Posts made by Herja

@Wretched ... I completely missed that and now feel a little dumb. lol

I did not see it coming. Not in that way. I really want to talk about it, but I don't know how to do a spoilers tag. Needless to say, I was shook.

The plot twist in the last Watchmen episode.

At our family dinner on Thanksgiving, my stepmother was speaking to my niece because some kids at her school were teasing her about being weird and said something like, "It's okay to be weird if you are smart."

After which EVERYONE IN THE ROOM TURNED TO LOOK RIGHT AT ME.

I told them all to go to hell through a mouthful of pie.

I love my family.

So, after a rough break-up this summer, I made an attempt a couple of months ago to very hesitantly dip my toes back into the local dating pool. Ended up kind of casually talking to a friend of a friend. He was cute. We have similar interests. Seemed like a good place to start.

Literally, after a week of talking, he starts getting... weird. First was him making repeated comments about how I don't post a lot of pictures of myself on Facebook and then very quickly assuming that I don't like the way I look and trying to reassure me how attractive he finds me in a really 'off' way while trying to wheedle pictures out of me.

Look, I don't put picture on Facebook because that has become nothing more than a place for me to post memes. Period. Also, I know that I'm attractive. You don't need to reassure me like you are going to be the white knight to come and boost my self-confidence so that I can reward you with my eternal gratefulness in the form of oral sex. I have plenty of self-esteem, which I why I don't feel the need to post pictures of myself on Facebook for validation!

Then, he started getting weird about me not talking to him for days at a time because I was busy with my life and getting some strange vibes with him. He kept commenting really passive-aggressively on my silence, then claiming it was a 'joke' whenever I called him on it.

Needless to say, I decided to skip the dating pool and just hang out on the side of it drinking cocktails instead.

@Quinn No, he was not.

@Ominous I guess I’m boggled that you see some distinction between them. I don’t think your analogy is apt at all, frankly. There is no more meaning to having a piece of code that says I am Queen of the realm than having a group of players agree to it and we construct a narrative around that imaginary fact. In both cases, it’s an entirely imaginary construct just one happens to have a system that someone coded attached to it and one doesn’t. It’s about player buy-in no matter what. Even if you have game mechanics that say that being the Queen is an honor, no one cares if the players don’t care.

@Ominous As someone who RPed freeform for years, this isn't the case. A 'crown' doesn't mean any more just because there is code behind it. Something like that only has meaning when the players give it meaning, whether there is code or not. I've played in plenty of freeform games where plotting and intrigue happened in much greater depth than anything I've seen yet on Arx because playing that sort of story mattered to the players. They didn't -need- code to make it happen.

@Roz

@Meg You are special, bb. Everyone else gets NOTHING. NOTHING!

The easiest way to stop whisper campaigns is to stop sharing details about your personal life with those who have no significantly earned your trust. A person can be a damn fine roleplayer, but not be someone you want knowing your life's secrets, you know? What we do creates this amazing feeling of intimacy. Sharing creativity with someone often does. Yet, I think in many ways, it is an illusion. People are people when they are out of character. People who gossip. People who lie. People who don't respect boundaries. Most of us wouldn't tell someone our secrets on the first meeting or even at the fourth. Yet, there is this safety and comfort with doing it online.

I don't say this in effort to 'victim blame' anyone. I say this as someone who has been heart broken and hurt by people I thought I could trust just because we had a super fun time roleplaying together. Just because someone plays your friend in a MUSH doesn't mean they are your actual friend. I think that roleplayers, as a community, have a really difficult time telling the difference in general.

Today was the first birthday without my mom. Didn't expect it to effect me. Surprise!

@Auspice You haven't even TSed me yet, tho.

@Darinelle

Edited to add: I was a part of one of @Darinelle's Halloween scenes a couple of years ago. My character ended up with a creepy, look-alike doll and a broken arm that didn't heal for like 6 IC months. So, HAVE FUN.

@mietze I hope you don't either. That's a terrifying feeling!

@Auspice I don’t have allergies so Peak Week for me is either that stretch between late October to early November or in the spring when the weather shifts from cold to warmer. My lungs hate the weather change.

Players that not only tolerate when my GMed scenes get weird (because they always kinda do) but seem just as in to it as I am and roll with everything I throw at them. Players like this are the reason why I love GMing. You guys are awesome. If I could have kept you in the scene for a week, I would have.

Mixers.

I love being able to create situations and stories in which players can develop characters. I love crafting a narrative and then seeing how even MY expectation of what that story might be changes once players start interacting with the hooks that I put out there. I love watching that development and getting to engage in those emotional highs and lows with a player. For real, if I have ever GMed for you and you laughing or cried over something in our scene, I can guarantee that I was sobbing and cracking up on the other side of the screen with you.

People who have been checking in on me over the past couple months as I work through a pretty debilitating bout of depression. It's just the occasional 'Hey, how are you?' and talking about random stuff that usually has nothing to do with my mental stuff. Those check-ins have been enough to convince me that despite whatever I'm feeling now, people care about me and things are probably going to be okay.