MattyIce : Thanks for the invite.  I'm still out due to the NFL's stance on abuse and violence with their players.  I'm boycotting, including pick'ems.

Have fun.

The NES games aren't working so well for me anymore and I find the boards are... stuffy.

I'm out.  I'm all set with Vizzed.  It was fun for a while, it lost its flavor, there was some resurgence but things are just.... well, I just going to take off.

I watched as no one emailed Singelli as much as she was loved so I won't worry about leaving an email.  I don't think anyone will care what happens beyond this community.  That's fine.  I have no problem with it.

If I may say one thing: The thing that's driving me away and I'm sure has turned others off is the drive to be correct.  Whether it's 'the rules' of the threads or where something should be posted or regular members summoning MODs because members think thread questions are answered and things should be closed....  You folks are missing the big picture.  Instead of getting stuck on "Well, what is this categorized and what forum should it go?" you're missing the message.  It's about the interaction, the conversation, and building relationships through words.

The point isn't being right.  The point is interaction.  That's why everyone is so lonely.  Many people miss out on interaction for the enjoyment of the experience.  Stop worrying about grammar, specific facts, and stop apologizing for maybe putting a thread in the wrong place.  Everyone should focus on talking to each other.

I know what's going to happen next.  There will be some scrutiny of what I wrote.  "Maybe it belongs in Cafe Corner because it's relationships!"  "No, no, it's a general forum post."  A MOD will step in and solve that problem.

Probably some folks will try to find the grammatical error I put in on purpose.  They'll point that out and feel happy about themselves because they were right about something.

Probably most people are going to miss the point of this whole thing and I spend 400 words venting to a brick wall.  With any luck, I'll impact one person for more than 5 minutes.  I don't believe in luck.

Vizzed has run its course with me.  I'm done.  I hope you enjoy your time here, I hope you make good decisions in real life, I hope you realize profanity just means you're bad at vocabulary, and I hope you all find some kind of peace and acceptance in the real world.

Good luck.

Let me clear up a misconception; I'm here for fun.

Postman3 : The noun custom means habitual patronage, as of a store.  I didn't mean customers.

Either way, I'm out.  You folks continue writing away.  I'm not here for critique, or communication, or planning or routing a story.  I'm only here to write.  If I wanted someone to go over my stuff with a fine-tooth comb, I'd take a community education class.  I'll communicate this: This isn't fun if we sit here and grade each other and correct each other.  It's not about the words or what you think is correct or incorrect.  It's about the story.  But I don't get the feeling that's going to happen on this particular thread.

You folks enjoy yourselves.  I hope you have fun.

Singelli : Yes, the location is a tavern + inn.  The ground floor is stone-walled with a large wooden door four men wide, studded with iron.  The counter area with tall stools runs along the long side of the tavern and a large stone hearth sits opposite.  There are sconces with smaller fires on the four stone posts in the main area supporting the second floor.

A spiral staircase leads to the second floor where a hallway with four rooms per side sit.  All rooms lock and have a straw-stuffed bed, ewer and pitcher of water, and chamberpots.  There are small windows that look out on the alleys and buildings only eight feet away from the walls of the tavern.

There's also a privy in the back.

janus : Let me understand you correctly.  You're not being sarcastic or facetious with that first remark?  You honestly believe in those things you've said?  You're 31?

Let's look at what alcohol does: The CDC estimates 88,000 people die each year in the United States from alcohol-related fatalities in 2014.  40% of all automobile fatalities are alcohol-related and 40% of all pedestrian fatalities are alcohol-related.  50% of defendants accused of murdering their spouse were reported as drinking or with alcohol in their system at the time of the crime.  3 million (That is a 3 with six zeroes behind it) victims of physical abuse or assault report their attackers were drinking or drunk at the time. 

That's a lot of damage being done by a legal, federally-regulated intoxicant.

The CDC also reports, as of 2014, that 480,000, almost half a million folks, die from tobacco-related events.  Cancer, disease, and so on claims another half a million people.  

That's a legal, federally-regulated business as well.  

So, you want to put drug users on mind-altering substances like meth and coke out in the open.  You want that stuff to walk around and be available at any time.  I wouldn't want my mother living next to people who smoked meth for fun on the weekends.  I wouldn't want my kid to live next door to someone who does heroin whenever their bill comes.

One type of crime (drug possession) would go down to zero, obviously.  But what's the cost?  If more people have to die and people who should be prison walk around free, where's the justice in that?

If it's illegal to have pot, don't possess pot.  Instead of changing the rule, why not... I dunno.... follow the rule.  

I agree with PM Trudeau, but recreational drugs won't stay in the house.  That stuff goes outside.  Imagine a bar somewhere where you can get a beer, a shot, and meth.  You think people get violent now?  Wait until they're tweaked out of their minds with alcohol and heroin and see what unfolds then.

