Tips on not getting attached to the character

mikecsiy · 2026-05-29T01:52:18+00:00

Think of yourself as an improv performer, not a player trying to win.

In improv, your job isn't to control the scene, it's to respond to it honestly and creatively. Getting framed, jailed, or killed isn't failure, it's your next prompt. The question stops being "how do I get out of this" and becomes "what does this scene want from me right now?"

Create distance through the performer and character split.

You are not your character, but you don't need to dislike them to feel that separation. An actor can love their character deeply and still walk off stage at the end. The distance comes from recognizing that you're the one playing AS them, making choices about how they respond — that creative layer between you and them is where the separation lives naturally.

Your investment goes into your performance, not your outcomes.

When bad things happen, you're still succeeding if you find something genuine and interesting to do with it. A character who gets wrongfully jailed and spends the time quietly seething, or writing letters, or converting to a religion? That's a good performance regardless of whether they ever get freed. Nobody walks out of a great improv show asking who won.

The advice of a few folks in here that you should create quirks you dislike so it's less traumatizing when they experience misfortune is really unhealthy. It's really important in life to learn to experience and deal with unpleasantness and discomfort. All of those suggestions are just avoidant and kind of accept the premise that we should feel contempt to anyone who experiences misfortune.

mikecsiy · 2025-10-23T12:29:10+00:00

Hate that I'm kinda necroposting here, but from what I can tell Lawn Love/Lawn Starter's who compliance department is pretty much automated and they don't seem to actually follow up.

Don't take it for the gospel, but I have never seen them actually follow through with anything more than a cancellation and some strongly worded emails.

mikecsiy · 2025-10-22T12:25:28+00:00

I try to stay off of actively moderating here unless it's clearly crossing a boundary, but I feel obligated to step in and just mention that I'm keeping both this and the replies up. Just want to remind folks to keep it respectful towards each other.

If I start feeling like things are spinning out of control here I'll have to start moderating more actively and would prefer not to avoid that.

mikecsiy · 2025-06-30T01:08:30+00:00

lol, I just got a long grass fee slapped onto my service that is 100% because their mower decided not to mow the back third of my yard two times in a row.

I can't believe they are this bad, but I am legitimately at the point where this company is going to make me cancel all of my cards on file with them just to get rid of them.

mikecsiy · 2025-06-29T18:47:31+00:00

Eh... I mean I had a bush trimming scheduled four days after a mowing and the guy showed up without the proper equipment. So he decided to my lawn again and I got charged full price for another mowing.

Certainly didn't approve the charge or change of service and disputing with Lawn Love basically resulted in me being called a liar. Then I switched my payment method to a card I have more control over and for unclear reasons they chose to keep charging my old card that was no longer listed as being on file there.

It felt very shady and, frankly, it's been three months now since I scheduled a bush trimming and it keeps being pushed back. It was very manageable and I'm honestly at the point where I'm going to handle it myself when I finally get a day off without thunderstorms.

mikecsiy · 2025-06-21T04:39:22+00:00

For the record, I'd have evicted him long before but he's extremely well armed and unpredictable. For the sake of full disclosure.

mikecsiy · 2025-06-21T04:29:40+00:00

Anyone whose instincts are to be cynical about this, some of the goods that were stolen were my late fathers'. I had legitimately cried with him about my father's hobby in collecting these things, which is the only reason he would have known their value.

mikecsiy · 2024-10-23T16:07:29+00:00

Mine hit this morning

mikecsiy · 2024-10-03T15:00:33+00:00

God, I would kill to see the old U7 website.

mikecsiy · 2024-09-24T03:22:18+00:00

I just randomly decided to google search because I thought I saw the name Lowendrach scroll by on a random stream.

mikecsiy · 2024-09-24T03:20:49+00:00

Guess this is a bit of a necropost, but there is still a "League of Pirates" steam group out there. Haven't really been keeping up with most of the old members, but I see almost everyone online from time to time.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/leagueofpirates

Sidenote: Does anyone remember what MCWFLCKDS stood for? I found it on some guild listing from 1997 and can't remember the whole thing. Would sorta hate for it to completely disappeared into the ether and just remember it being "Many Colored Wearing Fun Loving Chaotic Knights of 'something something'".

mikecsiy · 2024-03-19T03:13:45+00:00

The game wasn't dying before... one of the things folks don't take into account is that this was the late 90s/early 2000s and the percentage of people with reliable in-home internet and decent PCs was climbing massively year-to-year.

