Optional Realities & Project Redshift
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@Jaunt said:
I'm still willing to respond civilly to civil conversation. I could go either way, though.
Is your site geared and aimed towards text-based roleplaying, or is it geared towards a specific type?
Edited to add: To be clear, this is what I see as the conflict boiling down to. The claim was that it was the first, and then when it was pointed out that it excludes a large number of folks, that's when the condescending assholeness came out, and now you're saying it's the second.
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@Sunny said:
I think a huge part of my problem with these guys here is that they're taking advantage of this place in a not-good way.
I don't know how they could. The rules of this place are scarce to nonexistent. The worst they have done is be smug and slightly two-faced ("engage us! ... no, in not that way" and "we are about all games! ... no, not those").
It does sound like they're going toward one of the (strongly worded) suggestions I gave earlier in this thread: Either be open and build bridges, or own up to being closed and do whatever you want. Nothing's wrong with either, but trying to be both (c.f., OR's own mission statement on their homepage) is disingenuous.
@Jaunt said in Optional Realities & Project Redshift:
I'm still willing to respond civilly to civil conversation.
According to the 10 or so people I talk to, you are not.
You don't get to decide what is civil all by yourself. This is why it's called "civil".
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@Thenomain
I know there aren't rules against it or anything else, but it still seems that way. It's like guests posting on advertising bboards on games. It's okay, it's not against the rules, but it still lacks class. We have a great community here, and they come in pissing all over it. No, the rules don't say they can't, but the rules also don't say that I can't get furious with them for doing so. -
Oh absolutely. This is almost certainly why the administration here has not closed the thread. I'm not sure what @Glitch or @EmmahSue think about it, mind, but since of the three I'm the one who wanted to try and keep the vitriol out of conversations and was told to back down, then I'm guessing it's all good.
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While we're sharing booze, I was absolutely delighted to find that I can pick up all my old favourites here now. I practically grew up on this stuff:
Unfortunately it, like the armagnac before it, is simply not strong enough to deal with the fucktardedness of the OR crowd. It's languishing in it's hiding spot under my bookshelf.
And man, the ice wine won't even come CLOSE to being strong enough. I'd have to guzzle the entire bottle for just a sentence from Dick Nixon:
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@Sunny said:
@Jaunt said:
I'm still willing to respond civilly to civil conversation. I could go either way, though.
Is your site geared and aimed towards text-based roleplaying, or is it geared towards a specific type?
From our website:
"Optional Realities is a community and design-blog for text-based role playing games, with a focus on character and story-driven games that include permanent death as a feature. "
The criteria for joining our connections page and receiving your own dedicated sub-forum on OR, per our website:
"1) Roleplay Centric: A focus on theme and roleplay with a requirement to roleplay as part of the gameplay on your game.
2) Perma-death: The possibility of non-consent permanent death to occur to a character by another character. Death meaning that the character’s personality, memories, and existence is lost.
3) Automated Systems: The support of some form of coded system for players to interact with the setting / game world without requiring a third party."
Personally, I think that the wording of the criteria could probably use some work. Number 3 in particular is too vague for my tastes. It's something we're discussing on OR.
However, OR does not exclude folks from games that don't fit into its connect criteria. We have a sub-forum dedicated to "Other Games". That sub-forum's actually fairly popular.
It's just that all of our contributing writers and the vast majority of our long-lived community plays/designs a specific style of game that does not encompass every RPE MUD or MUSH out there. Because of that, the content of our articles are often irrelevant to other types of games.
In short: yes, we gear ourselves for a specific type of game (that has a ton of variety within the genre). We still let other folks take part in the community, too, but our primary focus is on games of a similar type. Some MUSHes fall into that category, some don't.
It's not personal. It's practical.
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And the added bonus! You get to interact with used car salesmen, yapping shih-tzus and failed bad cops while you're at it! How could anybody not want to go to OR!?
