Best posts made by il-volpe

Actually, you can bring your online friends soup. Sort of. I have ordered delivery food online for friends 1.5k miles away.

I may have mentioned this before, but in the interests of realism, at least 30% of found magic items ought to turn out to be sex toys.

Achievement unlocked.

@Jaunt said:

You continue to make assertions without even taking a look around the OR website.

http://optionalrealities.com/partnership-criteria/

Since this is not the part of your website that I (or anyone, so far as I've noticed) is concerned with you changing, it is hardly surprising that when you say you've changed the site based on feedback from here, we don't notice it.

You'd rather just speak on everyone's behalf and try to bully us off your site. Not gonna happen.

I am not Lithium. I have not asked you to leave. I've asked you to conform to certain community standards. I have tried to explain what they are, and why your violations of them are obnoxious. You've refused, essentially stating that there's no rule enforcing those standards, and in spite of being told about them you don't see them as a requirement for being welcomed into this community. Instead, because you're not welcomed, you claim to be bullied.

Allegorical Play:

MSB People: "Ducks. This duck, that duck, I love ducks, that duck over there is diseased, how do you heal a sick duck, fuck that duck."

OR People (wandering in the open door): "Check out our new poultry community!"

MSB People: "Cool, can we have a duck show?"

OR People: "No, we only do chickens."

MSB: "Then call it a chicken community, or include ducks."

OR People: "NO! Yes! Maybe! Next week! Anyway, you shouldn't be bitching, anybody who likes ducks should be totally interested in what we have to say about chickens."

MSB: "Largely, we're not."

OR People: "You're lying! Lots of you are into chickens!"

MSB: "...?"

MSB: "So, ducks. Ducks, ducks, ducks."

OR People: "CHECK OUT OUR POULTRY CLUB."

OR People: "CHECK OUT OUR POULTRY CLUB."

OR People: "CHECK OUT OUR POULTRY CLUB."

MSB: "We heard you the first time. Would you mind not calling your chicken club a poultry club, as it's misleading. Also, would you mind yelling "CHECK OUT OUR CHICKEN CLUB" less often?"

OR People: "I do what I want! You're just bullies! I won't give in to the terrorists!"

I find the irony of this discussion coming up in response to my fearing that bigots will find my gay autistic self unfit to own a pet to be very bitter.

Eugenics is alive. I actually know someone who was force sterilized, and she's young enough that she could still be reproductive today if they hadn't done that.

I was just talking to a non-gamer about MUSHland and mentioned the horrible incident of VASpider as a houseguest doing massive damage to somebody's house and breezing off.

And also mentioned this time I had MUSHers as houseguests. One was on vacation, doing a road-trip tour of the US. They went and picked up the second MUSHer and spirited them away from an abusive relationship, took them along on part of the trip. They stayed at motels and other players' houses, and left the one who had needed a ride out where they wanted to go before the other flew home.

It's like that, too.

Eat your heart out.

Faraday. Super helpful, pleasant and easy to understand. Made stuff possible for me. Built code that's what I've been wishing for since 1993 but masses better than I knew to wish for.

Faraday. You're the bee's knees. The cat's meow. YOU ARE DOCTOR WHO'S SHOES.

These fuckwits who claim superior understanding of economics and yet also insist that certain jobs are designed for high school students.

@carma One of the John Wicks is the John Wick's Cat: A Little Game About Little Heroes guy, and that would make a fun MU.

PCs are cats defending their humans from the monsters that only cats can really see.

The Boogeyman is still under the bed.

Bloody Mary is still in the mirror.

All your childhood fears are alive and well, looking for you.

And your only guardian... is Mister Whiskers.

@silverfox

Does her halloween costume count?

Lemme fix that.

WoD in particular is really susceptible to differences in tone being basically like...gamebreaking/immersion breaking. inflexible and uncreative players who talk as if those traits are virtues.

