Best posts made by Coin

Somewhere in the world, there is a park where there are an infinite number of basketball courts. Now, you have to pay a small amount of money monthly to use the basketball court, and it's really less a basketball court and more an area where you can set up hoops, and bring your own paint to paint the lines, maybe polish the floor yourself. You also want the people who play basketball with you to look cool, so you design the jerseys and shorts, too! Anyone who plays in your basketball court can bring their own ball, though, just in case you're not around with yours! But there are an infinite number of these courts, and anyone can have one if they have a little money and the motivation and time to put into it. This is not a public court at a park that needs to be shared. So if I pay for the court, and I put in the time and effort to make it nice and have the hoops and the painted lines and all that shit, and then I say: "Anyone who wants to play, can come play, but on this court, we only play HORSE," then guess what? If you don't want to play HORSE, you don't get to use the court. You also don't get to use the court if I don't like you. Why? Because it's my court. And if I want, I can make it as exclusive or as public as I want, applying whatever filters I want, and deciding whether or not certain rules of the game are applicable--or not.

Basketball is MUSHing. The court is a game server. The painted lines and hoops are setting and code. The rules are ... the rules. And the ball is plot. Sometimes I bring my ball out, sometimes you have to bring your own. Some courts require you to bring your ball more often than others.

This isn't that hard. If a game is promoting a type of play you don't like, don't play. It sure as shit doesn't sound like the people having a good time are actively going out of their way out of character to force other people into having a bad time. They're just playing in a way that other people don't like. Tough. Especially since I'm positive some of the people complaining have, in the past, decided that their fun was above other people's and they could just do whatever they wanted and be fucking dicks because "well, that's just my character".

Relatedly, no one needs a reason to dislike someone else. Some people just don't click. If Johnny and James are best buds, and James and Terry are good friends, but Johnny hates Terry, then if James tries to force them together so they can be a Power Trio, James is an asshole. Conversely, if James goes to a party with Terry, but doesn't invite Johnny, Johnny has no fucking right to be pissed off, because he hates Terry--why the fuck would James be an asshole and put them together in an uncomfortable situation?

Games work the same way, both with playstyle and with people. If I am in a group with Johnny, who hates Terry, I am not going to invite Terry to the same group. And if I play on a game that has a playstyle Terry likes, but Johnny doesn't, there is no reason to change the game, it's just not the game for Johnny.

This is kind of like going to a consent-based, traits-based superhero game and whining because they won't use a system. The only difference is that playstyle changes, grows, and is harder to recognize immediately. But it's still the same concept: if the game doesn't operate in a way you like, it is not the game for you. You can say "this is why it's not", but if staff says "well, then this isn't the game for you", then that's pretty much it, man.

This doesn't excuse people from being assholes, but this sort of "public games are for everyone, if they aren't, don't advertise them as public" bullshit has got to stop. Public games are public, but that doesn't mean they're for everyone. These things are not synonymous. Stop conflating the two, this isn't government and your taxes are not paying for someone's MU.

If we want to build a better community, we need to start by defining which parts of the hobby we all have in common, and which parts are particular. Playstyle is the latter.

@Tat said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

This player had also picked up a roster on Spirit Lake. Thanks to folks who shared info about him - after getting the new Ares security upgrades in, he's been banned from us as well.

His behavior on our game never crossed a line (that we knew of), but given what we've seen from him from people I know and trust, we're not willing to give him that chance.

@faraday said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

Of note, since not everyone reads the Ares forums...

The player in question has been banned from AresCentral.

Being banned from a particular game generally does not affect your AresCentral status. However:

1. If you’ve been banned from a game, you may not come here and pester the game-runner(s) who banned you. Take the hint and leave them alone.
2. I reserve the right to make exceptions in extreme circumstances, like someone who’s been serially harassing people and maliciously attempting to bypass bans across multiple games.

They responded (due to a glitch with the forum ban... my error) protesting that they had been so very polite while doing #1, while apparently completely missing the fact that it was inappropriate to do so in the first place. (And also letting #2 sail right over their heads.)

This sort of thing (and @GirlCalledBlu and @Seraphim73 's banning of him based on his attitudes on Gray Harbor and Arx) makes me happy for the community.

I have always felt that the whole "well they haven't done anything here and until they misbehave within the bounds of the game we can't do anything" was absolutely ridiculous. As a community, we need to support each other across games; we all play in each others' games and staff for each other. We are, in effect, a community, and we don't just need to look out for each other, but also be willing to accept that when someone does something inappropriate to one of us, they don't get to just connect to another game and act as if it didn't happen.

I'm White Hispanic with blue eyes; my roots are Spaniard and Italian.

