Posts made by Kestrel

@simplications

I'm calling bullshit on all of this. You're a phony. Using the language of the oppressed while siding with the oppressor is textbook fascist baloney, and while the current crop of useful idiots might eat it up, I am not buying any of it.

We can skip past the fact that you have such strong opinions and intimate knowledge of MSB's Hog Pit despite supposedly having only registered an account here after it was done away with. I'm willing to bet that one of the threads you're determined to see expunged is about you, but as that's speculation, let me instead point out the factual inaccuracies:

@simplications said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

At what point did the forum protect someone? If Jerkface gets banned from the game he's on, it's not because he's somehow been identified as Jerkface without having engaged in bad behavior. The identification requires the bad behavior to occur. The behavior, and the toll it takes on the victimized, has not been prevented.

1. Cullen/Azazello/Surtr was banned from at least two games as a direct result of the thread that started about him in the Hog Pit and was later cross-posted to Reddit. The two games I know of having done this are TI: Legacy and After Earth.

He preyed on players on both games. On TI, from the forum post, I presume that his target either didn't come forward at the time, or that it was an isolated incident and therefore not treated as actionable. With regards to After Earth, I actually know a little more: he made it to the staff team despite rumours of abusive behaviour, was eventually banned by the head dev, and then managed to talk his way out of it and get the ban reversed.

The head dev had doubts about him, but because he's a serial gaslighter and making people doubt their own reality is what he does, he was able to suppress them. Seeing the thread helped corroborate many people's individual experiences as being part on an overarching pattern and realise that no, they're not the jerks for disbelieving him, he is for lying to and manipulating him. He was then rebanned, this time permanently.

Never mind what he did on some stupid game though, because my real issue with him has always been that he uses these games to form real-world relationships with the women on them, and then uses game mechanics to further stalk, harass and control them in their communities. He's driven good players out of this hobby, some of whom never returned, and I for one am sick of it. How does the thread protect people? Because when you're being gaslit in an abusive relationship and asking yourself, 'Is it me, am I the crazy one?' Seeing a bunch of other people screaming from the rooftops, 'No, you're not, get out!' can absolutely make a difference between life and death.

lol I know life and death sounds so dramatic. His criminal record includes a Class B felony, but I think sharing that with the class would be against the rules. Sorry, no receipts.

DWOPP and @ZombieKerouac were also successfully banned from multiple games thanks to identification on MSB, and I for one do not think any of these people deserve any more chances to further poison this hobby or hurt anyone else.

@simplications said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

In order for that behavior to be reported, it has to have been done to or in the presence of someone that is reporting it. Did they skip reporting it to the game runners and instead came to the forum instead? This doesn't make any sense.

@simplications said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I wouldn't want to see any of these as posts. If someone is acting in a problematic way on a game you're on, you should take it to the game runners. They have the opportunity to hear what you have to say, possibly compare it to other reports they may have heard, and get the other side of the story from the accused. This protects all parties.

2. What if the abusive person is staff? As has been the case on Firan, Sindome, and After Earth. Or good friends with staff? As is the case on HavenRPG. Or staff just won't, for whatever reason, do anything about it, as is the case on many games where people don't check their privilege, and plug their ears imagining that since they don't see it and aren't directly affected — and may never be affected, for example because they're men — then it isn't happening or doesn't matter, because IC is IC, and there's surely no way for OOC malice to tarnish that without the victim being to blame.

3. When abusers are banned, there are always people who are like, 'Wow that seems unjust. I happen to know his cat's uncle and he's a great guy. Maybe staff are the real abusers and banned him for no reason?' But when there's a public thread full of people coming out of the woodwork to put their hands up and say, 'This happened to me too,' it's a lot less sus.

But I don't think you care about players at all. I think protecting shitty staff and the abusers they harbour is entirely your goal, and it's a goal served by ... look I need to brush up on my political lingo, and you seem very well educated. What's the phrase about something something silence oppressor?

