Erik Tiber

I'd certainly like this. This means I get to roleplay Lockie more and get more attention. Please give me attention.

Or sometimes she goes on a rampage, not as a security officer, killing handcuffed fleeing suspects. I think calls of "b-b-but lethal force" are rather valid if the character in question is not supposed to be out arresting people and is going on a psychotic rampage, killing people with little reason, and acting in a manner that would frankly be worthy of federal intervention if this actually happened in real life. Like if Ana doesn't ever respect anyone, and constantly acts in an abbrasive manner, and constantly uses excessive force, and constantly goes beyond the parameters of her job to use said force, and is known for ignoring orders if it means she can't use excessive force or engage in whatever petty act of revenge she wants, there may be a problem. Yes, except she's blatantly worthy of being removed from her position given her long history of gross misbehavior. It's somewhat strange if you can't see how her behavior is literally beyond the pale.

Yes. It is. Luna's picture of herself is so adorable, her head looks like an egg!

Basics of what each species does would include biological information and all that. You'd just build them from the ground up. Look at what I did for the Skrell. I took how they reproduced, other basic biological information, and then asked "What sort of society would they have?" and went from there. Then Delta took that basis and fleshed it out. From what people say, apparently the result is good. I think the moral of the story is that if you think things out from the base up, then the result is normally better. Something like a species should have that level of thought put into it; if someone doesn't put that much thought into an entire species, they are doing a bad job. Since individual species are very important. What a tajaran baby is called isn't so important. But what a tajaran baby is like, is important. You need to determine their biology, consider the impact of their environment, determine their psychology, their diet, that sort of thing. Then determine what their basic social structure is, a vague overview of their history, then you can determine what they're like now. Then you can determine details like "What are these things actually called?" and other little bits. If you actually take those base factors into account, their history pretty much writes itself. It did for the Skrell. I just had to get into a brainstorming session with some regulars from Sufficient Velocity over IRC. EDIT: In fact, for many things, finding out base factors gives you an awful lot of nice details later on and causes a bunch of stuff to basically write itself. Simply trying to be logically consistent on some basic things can give interesting depth to societies and species.

Yes, I completely get that. However, there is nothing inherently bad in realism. There's no slider of realism versus quality of RP. It's not like there was ever much realism. And it's not like we ever had a good framework for even thinking about realism. And it's not like we ever tried to have realism, really. The lore could be more important if it were, well, a good story. If it had strong themes and kept with them. If we could let people come and review it and tear it apart. I'd say that the previous problems were primarily top-down mismanagement and lack of communication and lack of an ability to criticize or change things.

Well, if people want to vote to abdicate their right to vote to a random number generator, they can be my guest . I'd think that we should instead try to make gamemodes reflect consensus. Minority gamemodes would ideally be played in proportion to their popularity, rather than not at all.

By tablespoon. I remember. I also remember when you were nearly fired over creative differences. I also remember when Tablespoon used his authority to enforce his own opinions as law. If he liked something, he'd argue that it's plausible or realistic. If someone then successfully disproved that argument, he'd refrain to 'realism isn't so important'. At least, that's what I remember. Such basic concepts as 'suspension of disbelief is a thing that exists' and 'you need to convince your audience that something is plausible' were questioned and treated as alien concepts. The massive limitations imposed on the team are why others at my old forum, sufficientvelocity, told me that I should quit way back in december of 2014, when I went to them for help with brainstorming for the Skrell. I am not the least bit surprised that this thread was created.

