Best posts made by il-volpe

Some MU people knew of and were a little invested about this thing. There is a new litter of tiny hairless pathetic little mousies in it as of yesterday.

These Peromyscus leucopus mousies try to move into my house every fall, and so I seasonally set traps. I have some live-traps because they also try to move into my car and I kept sticking my hand in snap-traps when I set them under the seat. Because 2020 was horrible enough, that year I used the live traps exclusively and would drive the cute little bastards a few miles and let them go near this abandoned barn. After giving them a rest and a meal in one of these cages. Then one day I caught four and it was snowing. So I ended up keeping them and buying a couple of boxes of loads of second-hand 'critter trail' cages and parts, and ended up with this. They had some babies over the summer and now there are ten.

It's pretty crazy entertaining at night when they all run about.

Frequentlies:

You know those cages are terrible, right?

Yeah, they're too small for hamsters, but these mice are small. They're also semi-arboreal, so this kind of cage is actually behaviorally appropriate.

Isn't it a huge pain to clean?

Well, yeah, but mostly they poop in the little flying-saucer and loft 'room' parts, so I just dump those out and rinse them. It takes a long time for it to get whiffy.

This is my 4th grade fantasy.

Isn't it though.

Can you hold them?

Not really. They are tame and take food from my hands, but they do not seem to be very capable of holding still.

@tributary I wonder if people aren't kinda forgetting that VASpider, in their heyday, had, like, all the bona fides and then some. So if they were saying Abelard was abusive, you'd also have at least half a dozen Flying Spider Monkeys confirming it, and assorted fans saying, "I know VASpider, they would never lie about something like that," and very likely your own experience of an active, helpful, and fun-creating player who didn't seem like the sort of person who'd accuse someone they barely ever saw of harassment. So you might not believe Abelard at all. And if you did but there was a level of ambiguity or a common 'both of you have been dicks,' type situation, well, Spider had the goodwill points.

@faraday

... is the best explanation we can hope for.

I think the truth is, everybody does wish fulfillment RP at some point or another, and as some element of nearly every character. Not all the time, and not only. Same way everybody wants to win some. Of course they do.

Every so often, yeah, one runs across a player who really seems, from every angle you look, to be doing only wish fulfillment and want all and only triumphs and glory. But more often, it's just an accusation used to promote the idea that somebody deserves less consideration in a conflict. It is also very often projection. Abelard wants to roll, protests being simply declared to have failed, but Brigid will not get the glory if Abelard succeeds, so she says Abelard "just wants to win," or "just wants his character to be super-cool all the time." In reality both want to win and be super-cool, and neither wants only that all the time, but both are likely to suggest the other is greedy for wins and wish fulfillment and rejecting other play. Just how likely they are to make these accusations depends on individual temperament, individual mental state at the time, individual past experiences of such claims working or not, how much OOC-cooperative vibe/tradition exists on the game, and (as mentioned in the incentivizing failure thread) how confident those players are of getting more chances.

@Derp

She is fucking golden. Pretty as a wild thing, biddable, tuned in, athletic, gentle with kids and old people without being told, brushes clean in a swipe like she's teflon-coated or something, can actually be called off when trying to chase deer if you can believe it, and the spitting image of Beatrix Potter's dog Kep.

Also, very Scottish, and as some of you may remember, if it's not Scottish, it's craaaap.

She has cousins.

https://www.scotchcollie.org/

@derp Yeah. So is roll-over XP so Abelard grows powerful, dies, and gets a new PC who's halfway to monsterhood to start with while Millicent, who joined the game when Abelard, Brigid and Camille were all two and three characters in, will never catch up and get to play with the big doggies except as incompetent sidekick.

Most MUs that are looking for that long slow game really ought to set advancement XP costs on a sliding scale so the more you have spent, the more everything costs, so new characters get the encouragement but by the time you're close to what game-runners consider a maxed-out sheet you can only swing two spends a year or so.

@mietze said in Autism and The MU* Community:

There are many people who are not neurotypical who have learned that no/stop means no/stop as well as far more people who are that rely on being able to push past that.

There seem to be a hell of a lot of neurotypical people who for some fucking reason cannot say "no," or "stop." And for some damn reason actually think they can complain to staff about somebody talking about something they don't want to hear, without telling the person doing the talking that they don't want to hear it. And there seem to be plenty of staff who for some fucking reason think the person who was never asked to stop or told it was a problem at all is the problem.

Of course it's art.

Probably it's crappy folk-art, but it's art.

@ganymede

I do see your dilemma and sympathize.

As an NT, learning that I cannot be held responsible for the weakness or sensitivities of other NTs has been liberating.

As an autistic, I am frequently held responsible for those things and can't escape it without narrowing my social sphere even more severely than nature has forced.

As a child I was informed, by a grandmother quite familiar with the rearing of autistic children (though she was far too old to consider it a medical thing) "Other people's feelings are real and matter even if you do not understand them." Much of my life has been spend banging my head against the fact that other people will not apply this principle to me.

