Best posts made by Cobalt

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:

This is Pancake, we found him behind the store last week... We're pretty sure he got abandoned because he's hard of hearing.

Hallo people!

I went through the trouble of having @EmmahSue reset my password so I could come give you guys an update rather than make Thenomain do it!

First off, jesus-fucking-christ thank you all for everything. You guys are utterly amazing and I'm touched and floored beyond belief. Thank you all, so much.

I was able to get a new ride relatively fast thanks to you guys. I only lost two weeks worth of work (I'm part time, don't have sick or vacation time, this hurts me a lot), it could have been losing my actual job. So you guys really did save my fucking life there.

Here's a general update on me:

Six days after getting the new car I thought I was having a stroke because the right side of my face was not working correctly. Leave work again, go to hospital. It's Bell's Palsy (at this point my doctor things I got a viral infection that wasn't visible on examine in either my ear canal or a salivatory gland because it's swollen and hurts a bit still), and I go on antiviral 5x a day. Then immediately get the flu and an ear infection, and miss another week of work.

The Bell's Palsy is slowly starting to get better, and I'm slowly getting over the flu.

Life's rough, but I'm still kicking.

Thank you for the people who have donated in the past couple of days: It really does help since I've missed so much work between the car accident and then the illnesses.

@apos @Griatch @Tehom @faraday

Thank you from the bottom of my blue heart. I apologize if I came across as whiny or petulant. These past few months have been a struggle for me in pretty much every category of my life. My confidence in coding has been hit pretty hard, and what I perceived as a lack in myself wasn't allowing me to take feedback or ask for help or take advice. It's really easy to get into a feedback loop of "you're terrible, and will never get better, don't bother". I'm sorry I let that color my responses and ability to take your advice.

I don't think taking a part someone's code will help me-- at least not at this stage in my learning. However, I have paid for through the humblebundle a bunch of python video tutorials, and once I get a droth of freelance work that's due tomorrow at 6pm CT (eep) done, I'll go back to those, and then maybe poke @griath or @Tehom to perhaps walk me through building a +Who for Sacred Seed.

Or poke people on the discord channel.

You're all very amazing people and again thank you for all the support and encouragement.

OMG ITS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE PHYSICAL COPY!!

@coin Yeah, that's exactly what's pissing me off right now. I'm pretty sure all the coders who contributed to TR would be absolutely fine with sharing their code. But taking the flatfile (which would have people's IP addresses and shit) and then ALSO passing off the code as your own when it's not.

I HAVE AN APARTMENT

So, if anyone is still logging in it's probably not a surprise that we're going to close down. It took me a couple of months of dealing with some health stuff and just 2020 in general, and I've decided to close down and work on something else. Thank you all for the wonderful stories we had while we were here. Thank you for being here with me to learn about FS3 and what works and what does not work.

I'm going to leave Euphoria up and running for a few months so people can come by and grab descs, logs, +sheets, etc. as they want or need. But I likely won't be logging in here any longer.

If you'd like to know what I'll be doing next, you can find me at: bhammu.com:2021 -- note this won't be a playable game for quite sometime. It won't be opening in a few weeks, but sometime in 2021. It'll be an urban horror game set in a world not too unlike our own-- only this one has monsters in it (the type with claws and fangs, not just people lacking empathy).

Feel free to stop by, feel free to make bits and hang out, we can chatter as I world build and get the game set up.

Again thank you all for being here with me for the learning experience that was Euphoria.

I hope that 2021 is a better and brighter year for all of us.

If anyone wants to know: I started the new job today. (If you don’t know it’s pizza delivery which isn’t super glam but will help me be independent while I work on getting into UAB and apply for internships with places like Lockheed-Martin).

Mostly did paperwork and then rode along with a driver with experience. Got asked if I smoke yayo by a dude in a parking lot!

@sonder said in Miami, Blood in the Water:

Darc began coding for us before he made his own game. One day, Darc was gone and suddenly had San Francisco up which had references about The Reach’s news files. When I asked him how he got all of this stuff, he said that he was building a CG for Miami and was just testing it there. At that time I had not seen the other references to The Reach and have since been approached about Darc taking our flatfile with the shell access he had.

He won’t be on Miami staffing.

Hooooboy, I am torn between "I fucking KNEW IT" and anger. I brought up the fact that the code base looked familiar, and that he HAD some of my code and Chime's code for sure. (That +where is really fucking easy to pick up). And people were "no, no, darc's coded all of this himself!".

"No, this is Reach code. This is my code. This is Chime's code."

"No, Darc's coded all this himself, he said so!"

No fucking wonder he was so fucking insistent on not accepting any code help from me. I would have known without a shred of doubt that shit was our old code.

Let me be clear:

I don't care who uses my code. I have old code that I'll flat out give you. Pretty sure @Thenomain doesn't care who uses his code either.

But fucking stealing an entire flat file is a serious fucking scumbag move.