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So the OR representatives really need to stop trying to say it's otherwise. It is not about text-based roleplaying. It is about a specific subset of text-based roleplaying. There's nothing wrong with this fact. What's wrong is that the OR representatives have tried to present the site as both. It's not both. That's why this whole fucking argument. Just letting someone in and allowing them to post somewhere doesn't make it inclusive. Not when it's referenced the way it is.
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@Jaunt said:
Our community is a specific genre of MUD that is over 20 years old. If the style of MUSH played by "most" people on this board is not represented on OR, then those people don't really need to worry about OR. It's that simple.
OR exists for the games for which it is relevant. It not being relevant to your games does not equate to us shitting our your birthday cake.
This is, a thousand times over, the reason why I'm not really interested in engaging in 'discussion', particularly with the likes of @Sunny and @WTFE and company where the 'conversation' has mostly consisted of calling us names and trying to insinuate that we are in some way awful people because we're targeting a specific subset of games. I'm really under no obligation to 'discuss' anything under those terms. Engaging with @Thenomain has been interesting, but the tendency to seemingly rabble-rouse and encourage 'logical arguments' that have consisted exclusively of flagrant insults and bile-spewing turned me off really quickly. Why would I want to converse with people who are seemingly only interested in throwing shit at me because the site I represent doesn't cater to their particular tastes?
@Thenomain said:
Last I checked (two weeks back), OR represents itself as a site for discussion of all online text-based role-playing games.
All.
Not some.
Not even only those that fall inside the Three Rules of Jeshin's Best-Game Ideology.
All. Even Choose-Your-Own-Adventures.Discussion of all online text-based role-playing games is something that we encourage on our site, and all games are up for discussion, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a narrower focus group in mind.
I'm up for discussion, whenever and wherever so long as it's interesting, intelligent, civil, and thoughtful. This stopped being any of those four things a long time ago. We've had some marvelous people come by and participate on OR from advertising here, and unless Jeshin tells me otherwise, we'll continue to post our advertisements, but unless the quality of 'discussion' improves drastically, or people start to discuss things rationally and by making logical points instead of shoving words in others' mouths and spewing insults, I'm personally going to bow out of it.
This idea that not wanting to engage with the handful of heavy posters in this thread, who, aside from @Thenomain, @Surreality, and a few others, seem to mostly be interested in getting a rise out of people is equitable to pissing all over the carpet is pretty odd to me. It reads more like people pissing on their own carpet, and then throwing a fit when I mention the smell, to me. Do you berate people when they stop responding to personal attacks in other discussion threads, too? Probably, and that's okay. It's not how I like to engage in discussion, though, and it's the reason I haven't contributed significantly outside of this thread (despite reading several others).
OR isn't going to appeal to everybody on Musoapbox. We don't expect for it too, and that's not a promotional issue, that's a difference in target audience. OR is not Musoapbox 2.0, or TMS 2.0, or TMC 2.0. OR has a target audience, and if you're not part of an audience, or you're not interested in really finding out what people in that audience find so compelling about a genre, or you're not willing to accept the trade-off in target audience for the general discussions, then by all means, stay away. It doesn't offend me that you're not interested in OR, and it really shouldn't offend you that OR isn't for you. It's not really that complicated. We certainly have material and ideas and discussions that have appeal wide outside the auspices of our target audience, and which may be useful or informative or helpful for people outside of our typical users, and everybody's welcome to discuss those ideas, but if our community focus is too much of a turn-off then so be it.
So, let me pose a question. How do you think OR as a community would behave if MU Soapbox advertised on our board? Because I certainly wouldn't be anything but supportive of people from our community coming here to check out the discussion and see if it's for them, and I certainly wouldn't try to quash that advertisement because a handful, or even a majority, don't find that it's what they're looking for.
@WTFE said:
You may want to try giving your lapdog (@crayon) a good sharp tug on the leash, but your pit bull you may want to just put down.
I'm sure you feel real clever and all, and your ability to get so much attention without once making a single logical or coherent argument or point that wasn't essentially grounded in insulting people or making statements without qualification or substantiation is pretty impressive in its own right, but I'm still pretty unimpressed with your contribution to 'discussion'. As many times as you've reiterated the dog metaphor, you've been pretty clearly behaving like a belligerent attack dog from the get-go.