The only people I saw complain were on the lore team. Primarily tablespoon. To be frank, those people can be ignored. I could not give less of a shit about people conflating realism with furry loving or somesuch bullcrap. Those people who complain about that wouldn't know good writing if it slapped them in the face. I remember when I did work for languages. I researched them heavily, then Tablespoon decided to revert my changes because 'realism isn't so important' or somesuch. The primary objections to realism and detail came from within the team itself. Mostly tablespoon, fro what I remember. To be frank, the only complaints I ever saw regarding 'controlling the lore' came from tablespoon. No offense to Skull, but I object to his design philosophy that detail is an all or nothing game. If some areas have more detail than othwrs, that is fine. It might look awkward, but that problem is trivial really, and far outweighed by the benefits. Exactly. This was always a problem. It was one of the major reasons I decided to leave. The problem us that when I was on the team, specialists were given no extra weight whatsoever. We were not utilized as specialists. We were discouraged from being specialists. Instead, we have species being treated as exclusive spheres. Which results in silly things. When I was advising Pump on the Unathi, anything involving plausibility was shut out. I tried advising based on my knowledge of climate. Concepts such as 'indirect sunlight means northern areas are cold' were considered 'too complicated' and I tried explaining that getting rid of axial tilt would not make northern areas jungle-y, it would only get rid of seasons. No dice. I tried advising based on my knowledge from my intro to anthropology class. No dice. As of now, the Unathi apparently have no roads but they have electricity. At least this is what I have heard from players, regarding the Unathi lore they know of. Now someone please correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly here. I tried doing this some times. The main feedback came in the form of people wishing for more detail. I'd say that the issues were top-down in nature. Look back at my first thread. I did this. Then the idea of consistency was completely misinterpreted by tablespoon to apparently mean unchanging rather than internally consistent. And to be frank, I didn't have a very good idea of what we should do creatively.

Any feedback for Lockie, Zheng Lu, Chandrakanta Bhattacharya, Wang Shui, or any other characters of mine?

this also accounts into the typical goal of strategic voting. it works two ways. one, that this mode must be picked. we must all pick this game mode. two, that any game mode we think is downright awful, we must prevent that game mode from getting voted at any cost, even if it means voting another game mode we don't hate. this is a very toxic way to deal with this and it's not cool at all when it's done. It's a natural byproduct of a first-past-the-post system. Strategic voting is a symptom, not the disease, and even as a 'symptom' it is necessary. If you prevent strategic voting then the results will be even less representative of what people want. This. So much this. If you want to improve voting, then you would have a runoff election. 40 seconds for one vote, then 20 seconds to vote between the top four choices. I'm not sure if the alternative vote would be easy enough to program.

Oh man, thanks for sharing this. I find it very interesting to read about everyday life in places like old Yugoslavia. For shitcurity, I'd imagine that mostly they'd just try to keep everything appearing nice and ethical, regardless of how things actually work out. I live in the St. Louis area, and my college is riiiiight next door to Ferguson. And the thing is, like half a dozen municipalities in the St. Louis county area have/had worse-acting police forces than Ferguson, but it's not like that's actually brought up. Generally speaking, police forces maintain plausible deniability. So you probably wouldn't be seeing officers talking shit over comms. They'd just do it in person. And you wouldn't see officers beating people out in the open, they'd take them somewhere else out of the view of the public. Or at least somewhere where they know they won't be recorded. And if someone starts complaining over comms about sec abuse, you'd see them pulled aside for abuse of comms (without the officer mentioning such over the radio), or for insulting an officer.

Yes, this, exactly this.

On another forum I frequent, if a post nets someone an infraction (except for certain cases like, blatantly inappropriate content IE extensive gore or literal porn) the post is kept, with an adendum on the top noting the fact that it was infracted.

