And again, that's yet another thing. Warning someone because their tone is deemed not appropriate is not the same as warning someone for disucssing a certain topic.



Apart from the tone, how much "closed doors" matters depends on who closed and opened the doors. Expecting those not sworn to silence to avoid a topic just because someone else talked to them is a bit much, IMHO.

Uh huh.

But the thing is that nothing I've been talking about took place behind closed doors. On this thread, the thread which was linked in my reprimand, I was speaking about:

• The things I liked and disliked in the various "Cities of..." books. Which I didn't work on or see any drafts of ever.
• The things I liked and disliked about the bonus material that demonseed elite added at the last moment to Street Magic. Which again I did not work on or see any drafts of before publication.

Honestly I'm just a dude. That I am held to a higher and different standard from other posters here is offensive, but it seriously has nothing whatever to do with anything that I am actually doing. This brings to mind the time you gave me a time out because you didn't like the mathematical conclusions I was reaching about D&D 4e material. It's seriously not cool.

I've posted a link to the board game, I'm off. And I'm off because the moderators have made it extremely clear that I am not wanted. I'm a "big problem" regardless of what I do or do not do. Regardless of what I say or do not say. I'm offended. And I'm leaving again. I've made my point: you'll never change.

-Frank

Funny enough, Frank wasn't "Warned". He came back, and came out swinging with his same aggressive, rude, in your face posting style he had when he left, and that often got himself in trouble, and we were attempting to circumvent having to actually warn him about anything.

Contrary to a few folks belief, we're not trying to drive anyone off. But we're also trying to make sure that individual posters are not chasing anyone away either. And posting behavior such as Frank's (and others) have done just that in the past.



*sigh* And you're misinterpreting what I said, and blowing it out of proportion.

Frankly, there's nothing really top secret going on with freelancer discussions, outside of unannounced products and plot lines. But it's incredibly tacky and amateurish for anyone that either is or has been a freelancer to be involved in discussions that are doing little except tear apart decisions made by those in charge, or ripping up the work of other writers and freelancers. It doesn't lead to constructive discussion about Shadowrun. And we don't want it on Dumpshock. Period.



Two things before you go, Frank.

A) You're held to a different standard because you were a freelancer at one time. Like it or not, that puts you above the average fan. It gives anything you say a little bit more weight, whether you like it or not, and whether what you say deserves it or not. To the casual fan, you represent the company in a minor way. And honestly, considering the way you throw your virtual weight and opinion around, I think you know that very well. So yes, we do hold you to a different standard.

B) It's almost never been about the content. YOu could have been discussing felafel recipes, and my response would have been much the same. It's your tone and your attitude. It's always been your tone and your attitude. Both of which are usually incredibly negative.

And with that, lets let this thread head back on track, or let it die with what little dignity it has left.

Bull

Clarification: The Deep Lacuna entry in Street Magic was not bonus material added at the last minute. The entire chapter on Astral Space and the Metaplanes in Street Magic was something I was asked to do when the original author it was assigned to had to back out due to real life complications. Since I came into the whole project late, my drafts didn't spend as much time up for review as the other chapters, but they did all go through the standard first draft/review/final draft process with Peter, who was in charge of developing the book. I did put the mechanics up for review before the fluff entries, it's true, because that stuff was more important for going out to the playtesters, but the Deep Lacuna idea in particular had been discussed among the freelancers and devs long before I wrote it down for Street Magic.

And I know Bull's posts aren't directed at me, but I hope it's clear when I discuss freelancer/developer decisions I'm not doing so with any vendettas in mind. I do feel like I was treated unprofessionally and inconsiderately by some at Catalyst and FanPro before them, and it is the publishers that keep me from continuing to write for Shadowrun, because I certainly don't love the game any less. But I don't hold back the praise I have for many of the freelancers and developers I've worked with and I equally don't hold back the criticism I have for some ideas (though I try to criticize the ideas, not the people). And equally, I'm always willing to hear out any criticism for any of the ideas I had.