@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Remove them from your circles instead of just warning the people around you. Tell staffers, share information, cut them out of the community. When they come back under a new name, find them (perhaps find out about them on a board like this) and remove them again.

While I understand and concur with most of your responses, doesn't this sounds a little bit witch hunty?

Call me old-fashioned, but when I hear the term "witch hunt", I tend to think of the hostility women are frequently subjected to, in hobby spaces and in the real world, for refusing to adhere to a gendered social hierarchy. For calling out misogyny when they see it; for setting personal boundaries; for refusing men who feel entitled to their time, kindness, labour and therapy; for trying to warn others about powerful and popular abusers, and exposing them for the charlatans that they are.

You and @Ghost are living in a fictional world if you think that doing the above is ever easy, let alone rewarding, that it involves coasting by on "popularity currency" and doesn't carry serious risks and consequences for the accuser. A smear campaign that was launched against me, to discredit the thread I made about Cullen/Azazello/Surtr, has yet to be recanted by a then-advocate of his, even though she's since come out as a victim; it cost me a real-world friendship at the time. A staff member on the game I was playing used her position to consistently grief and troll me for exposing him. I can't imagine how much worse all of this would've felt had I been one of the many women he'd harmed more directly, or lured into an RL relationship. I can't imagine what it's like to be Amber Heard right now.

An inkling is perhaps why I myself never told anyone about the well-liked Chad in this hobby who abused me personally, not until he was long gone, and even then only to a select few. (Some of whom still managed to disappoint me, based on how they responded.) I would also point out that Azazello coasted by for literal years in this hobby before he was banned anywhere, his reputation very well known, by which point the harm he had already done was immeasurable — and that he was able to continue committing harm for his sick pleasure long after that, too. The backlash against his accusers, however, has always been instant.

A very mild example of the above happened on TSS, too; but because of these boards, and because of excellent staff policies on that game, it didn't go very far. This guy didn't like being privately told no, so he tried to publicly torch me. Thanks, @Seraphim73 and @GirlCalledBlu, for not putting up with that. Thanks for conferring with other witches to kick a witch-hunter off your game.

Even typing up this post, I feel the exact same way I've felt every time I've been in that position before. Does this make me look dramatic? A mean girl, a bully, just plain crazy? And worse, because until my name was brought up in connection with it very recently, I hadn't realised it's what I'm now mainly known for on these boards — will that lead others to question the validity of other claims I've made before? Because that would now carry consequences for more than just me, and it already has.

I'll give @Tirit the benefit of the doubt, actually, because I don't know them, and maybe I'm misattributing sentiment to their relatively few words on this topic.

@Ghost, though? I'm still waiting for receipts. Who have I bullied on these boards? Because I've found myself rereading old threads as a sort of post-mortem for MSB, and realised I was actually incorrect when I claimed I hadn't responded to most of the conflicts you've initiated with me over the years; in point of fact, I have never responded to any of them until the last few days, after you'd decided to label me a bully.

I can recall exactly two people I have ever antagonised on these boards: one is Azazello, and the second is Discordance, a staff member on Haven, for abusing her position to antagonise his detractors. I'm no longer terribly confused by why you see me and so many other "mean girls" as villains, however, because I think the safety of this newly witch-free space has allowed you to start making your agenda entirely clear.

It's curious that we're told "the clique" can't be named, and their crimes can't be listed, because so many people fear their terrible retribution, and therefore receipts can't be produced, either. It's to protect the victims, mostly from women witches.

It's curious that a dearth of receipts seems so much more suspect, and so much less understandable, when it relates to at least a dozen women (and I really think that's an understatement) who have things to say about a single man.