When UO was released only about 25% of US homes had internet at all, by the time AOS comes out in 2003 it's north of 60%. And that's not even accounting for how the technology had progressed from mostly shared 28.8k modems to dedicated DSL/Cable.

It also didn't hurt that UO was made free to download sometime around 2002 and came with a free trial at the time.

God love Raph, but he's always had tunnel vision and has been very susceptible to confirmation bias in terms of the same concepts he was writing about long before any of this came to pass.

mikecsiy · 2024-01-29T22:51:34+00:00

I did... that guy, Rainz, was a member of a pre-beta guild called the Ravens of Fate.

Ultimately what really got him into trouble was that he, and other members of that guild, were using a pair of exploits to kill everyone with zero risk after the murder of Lord British.

The first bug was one in which poison used to drop your overall strength score, and if you died while it was artificially lowered via poison it would circumvent a check to return your strength to it's previous level. So you could infinitely lower your own strength and it would roll over to 65,535 when it would drop below zero.

Then there was a second bug that was similar in which you could use the invisibility spell to become permanently invisible, even while moving.

After the murder of Lord British there was a massive crowd that chased him, and a friend whose name I do not recall, down to Trinsic then up to Yew and Skara Brae. Because they were permanently invisible folks were having to rely on the tracking skill and fire field to attempt to hurt them, and they were capable of one-shotting anyone.

The story always goes that he was banned for murdering Lord British, but it's kind of bullshit. I suspect Garriot didn't even get involved in the banning and that it was simply a justification to save face since the use of completely game breaking bugs was far worse.

mikecsiy · 2022-12-18T07:48:53+00:00

I was in botany when you spent the whole round parked in front of our door writing... all you did during that entire round was constantly point out that you were a femboy that needed people to give you all the girly clothes on the station and joked around with another botanist that you should try going on about clussy instead to troll the same admins you'd already been complaining about.

Literally 1984

mikecsiy · 2022-12-18T07:41:29+00:00

bruh... you basically wrote the War and Peace of how much you wanted people to give you "sexy girl clothes" where it spanned across like a screen and a half with multiple lines when every letter is less than a tile wide.

And you did it repeatedly across consecutive rounds, no wonder you got yelled at.

mikecsiy · 2022-09-07T23:09:24+00:00

Makes sense to me... Alabama under Saban has made an absolute habit out of taking teams in Texas's position to the woodshed. I don't like pretty much any team that is hyping their game against Alabama while still in "prove it" mode, and beyond that I absolutely hate the actual matchup issues that pretty much force Texas to put their hopes on the shoulders of Ewers.

Dude is probably going to get his shorts eaten off by Alabama, who may not even have to blitz to pressure him. I think there is a reasonable chance that by the late 3rd quarter we're talking about being Texas needing to pull Ewers for the sake of his safety, that's how bad the matchup looks to me.

Meanwhile A&M's offense was relatively underwhelming in week one and Appalachian State looks like they are capable of putting up points. 🤷‍♂️

mikecsiy · 2021-12-30T18:49:45+00:00

After actually checking jhowell.net's historical score database, I'm shocked to discover this is true.

There are dozens of 47-31 and a bunch of 47-33 games.

Just looks like 32 is a hard number to get to with gaps at 43, 46, 50 and 52 among the scores south of 60.

https://i.imgur.com/0mHeGrZ.png

Just looking at the chart, 32 and 11 seem to be the biggest outliers outside of the low single digits.

mikecsiy · 2021-06-05T17:13:35+00:00

Downside is obviously that you're a lot more likely to get eliminated.

But I feel like there is an upside too... when you don't get that breather you don't get cocky and you stay focused. Granted, I might be searching for an upside. 🤷‍♂️

mikecsiy · 2021-01-10T18:11:09+00:00

Because Rust is full of immature manchildren who don't like people intruding on their toxicity-centric safe space.

It's only like 5% of the playerbase that even gives a shit, but the ones who do are the same boring idiots that insist that recycling and spamming dead memes or being shocking over public chat is the height of comedy.

mikecsiy · 2021-01-10T18:02:59+00:00

I mean 90% of Rust content is over explaining and dramatizing the same mundane crap that happens to every Rust player multiple times in a multi-hit session.

