Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@HelloProject ... Yes. Dreadlocks appear in many cultures but contrary to what certain TV shows like to promote, the early medieval period that isn't actually called the Viking Age anywhere historians aren't crying their bitter tears, has left us a fair bit of engravings and pictures of the Norsemen. Short hair and excessive personal grooming were a thing. Giant dreadlock manes were not.

ETA: The reason I laugh, rather than get upset, though is that cultural appropriation this way is annoying but not oppressive. When I stop laughing it's because certain alt-right groups are appropriating so-called viking heritage to peddle their homo superior bullshit.

As a Dane, I'm not going to even pretend to deny that I don't fall on my ass laughing helplessly when I see Americans talk about their viking heritage.

Some of them do know what they're talking about. Most of them think they're descended from Vikings the show.

@Warma-Sheen said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I wish more people who did not want to read up about who they are playing did not make characters.

I don't disagree with you. Some reading is certainly to be expected, and reasonably demanded. But I do feel this need to point out that some is not fifty pages. I am not the only person out there with mild brain damage, finding it difficult to retain large infodumps with little context.

@Groth said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

There's a writing exercise I recommend if you're in doubt (like many others here, I am a writer). Write your story with every character as a white male (or whatever your default is). Then roll dice for gender, ethnicity and sexuality. If doing so fundamentally changed your story, then you're not writing people but tropes. Obviously works best in a setting with at least some equity.

I think there's a worthwhile caveat here that there's a lot of story-lines where the gender and ethnicity of the characters are crucial to the plot. Take Game of Thrones for instance, if you switched the genders of Cersei Lannister and Robert Baratheon then their children couldn't be Jaime's kids anymore and that entire story is gone.

No writing exercise covers all scenarios. This one wouldn't work very well on any quasi-medieval footing anyhow, seeing as that the gender roles in GoT are already highly skewered, and swapping it all up would break the story. The race aspect might still apply though -- is there any reason the Baratheons could not be black?

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

WTF. You do not have to send out Fuck Me Vibes to be subject to people being gross. You do not have to have a conventionally beautiful/handsome PC, you do not have to "invite" it, and people who are "picked" for being gross towards are not secretly inviting it.

You sure don't. Creeps gonna creep and to the real creeps, what you do doesn't matter one bit.

Getting here late, but uh, my 2 kroner.

I create characters that fit the story I want to tell. I do the research I need to, in order to get the basics right. I don't sit down and think long and hard about their skin colour and culture because I am not giving a presentation on it. I'm playing a person. Even when I play literally a white guy whose home address is 10 minutes over from where I live in real life, he's nothing like me. Different experiences shape different people. There are no two members of any ethnicity who are the same, have had the same formative experiences.

I love seeing diversity. I hate diversity taking priority. Play the character you want, and if they're a member of a different nationality, ethnic group, gender or sexuality of your own (and you want to make this an issue in the first place) do some basic research, avoid the most obvious tropes and clichés.

There's a writing exercise I recommend if you're in doubt (like many others here, I am a writer). Write your story with every character as a white male (or whatever your default is). Then roll dice for gender, ethnicity and sexuality. If doing so fundamentally changed your story, then you're not writing people but tropes. Obviously works best in a setting with at least some equity.

On the subject of characters getting hit up for the horisontal mambo? Never happens to me. My characters tend to stay single for the duration of their run. I am a slow burn kind of player, and I think I give off a very obvious vibe that I'm not interested in RP relationships that last three days at best. I use a male top model for a PB on two out of three games so it's not about the looks. Have seen old, disabled, pointedly not attractive characters get pounced on by hornies (yes, old and disabled is considered 'bad' by a certain demographic. I am old and disabled in real life, I get to say it). It's about the way you act, talk, and signal.

And then of course there's that demographic of players where the only thing that matters is that your character has a pulse, but that lot tends to get bored and wander away from me after about three minutes of me pretending not to notice their cleavage or long eyelashes. I am not displeased with this.

Gray Harbor; a small town sitting on a thin point of the Veil -- the 'curtain' that separates our world from whatever is on the other side. Heaven? Hell? Parallel dimensions, other worlds? No one knows how it really works. Many who live in Gray Harbor have powers that seem to originate from the other side, and that's not all that the thinning of the Veil causes. The town's official murder rate is through the roof, yet somehow, the FBI never seems to get involved. People pass through and find themselves unable to leave, or drawn back. Other people leave and find their memories of the place hazy, or simply forget they were ever there.

Gray Harbor has no single source material. It's a supernatural sandbox based on many ideas and concepts. Powerful influences include the novels of Stephen King and Clive Barker, TV-series such as Castle Rock, the X-Files, and Stranger Things. Plots and storylines are told by the story telling team and by regular players with a yarn to spin. It's not a game of winning against the dark or solving a supernatural riddle. It’s a game about surviving onslaughts both supernatural and mundane, protecting your loved ones, and keeping your sanity while you do. We tell intense stories -- horrible, haunting, speculative, and sometimes just plain funny -- about ordinary people given extraordinary abilities, in a place where the nature of reality itself is constantly being negotiated and pulled in many directions at once.

Welcome to Gray Harbor. Everything is fine.

https://gray-harbor.com/

[Disclaimer: I'm not staff, I just selfishly want more company, particularly during European hours. Come on over, ask questions, talk to people, see if we're your thing.]

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

A vibrant community of folks who RP with emotes on MMOs.

