Alright. So. Smol might be the wrong direction...

Votes with her feet by kicking the door back in , EXTRA HARD... no, you don't get to know what size those feet are, fuck off

So I am in chaos goblin mode, in part because I'm arguing circles around folks about bodily autonomy on the Twitters over the abortion thing, which is part of what kicked things off here. Current Events thread was locked, and then Politics and Hog Pit to boot. So now you all get to see the scary real world events happening here! Abortion ban! Rawr!

Not that... there was anything actively discussed in Politics aside from the Current Events thread, but gotta shut down all avenues of dissent, amIright?

So we've got hidden threads and entirely deleted threads that are pointing out the authoritarian bonaza going on here. Farfalla getting banned for nothing. Nearly twenty people banned for defending Farfalla. Refusal to post logs, which is KIND OF THE WHOLE DEAL HERE. You post logs, and let people decide.

If this a court and Gany is the Judge whose decrees must be followed, then hiding threads is suppression of evidence in a trial you should rightly recuse yourself from, and deleting threads is destruction of evidence. Which... I am not a lawyer, but those both seem kind of bad. Unethical, maybe. Could even be illegal. Who can be sure? The unemotional robot seems to be on the fritz, can't ask her.

... incidentally, if this is a court room, there is also Derp the Building Maintenance/Janitor, acting like a Bailiff by closing threads when it has been stated multiple times he is only supposed to be doing code support. Weird, that.

So when admin on a mush does these sorts of things, people come to the Soapbox (the press/town square) and let the evidence out HERE, where all can see, even after trying to be shut down.

We've got logs of Gany comparing people banned terrorists. Someone else threw up a lynch mob comparison. Screenshots grabbed from before Gany locked everything down and tried to hide them away. Also at least one screenshot of Gany insisting that 'no, actually, a lot of people have not complained to me about this' when people are standing in the square, being ignored.

The reason we do not DM concerns, is the same reason we do not page complaints to staff. If you shut down the public complaints, then you can lie about how many people have been complaining, and try to brush everything under the rug.

Again. If any game had an administration that did this, the Soapbox would rally against them. We are an anti-authoritarian, pro-transparency kind of people. And continuing to delete threads, lest others see you joining in on that sort of fuckery, is pretty disgusting.

For these reasons and more, I join the chorus: ban me, you coward.

The United States of America

04 July 1776 - 08 November 2016

GOODNIGHT SWEET PRINCE

The Coronavirus Shitposting group I am in has some zingers.

The numbered dial on your toaster is for how many minutes the bread is toasted for, rather than the 'degree of toastiness'

David Koch, about fucking time.

This thread has a few more instances of 'we should not help group A who are often overlooked/in need of help, because it might also help group B who might manipulate the system/benefit when they shouldn't!' than it probably should, and is drifting closer to Politics territory than anyone wants me to bring up.

ahem

The ideas behind a lot of these are good. I'm not a monster, but I play one online, so while I will do chin-strokingly evil things, I try to get the boundaries set in advance, check in periodically through the scene, and all that jazz.

And even with all the advance prep there, I STILL somehow manage to feel like a piece of shit when I accidentally go somewhere that wasn't said was off-limits, but I also didn't do the regular check-in about.

THAT'S RIGHT, I'M MAKING THIS ABOUT MEEEEEEEEE!

Or maybe not, and I'm just like. Posting a warning.

Like @BlondeBot says, all the code and policy and systems in the world won't stop every problem that can happen. Ignoring all of the bad-actors, this sort of thing can happen to people even when all parties are acting in good faith.

But more/new systems can allow for additional ways to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and can also provide other ways of resolving the issues that come out of it.

@mietze YOU did absolutely nothing wrong. Mental Health trumps online chat game nerds.

This lies directly at the feet of other admin, who know what they have done, and refuse to back down and admit they were wrong.

Votes with her feet by kicking the door back in , EXTRA HARD... no, you don't get to know what size those feet are, fuck off

So I am in chaos goblin mode, in part because I'm arguing circles around folks about bodily autonomy on the Twitters over the abortion thing, which is part of what kicked things off here. Current Events thread was locked, and then Politics and Hog Pit to boot. So now you all get to see the scary real world events happening here! Abortion ban! Rawr!

Not that... there was anything actively discussed in Politics aside from the Current Events thread, but gotta shut down all avenues of dissent, amIright?