It's curious that @hobos can continue to publicly harass someone who's publicly told him to not contact her, and to cease giving life to malicious and unfounded rumours about her, but that publicly calling him out for doing that is apparently against the rules, and invites hostility from admin voices. Incidentally, the "receipts" he presented, which have since been spun into "omg someone falsely accused him of a literal crime, how damaging", were of a woman — not the one he was harassing — stating that based on his observable behaviour, she would personally distrust and feel uncomfortable with him. I wholeheartedly share this view. I would never trust my drink in the hands of anyone who defended a predator, who has multiple accusers, on the grounds of, 'But my friend from another game knows him and he's a really great guy, it's just the mean girls who hate him for no reason, because they're jealous!' Personally I wouldn't trust my drink in the hands of most men, because we live in a society, but definitely not with someone who shows repeated, continual disregard for others' right to their boundaries, while feigning remorse and vilifying them for it.

I personally have no association of any kind with @Roz, the main "mean girl" I've seen insinuated as a presumed leader of this clique, but I've frequently upvoted her posts on MSB, because I've generally found them eloquent, classy, and intolerant of misogyny or abusive behaviour without herself needing to resort to aggression in the process. From the sidelines, it strikes me that this is what it takes on these boards to now be labelled a "mean girl".

I refuse to take this thread seriously because it's a lie, an exercise in public gaslighting, and a witch-hunt.

I think the way "we" fix the hobby (tbh, not you, but people who are actually walking the walk) is to take the approach I saw outlined here by @Apos.

Lastly, I would just like to commiserate with @Sunny and @GreenFlashlight for prophesying the future of MSB with Simpsons-like clarity two years before we reached this state, even when we were at its peak. You both knew better than me.

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

while I think you are a bully

Any receipts, or are those waived for members of the anti-clique clique? It’s been a while since high-school, I don’t remember the club rules.

Thank you also for the armchair psychoanalysis, it was kind of you to take time out of your day to reflect on my wellbeing. As a return gesture, I would like to suggest that I think you’re projecting.

@Misadventure said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

The question for you becomes: what if people disagree with you and feel people were accountable enough?

Then I suppose we agree to disagree and make peace with the outcome. I still don’t think you’re being disingenuous, but I have a lot less confidence in those you put yours in, and must live with the incorrigible impulse to call a spade a spade.

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Kestrel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I'm a person who's been paying attention to the discussion on both of these boards and over on @Ghost's Reddit thread

Oh that's riiiiiiiiight I'd almost forgotten.

After that thread was necro for 3 weeks or so Kestrel decided to "check in" and throw barbs on that because things must have been boring.

Poke. Poke. Poke.

That's what's going on here and I don't think it's constructive at all.

Yeah I liked how you implied my throwaway troll comment makes me part of some secret cabal or that I've bullied you personally, even though literally the only conflict we've ever had on these boards was:

1. When you decided to persistently attack the creators of the 100 MUSH and everyone posting their support for the game on their ad thread, even though to my knowledge you didn't even play it, over some ancient beef with how they ran their last game.
2. When I advertised a pro-intersectional MU* community.
3. When you wanted to cast doubt on Azazello being exactly who everyone says he is.

Each of these conflicts being initiated by you, most of which I did not respond to.

Bruh if these boards have a bullying problem, you are it.

@Misadventure said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

@Solstice I agree with what Derp said, and it's not benefitting me one bit.

Am I a sycophant, or am I someone with their own opinion worthy of consideration as a human being?

The latter; I have no reason to doubt your sincerity and have never personally assumed any statement of yours to be inauthentic.

I would like to go on record however saying that I've never played Arx, have no intention of doing so (L&L not my theme), nor have I ever privately communicated with its staff members on any platform, nor with BMD's staff, or any of the usual suspects generally insinuated to be part of this "clique".

I'm a person who's been paying attention to the discussion on both of these boards and over on @Ghost's Reddit thread, and was able to arrive at her own conclusions after quite an extended period of sitting on the fence and letting people reveal themselves.

