Posts made by Groth

@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.

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

@Groth I feel like it would really benefit you to stop, take like half a day, come back tonight or tomorrow to re-read this series of replies, and then gauge whether it benefits you or not to keep replying to this series of comments.

It doesn't benefit me but I have this very faint hope that MSB may one day become ever so slightly less shitty to people who struggle with understanding social cues instead of reveling in it like it's some kind of virtue.

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

I think you might be surprised to find out how many people on the forum are on the spectrum, or have a close relationship with someone that does.

It still does not mean that folks will not be shown the door for inappropriate behavior.

You can have empathy for someone's struggle or having been there yourself, and still show them the door when their behavior gets to the point it is detrimental to others on your game or more than you can handle.

As I have said it isn't fair. But it also is not kind to tell people that they should expect accommodations from places that are extremely unlikely to give them.

Is there any reason why you do not organized a game that can accommodate behavioral issues to give those that cannot or will not learn to moderate them, perhaps with more concrete and published boundaries, a mu they can play on that where behavior won't be a stumbling block? Seems like you are passionate about the subject, have ideas on how others should do this, and seem willing to tolerate a lot of behavior others wouldn't. Why don't you step up? Maybe if you showed others it could be done and how, people might be willing to try your strategies once they see it in action and working.

Because it is also the case that many people do try, but have limited success, especially when the behaviors involved are lashing out, or extreme emotional distress or neediness coupled with angry lashing out when someone puts down a boundary.

It's not about tolerating more behaviors. No matter how deep your understanding and patience of whatever issues someone may have, you can't run a functional game if people can't behave within a certain standard and quite frankly there's nothing about being on the spectrum that makes it particularly hard to follow reasonably clear rules. My problem isn't with people being shown the door if they're unable to behave, my problem is with the flimsy justifications I keep seeing for treating them badly before and after they're shown the door.

All I'm asking you is to stop making light of a disability and inventing justifications for making light of a disability. It's really not that high of a bar.

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

Not having the skills or ability or capacity to deal with something isn't the same as not caring about another human being.
"Join the club" is not mocking; it's a frustrated expression of 'yes I am feeling that way, too'.

What I'm trying to get across is that you're not feeling the same thing. While there exist a shared cause in isolation, it's a very different kind of situation.

Whatever frustration or suffering you may feel over not being able to do the things you're used to doing or meeting the people you're used to meeting. They're not the things someone like me feels because I wasn't doing those things or meeting those people in the first place.

For someone like me the struggle is more fundamental, it's things like 'How do I connect to another human being at any level?'. 'How do I maintain a relationship of any kind?'. It's hard for me to empathize with a lot of the frustrations expressed in relation to social distancing because they involve feelings and experiences I have not been capable of having. It doesn't make them any less real but I think it's clear it's a very different kind of experience, not in the sense that one of them is more severe then the other but rather in the sense that the problems and frustrations are different and can't be directly compared.

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

Absolutely no one is making fun of anyone for having disabilities. What you initially quoted in no way is an example of making fun of someone for having a disability.
@surreality said
"Join the fucking club!"

As fascinating it is to watch people on this forum keep inventing excuses to not care about people on the spectrum it grows rather tiresome. I'm not asking you to be an unpaid online psychologist, I'm merely asking you to avoid comparing a lifelong disability to temporary social distancing. I'm asking you to not encourage making light of a condition someone was born with and has to deal with for their entire life.

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

There are endless permutations of this and all of them are real. I would ask you, how dare you delegitimize the suffering those people are going through?

Suffering doesn't make it any more appropriate to make fun of disabilities. Suffering doesn't make the comparison any more valid. I'm not delegitimizing their suffering, I'm saying it's not comparable because it should not and can not be compared and I'm not going to indulge it being used an excuse to mock the disabled.

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

@Groth In a normal period of time? I leave my house about once or twice a month, typically for medical appointments. I talk to precisely three people online -- barely ever. In person or on the phone, only my husband and parents. My husband works out of state for the majority of the week. We do one trip annually, through which I spend the entire time freaking out. That's been 'the norm' for roughly a decade.

