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.
@Derp said in Favorite/Most Memorable Childhood Books:
V.C. Andrews - Flowers in the Attic Series: Look, I was a pretty advanced reader and I devoured this series. Even the prequel that everyone else hated.
Nice. When I was kid my family went on vacation and I took 2 books along, Red Dragon (the prequel to Silence of the Lambs) and It. My mother was horrified that I was reading books well beyond my 11-year-old sensibilities, so confiscated them.
When we got to the cabin we were staying at, someone had left behind Flowers In The Attic and My Sweet Audrina and I read those instead. She didn't have a clue about them.
I definitely learned something from those books.
ETA - Meaningful childhood reading list:
The Stand - Unabridged and Illustrated Version
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Princess Bride
The Little Drummer Girl
Discworld series through Hogfather (and then it changed enough that I didn't like it anymore)
I'm not sure if you've done this yet but - I would look at Glassdoor and see what current employees and past applicants have said about their interview to offer process and typically how long it takes. Some places are just slow as hell because their own internal processes enable that or there's someone out of office for the holiday or other reasons that isn't progressing the contract along.
I would avoid going outside the bounds of your contract recruiter, though without talking to the recruiter that you're thinking about also contacting the company and getting their blessing. You don't actually know what the recruiter and the contract administrator in the company have talked about and it will more than likely succeed in pissing off your recruiter (no matter how slow, lazy, shady, sus they may be- if they are on those things) and it will send up red flags to the contract administrator about the ability to follow directions and go with the flow that may not reflect well on your ability to convert to FTE or at worst case, they may decide this is already starting out on a note they don't like and decide to use another contractor.
In the meantime, you probably already know this and are doing this - but keep applying for FTE and contract jobs. Contract work is extremely ephimeral in tech circles and has a more frequent tendancy to fall through or see big delays or push backs.
Question about Arx!
So, I have previously tried to play but I'm not in a space where I can be online a lot during working hours. My experience with Arx at the time was that this wasn't conducive to getting to do stuff with plot on Arx in the rostered character I picked up.
I don't know enough about Arx to make a new PC and would probably pick up another rostered character but I'm worried about not being able to keep up again. Is the pace still kinda nuts or is it really specific to roster characters and faction or has it generally settled down?
@tek said in Emotional bleed:
@GangOfDolls Now to be fair, in the right setting with the right oversight, that could be helpful. However, a recreational game with people who didn't sign up to facilitate your therapy is NOT the place for that shit.
I generally tend to take a harder line in that I don't think it's generally ever healthy to do this, from my point of view. The therapeutic process requires a lot of oversight that you can't get in a game setting.
But more over, if you're doing this in a game setting, then you're doing it while interacting with other players and whether they know it or not, that's really not a fair position to put anyone in. Even if they consent to it because I don't believe this is actually something anyone can fundamentally consent to because the underpinnings of it are unethical. It doesn't make anyone a bad person. It just makes it a bad action.
This is different just exploring a thing. Exploration of human behavior and meaning is way different.
@tek To add to that, I've tended to notice it be more of a thing when players are trying to work out/unpack/give themselves a short course in self-administered therapy about something they're struggling with via PC as a proxy. This is almost always a total recipe for intense and ugly disaster.
I think one of the ways bleed is avoided is to also do a radical self-inventory of things you do not want to RP about.
Here's my list:
Romantic infidelity
Body horror
Racism and racial violence
Pregnancy
And then you tell people your list at the outset.
There's this idea that you have RP everything thrown at you even if it's a total shit sandwich that doesn't do anything for you or your PC and politely be on board with having a bad time so someone else can have a great time. And if you don't like something, you have to play through it in-game even if it's objectively harmful to the player.
To which: hell no.
There's a huge difference between moves and countermoves in an IG conflict and your PC is bested or you just don't like the outcome versus being subjected to being a punching bag for IG events because it's great fun for someone else at your expense. People can intelligently tell the difference and those who try to use this an excuse to not 'lose' in game are in the wrong for attempting to manipulate an outcome.
If you're at all a human being and someone says: 'hey, I can't RP about this subject' or 'this is taking a turn to a place that's really hard on me and I can't do this', then you give them an out while preserving the IG outcome.
Edit: a word
Not dumb at all. I think what might be a task to manage is the theme: low-tech 50s.
I like this theme but it's one of those things that if you want purity on the theme, it'll require some monitoring of players when they let non-50s things seep into the game.
This is something to think about in terms of how theme is theme and how much you want people to stick to it.