Decriminalize pot.  Sure.  I'm fine with that.  Fine the heck out of people and keep things moving.  The rest of it has no business out in the market.

singelli:
mario102 :
Postman3 :
supernerd117 :
cylonbait :

You folks all answered Singelli's call.  This is the thread in which we write a neat little combined-effort story.  Remember, no graphic gore, no explicit adult situations, no magic, etc.

LOCATION: Nothing related to true Earthbound locations.  Imagine mainland Europe, with temperate forests, mountains, hills, plains, and so on.  There are rivers as well and maybe we find an ocean.  The starting point is a large town named Swain, a community located on a crossroads between two larger kingdoms.  The two kingdoms have contested over it in the past but the current general allegiance goes to the larger kingdom slightly further away.  Their names?  We'll discover those down the road.

TIME: It is springtime.  The last snow has melted for good.  The era is pseudo-medieval.

SITUATION: Word has reached Swain that the two kingdoms are mounting armies to fight a war against each other.  One kingdom managed to insult the other, so the rumor goes, and it is said they're both preparing for war.  Swain is located on a crossroads and near a river that act as major travel routes in the region.  People are either fleeing, preparing to hide, or declaring for one group or the other.  A week has passed since the first reports came.  And.... action!

**IN CHARACTER ROLE PLAY FROM HERE ON OUT.  QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, AND OTHER ITEMS WILL BE POSTED IN THE OTHER THREAD.  ANY NEW WRITERS CAN INQUIRE ABOUT PARTICIPATION ON THE OTHER THREAD AS WELL.  GAME ON!**


Erven's surveyed the common room with a frown.  His fingers ran through his hair for the 100th time of the day.  He inspected the few hairs that came out.

"More gray than black," he muttered to himself, flicking the strands away.

The tavern was quiet.  A few solitary drinkers were scattered amid the long tables.  The brick fireplace held little more than glowing embers.  It was late but there was no reason to get the blaze going.  Empty rooms waited up the stair but people found their way to their own homes.  And they did so earlier and earlier each night.  The moon hadn't shown her face yet when Erven barred the door for good last evening.

He shook his head.  Riders never brought good news.  People panicked at the hint of any trouble.  He had seen enough in almost forty years to fear little and rumors of war weren't enough.  But neither were the coins in back.  Erven didn't want for much but a destroyed town didn't fill his pockets.

"And conquerors fancy themselves rightful owner of a drink," he told Anise, the barmaid.  There wasn't enough custom for two girls and Erven sent the other girl back to her father.

"Aye, and whatever else they may lay them's hands on," she replied with a frown.

"If'n you don't want to be here, I can handle the place myself.  I've been at it for 20 years, girl," Erven replied.  He had a strong back and a thick torso from handing kegs of beer his adult life.  "I could serve a table or two.  If you feel safe in taking to the forests, have at it."

Erven caught the worry behind Anise's eyes when she left him to collect empty tankards.  She was a good girl, dull, but she worked.  Erven wouldn't have his staff any other way.  His eyes roamed the room.  My hall, he thought to himself.  He didn't know any of the folks in.  They were most likely from beyond the city limits, in town for news or rumors.  He couldn't boast to having the largest tavern in town so they could have been from Swain.  He did know the uncertainty hanging in the air overpowered the smell of wood smoke.

Let's at least spell out what we're looking for here.  Things will develop as we go and the trail may wander off into the woods.

Let's settle on a few issues:

Everyone's basic character.  Name, physical attributes, generic emotional balance, and motivation.

Time Setting: Are we talking current day?  Are we setting up a fantasy setting a'la medieval Europe?  Is this in the future on some distant planet recently settled by humans (See Allen Steele's Coyote from decent Sci-Fi writing)?

I don't want to put out a heroes' quest or immediate objective like, "OVERTHROW THE EVIL KING RAGNAR".  Let's set the scene and see how things progress.  I'd rather uncover the story, like unearthing dinosaur skeletons, and not plot the thing like a graph.


Let's decide on situation and go from there.  Let's also limit everyone to one main character and one ancillary character to be introduced down the line at that person's desire.

shanezer : If you're going to complain, at least give us an example so we can see what we're working with.  If your parents yell at you because you thought it was a good idea to mow the lawn without shoes?  Well, that makes sense.  You'll get your feet shredded by flying debris, rocks, sticks, or whatever.

You say "Barely wrong" but you use parenthesis.  That, to me, means there's something wrong and you know it and you know better.  Maybe you made a bad decision and they yelled at you.  Walk us through what happened.

Me?  My parents let me go out and explore and try things.  I have a lot of scars, I'm kinda surprised I'm still alive, but I'm better for it because I understand how much things hurt when they go wrong.  I'm lucky I didn't lose fingers, toes, my head, etc. for all the stuff I've done.

