Best posts made by Kestrel

I scrolled back through the thread to see where or if @faraday was being dogpiled because I wasn't reading the thread that way at all, and it made me wonder if that comment was referring to my one specific comment @ them. What I saw was @Pandora propose this idea and the vast majority of responses saying 'nah that's not necessary'. I upvoted the OP when I first read it, then went on with my life and came back a few days later to some confusion, because I'd assumed there'd be a unanimous +1 consensus and evidently that was not the case. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting at all because I wouldn't have assumed my voice would add anything to the discussion that wasn't already being said.

I was wrong, and I saw a lot of people agreeing with @faraday, so felt the need to back the underdog.

To clarify I have a lot of respect for @faraday. I have no idea what she does/doesn't do on her games to ensure things run smoothly, as I haven't played a game she's staffed, so can only base my responses on what was said on this thread.

In particular, this —

@faraday said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora My policy is simple: Work it out amongst yourselves. If you can't or aren't comfortable doing so, contact staff to help mediate.

— I take some issue with as criticism of @Pandora's proposal.

Whether intended or not, the phrasing of this policy, as expressed here in particular, can come across as pretty victim-blamey. I can only speak for myself that it wouldn't in any way encourage me to come forward with any complaints I had, because it implies that doing so isn't the adult thing to do, and makes me somehow lesser. It also puts the person complaining on equal footing in staff's eyes with the person they're complaining about, as a baseline.

Operating from a position of 'innocent until proven guilty', this makes perfect sense. In the case of most existing systems, you don't know what happened, your job is to find out and treat the situation without bias to start.

What @Pandora is proposing is a lot more clear-cut and I would feel much more comfortable coming forward under such a system, because it would mean all I have to say to staff is 'I used red and they continued', which is an explicit rule violation that doesn't require any kind of mediation or consideration, in theory. It gives me the immediate upper hand should I complain. The problem-player in this case is plainly evident.

A while ago a friend told me they got banned on Arx for sexist behaviour. I was surprised by this news because they'd never displayed sexist behaviour anywhere I'd personally seen (and I'm one of those diabolical loud-mouthed feminists you hear so much about from insecure men). But I wasn't there, I don't know what happened, and accept that maybe they behave totally different around me vs. around others. If they'd told me something like 'someone used a flag that means I'm supposed to cut that shit out but I just couldn't help myself', I wouldn't have to wonder whether anyone was being reasonable in accusing him or just jumping the gun.

Birds of Prey was damn good.

When you dangle a character flaw out there up for grabs and someone totally calls you out on it and takes a bite.

Yes. Give me all the consequences, please.

Discovering godawful drunk selfies on my phone months after I took them and laughing at my own cringe-worthiness.

I RP as an exercise in creative writing and self-improvement.

I explore characters I'm interested in exploring largely because they represent something about myself or about the world that I want to spend some time critically examining. People who've RPed with me in the past can probably attest that my characters are all very, very different; they're not self-inserts, so this might not seem obvious. But they each either have a different slice of me, or a slice of something about the world that I want to lampoon or am currently trying to come to grips with. If I make a wealthy magpie of a woman obsessed with shoes and handbags, it's because consumerism is on my mind; I did this shortly after the most recent UK general election because I had a critical axe to grind and I wanted to make fun of this type of careless human being. Sometimes my characters are more personal and contain facets of trauma I want to process.

I'll make no bones about the fact that I made my current anarcho-communist Savage Skies character because I just want to let off some smash-the-fash steam. It's cathartic.

I take many of the lessons I learn this way IRL, and feel that RP has genuinely helped me become a better, smarter human. I've been in tense job interviews or nerve-wracking first dates where to fight off anxiety, I asked myself, 'What would character name do?' And then I just turn up the confidence or sex-appeal and cruise right through.

It improves my writing, and contrary to the "RP isn't writing" logic, RP has absolutely given me the tools to better myself as a writer. I lived abroad for a good few years during my childhood in a non-English speaking country, but discovering Achaea in my adolescence gave me the tools to significantly improve my English to the point where when I moved back, although my pronunciation was rubbish and my conversational style awkward, I was writing at a much higher level than the average, native English student. (When you learn English from books and medieval fantasy RP, and your favourite book is The Hobbit, you end up speaking really weird.)

Oh. And it helps that I enjoy it.