As a current LARPer and MUer, I'm not super prone to bleed these days. I'm not sure why that is because I was certainly way more vulnerable to it when I was younger and experienced a certain amount of it. I was fortunate that it never had destructive consequences and that the people I larped and mu*ed around were constructive, healthy enough to participate in making sure there were boundaries to prevent that.
When I was in mid-20s, I was in a game where my PC was in an intense romantic relationship with another PC. The game was online but myself and the other player knew each other from local larp circles, so we were friends offline before this pairing in-game happened. He happened to be married at the time. I was not. Things sloshed over for both of us in terms of bleed. We were able to hit the breaks, acknowledge there were feelings that while 'real' they probably didn't actually mean that we wanted to hit self-destruct on our social circle and his marriage just because we felt that way, this was an infatuation, and we just let the thing run its course.
I was lucky because if we hadn't taken a step back, we probably would have enthusiastically let bleed dictate behavior, a huge explosion would have happened, and at the end of all that, it would be the last few minutes of The Graduate but in real life, so the slow seep of regret and divorce attorneys.
This is all to say that I think the first step is acknowledging that it happens and that none of us are robots and that brains and hearts are easily mutable and changeable things when it comes to manufacturing emotions and then leaving them unattended. And I think having serious conversations with the people around you that you trust about how to pull the fire alarm if something happens, before it happens.
And there are other kinds of bleed for sure. Nordic format larps and some MU* are really good at the suffer puppet game where intensely shitty stuff happens in a game and then you're stuck in your feelings about it. The larps at least have a de-role and debrief process that gives you tools to separate yourself from the events at the very end of the event (often with mental health professionals involved)-
A de-role exercise I really like is taking a piece of your PCs costume and then literally putting it in a box and basically giving your PC a eulogy. It really helps, I think, with reframing context: this PC was 'alive' for a weekend and now, it's not. There was then and this is now.
I think some of these exercises can be translated into MU* spaces.
Derp, too many tabs open. Nothing to see here.
@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.
I love Cheezits but it's entirely the case that I might love them too much.
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.
Also so sad about this one.
He spent 10 years battling cancer. I think I relate to this one because that was the length of my dad's own battle. It's hard to describe a decade with cancer, just watching it happen. I can't even imagine.
May his memory be a blessing.
@Macha This is not weird at all, at least not to me and I don't believe in woogie or woogie adjacent stuff. The day my dad died, I woke up with a horrible stomach ache around 4 a.m. and not long after I got the phone call. It wasn't until a few hours later when I found when my dad passed I realized that the pains that woke me up were in the same window of time when he died. Some things just can't be explained and sometimes, maybe it's better without an explanation.
May her memory be a blessing.
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.
On the one hand, I think some of what you're describing is unfortunately pretty typical. I think a lot of MUSHing isn't looking for the perfect environment but the good enough environment where the bad outweighs the good. And sometimes, that's not possible the bad definitely is overweight and the good is being starved.
But I will offer some gentle feedback that you may want to examine your narrative about what's happening and try to run through an outside perspective.
You describe yourself as being hated and I grant that this may be hyperbole to emphasize how bad your experiences are but just in case, that's not the situation...
Hate is really strong term and unless you're being told by totally different individuals that they very specifically hate you every time, then I think you may be overly stacking their feelings about you or the situation at hand. And are you actually evaluating the situation with an even hand or are you letting your emotional outlook on the situation paint everything with a galvanized brush?
It's also the case that you may not get along with some people on some games some of the time and if you like the same games, you're probably going to run into them over and over across games. I think everyone on this forum has at least one person that they don't particularly care for but having to learn to co-exist on a game with them is part of the deal and you learn ways to cope with them being there.
And just... I think it's worth examining that the only common denominator in all these experiences is you. And I'm not saying you are the problem but I am saying that you are ultimately in charge of how you react to these situations and you may be biasing your reactions with the expectation that you're going to have a bad time, you'll generally find it.
I donate platelets about once a month, which I actually enjoy doing especially in 2020. It at least feels like a positive contribution in some direction instead of helpless screaming into the void. And it has benefits like forcing me to eat enough iron-rich foods to stay on top of my donation game.
I made my last donation appointment a while back, forgetting that Saturday was Yom Kippur. It was too much trouble to cancel the appointment, so I went anyway. I just wasn't hydrated enough, which I'm now finding out three days later makes a huge difference in how quickly you bounce back from donating.
Lesson learned but Lort, I am tired.
I would like to be uploaded into a digital afterlife San Junipero style.
In that way, I'd be MUSHing my own afterlife forever.
