Best posts made by Derp

Kay Lahusen, who helped get homosexuality de-listed as a mental illness.

Sure, there's always going to be some of that. No MU is ever going to be bias-free. It's run by humans. Even if you get an AI to run a MU, we teach AI stupid amounts of bias all the time, because they learn from us, and the stuff we want them to focus on. There have been numerous studies about how bias actually gets magnified when you take the human element out of decision-making, like when used to grade essay answers.

I can see both sides of it. On the one hand, the 'friends of staff' argument can have some merit. On the other, those same 'friends of staff' are likely the ones that were considered in the creation of the game, gave their feedback on the theme, and helped shape the world -- so they're also probably the experts on the theme of the game itself, and the ones in the best position to try and help move things forward. There really isn't a way around that. Staff is always going to have a handful of people that they lean on, either because of expertise or quality, to move things along. A little mini sub-staff. Every game has it, and if a gamerunner tells you they don't, then they either don't realize that they're doing it, or they're lying.

But that's also why compartmentalized information sometimes has to be overlooked, even if you want to act on it. If I see a page where someone is bitching about me, or about a decision I made, I likely might be a touch annoyed, but I'm not going to make that actionable, unless there is some other reason to do so (control of misinformation, maybe -- I dunno, I can think of reasons, but if it's just spleen venting then fuck 'em.)

So there is something to be said for privacy via compartmentalization, but there's also something to be said for 'sometimes you just got to give someone the OOC lowdown on what you want and set them loose upon the world'. Every player gets this, in one way or another. That's the entire reason that you have theme and policy files.

@il-volpe said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

These fuckwits who claim superior understanding of economics and yet also insist that certain jobs are designed for high school students.

The ones who absolutely would exploit child labor for zero wages if they could?

@Ganymede said in Privacy in gaming:

There will always be bias. But there can be safeguards against it, and those safeguards include clear rules which will make bias easy to detect.

While I mostly agree with you...

...a part of me also thinks "come on, law-bot. You're a lawyer. You know that no amount of rules are going to stop people from people-ing, and trying to write in super complex codes is exactly how you get "TITLE 36 1/2 of the OHIO CRIMINAL CODE, ARTICLE 37, CHAPTER 118, SECTION 1302, PARAGRAPH 4(A)"(1)...

Writing 'clear rules' just means that someone is going to try and find all the edge and corner cases. I'm less a fan of 'clearly defined rules' and more a fan of 'let people know up front that you are not gonna play that game with them.'

(1) I have no idea how Ohio's laws are laid out. Does it follow TACS? I dunno. It's an example, don't overanalyze it...

@aria said in RL things I love:

USPS informed delivery is awesome.

When it works.

@DareDaemon said in Punishments in MU*:

In the hands of a good staffer it is, but we all know that some staffers are shits who cannot be trusted where the goal of punishment frequently isn't correction, it's coercion.

But here, 'correction' implies that there is a universally accepted way of doing things. There isn't. All of what we do is 'coercion', in the sense that we are trying to create a specific set of actions and discourage actions that we don't want to see.

What counts as 'abuse', too, is largely subject to an individual game's policy. What is written into the contract for some may be completely out of bounds for another.

Edit because it attributed to the wrong darn person. Sorry, @Lemon-Fox !

Just noticed that we have this TV thread here and then Great TV in -- another one entirely, but I'm gonna use this one because the other one is older and that's just how it's gonna be for today.

So, late comer to Paramount, but given that my car is somewhat out of commission and travel is limited, I've been binging the hell out of some series.

How did I not realize how awesome Star Trek: Discovery and Lower Decks is? I feel like I missed out.

Also, new Evil is still great.

@Auspice

Look, I like you too, and we tend to get along in these things, but in this case, I think you're just flat-out wrong. And that's fine. We don't have to agree on everything.

I told you when I would be willing to act, in multiple scenarios, and when I think it's inappropriate to act. In this situation, I think that it's inappropriate for me to act. I think it's also inappropriate for you to act.

But different games will have different standards. There is no universal here.

All I can do is give my own perspective.