Just my perspective, but no offense, when I was working on the lore team people seemed to be frankly, a bit obsessed with ensuring that nothing 'snowflakey' could occur, using that as the primary motivation for many decisions more than coherence or whether this would make a nice setting. It seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me if you're restricting thing significantly to prevent snowflakes. Even then though, 'snowflakey' is entirely relative. If neural implants are super common in lore and almost everyone has an MMI, then someone having two thirds of their brain replaced with prosthetics is not a snowflake. They're normal and would not be treated as remarkable. Problems with genetic engineering could be mostly solved by putting up a page listing common genemods and stating what regulations are in place, while explicitly mentioning certain things as just flat out unlikely. Other things which should be unlikely are common, and to be frank, yeah, I'm one of these people. So many characters have amputated limbs from accidents rather than voluntarily. Lockie, obviously, is an example. Many people also seem to have some manner of disability or other that would, logically, be rather easily solved. Extensive scarring? Plastic surgery. I remember the various mute characters. Really, we shouldn't try just throwing out so many different things for the sake of banning snowflakes. Just make a coherent aesthetic and just be descriptive. Describe what common cybernetic mods are and all that. Describe common genemods. Both genemods and cybernetic augmentation offer interesting avenues for roleplay. For example, memory modification. Consider a character who routinely chose to erase their bad memories, because they felt that it was better to be happy and ignorant of all the bad stuff in their life. With genemods. Consider someone modified for increased neuroplasticity. This means they can learn at a notably faster rate (like not super fast obviously, but bear with me), but they also suffer significant personality changes as a result of their increased neuroplasticity. Or consider the corporate executive with a genemod allowing them to regulate their circadian rythm, meaning they only require four hours of sleep a night, or maybe only two. Imagine them working through absurdly long stretches of the day, for longer than most people are awake, like some tireless machine. (Such a character could probably be played as an HoP or IAA or RD). There's many interesting possibilities and ethical questions raised by these. And if they were instituted into the lore they would be semi-common. They would not make someone some bizarre attention-grabbing weirdo on station, they would be an average joe basically, which is antithetical to the purpose of making a 'snowflake' anyway. Of course, where do you place the limitations? Personally, I'd prefer if there were some limitations based on what is biologically plausible, because I like that sort of fiction. Of course, by happy coincidence this would also ban much of the more outlandish and 'attention-grabbing' things. Make plastic surgery be cheap and affordable. People don't have an excuse to look like some weird freak or experiment. They could just get surgery and get that fixed. Maybe give people the option of giving their prosthetics a sort of pseudo-skin covering so they aren't immediately obvious (something I personally would REALLY like). There. If a character now has weird cat ears or something from an experiment, it would have to be because they want to have cat ears from some reason, and it is entirely by their own choice. And since that stuff is by choice, really, why wouldn't they be subject to social sanction rather than interest? Personally I think that we should focus on the, you know, elements of the character that are impacted rather than just their appearance. What makes someone a person. What determines your identity. Questions that are important to who someone is as a character. EDIT: And of course. If people object to measures which mean that scars are now purely by choice and various other things, how are those all that different from the characteristics often decried as 'snowflakey'? Not as a counterpoint, but just so that we have consistent standards, that we apply consistently, whether those standards are lenient or not.

I see what you did there.

It's something I've very rarely encountered if ever, and usually when it gets to that point, you were already fucked a while ago (bar for collapsed lungs, which are currently broken according to Skull). I'd like to have other doctors' input on this, but again, adding more doors to the treatment centre is a minuscule change in comparison to simply walking through the supply room. Sounds good, fair enough.

Yeah, I agree with both this and the OP. The problem is that people are being blatant about being bad, when really they should at least put in minimal effort to keep up appearances. Plausible deniability at the least.

This would definitely help, so much.

When you can't keep them in cryo too long because they'll start taking damage in there faster than it can be healed? Or in the case of internal bleeding, because they still bleed, and will bleed out in the tube. And when you take them out they start taking rapid damage. There are many cases where someone might stabilize in the tube but they'll keep taking damage until you give them surgery. And now the travel time is almost doubled.

If a patient who requires surgery dies in the medbay, it is often due to, well, the time in between surgery, the scanner, and cryo. Either they have liver damage which for some reason means their liver now produces sulfuric acid, and you can't get them into surgery in time, or it's internal bleeding, or some other thing. Can you tell me? I'd sure like to know. I'm actually being serious here. As a medical player, I would very much like to know how to cut down time more. Because in the times when you do get critical patients, this is already a problem. This would mean that those patients are far more likely to die. The ones that can only stay out of cryo for a few seconds because they'll die almost as soon as they go out. I frequently play medical. If there's a situation where the patient needs surgery to live, then, well, this is very important. It's not that I didn't want to do the walk, it's that they would have died otherwise if I were not able to quickly bring them in and out of cryo on a VERY short notice. It's not wants here, or laziness, it's the fact that, well, they'll die way more. The distance from cryo, to scanner, then to surgery is almost doubled. If you can only keep someone out of cryo for a minute at a time before they die, then that trip time matters. That time difference is now doubled. In this case, internal bleeding patients will be way, way more likely to simply die. Sticking them on a table is still extremely dangerous and has a good chance of not working. I like the Bay medbay (better than our current one by far imo), but we sadly can't use it because we have the /tg/station layout of engineering, not the Baystation one. Atmos is starboard, and eats up a lot of the space that Bay uses for its surgical ward, and some of the other stuff that medbay has. All I really took from Bay was the lobby and chemistry lab, but adding the full medbay layout would require us to rework engineering as well. The current baystation medbay is actually far, far worse than our current one. It is huge, and you will not navigate it in time to give patients the treatment they need.

