@Tinuviel said in Firan Secrets:

@Pandora said in Firan Secrets:

It's too bad he grew up; being able to fuck people is what fucked him up, I think.

Sounds like pretty much any post-adolescent male.

I don't ascribe to the idea, even in jest, that males as a whole are brainless slaves to their testicles. It takes active choices, for which people must be held accountable, to become abusive assholes.

I'm an openly and flamboyantly gay, black female. When I mentioned casually that Acheron and I were dating (this was like, 9 years ago, mind you) I had a male player flat out accuse me of lying and then go into some pseudo-academic rant about mixed race dating. I had female players 'jokingly' assert that I was being greedy by dating a guy when I'd previously only dated women as an adult.

Discussing baby names OOC on Firan, I was informed by some old whore (that's how I think of her in my mind, 'some old whore') that naming my kid the name I'd chosen would 'make her gay'. My kid is non-binary and gives talks about gender identity in elementary school. If it was the name, OH WELL. I only mention this one because deep down it still bothers me, a lot. Keep your judgments to yourself, even if the name is Mabel or Gertrude, you just say 'Oh, that's pretty!' or keep your trap shut.

I mostly play gay male characters. I usually play them on yaoi-based sites, and by tacit agreement, most people pretend to be male in real life. Openly female players are often shunned due to a lack of 'authenticity'. This leads to very weird shit, like dubiously-male players making assertions about masculinity that are often wildly off-base, and sometimes harmful or abusive.

When I play gay male characters on a MU, no matter how openly gay they are, they're still hit on by females with varying degrees of aggressiveness, in what feels like a double-standard in that if a guy was actively pursuing a character that identified herself as a lesbian, he'd be considered skeevy. I've only heard the jokes about not having met the right woman yet IC, so no abuse OOC that I can recall.

When I play straight male characters, life is great. Drowning in attention, can be as much of an asshole as I want free of most repercussions, and any IC or OOC blowback can be attributed to the other party being a hater. My OOC harem, unrecruited, will back my every utterance. Being 'male' and a decent writer will honestly get you wherever you want to go in this hobby because the dick-drought is real and it isn't going anywhere, any time soon.

There is a pejorative term 'mesbians' that relates to male players playing their fetishized female lesbian characters that are usually some sort of 'exotic' mixed race of white + whatever, average height, average build (but with big tiddies) shuns makeup because she's a natural beauty, wears thigh-high stockings with every single outfit, reads comics, disdains monogamy, and is an expert combatant. (This is an oversimplification for the sake of KISS, and I mean no overt offense to anyone male/female/otherwise that plays these types of characters) When I play lesbians, I feel fucking weird because the lesbian community in many games is often made up of female characters that don't feel relatable to me personally, so I wind up with fraudulent lesbian characters that aren't attracted to most women in their vicinity.

My straight female characters are almost universally spaghetti-sexual - they'd only be straight until they meet a hot female and things get steamy. That rarely happens, sadface. So if and when they wind up dating a guy, this introduces a whole new level of awkward. Will my natural tendency toward being the aggressor scare them off? (Not usually, but it's still a fear) Will they bring up the idea of threesomes way too soon because they're assuming it's what I'd want? (Far too often, but I feel like this is less to do with me, and more to do with people living out their best fantasy life) Step the awkward up a notch if the player knows I'm gay. Will they be gunshy about hitting on my character, thinking she's not interested? Will I be FRIENDZONED? These last two seem most common for me, mostly due to my habit of only really RPing with people I know.

Needless to say, my female characters almost never get laid. There is much weird going on in my head & I feel like most people are female-ing better than me.

THIS IS A SPOILER
***Spoiler tags suck and are not intuitive.***

When your character meets another character purely IC, you've never spoken to this player before in your life. And they just click. On the same wavelength, with the same views, you find yourself nodding as you read their posts, and an adversarial group scene turns into some action-flick movie moment where the two of you are back to back, firing on all cylinders. Yes.

On the subject of creeps & creepiness:

In much the same way we often quickly close out our porn browser tabs once we're uh... done with them, what is or isn't sexy or welcome can vary wildly with one's mood or willingness to be exposed to it. So what one person may consider creepy behavior, someone else might find alluring in that moment even if they would probably agree it was creepy from the outside looking in.

