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#11
Life Stories / Re: Watcher, Rebel, Broker, Be...
Last post by CrystalisRC - October 14, 2018, 08:24:47 PM
we all have our stories to tell.
#12
Gaming Discussion / Deep Rock Galactic
Last post by Rakeela - July 08, 2018, 12:23:33 AM
Deep Rock Galactic is one of my favorite games.  It's a co-op FPS.  The theme is space dwarves on a bug-infested planet.  Roles: Gunner (minigun, power revolver, satchel charges), Scout (assault rifle, shotgun, flare gun), Engineer (shotgun, RPG, turrets), and Driller (flamethrower, weak revolver, satchel charges).  Each class has a mobility option:  Gunner has ziplines, Scout has a grappling gun, Engineer has a platform gun, and the Driller has drills.  The Scout's mobility option is the only one that doesn't make the map easier for other players to navigate, but they have the flare gun to provide good lighting for everyone else.  The Scout is also fast, light, and well-armed.

The dwarves in the game seem basically immortal.  They make reference to lethal risks, but anyone who doesn't get out of a mission alive is listed as MIA, not KIA, and dwarves can take arbitrary amounts of damage after taking enough to down them without ever being out of the game.  Team members have unlimited revives as long as there's anyone on the team still on their feet to revive them.  (While playing solo, the robot ally can offer three revives.)

Effective cooperation is a big theme of the game.  It has a solo play option (with a flying robotic companion), but it's better to play in 3s and 4s.  I haven't had any bad experiences so far with random matchmaking, but I prefer playing with people I actually know.  So I'm always looking for people to play Deep Rock Galactic with.  My favorite class is the Driller, though as I've already leveled the Driller fully, I usually play other classes to continue gaining XP with them.
#13
Otherkin and Beliefs / Re: Wind
Last post by Rakeela - July 04, 2018, 02:07:05 AM
I don't have to think about wind to feel it, sometimes.

I used to feel a phantom tail, phantom wings.  I even had some of the usual stories of the world seeming to bend in little ways to a phantom tail.  People tripping over it, doors rebounding off of it, this one time some schoolyard jerk came up behind me and stomped on it.  I don't know where he got the idea.  Well, none of the phantom limb sensation stuck around when someone told me spirituality was boring, even though telling me that couldn't make me not a dragon.  The phantom wind sense survived through years.  I didn't need to think of wind as a spiritual phenomenon to care about it as though it were.  To risk a bit of materialism, maybe part of my brain watches the rest of me, and can reward me with the sensation of wind.  Otherwise, maybe it really is a spiritual holdover from a life of false service to a wind goddess.  I'd like that better.  It's part of my reward function either way.
#14
Otherkin and Beliefs / Re: Sexually Differentiated Ja...
Last post by Rakeela - July 04, 2018, 01:59:54 AM
When you specify a pattern, other patterns fade.  I consider this to be interesting.  There's nothing fearful to the process.  Decisions can be made again, made anew.  New patterns can be projected.  Faded patterns can be revived.  A pattern formed in one place, one mind, does not stop the same pattern from forming elsewhere.  A decision made that fades a pattern in one mind does not fade that pattern in any other mind.  An error in specification leads to bad refinements of the pattern.  What makes an error?  What makes a bad refinement?  That's totally subjective.  Sometimes the recognition of error comes in just noticing that something faded was desirable.
#15
Introductions / Re: It's been a little while, ...
Last post by Rakeela - June 21, 2018, 03:16:41 AM
Yay, Kistaro!

Real communities have the power to protect people.  The automatic exploitation of modern advertising is about as anti-community as it is possible for a thing to get without malice aforethought, and the platforms that are designed to enable advertising are thus hostile to the formation of communities.  It used to be typical on the internet that people did not value exploitation, but flew to many places to find what was unexpected.  Too many of those who watch for manipulable others then infested the internet, and platforms were designed in support of them at the expense of those who did not value exploitation.  It is good to return to the forumite pattern.  Any particular forum may fall, but if the conduct of being a forum is adequately valued, forums generally will multiply.

Be yourself in many places.  Meet people in spaces where they can be known.  That is the protection.  Monetized and manipulated spaces defy both real connections and the expression of an authentic self.
#16
Introductions / It's been a little while, what...
Last post by Kistaro - June 18, 2018, 02:00:17 AM
Hey, folks. I'm Kistaro Windrider, and I think I said a few things on the old Dragon Realms but wasn't too active. I was more active on other dragon forums, some 15 years ago - Baxil's (tomorrowlands), Tysha's, and Shiari's, mostly - and I miss them all. I drifted away from LiveJournal, too. Once I graduated college and entered the workforce, I felt like I never had enough time to write anything worthwhile, so I didn't say anything, and just drifted away.

