Thought or Rant of the day!!!

[Snickie]

It's not just one dead. But many of them. And well yes I get sad but thats over quickly always.

Good. I experienced some roleplay earlier this week, actually, that was so well done that I literally cried for half an hour. But then I was fine.

It's also too quiet in cantr. And lately it doesn't really pay to make friends or plans as chars keep dropping dead.....I just don't have that much fun playing lately as there will always be sadness because a char died I liked. And no much time for fun rp in game as it's so quiet.

I try to make my chars social enough to where that doesn't happen, but I know for a fact that a lot of people who play aren't in my time zone, and that can make things difficult; in Klojt, most of the activity happens when I'm asleep. It is similar where one of my chars is in the Hofran province, which is somewhere in the Polish realm (but I haven't figured out where exactly yet).

And todays rp is actually not that good from me because I play on phone and it's not great to play on it. So I rather not to do long rp from my side as sometimes if I do enter the browser closes down without getting the text posted.

Phone is about all I roleplay from, especially since it would be rather difficult to hide a laptop under my desk at school. But I've had problems with it in the past, so I understand where you're coming from.

Problem is I can't unsub as I feel like letting people down. And also because of certain people and chars... I also never thought I would get to this point. But there's no way I will unsub. Though I might be cutting down on chars. (don't worry anyone it will only be those without people really caring about them, two are at that point now)

Also most of my chars have a partner now and almost all are not very active. That also cuts away a lot of activity thats fun.

That's part of the reason I refuse to unsub for anything, especially since one of my chars is in the middle of nowhere (that would be my Fu Island character) with her fiancee and two other people, and she's the only one awake lately, so if she dies, the other three will follow her.

In addition to that, there are several chars of mine whom I don't care for, who I've considered letting them go off to die. Unfortunately, there are too many chars who care about mine to let her die at all (ones who, by personality, as I've interpreted it, would shove healing food down her throat if they could in order to keep her alive). And I was going to say something else, but I forgot what it was. I'm sure I'll remember it once I've posted and long-forgotten about this post.

[raspberrytea]

It has gotten significantly quieter on Cantr, I feel, but I've actually been glad for it, since I'm preparing (or supposed to be, hah) to move countries again and I'd rather not be involved in any lengthy or involved RP while I'm packing, in transit, and settling in.

When it does go quiet like this, and people start dropping like flies, I figure you pretty much have two choices without killing the character or unsubbing:

1) Stay there and liven it up yourself, to make people want to keep their characters alive and keep playing.
2) Go on an adventure.

I think 2 is especially important, because sometimes it just takes a long time to find characters that your own meshes well with, and unless you keep trying, you'll always have to force yourself to play (as opposed to enjoying it).

[Snickie]

I'm wondering whether to click the green smiley face and make a Spanish character so that I might FINALLY get around to learning Spanish...but I don't want to at the same time because I have enough fun with my other seven chars. And I don't want to go through the work of translating every single thing that is said. That would take forever, depending on the active population. But then I could say I'm playing Cantr for school (although I doubt that'd pass with my dad). MRF! This is so hard!

I probably won't end up doing it, though. The best I can say in Spanish is:
"Como te llamas?"
"La computadora es en la mesa."
"El gato negro es gordo."
"Yo soy alto y delgado."
"Ella es pelirroja."
"La profesora es baja y bonita."
"Fernando no es guapo! Es feo. Muy feo." (Poor Fernando. xD )*
And finally...
"Madre de dios!"
...

And that's the end of my rant.

*; Fernando is the name used in the example of this assignment where I was supposed to interpret simple dialogue. I mean to refer to nobody on these forums, or anybody else here, in the way I referred to the non-existent Fernando in the quote.

Edit:
Note to self: Always finish tags and preview before submitting.

[EchoMan]

This has so far been the quietest monday in Cantr since I re-started. I expected a lot of highlights when I got back to my PC after four hours of meetings + lunch, but didn't have even one.

[mojomuppet]

Dam Echo Ive already shot someone today, am burying a few folks that dropped dead, made some trades, have plotted against some smuck that just sends my char into fits, and Im trying to win the heart of my dead buddies girl. People are playing.

Snick Ive also considered that but Im to scared to use up a slot for something so educational. It goes against all my cantr morals.