For the people interested in the derail topic on Lovecraft and cancel culture etc., here's a new thread.

I love that my life is currently filled with people who are significantly smarter than I am, but who are also engaging and compassionate, and that I'm learning so many new things because of it, including about myself.

@bear_necessities said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

It's super extreme under any circumstances to suggest that administrators are racist, or that the game has "wrong racial feels" or whatever just because they don't outright ban or alt-history every single bad thing that anyone ever did in that time period. Like, I wouldn't go around thinking @Seraphim73 or @GirlCalledBlu were racist even if they DID allow Nazis, or racism, or sexism, because omg you can explore these themes on a game without being racist, sexist, and/or a Nazi yourself.

Can, but ... based on experience, usually don't.

There's honestly way too much Nazi sympathy out there in the world these days and I'm glad @Seraphim73 & @GirlCalledBlu chose to simplify things with some hard lines in the sand.

I don't think playing a fascist makes you a fascist but I think a game with fascism as a theme where you can play a fascist will almost definitely attract some people who are here to live out their fascist dreams.

Also to be really fair to @marsmrsmars, that's not what they said.

I don't want to go into details but since already one person on this game managed to annoy me with something that felt uncomfortably close to Holocaust denial, though it's entirely possible I misread, misinterpreted, or am naturally inclined to overreact and be on extra high alert because it's an emotive topic — I'm just really glad this person wasn't actually playing a Nazi, and is unable to, or I might not have reacted as calmly and as I did. But like I said, staff handled it well.

I'm keen to defend this game too but also, can we please not dogpile @marsmrsmars who's raising concerns. A kneejerk reaction to allegations of racism, even if you don't agree with those allegations, is never a good look.

I feel guilty for how easy this quarantine has been for me, but honestly it's brought me closer to a lot of people I care about, despite the physical distance. As someone who's lived alone for my entire adult life, this has seriously driven home for me that no man is an island, and the importance of good custody of one's social relationships.

@Autumn said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

<Hypothetical are pro-Stalin characters bad if they don't know he's bad?>
Does whether or not that character continues to profess adherence to Communist principles make a difference?

You can be a Communist and not a Stalinist, you know.

I am. ‍️

Reading old logs of my shitty RP from years ago and realising, with spades of pride and tremendous relief, just how much my writing has improved.

What I love right now is having people I care about who are as mad as I am about vague general handwave at the world stuff.

Having someone to be angry with, to vent and shout with, is a wonderful catharsis I needed more than I knew. Weirdly, it makes me feel saner. Like the world tries to gaslight us but this person gets it and having that to lean on means the world to me.

The world is burning but I know they’re always there to pass the hose. Or flamethrower, depending.

@krmbm said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

The question becomes, Which is the easier path past this. letting faraday sort through bugs that aren't really bugs.. And then seeing that the issue remains.. Or trying to fix it through other means.

@krmbm said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

Honestly, Had you two done that last night rather than simply throwing away the blacklist and banning me. I wouldn't have near the issues I do with you and your game.

@bear_necessities said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

So, Do you want to talk or do we keep up this little game?

@bear_necessities said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

Oh I will be, After I have my fun and see about some old friends starting their own. All I wanted to do was talk Bear.

Yup, this tell right here. Randomly capitalises words mid-sentence.

I'm sure there are other people who do this for all sorts of reasons they can't control, and that alone isn't a tip-off. But for future reference, in connection with other snippets of evidence, if you notice similar behaviour patterns from trolls and this particular grammatical quirk, it should help you suss him out in future.

EDIT: Also, double ellipses .. instead of triple ... is another tell I've noticed.

If anyone's curious also about the scene that gave me the creeps with him, it was a gym scene, he showed up on a 6'7" guy and posed about how tough and srsface he was in front of a punching bag, rolled brawn to break the bag, made OOC jokes about wanting to fight the women and use the slightly shorter/leaner guy in his workout somehow, and ICly escalated very quickly to comments about wanting to take the female characters over his knee to spank them before making thinly veiled creepy/domineering threats at my character. At which point I lied about having RL things to take care of and noped out.

In isolation none of these things would have bothered me, but as a combination of factors it gave me bad vibes. It could've just been called cringey yet harmless, but I think regardless of the possibility that I was being oversensitive about it (which I'm now glad to know based on this thread that no, it wasn't in my head), at the point where I indicated it had made me uncomfortable enough to draw boundaries, the sane thing to do would've been to either apologise or just shrug and move on. Instead ... yeah.

