Best posts made by GangOfDolls

My brother has several co-morbidities:

Bipolar Disorder II or Cyclothymic - the diagnosis has changed a couple times
Borderline Personality Disorder
Adult ADHD

He is, as you can imagine, a pretty tortured person and a generally unhappy person. For as much as people with Bipolar disorders have to be committed and regimented to staying on their medication and having people who can closely observe when things are 'off' and they need to be packed off for an evaluation and adjustment, my brother has never been able to do this for more than a year or two at most. Most of the time, it's impossible largely because his Borderline and ADHD problems are more supercharged at preventing him from maintaining structure on himself and not reacting destructively to people in his life that try to help.

As a result, my brother is in his late 30s. He has no friends (literally, I'm not even joking) because he burns down friendships pretty quickly, a string of girlfriends who often tend to be dealing with serious trauma-induced mental health issues of their own and/or drug problems and/or aneurotypical issues of their own so those relationships tend to be explosive and short-lived, a fractious relationship with his teenage son who is exhausted of his father and tired of being let down all the time, and has been dependent on family for housing and financial support more on than off in his adult life. My nephew's mother is unfortunately of no help here, as they met in a treatment facility because she has a severe Borderline Personality Disorder herself and has attempted suicide several times over. She's been better in the last few years, but her current husband is the one who seems to be holding her ability to parent my nephew together (he's a motherfucking saint, her husband).

Despite all this my brother is not sick enough to be placed under a conservatorship. We as a family have tried but the standard for that in the state he currently lives in basically holds that he has to be incapacitated or nearly so to have a court rule that way. The best we can do and have done is a series of medical and durable POAs, that my parents have managed until my brother inevitably contacts our family attorney and revokes the POAs. This is often out of spite, more than due to the episodic nature of his illness because he's often attempting to extract money out of my parents for bullshit reasons (a new surfboard, upgrading the stereo in his car, first class tickets to Thailand are some past reasons) and when they won't capitulate, he revokes. Then eventually he relents and all this starts again.

My mother is 74 and is at the end of her fucking rope with all of this and has asked me to take on holding his POAs for the forseeable future. It's in reality something I'm going to have to do when she dies, as my father disowned my brother about a decade ago when my brother accused my parents of sexual/physical abuse in order to leave a treatment center early. For the record: It's not true for a lot of reasons I won't articulate here and my brother recanted the whole tale, after he was confronted and realized it wasn't going to get him out of an involuntary mental health hold.

Anyway.

I'm in deep contemplation about whether or not I want to take this on. On the one hand, we live in different states and the distance makes this easier but also harder for conflicting, opposite reasons. Easier because I don't have to see him in person and I'm much better at telling him 'no fuck off' when he wants a check for something childish and manipulative. Harder because he can resind and then because I'm 1,200 miles away, there's not a lot I can do. But my likely response to that will be 'cool, sounds like you're doing a thing' when he goes for that.

Does anyone have any sort of experience of the practical aspects of POAs? The most I imagine I'll be doing is monitoring his finances. He doesn't overspend because he's bipolar; he does it because he has no financial literacy and impulse buys things due to his ADHD.

And also, I'm just venting because I hate this.

I was not a nerd as a kid, at all. My parents were very norm core and as a result, my exposure to nerd stuff was pretty minimal. My dad liked scifi movies but that was kind of the extent of it. I was in theatre in high school but it was an extension of being a cheerleader and being on the dance team, because the musicals needed dancers.

I was aware of D&D and really high level stuff but only as it's portrayed in the media. I was in an improv theatre troop (Comedysports) because I enjoyed high school theatre and wanted something creative and active to do after work (I had already graduated college by this point). A few male members of the company invited me because we'd regularly grab beers after a show or a rehearsal. They invited me to a TT game that they were running because I was quick on my feet thinker and also I was a woman willing to come to their TT, to be honest about it.

From there, I just kept getting asked to keep playing and from there it transitioned into larp and online games.

@GirlCalledBlu

I just want to point out that there's a difference between being a good storyteller and being effective at being a good game administrator.

I think we've all played in games that had excellent plot but had absolutely batshit management of the game going down. And because the plot was good, people put up with the batshittery far longer than they should have.

