Best posts made by Ganymede

@BlondeBot said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I have never heard of 'Sorry, I'm not coming in today because I'm volunteering.' being an acceptable excuse to miss work in any vocation, for any gender.

The disconnect may be that I work in a profession where the concept of "sick days" and "vacation days" are mashed together.

Many attorneys don't get "sick days" or "vacation days." We work in small offices which run on the concept of getting billable hours paid. The more hours, the more money, the better off the firm. Larger firms or public entities are going to work differently, as do corporate counsel, but for the most part the legal profession in mid-sized cities operate on a "get hours get paid" basis.

Frankly, I think the concept of "sick days" and "vacation days" is antiquated and should be abolished, but that's another topic for another day.

So, where "sick days" and "vacation days" aren't used or important, people just take time off to handle their outside obligations. Around here, this includes fucking snow delays and other bullshit that comes with spawning. It is not uncommon to have firms lauding the volunteer work done by associates and partners (when they could be in the office), and at the same time lecturing women about how important it is to commit to their firms or suffer career failure. And the messages between the genders are sometimes offensively biased: a man goes off with the national guard to Afghanistan for three months, and dumps his work on his fellow associates, is a hero; however, a woman who has to spend a week with her sick child is somehow not committed to her firm because she couldn't find babysitter arrangements.

"Sorry, I'm not coming in today because I'm volunteering to help the people affected by the recent tornadoes" has been common over here in southern Ohio as of late, but man if I haven't heard stories of women reamed for asking for a day off to take care of their sick kid.

@Trix said in Mobbing in Text Games:

There's this thing called 'academic mobbing' that can be freaky accurate when applied to how people behave in mud communities.

We sometimes call this "dogpiling."

People shouldn't be quiet about this - or delude themselves into thinking they haven't been part of the problem with compliant silence or outright shunning.

People who engage to defend others are sometimes accused of "white knighting." Others may stay away because there seems to be no purpose to engaging with the mob. Yet others will simply snipe from the sideline or joke to make light of the situation. And still others might divert attention with a non-sequitur.

Are there any universal conduct rules that anyone would like or have liked seeing across the board for all text games?

Sure, but no one listens to me.

1. If you've nothing to add, don't.
2. If someone else has said what you wanted to say, let it stand.
3. If someone has said something incorrect or false, correct them.
4. Point out or report bad behavior when you see it.

How does handling of disputes make for better social environments and which games get it right?

Good question. How many games "handle disputes right"? I will posit to you that no game has, or will, ever get it right, and demanding them to do so is tomfoolery. Even the most reasonable cadre of staff will make mistakes to someone's detriment.

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

I also do, for as new an attorney as I am, very good work. So I am given particular allowances by my bosses, who happen to be my friends, who founded our firm when we all said to hell with the public defender office. I come in three times a week for half days and telecommute the rest of the time. Nobody else has that luxury. So given that I spend so much time at home already...

Do you win cases? If the answer is "yes," then I really don't give a fuck what others think about the accommodations you get.

Do you bill sensibly and properly? If the answer is "yes," then I really don't give two fucks what others think about the accommodations you get.

Do you need these reasonable accommodations to function, plus some extra time to deal with shit outside your control that will affect your ability to succeed? If the answer is "yes," then I really don't give three fucks what others think about the accommodations you get.

We are in a results-driven profession. We are expected to win. As a shareholder, it is my job to get the best and the brightest to win. And if that means I have to let you wear a headband with a horn sticking out the front, so be it.

Client: Why does she look like a unicorn?
Me: Would you care if she won your case?
Client: No.
Me: Then meet your new attorney, Twilight Sparkle, and watch her do her thing.

What you have isn't a luxury; it is a reasonable accommodation arguably mandated by the ADA. And as a result of that accommodation, your firm has the rough equivalent of a nuclear fucking weapon. My new associate may not be terribly savvy with the Civil Rules, but she eats witnesses alive on the stand while I gleefully sit in the first chair.

@Tinuviel said in TS - Danger zone:

In the vague example I gave, I'd treat it more like... well, prostitution as it is depicted on television. Yes, you're doing wrong. But this big thing you're reporting is way more important to deal with right now.

ETA: I wouldn't want anyone to feel that they would be punished for reporting a serious incident, under almost any circumstances.

In my little area of the world there is an active campaign promoting the public shaming of johns in an effort to stave off prostitution. Perhaps surprisingly I am a strong opponent of this movement.

