order with 5 other people, 6 sets are for others, 6 sets are for myself and I haven't decided whether to hold on to the 13th set for a gift as I'd originally planned or just keep it myself Besides, this way I have enough mistborn dice to form pools for all characters during conflicts in the MAG rather than just remembering how many dice everyone had till their turn comes up.

This is a bit of a necro, but a reasonable one I think. My dice arrived 172 mistborn dice. (Around half are mine.)

So finally saw it. My personal opinion: It's good, but not great. +It felt like star wars +A lot of good moments +Rey in particular was good +Good visuals and sound +The closing lightsaber fight was one of the best in the films in my opinion. It was more dynamic and interesting than the original trilogy and didn't look like a pre-choreographed performance the way the prequels did. -Too unoriginal and predictable. I know it was paying homage to the first film but it was just too much the same and what wasn't the same was still far too predictable. -There were a number of times where the dialogue was noticeably clunky and excessively expositiony, though by and large it was pretty good -There were a few too many exceedingly unlikely coincidences and things that just didn't quite make sense -I'm still not quite sold on Kylo Ren, or to a lesser extent on Fin. I can see the potential but they didn't quite click for me yet. Not sure if this should be a negative but Han's death really didn't work for me. I just found it far too obvious far too far in advance and when it happened I just didn't feel much. It wasn't till I'd got back home and read what other people thought of the movie that I really realised that, oh yeah, that was a really big deal. Sometimes I wish I was better at shutting down the analytical part of my brain, but I spend more time training myself to think like that for the purpose of being a better game designer. Overall I still enjoyed it, I'll probably enjoy it more the next time I watch it and I'm on board to see where they go next Edit: One other thing I noticed was to do with names. In the opening parts of the movie the writers took pains to make sure each character was named as early as possible, multiple times if they could and sometimes at the cost of some clunky dialogue. The exception was for Rey, she was onscreen for a considerable length of time before anyone used her name. I'm pretty sure that had to be a deliberate attempt to subtly set up or reinforce the mystery around her identity. It's also cool being the same age as the heroes for a change

Congratulations! Very well done

The two sides are both alliances of 4 to 5 major houses. The flag pins represent the primary keep (or manor) of each currently involved house. The other houses won't be part of the initial conflict, though they certainly may get involved as the war progresses, I expect some will end up playing an important part My campaign takes place in an altered canon set during the Well of Ascension time frame where the skaa rebellion never happened and the lord Ruler still rules. Only 4 of the great houses from the first mistborn game survived the house war Kelsier's crew caused and the game (so far) has largely revolved around the struggle between 20 other houses who are all aspiring to replace the fallen great houses.

Heh, I'll consider it. It's really a matter of finding when everyone, or the most people, are available. Other factors don't really get to impact the decision.

Made this for a mistborn session I'm running tomorrow The session spells the beginning of a house war and I expect to get use out of the map for a few sessions to come

Happy anniversary everyone Clancy the storyteller was sitting in the tavern when he heard the news. He finished his drink then quietly stood and went up the stairs to his room, latching the door behind him. He sat on the bed for a long moment, thinking. Finally he shook his head, "No, not this time, not again." His mind made up he hurried around the room, collecting his few possessions and stuffing them into his travel pack. Packing done he peaked out the window and, seeing the alley beyond was empty, he climbed down and slipped away through the streets, over the wall and away from the town. I really can't afford to play this time :'( I already have more rp commitments than I have time for and I just couldn't commit to being properly active if I signed up. So unfortunately everyone's "favourite" manipulative spiked storyteller is sitting this one out.

I was feeling really stressed out this morning about a number of things today, some of it just the standard social anxiety stuff, but everything worked out quite well

Like others I mean everything I post here. I do empathise more than I post but I tend to only post when I have something I think is particularly helpful or useful to say (or feel the need to talk about my own problems but that's a different kind of post ). I don't need to know/have known someone personally to feel sorrow at their loss. That said, I certainly could empathise more than I do but I choose not to. There's (naturally) only so much negative stuff (in others lives and my own) that I can really think about at a time without it negatively impacting my own mental state and behaviour which would have a ripple effect to other people I interact with.

