Best posts made by Ganymede

@sparks

Fixed.

@thenomain said in Looking for an Artist, actually willing to pay...:

The real point is, "how do we know what's a reasonable price"?

There's lots of ways to determine this. That's why I'm an economist, not a business major.

(That's right, motherfuckers, I'm more than just a lawyer.)

You can take this to the bank, but how one determines the reasonable fee of a lawyer is far more of a calculable figure than what happens in the medical field.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

My company sometimes gives us $25 gift certificates to the company 'zazzle' store.

that's our 'special bonus'

@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Current practice makes me concerned that someone can post something very inflammatory/inappropriate and be just fine, but responses to that initial thing get swatted, leaving the original nastiness to stand. If this comes in the form of actually deleting these posts, what we have is somebody saying something ugly and no rebuttals being present for it. That's a recipe for disaster.

In my experience, other members have been quick to flag the offending post. That helps us quickly get to the offending post. That said, yes, if the flagged post isn't the offending post and is, rather, a responding post, then we've got an issue.

That requires us, as staff, to try to identify and determine what the offending post is, or ought to be.

An alternative, I suppose, is to put out the general warning post that things are, or have been, out of hand, and any posts thereafter get deleted. But I'm not sure if that addresses the problem, or if that would, for whatever reason, encourage to be as shitty as they can as quickly as possible.

@HelloRaptor said:

I'm pretty much the opposite. I like WoD, but even a WoD game is going to get a pass if it's set in the past. I can handle alt-present, or possible future, but if you try to set a game much before the 90s I'm just eeeeeenh.

How dare you disrespect New Wave Requiem.

I was Raimond the 1st.

@faraday said in The Hockey Thread:

I'll just leave this here for @Auspice

I think there's an "I" missing in there.

@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I think basing moderation primarily on reports is a really bad idea, and if that's the way it's going to be, I do not think there is any particular action that y'all can take as a result that's going to actually avoid making it more toxic than it is right now. Deleting posts is just going to make it worse.

You flag posts. We go to it, we look at it, we talk about it.

Other members do this too. Most of the time, they are finding our good friends that just won't leave us alone. (Thank you!) Other times, it is to identify posts that they believe cross the line. I can assure you that I read these when I get online to do so. And reporting members have good eyes and good minds, and often aren't even involved in whatever kerfuffle is being perpetrated.

If you read my post, then you should have picked up that my concern is that we have to figure out what the offending post is. Sometimes it is the flagged post; other times, it is a post to which the flagged post is a response; and other times, I can't figure out who the asshole is that started the dogpile, or if any post even crosses the line at all. And, if you can't tell, the three of us don't always agree on what crosses the line and what doesn't.

We have given the members the ability to report posts. We have never said "we will never act unless a post has been flagged." We have acted many times without prompting. So, we don't expect members here to report problems. That said, if members do flag the posts, we get that notification, and it allows us to hop to the post at issue immediately, which saves us some time.

We're not stupid. We know there are biases. And I'd like to think we've been careful not to act where we believe biases may be at play.

We do what we can. We're not perfect, and demanding constant, prompt vigilance is absurd. You say we're half-assing it, and that's your opinion, but I don't often stick around doing things with my free time (or, in this case, work time) for other people without compensation where I get the impression that: (A) people don't think I'm putting effort into what I do; and (B) people think I'm incompetent. In fact, I tell my paying clients that if, for any reason or at any time, they are unsatisfied with my performance, they can notify me and I will find them alternate counsel.

If you want the keys to the car to drive this thing, then I'll talk to Arkandel and you can have my set. If whatever sanity or insanity I have brought to the job is intolerable, then I would rather remove myself than to point fingers or discuss further.

@surreality

I see what you're getting at, and I understand the concern. That's why it was a suggestion only. I don't think it's a particularly good one; if it was, we might have already tried it.

@rizbunz said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

Is there a WoD game out there where people are having FUN anymore? Where players are actively allowed, and encouraged, to make changes to the world around them with their characters?

I'm having fun with the limited time I have at Fate's Harvest.

To answer your real question, though, I honestly don't believe there was ever an Old World of Darkness game that was not rife with the shit you want to avoid. All you could do was find a place that appealed to you, and try to get some good mileage out of it. I liked my time playing at and running Due Rewards, as well as Denver by Night, but those two places have stories.