I wonder how many of us it happened to. The short attention span created by Twitter and the keyboards (or lack thereof) of modern smartphones, which for some reason I find myself using more than my computer even though I am a professional computer programmer pulled me away from classic forums, but they were such better places - mostly because they weren't owned by ad companies trying to figure out how to compel you to interact with them, how to sell the site itself to you, for more ad impressions. It feels like everyone got pulled into that for a while, but we're breaking back off into our real communities again. At least, that's what I hope, and rejoining here is part of bringing that about anyway.

I'm quieter than I want to be on forums but when you get me talking I'm hard to shut up, I think a lot of dragons are like that. Nowadays, I'm a software engineer at a huge tech corporation (partially responsible for what I was complaining about in the last paragraph, naturally). I have a complex cosmology that I should get in the habit of talking about more, which is intertwined with my concept of myself as a dragon. I hope to talk about it more in relevant forum topics here, if that topic gets going again.

What have the last ten years been like for you folks, meanwhile?
#17
Announcements / Re: IRC
Last post by Akhorishaan - June 17, 2018, 02:13:32 PM
So, as the few of you who have used the IRC servers in the past already know, the server hasn't been running for awhile now.  Unfortunately it wasn't seeing enough use to justify running it, as we've pretty much exclusively moved to using Discord as our chat room of choice.

If you wish to join us, take a look in the first post in this thread for a Discord invite link.
#18
Introductions / Recently awakened.
Last post by Actorius - June 15, 2018, 05:21:52 PM
So, new to the site, and new to the acceptance of being dragonkin.

Not yet at the point where I have settled on a name or even a coloring, I do know i am a western dragon type. I had always been fascinated by dragons, stories and movies that included them, and artwork, but it wasnt until reading The Inheritance Cycle series that i really began to feel the need to be more than human, and even now, it feels as if i should just be able to step into my dragon form, and it really sucks that i cannot.

I am Australian, and i am Dragon
#19
Otherkin and Beliefs / Wind
Last post by Rakeela - June 13, 2018, 05:13:42 PM
One of the long projects for me since arriving on Earth has been the spiritual contemplation of wind.  There are notable gaps in my past life memories around matters of divinity.  I was passively faithless in one life, and actively false in another.  It feels rather as though I remember what I believed in, and so I remember a lot of very material things.  I might not remember that there were deities of that world at all had I no memory of petty blessings and blasphemies (these being social rather than spiritual) and the material forms of holy constructs (such as a building I would characterize as a dragon cathedral).  Many of the blessings (but hardly any of the blasphemies) centered around the wind.  It was a dragon goddess of wind in whose service I was false.  We did not curse the wind.  Inconvenient though it might be, who could but feel honored by the arrival of a storm?

Wind for dragons was many things.  It was of course travel, which was also visibility.  Even we shapeshifters knew no way but to fly in our own forms.  The presence of dragons in an area would thus not be wholly concealed unless we were willing to scuttle across the surface of the earth.  Wind was also planning amidst chaos.  Wind was unpredictable and yet necessary to predict.  The earth and sun were stable, and so it was the wind that determined sun, cloud, and rain.  The least winds could be fortune and woe in hunting, and as all people in that land had learned to chart their territories with paper plans, so we knew well the greater winds could show fortune and woe in farming and construction.  Very often the pleasantness of construction could be changed by wind, and sometimes great winds could tear down weak constructs.  The wind in all its variations flowed everywhere and touched all.  That which was like wind could be mapped like wind as well, for wind is not the only thing that flows everywhere and touches all it can.

Sometimes I am enveloped by a feeling of phantom wind.  To praise the wind can cause it, as can the sight of storms, or the sound of thunder.  It is cold upon me and yet tremendously welcome, bringing with it alertness, peace, and optimism.  As well, my social life is touched by wind, as I remember long a day spent in windy weather, and when interacting with others goes well I find occasionally the unexpected reward of phantom winds thereafter.
#20
Otherkin and Beliefs / Sexually Differentiated Jawlin...
Last post by Rakeela - June 11, 2018, 05:24:34 AM
Should male and female dragons have different jawlines?

I tend to accept tremendous morphological differences between dragons.  Any dragon is a dragon if they have the semblance of a dragon.  "Among our kind, wyverns even mate with wyrms," is a way that I've thought of it before.  I don't want to front-load my expectation here (though I have one with confidence), so what do others think?  Be assured that no answer is wrong.  If it is memory, it is memory.  If it is only preference, still we might yet have preference.