Best posts made by Groth

@Ganymede said:

If you say so. I don't need a well-written policy -- or any policy -- to alert me when a staff member is unfair. All that matters is what I think is fair, not what that policy may tell me is fair.

Alight. In the case of RfK specifically, Shavalyoth founded the game after having bad experiences with Staff on other games with more loose policies and decided to make her own game with clear policies to prevent what had happened in those other games. These included things like never staffing while drunk, never spying on the players with DARK, ensuring that the NPC's play by the rules and a commitment to a restorative system of justice.

Like @jaunt Shavalyoth originally decided that staff shouldn't play PC's at all and she herself never played any PC, however beyond her coder she didn't manage to get anyone else to help out as staff as they all wanted to keep playing so she compromised. As RfK was always intended to be a fairly PvP centric game the policy was designed to make Staff PC's be non-threatening to the rest of the PCs and this was iterated on a number of times.

Overall, my experience was that her policies were very successful in building trust. Not by the sheer fact they were written down but rather by the fact she unfailingly kept true to the promises she made to the playerbase and that the people she brought on to help her agreed to do the same thing. If those policies hadn't been written down I think it would have been harder for her to build that trust and harder to ensure that the members of staff she brought in would stay true to her vision.

@A-B said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

Shite, shite, shite. I did not mean to start this.

Picking fights over tangential points of principle is what I do, don't worry about it.

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

See also the rainbow-colored Mickey Mouse hats they sell during Pride Month. I think I mentioned those already but can't be bothered to check.

That is blatant profiteering merchandising. Not a statement of support. Disney would sell nazi Donald duck plushies at far right rallies if they thought it would make them net profit.

I personally find attempts to use English grammar-like syntax in CLI commands only make them even more hard to remember and type in properly.

@bear_necessities said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I still think the real issue is the incredible lack of broad-appeal games. If a couple of people just made a few Ares games that were modern day and weren't WoD, I think it'd be really successful.

I think there's a lot of pent up demand for WoD with the serial numbers filed off AKA Urban Fantasy The Mush. Let people play vampires, werewolves, fairies and wizards without all the excessively complicated rules.

@Ghost

I've seen a fair amount of complaints regarding the Netflix Triss but it seems most people overlook it just because the Netflix Geralt was so extremely on point and Triss isn't particularly central to the book plot. Meanwhile the Anya Chalotra Yennefer looks close enough to the Witcher 3 version that I don't think most viewers thought about it as a diversity thing.

@Ghost said:

The game isn't accepting force applications on this new game, yet the "Feature Characters" of Luke, Rey, and Kylo Ren are already in play. Looks like staff already done gobbled up some force slots.

"Feature Characters" are probably my biggest peeve with 'fanon' MU*. I'd rather them be NPC only or not show up at all rather then be played by favored players.

@silverfox said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

Online I can't understand how anyone is thinking or feeling. I assume that is the same for everyone else. I try to be transparent about my emotions if they are going to be an issue.

That said? Everyone is going to read things through their own filter.

So here's the problem you run into when you have a neuropsychological disorder. Because your brain is wired fundamentally differently from 98% of the rest of the population, when someone interprets you through their filter they're going to be wrong almost always.

Then they're going to use their wrong interpretation to very loudly and insistently argue that you are being manipulative because they at a fundamental level do not understand where you are coming from and they get backed up by the majority because they also do not understand.

It's intensely frustrating to a level that's hard to put into words and it happens constantly.

Ironically the solution here is to be less transparent about your emotions, always back down from any circumstance you may have to explain yourself because statistically it'll always make the situation worse. Being successful in online spaces as someone with high functioning autism involves building a mask that looks normal while not allowing any of your actual feelings and emotions through.

@Ghost said in Good TV:

@Groth Yea Triss was good stuff in terms of casting. I think the major appearance points of Triss are red hair and freckles. The casting nailed that. I got the sense that they changed her behavior a bit to avoid her being a bit of a Yen clone. It would have been a lot stranger had they made Yen less Yen.

The single wierdest casting choice to me is Fringilla because unlike a lot of other characters she has a lot of family and is supposed to hail from what is basically fantasy france. Does that mean all of Toussaint will now be sub-saharan African or what?

Is there any great MUSH out there that isn't a ragequit game of some fashion or another? You don't usually go out and create a new game if you're happy with the previous ones.

@Admiral said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@Groth I get accused of all sorts of shit constantly. The very same people who scream at me for how 'insensitive' I am being through what I think is innocuous chatter feel perfectly fine going on at length about what an asshole I am. Which is, of course. Extremely insensitive.

The hypocrisy is real.

What I'm talking about is not hypocrisy, it's lack of understanding. Whatever accusation is leveled may just be accurate most of the time and in most contexts but neuroatypical people are an atypical context. For a normally functioning human being this isn't a big deal, their interpretation being wrong 2% of the time still leaves it perfectly capable of giving them good contextual understanding the other 98% of the time.

However on the other side of the equation that 2% is their life. Those 2% of situations where interpretations go wrong is their always.

