Hi guys,

I'm sorry for my dramatics with this post. @GreenFlashlight kinda hit the nail on the head, re: depression. I wanted to thank you all for the kind words and support you left here. I also wanted to let you know that I am O.K.

Medicine has been increased and I'm undergoing different tests and dietary changes to figure out why I feel sick all the time. But I'm beginning to feel more like a human being again day by day.

I'm not planning on returning to MUSHing at large any time soon-- at the very least nothing Big. Nothing I'll need to invest too much of myself in. I'm focusing my time on writing and getting healthier: emotionally and physically.

Thank you again for all the kindness, and I'm sorry if I worried you all.

-Cobbles

First:

I said this privately to @surreality but I'll say it publicly too. While I won't say "it's okay" because that'd be speaking for other people who have been impacted. I will say-- I understand and I'm not mad at you Surreality. I was underneath the thumb of Spider for long enough that I know what it's like to take a step back and realize you were being fed venom for a long time, and have to look back on your past actions and judge all of them as carefully as you can. It's a shit feeling. I'm glad you realized the person in question was toxic.

Also, though I didn't say this in our chat because I'm running out of time before work I'll say it now--

I do owe you an apology as well. I apologize for the day I basically spammed you with gifs in threads. It's not an excuse to be explain: I was honestly just trying to have discourse with you and then you started saying that I was always out for you, and I just sort of snapped and was like 'well she wants conflict, I'll give her conflict'-- It was petty and I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry.

Lastly:

I'm gone. Until @Auspice is no longer an admin-- at the very fucking least --on this board I'm gone. I won't be returning to MSB. I won't be engaging in the MU* community where I know she is. It's one thing to tell people I'm aggressively chasing the guy she wants on a game (she was wrong by the way) but it is another to tell people details about my real life and about my real life relationship-- whether those details are correct or inaccurate.

That is the shittiest fucking thing.

And I won't be a part of a community that welcomes her with open arms.

ETA: I can't find how to delete my account, so it'll just be around like my ghost forever. Bye guys!

We have finished our vet visit. Oya has an inflammatory reaction, and some white & red blood cells in her urine. They think mild UTI and stress from my roommates cat(s) being in her territory. So we have some work to do to get her territory set up specifically for her and the other cats kept out of it.

She has been given a long lasting antibiotic shot, a small dose of painkillers to help with any pain, and been given some samples of urinary proactive pet food I'm gonna see if she'll eat and get more of if she does.

Thank you so much for everyone who donated! I was so worried it was something worse.

If anyone needs the money they donated back please let me know via PM and I will get it back to you ASAP once I'm out from under scrambling for my rent.

@surreality People don't change. After years of dealing with Spider, this is something that I've learned. If you (general, not specific) are at your core a rotten person. No matter how many times you're confronted, no matter how many times you swear you're gonna change, no matter how many chances you get-- you'll still be a rotten person. There's only so much maturing that a person will go through in their life.

But here's the catch, not everyone who does something bad is rotten. I got caught up with Spider, and I'm certain I was manipulated into doing shitty things. Or hell, I did shitty things because being in Spider's favor felt good, so if it made her happy that made me happy. But I don't think that at my core I'm a shitty person. So I've made and effort to look at who my friends are and how I interact with them. Are my friend constantly talking about how shitty another person is? Or how someone is stealing their spotlight, or doing this, or doing that? Maybe I shouldn't be friends with that person.

Now, I'm not saying that my friends and I don't gossip. Because we do. I think that everyone in this hobby does. But my friends and I also don't focus on gossip. We don't talk about people's personal lives. We don't tell other people about someone's break up. We don't disclose personal information regarding people's health, physical or mental. We don't discuss if someone is having financial troubles. We don't talk about who is TSing who (unless I mean it's like DownWithOPP or whatever). But I have done those or similar things in the past. Like I said, I got hooked into Spider's web. These days, however, I surround myself by people who I know at their core are good eggs. Do they mess up sometimes? Yes. But so do I.

There are going to people who judge me based on how I acted when I was thick as thieves with Spider. There are going to be people who don't. At the end of the day all I can do is surround myself with good eggs and let their good-egginess help keep me on the straight and narrow.

And at your core, Surr, I think you're a good egg.

Find friends who you know at their core are good people. Who you can have light hearted conversations with, mild gossip with, but who at the end of the day aren't going to start nasty whisper campaigns. Anyone who continues to judge you because a shit-head fooled you well... that's their lose. Move on with your life, go have fun with your eggs.

Me to me: Did we take the egg metaphor too far?
Also me to me: MOAR EGG.