There needs to be a line drawn between 'creepy in a "I'm just not interested" way' & 'creepy in a coercive/manipulative way' & we should definitely handle them differently. Context matters, and situational expectations matter.

Someone hitting on someone in a bar is expected behavior, and if they do it badly they might be creepy (IC) but that's not by itself indicative of OOC creepiness. Someone hitting on someone in a way that indicates there will be negative repercussions for the player if they choose not to engage, while IC, could certainly be a sign of some OOC creepiness that warrants further action.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the issue of creepiness, but shout-out to all the creeps out there doing it the fun and friendly way, I appreciate some good old-fashioned awkward.

I've got so much to love right now I'll get it all out in one post.

1. My kid is not only incredibly well-behaved, sassy, smart, adorable, and clever, she's also tested her way into being moved up a grade. Children are loud, messy, and expensive but they're so worth it; like the Holy Grail of Steam Achievements if you play your child-rearing cards right.

2. After many months and many thousands of dollars, my immigration woes are over and we've got our visas - SO LONG, TRUMPMERICA. Course, I still have to deal with Theresa May but at least she's not orange during winter months and her tweets don't make my child cry.

3. I'm moving next week, which means missing Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving, but my family has made the decision to have Thanksgiving a day early to make sure we get one last authentic Turkey Day feast. I'm no fan of Columbus but if you got to eat like my family gets to eat when the moms, aunts, and grandmothers get together in one kitchen, you'd be lining up to give thanks, too.

Far be it from me to discourage name-calling and shade-throwing, but I think calling a group of staffers the sexually frustrated rejects from some other game in their own ad thread is one of those things where common sense might tell you that's going to get moved.

If you want to voice a complaint in an ad thread there are informative, non-biased ways to do so. Every opinion won't be a 5-star review but they can at least strive to be civil. And no amount of unbiased moderation is going to please 100% of everyone 100% of the time; there's a level of human error allowed when judging what can stay, what has to move, and when to step in.

So be sure to do your best, MSB administration, you don't want this thread to have to move into the Hog Pit - entertaining as the thought may be.

I'm finally moved into my new house and (mostly) unpacked and my room is far enough away from everyone else's room that I can finally, after almost two years in that apartment, MASTURBATE IN PEACE.

This is in the mildly constructive thread for a reason; if you don't have anything mildly constructive to add ('Fuck this idea, fuck this discussion, I'm out and you should be out too!' is not constructive, useful, polite, positive, affirmative, or any other positive word other than adamant) then please kindly see yourself out. No one here is obligated to like any idea posted here, the point is to come up with ideas and see what might help. No coded tool will be a 100% effective solution, the same way no policy has ever been a 100% effective solution, but damn if I'm not heartened to see people trying to bridge the gap. I might not be the friendliest or most sober member of this community, but I do appreciate you people, or I wouldn't be here.

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I think @Pandora brings up something that this thread is definitely capable of discussing.

The fact that the vast majority of lesbian characters in MUSHes are literally the same ultra horny sexpest character. Not that I have room to talk about sexpests, but I feel like I so rarely see lesbian characters who aren't obviously a dude RPing a fetish. If this was black characters they'd all be sitting around eating watermelon and nailing all the white women (I know it seems like I'm throwing stones from a glass house, but I definitely do things in MUSHes other than nail all the white women on most days).

Exactly this. I'm not going to lie, the idea of a bunch of white people sitting around chatting for 20+ pages about how to artificially inflate the diversity in games makes me nervous for what that artificial diversity will look like, and the continuing chatter about how the community is too insular to invite in minorities so it's better to pretend to be them instead is tragic as fuck.

Fix the culture if you want diversity, and if you can't be bothered, leave us out.

Surely we're done pretending it wasn't the main draw of MU* Soapbox?

I'm too old and cranky to to find a new place to argue with people, just bring it back.

@crawfish These are all so gorgeous I would struggle to pick just one. Bang-up job, seriously.

Sans bells or whistles:

Lesbians have a diversity representation problem in mu-ing; in no game of note does the lesbian community ever seem to resemble a diverse, healthy lesbian community.

@GreenFlashlight Butches are very much still a thing, I'm part of a few different butch/stud fashion/relationships groups.