At what point do we have to start posts with "Mother may I..."? Let me know so I can gtfo.

oh, can it...

No, I take it a serious thing when Bull says Freelancers cant criticize other freelancers work, ever. There is a reason North Korea was recently shown to be incredibly bad off economically as well as educationally. Criticism is not allowed.

If all you can say are good things then no bad things will ever be pointed out. Unless Bull thinks everything to coming out of Shadowrun is Perfect then clearly there are bad things.



Guess what buttercup, criticism comes in all forms. Just because it's not wrapped in a little pretty package for your sensitive daisy ears (elfjokelulz) doesn't mean it isn't incredibly valid or criticism. Frankly, if you can't stand to see criticism that isn't a fellatio to the devs ego then get off the Internet.

Mr. Bane, while I understand your view, this forum is the moderators' house and they decide what happens in it. I've certainly noticed a pro-writer bias here many times, and even though I think one of the wirters is an absolute AssHole, it's always clear which way the mods swing their support, so I generally just ignore the AssHole. That approach may not work for you, and if you can't deal with the bias, you'll need to go elsewhere to really be able to vent freely about it. That's what Frank has offerred to do, and it's not really a bad road to travel.

First, I think you're at least partially misinterpreting Bull. Like I said in my post, I've been critical of some ideas in Shadowrun before and I've never been warned by the moderators for it. Perhaps it's in how the criticism is done.

Second, just because these forums are on the Internet doesn't make them a paragon of free speech democracy. These forums do belong to someone, who pays for hosting, and who has invited us all here as guests. Sure, there are lots of places you can set up on the Internet where you can post however you like with no repercussions or moderation, but I don't recall it being said that this was one of them.

I'm not sure why people are crying out "unfair!" when no official action was taken here. Frank was given a polite heads up that he was beginning to turn the threads he was active in to flame bait, and Frank's response was to bunch his panties together and take off in a huff. Honestly, the inside baseball stuff going on is mildly interesting, but any thread that degenerates into flames all take on the same character: tedious.

That said, Mr. Bane seems to be taking a kitchen fire and calling it a holocaust. Who is telling people not to criticize, honestly? We have the Matrix thread, which has been nothing but people bashing a system that constitutes a significant portion of the game, and no one came along to tell anyone to knock it off. This thread had quite a few criticisms leveled at LA and Catalyst's new mega fun corp, Horizon, and no one said word one until Frank began ripping into Demonseed's aesthetic and logical sensibilities, at which point he was given a polite warning that he was beginning to head into flame territory. Apparently, that means this board is on the slippery slope to becoming the playground of Our Glorious Moderators? Give me a break.

chan-style postings will get someone banned faster than captain chaos himself could do it

You boys got sum perty perty lips.

There's a difference between critizing the work and criticizing the work, the person behind the work, the person who hired that person, and the company that hires all of those people all while complaining that no one appreciates his carefully constructed, logical to a point rules, using language that is both derogatory and negative.

The mods have told Frank multiple times to watch his language and to try to interact with fellow posters in a way that doesn't sound like the Word Of God. He's also been asked not to drag out dirty laundry that's been aired multiple times between himself and the devs and fellow freelancers from projects three or four books ago because all it does is drive the actual Catalyst staff away from the board and make this place a cesspool for weeks at a time.

It's not healthy for Dumpshock in general, and if he doesn't want to follow the rules, he can take his ball and go home. That's all that Bull asked.

Liar liar liar liar.

Dude, you have fifteen posts and half of them, if not all, are immature drivel or misguided remarks about freedom of speech. Just leave and don't let the door hit you in the ass. You can go comment on some other forum about how you're so damn hardcore and independant we couldn't handle you here. Just.. be quiet.

This is a thread warning... let's get this back on track in talking about Corp Enclaves, or the thread will be locked.

Ah, another person who believes that if it's insulting, it shouldn't be addressed.

Well I can pucker up.