Something gamebreaking and immersion breaking for me is when, in a game like WoD, where mooks are people, the PCs kill them like they're pixels and nobody minds, and the guy who murdered a dozen (kobold) children goes home and his neutral-good 11-humanity 5-empathy justice-activist girlfriend still wants to fuck him. This challenges my suspension-of-disbelief a lot more than a PC acting the clown, but unlike fishmalks and superfriends, it's not a WoD-player-virtue to hate it.

Thay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thích_Nhất_Hạnh

ETA:

The Good News

The good news
they do not print.
The good news
we do print.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
that the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen. You have ears that can hear it.
Bow your head.
Listen to it.
Leave behind the world of sorrow,
of preoccupation,
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.

So. Re: Player expectation management

Players aren’t really a bunch of entitled little shits, or at least not more so than humans. My experience is that most players are fine and manage their expectations just fine. True, I am absurdly tolerant of their abuses in that I don’t find it unreasonable for a player to expect that a GM (noun) will at some point GM (verb).

Most players mostly manage expectations appropriately. But one does have to support their efforts a tiny bit. Try: Don’t piss them about. My logging on just expecting a scene maybe doesn’t look so entitled if you include that the GM said the scene would be happening at that time. Objecting to rain-checks from someone who shows up an hour late for your scheduled scene, cancels, and cancels it again for the reschedule, and again, and again, for persuasive reasons like forgot, double-booked, don’t feel like it… well, maybe the person who kept showing up on time wanting to play isn’t the person who’s not respecting that others have lives. Telling a player “I forgot this, you should have paged me,” about some two-weeks-stale jobs but feeling hard done by and harassed when they do page or otherwise appear to expect less than two weeks turnover? Not a pushy player trick.

Players will have the unreasonable expectation of fairness. They think that if they interact with the game correctly they’ll have as much chance of fun as anybody else, and the systems will work for them the same as for others. The latter can be approximated. The former is impossible on an open MUSH but you must make a run at it and expect some pushback when you inevitably fall short. They’re not being little shits, they’re being social vertebrates: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequity_aversion_in_animals Live with it. A GM who has playgroup A steal a ship, playgroup B blow up a base, and playgroup C get invited to a scavenger hunt is foolish to expect no murmurs. It’s technically correct that he doesn’t have an obligation to run scenes for those entitled little shits so they oughta be grateful for what they get, but they’re mammals, not narcissistic supply. Sometimes it’s GM expectations about praise and criticism that need some management.

@Jaunt said:

You suggested that it wasn't fair-minded that only members of games that are part of our "connections" can submit articles. I told you that anyone can submit an article if they want to, including folks from this site.

Not at all. In fact, it took me a couple of re-reads to find the spot that might have given you that idea. Was it this?

@il-volpe said:

OR appears to have this thing going in where it's partners/privileged advertisers write these articles, and that's one reason they're privileged

This says nothing about who is allowed to write articles, only comments on who does write them, and suggests that maybe writing one probably gets you shifted up the docket in terms of getting reviewed to see if you'll be allowed advertising space.

Your reaction, interpreting that to mean that I think I'm not allowed to submit an article and find this interesting enough to cry "unfair!" is the very thing that makes me conclude that you believe I would want to submit an article. I don't want to submit articles to a gaming community that pays only lip-service to the sorts of games I want to play and will deny me the perks of writing articles (if said perks exist) and further, it makes me suspect you of being a bit full of yourself to see you respond as if wanting to write an article is the motivation for my remark.

I think that you're being over-sensitive in continually assuming that we're out to look down on you. We're not.

Hmm.

@Jaunt said:

This idea that their submission is slave-work, but that your volunteerism towards your game isn't because you're passionate about your work is inconsistent ideology, and that's what I'm getting at. I hope that makes sense to you.

I wasn't talking about them. I was talking about me, and other MUSHers. Your OR community doesn't serve our specific interest as fully as it serves the specific interest of the writers of your articles. See? So while they get the various benefits of volunteerism from writing the articles, the membership here does not. Yet you appear to believe (see above) that we want to write articles for you. When someone attempts to convince you to do work for no or minimal benefit, they are indeed operating a scam. Does this make sense now?

I think that you're being over-sensitive in continually assuming that we're out to look down on you. We're not.

