Best posts made by hobos

@Hella

Well it's not for absolutely nothing that I've been vilified in the past. But thanks, I appreciate your generosity of spirit, Hella. Glad you understood that I was trying to be positive rather than demanding that you or anyone throw themselves to proverbial wolves. #heartwarmed

And whenever I get around to being able to play again, I will be trying to take my own advice, at least.

Editing to say, also, I'm sorry for attacking people here who are probably just doing their best. There is a lot of history of vitriol on these types of forums, and it's not something that changes overnight. But at least people are making efforts and it's definitely not as bad as it could be.

I do think that racism, sexism, and other levels of -isms, phobias, and general bigotry can be valuable to play about. Stories thrive on conflict, and flaws can drive character development, and all that writing and exploring tends to be why we play these games.

The problem is when these sorts of flaws are not actually accepted or portrayed as flaws by the player of the flawed character, and there is no path towards redemption, just a lot of giggling bigotry under the guise of intellectual exposition and/or pretendy funtimes.

To be honest, I kind of like the approach of "Well, the history of this country is white, and you have to think about how a black character would have gotten here if you want to play one here." more than I like the approach of "Yeah play whatever characters you want! Black or white! A black person applying into a family of all white people? All great! Skin color doesn't matter in genetics at all!"

Why? One is just the thematic recognition of race as a thing that exists and is limited by genetics but somewhat excluded due to the limited geography of the game, and the other is color blindness.

We're past the time that colorblindness is considered socially forward, aren't we?

Diversity is powerful because everyone is different, people with different colored skin might come from different places, have different experiences, and have different cultures that lend them different strengths and weaknesses. This is what makes the vast range of humanity to be as beautiful as it is. Speaking as a POC I am always more irritated by seeing race as a factor completely ignored in some dumb nonsensical way than I am to seeing people be sticklers about what race is supposed to inhabit what geographic location in some fantasy world. The absolute worst thing though is villifying a race from a location (ex: Southrons in LOTR).

I did play in a game once where the staff was very dramatic about how you weren't allowed to have red hair or blue eyes (or anything but brown hair and brown eyes) if you were applying as a certain race, and the constant harping about all this did annoy a lot of people. Nobody called it racist, but that's because the power dynamic doesn't exist.

Nymeria should realize that if she doesn't expand the geographical borders of her game world, then people are totally within reason to call her racist for thematically excluding a color of skin that is oppressed in the world. At the very least, Nymeria should realize that she is creating a haven for actual racists to not have to encounter black characters in, or to always be in a position of power over black characters.

Authors and game runners in general should wake up as society wakes up to injustices, and allow developments to occur in their fantasy worlds that makes things less racist. It'd be actually great if something could happen like an embassy of black people come to King's Landing, get trashed for their skin color, and then you make a whole plot conflict over it where the racist bad guys lose in humiliating ways and then a great trade empire is established with people of many races and cultures. That way you acnowledge disparity, let people play out righteous fights against injustice, validate what's right and fair, and now have a world that isn't racist at all while still recognizing diversity in the best ways.

Recognizing that a fair deal of MU*ers are vision-impaired is integral to the understanding that a PB doesn't function as a replacement for an actual description. Vision-impaired people have very little use for PBs in general.

But I can't understand if this is just about PBs, or specifically about PBs that are photographs of people. If it's just about PBs, well, when I started mudding as a wee 12-year-old was the first time I started drawing pictures of my characters and it was definitely not about cybersex.

That said, I completely agree that for some people, it's apparent that the PB is about cybersex. I think those are the minority though, and I've learned enough to steer clear of those few. Either way, the PBs aren't the problematic thing about them, it's the sexpesting that is problematic.

I don't see sexual assault in those logs either but I get how the pretense could be triggering to someone exposed to this exact sort of real life trauma. Macha, you said you have your own trauma regarding this kind of situation, but not every person reacts the same way psychologically about these things. Maybe skirting the boundaries of these questionable acts in roleplay is cathartic to you while it might be incredibly repulsive to others.

That said, it doesn't seem to me like a very damning thing, objectively, to add to your apparent list of weird offenses. However, just like @Hella wrote, people will seldom trot back their understanding of a situation even when confirmation of your perspective comes to light.

If there was something to be learned from this, I think it's probably not to roleplay questionably-icky things with a person whose enthusiastic consent you do not have in any sort of record. It does seem odd that Cobalt didn't talk to you about the situation at all, but the immediate jump to suspect that their motivations were jealous is also odd to me. Hopefully they will comment and clear this up.

@faraday

It's one thing if a black person's backstory is that they were adopted into a white family, or a white person was adopted into a black family, or if there is a black family or a white family or a mixed family. That's a perfectly nice way to establish diversity of skin tones.