[Snickie]

Dam Echo Ive already shot someone today, am burying a few folks that dropped dead, made some trades, have plotted against some smuck that just sends my char into fits, and Im trying to win the heart of my dead buddies girl. People are playing.

Snick Ive also considered that but Im to scared to use up a slot for something so educational. It goes against all my cantr morals.

Cantr morals.
(Just a gut reaction.)

RotD: Why is it that the character I want to see light up most is the one that's had the least activity in the past forever? WAKE UP, PEOPLE. I wanna do something with my char besides wish everyone would wake up. At least hunt? Show some sign you're alive? Please?

[Gran]

If only the active players who complain where at the same place...

They wouldn't be complaining.

Fun & Education:

Cantr supposedly serves to learn other languages. Probably by giving you some reason to learn them (e.g. foreign people raiding your town). Yet learning a language you have no grasp of is still very difficult. I myself have memorized a small amount of Lithuanian lexicon and used ro remember some verb tenses. Yet I know next to shit and native speakers most likely want to beat me, so I stay at a "very laconic communication" level.

On the other hand, languages you alredy know can become quite well polished. My written English and Portuguese, for example, are now significantly better.

And under certain conditions, there is also a random chance you might develop a taste for philology or linguistics. In any case, cantrchat discussions usually end up there somehow( sometimes before the stagnation of the chat activity).

[SekoETC]

One of my characters has been trying to learn Polish lately (well, another one too but not as much) and the difficult part is I really want to keep it in-game only, and not look up off-game sources even though there are plenty available online. Sometimes I might make an exception if a word could be formed based on known words if the character had a deeper understanding of grammar than I have, just because if I formed new words based on the rules I've figured out in-game, the resulting word might either be unrecognizable or understandable but wrong, in which case the listener might not care to tell the funny foreigner how it would actually go.

[Snickie]

I suppose this makes me a bad RPer. I'm cheating and using the OOC translator stuff because there are several Polish characters in my town right now and I'm too lazy to learn the language myself.

Although I do know this:

Dzien dobry.

and...

Jestem [name].

[Gran]

Well, learning everything in-game is the kind of scrutiny most don't pay to. Though it is marvellous when functionally achieved.

In the future I might aswell try, maintaining a wordlist from experience. But that also means trying to break down the grammar and understanding it too. The only problem here is the writting: You can't make yourself well understood if you learn it wrong. And in languages with too much diacritics or special characters, people sometimes simply drop them or use a digraph which you have to sort out (e.g.gr. like using 'oe' instead of 'ö'). Not to mention your browser messing up characters (always check for that).

Examples:

For a long time Portuguese characters spelt 'žemėlapis' as 'pemelapis' because it was rendered as a thorn, which in turn was interpreted as a 'p'. At least one Lithuanian might have wondered why.

Polish used to be rendered as a confuse mass of mathematical and wingdings signs when using Unicode codification, though this issue seems fixed today.

[SekoETC]

I copypaste special letters or whole words from a note so I don't have to figure out how to extract them from my keyboard. Although judging by many in-game Polish dictionaries containing a lot of words written without the special letters and nobody having fixed that, they're most likely understandable even that way. But if something is typed in an unconventional manner, it often makes it impossible to use Google translate unless you manage to guess correctly which letters to change and into what. It's especially difficult with Cyrillic letters being replaced by similar-looking Latin letters, at least p and р look pretty indistinguishable in most fonts, so it's difficult to notice where the problem is. When I was dealing with Russian characters, I used translit.ru to change transliterated text into Cyrillic and then ran it through google translate, although IC I only used the knowledge of words I'd learned in-game, but often I felt like asking people to rather use Cyrillic letters if they could because they might transliterate things differently than the converter does, which would lead into unrecognizable spellings in Cyrillic.

[notsure]

Echoman,

It's a holiday in the States today. That's probably why there hasn't been much activity from there.

ns

[gejyspa]

But shouldn't that mean there is MORE? I'm here in the States, and have been active all day.

[Snickie]

But shouldn't that mean there is MORE? I'm here in the States, and have been active all day.

I second that!

[Keegan Ingrassia]

So've I, but some Americans actually spend Labor day with their families and friends, outside BBQing and such. (heaven forbid!)