I appear to have sprained my right wrist again, that or partially crushed the median nerve again. Either way it's pretty painful, can't flex as well and can't deal with as much weight/force. It doesn't even make for a good story; I probably just slept with my head on it again cos apparently I'm an idiot and my body has all the resilience of soft putty. (I do know better than to deliberately sleep like that, but if I wake up fractionally during the night and shift position I occasionally do it without noticing.)

Ah yes jeans, I don't wear those. Aside from not having a particular desire to wear them I've never found any that actually fit. I'm not particularly tall but nonetheless any jeans I find that are long enough for me are far too wide around the waist On a separate note: While I wasn't particularly pleased that my new laptop was faulty on arrival I certainly can't fault Dell's customer support. In related news I now have a working laptop.

Essentially: -The Jews, particularly the chief priests & elders of the time, demanded his death -Pilate, the Roman governer, eventually agreed in the face of the angry crowd So the Romans killed him at the demand of the Jews. Anyone, especially any Christian, who thinks this is a reason to mistreat Jewish people is utterly wrong though. As far as the Christian faith is concerned Jesus death and resurrection was planned by God, it was always supposed to go that way. Additionally, the point of Jesus's death was the forgiveness of sins, it's definitely not our place to condemn people. I have to admit that I don't know a lot about the differences between some of the various Christian churches, but for Anglicans it's about the love Jesus showed and how we should be sharing the same love with others. If someone has done wrong we should be praying for them to turn to Christ and abandon whatever evil they are doing, not condemning them for any actual or perceived sins. We believe that none of us are worthy, all of us have sinned and fall short and would be condemned. But because Christ died for us so long as we believe in him and accept him as our saviour he will speak for us on judgement day.

Ok, so, this is going to be somewhat rambly and it'll sound like it should be in the bad day thread for most of it but bear with me. I was playing cards against humanity with some friends on Friday night. We were using cards from a game called "The Art of Conversation" in place of the black cards. (No this isn't leading to a joke that would break the site rules ) One of the cards that came up was "What is the first thing you remember learning at school." Or something like that. I was homeschooled till grade 2 but the first thing I remember actually learning from school was that some people will hurt you for no reason. Thinking about this lead me down a certain chain of thought regarding the effect certain people have had on me and forgiveness. For a quick background just so this make's sense: I have a pretty good idea why I am the way I am. I have fairly severe social anxiety, I avoid physical contact, I'm afraid of people in general and I know the main people/events that caused me to be this way. I've spent time in the past thinking about forgiveness and coming to the conclusion that I had forgiven them. But I was never quite sure if it was entirely true or if I still held some small amount of anger and resentment towards them. This time when thinking about it I went down to the most basic essence of it: If I could, would I make them all truly understand the effect they had on me? The answer, as it turns out, is no. It's not about appearing strong or not appearing vulnerable in front of them. The reason I wouldn't do it is because I don't want to burden them with that, I don't want them to have to live with that knowledge. So realising that, I'm finally certain that I don't bear any ill will or resentment towards them now and I'm really happy to know that's the case I was fairly sure but I'm glad to get past that niggling doubt. Not the kind of thing that is normally posted in this thread, but in some ways it matters as much to me as anything else I've posted in this thread

I disagree. I think your post was quite reasonable and the advice was solid. Understanding the psychology of other parties in a situation can be essential to finding a good solution. A rational explanation of why someone might be struggling to accept something, coupled with practical advice on what to do to help them understand and accept it makes for a valuable post in my estimation. Sure sympathy, commiseration and pug pics are nice but I think the posts in this thread that hold the most value are those that do more than that. Pestis appears to be reacting against the idea that the basic parental psychology you outlined means that it's perfectly ok for them to act that way and no efforts should be made on their part to change, which, unless I totally misunderstood, is not what you were saying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I read you weren't dismissing it as a problem, but rather acknowledging the problem, explaining a likely cause for it and suggesting a method for dealing with it. It's generally very difficult to solve problems without understanding what is causing the problem and how others may be struggling themselves. Put simply, we (I think I speak on behalf of others here too) appreciate the perspective, insight and advice you post here Maxal

Dogs can be so awesome. Surprisingly, our border collie is completely uninterested in his reflection. I suppose he notices it but he doesn't care about it at all.