ETA: And along with narrowing social sphere, I must also find work where interaction with other people is minimal. ETAA: More minimal than can be reasonably expected, really.

'Nother thing -- you can take advantage of an element of the setting to slow down PCs magical-power increases while still letting them spend XP like mad. The characters in the books and show are mostly using spells, not just channeling their raw magical will over spheres-of-influence or whatever. These spells have insane prerequisites, so sure, you've got pyromancy level n and that's enough to cast this but you also need to speak Estonian at a y and of course manual dexterity at x to do that crazy shit with your thumbs, and you really need to be able to paint a half decent watercolour for this to work right.

@derp said in Critters!:

@silverfox you have the best cat stories

Good cat story:

I had a 55 gallon planted aquarium with this big home-made light-box/hood on it. The light box got nicely warm. My cat liked to sleep up there. One day I was cleaning tanks and she was up there, so I picked her up, said, "Sorry, you gotta find something else to do," set her down and proceeded to take the light-box and lid off and do the cleaning.

I had just finished, topped up the water in tank, and was about to put the lid and lights back on when my mom dropped by. So I was standing there by the open aquarium, talking with my mom when the cat walked back into the room. She, the cat, gave me a distinct, 'Fuck you, I do what I want' side-eye look and jumped from the floor into the aquarium. Same jump she made daily to sleep up there, but the lid not being on she dunked herself completely, then levitated out and ran off to escape the gales of laughter.

She never jumped casually to that spot again, but would pause and look carefully.

The children of one of my mother's friends have caused the middle school to be evacuated. They brought a durian to school.

In Colorado, where the school admins had no idea what that stench was.

My grandmother, who once poured a box of powdered cayenne pepper into the forced-air heating system at her High School, would be proud.

I am considering carrying a durian around to improve social distancing compliance.

@Ninjakitten said:

Why not simply claim to represent/focus on highly-automated MU* RPGs and then continue to do so?

It's all the more offensive that they're not actually representing highly-automated MUs -- as I understand it, any MUSH using Faraday's FS3 qualifies, because of the semi-automated +combat system and the automated +heal.

Yes. I understand what @Jeshin means when he is talking about RPing around automated systems, and the idea of RP-enhancing automation. But this is the opposite of what FS3 is trying to do. FS3 +combat isn't there so you can have fun whacking at things/one another without a GM, and that is not, largely, what people use it for. It's there so that when the story calls for combat, you can get through it faster and things are tonnes less likely to go pear-shaped when somebody falls asleep at the keys. It's there so you spend less time interacting with coded systems than you do if you do the combat with +roll. It's not there to enforce rolled outcomes, either, really, which is why you can take endless damage but it will never say you're dead.

It is hilariously stupid that Game of Bones would qualify for this MU-list but few, if any, WoD games would, when GoB is much more fuzzy about combat than most MUs.

Basically, almost every RP MUSH/MUX that ever there was passes the first two criteria with flying colours, while almost all of them fail the third, and those that pass probably pass by the letter of the law but not the spirit. Even if it wasn't an annoying criterion (especially to hold onto here) the 'arbitrary' spot where it's placed is stoopid.

From a player point of view: "New PCs are not at a substantial disadvantage," pretty much says, "You cannot advance your PC." If an old, experienced PC has no substantial advantage over a brand new one, how has that old PC advanced?

Being able to advance a PC is part of the fun.

As a player, I've found that a lot of policies designed to reduce 'stat inflation' are simply making my XP meaningless. You can only spend so many XP per week? I don't spend for a while, 'cause I've got other things on my mind, and then find I've got a hoard of XP that I can't possibly spend. I've had the experience of having to get staff approval for XP spends and finding that my staffer refuses to approve any of my spends (and indeed, responded to all my requests in that area by telling me that he would never have approved my character) though this was staff misbehaving, I think.

I find it much, much less annoying to earn XP very very very slowly yet be able to spend it freely. Then the XP is scarce, yes, but it's mine, and I don't feel conned.

For thirty frickin' years my father has 'owned' and moderated a listserv about entomology.

A few weeks ago somebody posted a link to a petition to change the name of the Linnaean Games, a sort of entomology trivia contest, because some people are troubled by the racist aspects of Linnaeus' original taxonomy concerning humans.

So some assholes responded about racism not existing, Linnaeus being right about human subspecies to begin with, and please somebody protect our statues.

And some other assholes responded to that by complaining, instead of to the list moderators, to the university that hosts it. And /they/ responded by shutting down the list entirely and removing the offending thread from the archive. All without giving my dad a minute to take care of it.

@Jaunt said:

Crayon and I've both admitted that the mission statement doesn't use clear language. We'll be changing it. I'm not sure how many times we can say this.

