surreality's playlist

surreality

Also, since after the weirdest round of crazy ever on Shang...

I do have an OOC hangout/login bit on Shang to keep in touch with a few friends who are there! If you don't know what it is, you have other means of contacting me. (Like, y'know... here.)
No, I don't currently actually RP there and haven't been on the grid in upwards of three years now. I quite literally have a login in a rented room that sits there to talk to a couple of friends OOC once or twice a week to catch up on our lives in general.
I am not besties with staff there. Until having to file a +complaint about someone deciding it'd be happy fun times to harass me tonight, the last time I had any reason to talk to them was:
-- 'hey, is your rental room code anywhere? I'd really love a copy if so!' several months back, probably around Thanksgiving 2016
-- 'Weird, this shows multiple failed connect attempts to my account that I don't recognize all occurring within an hour, can somebody look into that?' (One once in a while isn't terribly rare, since it you try to create a name already in use from the login screen, it'll show up like that. 3 or more within the past hour? Yeeeeeeah, I'mma ask somebody to look at that plz!) in October 2016
-- 2015, when I had to report someone for crazy levels of abuse.

So! That seems to have had to be said. The reason why will be in the 'Batshit Crazy Sightings' thread. (Edit: http://musoapbox.net/topic/1454/batshit-crazy-sightings/241 -- seriously, I am tired of being crazy bait.)

surreality

...and, as a final update, I'm out, folks. I'll check in for the next few days for any PMs or whatevs for skype or email info if anyone wants to keep in touch, but the pending situation that had everything on edge went... poorly. I can't be around any more. I won't be doing game stuff going forward, or playing anywhere, so if that's the interest (which would be understandable, duh), I can't be that person any more. Sorry, folks. I really did try.

For the folks I have met here, and through this hobby over the past 20+ years, thank you. Even the people who drove me crazy gave me great stories to tell, in the end, and I thank you, too. (Even Spider and Jeurg.)

The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
Thank you to all the people who let me believe this for as long as I have, and may your world be made of many stories worth telling for many years to come.

Be well, and know I'm sincerely grateful.

SparklesTheClown

You'll share your Akashat alt but not your Shang alt.

Poor Akashat.

My old Shang character did make friends with the queen of Akashat when she came she Shang. She's cool as shit and everything got super Lovecraftian.

surreality

@HelloProject I still actually have two logins on Shang that will probably be maintained. One is because I have friends I only know there, and don't want to lose touch with. That's Muse. So if anybody for some reason wants to track my dumb ass down, well, that login is on all the time and is on an autoreconnect, even though it stays dead idle most of the time. (I don't really pay any attention to the screen.) If nothing else, a message can be left.

There's another that is basically a placeholder. It has a name and an alias of two characters I played for years. When I left Shang a number of years ago, someone took the desc from one, the name of the other, set their &quote to something I had said IC in public that was not a generic quote but was a character-specific IC statement, and used a pic I was using for a PB of a character on a completely different game. They then proceeded to play coy when my friends would page them and ask if it was me, and tried to get RL information out of them about me and about my friends. The only reason I eventually went back to Shang at all was to create a 'storage' login to keep those names and info and identify myself in a way that would hopefully prevent that from happening again, because even if I don't play it, my friends don't deserve to be tricked by an asshole who is trying to get personal information out of them. I still don't know who did it, or why, but for reasons I hope can be understood... I will not be sharing the name of that one.

SparklesTheClown

@surreality Why do you have like the worst MU history ever?

surreality

@HelloProject You don't even know the half of it. It's why other than lingering around here a little for another week or so to make sure I catch up with some folks and clean up some loose ends, I'm pretty much done.

I am more or less the hobby's canary in the coal mine, I think. Maybe it was foreshadowing that I turned bright yellow and then almost died earlier this year? ...weird how I totally missed that symbolism entirely until just now! Signs, man.

SparklesTheClown

@surreality I've experienced all sorts of crazy shit in this hobby, but in the decade+ that I've been in it, I haven't experienced anything close to multiple things you've experienced in twice that long. And chances are I've played more games than most people in general, due to that whole five years I spent not leaving the house when I first got into the hobby.

Makes me wonder if you're cursed. I mean, I have literally been cursed and it's still not that bad.