As I too was then swept under the label of "clique" (initially, ironically, for having stated that I wished to stay on the fence), I note that there's quite a lot of what you're describing going around, @Misadventure, though to be clear I'm not implicating you personally in it.

I think this broader conversation is being controlled by people peddling a lot of absolute fucking horseshit, and I don't need anyone else's borrowed opinions to smell the stink.

This is not a tale of two warring tribes, nor as @Derp puts it, friction resulting from "two very different groups of people interacting in the same space". This is a whole bunch of people cut from the same exact cloth, some of whom now have the weight of a banhammer behind their desire to win internet arguments, and some of whom don't. And, somewhat more enviably, the apparent wealth of mental fortitude with which to keep the spin going for this long, instead of just admitting to an ounce of accountability.

lol. lmao.

Is this the part where I take your thread seriously, invest the time and emotional energy to respond in good faith, only to then receive a veiled warning from our new admins, accused of being in a clique with people I don’t even talk to, and told that my choice to answer the very question that was asked in the first place makes my motives suspect?

Fast-forward to the thread lock and paternalistic lecture IMO.

When you help a confused newbie get settled into a game, and then a few weeks later see them helping a different confused newbie get settled in, resolving the exact same obstacle you helped them past.

I'm like a proud mama.

The lil bit of magic that happens when someone's style meshes so well with your own that you're both just elevating each other to a whole other level every time you get to share a scene. Separate you're OK. Together? Whoa, I actually didn't know I could write like this. Or that they could!

I've been a little insular lately on the game I play for anxiety reasons; just haven't been up to braving big social scenes. But there's one person I've had an abandoned plot thread with for so long, at this point, that the prospect of finally getting around to following up on it has somehow managed to turn into just another daunting chore I've been dreading. Well, today I finally did it, and what the hell was I so afraid of, damn?

Related MU* thing I love: chill people being chill about RL obligations. Sometimes I stress myself out trying to write fast for people, but the person I had this scene with today just let me cruise through a mutually busy day. Sometimes one/two poses per hour peppered throughout the day with regular intervals and not having to rush is actually just fine by me.

First World Problems, but I'm frustrated by how much I still like Joss Whedon and how much his creations have irrevocably influenced me despite ... everything.

Finding an underused played-by you just know you're gonna use one day.

No character for them yet, but already excited for when you eventually end up with a perfect fit.

It used to be a running gag that MU* were all populated by teenagers and college students who were inexplicably and implausibly omnicapable superheroes. 19 year old star doctors, lawyers, detectives and scientists, etc.

As the MU* community has aged, I've noticed that the characters making up most games' casts have too. Lots of people actually do seem to prefer playing 30-40+ year olds etc., and I find that the IC demographics tend to be fairly realistic these days.

I like this. It's nice to see. I've always felt that older characters often have more layered stories to tell, even when I was actually a 19-21 year old on these games myself.

For those who couldn't make the opening event, don't feel like you missed your chance to jump in. It was lots of fun but super chaotic; amid the opening poses of survivors first washing ashore on the island, a lot will have been missed without the chance to reread the first scene. You can achieve the same sort of "introduce your character" moment (maybe better) by posting a vignette, like this one here. There are also many plausible reasons for why your character wasn't involved in the initial exploration, e.g. they may have been mistaken for a dead body or been recovering from shock/injuries.

We have a friendly community who'll happily drag in stragglers, and @crayon's an A+ GM. There are also a few roster characters still available and more on the way.

@juniper said in MU Things I Love:

@kestrel Same. I am a terrible, awful person, and need the latest drama scoop.

Shoutout to @Pandora and @Salvation for providing me with excellent New Year’s entertainment. I swear the latter grew a whole new set of teeth somehow, which I didn’t even know was possible for a human and confirms she’s some sort of shark.

@crayon’s been making me watch Squid Game at gunpoint which isn’t half as good.

For my New Year’s Resolution I promise to be a better person and have fewer guilty pleasures and no longer derive any enjoyment from other people’s spicy wordsmithery though. So please forgive me this only sin and thank you.

