Posts made by gryphter

How to Alcohol, in 2 Easy Steps:

1. Keep Irish whiskey in the freezer. I like a 15 year Redbreast, but Jameson will treat you right too.

2. Drink when thirsty.

Looking for me. I lost touch with myself some time ago and I'm hoping we can reconnect. Can anyone help me find myself?

@Sunny That's very interesting. I guess I need to think a little deeper about our supposed doom. Perhaps I'm just being a little too cynical.

@Sunny I'm not invested enough in the point to research a bunch, especially when I'd rather be wrong. It's just my sense that there are a lot of areas where we might be found lacking, such as protection of minors. I say this as someone who once was a minor who failed catastrophically to be protected from a bunch of wild shit on internet text games. No ragerts, but probably not ideal, and as an adult I sure as hell don't want to explore certain themes with a child. To solve a problem like that in any kind of real way we'd have to start verifying who it is that connects to a game.

@Sunny I'll give you that, but it's close enough that I have an interest in how it's being protected.

I think often we don't pull some of these threads because we sense that the correct application of the law would annihilate our hobby's ability to exist. It's doubtful we would be able to satisfy the requirements of the law, if the law deigned to truly care, in more than one area.

Right out of the gate the glaring lack of protection for PII and the equally glaring lack of vetting and accountability for those that can access it.

Does it matter what the intended use is? For example, what if it's staff's policy on an Ares game to monitor public scenes so they can delight and amaze by GMing into them at random?

Now what if they do the same thing, but with private scenes? A private scene isn't necessarily a TS scene, just one you don't want any uninvited players to join. Would you want a way to demarcate those? One could always be politic and call the flag 'No GM', even though we'll all know it really means 'TS'.

I'm aware that I'm planting my flag firmly on one extreme of this issue, but for me it's all in. This might be somewhat informed by games I played on in my early years in the hobby, where this was the clearly-stated expectation.

I also admit my understanding of the issue is somewhat limited by my own imagination here. I can't imagine what I could page, @mail, messenger, or pose that I would need to consider sensitive or private. I have no shame. Conversely I also can't imagine why I would want to watch anyone else TS, or even RP out a normal scene I have no connection to.

I'll admit that anyone who can talk their way into a wizbit having access to my PII has always made me uncomfortable. When someone could copy/paste a bunch of sensitive information out to who knows where, it seems like we can and should do better than 'well they won't though'.

@Arkandel There's something between these two ideas that bothers me, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. I won't go back to the analogy, but it feels weird to me to log onto somebody's game and expect privacy. It's theirs and I feel like they have a right to monitor it and control for content.

I think the weirdness happens somewhere around that important word: expectations. There's currently no process at all, really, that talks about how much or how little privacy you might get so as to set those expectations. Given that, I can see where somebody who walks in with an expectation of privacy -- which never gets challenged at the door -- might take it poorly to learn later on that the reality is very different.

When a person enters an environment where they're being recorded out in the real world, they typically legally need to be informed of that. It seems reasonable to expect similar treatment here.

To my thinking, when I log onto a game, a few important things happen. First, I'm connecting to the infrastructure of a system that someone else owns. They pay money to own it; there is no reasonable expectation, therefore, that anything that happens there is 'mine'. I bring some of my stuff with me, like my PII, and I can't argue with anything said here about how we should be protecting that more effectively -- I should be able to maintain control over my stuff that I brought, or if that's impossible I should have some recourse to feel satisfied about what's being done to protect it for me.

I begin to RP, generating content within this setting which is someone else's creative property. Elements of my content are my original creative product, but they're impossible to divorce from those setting elements somebody else crafted. Who owns what, intellectually speaking? If I create a character from the ground up as being a part of that setting I don't own, and the person who does own it has to approve my integrating what I've written into it, it starts to feel like a vanishingly small portion of this can be called 'mine' creatively. Reduce this even further if I'm playing a roster character, which I far more often do. Sure, there continues to be an original creative element in how I voice that character and move them around the world, but every single shred of it is tied to the stuff that's not mine. It's partly mine, but mostly not.

Now I have this character I probably don't own on a game I definitely don't, and as time goes by I become a part of the community with the other people that play characters they don't own there. Some of these people are my friends, and I want them to feel safe and have a good time, getting to be involved in stories about the game world that isn't theirs. There are other people on the game too, and some of them might have it in mind to make things unsafe and/or not fun for others. I want me and my friends to be protected from that, and to have some recourse for satisfaction when that protection fails.

For all these reasons, I expect staff on a game to exercise their powers to observe. I accept it, because frankly I'm the one with a hand out here, asking to participate in something that's not mine."Sure, but I'm going to keep an eye on what you're up to" seems perfectly reasonable to me as an answer. Much like when I go to work and the entire facility is monitored; it doesn't creep me out, it makes me feel protected. I have the expectation that the people who own the company will do what they need to do to maintain a safe environment, and I trust that any information collected supports that goal. I don't know what I could possibly put in a pose written as part of a game's world that I couldn't bear to have the game runners read, but maybe that's just me. If it's sex and I'm embarrassed about that, well, maybe I should keep my pants on at the office if I don't want people to laugh at my inadequacies of both equipment and technique.

The security guards probably shouldn't gather 'round the monitor to watch, but they might, and if I don't like that I feel it's my fault for giving them something to see (even if science lacks a sufficiently sensitive device to measure its tiny scale accurately).

And for anyone keeping score at home, I'm in the 'wave at the camera, smile, and give them a show' camp.

So I wake up this morning to discover that my paycheck wasn't deposited as expected. Get on the phone with the bank, where the robot tells me the call volume is too high and immediately hangs up. What the fuck even. Give me my money or an explanation like.... now?

I still like the old analogy that logging onto someone's game is like stepping into their living room. It doesn't become your house just because you entered it. If you start wandering around the house, it's perfectly reasonable that the host might want to keep an eye on whatever you're up to and make sure it fits with the values and the environment they've established in their home.

@Auspice At this point in life even though I've come to expect people to be stupid, they continue to raise the bar. It's amazing.

ETA: Not stupid, that's totally wrong. It implies some kind of blameless deficiency. This is not that; it's willful dipshittery or, to be more literal, the kind of irresponsible and disrespectful behavior that's sadly becoming the norm.

I can't contest this point. Driving home from lunch today, I observed a driver of a big truck who felt the best place for him to park this monstrosity for a while and disembark the vehicle to engage whatever mysteries a dipshit like this is involved with, was at the end of a road that joins the one I was travelling down.

To better enable his dubious activities, he elected to park it lengthwise, so as to completely block both lanes. Now this a rural area, yes, but it's not 'sure block the road, it won't be used again until spring' rural. It does mean we have nice, wide dirt shoulders, just perfect to receive a vehicle whose driver needs a lengthy introspective in the middle of nowhere to regather their life's purpose.

Yet, no -- this paragon of mammalian intelligence had a better plan.

I think a whole lifetime of 'what the fuck even' flashed through my brain in the handful of seconds it took to drive past this tableau. Then another before it was impossible to look wistfully into my rear view mirror and reflect on the futility of continuing this bold experiment we call human society.

I'd like to officially submit my recommendation that we take off and nuke the site from orbit.