Anti-prostitution laws do not address the underlying problem. Whereas there are some prostitutes that are actually slaves, by drugs or intimidation, to men, the majority of them are adults who have entered the business to get money. Usually, this is because these adults, for their personal reasons, cannot hold a "regular" job or have no marketable skills. Prostitution isn't the safest of adult professions, but it has a flexible schedule and does not require devoting hours of time, as exotic dancing might.

Shaming the customers will cut off the demand. Cutting off the demand puts financial pressure on the prostitutes, which forces them into riskier situations to make money. That will push them to the pimps, which only allows them to profit more.

Anyhow.

I guess what I'm saying here is that there are unintended consequences to some of staff rules. Stigmatizing TS and other adult situations in games makes it easier for stalkers and abusers to get their way. Being open about what we do in our spare time allows us to make connections, spot the bad people, and ostracize them.

It becomes harder and harder not to shout at a grown-ass adult when they undermine your attempts to discipline your child, and then act like nothing happened.

Like, I get that you are a PA, but I’m the one with the psychology and teaching degrees. You stick to fixing them when they are sick and I will raise them into responsible adults that aren’t entitled fuckheads.

White people.

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

As a boy, I was allowed to run all over the place, play with whomever I wanted to, go hiking in the woods, exploring caves, break into old abandoned houses, whatever I wanted and no one batted an eyelash and you know what? None of us ever died or got kidnapped or had anything bad happens to us just because we were outside in the world.

You are familiar with the concept of privilege, I presume.

Parents should be there for their children but let children develop at their own pace because the worst thing that can happen probably won't happen, but if you act like it will you're probably doing almost as much harm.

And what about children who are mentally or emotionally less-developed? Is it wise to let them wander freely in a world which expects them to be different than they are?

Parents live in a world wholly different from people who have not had the same responsibility thrust upon them by an uncaring society that finds it permissible to disseminate the most ignorant advice as sagely. I'd rather this conversation of past traumas and philosophical hypotheses die a sudden death.

@Seamus said in RL Anger:

My vent du jour is.. He was impeached, but likely won't even get kicked out of office, not that the one to replace him is any better, but really... It just pisses me off.

He can't pardon anyone while impeached.

Stretch the process. Deny him the ability to pardon his cohorts. Vote him out. Prosecute the lot of them.

@surreality said in Model Policies?:

Culture varies from game to game.

Being able to explain the cultural differences between games is largely an exercise in futility, if we presume that people can have their own understanding of what "being excellent" means even on the same game.

I appreciate players who want guidelines to follow so that they can avoid "trouble," but having an online social faux-pas might as well be added to "death" and "taxes" as an inevitability we all need to be gracious about.

Knowing that everyone is going to make a mistake about something largely means that the overseers of games should act thoughtfully and maturely when confronting a situation. This goes back to what I said about the quality of staff as opposed to the quality of policies. Staffers who are dogmatic and policy-driven have, and will, let egregious things happen because "they were not against the rules." Anecdotally, this happens more often in my experience than incidences of staffers taking harsh, egregious action against a player for something that isn't contrary to some unwritten set of mores that persist across games, which may euphemistically be called "common sense."

I think we all know people here which we trust implicitly and are well-regarded based on their online persona. Most, if not all of us, would play on a game run by Faraday, for example, even if her conduct policy read something like: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. And when Admiral, in some other thread, asked who was running a new game, I found this to be the best question a player can ask.

Nothing is magically intuitive, yes, but policies aren't the only or best solution. I think the best solution is to recognize that a player making a faux-pas is a person, that people make mistakes, but that there are certain mistakes that breach common sense and that these mistakes cannot be condoned if you want a player population to remain. And the best way to communicate this sort of policy is to tell players: we will do what we believe to be fair and consistent to the best of our ability to provide a welcoming player community.

@Selira said in Good TV:

FUCK YOU, SHORESY

"Fuck you, Reilly. I made your mum so wet, Trudeau deployed a 24-hour infantry unit to stack sand bags around my bed."

@Ghost said in Well, this sums up why I RP:

And why do YOU guys RP?

I need a distraction.

I have too many goals and ambitions. Getting online to play a little bit settles my nerves and reminds me that I don't have to be beautiful or productive or powerful or successful to be happy.

I don't know where else to put my thoughts right now. Normally I share personal matters on my Facebook page, but my network includes a lot of family and I don't want to freak them out.