I shouldn’t, but I kind of love reading about the ongoing drama of games I no longer play now that it no longer directly affects me.

@macha said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@tributary Yeah, I feel... nothing.

Very normal. They start you out on a low dosage and work their way up until you mention feeling something, because they don't want to take you higher than needed and your brain needs time to adjust.

Pretty much everyone I know who's started out on a medication journey has had the initial freakout on day 1 of 'Oh no it isn't doing anything my last hope is gone and I must not have ADHD apparently I'm just broken'. Don't sweat it!

@faraday said in Did you get diagnosed with...:

• Many doctors, particularly ones of older generations, are not well-versed in adult ADHD. They have stereotypical notions that ADHD is a "kid problem" and people outgrow it. (Some do; most don't.) If your friend wants a proper diagnosis, they'll want to see someone who says "adult ADHD" amongst the symptoms the treat--that's a good sign that they at least are aware that it exists.

@silverfox used male pronouns to describe their friend, but regardless for anyone else reading who might be going through similar motions, I would like to add that I strongly recommend seeking a female practitioner and/or someone who specialises in "ADHD in women". There's a double whammy stigma not just against ADHD in adults, but specifically female brains as well.

More on this can be found here:
Females with ADHD: An expert consensus statement taking a lifespan approach providing guidance for the identification and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in girls and women

(If you have the patience to read the above study, I would recommend also looking at the references as well, many of which are likewise very insightful.)

tl;dr for the above link: women are severely underdiagnosed due to referral bias, for example in one experiment it was found that found that teachers were much more likely to refer written profiles of students for an ADHD assessment if male names/pronouns were used even when the profiles were otherwise identical. Women & girls with ADHD do tend to present somewhat differently (more internalised symptoms rather than externalised, which is typical across the board for mental health problems in women). Yet despite underdiagnosis and undertreatment, they do not have better life outcomes in terms of academic/professional success or interpersonal relationships if left undiagnosed/untreated. So this matters. A lot. Even if they're more likely to seem OK, on the surface. Research and common medical knowledge is also generally lacking, for example there's been found to be a lot of interplay between female reproductive health & ADHD, but hardly any psychiatrists know or think to ask about endocrine factors when diagnosing and prescribing. Female puberty, menopause, menstrual cycles, contraceptives and endocrine disorders have all been found to impact dopamine levels and the efficacy of ADHD medication.

Additional hurdles exist in the UK where the NHS have only just barely begun wrapping their heads around the existence/validity of ADHD at all. I wish I'd kept a screenshot but it was barely a few months ago that their official medical advice website had stuff about ADHD being linked to low IQs and only being diagnosable in children. They updated that only very recently; apparently there was an explosion of people seeking treatment/diagnosis during the pandemic, forcing them to reexamine their current systems & knowledge base.

For me personally ... I've had to fight tooth & nail for my diagnosis, treatment and medication; it's been a trying journey, but very much worth it in the end. I feel like it's a journey I'm still on, and a lot of people in this community might be able to personally attest to the emotional rollercoaster I've been through this year pursuing it. (Because they were wonderfully supportive and I love them for it.) It's been less than a year since I was diagnosed and it's actually thanks to members of the MU* community that I pursued it at all; a few people in a Discord server I was a member of for a MUD I played were discussing it, shared online tests about it and more than one person seemed to be nudging me with the suspicion I have it. I was pretty resistant to the idea at first but then the more I read about it, the more things started finally clicking into place. I was able to talk to people one-to-one, and even just browsing that ADHD thread here that I'd been ignoring for years helped a lot.

Like @saosmash, I had to pay out of pocket. A lot. I'd estimate for the first year of assessments, appointments and medications it'd amount to something like £5000 in London. It'd be a lot cheaper on the NHS (like just £100 a year), but getting the NHS to believe you have ADHD and need real medication for it is basically impossible without first coughing up for private treatment. (Doubly hard with the aforementioned bias factors.) Hopefully soon I'll be able to make the switch off of private care, with enough important looking letters from the expensive experts I've seen.