To be clear: I am not saying that your handling of the 100 was to that level.

I am, however, saying that while your storytelling chops were solid, your organizational prowess at running said plot and running the wider game were problematic. And when games start out on a bad administrative note, they tend to snowball pretty quickly when there's a lack of awareness or a refusal to accept that the feedback you're being given as a game runner is valid when its pushing back on things that are a problem.

My experience of The 100 in terms of game running was that of an echo chamber. Decisions would get made about timing or logistics IG and OOG that inconvenienced more players than it helped or were often bizarre/weird/nonsensical that it proved a distraction (sometimes really large) from participating in the story on offer. Sometimes these changes to format would happen midplot or midstream when PCs had already established their PCs as doing 'x' for months, making it harder for players to find ways to gracefully pivot on months of actions or RP to whatever abrupt change was happening just then.

This was often made worse by a lack of any communication about expectations or timing to players. Players would politely explain why they weren't tracking the leaderships logic or decisions about these things or why from a player perspective things were problematic.

You and @Seraphim73 would often say 'oh, yes, I see your point' or 'oh, yes, I apologize we didn't communicate this sooner but...' and then assure us that you were going to logistically compensate the situation. Players would then think that the situation was resolved and then the exact opposite of that would happen anyway.

And one time or twice is just attributable to miscommunications or misunderstandings but it happened a lot. To the point where it often seemed as though, you would collectively take player feedback, agree to adjust, discuss it amongst yourselves, and basically blow us off collectively. And perhaps that's not what actually what happened but it was frustrating to feel like at best, your attention span as game runners was highly challenged or at worst, you were pretending to listen with the intention to disregard player response at many turns.

Game running is a skill we develop, and I stand by my comments made previously in this thread that we improve over time from doing and @sunny has said the same. My assessment was that because your vision of the game was uniform enough, there was often not much room for effective alternative viewpoints or polite pushback. It created an echo chamber problem that compounded a lot of the other issues going on in the game. It makes me sad to think though that an opportunity for clarity on this issue was missed so often while the game was still running because it was all right there, just not recognized.

Good luck on future endeavours.

@Sunny It'll be okay, I promise. I totally understand these feels though. My senior cat has some health problems and I'm always baseline anxiety ball that I'm going to get bad news about them. So far, though - she's a tank who seems totally unbothered by her issues and I'm just the silly fretting adult.

@Wizz

Yeah, I don't know? The use of a slur and casual application of broadly anti-semitic ideas, I guess, in this climate just sort of signals a willingness to jab the bear with a stick.

So, its hard to tell?

I take Xanax but only because I have a serious fear of flying but have to fly alot for my job and getting turnt on an airplane to cope is a bad plan.

Otherwise, on flights where I am not medicated or sauced - I am a fucking basketcase.

One of my long running concerns about Xanax is how well it works with me and I can easily see myself taking it when ever I went to drop in and drop out on my life. So, I basically treat it as the special treat I get to have only when strapped into a metal tube hurdling through the air. Otherwise, its made of poison.

Else, I'd be swallowing it by the wee fistfull all the time.

Time was, WoD/CoD was a popular and dominant genre. And to an extent, that is still true. However.

WoD (especially oWoD) is suffering from looking like your demented paw-paw who yells casually racist things at PoC baristas at Starbucks. And it's suffering from that because a lot of what WoD based it's theme/tone/identity on was a lot of a hot ass garbage ideas about women, minorities, transpeople, various cultures, PoC, and many other vulnerable groups. It's the Edgelord Manifesto.

And that material has aged poorly and it's pretty difficult for most people to engage in that material and pretend that it isn't. And it still struggles with that even as it tries to come along but for every team of writers that tries to update one of the facets of CoD, you have literal fucking nazis who know better but on purpose are trying to propagate the same bullshit that they were writing in 1989.

All that really suggests is that Onyx Path has a very dissonant way of managing these IPs and it can't seem to figure out how to avoid leopards eating its face, every time they don't vet who they hire for content creation enough or in some cases, at all.

I think the general appetite for this content has modified in that there are still a lot of people who love both WoD and CoD but are trying to reconcile how to play it without contributing the problem and enjoy it with a more critical eye. But there are also a fair number of people who are just exhausted from the garbage parade and don't want to engage with it anymore.

