I'll show you a picture of myself if you show one of yours. Deal?

Great pic! What's the character concept?

oh it's not really as a cosplay thing! not this time anyway Just needed to femme up a bit after weeks and months of sitting around indoors

Though the character is supposed to be posh and stylish, so *shrug*

Having a good selfie evening apparently, so i'm not going to waste the opportunity!

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/img_20210124_182604537_hdr.jpg)

Finding a picture where i'm proper smiling (that i don't hate) is a VERY rare occasion!

You look great:) Super cool necklace!

pyxistyx wrote:

oh it's not really as a cosplay thing! not this time anyway Just needed to femme up a bit after weeks and months of sitting around indoors

Though the character is supposed to be posh and stylish, so *shrug*

Ha! I didn't think you were cosplaying, I just wanted to discuss and vicariously enjoy some one else playing TTRPGs.

oh! ok. I'm so used to seeing TTRPG folks do cosplay for their characters on stream i assumed that was what you were going for

Yeah in that case Ariadne is the bratty daughter of a megacorp ceo who rebelled against an arranged marriage and ran off with a handful of wedding presents and took off (read: stole) the first available ship with a handful of other Randoms.

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/ariadne1.jpg)

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/balloons.jpg)

Those boots were made for walkin'!

I really liked reading SWN, but haven't played it. You should read Lady Blackbird at one seven design (the Blades in the Dark designer). It's a very short one-shot story RPG that stars a Lady with a similar story. It might inspire you.

https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blac...

Tempted to go full goth for 2021, not gonna lie...

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/img_20210212_181158079_hdr.jpg)

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/img_20210212_181240594_hdr.jpg)

Beautiful pics! Goth suits you.

My mom's been digitizing some old printed photographs, and came upon this very unflattering picture from about 20 years ago, of me and my daughter playing Dreamcast.

2000 summed up in one picture.

Looking back at old pictures, here's my brother and I. That computer ran my BBS up until 1994 so we are looking at early 90s I'm going to guess.

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/yqfsLCs/robandi.jpg)

You ran a BBS? My man! You must be even older than me!

The pre-internet BBS scene was awesome.

What are the books on the shelf? They look legal-y or are they the collected works of someone from a bookclub?

1Dgaf wrote:

What are the books on the shelf? They look legal-y or are they the collected works of someone from a bookclub?

Looks to me like it’s a set of encyclopedias (the go to reference for everything before there was the internet and smart phones).

Tscott - Correct! Encyclopedias.

Fedaykin98 - I ran a BBS in the early 90s. I also ran a group called TRiC (The Renegade Information Crew). We would create modifications to the Renegade software and release packs on how to implement them into your BBS. For instance, my BBS was the first one to have arrow keys for menus. I had aCiD and iCE (top ANSI groups) creating all of the artwork for my BBS. I also had TRiCnet which basically mirrored FidoNet on a much smaller scale.

Oh man, I could talk for days about BBSs

I remember those ANSI groups! Great stuff.

I was literally the "Doom Co-Sysop" of a great Houston board because I uploaded so many Doom mods and maps. I was really into that game.

On a related subject, a friend and I used to go to the Houston 2600 meetups fairly regularly. I even went to DefCon in Las Vegas once, bless my Vegas-loving parents.

DeThroned wrote:

Oh man, I could talk for days about BBSs :)

A friend had a BBS called The Lion's Den. I used to love dialing in to see if I could beat my friends in The Pit or in Star Traders.

Then we discovered a large BBS run in a much larger town that actually had a local dial-in line. This was a big deal since I didn't want to pay long-distance charges to access a BBS. A few of us dropped into the nacent forums and turned the whole thing into P&C, because we were teenage asses. I remember having to download message packets and the upload my replies to be posted to the BBS.

Ah, the early Nineties. Everything seemed awesome and possible back then. What a sh*t-show it turned into.

Man, for the entirety of my teen years, BBSes were my social life.

Explains a lot, really.

Also loving the Dot Matrix.