What did you do?

legacyme3 : You're (again) absolutely, unequivoically, without any sarcasm, 100% correct.  I was going to say the exact same thing.

If I really like Dexter the tv show and I love to read what people have to say and I can't wait to get online to speculate, talk, and see the rumors and all, I should darn well know if I miss an episode..... maybe don't go online to those websites?  Maybe?  

I love sports and I know if I miss the final of a game or I don't want to see it, I don't go to Yahoo or some of the other major news sources because they'll splash the scores at the top of the page.  I can come here or to one of my war games until I see the result the way I want to see it.

Just because you're online and you have endless information at your fingertips doesn't mean you can't figure out how to avoid said information.  I have no idea how people never learned what a media blackout is and how to separate themselves from a particular discussion.

Baffling.

It's not the internet, it's you.  If you haven't played Final Fantasy 3 and you want to see the end, don't go to Youtube and watch "Final Fantasy 3 endings."  Of course you're going to see spoilers.

I'm intrigued at the rule of "No canons."  

Do you mean current existing canon or are you denying the opportunity for characters to develop a spirituality as their role and progression unfolds?

And I'm in.  Are we playing via email or are we going live on here?

The original question is "Can you come check out my video?"

First, I'd say no because you didn't tell me what it was about.  It could have been anything and most things aren't interesting to me.  

Second, you didn't hyperlink it.  I had to copy and paste and go to the page.  Any little thing that makes more effort for me is going to make me skip the video.

Then, the title is a walkthrough.  You don't give any instruction, there's no voice over to even tell me what the first few parts of the set up where and what you were doing.  I clicked ahead about two minutes to see if there was any audio from you to say, "This is why we're doing this."  There was nothing.  I closed the video.

F. Starr : This might just hijack the thread but you mentioned stereotypes and the part about humans being more dangerous than zombies.

You don't think humans are going to be more dangerous than zombies if anything like that happened?  Think of today.  Of all the animals that can kill people, humans do it in numbers waaaay bigger than probably all other animals combined.  Humans rationalize, form factions and group, respect violence and power, and generally have the know-how and the aggression to kill everyone else to make things happen.  It's politics, it's how most of our history was made, it's what we do.

Humans do violence.  Look at our history.  Everything is done through violence.

Anyway, another zombie tv show.  That's cool as long as they don't let the human part interfere with the zombie part.  Walking Dead is way to guilty of doing that.  50 minutes of people talking, 3 minutes of zombies.  Yuck

LunarDarkness2 :  

"Does anyone have any tips for me to improve my voice acting? Thanks."

Ahem.

Let me get this straight.  You're asking for help and some ideas and when I come and tell you you need work, you don't want to hear it?  And you have this opportunity and you send poor quality for evaluation.

Okay, you want everyone to tell you an awesome job you're doing, even if it's not true?  Would you rather we lie and say...

Fine.

"Man, those were both great!  That's awesome voicing and you don't need any improvement.  Obviously, you'll get the job you're looking for.  Great work!"

I hope that solves everything.  Please don't let my earlier constructive criticism get in the way of a nice compliment next time.  I don't have any idea how asking for help and then hearing what a great job you did is going to help.

What ever makes you happy, I suppose.

zanderlex : You're 21 and you don't care where a stadium gets funding from?

I won't sway you one way or the other but I have a few suggestions for you to (hopefully) mindfully examine.

1.  You should know what happens in local and national government and how things work.  An important question to ask whenever new ideas new stadiums, new legislation, etc happens is, "Who's going to pay for this?"  You can see a check go from $200 a week to $150 a week because you didn't bother to educate yourself and vote for or against something.  

2.  School is a wonderful time to learn what you really love.  Ideally, you attack these papers and work, dive into them and see how they fit in your life.  If anything, learn to perform unwanted tasks with pride of your work.  Those of us in the work force with careers know we don't get to do things we like all the time.  However, the things we don't like, we still go and do and do well.  It's a matter of personal pride to perform the best we can.  Try to immerse yourself in some of this stuff and learn that, while you don't like it, you should be destroying everything you have to do with awesomeness.

Instead of just looking up stuff to write a paper, try actually reading a little about it.  Learn about what you're writing about and the paper will be a lot easier to complete.  A little bit of research and history go a long way in getting the final project done.

The second one was horrible and it makes me wonder if you can sustain the strain on your vocal cords.  You don't sound comfortable and it doesn't sound like a repeatable and workable voice.

The first was okay.

I recommend taking Toastmasters or public speaking classes.  Find something at a local library or a college or university.  Take forensics in high school.  Those types of classes and programming allow you to develop inflection, pace, dialect, and methods of speaking.