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

I'm not so much principled as I am chaotically pretentious.

Chaotic pretentious is my new favourite D&D alignment.

Ah, gosh. I’m gonna go there, aren’t I? Yes, yes I am.

Toxic masculinity (I’m aware half of the people reading this have suddenly tuned out) is what leads to this kind of behaviour and I tend to find it very telling, when dealing with these types of people, to look at not just how they treat women, but how they treat other men.

I noted that one of the red flags that set me off with this guy early on wasn’t just his jokes about wanting to fight/spank the female characters in the scene with him, but also his OOC “joke” about wanting to use the only other male character there in his workout. Said male character, at 6’1”, was comparatively shorter, was described as having a lean physique, had an intellectual-type job description. Aksel on the other hand seemed to have been designed as a concept purely on the premise of machismo. I mean here’s his shortdesc, as noted by @bored …

I don’t even know how he did that, how he made it red, but it seems to fit in pretty neatly with the rest of his attention-seeking behaviour, doesn’t it? And again in isolation this would be meaningless, but in combination with other stuff?

I am very wary of people who, regardless of gender, treat any encounter with individuals who share their gender as an opportunity to compete/posture. The type of abuse directed at men vs. women is obviously different in the case of toxic masculinity, but when all women are nothing more than sex objects, and that’s your main drive, it follows that all men are competition, and your entire self-worth is based on being better, more “Alpha” than other men — as defined by being more “manly”, taller, physically stronger, better at getting women.

Azazello/Cullen is another person in this hobby who’s very easy to spot for this; while he treats all female characters (if, and only if, he believes them to be female-played) as prospective rape/stalker victims, he also has a penchant for going on murder sprees anytime he encounters male characters whom female characters/players in the game seem to gravitate to, especially if they’re thought highly of and their masculinity is non-traditional, e.g. based on being a good person, an upstanding citizen, a “caretaker”, rather than raw physical power. His characters are always super tall, white, blonde, and his descriptions wax poetic about both his musculature and his very European heritage, his supreme pale-blondness.

When I want to know which men are “safe” for me as a woman, I very often look first at how they are with other men. And if you want evidence of male-targeted misogyny in action, look at PUA & InCel culture.

I run a business and I try to do it as ethically as I can. I'm my only employee currently but perhaps that will change at some point in future.

I'm very over people saying to me, 'So you're a Leftist, eh? But you run a business, huh? Isn't that just a wee bit hypocritical of you? Your politics don't seem to align.'

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Legit stahp. Why do people not understand the concept of criticising systems while being forced to operate within them or starve.

Also? Miles better than having an employer I'm at the whims of, and working for a company whose principles I don't agree with.

@deathbird's MSB signature

ItS jUsT wat mY chaRActEr wLd dO

god it's 2020 why do people still think this is an acceptable line

Sorry for the cold shoutout and thanks for making me snort my coffee.

@HelloProject said in RL Anger:

So, my ex-therapist tracked down my Twitter (as I have a google info box due to releasing my music through a distributor, so google is like "Wait are you famous?"), after exactly two years when it would no longer be illegal for him to contact me. And then, after I had to figure out who he was, he confessed that he always was attracted to me. I always had weird vibes and like some things he'd say and the way he'd make physical contract with me kept feeling very inappropriate, which is a part of why I left. But then when he tracked me down today (literally this was like an hour ago), he said all kinds of wildly and blatantly inappropriate stuff.

So yeah I'm incredibly emotionally shook.

That is a world of not OK. I am very sorry. I cannot imagine the yikes you are going through, but I'd be pretty shaken too.

I'm fortunate to have never gone through anything like that but a while ago I did stop seeing a therapist who I noticed was starting to make me feel worse, and more dependent, rather than better. She had my full trust for the longest time, so it took me a while to both decide to stop seeing her and then to understand why I'd been feeling that way, once I was therapy free.

I found this article, among others on that same topic, helpful in processing the situation. Maybe it'll help you too.

Watching the master at work.

When you see someone doing a really cool thing and you're like, wow. And first of all, you're happy 'cause you get to be there with them, participating in this very cool thing they're doing. But secondly, you get inspired and feel like you're learning something and think, 'How can I use this?'

@Ominous

God damnit, I think I have a new fetish.