My strategy is to try to pre-cook a large amount of meals once a week so that whenever I feel like I absolutely can't cook anything, I just have to throw something into the microwave. Things like Lasagna, Chili Con Carne and Chorizo in tomato sauce all work really well.

I'd suggest alt-history Victorian London, that gives you a cosmopolitan, reasonably low tech, reasonably liberated setting.

Out of sheer nostalgia I'd like to see a 1990's setting. I want to see trench-coats, brick-phones and Usenet.

I didn't dislike the Mandalorian but I also didn't like it enough to follow it week to week.

@Coin said:

@Arkandel said:

@Groth I'll help run it, but I won't head it.

You have a bad habit of getting people to hypothesize and get into an idea and then going, "but I'm not gonna be in charge!"

We've seen what happens to people who headstaff.

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Stuff like this is usually pretty easy to explain, since I see it all the time and have had this discussion a lot. To put it simply, Asian-Americans and people who live in Asian countries are living extremely different experiences. You can't expect someone who grew up in China who has only lived in China to have the same experience and opinion as a Chinese-American. Considering that in China you grow up literally in the dominant ethnic group, why would the concept of cultural appropriation or anything like that even be something that you think about?

"Americans got mad, but people in China didn't" is just not a good argument and displays an overwhelming amount of ignorance on the part of journalists. Like, I don't see American journalists looking to see what the opinions of people who live in Lagos are about African-American issues. It just makes literally zero sense to me and has always been my least favorite line of thinking.

While I do think cultural appropriation is a real thing in a lot of contexts. When it comes to X-Americans in particular I think it's really somewhat silly and a good way to point out that silliness is to put it into a European context.

Some people from the US seem downright fetishistic about the idea of them having some degree of ancestry from Ireland, Italy, Germany or what have you and often attempt to celebrate holidays and icons in ways that are downright absurd to the people who still live there.

To me my traditions are simply things me and my family have been doing for long enough that it feels natural to continue doing them, they're not an attempt to celebrate my heritage. I have no reason to care about anyone else partaking in these traditions beyond the fact it's obviously annoying if someone uses a symbol without knowing what it means.

To tangentially address a random stranger quoted in the NYT article

I wouldn’t wear traditional Irish or Swedish or Greek dress either. There’s a lot of history behind these clothes. Sad.”

The reason you shouldn't wear the traditional Swedish dress is that it's pretty lame. The history behind it is that peasant clothing got regionally standardized during the 17th and 18th centuries for economical reasons and during mid to late 19th century there was a period where everything had to become 'gloriously Swedish' as part of the national romantic movement and suddenly peasant clothing was a national treasure. You can blame the same movement for a lot of the viking fetishism and a bunch of history revisionism I'm not sure we've fully untangled yet.

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

(I tried to hide this behind a spoiler tag, but I can't seem to figure it out. If someone wants to PM me how to do that I'll fix it. Highlighting and hitting the little eye-crossed-out icon doesn't seem to work.)

The way the spoiler tag seems to work is that your text must start on the immediate line after the spoiler tag and there can't be any blank lines or other formating tags inside the spoiler.

My stress comes because of the system and telling me that "self-care" is going to somehow fix it is insulting as fuck. The only thing that can lower my stress levels at this point is, "Here is x time, go work to figure out how to make it all fit."

From what I've read on the state of workplace psychology. The professional consensus is that workplace stress is almost always caused by the structure of the work and practically never caused by the specific worker that is stressed out. It's not a popular conclusion among employers though since it means they have to put actual money and organisational effort into doing something about it.

@Goblin said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Either or, the thing I was coming to was that on Arx, I play a PoC - undefined in a manner, but definitely PoC, which when I picked the character up, due to his desc being vague on it, I /never even considered/. I immediately looked for pictures I enjoyed, and ANYTHING that came up, was indeed, white males. I belatedly had a conversation with one of his IC relatives, his cousin, who had a PoC desc/picture, and I had that unsure feeling of whether I should change or not, and decided NOT to at the time.

I decided to change his PB now, and oh boy - you're right. There's no reliable way of searching. If you search for black swordsman you do indeed get something else entirely. It should ABSOLUTELY be as you describe, and it annoyed the fuck out of me, and I mean, I'm as pasty white as it gets, and it gave me an eye-opener. Another one.

Either or, I did find a nice picture. My character is not black, but a PoC anyway (also I do feel a bit unsure about terminology, I am not American and I don't mean any offense if I chose the wrong words, feel free to educate me if I'm being dumb.) A picture that I am chuffed to bits about, that fits the character description perfectly. (Also to be sure you understand, he is not described as black - but black hair, dark olive skin.)

For olive skin, you can usually search for Italian/Spanish/Greek/Arabic etc. Also Bing image search seems a lot better then Google image search but you get a bunch of wargaming miniatures and yu-gi-oh cards either way.

Cryptocurrency is a really fascinating way to spend a tremendous amount of electricity to achieve absolutely nothing.