@insomnia

I play Deirdre on Fallcoast, a Sanctified Vampire. I haven't played in a few days because I've been fuck busy and my ankle is all sprained and shit.

I may also be playing a Geist in the near future.

@Cupcake said in RL things I love:

I live in a house with other women and a 16 year old boy, and whenever somebody needs to do something like move furniture or open a jar, the call out is: "Let's get down to business to defeat the Huns!"

Someone pointed this out to me, and I love it:

Let's
Get down to
Business
To defeat the Huns.

@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I'm asking for consistency and clarity.

You can always expect that I will try to be as clear as I can in my communications.

But you cannot expect that I will always agree with Auspice and Arkandel, and I don't. I've made this clear countless times. Expecting the same result from three judges in the same jurisdiction with the same set of facts is reasonable, but in practice it is highly unlikely so I don't.

@apos said in A new platform?:

I don't think it's unrelated though. Like MUDs and MUSHes get grouped together interchangeably on a lot of sites but we know there's some really core philosophical differences in how they are presented for a lot of them, with a lot of MUDs being a MMO writ small while a MUSH being a tabletop writ large. This also means a different approach towards new players, where the former is going to be a lot more automated because a reactive environment is a core part of their game philosophy, while the latter is about getting players into RP situations with other players.

I disagree.

My experience on MUDs has largely been negative. I had difficulty acclimating to the commands and the system. I read over the manuals and help files, but it wasn't clicking. And when I asked about it, I was told brusquely that everything is crystal clear.

Like technical manuals.

While MUSHes are more reliant on having a welcoming atmosphere, having a welcoming atmosphere, in my opinion, is the sine qua non of whether any MUD or MUSH survives. You could have staff and people creating plots and battles to play through, but if they are all dickbags the place is going to fall apart.

Updated again.

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

As a warning, tho, BGG is a 'fun' place to find a festering cesspool of the sort of guys who think gaming should be for men and only for men.

Unsurprisingly, I heard that their speed-dating meetings are a veritable sausage party.

Look out, ladies!

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

If you think something belongs there, put it there. Delete things that belong nowhere.

Let's not pretend that the volume of garbage that piles up in the Hog Pit doesn't stink up the rest of this place.

What surreality says rings true. There are people here that have, in my opinion, gone on crusades against others to assassinate their reputation on a board with little or no accountability. We could shove all of the mean-spirited jibes and personal insults into the closet, and we could tell everyone "hey, it's okay to be shitty in the closet, but be nice out here because the folks that cannot or unable to defend themselves will surely not be affected by whatever vomit you spew in there," but we all know -- we all should know -- that this is not the case.

If we're a community, then we're a community with this weird fucking warehouse out on the docks where people are able to engage in the vilest sort of behavior so long it stays in the warehouse, like barebacking sheep. The problem is that, like Fight Club, expecting no consequences from that is foolish, and the sheep are understandably anxious.

@the-tree-of-woe said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

I have issues with the Circle of the Crone as a covenant because the basic Mother's Army really is just "Wicca, but Evil" and as much as people like to rag on Wicca, it's pretty much benevolent and that is some lazy shit, along with the 1e depiction of the Lancea et Sanctum being some pretty heavy reflexive lashing-out against Judeo-Christian religion.

When I read The Mother's Army, I thought of them more like the cultists in Crichton's Eaters of the Dead.

Wicca does not have the monopoly on Goddess-worship.

I played Sam Mitchell (Inactive). It was tough to get RP back when I played him/her/it. But now I'm back on Fate's Harvest, and I'm going to try to give it another go.

It's going well so far.

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

Take me out for pho and drinks, Gany

Babe, you know where I live. Swing by, I'll put the kids in bed, and we'll drink and pho-k all night long.

@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Different rules? IDK how to say what I'm trying to get at. I don't disagree with you. I just think that it should be allowed to warn people about folks like Sovereign.

I get what you're getting at.

I think that you can very easily warn people about folks like Sovereign without wandering into Hog Pit territory. In fact, I've read very descriptive accounts of him that, although stating vile and despicable things, very accurately recounts the vile and despicable things that Sovereign said and did.

It's not slanderous or defamatory if it's true.