I've had to argue with my (unfortunately male) psychiatrist a lot, cite studies (which should've been his job to be informed about). I've honestly cried over this, more than once, both with relief (when getting a prescription) and stress (when having to fight for one). I'd switch practitioner but the waiting lines in the UK during this pandemic are borderline insurmountable, and having to start over with someone new would mean having to pay more again and risk losing the prescription I'm on now until my diagnosis is reconfirmed. Having money to throw at people helps, and still only to a point.

The returns I've seen on this have all been worth it in the end, however; my life is measurably better on medication. My work, relationships, physical health and even academic potential have all improved. (I'm starting a new degree and several new work projects, which I wouldn't have had the confidence to do without this.)

I've had to do a lot of my own research since I've been able to get relatively little help from medical professionals due to both logistical impediments and institutional bias. A combination of Sci-Hub & NCBI have helped enormously. (God bless Alexandra Elbakyan, hero of our times and personal saviour.) I've spent a fuckton of time just searching stuff about the medication I'm on, my symptoms, etc., poring through the available research. It's been time-consuming but kind of fun, if you're a fucking nerd like me. I couldn't muscle answers out of my psychiatrist so I had to hunt them down. Specific individuals in this community who were available to share their personal experiences with me were a big help as well. (Other women especially, and Americans for whom the whole process is much easier & saner sharing their perspective of much more sensible doctors.)

I often think about how life might've turned out differently if I'd been diagnosed in childhood but ... water under the bridge now I guess. Just gotta make the most out of what I have and am capable of now in my upcoming 30s.

Gonna just share a mild funny for my experience of ADHD medication.

I took a week-long break from it during the holidays because being from a secular Jewish family, I don't celebrate Xmas so for me this part of the year is nothing but a quiet week when nothing's happening, and I can afford to relax a bit more. I love how productive, motivated and driven the medication makes me, but it's nice to set that aside for a bit and be able to just switch my brain off for a little while. I didn't do anything fancy, I just spent the week sleeping a lot, living in filth, ordering takeaways and catching up on Netflix shows.

I took it today again for the first time in a bit and my dopamine receptors seem to have "reset" (which is also always good), so the effect my normal dosage is having on me right now is:

I realise I am not making the best case right now for stimulants as ADHD meds not being "drugs" but look. Sometimes, just for a day or two, funky brain chemicals can be fun. ('Cause I also know in a day or two my brain will readjust to this dosage and I'll just go back to behaving like a normal neurotypical on these meds, lol.)

@macha said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

So, I was excited to tell a long time friend about the progress and the script.

his response. "Shit, Adderall? I hope that is not where you settle. I've never known that to be any good for anyone."

.. like really, dude?

Adderall abuse has gotten a lot of media attention lately, both through pop culture references in fiction (e.g. featured heavily in the latest season of You) as well in the news and documentaries (Take Your Pills is one I've heard about, but haven't watched). I've noticed a lot of side-eye when I mention to people IRL that I'm on stimulants, people seem to default to the assumption that I'm lucky/sneaky to have scored a diagnosis for those priceless drugs and that I'm probably abusing them. Like weirdly even someone who told me he has ADHD too said he chooses not to be on them and thinks many people who have "anxiety" use those kinds of drugs to self-medicate.

The stigma sucks but I also just don't owe people an explanation and don't have to justify my healthcare requirements to anyone other than myself & my doctor, so I don't. They're not in my head or my day-to-day life/routine and I don't think I could make them understand it without that experience. Why bother? It's helping me and that's what matters.

It wouldn't surprise me if your friend had come across similar headlines (or maybe incidents of actual substance abuse) and arrived at the currently topical mainstream conclusion without much nuance. C'est la vie.