Oh, we don't need anything that would really be considered a 'superhuman ability', I have in mind near-baseline stuff primarily. Oh, yeah, definitely agreed. Which is why genetic modification in backstories could be limited strictly to what is biologically plausible. I could compile a list of common mods and the regulations in place. Specify that people would still be near-baseline. Should be easy enough. 'Designer babies' would, primarily, simply be kids whose genetics are impacted by their parents. They would not be created to fill any particular role, or any particular profession. They would primarily be a Exactly, and that's why it's regulated and you don't get people with cat tails and cat ears and weird purple skin everywhere. Because that's not FDA approved. I would imagine that this would be very difficult, thus why you aren't getting too many more radical changes. There's 400 years of research into genetics of course, and they do have access to AI's, and hundreds of millions of times the total computing power as modern 2015 Earth. I'm talking about in-vitro stuff, not after they're born. After they're born I have no clue about, but there's no reason to think that even then you'd be able to get super-radical external changes to people too quickly. Stuff like hormones sure, but I doubt you'd be able to change their skeletal structure too much without surgery, many of the other radical changes you describe would also probably require surgery. Of course, thus it should provide interesting conflict for people on the station. Well we do have fully-cloned bodies that you can simply place the old brain into, and I have no reason to believe that cancer is even all that problematic. They'd probably have treatments for most of that anyway. And you have cloned body parts, no more waiting list for organ transplants, no more deaths from rejection... improved brain function too. And, don't forget, genetic modification to increase lifespan, as that is partially determined by genetics. Like people today aren't living just as long as people 100 years ago did. The UN thinks that you'd see average lifespan in the low 90's in certain first world countries by 2100. If you have cloning machines that can 3d print out an entire brain and body, which also functions as basically a non-destructive uploader (by scanning the brain), that implies a rather extensive knowledge of biology. Nope. It gives people options for interesting stories. There's an entire literary genre, biopunk, about the social implications of genetic modification. You don't need super-snowflake whatevers. Restrict people to realistic genemods, explicitly, and ban all those bizarre mods you just listed. Also, somewhat increased intelligence doesn't mean that someone can work all the jobs and be better than everyone else. They're not rich so they're still near-baseline, and there'd be others with similar mods who are competing with them to get those top positions. If anything, robotic augments and genetic modification could serve as a reason to restrict people from making a jack of all trades, because if you're not specialized you'll be outcompeted by someone who is.

I'm concerned at the distance between the full-body scanner, cryo, and surgery. As-is the distance between cryo and surgery can basically mean that if things go bad in surgery, the patient will definitely die. The five extra tiles is a huge deal, and it's way more than five more from cryo to surgery. Ideally you would want surgery to be near both of those. There's already been several occasions where I had to operate on the table by cryo because it would have taken too long to go between cryo and surgery repeatedly. It worked once or twice, but most of the time if the patient needs cryo they just die because of the long distance. This would only increase the problem. Perhaps introducing doors on the sides into the area with the scanner? The accessibility of the sleepers is secondary; if time is a crucial factor, you use cryo instead. I'm not so sure, the accessibility of the other rooms is pretty crucial, and you'd need to sacrifice something somewhere else to move the CMO office up to the front.

Flash cloning should def be expensive, that shit's basically nondestructive uploading tech as is. Most assuredly, since I am confident that admuns could make clear the boundaries. Hey, we could even have a pagge on common genemods. And demonstrate which mods are not common and why, and all that. Weird mods could basically be treated like visible tattoos in terms of job prospects, and we could easily make plastic surgery be common enough that people could be reasonably expected to change their weird appearance.

This is the original thread, it's about alcohol. If you want to talk about the Lore team or something that is to do with lore please make a post in Lore Questions. Anymore posts about genetics or the lore team will result in the topic getting closed. And note I made a thread for that too in lore backstory apps, ah, in case anyone else wants to comment. So just do it thee.

I'm not quite sure if shitposting is the correct response here ;:v