Can confirm, came back to MU*s from that. Don't miss the ultra toxic, alt-right take-over of at least European WoW servers one bit.

@Xetetic I'm sorry to hear that you've had such a miserable experience. Can't say I blame you for wanting to do something else for a while. Some games are exceedingly difficult to get into and some feel like an old boys' club where new people simply aren't welcome.

Here's to hoping you feel up to returning to the hobby and find one of those more welcoming games when you do.

I can't stand sped up time. I have to deal with the holidays ONCE a year, that's bad enough -- please don't make it twice or even more. Timezones make it difficult for me to play 'live' scenes, meaning that often, my scenes take 1-3 days to resolve -- so suddenly, with time on 1:2, I've lost a week to having a conversation, and oh hey, that thanksgiving dinner you invited me for, that's new years' instead.

@peasoupling said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@bear_necessities said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Alamias Yes, Gray Harbor is my game which I made specifically because of the lack of those kinds of games My point still stands, and the popularity that both Spirit Lake and my game have seen are a result of a lack of games in those categories.

I will say, and this is not meant as a dig at Gray Harbor, at all, which I had a lot of fun on, is that one reason I fizzled out and couldn't get back into it (besides being a horrible flake) was that things got a bit Dream-centered and heavy on the magical realism for me. I loved reading about it but I couldn't relate to playing on it, in a way, precisely because I was hoping for something more lowkey there. There's a lot of room for different ways of approaching a modern or modern-ish setting, so it's not like the niche is full at all.

It's not at all full, and the more games are out there, the easier it'll be finding one that works for you. Personally I enjoy the people and community bits of Gray Harbor more than I do the metaplot and the dream magic, but if anything, that's the power of that setting: That you can make it as realistic or not realistic as you want. Some players want all the magic action and some players prefer a light sprinkle of supernatural but mostly everyday problems. I'm on the latter end of the scale there, but the buffet style approach of the setting seems to be working (at least for me).

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@L-B-Heuschkel People are struggling, but they were also not RPing with me in 2019, pre-pandemic, when I started this thread. So there's that!

It's interesting to me, because I am RPing more during this whole thing not less. I want a distraction and social interaction. In theory, MU*s are both, except when you have to endlessly hustle to RP, and then they're just unfun.

Not disagreeing in the slightest. I gave up on MU*s around 2010 because of this. I'm in Europe, and RP? RP meant having to be online from midnight to 6am to get any. Simply not an option.

Ares made it possible for me to get back into the hobby. Where I play (Gray Harbor) there are players in the US who are able to RP (if work slow) through the Ares interface during the mornings US time (which are my late afternoons and evenings), and players who are cool with slow scenes that don't happen in realtime.

I struggle with focus too when slow scenes take more than 12-24 hours for a pose round but it's a price I'm willing to pay. Most still resolve in a couple of days, not weeks. Live scenes are definitely more fun, but time zones means this is simply not an option for me most of the time. I understand that for some, slow scenes are difficult. It's just that for some of us, they're the difference as to whether the game is playable or not -- whether the reason is being on another continent, chronic illness, or other tardiness.

Finding RP from Central European Time has always been difficult. The one 'up' about it is that the people who are willing to make the effort usually are invested roleplayers -- the scenes I get are usually pretty full of content, not just random bar banter and people trying to score. Every cloud has its silver lining.

@egg It is. And it's not become easier over the last couple of months when real life stress and shake-ups due to a certain pandemic has sapped people's strength. I'm on three small games and only one of them is kind of starting to bounce back now. People are struggling.

@Tinuviel said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@A-B said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

These things are basically my entire social life.

Seriously, don't do that. These things are social, sure, but they cannot replace actual spaces designed specifically for social interaction. They're not that. Make friends, sure, but don't devote your entire life to these things. They are temporary, and your time on them might be even more so.

Just chipping in to say that for some disabled or chronically ill people, at least, that's not really a choice that exists. Not pertaining directly to the situation here which I know nothing about -- just noting that to some of us, online communities are our social interaction. That's definitely not a healthy or desirable situation, but it is how it is.

It still doesn't mean that other players or staff are anyone's unpaid volunteer therapists, though.

That feeling when someone tells you they read your log of a recent scene. Even if they were not in it, and were not mentioned in it, and had no reason to give a fig about it. You made something interesting enough for someone else to decide to sit down and spend their precious time reading it.

Grabbing a moment to vent about the person who just in all seriousness told me that I don't understand what it's like at all for someone to be quarantined for weeks and not able to leave their house. Because I have lived like this for years and hence I am used to it, and it's not hard for me.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't mind at all not being able to walk, no worries, it's permanent, that makes it cool.

@Kestrel What makes me mad is that it keeps clogging up my social media feed except -- this meme doesn't even have the worst one. Namely that Corona doesn't even exist, it's all 5G radiation killing people.

I want to think that we will learn something from all of this. I watch reports of how emission levels alone are cut in half in our cities here because no one is driving and I think, well, maybe finally, our society will evolve a bit. Maybe the climate disaster can in fact still be prevented. We can clearly affect change as a society when we're scared enough to get together and do something about it.

But I don't think it will. Because the people who actually need to be scared, the people making the decisions that really matter -- they're not the ones losing jobs and income and family right now. And for the rest of us, the need to get back to normal is strong. Once this quarantine et all is over -- most will rush out to do all the sports and events that they missed out on, and try to forget that it all ever happened.

And nothing will really change at all.

@SinCerely I love that I recognise your icon at first glance. I mean, not that I'd admit to it.