Still, you shouldn't do something that doesn't bring you joy. So like, I can't blame you for wanting to leave.

surreality

@HelloProject For reals, you're not the only one who has wondered if I was cursed. That, or 'must have been Mengele in a previous life' or some shit.

Weirdly, more than a 'who I was and where' list, I should totally add the 'list of seriously WTF crazy shit' here. I'd be writing for days, but shit, why not.

Ghostwheel:

First meetup/MOObash, got unexpectedly grabbed and kissed by the guy with one eye, without his glass eye in, and ended up so startled I didn't close my eyes, and ended up staring into the hole the whole time before yelping and running. Did not want to kiss this person ever in the first place.
First game I was on where staff was so hopelessly corrupt at times that the whole lot of us would get fired once in a while, only to have the sane people re-hired. Kept getting re-hired until intentionally breaking the 'cannot relay info presented to us as staff' rule when the wife of one of the staffers, who kept logging in his bit to create and code special twinkerbelle items for herself and @setting her stats higher and said as much to me explicitly on my staffbit knowing I would never be allowed to say anything about it, kept trying to rally the players against all of the staff because she insisted that the staff was cheating (which they weren't at the time). Posted log of convo to a public board, immediately resigned. Was asked to stay anyway, said that I damned well knew I broke the rule, I did it on purpose, I was not sorry, and if I got a pass, that would actually be improper (even if the action itself was the right thing to do), and I wasn't going to be the girl saying 'the rules apply to everyone, really' and then have a rule broken for me, no matter why, because that would have been hilariously counterproductive.
Watched detailed discussions of zoophilia take place on public channels, and a 40-something drunken divorcee and a 13-year-old nymphette have a years-long flame war over who was the best e-lay, and a themewiz send an underage boy recordings of her masturbating while calling out his name, and a 50-something Pern addict seduce another 15-year-old boy only to leave him when she dubbed him 'her abuser'. Did not have nearly enough popcorn for that shit. There is just not enough popcorn in the world for that shit. None of that involved me, but damn was there a lot of whining from a lot of people, all the time.

Seriously. That was the intro to the hobby. Even most epic Shang drama can't hold a candle to the day to day WTFery on Ghostwheel from the mid-90s.

Cybersphere:

Yay rape incident.
Do not even remember the dude's name, but some dude I had talked to some on there for a bit lost his internet, and I had an old AOL account I wasn't using but was still on its $10/month or whatever that we'd never gotten rid of, and I still used it once in a blue to talk to some friends. Told him he could use it, and what limits there were on that (since we had the cheapest it had some weird special condition or something) but he totally ignored that, so we ended up with a bill that was literally hundreds of dollars out of nowhere, and just shut the whole thing down.
Shit started to go really well, then my grandmother got sick RL. I needed to be with her, so had to drop everything. Couldn't really get back into anything afterward.

FurryMUCK:

I was only there for two weeks, if that. While by all accounts this is more than enough time for something to go mind-bogglingly wrong, nothing did. That in itself is somehow inherently weird.

...to be continued, I suppose. I suddenly need a drink.

SparklesTheClown

@surreality I was briefly on FurryMUCK. I realized that people in furry MUs are super judgemental about my love of rainbows, unicorns, and monkeys, so I realized I wasn't a furry. Plus someone hated my desc writing.

Also, when I was 17 I kept trying to TS an adult, but she was like nope, so I guess not everyone is horrible.

surreality

This is not a rumbling of any sort of return; quite the opposite, really.

A friend asked me today if I was someone going by Sevi on FC, and no, that is not me.

I could immediately see why he asked, since I was making a character named Seva Severine to partner up with him on TR before the idea stalled out, with the same amazingly obscure PB. Normally I'd've just called him a paranoid nutter, but, well, yeah, that's whoa nelly levels of hilarious coincidence, so can't blame him for asking about it under those circumstances.

So just in case anybody else is wondering, no, not me.

il-volpe

Jebus, I missed or forgot a lot of Ghostwheel shenanigans.

surreality

@il-volpe I know, right? In a weird way, 'growing up' on that place, it's sorta hard to be shocked by much since.