I once took a road trip in the nineties along the border between Mexico and the U.S. with three other people: my step-father (same ancestry), and two other (pretty white, but maybe a bit more olive, I dunno) dudes (his friend and that friend's son). Both of them were born in the U.S., my step-father had had his U.S. citizenship for years; I was the only one who was an immigrant.

Every time -- and I do mean every single time -- we crossed back from Mexico to the U.S. (we did it like five times, it was the point of the road trip), they were asked for their papers. I was not. In at least two occasions, when my papers were offered, the migra officer waved it off, because it was unnecessary.

White is absolutely about the color of your skin and the way people identify (or don't) with you in the U.S. It was like that back then and it's still like that now (my brother can attest). Being of Italian or even Spaniard blood does not make you some swarthy POC and I really wish a lot of the people who look like me and are from the places I am and my ancestors were from would recognize that.

P.S. There's white people in Mexico and Brazil and Venezuela and Uruguay and Colombia and Argentina and... I'm not gonna list all of South America, but just shove it all together. A lot of us are from the same ancestry I am (usually a lot more Spaniard than Italian; in Brazil a lot more Portuguese). There's racism all throughout South America -- based on skin color, based on provenance, based on who your parents or ancestors were. And at no point -- not a single fucking moment -- has being on the white side of that not benefited me, nor a single moment in which being a POC has not harmed my friends and other people.

Just, you know. Public service announcement.

I was raised by a rather progressive mother. She may not be very feminist on the surface (she has issues separating radical misandry from the word "feminism", I don't know why) but the core values are there and she instilled them early in me and my brother, which is why even when my brother and I are fighting like rabid raccoons, when we find ourselves in certain situations, we are in complete synchronicity.

Anyway, I have a story relevant to this topic that I think you guys will appreciate. It happened about seven or eight years ago during a party my brother hosted at our place while my mother and her boyfriend were on vacation.

I live in South America, and while I know that the stereotype is "brown skinned", in case some of you don't know, there are people who would qualify, on sight, as essentially "white"--especially in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, and others.

In my country, racially charged and racist language is a lot more prevalent and a lot harder to combat (we don't have the history the U.S. does) so we're used to hearing certain things. And while the word "nigger" isn't used at all (aside from perhaps people commenting on its use in the U.S.) there are other colorful phrases that mean essentially the same thing when referring to darker-skinned people.

I'm hanging out with my friend at this party--we're substantially older than the majority of the people there since they're all friends of my 10-years-younger brother, but we're having a good time, drinking, etc. And then someone says the equivalent of "niggers". He wasn't actually calling anyone present that, he was talking about "a certain type of people". (i.e. people with brown-skin, which as you may suspect quite correctly, form the majority of the lower class, like, you know, in most places.) (Yes, you get people of dark skin using the same terminology, and not in the way African-Americans have appropriated "niggah", but rather in actual insult, it's mind-bloggling.)

I told him not to say that. I even said "please". His argument as to why he should be allowed to say it is was tantamount to "I was talking about their way of thought, not their skin color" (another variant: "I was talking about them being 'niggers of the soul' not, you know, their skin color"). Suffice to say this didn't endear me to him any, and I told him I didn't care--just stop. I'm a teacher--I like to educate if at all possible--but I was also relaxing and frankly I didn't have the desire to argue about it with an idiot--but then other people started: some defended him (usually citing cultural norms and a lack of cultural understanding, which is a shit argument) and some took my side.

Eventually, he got sick of getting schooled and when my brother--who was clueless as to this--walked by, the guy called him over and told him I was giving him a hard time. (My brother was holding a dude by the arm like he was going to use him to swing at a baseball, and the dude was holding his own head with one hand, so keep that in mind for the next part of the story). He didn't know I was his brother. He didn't know he was in my home. He explained what happened in the most favorable light (for himself) that he could and my brother grabbed him by the arm with his free hand, asked me to help with the other guy too, and together we escorted them right the fuck out.

Turns out the other guy (remember I told you to keep him in mind?) had pinned the door to the bathroom with a girl inside and was telling her he'd let her out if she let him take a picture of her bent over with her skirt pulled up. My brother had to pee and when he came around and heard the dude insisting, he knocked the guy's head into the doorframe and dragged him off.

We lived across the street from a police station. Racist Douchebag didn't get more than a boot from our house, but the other guy got charges, once we got one of the cops to cross the street and take the girl's statement.

Moral of the story is: surround yourself with people who will back you up when you are defending people, because even when you think you know the people you invite into your home, that's not a given. And raise your kids right--I have a ton of faults, but allowing that sort of shit in my vicinity, much less in my home, isn't one of them.