Hmm.

As @Thenomain suggested, there needs to be a consensus about our language re-branding before we implement an improved mission statement. It shouldn't be an arbitrary change, or a knee jerk reaction, or a change that satisfies one administrator's ideas and not others. Once we reach consensus, it'll be changed. Since OR's been doing well for itself for the few months that it's been around, I think it'll be okay to last a few more days until that consensus is reached.

I expect that you will find that until you change it, people will continue to criticize it. This should not surprise you; you have administrated a MU, have you not?

I'm suspicious, because I am a suspicious bastard (or at least, display the persona of one on MUSB, sometimes) and my suspicious bastard persona says that the reason the mission statement reads like it does is that you folks want to grow your community by attracting folks from outside the focused interest in RPI MUDs, but you don't want to do the work of maintaining and moderating a community that serves all MU* types. Yeah, you may attract a few members this way. But really, this is like calling the 'Ladies' Sewing Circle and Anarchist Society' the 'Community Fibre Arts Club', and telling any knitters who come along, oh, sorry, the club's about sewing and anarchy, but you're welcome to hang out. The club may not want to admit it, and hell, it may not even reach the front of their minds, but other people are going to figure, correctly, that really the name is about drawing people in so you can convert them from monarchist crochet to anarchist sewing. This is not cool.

By the way, if/when you get around to changing the OR site, a word of advice: Run about it and add alt text to any important images, including the infographicy things with your mission statement on. They need to be machine readable. MUs are among the few games accessible to blind people, and it's not difficult to make it so all the important shit on your game and site works with their screen-readers. Actually, if you want to do ten minutes of research and write about that, that'd be an article worth having out there.

I do hand flaps, and tics. Not all the time, I can be very still. I do what my sister-in-law calls "the tyrannosaurus thing" which is holding one's hands high in front of one's chest. Once I walked in on my sister-in-law, my stepmother and my grandmother all talking about how they could tell when their husbands were getting sick because they'd do the tyrannosaurus thing before noticing themselves that they weren't feeling well. My grandmother looked at me and said, "It doesn't work on you, you do it all the time." I'm a lot more aware of it since then and do it less in public.

I'm pretty drawn to people who tic and stim, my instincts go "family!" and I want to share food with them and clobber any hyena that tries to nibble on them.

@Enoch said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

You only need to go to the Hog Pit to see Arx is the only real representative of the hobby, at least for now

Hahahaha.

GoB went on happily with barely a peep heard about it here.

The games that were talked about on the old WORA and SWORA and now in the Hog Pit are probably not representative of the hobby. To get consistently talked about here, the game must not only be big enough that multiple readers here are playing it, it must also be bad enough that multiple readers here want to bitch about it and hear the bitching of others. But a game does not have to include multiple pit-crew members to be big enough to provide RP on demand, and it doesn't have to be bad enough for people to want to bitch about it every week to be, uh, good enough to play. Though obviously the larger the group of players the more likely it is that somebody'll have a gripe.

@silverfox said in Autism and The MU* Community:

Where does the line get crossed for a behavior to be more spectrum than a quirk?

Seemingly sarcastic, yet true: The line is where neurotypicals start to think it's weird and annoying.

@devrex said in The Desired Experience:

have been quietly baffled when someone has made, say, a shopkeeper.

And then the shopkeeper is going: "I can't get any RP around here."

I suspect that shopkeeper frequently does want to go into the dungeon.

Behold. The most interesting character.

On a MUSH, odds are that the Bashir character never looks at Garak twice, staff ignore his hooks and never run 'The Wire' and Garak's NPCs (Enabran Tain, etc) never appear. Nobody interacts with him much, he says, "I can't get any RP around here," and leaves, and people shrug, "Why even make a tailor?"

Bashir, on the other hand, is genuinely boring until a sudden change/addition to his backstory was made five years and 112 episodes in, but is definitely a needed/wanted position/concept. Nobody will question why he was created nor assume that including him in action or looking for interpersonal depth with him is vain. It's even likely that they won't take five years and 112 episodes to try to help him grow more interesting.