Hallo, I've embarked on another ares/fs3 project. This is one that isn't going to open in a couple of months or a handful of weeks. I won't have an estimate of when it'll open, because I'm taking my time developing theme and setting stuff. But here's the deets of what I have so far:

Elevator Pitch: BhamMu* is a modern urban horror game set in Birmingham, Alabama. In Bham the magically entangled fight against intruders from realms beyond even as they struggle with their mundane lives.

Setting: As mentioned above, Birmingham, AL. The grid will be made up of five neighborhoods that roughly make up the downtown/metro area of Bham: Central City, Five Points South, Fountain Heights, Highland Park, and Southside.

Theme & Mood: Struggling against magical extraplanar intruders while also struggling with the same day-to-day struggles as the nameless/faceless masses. Trying to stay sane while fighting unknowable horrors from beyond.

Key Points: There is no "veil" or the like, but the majority of the world doesn't know about the other realms or intruders from them. Most people think psychics are scam artists. The witches are just hippies. And that ghosts aren't real. They might enjoy a "paranormal hunters" show but see them as fact or mockumentories. If you start trying to warn people that a squid-faced monster is coming to eat everyone's brains you're probably going to be put in a psych ward, or lose your job. Or be scorned as "a crazy person".

Key Words:

• Unentangled: Those who do not know that magic really exists and are more free of it's web than the Entangled.
• Entangled: Those who become entangled with the reality of magic, the magic web, the silken labyrinth, and the other realms beyond them.
• The Magic Web: A metaphysical barrier between our reality and the silken labyrinth, the entangled are constantly aware of it.
• The Silken Labyrinth: A metaphysical maze that leads to other realms than the human one. It often looks like a crooked version of the world where a person entered it.
• Intruders: Creatures-- often hostile --from realms beyond the silken labyrinth. These can be corporeal or ephemeral.
  • Corporeal Intruders: Intruders from other realms with a physical form-- these often prey on Unentangled whose blindness makes them easier targets.
  • Ephemeral Intruders: Intruders from other realms without a physical form-- these often prey on the Entangled whose awareness has weakened their sanity.
• Magical Affiliations: Groups of Entangled who have banded together because of shared goals or experiences.
  • The Web Burners: A fanatical group of Entangled who believe that the only way to be free of magic and the monsters from other realms is to burn down the magic web. To do so they believe they need to overwhelm the web with more Entangled. They try to force people to become Entangled, and supposedly have rituals that allow them to do this. NPC Antagonists.
  • The Weavers: A fanatical group of Entangled who believe that the magic web is the only thing that protects the worlds, as poorly as it does, from terrible monsters from beyond the silken labyrinth. They do their best to reinforce and strengthen the web. They believe that the more who are aware of the web the weaker it gets, and are rumored to have the ability to strip people's entanglement from them. NPC Antagonists.
  • The Enlightened Order of Entangled: A group of Entangled who became so through study and ritual. Typically occult academics who believed in magic before they ever experienced it. They believe that mastery over magics and the other realm is done through knowledge and ritualism. They have a rigorous hierarchy with each chapter having a local master with dozen of apprentices and pupils beneath them.
  • The Wild Magic Affiliates: Those who believe in spontaneous magic. Often called "Wildcallers" because they are known to simply call on magic with only a vague intention of what form it should take. They call on a wild form of magic to do their works. They are often those who became entangled spontaneously with no prior experience with magic. Their structure is not as rigid as the Order, but they tend to work in cells or covens and expect loyalty from their members. They have a loose hierarchy where covens report to a hierophant in each location where they have a presence. They have no formal teacher/student structure, however.
  • The Free: Psychic anarchists, iconoclast wizards, and loners. They may believe in ritualism but can't abide by the rules of the Order, or they may be those who believe in spontaneous magic but don't want to join the Wildcallers because they prefer to be alone. They have no set structure, only a loose affiliation and individual agreements.

That's it for now. That's as far as I've gotten. I'm going to set up a 'development blog' forum on the game/wiki, and be posting updates there as I go. I'm going to work out the details as of the three PC affiliations, and what is known about the two antag ones, then work on some stock enemies, and then work on what magic is accessible to PCs, etc.

Also all of this is subject to change if I change my mind later. :]

I started to go ahead and start my own thread because a) I wanted to narrow the scope down to a specific topic, and b) I wanted one in the mildly constructive forum so we might have a bit more of a civil conversation.

So thesis, or topic, or whatever: What are your experiences with either your OOC sexuality or your IC sexuality on games? What are some of the things you experience as, say, a bisexual player playing a straight or a gay character? What are your experience as a gay player playing someone straight? Someone straight trying to play someone who is not straight? (If people try to tell me there is no straight person out there who wouldn't try to play someone like Klaus in a game where you play FC I'm going to make you eat your keyboard, my friends).