I hope @mietze's kids (and any that any of you have) never have that happen at a party they go to or that they host--but I hope if it does, they have the support of others so that they are able to excise these sorts of people summarily and without remorse.

This is your World. Your world holds unspeakable things. You may not see them, lurking in the shadow; you may not hear them, prowling in the woods; you may not sense them, hidden between the gears of reality; but there are things that go bump in the night, and they watch you, waiting. Some will treat you as food; others will treat you as prey; still others will steal the most fundamental parts of your being.

Unless you're one of them. Vampire. Werewolf. Demon. You lurk and either eek out an existence in the fringes of humanity or take it by the throat and attempt to rule it. Either way, you're certainly not human anymore--some of you never were. This is your world too.

Eldritch is a cooperative, semi-improvisational roleplaying setting for the World of Darkness, by Onyx Path. It supports the first edition of Demon: The Descent, and the second editions of Vampire: The Requiem, and Werewolf: The Forsaken, in addition to their sub-templates and your basic Mortals (including Psychics). Eldritch is an attempt to create a story- and character-driven game that explores the themes of each of these games not only by themselves but also in their interaction with each other. It is a full-inclusion, cross-over-friendly game.

There will be politics. There will be murder. There will be espionage. There will be lust and fear; terror and savagery; adventure and techgnosticism. Find a place in our city and tell your story while helping us tell ours. Remember: no character exists in a vacuum, and you have the power to change this world.

You should climb up on your ego and jump alllllllll the way down to your IQ.

@Tyche said in RL Anger:

Then I learned that the only way I could be helpful was to participate in a great societal revolution to
revamp and overturn western civilization and the patriarchy.
Sorry I'm not really on board for all that.

Sucks to be you.

I do have some advice though.
If you find yourself playing tabletop role-playing games with creeps.
Go find another gaming group or start your own.

Or maybe, if there are people who aren't creeps at the table, the creeps could leave. That would be swell.

On a bright note there is great news for feminists today.
I read we're going to put a gun-toting evangelical Christian Republican woman on the twenty dollar bill.
Yeah!

All right, let's break this down.

Harriet Tubman toted guns. What the fuck do you expect a woman fighting to free hundreds of slaves to tote? A broomstick? Do you really believe that revolution and the fight for civil liberties is won by walking around with your hands in the air saying "please let us go / give us rights, we promise we ain't gonna misuse them [like you do]?"

Harriet Tubman was an evangelical Christian. So what? I'm a communist. I don't actually like religion, and I especially don't like the church, but that doesn't mean I automatically brand everyone who believes in god and preaches as someone incapable of doing good things. Could I, and would I, criticize her beliefs? Of course. But I would do it respectfully and more importantly separately from her achievements as a civil rights activist and successful abolitionist, and finally, I would do so in context, given her upbringing and what surrounded her. For fuck's sake the woman fought against slavery at a time when that's pretty much all her people knew--the concept of God being righteous and having her back was probably one of the only things that kept her going.

Harriet Tubman was a Republican. I'm not bothering to look up if this is accurate. I will do you a solid and take it at face value. Even so, she was born in 1822 and died in 1913. The Republican and Democratic parties switch sides [i.e. the (Democratic) party of small government became the party of big government, and the (Republican) party of big government became rhetorically committed to curbing federal power] somewhere between the late 1860s and 1936. So essentially, you're saying she was part of a transitioning party. Given her ideals and, more importantly, her actions, I am confident in saying that I think Tubman would have been a modern Democrat, if we go as far as to claim she'd join either party, which I'm not sure she would. She joined the more liberal party during a time in which she needed support to achieve her abolitionist goals. (In contrast, Andrew Jackson is one of the founders of the original Democratic Party, which as we've covered, had the values of the current Republican party at the time. So your actual argument, if applied within context, works against the previous face of the $20 bill.)

Now sit down and shut the fuck up, you're embarrassing yourself.

@stabeest said in Apology to Darinelle:

@saosmash Goddamn this. It feels really shitty to be informed by a 'friend' that someone has been talking shit about you. Most of them try to couch it in the whole 'I just want to work things out between you.'

No. You want to stir the pot. If someone has an issue with me or the way I do things, I expect them to come to me about it if this is truly important to them and it wasn't just a moment of venting out of frustration. If it is serious enough to need a resolution, they need to come to me themselves. If it's not, then I don't need to hear about every time I irritate someone and they needed a moment to bitch.

I knew someone who would constantly bitch about someone else to me. It was all the time. Every day. Eventually I told them if they didn't stop and go hash it out with the other person I was just going to stop talking to them.