That has knock-on effects, including less of these games, and when these games do turn up or re-open as is the case with Fallcoast, people tend to be a little more choosy about how these games are handling problematic baseline material and if they want to participate in that.

Do you think western societies will adopt Universal Basic Income models?

Some may, but it will shock me if the United States jumps on that bandwagon. Everything about how our society functions from soup to nuts is about punishing the poor and getting the poor to agree that they deserve abuse. The compass alignment required for this to happen means a realignment of how employment, education, and health care functions in this country. It's possible to do this but I'm not sure it's probable given the buy-in required.

Major cities are getting the brunt of this but the majority of the population outside of these cities isn't going through the same experience. It's still abstract for these groups and most of this is, so far, just one big fucking inconvenience when it comes to businesses being open and life being able to roll on. There's no amount of escalating cases numbers in New York City that you can show a lot of these people to agree that it's their problem. Sure, it's a problem but that's all happening in New York, which is pointedly not Bible Thump, Mississippi to them. There's still a fair amount of denial that they're just weeks behind these places because magical thinking and prayers will exempt them.

Do you think industries which attract large crowds (sports, entertainment, etc) will stay the same?

Our capacity for forgetting is pretty impressive. Large crowds will prevail as the appetite for this kind of consumption will probably not abate. The average person at this point just wants to go back to normal and their sense of normal includes Las Vegas, arena tour sellouts, and EDM festivals.

Will traveling in general be affected? Not just in the political sense but for example how might tourism change after this?

There will probably more advisories about seasonal outbreaks of the virus and how people are allowed to enter and exit populations where exposure is likely but those restrictions will be per nation. However, unlike 9/11, we don't have a tangible enemy, so the idea of safety when traveling is a lot harder to traverse.

What about films, do you think there might be a shift away from major releases going exclusively to cinemas first?

I think that really depends on how well their market tests of in-home access really does. They're entering a particularly busy channel where being a blockbuster movie is not a standout because original programming on a number of paid app services are doing the same thing for content. Going to the movies is about the experience. They're going to have to find a way to market this experience that's different from just firing up Netflix and sitting on your couch.

The service industry in general took a major hit. What happens down the line, do things get back to normal?

Probably, yes? Certain kinds of services probably won't survive but new ones will rise in their place.

I would like to be uploaded into a digital afterlife San Junipero style.

In that way, I'd be MUSHing my own afterlife forever.

Contrapoints has a really excellent breakdown on cancel culture after being cancelled herself. It's long so you may need to watch it in doses but I think it's really worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

@ThoughtBubble

I think @GreenFlashlight has a good way of explaining that it can be a mix of things.

The thing that I can advise which takes some time and grit and fortitude even when it feels like you don't have any to summon is to try and seek out one or two people that you know in the community who is apart of this issue but has enough information to make an assessment.

I would ask them for candid feedback about what they view might be happening. I would commit to making it clear that you're asking with good intent and further to commit to not react poorly, get angry at them, or otherwise, shoot the messenger. And they might say some things that are painful to read (but they also may not!) but do your best to just take it in as information and nothing more in the moment. You can have assessments and emotional value judgments later but often how we feel about what's being said and what's being said can be very different things, and one can drown out the other in the moment.

I think it's sometimes better to ask people who aren't quite friends but not people with whom you're in conflict with and have no skin in the game, as they won't avoid saying things to avoid hurting your friendship. But at the same time, I wouldn't pick out people who are overly blunt or indelicate for the sake of being so.

And then just kind of sit with it for a while. Sometimes the feedback ends up being right once you're done sort of processing it and taking it all in. And sometimes it's not actually accurate and you're free to file it in the circular file.

I decided to stop being a burnout non-joiner and get in the ring by joining my company's Movember team. 60 miles in 30 days starting Nov 1st which is going to force me to climb out of my Covid Sad Pile of Cheezits and run more.

My dad died of neuroendochrine prostate cancer (it's sadly pretty aggressive) and it feels good to do something active in his memory that spares someone his fate.

@tek

I'm also seconding a VPN connection.

In a former job, I traveled to Singapore and Malaysia 1-2x a year and my ability to connect to games while using wifi networks was pretty hit or miss due to security configurations. I also couldn't log into my US-based Netflix and Hulu accounts.