I actually know exactly what I'm talking about, but nice job trying to tell me you know my circumstances better than I do.

Then why invite the comparison or give it a veil or legitimacy? You should be well aware of the fact that what the 'vast majority' are dealing with isn't remotely the same. It's like insinuating that stubbing your toe means you don't need to show any empathy to someone born without a leg.

While there are people out there that will act like that, it's shitty behavior and we should call it out as shitty. It's straight up mocking someone for their disability.

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

People who have zero experience with isolation are already struggling, and I have a genuine non-snark concern that if you talk about how you're in one of these spaces to escape RL isolation and expect some indulgence on the part of staff or other players because of a combination of anxiety and isolation, you are going to get sledgehammered by people screaming, "Join the fucking club!" as it is something the vast majority are dealing with.

With all due respect I suspect you and most others on this forum have absolutely no concept for how far isolation can go and it comes across as incredibly shallow to compare a few months of reduced contact with your friends with the kind of multi-decade long stretches of time some people on the spectrum isolate themselves from most human contact.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

@Groth - It's more that the game seemed very heavy on analysing characters' feelings and describing them in minute detail and I struggle with that, it embarrasses me and I don't know what to say, not when there's nothing happening except feelings, and we were discussing how much of that was really necessary and advice about ways of doing it, quite productively at first. But I got despondent and wailed a bit (as I say, I had other things on my mind at the time and should never have been there, only I was that desperate for something to take my mind off things).

My solution to that problem is to mostly play sociopaths. I'm not well equipped to describe many common emotional reactions so I play characters which don't have them.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

I wasn't told, that's the thing. I was worrying about something to do with RPing, whether I could manage what seemed to be required, and we had a bit of a discussion about it, and because I was on edge I went on and on wittering about it, and wondering nervously whether they were getting impatient but as I said that's my permanent state in chats at all times by now hence it told me nothing, and they suddenly threw me out.

So if this had anything to do with the rules of the game. I can tell you that no game admin particularly wants to get entangled into arguments about technicalities because it's not helpful, they don't want to give anyone the impression they've managed to get admin approval for some sort of undesirable behavior.

If you want to do some specific thing you can usually get an answer about if that specific thing is allowed or not and if you want someone to explain the intentions of the game they'll usually be happy to do that. However no one is going to want to help you clarify perfectly sharp borders because they don't exist and people asking for them are usually up to trouble.

@Ominous said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

I would make clear that @A-B is in no way entitled to an appeal or a reconsideration, and, if they do reach back out to Spirit Lake's staff in a few months, they should expect a 'No' reply and, if they are unable to accept a 'No' reply, they should not reach out.

That is true and while we're making excessively clear clarifications, I suppose we could make clear this goes for any kind of asking. You always need to be able to accept the answer 'No'.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

The thing is, I don't KNOW when I'm doing something wrong. I might be nervously wondering if I'm doing something wrong, but by now that's my permanent state all the time when I'm saying anything at all in any kind of chat thing, hence it doesn't tell me anything. (In fact being in such a yammering state of nerves is probably half the reason why I end up getting into a state in chats and being thrown out as an undesirable.

If this is something that happens to you with any kind of regularity it's a sign that what you need first and foremost is to find an ability to take a step back and dial yourself a notch down. Step away from the keyboard and take a walk around your apartment, regain your perspective.

Chances are you're trying too hard, that you're treating places like Spirit Lake as something they were never intended to be. You don't need to become a master of reading between the lines of human communication if you just stick to using the chat for its intended purpose rather then hoping to be 'successful'.

@Derp said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

That was your choice. As was the other thing that got you banned, that you now wanna fight about?

Not a good look. And definitely not a winning strategy. You're doing yourself no favors here really.

I would just let it go. You basically just used the mu-equivalent of the 'Well she was asking for it by wearing that skirt' defense for your (ongoing) bad behavior. Not a way to win friends or influence people, man.

What do you mean now want to fight about? I don't know what thread you've been reading but in the thread I've been reading AB has only talked about the actual ban in one post and everything else has been them attempting to explain themselves with little success.