What I was talking about regarding "play whatever you want, it doesn't matter" was if the game's policy is literally to play whatever you want in some weird shallow mockery of diversity, and gives zero respect to all the real weight that comes with differences between people. It might be some people's jam, but I think it's disrespectful and weird. It's like... stealing someone's appearance for pure aesthetics, with none of the burden of that appearance, and not even trying to respect its roots.

Anyway, I have the sense that too many of my own feelings are invested here, so I'm not going to engage past this point.

Probably making myself a double pariah here but...

I kind of agree with you, Ghost. On the specific point of not using other human's pictures to play out sexual kinks, at least. It's creepy. Saying "well that person's general image is just public domain, when they go and choose to be famous they're constantly selling their virtual body and everything everyone might do with their virtual body ever, so...." is very very close to the similarly silly comment that "what we do in virtual space doesn't matter, so anyone who's ever been nonconsented on a game should've just logged off lololol".

And I also agree with everyone else saying that the way you're expressing yourself is overly aggressive and unnecessary.

But I'm pretty sure it's because of some kind of trauma, because while I'm loathe to call it "trauma" exactly -- considering it was completely virtual --- virtual trauma is a sort of trauma too, you know?

Like that's the sort of thing we discuss in this space. What matters in the virtual world, if anything at all? I'd say people feel many of the same sorts of things.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure you have some kind of issue because I have absolutely been in the place where someone was kind of hounding me for TS and trying to tell me what PBs to use and pushing me to find more PBs and in the end pulled some really weird predatory manipulative stuff that had been making me feel like I just wanted to quit.

Every time I read one of your posts in this thread, I think about that situation, and the way it made me feel was just so simultaneously disgusting and disgusted that I just, well, agree with you. And I can empathize with your tone, too.

It's just that the majority of people using PBs aren't bad actors like that.

@Ganymede

Dark, personal, and potentially-triggering RP can be pretty great for a variety of reasons. That is, if everyone involved has enthusiastically consented to it. If not, then yeah... I can see this is definitely crossing boundaries.

I think more games could benefit from clearly-delineated xcard systems. Then you wouldn't have a situation like this where a manipulator could potentially later pretend they didn't consent, in order to get someone else in trouble and attempt to misplace blame. Everything could be in some xcard log and simple to know. Not that it's helpful for the situation right now, but that's what I'm taking away.

@Derp

I mentioned being confused by the jump to conjecture earlier, but now I see why.

We're at a point where Cobalt is being accused -- if this alleged pattern of behavior is true, then there is a serious problem that players should know about if they are playing on a game run by this person. Banning people without a word because you're ERPing the accuser is obviously not a fair thing to do.

Do you have any proof? It is a sincerely ugly accusation to make and I would definitely feel personally attacked if you were making it at me and people believed you without evidence.

Also maybe so. I would prefer to think that nobody here is on any "side" except the truth, though. And I would love to see people on this forum acting that way.

Maybe it's a pipe dream.

But we can start by bringing receipts when accusing people of past misdeeds.

Didn't we all agree that this was important and necessary? But now I feel like I'm poking a spazzy badger. And this gives me a sinking feeling that all the hopes and dreams about a "fairer" community was... in itself, pageantry.

Come on, Derp. Prove my sinking feeling wrong, please.

You really can tell, yeah. It's like the text equivalent of the uncanny valley.

Also, even if it wasn't, I don't think I'd want to play with it. It'd feel weird to know that some human didn't want to play the actual game with me and instead was using a robot to interact?

Kind of like if you walk up to someone IRL, and offer a handshake, and instead of shaking your hand themselves, that person instructs a robot butler to shake your hand for them.

For game lore written by AI, it's the same feeling, as if you want to walk into a beautiful palace constructed by human beings but instead you're walking through a hologram generated by a robot. Maybe it doesn't really look that different but there's a totally different vibe.

A long time ago in college I remember a discussion about AI where we were considering if robots could ever reach human levels of creativity. The consensus was that human creativity was measurable and logical and robots could achieve it, eventually. But I disagreed, because I don't think human creativity is actually measurable and logical. I think we don't know what we know. So we can't code it into a robot. There's a whole dimension of sapient consciousness that lends weight we can barely even sense, let alone measure and encode, to the things we think about.

You know that feeling you get sometimes when a vibe is "off"? Sometimes vibes don't align, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they're just unnoticeable. But a robot doesn't have conscious vibes. It's empty.

So, the human consciousness behind a piece of artwork, whether it's visual or verbal/written, is immeasurable and invaluable, and shouldn't be discounted.