Ohio's Governor just said that the state expects the pandemic to peak around May 1.

So far, Ohio is 16th in the nation with 704 confirmed cases. This is good, given that Ohio is the 7th in the nation for population. We have been in lock-down mode for almost two weeks. It does not sound like a long time. So far, though, our firm has suffered a 50% decrease in billable hours. This is partly due to the court system pushing civil cases back. It is also likely due to our corporate clients pulling back the reins on moving forward with certain legal matters.

May 1.

Checked with our office manager today. At the moment, we can maybe swing the next payroll. That's after the 25% reduction to wages implemented across the board. We have obligations in the form of vendor contracts and company cars on leases that cannot be broken willy-nilly. And there appears to be no solution: we simply must get the courthouses open again so that business can continue if the firm hopes to survive.

May 1 will be the peak.

Nothing in the proposed bill in the Senate will help. I have examined our commercial general liability policy thoroughly, and I cannot find coverage for this particular business interruption. The state isn't offering anything at the moment. We are currently on a lease for our space and have no assets to leverage as collateral, and it is doubtful that the SBA loan we may qualify for will cover for another month of expenses.

May 1 will not be the end.

I try not to let the bleakness take over, but it is difficult. We may have to furlough everyone, presuming that the Senate bill is passed and signed, so that they can get unemployment. But that means our paralegals, who are billing what work they can, will no longer be generating income for the firm. It's the only solution we have at the moment.

Dayton is strong enough to weather this.

But there will be violence. Maybe not around where I live or in the streets of the city in which I work, but there will be violence. New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles will burn as the cuts dig deeper and deeper. The new bill will cover maybe one or two weeks of expenses -- that's it. Do the people in Washington D.C. understand what it costs to live in a major U.S. city these days? $1,200 is nothing, but it is enough to buy a gun and some ammunition.

There will be dark times ahead.

@surreality said in Well, this sums up why I RP:

• no 'I have to make money off of this somehow' pressures at all (which is a common problem with any other creative thing I do, considering how my family gets; I have lost many creative hobbies to their pressures to monetize them over the years, at which point I stop doing that thing because it's no longer fun or relaxing)

Riding on this point: MUSHing, for the most part, is free. That means that it is a hobby that everyone can enjoy without having to invest a whole lot of resources. So you get a wide smattering of people who play, which is always nice to engage in.

@surreality

I could admire cute pussies all day.

I mean kitties, of course.

Do not actually post pictures of —

— fuck.

@Ominous said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

Laboriously trying to mechanically mimic a thoroughly normal and average person is what you should do here and when not in character.

To be fair, if you are all attempting to be normal and average then I will be over in a corner crying or something.

@Cupcake said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I'm not doing this for others, I'm doing this for me.

And I'm behind you on the choice, if that means anything to you.

I saw a message through Facebook that seems appropriate:

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

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

So, I don't care if this is considered virtue signalling, white knighting or white saviour.

Calling out racism isn't white-knighting; it's something to be done.

Virtue-signaling is a specific behavior to draw attention to one's moral character. For example, "I hate how the rich take advantage of the poor!" is a statement as to one's moral character, not as to how that exploitation is wrong. Another example, "I would never treat a person of <whatever ethnicity, race, religion, etc.> that way!"; like, thanks, no one asked you what you would do.

@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

Of course there are everyday heroes, but as a medic iRL I can assure you that most responses would be pretty dull to RP. A single season of a show like Chicago Fire is basically everything exciting that happened in every fire department across the US in the span of a year.

People: OMG, is being a lawyer like it is on Law and Order?

@silverfox said in The Work Thread:

Crying signaled 'oh shit. Okay. Yes. We will step in now.'

No offense to your principals, but this is bullshit.

If you're a partner, owner, or firm, your job description includes being able and ready to step in at any time to assist before your staff come to you in tears. That is the price you pay for being a damn boss.

Like, I'm new at being boss, but I know what I expect. Some motherfucker put my assistant into tears and I called him immediately to terminate him as a client. He backpedaled faster than Roger Clemens at an inquest.

Everything begins and ends with the boss. That's why you get to be called bad muthafucka. You want your troops to march into battle for you? Battle for them twice as hard.

@carma said in MU Things I Love:

I don't know if there's a MU memes thread, but my fortune cookie today is eerily accurate advice.

... in bed.