Being upset about being banned is fine, being upset about not feeling understood is fine, using MSB as the place to communicate for lack of better options is also fine. Now as it happens if you're visibly upset on MSB, then the locals will descend on you like a swarm of piranhas because that's been the MSB culture ever since it was created.

From a strategical perspective, complaining about your ban after it happens is never going to help you, regardless if you agree or not they presumably banned you for a reason and that reason will be fresh on their minds. If you want to play on that particular game your best bet is to wait a few months and ask for a second chance.

In terms of avoiding getting banned in general, just remember that a MUSH is just a place for people that want to have fun role-playing together. Don't make the OOC environment weird and uncomfortable, avoid being excessively intense or drag politics in where they don't belong or harass people. Focus on the character you want to play and the stories you want to create together with the other players and you shouldn't have any problems being accepted. Don't talk about your RL issues because a lot of your fellow players are on the MUSH to avoid their RL issues.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

It occurs to me - is screaming and howling in tears OK in character, usually, in MUs? Because my role-playing characters are usually very mechanical and colourless indeed and bore me and everyone else, owing, I think, to me laboriously trying to mechanically mimic a thoroughly normal and average person with nothing particular on their mind. Hence maybe a bit of wealth redistribution wouldn't go amiss there, if you reckon there's a chance of it being OK for a character to get upset!

Being dramatic and hysterical in-character can often be seen as a good thing as long as it's appropriate and not overdone. Being dramatic and hysterical out of character is almost always seen as a bad thing because no one wants to spend their hobby time being an unpaid mental health counselor.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

I do think (and I want to say this in front of everybody) that before banning somebody without warning, it would be only decent to actually tell them that you want them to stop rabbiting on and see if that does it. (Especially somebody who has already told you that they have Asperger's syndrome, and therefore a tin ear for guessing what somebody is not saying just from the tone of their wording.)

Yes, I am angry.

My best advice is to try to avoid saying unnecessary things and come to terms with the fact that if you don't get along with the staff then you won't enjoy playing there. I tend to use mudstats to get an idea for which games are still around and active though it doesn't track Ares games like spirit lake as far as I know.

@Macha said in The Work Thread:

I am not sure what to do. I know if I let them shove me into this role, I will be miserable and my mental health will suffer greatly. But what I don't know, is if I refuse to take this role that is not my job, and they lay me off, etc, if I can qualify for unemployment.

I feel frustrated and helpless and... yeah.

Since this is an important decision with potentially large consequences, you should probably take this question to a relevant lawyer in your state.

My limited understanding based on googling around is that US employers have a very wide leeway in offering you new roles usually based on putting "other duties as assigned" somewhere in your job contract but for purposes of unemployment you only have a duty to accept 'suitable employment' the definition of which varies state to state.

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

I'm talking about stuff like pea guacamole, carrot hummus, or the latest nonsense I've seen, using bicarbonate soda to strip the skin off of beans and then scooping them out of the pot at a gentle simmer instead of cooking/enjoying them as they are. Just stop. Why? Why?

Maybe they just have a lot of time on their hands?

A nice thing about cooking is that once you develop a good feel for the basic process and the way flavors work, you can use most recipes as a source of inspiration rather then something you're bound by. Use their good ideas and toss away the bad ones.

@insomniac7809 said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I think that, for all the fine lines we might want to put around what is or isn't "white knighting," it's gone the same way as "virtue signaling" and "SJW" in that it's now just a way for the Tyches of the world to attack anyone left of Mussolini as fake.

While it can be argued about how beneficial it is for language and society to have sarcastic terminology. I think both white knight and SJW originated as sarcastic terms on the internet. There hasn't been a popular non-ironic usage to undermine, they've almost always been used as a way to attack people of whom you disapprove.

I've never actually been a fan of Sudoku before but for whatever reason this channel 'Cracking the Cryptic' showed up in my youtube recommendations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAyZ9K2EBF0

It's almost hypnotizing to watch this guys enthusiasm as he solves mindbogglingly hard puzzles in minutes while apologizing for being slow. He has such a pure love for the process, the puzzles and the people who make them that I've found myself watching for hours and hours. I definitely recommend watching him even if you don't normally like puzzles because his genuine joy is infectious.