ETA: To make the 'as a player and a staffer' clear --

As a player, I wouldn't do shit because it's none of my damned business. If someone says something to me, then I'll direct it to the people whose business it is, and encourage said player to do the same.

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

@greenflashlight hmmm, that got me thinking ... behavior in captivity, meaning less freedom of association with others, generates domineering behavior.

Is human civilization effectively captivity?

Yes. Most political scientists and sociologists start from that premise and work outward. Submitting to power for survival does that.

@faraday said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

We do have a problem with players tromping over boundaries, harassing other players and just generally being creepy sometimes when it comes to IC relationships.

Yeah, that's why I said if there's an OOC component it could be actionable. I'm not oblivious that there are assholes out there in the hobby, and I've booted more than my fair share of those people, as anyone who's actually staffed with me can probably attest. The other side of this coin is that not everything has to have a full-on procedurally correct trial. If you, as a gamerunner, feel that someone is being a disruptive influence for your game, and making your other players uncomfortable, you can boot them even if they haven't explicitly violated the letter of the law.

This is all a game of balance. There's no perfect solution. If there was we would have found it ages ago and this wouldn't be an issue.

@dvoraen said in Good TV:

@wretched said in Good TV:

I am really loving season 2 of Evil.

I'm jealous because I can't watch it. (Don't have Paramount+.) I have to wait for Netflix to get it.

Paramount+ is one of the best investments I have made. Between Evil, Lower Decks, and Star Trek Discovery, it's more than paid for itself, and it's the cheapest one that I have at like ... what, six bucks a month or something. Quiet place 2 I think is on there now. Well worth it.

@faraday

And that is becoming vastly less of a concern every day. Once upon a time, there was a real worry about losing contact with an otherwise anonymous person that didn't want to share contact details because those were all mostly linked to real-life personas or niche RL sites.

Then we got instant messengers, and people started making burner e-mails, and Discord came along, and now there's AresCentral too, which makes all that even easier.

So what you can lose in the process of leaving a game has been greatly reduced, and setting up your own sandbox to tell stories in is dead simple now.

@greenflashlight said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I never have any idea what that question means. How about you tell me something about yourself so I have an example to follow?

This is how I feel every time I see 'must be detail-oriented' on a job posting where I have to write an introduction letter explaining shit about me.

Like -- what the fuck does that even mean? Do you want someone who remembers all things at all times and can summon them up like an Alexa? Or do you want someone who makes obsessively sure that all things are on calendars and filed the way they should be just because he can't remember if he did that one yet and even though it's crossed off the post-it I don't trust the post-it?

Because I am the latter, and so far it works out very well.

@surreality

I actually fairly frequently stand up for players, and examine the motivations of the actor. But it's been my experience that the scales balance about evenly on 'unreasonableness'.

But if it'll help, here is a snippet of policy files (unfinalized) from a project that I am currently working on:

Consent

$GAMENAME is mostly a non-consent game in nature, meaning that a player cannot refuse to allow things to happen to their character, simply because they are uncomfortable with it. Some limitations on this exist:

Any player may request a FTB (fade to black) at any time. This does not mean that the event did not happen, only that it is not RP’ed.

PC death or any other effect lasting longer than the duration of a single scene requires the involvement of a judge or staffer. (Remember that a single scene may be flexible in its duration to some degree.)

However, all play on $GAMENAME is expected to consider the rights of other players, the storylines of all characters, and the overall storyline in its conception and execution. Play that sacrifices or ignores any of the three above items in favor of the personal aggrandizement of any player is not acceptable on $GAMENAME. All players are reminded that any concerns or issues with OOC communication are to be directed to staff for resolution if they cannot be readily resolved with the player(s).

Staff reserves the right to intervene in scenes or RP in-game if an NPC or world-based response to PC actions is deemed necessary and appropriate. ICA=ICC, and more powerful figures exist than any one character on the grid, no matter how high level. Nobody in the world depicted on $GAMENAME is immune from the consequences of their actions, and $GAMENAME relies on this fact to maintain story balance.

@arkandel said in Pandemic Era Issues:

There are other medical conditions caused by people doing something wrong - do we not treat patients for cancer who refuse to give up smoking, for example?