Here are some of mine:

@Ghost said in MU*ginalization:

@Cobaltasaurus said in MU*ginalization:

@Roz said in MU*ginalization:

This is a lot of words so I'm just gonna vote Yes as a general "yeah I've experienced sexism on a MU*" kind of response.

Oh. My vote should really be "yes" then, since ive also experienced sexism on games. Also homophobia, toward my male bi character.

Also bi-erasure toward the same character, and slut shaming.

Eta: in the last two im talking about things that crossed ic/ooc lines since they were unthematic to the game. Not just IC unpleasantness you might expect in say a modern day game setting.

@Cobaltasaurus @Wretched

I, myself, have not experienced first or secondhand bi-erasure, but I could definitely see where that's come into play. Sucks that you had to deal with that. Thanks for the input.

So here's the thing about it; it's just a thing. It happens a lot more than you think. When the situation happened, I actually didn't even realize it was bi-erasure happening until someone else told me. Or at the very least I didn't realize that was the term for it. And thinking back over my history of mushing that was actually not the first time I've experienced it.

Back on Haunted Memories (one of the first nWoD games out there), I had a female werewolf alpha who had mainly female members of her pack. I was told, OOC, that people just assumed she was a lesbian. Despite the fact that her public RP hooks referenced a husband that she lost when she first changed, because he was a werewolf as well.

I was incredibly young at the time and went out of my way to get her a male lover, to show people that she wasn't a lesbian. (This is real fucked up, young me why did you do stupid things?)

I can't really speak to what gay men go through in this community but I imagine (from experiences of my own playing either gay or bisexual male characters on rare occasion) that it's a lot of stereotypying and female-players fetishizing gay relationships. My own experiences with female players telling me how "hot" gay sex was made me incredibly gunshy and disinterested in playing male characters interested in men until Arx (I have been mushing for nearly 15 years). With the exception of the one time I played a bisexual male on Star Trek: Gamma One who ended up seeing a PC I knew was played by a gay male OOC.

ETA, I forgot to add before hitting post:

I can't really speak to what lesbians go through in this community, because most of my female characters that are interested in other women end up also eventually being interested in men (I'm looking at you Cyto@HM and Nikki@TR), as an IC/OOC bleed through my pansexuality that I can't help no matter how much I try.

But we ALL know the Elfbian Mafia Stereotypoes. I'm sure lesbians in this hobby have a difficult time.

ETA2: FC, not OC. Whoops.

I am, in fact, apparently getting a raise. I'm confused as to why my boss decided to bump me up not one, but two levels, but I'll take it.

@Derp There's a difference between being socially awkward and being a creep.

I present onto you, them beans:

I’m not answering because I think you’ll actually believe me, I’m answering so Bess and Hobos don’t have to keep having a circular conversation with you all.

No. I didn’t TS Isaac. I RP’d all of once with him where I was acting as GM and was busy having a vampire spray other characters in the scene with pepper spray. For the record, I didn’t TS anyone on my game. Ever since people accused me of TSing a staff NPC that my character was actively plotting to kill I have stopped TSing random people and only rarely engage and only with people I’ve known for a while. Huh, it just hit me I was talking about TR but that applies to Arx too…

I’m really tired of this particular community using the fact that I engaged in sexual RP in the past to shame me or question my judgments.

The slutshaming you have going on here is all too familiar. I also have literally no idea what Derp is talking about how I have banned him from games because I wanted his TS partner, but he won’t provide receipts so idec.

Now, this is literally the last of my attention I’m giving any of you.

Just so we’re clear, @reimesu @Ghost @Derp @Ganymede Do me a favor, and don’t come around to any game I run in the future. Because you won’t be welcome.

@reimesu lol Are you for real? Calling out the action would have been “This doesn’t make sense” or “seems like an unfair banning”.

Not spinning up a whole tale about how I wanted Isaac for myself so banned one of his TS partners. Labeling me as just jealous, rather than as I said grossly distressed and disgusted by Macha’s RP.

Hilariously, Isaac, Itzak, AND Macha are all not welcome to my next project. Because they are all, in my opinion, equally problematic and toxic to the community.

The final straw for Macha was her trying to get other people to ask me for a copy of the game db for her.

ETA But I forgot it is your precious Derp who can do no wrong.

Y’all can fuck right off.

@reimesu said in Ruiz:

@Bessarion said in Ruiz:

And I'm done giving your dysfunctional ass attention. Just stop.