So do it. The amount of time it takes to replace... oh, never mind. Here:

Optional Realties is a community and design blog for text-based, online RPGs with automated character actions and effects. We focus on character and story-drive games that include permanent character death as a feature. While many call this an RPI MUD, our focus also includes games that use other codebases (MOO, etc) to create a similar player experience.

Optional Realities is a place where we acknowledge that we have a lot more in common than what separates us, but nevertheless our focus is on a narrow style and platform of play, because reasons.

OR's largely dedicated to one specific genre that's lacked a central hub for discussion for a very long time. That's the reason it was created. It's not personal. I don't see why that's so hard to understand.

It isn't. It's hard to understand why you folks find it hard to understand that you're gonna get trounced when you advertise a community that's not inclusive of all MUs, saying you want to bridge the gap between formats, failing to be clear that it's not inclusive or rather, actively claiming it is, and excluding the favoured format of the community where you're advertising

And is being the wageless coder/writer-slave of a volunteer hobbyist MUD is a scam? Maybe it is. Maybe try to be consistent with your valuation of volunteer/hobbyism.

What's inconsistent about it? I have several volunteer positions. I do them because I think the work is important, or I find it fun, or it pertains to my interests, or it offers good perks, or it allows me opportunity for professional development. Writing articles for OR does none of these for me. The earlier response about how we could submit articles, but nobody'd asked, seemed to me to imply that you folks think we ought to be honoured to.

Just like your view is marginalized and wrong. And just one post after you had the balls to tell me that I was the one looking down at you, too.

What view are you even talking about? I never said anything about having dedicated GMs or not having them. I said I don't like a "customer service" model of GMing. That's because the players are not my customers. I don't owe them anything. They're my guests. I treat them with fairness and courtesy because I'm not gonna be a dick to my guests, and I offer them game because that's what I invited them over to do.

@kk I wanted to allow secret alts, because I wanted people to be able to avoid 'log on your alt!' harassment. What I got was a player making half a dozen or more alts to try to interact with another player who did not want to play with them. So I made the public alt registry rule to stop that harassment, which worked, and did not have a problem with the other kind, at least not that I was made aware of.

@Tinuviel Stop it vs stop it completely kinda thing.

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

You want it because people suck, but you can't have it because people suck.

Exactly so.

Yeah. There's due diligence when adopting out a pet, or dare I say it, selling an animal, and then there's the rescue business where you're all 'shit better hide the dildos, the judge is comin' to see if I was lyin' about having the chops to own a cockatiel,' and wonder why all the volunteers and all the 'adoption success stories' on the website are white ladies of around the same age and haircut.

@Jaunt said:

I'm not on the spectrum, and I'm a social guy.

I would have guessed as much.

My asking for specifics from @EmmahSue was due to how counter-intuitive I find its unspoken social etiquette to be. It's not rule lawyering, it's an attempt to understand your community; again, you project what you want to see onto my words. It's why trying to talk to you is so often useless.

You asked EmmahSue what the the official moderator stance is on the issue. I pointed out that thinking that there such an official stance exists is a failure to understand how the culture here works. I then proceeded to attempt to explain how it does work.

This is an attempt to be helpful.

Honestly.

From my point of view, I have simply repeatedly tried to give "don't do it that way, do it this way," tips about getting along in MUSB. You have projected, or whatever, to see them as naught but insults (or whatever it is you see that makes them so useless) in spite of them including direct descriptions of how things are and suggestions about how to deal with it.

...no way that I'm going to be convinced that using aggressive, insulting language to make your points is not going to muddy the actual specifics of your point and reduce the likelihood for mutual understanding..

I just don't find it an appealing or particularly effective method when the goal is actual, valuable discussion.

I don't think anyone here, ever in all its years and different names, has thought that the jolly vitriol was a particularly effective method for valuable discussion.

So, hey, did anybody tell you what WORA stands for? "When Online Role-playing games Attack". The board's culture is informed by its history as a place where one gets that cathartic whatfoo from bitching about the games, and about the players, and arguing.

It's how it is here, and if it genuinely bothers you, this is not the place for you. That's not bullying, any more than OR's policies about automated combat, which make OR not-the-place-for-me, are bullying.

As far as how other sites view our advertising weekly updates to content, none of them have said a single word in protest about it ...

I'm a bit surprised, but some places tolerate that sort of thing. Personally, I don't care a whit, I am just also very much not surprised that some people here do mind. If I were you I'd go for monthly or maybe fortnightly updates and see what happens.

What @derp says.

I'd say one of the actual issues isn't antagonist PC players not wanting to lose, they knew that was in the cards when they signed up. It's getting tired of losing by an ex-machina fluke of luck or something every time they've out-maneuvered the good guys, which is every time 'cause good guys are always "never mind maneuvers, go straight at 'em."

I do mean antagonist PCs, though, where the player signed up for that role in the story. Not the same as an evil character played as a normal PC with the expectations of wins and heroism.