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Pandora said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Rinel I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but when you divide the line, in text-based gaming, between trans/not-trans lesbian representation, you are ignoring the fact that men who play lesbians are almost universally not playing trans characters, they are speaking for and over female-socialized lesbians.

I don't know why men playing lesbians should be expected to play trans lesbians instead of cis lesbians. The ways in which cis lesbians and trans lesbians differ is not something that means a man is more suited to play one over the other except in perhaps the most basic and vulgar concepts of anatomy, assuming you have a trans woman who has yet to begin any form of physical transition.

I in no way implied that men should play trans lesbians, and in fact I think that could actually make things worse. I said they don't. The fact that "No, everything is fine and not liking the way lesbians are represented in games is dogwhistle terfery" is the response here leads me to believe that lesbians don't get a voice in lesbian diversity representation unless they're trans, and that's disturbing.

@HelloProject I don't police anyone's thoughts. If words that describe reality, like 'male socialization' that don't really have linguistic alternatives that would A) mean the exact same thing & B) not be seen as equally problematic - are verboten, we can't really discuss diversity and representation of lesbians and that bothers me because...

@Rinel I'm not trying to pick a fight here, but when you divide the line, in text-based gaming, between trans/not-trans lesbian representation, you are ignoring the fact that men who play lesbians are almost universally not playing trans characters, they are speaking for and over female-socialized lesbians.

As one result, you see almost no butch/stud lesbians in MU*s (And I mean masc-presenting lesbians, not aggressive lipstick lesbians) because it's easier to just play a man and date women that aren't played like a temporary respite from watching porn.

It would be, in my opinion which you may disagree with, a disservice to trans people playing lesbians to say 'Let's lump you in with the lesbians played by men because that's easier/safer than talking about "mesbians" as their own problematic category'. I know problematic is a trite word these days, but work with me here.

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Pandora said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Non-binary, genderqueer, genderflexible, trans, agender people exist, and some have male socialization, and some play lesbians without a lot of regard for female socialization differences, and that's not been great for lesbian representation on games and it's hardly hating or fearing trans people to say so.

See it would have legitimately been better to just lead with this instead of dancing around the point, because then I could have just said "you mean it's not great for cis lesbian representation since trans lesbians exist."

Because, yeah, the experiences of trans lesbians are often really different from the experiences of cis ones.

I didn't dance around any points, I said what I said and you chose the most uncharitable interpretation possible and that's just a day ending in Y on the internet.

@GreenFlashlight That was tackling the pretty uncontentious part of what I'd said, I left 'male socialization' out because I wanted to talk about lesbian representation being diluted by men for years & that being something we've talked about forever, versus the newer mainstream coming to terms with people socialized as male who no longer identify (or never identified) as men.

Spellcheck is telling me 'uncontentious' is not a word and it's stressing me out.

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

To many shitty people, sexuality and gender identity aren't who people are. They're choices being made.

I'm not saying that's how Pandora views it, just that it's hardly outside the realm of possibility.

I'm definitely a shitty person for plenty of reasons, but not this particular one, alas. I'm a lesbian despite the actual, meaningful inconvenience that can be sometimes; if I could choose to be bi or pan I would, so I know very well it's not a choice being made.

I explicitly said 'men' and 'people socialized as male', which clearly isn't saying 'anyone socialized as male is a man' or I'd have just said men. Non-binary, genderqueer, genderflexible, trans, agender people exist, and some have male socialization, and some play lesbians without a lot of regard for female socialization differences, and that's not been great for lesbian representation on games and it's hardly hating or fearing trans people to say so.

If that's not good enough, do carry on with the castigation if necessary, but I've always felt it best to be really honest here, even if I am being collectively shouted at about it, again.

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

honestly I'm pretty pissed off that you're such a shitheel

My feelings are hurt by all this name-calling outside of the Hogpit.

@Rinel Well now that you've gotten them out, I hope there is peace in your head.

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

See, this is the shifty attitude I'm talking about. I'm legitimately trying to give you the benefit of the doubt because I prefer to think people aren't raging bigot, but what you're writing over and over just sounds like transphobia without a spine.

I don't hate or fear anyone for having gender dysphoria.