@Thenomain said:
And yet, you refuse reasonable conversation here.
You're assuming that all of this conversation has been reasonable. I'm pretty sure we can both acknowledge that the majority of it has not been.
@Thenomain said:
You are not entitled to define the hobby without input from all parts of the hobby, even if you disagree with them.
Whoever said we were trying to define the hobby? Again, begging the question. Making assumptions. Inserting words in mouths. Then come the attack dogs, @WTFE and co., to vehemently spam insults and contribute literally nothing of substance.
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While we're all bruising our brains to stop the damage from reading @Jaunt's ravings, has anybody here ever tried Tatratea's liqeurs? I can get them here, but they're really expensive, so I'm not really willing to take the plunge unless I get some good reviews. I'm most interested in these ones:
Peach and White Tea (42%/84 proof)
Original Tea Liqeur (52%/104 proof)
Forest Fruit (62%/124 proof)
The other ones may be of interest too, but those aer the three I'm most interested in. Some of the questions I have are:
- How much of the actual tea flavour shines through in these? And here I mean the full complex of tea flavours, not just the bitter quantities. If I want stomach bitters I can drink Jägermeister.
- How much flavour is lost to the alcohol burn? For example, that mare's milk hooch I linked earlier I originally got in a 38%abv version, then the 52%. I was afraid the parts that made it taste awesome would be overshadowed by the alcohol burn, but thankfully I was wrong. The awesome parts got more concentrated. Is it the same for the Tatratea line?
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So let me see if I'm understanding this correctly: you're interested in advertising in this community, but not at all interested in participating in it. Your site allows discussion of other genres of play, but is not aimed/geared towards them. And yet two of the three have been trying and trying to avoid excluding anyone. When it's been pointed out that there's exclusion, there's been argument. If y'all would fully stop all attempts at claiming that you're inclusive of all of mu*dom with your qualifiers and refusal to be definitive, that would pretty much solve most of the issue. Except the whole 'coming into a community I don't intend to participate in' bit, which is, again, completely classless.
Look. This is a discussion board. It has been stated that y'all are not interested in discussion. Do you guys really not understand why I'm annoyed by these things?
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@crayon said:
This is, a thousand times over, the reason why I'm not really interested in engaging in 'discussion', particularly with the likes of @Sunny and @WTFE and company where the 'conversation' has mostly consisted of calling us names and trying to insinuate that we are in some way awful people because we're targeting a specific subset of games.
See, this is why I think you're a yapping little shih-tzu. Dude, I fucking LINKED to my first post in this thread. Please point to where I called you names in it or where I insinuated that you are in some way awful people for targeting a specific subset of games. (Hint: this is not possible.)
As I pointed out to your asthmatic pit bull earlier, it took this thread lurching around for 57 more messages before I finally fucking lost it and wrote you assholes off as, well, assholes.
No amount of inner narrative rewriting is going to change the cold, hard facts here, Yappy the Wonder Pooch: you had never even once seriously considered engaging in actual conversation here. You started in broadcast mode from message #1 and continued in that until long after you'd pissed us off.
Now you're saying "we just don't want to talk with some specific people who are misbehaving". This isn't merely disingenuous anymore. This is a flat-out, fucking, lie. And a pathetic one since there's a 24-page record (at this point) proving quite the opposite.
We've had some marvelous people come by and participate on OR from advertising here…
Name three. Oh, right. You "won't" (read: can't).
I'm personally going to bow out of it.
You know, this is the second time you've promised this and you STILL WON'T FUCKING SHUT THE FUCK UP. For some reason I think you're lying. Again.
So, let me pose a question. How do you think OR as a community would behave if MU Soapbox advertised on our board?
You'd be condescending pricks, just like you were here. Duh!
… you've been pretty clearly behaving like a belligerent attack dog from the get-go.
It's almost as if you haven't actually been reading.
Oh, wait. Scratch that "almost" part. Replace it with "exactly".
