@LWhiskey To me it looks like a vicious sort of trap. Either it gets approved, at which point someone has approved a hideous caricature of a character, look aren't they racist for letting it in - or it doesn't, at which point they won't approve a black character, look aren't they racist for not letting it in.
I don't believe that app was made in good faith.
@A-B The most important thing in this world to learn is It's not always about you.
You can accept that you did something wrong without accepting that all the wrong is your fault.
When you accept that you did something wrong, part of taking responsibility for that is analysing it and working out what it was that you did wrong. The next part is trying to do better.
You made a mistake! Congratulations, you're human after all. Now work out what that mistake was and try not to do that again. Me, I have a long and convoluted script running inside my head for 'what not to do in X situation'.
And get help with this analysing stuff. Seriously. Find someone who'll help you pick apart what people were saying and what they were meaning, what you said and what other people assumed you meant, and just how it all came crashing and burning down around your ears. Other people do this shit instinctively, but we have to learn. The good news is that we can.
I got formally diagnosed a couple of years ago (during Autism Awareness Week, entertainingly).
I'm in my 40s. There wasn't really a stigma around autism when I was a kid - it was just something that didn't happen to girls, and therefore I was forever being naughty and acting out, and had to be corralled back into what was socially acceptable even though it made absolutely no sense (and still doesn't). The word 'ladylike' still makes me twitch, because it was always what I wasn't and yet what I had to be whether I understood it or not. This is not an uncommon experience for women diagnosed later in life.
It occurred to me that it was a possibility when I attended a talk on neurodiversity in my then-new workplace, four years back, and a new presenter brought up a list of traits that people on the spectrum might display; I looked at it and went 'Well - I don't have those two? But other than that...' - and then a work-friend with two autistic sons said 'Sorry, I thought you knew'.
I did some background reading, then marched off to the doctor's and made them refer me. Attended a screening interview, then a diagnostic interview, and then after talking to my mother they made their minds up. During the formal diagnosis interview, the poor chap tried to gently break it to me that sometimes an experienced clinician can pretty much see it walking through the door, and that's what had happened at the screening interview. The interviews after that had been justifying the diagnosis rather than determining whether I warranted it; in some ways it was nice that it was so obvious, but I was left feeling a bit as though if it was that bloody obvious then maybe someone should have said something in the preceding decades.
So yeah. I'm on the spectrum, significantly so, and always have been. It would been nice to have known a few decades ago, to have had some coping strategies I didn't develop myself, to have understood that not everyone thinks like me and that not everyone can cope with difference. I only found out after I got my life on some sort of track, not when it could have made a massive difference to its prior path.
And then, talking to my little brother to let him know that it's in the family in case my nephews need the support I didn't get? It turned out he'd known it was likely for 20 years.
As to what MU* RP has done for me? Playing a charming character who was able to handle people let me learn how to deal with people in a friendly fashion myself. I got to test things out before trying them in reality, and I got to learn a lot about how people who aren't me think - and that helped me realise that it's not the same way I think. Not everyone has a branching code-like script for interactions with other humans. Who knew?
LARP helped hugely as well; when you've been in a battle with 3,000 people, when you've hopped up on a table to make a speech to fifty, when you've saved someone else's character with quick thinking and a spell that was never intended for that purpose, there's very little that can stop you grasping your courage in both hands and stepping up to do something that truly needs to be done.
RP teaches a lot of 'soft' skills, and without it I never would have learned to cope with people.
When the scene was incredible while you were playing it.
When you edit the log and it was still incredible.
When you open up the log you already edited, just to read it again.
I play Raymesin, partly because they wouldn't let me be Grayson Grayson.
Something to do with the code might object...
For the record, these are real cats that @Crawfish drew for me. Well, one cat, one muppet.
I believe Notre Dame is owned by the French state, having been nationalised in 1905. The Catholic church have the exclusive right to use it (while having to fork out for running costs and keeping it free to visit), but they don't own it.
Repeating 'Do not take the blame for things that happened while you were dealing with real life'. It's not your fault. Don't take the blame. Do get in touch if you wish to.
I cannot remain where I do not trust the staff to behave in an ethical manner.
Farewell.
Helix is also known as Amberyl, a coder behind one of the MU* codebases, and the one who literally wrote the book on staff ethics in MU*. She pretty much abandoned it many years ago.
Best of luck to Simulacrum, but if Hella is begging people to come back, I'm going to stay elsewhere.
Repeating 'Do not take the blame for things that happened while you were dealing with real life'. It's not your fault. Don't take the blame. Do get in touch if you wish to.
Some friends and I have the rule that if you come up with something both ICly appropriate and so funny you spend more than 5 seconds giggling at it in RL, you have to do it.
This has led to all sorts of hilarity, to the point where I've taken it with me to other places. It usually brings a whole new energy to the scene, and is the starting point for all sorts of inadvisable decisions, character growth, and connections.
@mietze If you continually give all that you have, sooner or later you outdo the regen and end up with nothing left to give.
Taking a bit more time for yourself and your family is, in that circumstance, a very good thing.
A lot more people than anyone realises will be feeling this way after the last couple of years. There's a wave of people saying 'fuck it', and while it'll crest at various times depending on where you are and what you've been doing and how the people around you have reacted, it's coming for us all.
Two friends gone, in the space of a few weeks. Neither one of them was much older than me.
This year's started out brutal.
@redjellybean Also, if you find yourself in a forced dungeon/boss, people get a bonus if someone hasn't done it before. It makes everyone more tolerant of a wipe or three.
When what sounded like an entertaining evening turns out to be bloody brilliant. If the rest of the gigs I'm planned to go to in the next 12 months turn out that well, I'll be a very happy entity.