(Bold is mine) That's a personal attack. Please stop.

Lol.

But spinning a story about how I banned Macha because I wanted Isaac for myself wasn’t? Y’all some on some hypocritical stuff here.

Your view of me is really disappointing and hurtful.

@Lyanna said in Coming Soon: The Pack an Ares Game:

@Cobalt I love the look of the website, awesome work there.

I can't really take credit for that! That was all Ren! Who is absolutely magical. I was just like "hey here's a background image" and they went to town.

@faraday said in Coming Soon: The Pack an Ares Game:

Supernatural isn't really my jam, but it looks really nice. The idea of werewolves and vampires revealing themselves on social media is hilariously imaginable.

Isn't it tho? I was up googling when the first smart phones came out, when instagram and facebook and all that were all officially launched to get the dates right too, lol.

In a world where the existence of Vampires and Werecreatures was exposed in the early 2010s with the advent of smart phones and social media (and then opportunistic individuals going public on national and global television).

To the Windy Plains Pack, home, hearth, and family are the most important priorities. That's why they accept any shapeshifter willing to abide by their rules as family. Pack-- Family --comes first. Everyone has a job. And no one starts any trouble that could harm the Pack.

Set on the outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming, The Windy Plains ranch is home to the local shifter Pack. On just over 300,000 acres of land, the Windy Plains has been home to the Brunson family for seven or eight generations. Unfortunately, the local vampire Circle has decided they want that land. The city has been pushing closer and closer to the edge of shifter territory and now the Windy Plains is prime real estate for new, lucrative development.

Warfare comes in many forms.

--

• WHAT: The Pack is a game focused on a gigantic multi-animal shifter pack, located on a generational family ranch on the outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Pack would be happy to continue running their ranch with little outside intervention. However, the Cheyenne City Circle of Vampires has decided to invest in urbanizing more of the land outside of Cheyenne... and they want the Pack's land. Roleplay is meant to be family, ranch, and pack oriented. This is a game of Family vs Enemies (shapeshifters vs vampires), urbanization encroaching on relatively untamed landscapes, and small town struggles against big city money. All with supernatural adventures and mysteries.

PCs will be allowed to play shapeshifters of almost any RL predatory animal (something that would bite a human being). Or human beings associated with

• WHERE:
  Website: https://thepack.aresmush.com/
  Game: thepack.aresmush.com port 2022

• WHEN: I'm putting on the finishing touches of grid and some theme webpages, then will be working on pregenned characters and npcs. I'm aiming for a soft open to alpha sometime within December. People are welcome to log in before hand and chat. But we don't encourage starting chargen just yet.

--

Hello! I have been slowly working on this game for a while now. I'm getting to a point where I may be able to open to alpha! I have to finish the grid (which isn't as much of a thing on Ares games, thank god), add a little bit of info to the theme pages (oh my god I need more than just stat blocks for the monsters), and finish up NPCs and roster characters.

I'm not really sure where to advertise these days, so here I am! Whoo! Hi! Also, I'd very much be happy if anyone wanted to leave me feedback on anything that is confusing or doesn't make sense. I apologize for any typos or grammar errors on the wiki (I normally have someone else proof read my stuff because my brain doesn't accept grammar and glosses right over typos).

Anyway, I've been chipping away at this and I'm getting excited. I just wanted to share with people.

Some interesting pages you might like:

• https://thepack.aresmush.com/wiki/theme
• https://thepack.aresmush.com/wiki/the-ranch
• https://thepack.aresmush.com/wiki/the-pack
• https://thepack.aresmush.com/wiki/physiology

Oh, I've also just recently changed my mind about allowing human PCs as well as shapeshifter ones, so if you see any references on the website to humans not being allowed... disregard I'm going to go through and make sure all the pages are consistent before I open for apps.

I have a sadness.

I ran a nonsensical in the hedge on DW2.0, where an insane hob was throwing lizards at people from a tower screaming "merry lizardmus".

I accidentally killed a PC with one of the lizards due to dice explosion.

Or, the time, on TR a pack of three werewolves were fighting some wasp spirits, and one of the PCs kept rolling so badly and the Wasps NPCs rolled so well that they knocked him out.

These were rank one spirits vs an overpowered Rahul.

Still, Lizardmus takes the cake.

Unless you count back in the days of yore, where on a dice less Anitaverse game, my PC vampire and her broodmate were arguing and started fighting...

And I went to write "Azura knees Lily in the stomach", but instead wrote "Azura kicks Lily in the snug."

And everyone just assumed I meant her cooch.

》.》

@tooters yes