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@Sunny said:
Except the whole 'coming into a community I don't intend to participate in' bit, which is, again, completely classless.
You should probably not make assumptions about my intentions. I was very interested in this community, and participating in it insofar as my time and interests allowed, up until the insults started getting thrown around left and right.
@Sunny said:
If y'all would fully stop all attempts at claiming that you're inclusive of all of mu*dom with your qualifiers and refusal to be definitive, that would pretty much solve most of the issue
I don't entirely disagree with this, but I think the problem is that we need to be a little more definitive of what constitutes inclusion vs. exclusion. We're not actively trying to exclude anybody, and most of our forum policies are built around inclusion. We have several regular posters who aren't part of the target 'RPI' community, and they're welcomed as much as anybody. At the same time, we're not going to change the goals and basic principles of our community to appeal to a wider audience, and I don't think that really qualifies as exclusion, though it's certainly likely to narrow the number of people who are interested in our community.
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@crayon said:
Discussion of all online text-based role-playing games is something that we encourage on our site, and all games are up for discussion, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a narrower focus group in mind.
You're making it hard to reply to you at face value, you know. There is a certain point where responding to this fact, right here, is frustrating to the point of wanting to find Jeshin and get drunk with him so we can hash this shit out.
I have told both you and where this fails, because it does fail, and it fails right here:
(edit: this is the board being stupid again. quoting in a different manner)
] @Thenomain said:
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]] You are not entitled to define the hobby without input from all parts of the hobby, even if you disagree with them.
]
] Whoever said we were trying to define the hobby?You did. It's on your first page. I typed out the whole thing. Jeshin gets it. If his life wasn't being ... well, life right now, I'd be in the middle of a chat with him because what you and @Jaunt are doing is ... well, it's no better than what you are saying is being done. As much as @WTFE can get on my nerves, he is right. You both need to stop trying to defend yourselves, especially to people you look down upon, and maybe just take a step back and let hot tempers settle. It's conceited and just ... nngh!
I appreciate that you at least are trying to hold a conversation, but I honestly don't think you get it, and you're doing the same thing that people everywhere do when they don't understand: Bully through it anyhow. And since this atmosphere is pretty hostile to you guys right now, this is making you come off as, well, hostile as well.
This is why I respect Jeshin. I know how he feels about here, yet he is giving an honest, straight-forward try. He's not playing games here, and he's not saying nice things through clenched teeth, and that has to be hard.
You and @Jaunt have made some very good points, but like some of the good points made by people who aren't OR representatives, they have been couched in some pretty negative connotations. This makes it very easy to dismiss the points, and that gets both you and I ...
... Nowhere.
I'm going to hold you as accountable for getting nowhere as I, @crayon. Am I right? I try to be. Do I need to be agreed with? Absolutely not, but I will try to change how I think, and what I do, until there is a bridge between our communities.
Bridging the various text-based RPG communities is in your charter.
This is quite different than "our place is our place and we'll talk but we really want xxxx". A lot of the discussion here—those parts that are discussion—have been about this exactly.
I'm responding to you directly because you responded to me directly, because by responding to me I assume that you want to talk to me, so all of this "we don't want to talk about it" does kind of come off as confusing at best, but through the lens of both some people on Soapbox being downright vitrolic and you responding, understandably, defensively, then this "confusing" becomes downright bang-head-against-the-wall frustrating.
My advice? Pick your position and present it. Not officially like you and @Jeshin have been, but in the way a growing community would, like people talking about this great idea they have called Optional Realities.
And for chrissakes, don't be offended when we disagree. This board is more than a discussion board, we are all creators. Everyone who has posted in this thread has written for a game, or coded for one, or created a major event. We are not strangers to this world, nor to your world.
Jeshin gets it. I don't think he knows what to do with it, but he gets it, and I'd be happy to talk to him at length about this. He knows, but I think both he and I forgot that for a bit.
Note: I will ignore @Jaunt's reply to this post, if he/she has one. I'm just not interested in his thoughts anymore, and that's all there is to it.