I think there is a fundamental difference here, though. When you refuse to give up smoking when being treated for cancer, you're ultimately only hurting yourself. We can get into debates about the dangers of secondhand smoke, or whatever, but ultimately, COVID is much more lethal in the very short term and can affect a great many more people, including the network of exposure that it creates.

This is actively endangering other people, and there are good faith arguments to be made that the maximum good, and the maximum amount of lives saved, would be best served by refusing treatment if they refuse the most effective treatment in favor of continuing to endanger others while putting a strain on a medical profession that is already stretched to its limit. This is no different from any other sort of battlefield triage, just stretched over a longer timescale.

While I'm never going to actively cheer the deaths of the willfully unvaccinated, especially when it's widely available and free, I have absolutely zero sympathy for them. You made your choices.

@Macha said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

@silverfox Yes, the kid knowing it is happening only makes sure they won't poke into things they don't feel comfortable talking about. I can only imagine how many of my LGBTQ friends would have never found support groups, or felt able to come out, ask questions... if the parents had been watching logs of what they do on a computer.

I'm … kind of with @Macha on this one. I don't really think that is completely appropriate. And half of the warning signs listed in the post are like -- typical teenager. Changes in hygiene, behavioral changes. Some of them are valid and legit, but I think that if someone used some of those as 'warning signs' to invade a teenager's privacy, there could easily be lines crossed.

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to parent their child, especially not @Buttercup, and I"m sure that the context in this particular case matters, but in general I would be a bit more cautious drawing conclusions from that, and I can see how some people might be weirded out by some of the things mentioned. Without knowing all the details, a lot of that is really control-y-creepy.

@faraday said in Pandemic Era Issues:

That isn’t supposed to matter in medicine either.

And people aren't supposed to refuse safe treatments to save their lives, either, but this is the world we live in now. I get that people take medical ethics seriously. I work in a profession with serious ethics rules, too. But I think that the people who can be vaccinated and refuse are stretching the limits of ethics to their breaking point.

I don't know what else to say to people. If you won't get two free shots in the arm to avoid spreading a plague to hundreds, or potentially thousands, of people, knowing full well that bad outcomes happen every day, then you've decided to roll the dice with fate not just for yourself, but for everyone around you.

The drunk driver would be criminally prosecuted and forced to make amends, but the person that refused a vaccination and spreads a disease to all those other people will never be held accountable for the lives that they cost.

No sympathy.

@Auspice said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:

Just up the amount of weekly XP to 2 and get rid of short-terms, IMO. Increase beats earned for PRPs, encourage people to use conditions more. But get rid of short-term asps.

2xp a week is a ludicrously high amount for a 2E game. You will get ridiculous monsters very fast, because people will figure out how to hit it every. Single. Time.

I speak from experience. You will hate yourself if you make that your standard. You really want it to go slower.

@carma said in Autism and The MU* Community:

For anyone who's word-focused instead of number-focused, someone showed me junimojis, and they're a ton of fun.
How to play.

Puzzle example.

You fit all the letters of a given number into its box. Any remaining blocks in the box become blank squares. It's kind of like an acrostic, but you're given the letters to all the answers instead of clues, and you have to divine the shape of the board, which is always symmetrical.

Welp.

See you all in three years.

@Pandora

While I've already given the reasons why I don't think this is absolutely necessary, I think there is one more that we haven't quite covered yet --

There is such a thing as 'too many tools'.

If something is already available to do a thing, there is no reason to create a redundant system, complete with its own documentation, to clog up the systems. Even the default commands that games come with are often overwhelming for players to read. I've had an Ares server up for a month or so now and STILL haven't read all the help files, and I"m coding for this beast.

There are a LOT of them, before I add a single command to the game.

At some point, you have to draw a line and say 'no, this is not worth the additional effort and confusion and clutter when such things already exist'.

The problem isn't that the tools aren't there. The problem is that players aren't willing to even use the ones that already exist. Creating additional systems isn't likely to fix that, and can in fact be detrimental for organization and clarity.

If people really feel that there is so much of a problem that a special tool needs to be created, but are unwilling to use the ones already in place -- I'm not sure that's a tenable argument.