The problem with both of your submissions for voice acting is they sound exactly that: They sound like you're voice acting.  The trick is find a way to seem regular, at peace with yourself, even if the characters are all over the spectrum of personality.  I should be able to play a serial killer and you would believe it's just someone there talking, not a person behind a microphone.

You're learning the process.  Keep trying and find someone to mentor you.    The first one wasn't too bad but it was obviously amateur.  Keep working and you'll improve.

janus : Your first sentence is exactly what I was going to say.

Zanderlex, you're telling us how the money is found and what it is going to.  But I can find all that out by going to Wikipedia and calling it a day.  You could literally, not figuratively, but literally take that information from a website and paste it and turn it in as a paper.

Here's the deal.  It won't do well because you're writing some basic info anyone can find.  Give us something more.  Give us an opinion on the balance of funds from private or public sectors.  Give us a thought that if the public pays for a stadium, that teams should never be subject to blackout on television programming (I'm looking at you, NFL).  Tell us something more or spin the information to make a point, create an argument, or see something from another point of view.

Janus is saying you're giving us the recipe.  I can read about how to cook a steak anywhere.  Describe the sizzle.  Tell me how the marbling makes a steak taste better or worse.  Why do we need fat and not just meat.  I'm grilling and drinking beer right now so that's what's on my mind.

Don't give us just information.  Give us a statement of belief and back it up with information.

Super Mario 3 Pipe world (world 7 maybe?) over world theme is pretty awesome.  It's laid back, 'cool' and made me really like it.

There is a lot of great music from the NES world.  SNES has some of the greatest all time with their titles but NES can compete.

For me?  Punch-out has the greatest music, especially done with creativity.  There's a guy that does a bunch of video game themes acapella and he's one of the few people I'll actually pay attention to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhzI3Om9QIQ

Watch it.  It's worth your time.

The Dragon Warrior series had good music too and the themes to the towns and castles were good.

I think Punch Out and the intro to Dragon Warrior 1 were the best 8 bit songs.

It depends on how you want to define 'defining moment.'

I'm going with three events that directed my life to where I am now.

1.  Parris Island.  I graduated boot camp and accepted the title Marine on Sept 22nd, 2000.  It was pre 9/11 and I went into the Marine Corps with the express purpose of blowing up things, getting dirty, and getting paid to do it.  What I experienced was exactly that.  I was a machine gunner in the infantry for years and I went over to the MPs.  I went to many continents, picked up some language skills, met all sorts of people, and experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion.  I joined a brother- and sisterhood whose bonds will never be broken.  The current career path I have happened because the guy I work for is an old Marine.  We knew some of the same folks and had been to the same places.  The Marines honed my warrior spirit and focused me to achieve anything I wanted.  It is a wonderful organization... and had fire support.

2.  I got married to a woman who is insanely attractive, has long legs, has a doctoral degree in physical therapy, loves watching sports and drinking, and follows a demanding fitness regimen.  She is as perfect as anyone can hope for.  Most of my friends comment that I'm playing up several leagues, which is garbage because I'm attractive, I'm smart, I'm kind and I'm driven to succeed.  We make a great team and life is so much easier because we're with each other.  Never a moment goes by when I don't think, "I hate being married."  I know she feels the same.

3.  My daughter was born 1/25 of last year.  I'm watching her feed herself banana/peanut butter english muffin as I type.  She has changed my life for good and for the better.  There is nothing cooler than watching this little human grow and develop physically, emotionally, intellectually, and I can watch her personality shine through.  My wife and I are laid back parents and we don't fight over how she should be raised.  We're on the same page.

I love my life.

I am a drinker.  I love alcohol.  I drink mostly beer and I'll go from the light blondes to the big heavy nut brown ales and stouts.  I'll take everything in between too.  I don't have to have the hops everyone really seems to love and the right amount is nice.  Anything more?  You're drinking a lilac bush.

I am getting the hang of sour beers but they aren't the favorite of mine.  I'd rather something else when it comes to sours.  And my all time favorite is Harpoon's IPA.  It's a brewery in Boston and we went there often when I lived on the east coast.  I don't know if they sell west of the Mississippi River but I live in Michigan so I have access to it in bottle.

I like sake, gin, and red wine.  I'm not a fan of white wine.

I'll tolerate vodka and tequila and the other alcohols but the flavor of bitters really gets me and whiskey and bourbon are off the table.  I just can't do it.  I've tried.  I go to weddings and start with a glenlivit or something like that and it doesn't work.

Yuck.

ender44 : It amuses me you mentioned Xenocide.  It was a terrible book.  Horrid.  I'm embarrassed for Card

However, I took the name Warmaker from the pequenino character from that exact terrible book.  I used "Warmaker" for another military strategy game and it just stuck.  Now Warmaker is my title no matter what the profile.  I'm not on very many online communities but Warmaker is universal to all my accounts.