"Bull, your post completely contradicts what was actually messaged to Franktrollman via private message. In fact, it looks like you posted these contradictions to make it appear like you were taking a different stance than was actually going on."

Incidentally, please be aware that there's a difference between our casual messages to posters regarding their behavior and an Administrative Warning. Administrative warnings should always contain the quoted portion of the Dumpshock Terms of Service that we feel a poster has violated and a link to the post that represents the violation. Please notice the use of the word "should" in that statement; we're human, and sometimes we forget. Bull's message to FrankTrollman contained neither of these and, thus, was not intended to be an Administrative Warning.

Steering things back on topic, was there some magic phenomenon that prevented the "Fall of LA" from generating an appropriately sized tidal wave?

I don't think there was a mention of something like this, but if magic teleport-swaps landscape and the resulting tidal waves do not result at all magic can be easily blamed to avoid frustration.

It can probably be explained by the manifestation of the Deep Lacuna itself. As far as I understand it (keeping in mind I didn't read the entries that closely, so someone like Demonseed can correct me) the area underneath LA suddenly became an alchera - or an area where Astral Space crosses over and becomes physical space. In the Astral the area under LA was "empty" and mostly caverns and such, so at that time the city above simply "sank" into the now empty space beneath it. A tsunami (tidal wave is a misnomer, btw since its not created by "tides") happens when water gets displaced so, in the case of LA, the wave might not have been generated when the alchera phenomenon manifested it might not have "displaced" water so much as just "made it disappear."

Just spitballing ideas here, basically.

That was my interpretation of the Deep Lacuna effect as well. The water and land mass magically vanished, hence no tsunami. It isn't as sexy as massive tidal waves destroying the Pacific Rim but it gets the job done.

Arguments can be made that perhaps LA didn't "deserve" to be sunk but it wasn't that interesting of a locale in California Free State, just as Denver was fairly dull pre-Ghostwalker.

Upon further reflection I do now question if it deserved to be in a book called Corporate Enclaves. That's not a criticism of the city's new geography or anything to do with the writing. I was and am perfectly happy with both. But it didn't feel like a write up about a North American company town like the Detroit write-up in Target: UCAS. Despite the prevalence of Pito and Orange County's Americana amusement park I didn't get the feeling that Horizon is overtly or covertly pulling the strings of the community, like the Japanacorps do in Neo-Tokyo. My interpretation is that while Ares is beloved by the citizens of Detroit as a surrogate father, Horizon is just... sitting there in LA.

Then there is the issue of how fast the sinking happened. Given that most of the buildings are still standing, it must have happened fairly slow, as i do not think any building is designed to cope with being dropped several meters...

That could have been made a little clearer. My understanding was that the buildings were standing but structurally damaged. Theoretically the landmass and water could have magically "beamed" away at a slow enough rate that it wasn't an instant drop with a consequential flood but still quick enough to prevent escape.

You guys have the basic idea; for more specifics I'd have to have my copy of Street Magic on me. With the type of alchera that the Deep Lacuna is, the previous geography and the new geography exchange places. In this case, a lot of earth, sewer tunnels, etc. were swapped with an underground tunnel system. In some places, this tunnel system was not built to support what is now above it (buildings, highways, and other assorted urban infrastructure) and the tunnels collapsed. In many of these places, water rushed in from the sea, either into collapsed tunnels or even still-intact tunnels. Water wasn't being displaced, rather water was filling new voids, like when lake drilling breaches an underground salt mine.

As for the speed of how fast the transition happened or the condition of buildings in the collapsed tunnels, I didn't really cover that in Street Magic. I didn't have the word count, and besides I had no idea what the plans were for Los Angeles in the future. Note that the tunnels aren't under all of L.A., nor did all of them collapse, so the only buildings at risk are those above the sections that collapsed.

Contrary to the opinion of the idiot who came up with the original concept, LA is quite hilly. And rock doesn't gracefully fail under bending, it breaks. So in order to end up under water, the buildings in LA free fall over 100 meters. Everyone dies. All the buildings are reduced to compact piles of rubble.