Veloxi wrote:

Also loving the Dot Matrix.

Was that the Prequel?

JK, just giving you hell!

I had no idea when I was a kid that the reason my dad had so many computers in the basement and that we had multiple telephone lines was that he and his friend ran a porn BBS called Dave's Place. Which is such a creeper name for a porn site.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

...he and his friend ran a porn BBS called Dave's Place.

Unsung heroes lived all around us, delivering low-pixel pictures one line at a time.

I'll be honest, I saw the pic and thought "folks around here were raised better off than me". To have two computers and running a BBS? That seems like the stuff from an episode of Silver Spoon and not reality.

Then I realized that the pic was probably from ten years before I was the age of folks in their pic. By the time I was 15 and we had two computers, though one of them was a handmedown C64 while the other was a decent 486. I guess we'd have similar pics laying around somewhere.

garion333 wrote:

I'll be honest, I saw the pic and thought "folks around here were raised better off than me". To have two computers and running a BBS? That seems like the stuff from an episode of Silver Spoon and not reality.

Then I realized that the pic was probably from ten years before I was the age of folks in their pic. By the time I was 15 and we had two computers, though one of them was a handmedown C64 while the other was a decent 486. I guess we'd have similar pics laying around somewhere.

Your house had TWO computers?

Coldstream wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

...he and his friend ran a porn BBS called Dave's Place.

Unsung heroes lived all around us, delivering low-pixel pictures one line at a time.

This reminds me of the time that I was hanging out with a friend of mine and my freshman female cousin shortly after she started college. We walked into another friend's dorm room, and his roommate was downloading a porn picture, one line at a time. I somehow, not because of any experience, I ASSURE you, knew exactly what it was, and was horrified for my cousin. I had to say the dude's name and clear my throat several times to get him to get it off his monitor.

Hobear wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

Also loving the Dot Matrix.

Was that the Prequel?

JK, just giving you hell!

IMAGE(https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/spaceballs/images/c/ca/Dot_matrix.gif)

Fedaykin98 wrote:

This reminds me of the time that I was hanging out with a friend of mine and my freshman female cousin shortly after she started college. We walked into another friend's dorm room, and his roommate was downloading a porn picture, one line at a time. I somehow, not because of any experience, I ASSURE you, knew exactly what it was, and was horrified for my cousin. I had to say the dude's name and clear my throat several times to get him to get it off his monitor. :lol:

That's awesome. I will confess that as a teenager with a 2400baud modem, I may have once or twice seen the low-bandwidth striptease.

I remember when the local BBS upgraded to a 14400 baud modem ("Dude! You got a 14.4! Holy crap!") It seemed like a shocking amount of data to be downloading all at once. Should have been enough for anyone.

Going from 14.4 to 28.8 to a whopping 56k modem connection felt like the f*ing fast lane. Downloading a 5mb mp3 off Napster in only 30 minutes was incredible.

Then when I started college my school was one of the first to deploy campus wi-fi, now that was an upgrade.

Yeah going to 56K was f*cking life-changing.

T-Prime wrote:

Going from 14.4 to 28.8 to a whopping 56k modem connection felt like the f*ing fast lane. Downloading a 5mb mp3 off Napster in only 30 minutes was incredible.

Then when I started college my school was one of the first to deploy campus wi-fi, now that was an upgrade.

The dorm I lived in my first four years was one of the last on campus to get wired. Fortunately, I took a fifth year to really learn the material, and moved into a wired dorm.

A month or two into that year, I pretty much stopped gaming for a while.

The biggest speed upgrade I personally remember was going from 38.4K modem to DSL. When Pacbell announced their first DSL offerings, I signed up within about five minutes of hearing about it, the first day it was on offer.

Modems were typically about 300ms pings, and I remember playing with ping on my systems and not believing it. Because of where I was, I was about five milliseconds to MAE West, which at that time was the big Internet peering exchange on the West Coast. Almost everything on the West Coast went through there, and I was 5ms away.

That was an excellent year for Counterstrike; I was one of the Low Ping Bastards.