So, I started engaging with a VPN service and that solved pretty much all of it.

@Ganymede

A fair point. I'm pretty open (perhaps unhelpfully) to most things. I'm a little shy on the notion of massively multi-player places like Arx, only because I don't have the time to keep up with the pace at Arx between professional and personal obligations and not having a job that allows me to play from work. It's a nice gig if you can get it but those games that move at a breakneck pace just leave me feeling left behind. So, seeing as there's no reason to create a reason to feel bad - I'm just not a good fit for that kinda game. The concept of Arx sounds great, otherwise.

Did that replacement for Kushiel's Debut ever happen? I was kinda hoping it might just to try that world out but I'm guessing that it didn't come together, which happens.

@thenomain

Yeah, it is. But I think there’s also a basic confusion for some people about what they think is actually fun. People will scale a lot of drama thinking they have to in order to get to the fun, not necessarily realizing that games shouldn’t be a stinky onion where of you just keep trying- the fun will show up. Or if they’re not having fun but most other people seem to be so maybe their standard is wrong. And it might be but it might not? It’s hard to get perspective when the game is a feedback loop that reinforces the wrong thing for the player in question.

@ixokai

It’s not meant to be dismissive. Of course there’s a certain amount of compromise and tolerance that almost anything that requires collaboration with other people. And of course there’s an individual threshold for what you consider drama beyond an acceptable limit. It’s not a matter of inflexibility; it’s not always knowing when this isn’t actually the good situation you’re hoping for. That’s the holistic point of my comment.

As I was getting into above with Theno, there can be a lot of social pressure to stick around even when there’s flags that maybe you shouldn’t. There’s a fear of missing out on things and the concern that you’re letting down your friends by quitting or voicing negative feedback if they seem relatively fine. And given that there are more examples of bad game environments than good ones, it’s often the case that people will go from one game to another thankful that it’s not as bad as the last place so by that standard it’s a good situation.

My POV is that for most people their time is limited and that even in non-game spaces people will put their limited time towards things that don’t actually serve them and learning what does or doesn’t is a process that develops over time. The individual is always the individual and free to decide what that is for them.

So, a while back - I did ask what everyone understood to be current games up in this joint. I know, kinda lazy, yes?

Someone did constructively propose that maybe I aggregate that information. And having thought about it, I think I will. So, if you'd like to tap this thread with a game you're on and its up and running and functional with active people and staff, I would greatly appreciate it. I will also being doing a survey. I'll post it somewhere around Soapbox and try to keep it updated-ish.

Yeah, just to be clear active is defined as people logged in and the idle times listed aren't hours or days. If people are using idle timers vs. actually doing something, I wasn't going to go that deep with it.

For one because that's kind of invasive and a little creepy, I feel-- I don't want to micromanage what counts for activity beyond that level. And for another, 98% of the games on this list I do not play so I cannot substantiate what passes for actual activity on the culture of the game in question. ETA: If players of a particular game let me know that 'this place is a ghost ship with nothing going on' then I'll take it down unless there's some reason to believe that publicity of its existence my re-invigorate life back into it. Most of the time, though; when things are that far gone-- the game is over, even if the lights are technically on still.

I have been a little neglectful of updates lately. I'll have another edit done by the end of the weekend.

I dunno I guess generally speaking, an admin level position on a game would imply a level of trust being placed in their ability to keep something going and functional. When they stop doing so, they're asked to leave. Breaking written rules is important but so is being able to conduct yourself with a certain amount of integrity.

It seems like a lot of viciously spread rumors isn't really checking boxes where integrity is concerned? That seems to be what's alleged here?

This board half exists in order to internally communicate about badly behaving members of staff and games that create conditions for badly behaving members of staff to bless or excuse their behavior. I guess I'm seeing the contradiction of a staff member not being excused from their position here for the behaviors we sort of commonly find problematic or offensive on games...

I feel like there's a blind spot here.

I'm here with this hot taek:

I've seen people try to MU* in video games and hoooooly shit is it the most annoying thing to witness. I give zero fucks about /dance emote through someone's v. serious wedding RP in a public tavern.

So: ney.

Never shall these twain meet.