Here's the relevant portion in Street Magic

That's the beauty of it. It doesn't matter whether water was displaced, or it moved in to fill a void created by the sudden removal of a few hundred cubic miles of earth. In either case, a huge amount of energy was imparted on a huge mass of water, and everything that tried to stop the water would be annihiliated. Then, when the water did stop, it would drive itself back to equilibrium, and that backswing would create a massive tidal wave that would probably destroy everything within a few hundred feet of the Pacific Ocean.

Edit: It's not a few hundred cubic miles. It's about 60 million cubic meters. Even if only half of that was replaced by water, that's still 30 billion kilograms of water plowing headlong into the eastern side of the basin.

the big question then becomes how fast said energy was imparted.

a earthquake created tsunami have a timeframe of seconds, no?

The water does not actually get infused with much energy. A tsunami is a local extremum of potential energy. LA "moving over to make space" is a local minimum. Once the area is filled up, the system is in balance.

The system will reach balance, but the process of reaching that balance will kill everything in LA. At first, it won't be a tsunami, because the energy won't be potential. It'll be the kinetic energy of 30 million metric tons of water moving east to occupy the part of LA that is no longer above sea level. Everything that the water comes into contact with will be crushed. As the basin gets shallower at the edges, the water will shoal, converting some of the water's kinetic energy into potential energy. The rest of the kinetic energy will be transmitted into the structures at the edge of the basin, which will also be destroyed, or converted into sound and heat.

Then, when the water has nothing left except potential energy from being driven up during shoaling, it'll fall back to sea level and find its' equilibrium. That fall will create the displacement of water that will start the tsunami that will kill everyone in Guam.

You know, I did consider all of that. I spent days pouring over topographic maps of LA, I've been to LA (6 times in the last 2 years), and believe me, a city with three mountain ranges running in it just shouldn't "sink." Logically, scientifically - it'd be a planetary-wide doomsday senario. (Hey, I do have a science degree.) In real life. But then again, in real life, you can't do some chanting and wave around some feathers and make the Cascades errupt, either. SR is full of improbable. Pgs 11 - 13 of Corp Guide do address the Fall, and even talk about the improbable, and present some potential hypothesis to explain it; note that there are numerous hypothesis, from "wrath of God" to "permanent alchera." Admittedly, I wasn't the one who came up with the idea to "sink" LA. (I wasn't even writing for SR at the time it was done). I was the author who was given the task of explaining it, after both SR4 and Street Magic spoke of it. If my explanation fails, I apologize, but I'd like to say that I feel that I found the most balanced answer I could at the time.

And, if "It's MAGIC!" isn't a good enough answer... SR's Earth is an alternate reality. I'm perfectly fine with saying that the topography of LA was slightly different.

But then, I don't sweat the small stuff. In the end, why and how LA sank isn't really important, just the fact that it did is.

LA was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got completely reshaped by a massive surge of residual 4th World magic that defies scientific explanation. I'll accept that, and won't hold that against Corporate Enclaves, since the project inherited the the idiocy of sinking LA without killing everyone in the Pacific Rim.

I also kind of like what P2.0 says about what you have to do to get away with breaking the law when Big Brother is always watching. The idea that you can only get away with somethig by making it more profitable for Big Brother to let you get away than to catch you is kind of cool.

After everything we read in this thread, no, even THAT does not seem to be all that important.

This is one of those times that continuity whoring needs to go. A slight retcon in Street Magic or Corporate Enclaves would have gone a long way. AFAIK no one died because a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India or the name of the CAS were retconned into the canon. It removes an act of total stupidity and would probably be about as controversial as Shadows of North America saying Danchekker was full of it/censored in explaining why they were rewriting giant chunks of the NAN. But the fact is that someone seemed to have it out for L.A. a long time ago given that the next thing written about it was PCC taking it over in Year of the Comet following a massive earthquake (oh hahaha. How original). Jesus Christ. "The Big One"-level Quakes have been used FOUR TIMES as city-shaping plot events since the Awakening. That's just lazy. Someone could have picked up a copy of Ecology of Fear and read about how just about every form of natural disaster possible has hit L.A. over the years and/or is historically endemic to the region from hurricanes to floods, wildfires and tornadoes. It'd have been more believable and novel for once if there was a magical chemical fire which destroyed half the L.A.-San Diego MSA after a ship in the San Pedro/Long Beach port exploded (In part because something like that nearly happened IRL).