It didn't stop.

We don't talk anymore.

I got a kitty.

Everyone say hello to Ulthar.

@GreenFlashlight said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

If the Avatar is unplayable, then I don't really care what they're doing, but I do wonder how canon purists will react to the Avatar being removed from canon. It might save more effort to just say "oh the world's pretty much fine so the Avatar is off doing Avatar stuff and will be back if Sephiroth or whoever pops up."

Well, that's why I suggested it be set after Korra (or an Avatar) has just died. It answers every question: why can't anyone, even staff, play the Avatar? Because they are a baby. What is the Avatar doing? Probably eating their own boogers.

That feeling when you start writing again and suddenly put out over 2k words in a single sitting. Nnnnfff.

@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:

@roz said in Let's talk about TS.:

This whole scenario will just end up in game-wide civil wars and terrible toxicity the first time there's any sort of disagreement among the playerbase.

I'm sure they said something similar about having democracies instead of kings. Giving up control is always a horrible, unthinkable idea to people who have power.

This is not a personal attack, it is just an observation, but the more I read from you the less convinced I am you have a clear separation of the world of gaming and how it works as opposed to the real world.

It is a game. There is no actual oppression in the game because actual oppression can't be avoided; there is an absolutely huge chasm between a king having power (actually affecting your life in a way you cannot avoid because they rule you) and a staffer having power on a game (something that can be easily avoided by just leaving the game).

You are mixing levels of functional reality in a way that would make Theodor Adorno stick his head in a woodchipper.

@Arkandel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I don't mind some aspects of the cancel culture. I do dislike this immense effort to preemptively not possibly do anything that can be taken as offensive, though, regardless of intent.

Case in point was a potential plot for a new Star Trek movie (... for some reason that's on my newsfeed a lot lately) where a virus was killing large parts of the galactic population, which was nixed due to Covid-19.

We can't make movies about pandemics now? Would someone think they were too pro-virus?

This has nothing to do with cancel culture at all, IMO.

It probably has less to do with that and more to do with not wanting to grind people down with a plot about something they are actually going through at the moment.

I didn't want to see a movie about someone losing their loved one to cancer when I lost my grampa to cancer, for example; many MUs don't include COVID-19 in their modern, contemporary settings because escapism is about escaping reality.

When you get a really nice, and long TS mav in the middle of the OOC Lounge for at least three or more people to see, and it makes the rounds in less than three minutes, tops.

Truly a fucking gem.

@Derp I'm sorry dude, but you're being pretty dumb right now.

The whole point is that it doesn't matter if your friends are the exception--there is a multitude of people out there who suffer from sexual harrassment and they shouldn't need to prove it to you for you to offer your support and keep an eye out.

If you have never, ever been witness to it (something I doubt, but moving on) then lucky you, but they aren't asking you to stand up and say OH YEAH I TOTALLY SAW THIS. No, they are asking that if you see it, do something about it. They are asking you to not doubt them just because you haven't witnessed it yourself or they don't have evidence; they're just asking for support.

So if you haven't seen it, lucky you. But if you do, act in support of the person being harrassed.

That's it. That's all it takes to be an ally to people who are being harrassed: you see it, you help. Because if you are put in a position where you can actively help, it will also come with the evidence thereof.

Stop worrying so much about whether or not these people are lying and start worrying about whether or not you're too blind to see what they're talking about. One of those things makes you a better person, the other doesn't.

Oh, it's "talk about posers" time. This brings me back.

I'm not that old. I'm 32. I got into Nirvana after Kurt Cobain died and I wasn't even that into Nirvana, to be fair. Mostly, my friends were grunge and I was like 'yeah, this is cool'. My favorite Nirvana album is Incesticide, because my tastes align more with ska and, more popularly, punk, often of the California hardcore-punk style. I listened to the 90s punk quartet--that's Green Day, The Offspring, Rancid, and NOFX--and was quite happy with that. But I also was down with so many other bands. I've still to meet another person who owns the entire Screeching Weasel discography, including their Ramones cover album (in which they do Ramones covers with such a squeaky voice, it's great) on recorded cassette tapes. Yes. You read right.