So we've got hidden threads and entirely deleted threads that are pointing out the authoritarian bonaza going on here. Farfalla getting banned for nothing. Nearly twenty people banned for defending Farfalla. Refusal to post logs, which is KIND OF THE WHOLE DEAL HERE. You post logs, and let people decide.

If this a court and Gany is the Judge whose decrees must be followed, then hiding threads is suppression of evidence in a trial you should rightly recuse yourself from, and deleting threads is destruction of evidence. Which... I am not a lawyer, but those both seem kind of bad. Unethical, maybe. Could even be illegal. Who can be sure? The unemotional robot seems to be on the fritz, can't ask her.

... incidentally, if this is a court room, there is also Derp the Building Maintenance/Janitor, acting like a Bailiff by closing threads when it has been stated multiple times he is only supposed to be doing code support. Weird, that.

So when admin on a mush does these sorts of things, people come to the Soapbox (the press/town square) and let the evidence out HERE, where all can see, even after trying to be shut down.

We've got logs of Gany comparing people banned terrorists. Someone else threw up a lynch mob comparison. Screenshots grabbed from before Gany locked everything down and tried to hide them away. Also at least one screenshot of Gany insisting that 'no, actually, a lot of people have not complained to me about this' when people are standing in the square, being ignored.

The reason we do not DM concerns, is the same reason we do not page complaints to staff. If you shut down the public complaints, then you can lie about how many people have been complaining, and try to brush everything under the rug.

Again. If any game had an administration that did this, the Soapbox would rally against them. We are an anti-authoritarian, pro-transparency kind of people. And continuing to delete threads, lest others see you joining in on that sort of fuckery, is pretty disgusting.

For these reasons and more, I join the chorus: ban me, you coward.

When an administrator of a MUSH comes on here and says 'please page me on-game with your complaints, and we can work something out', the consensus is overwhelmingly 'Work it out here, in the open where we can all see it'.

When someone is banned from a game over complaints of staff action, we do not condone that sort of fuckery here. In fact, it is generally condemned.

We provide logs when able, to shed light and provide transparency on what happened, so that people can judge whether they believe something is justified, or whether they think it is bullshit.

In light of events that all fly in the face of the spirit of the Soapbox, I'm out for the foreseeable future, unless this somehow gets me banned. I tried to take care to avoid the specifically off-limit things, but who can say for sure?

Ping me on Discord if you get something Mummy up and running, that'd be sweet.

Until next time.

I DARED to like Mummy, which everyone else hates.

Jennkryst#0183 for whomever might want to chat about mummies and where to play them. Also whatever else.

We spoke on a MU, and I haven't unburied the laptop from miniatures I've been working on since then, but I managed to find a hard copy of Anatchy and am totally still interested in helping.

@insomniac7809 My 'have not run all the numbers but quick solution' is just give people XP and let them spend it on what they will. You will get your hyper-focused min-maxers, because they exist. But this method actually encourages jack-of-all-trades builds, because you can spread out and get MORE dots than someone who focused at the expense of everything else.

... also, this is really WoD focused, so ymmv with other systems.

@greenflashlight said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

I asked why that was, and I was told straight to my face with refreshing honesty, "Because bushi and shugenja can roleplay talking, but courtiers can't roleplay fighting."

This is just the social combat argument again, bushi/shugenja faking they have good social stats and only spending XP on combat... and I wasn't the one to bring it up! Tangentially related, this is actually addressed in the FFG L5R ruleset, courtiers get specific THINGS they, and only they, can do.

Edit to add - interestingly, when I am doing the min-max Boogaloo, I rarely max out combat stats. It's almost always the subterfuge or lying skills, to justify... you know. Lying perfectly in those poses that are totally true and not a lie, the dice say so, you have to believe me.

Obligatorally chiming in because I half-min-max... but it's rarely for combat efficiency or the like. It's almost always done when a game's chargen and xp advancement ratio is different. To explain to the five people on the forum who dont know the concept, and to use the nWoD math... two characters start, one with 1/1/1/1, and the other with 4/0/0/0. Player one needs to spend 27 XP (6 + 9 + 12) to get to 4/1/1/1; player two needs to spend 9 XP (3 + 3 + 3).

This is why CoD is a delight. The cost to raise things is flat. 0->1 costs the same XP as 4->5. So I feel less compelled to dump everything into a single skill, and make a more well-rounded character.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is amazing, and I am livid that the one local theatre that had it playing only had it playing for a single week.

So WotC has lied about this too many times before for me to be 100% on-board. BUT.

Spelljammer confirmed?