Scarier to this day was the constant insistence that things behind the scenes on Cybersphere in the same era/at that time were massively worse. I find that seriously hard to imagine.

surreality

And out for reals for a bit. Sticking around here is getting hard because it's making me want to try to do stuff and I'm not there yet, thus shouldn't. My temper being a giant pile of WTFery of late... well, yeah, kinda proves it. Not asking for sympathy, empathy, or forgiveness, just noting that I realize it's an issue and I'm not keen on inflicting that on y'all further.

No offense is intended to anyone here, but most of the folks I know only through here or the hobby I've had to take off skype and similar as well. Nobody's blocked or anything, but if I'm a mystery ? all of a sudden, that's why. It's not anything you did. It isn't that I dislike you in any way, or think that you've done anything screwy in even the smallest way, or anything like that. Please do not take it personally, it is sincerely not intended that way.

Hobby fu is just really unhealthy for me right now and if that's all we talk about, well, I kinda can't for the time being, no matter how well-meaning folks are. (And I know y'all are, and do appreciate that more than you might imagine.)

There's a couple folks I've known forever as friend-friends for a decade+, or that I mostly talk about knitting or random life philosophy or whatever with that are still around, but, uh, please grok that I'm not looking to talk game-fu at all. I do love you for wanting to invite and welcome, which is sincerely good of you and speaks so well of you and proves unquestionably why I think y'all are the best of the best, but as much as I you for thinking of me and wanting to include me, I'd be a drag to be around and I refuse to shit on y'all's fun, because I do sincerely want y'all to have fun. It is, after all, the real point.

Good luck to y'all starting games or restarting games or just dreaming some day of running a game or creating a world. Good luck to people brave enough to try new ideas; you are needed, your ideas are needed, and they have value. I am sorry I couldn't help more. I wanted to. I realize that counts for less than a handful of magic beans, but I wish I could have finished something more useful to contribute along the way.

No weepy tears or hand-wringing, just be well, y'all. I'mma try to do the same.

surreality

Updated. I'm out, y'all. Once people openly admit to ongoing intentional harassment, and that doing you as much harm as possible is ethical, moral, and just, it'd be foolish to stick around, so I'm not doing that.

All logins retired. Good luck, y'all.

bye

ETA: Echoes folks, no need to fear -- I'm still covering the hosting for y'all and will continue to until y'all are done whenever. Throwing a few bucks at DO every month isn't a big deal. (No need to panic; y'all know how to get in touch if you need to.)

GreenFlashlight

@surreality said in surreality's playlist:

Once people openly admit to ongoing intentional harassment, and that doing you as much harm as possible is ethical, moral, and just, it'd be foolish to stick around, so I'm not doing that.

Is this something you want to talk about and/or warn others in the community about? Forgive me, but I have trouble telling the difference between vagueness meant to encourage questions and vagueness meant to discourage questions.

surreality

Augh, good reminder to unsub from threads.

It's something that has been going on here on MSB for some time now. As was mentioned by someone in the VASpider thread: people don't see it because they don't want to see it.

It's pointless to go into it as the mods are not interested in doing anything about it. The people doing it are deliberately going after RL triggers and have been doing so for months in one case, over a year in others, to cause maximum real harm.

It sucks to lose a hobby I've been deeply involved in since 1996, but it's become dangerous to my health to be around this crew, and it's not worth it. Just leaving the board won't put a stop to it as the whisper games and provocations have been extensive and long-term.

I don't need to be around people who find it a happy funtime game to see how many panic attacks they can inspire in a day any more, and think this is 'righteous justice' as they do so. This isn't pit behavior, it's pit behavior outside the pit, and has been focused most egregiously in threads involving wellness and emotional support to engage in attacks. This is a transparent tactic of deliberate emotional abuse: to cut people off from any forms of support for whatever issue they're dealing with, but they sincerely believe this makes them good, ethical people as they engage in it.

There's a lot more to it that makes me roll my eyes so hard it gives me eyestrain, but it's even less worth mention at this point.

All I can do at this point is shrug and vote with my feet. No, this is NOT something that happened on HorrorMU, so don't give them any side-eye; they remain awesome.

Unsubbin', so I won't see any further replies, and I'm back out. Be well, y'all.