I used to call people posers. I never really was a gatekeeper--for some reason i found the right punker community in my city where, when someone didn't know something, we'd--sometimes just a teeny tiny bit condescendingly--learn them about it. We had a dude we called Biblia ("Bible") because he was literally just a repository of punk knowledge. If there was a punk band who had an album and it had been bootlegged internationally, he had listened to it, categorized it, memorized it, and could name all the songs. He was the BEST of us, and his knowledge didn't make him the best of us--his lack of judgment did. When any of us made some mistake--claimed something, whatever--about anything remotely punk, he would just correct it. No 'Actually...' or 'God you guys are dumb, what really happened was...' or 'No, posers, ...' He would just state the fact, and move on. If you didn't care, you didn't care; and he didn't stop passing you the joint or the beer because of it. His measurement of what made you a fan wasn't whether you knew as much as him or even whether you cared about it--it was whether you enjoyed it. That dude was awesome. He died about ten years back. His funeral was punk as fuck.

Further, talking about posers, I know a ton of people who can name every Nirvana song, own every album, know all the lyrics, and still fail to see the forest for the trees when it comes to the messages that Cobain was expressing. People who treat others like fucking crap, people who have told others to "killy ourself", pressured them to drug use, used them, abused them, turned around and blamed Courtney Love for driving Cobain to suicide and then actually gaslit their S.O., and many, many other things that, if you actually listen to Nirvana, consider their social commentary, you would know are pretty fucking incongruent with the band's general message.

Those people are posers. The person who likes the baby and the words 'Nirvana' and 'Nevermind' or got gifted the t-shirt, or whatever? Not a poser. Just a person.

I don't know.

I like to think that if Cobain were alive now, and someone said "You should only be able to wear Nirvana t-shirts if you can name some of their songs" near him, they would be the immediate recipient of his saliva smacking their forehead.

How dare you tell people how to live their lives when they aren't doing shit to you? And how fucking lame is it to have to insult people for shit that is innocuous as fuck?

Have some perspective.

At least get mad at actual idiots, like people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts but can't even revolt against their parents. "Viva la revolución, mom, now can you send me my allowance, my Twinky supply is low". Fuck.

At some point, dealing with the bad on a game outweighs enjoying the good.

It is at that point where you should definitely call it quits for the game.

It really is that subjective, and that simple.

A lot of these problems stem from the medium through which we tell these stories. Roleplayers usually involve themselves in online roleplaying via at least one of the following: tabletop roleplaying in real life, reading a lot in real life, watching a lot of television in real life. These things lead them to try expanding their enjoyment online and immersing themselves in the stories further, with lots of other people.

But the heroes of a book, or a television (or movie), or a tabletop game in real life... are the protagonists of the story. They get to go to space, and they don't just get to go to space, they get to blow up the space slug, make a hole in the space shield, and beat the fucking daylights out of the oppressive aliens. Because they're the protagonists. The story is about them.

One thing I've heard a lot is how "unrealistic" it is that a story is about a person and that person just so happens to do all this stuff or have all this stuff happen to them--but the truth is, it's the other way around: the story is about that person because that shit happens to them and they do that stuff. If someone else did it, or if it happened to someone else, the story would be about them.

And therein lies the rub. Many people come to online gaming to replicate and immerse themselves in the kind of stories they see the heroes and protagonists partake in on television and the big screen, or they come trying to find a way to do what they used to do in real life in tabletop with their friends back when they had time and didn't all live further away and didn't have life-sucking jobs...

But online play, in the massive games we run and play in, is a completely different beast, where you are not the protagonist--you are a protagonist amidst dozens of protagonists, and that spotlight istemporary and transitory at best.

The more people who get that, the better the hobby will be.

Got a 10/10 on a midterm and a 9/10 on another midterm.

I desire basic spelling and grammar in any RP partner. I can't help it. I can understand and ignore some stuff, but if I have to sit there and try to figure out what you're saying, nope.

Length and detail aren't really a thing for me. In fact, long and too-detailed poses when unnecessary make a scene drag, in my experience. I want the action, not the minutiae.

In general, one-on-one, five minutes between my pose and the other person's is about right. If it takes more than ten, I start grumbling, unless I was forewarned they'd be slow, in which case, I am also usually doing something else and will occasionally also take a while.

Too much %t drives Manu cray-cray. I use it sometimes when I am trying to do something stylistic (same with colors) often when I'm storytelling, but otherwise, I prefer they not be there. I just don't like them. I prefer double carriage returns.

I always am playing 3-pose rule unless there's initiative involved. I don't even ask, which some people might think is rude, but I have been at this long enough to not care. And if I am playing with close friends who know me and play with me often and we have meshing styles, I'll skip all the fuck over the placed, I do not even care.

Key to playing with me is knowing that I put as much effort in a one-line pose that I do in a long paragraph, because often the brevity of the pose says something in itself. Also, I don't like to be kept waiting and I don't like to make people wait.

Also, key in any scene, is to know when the scene is over. It is perfectly all right to say "I think we can wrap this scene up ehre" and then go play with someone else if you want.