Edit for second note: @crayon, if you want to discuss this somewhere away from this board and its negative connotations and negative everythings, give me a heads up and I'll give explaining this a different kind of try, assuming that both your and my hard feelings are left at the door and people who love their chosen hobby is appreciated. If I'm reading you right, this is a goal anyhow.
Yes, I'm aware at the contradiction here.
No, I won't be insulted if the response is "no way in hell". -
@crayon said:
@Sunny said:
Except the whole 'coming into a community I don't intend to participate in' bit, which is, again, completely classless.
You should probably not make assumptions about my intentions. I was very interested in this community, and participating in it insofar as my time and interests allowed, up until the insults started getting thrown around left and right.
I'm not making assumptions about your intentions, I am reacting to your behavior. I got seriously pissed off by your behavior and by @Jaunt's behavior and started shrieking. Should I have started shrieking? No. I'm not going to go back and delete my posts because that would be dishonest, but straight up your group made me so, so, so mad at how you were treating people here that good sense went out the window. Blah blah blah insulting blah blah, except I didn't start flinging insults without provocation. You don't get to use my reaction today as your reason for not participating in the community weeks ago. @WTFE has already pointed out quite solidly where/how he started getting pissed off and the insults started, so that eliminates that excuse.
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@crayon said:
@Sunny said:
Except the whole 'coming into a community I don't intend to participate in' bit, which is, again, completely classless.
You should probably not make assumptions about my intentions. I was very interested in this community, and participating in it insofar as my time and interests allowed, up until the insults started getting thrown around left and right.
Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated, 100%, American Grade A bullshit.
You were piping up with PR blurbs EXCLUSIVELY until the insults started getting thrown around left and right. That's, for the record, about 400 messages deep before, for example, I started throwing insults around. Others may have started throwing them around up to ten messages earlier (or not; frankly I'm too lazy now to bother looking on your behalf—it's not as if you actually read what people say anyway!). Let's assume that's the right number, though. That's 390 opportunities for you express your interest in this community and actually start participating in it. 390 opportunities that you not only ignored, in some cases you practically spit upon.
Yappy, we're not "making assumptions" about your intentions. We're "making observations" about your actions and inferring your intentions from these. If your intentions and actions don't match … that's entirely on you my little shih-tzu.
We're not actively trying to exclude anybody, and most of our forum policies are built around inclusion.
Yes. The inclusive "if you're not matching our specific idea of what games are, you can go to the back of the bus^W^W^W^WOther Games area of the board" approach.
We have several regular posters who aren't part of the target 'RPI' community, and they're welcomed as much as anybody.
My best childhood friend was black.
It broke my heart when Daddy sold him.
At the same time, we're not going to change the goals and basic principles of our community to appeal to a wider audience, and I don't think that really qualifies as exclusion, though it's certainly likely to narrow the number of people who are interested in our community.
Nobody—literally nobody, that's 0% of the people here—have asked you to change your goals or basic principles. 没有人. Niemand. Personne n'a. What has been asked—repeatedly, at length, and in a variety of styles ranging from polite discourse to froth-spewing venom—is that you stop shitting over here where you hold the people in such obvious disdain that you won't even actually discuss your goals or basic principles, nor even engage in meaningful conversation of any kind. THAT is what's pissing people off here, not the fact that you're not changing your goals.
Oh, that and being utterly and completely inconsistent from day to day and person to person as to what those basic principles and goals are…
But of course this will fall on ears as deaf as they were back on page 5 or so. Because you're just that kind of special. (Oh, and you lied. As I predicted. Here you bow out. Then you keep talking.)
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So, why are we still having this discussion? They said they wanted to treat this place like twitter and announce their new posts. Move on. They're certainly not interested in addressing the discrimination inherent in their website's design and that's perfectly fine since none of us are involved in paying for keeping it on the net. Ya'll are acting like anything they say about anything means anything.
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I'm going to start talking about booze in here, myself. We don't have a booze thread specifically, so why not take a thread that's literally useless to talk about it?