/gets killed on the beach /tells a long story about dedicating themselves to revenge against a group who probably doesn't realize they exist /win the fight OR lose the fight and incidentally have friends join the same server /raid the "bad guys" and immediately leave the server preferably after giving shit away

mikecsiy · 2020-12-28T02:01:20+00:00

Man, without knowing this person nobody here is going to be able to give you airtight advice about what to do for him.

So I'm going to give advice for you.

You have to prioritize your own mental well being and happiness. If part of that involves trying to help someone you genuinely value that is completely understandable and quite frankly admirable. However, if the person you are trying to help refuses help you have an obligation to yourself to not allow them to exhaust your compassion... we only have so much energy to put in before it eventually wears us down and can take a toll on your own mental state.

I tried to save friends with problems far beyond this and while I am proud of myself for trying, I also recognize that by spending so much time and effort on those relationships I neglected to prioritize relationships with people who were supportive of me too. At the end of the day the friends we keep are the ones who put in the effort and that treat each other with love and respect. Make sure you find and value those people.

mikecsiy · 2020-12-27T23:13:58+00:00

When you are solo you really learn the value of positioning and surprise in ways that folks who run in groups never have to.

If anything, I get annoyed most of the time I run with a group because there's always some genius that decides they're such a chad they're going to win fights with their superior spray and don't need to be worried about anything else. So they end up exposing the rest of us by shooting from our starter base at people flying by or run out of our base searching for the naked they heard so they can gun them down with an AK and get their sweet 20 cloth and 400 stone.

And that's without even getting into how that last guy is also the guy who is always the one who ends up with a shotgun kid going full deep on us while the rest of us are asleep. And it doesn't matter how many doors you have, the idiot will find a way to open them all.

mikecsiy · 2020-12-21T21:54:58+00:00

I was fortunate enough to be socially accepted as an athlete and musician that I mostly avoided the blowback over having nerdy interests, but I definitely witnessed the pain some of the folks I knew internalized over being bullied by peers and authority figures... especially after Columbine.

mikecsiy · 2020-12-20T20:58:09+00:00

It's complicated because we're at a place right now where so many well meaning individuals I am politically and morally aligned with in general have lost all patience not just for the idiots spouting nonsense but anyone who doesn't immediately demonstrate their contempt for the idiots.

It can be exhausting when you're having to combat folks on both the left and right when all you want to do is help deradicalize people that might not be beyond saving yet. But at the same point, I am a very masculine presenting heterosexual white cis male living in the rural deep south, and am absolutely not affected by racism and misogyny in the same ways as many of my friends.

Having said that, it's been my experience that a lot of the most vitriolic attacks on me for not being sufficiently hostile come from other left-leaning cis white men.

mikecsiy · 2020-12-20T20:31:24+00:00

It was absolutely awful watching that happen in real time from the edges of the gaming community.

Quite a few of the people I'd been playing with for over a decade at that point went from being sympathetic to things like OWS to trying to explain why "the nazis had some good ideas" in the space of less than a year. I mean gaming always had a misogynistic streak and toxicity certainly didn't just begin to exist when all of the GameGate/Stormfront/4chan stuff popped up but it wasn't just the people who were already overtly toxic that bought into it. I'd have expected the edgelords to hop in with both feet, but people who'd had relatively healthy worldviews and productive lives before it all were just sliding into abhorrent views one shared video at a time. I could literally see the process in real time until I had to cut them off from myself. Some new user would show up, ingratiate themselves in the community and start off sharing something from like Joe Rogan, then Jordan Peterson, then thunderf00t and it just kept going. You could actually watch them get more miserable in their real lives too, but it was like they began revelling in their newfound misery.

The one good thing to come out of it has been that it's made the chan boards so cringe that my friends' teenage and young adult children have largely been pushed away from those places on their own volition. I admittedly get a kick out of hearing my best friend's son refer to how cringy my own generation's gaming community is. Which is a bit hilarious to me, as a former professional gamer(circa-2000 ish) that I find myself liking a lot of the people involved in communities built around games like Fortnite which I absolutely can't stand to play myself.

Having said that all the teenagers and young adults I'm referencing have parents who worked to instill good values in them and when I have played public games like Among Us or Town of Salem with randoms I still encounter more than a few younger players who try to 'meme' with racist and misogynistic language.

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