Of course, the discussion about why it should have produced a Japan-killing tsunami ignores the fact that the effect wasn't limited to the basin. It extends up the coast to Santa Barbara and south to Baja.

This then goes back to the question: Why is a AAA megacorp that made itself indispensable to its host country headquartered in such a cursed location, and what has kept people from leaving in droves considering these things keep getting bigger with shorter interludes? Los Angeles exists because all of the minor disasters that the media loves to blow out of proportion don't actually cause the sprawl to cease functioning. Any one of these quakes would have destroyed at least once the aqueduct system that keeps southern California wet. That was one of the interesting things about CFS is that Ute and PCC could and almost did at times nearly shut off their water for good. At some point when all of the water supply is controlled by Santa Fe--a city which is all too familiar with drought conditions and water shortages and shares the same water source--you have to wonder when they say "Fuck it" and walk away. PCC did pretty well for itself for four decades while landlocked, so the access to an oceanic harbor that's been ruined isn't much of a selling point.

There's so much that could have been done between L.A. and the rest of the PCC that wasn't so instead we got a nice big section on a social network based on Facebook, which has actually wanted to become/buy Twitter since before this book came out and so it's now trying desperately to become a cross between Twitter and Tumblr.

Fortunately you can play SR without following most of the canon stuff.

But where's the fun in that?

You pick and choose what you like (from SR and other sources), and make the game as close to your version of perfection as possible. That's a lot more fun for me than struggling with stuff the devs deal out that you hate, or have trouble handling. It just happens that there's not been much lately canon-wise that I thought was fun.

Personally, all I retain is the setting that LA is now, not how it got to that point. I think LA has it's own flavour with plenty of run material for GMs to work with. Does the explanation why it sunk suck? I don't really care, honestly.

Yup. The spectacular idiocy of this entire mess is pretty obvious, who came up with it isn't really that important to me. Though I have to wonder if it's the same clever person who decided that multi-thousand ton sats in Geo could reenter the atmosphere using their station keeping thrusters in a matter of minutes.

You say that like it never came up among the writers.

stupid double post

I enjoyed what you did with LA very much. Who cares what the "ZOMFG my sciences sayz this makes no sense!" faction thinks.

Yes, next they will be telling me that my character can't commute by skateboard from San Diego to Seattle in a half hour. You just have to belivez!

Well, if companies can just ignore complaints from one section of their market, what could possibly go wrong.


I'm sure that's a great strategy.

For those that don't know, many accounting firms who bought insurance from Enron didn't like how the numbers looked. They were ignored.

But hey, if it makes you feel better to characterize those of us that way, go right ahead. Since you're on the devs side, you won't get reprimanded for that baiting behavior.

I said what I said and then cited two blatant retcons in the next sentence. Any inference is your own.


Hm. Good for you.

The fact that what it retains is based so much on the original flawed source is grating enough. That The Fall annihilated cool shit not covered or that could have been rewritten is particularly grating since I'm just a little bit invested in the setting that could have existed if chunks of the southland weren't in the ocean.

Good redirection, but it doesn't matter if Bull's post was Administrative Warning or not.

He is a moderator on the moderation team who flat out lied about a Administrative Warning. Twice.

If you think lying about an Administrative Warning is casual...



Has he received his Private Message warning him of baiting? Or was that just for the people who point out bad behavior in Mods?

Create that setting then. Who cares what fluff the devs write if you can do a better version (better suited to your taste) on your own?