Posts made by Pacha

@Ganymede

As a gay man I hate a lot of the (supposedly) positive stereotyping that goes on too.

I mean, you get the traditional homophobes who think that all gay people are depraved predators who are coming for your kids, but there is also another set of people who have unreasonable standards that you should be their own personal 'Queer Eye' or whatever. You should be an expert in art, fashion and design, an expert cook and have perfect hair/skin/teeth/abs and whatever else.

More than once, someone has accused me of not being a 'proper' gay because I don't meet some standard of gay perfection they have in their head. It is not as immediately dangerous as, for example, being black where some policeman might just shoot you for fun (though it still isn't safe to be 'obviously' gay in a lot of places --even in Europe). However, it puts pressure on a group that struggle far too often with not feeling good enough that they are meant to meet some unattainable standard of perfection.

I play Artur on Arx. I have had some alts, but none that really stuck.

I am feeling drawn in a sort of vampy-campy black velvet vibe right now though, so I might try an acerbic older divorcee at some point relatively soon.

This actually looks super fun. They seem to be allowing a lot of things most other WoD games don't usually (like Dhampir! And PC ghosts!) so I might give it a little look, even though I am not the biggest fan of Ares.

I had the audacity to take a few days off of work this week! One of my customers took this less well than I hoped and so upon returning to the office I was treated to an ANGRY EMAIL. I will provide an excerpt!

"I'll leave you with this. I hope your partner drops dead and while you attend their funeral, I hope your house catches fire and everything in it is razed to the ground so scum like you can know what it feels like to be in a state of unending turmoil and distress because bastards like you deserve it."

So yeah, that eased me nicely back into the swing of things.

I tried Marsilikos and found it hard to get into, though everyone I met was super nice. I might need to try again with a different character at some point.

I am playing on a pretty fun 1e Vampire discord server at the moment, bit I am not sure if we talk about those here, since they are not MU.

I had tried Gray Harbor and not gotten into it. I will totally give it another go I think.

@BetterJudgment

Fair enough!

@BetterJudgment

Did they ever change the way they dealt with gay characters? Or are you not aware?

So just to set a scene I am a gay male and I nowadays nearly exclusively play gay male characters. I very occasionally play female characters but when I do I will generally go for someone 35+.

I am not a big TS hound, but I am happy to go there if there is some element of story involved. However, TS involving female anatomy (either as or with) is a squick to me, hence playing older women as this generally (sadly, wrongly) eliminates most of the attention I don't want to deal with.

Before I came to MUSH I played a lot of MUD games, especially RPI MUDs (particularly Harshlands and Shadows of Isildur) which happened to be set in medieval fantasy settings (Harn and Middle Earth).

On both of those games (much more so on SoI) there was a policy of strongly discouraging nonheterosexual characters, on the basis that they did not 'fit' within the settings. This basically took the form of a staff member pulling you aside before approving you and making it clear that if you were discovered to be gay IC, it was basically open season for you to be subjected to any level of discrimination (up to and including your character being outright murdered) and that no complaints about it would be entertained.

As you might imagine, this had a chilling effect on anyone rolling up anyone that was nonheterosexual and of the few attempts that I did see (including the only gender non-conforming character I ever saw rolled up there) most ended up getting brutally tortured and murdered almost as soon as they were discovered. I will say that I generally played on 'team evil' there, so I am not sure if this was less pronounced in the more heroic areas of the game, but it was made clear that it was discouraged and opened you up to any level of IC discrimination wherever you played.

So, I will say that following that experience, coming to MUSH it was a breath of fresh air even for it to simply be non-controversial to app in as a character that reflected my OOC gender and sexuality. I realise that this is an incredibly low bar to set but it is genuinely where I started out.

I have still had some pretty shitty experiences, my most recent one was being accused (since I was at the time playing a female character) that as I was a gay male this was 'obviously' part of some fetish I had about luring unwitting straight boys into having TS with my character. This despite the fact that my character was single, not engaged in any romantic RP and not seeking any romantic RP.

I will say that generally (generally!!) I find most MUSH people to be really cool, welcoming and friendly people and it is very seldom I feel uncomfortable about being open and honest both IC and OOC about who and what I am. Reaching out to other LGBT characters (where you can find them) tends to find you a group of pretty cool people wherever you go, honestly, and I have been lucky to meet a few people who have actually become close RL friends of mine through MUSH.

I will still sometimes feel like I am getting a strange vibe off of a channel, or an individual or a clique, but rarely anything I can put a finger on and honestly as a gay person there is an element of that which is just sort of the background noise of life. This tends to be much more pervasive in spheres where there is more of an alpha male, or very very heteronormative theme (looking at you, werewolf) going on, honestly.

I have been playing here a bit and having a good time, but one of my friends ended up having a really unpleasant interaction with one of the staffers here recently and quitting as a result, which has sort of soured me on the experience a bit.

The staff has been pretty pleasant to me as and when I have interacted with them, so it might just have been a weird interpersonal issue, but from seeing the log I was definitely not in love with the tone the staffer took and I will be wary when dealing with that individual in the future.

I think if there is going to be discussion on ad threads at all at all, there should be both positive and negative feedback allowed. Otherwise just lock the thread immediately after the ad is posted and have the ad stand on its own.

@2mspris

Awww man

Yes this looks super fun.

@royal

Thank you for your interest! It is a cool setting!

Unfortunately, it never came to anything. A few of the team that was working on it got snowballed by real life, and then one thing led to another and it never happened.

I'm really sorry to disappoint you on that.

I think actually this game is fairly unique in the market at the moment.

There are urban fantasy/horror things, yes, if you want to be a hapless mortal at the hands of powerful monsters.

There is Arx, which has elements of magic, but not easily accessible or widely available and not for everybody.

There are superhero games, but that is a different sort of niche for the most part.

There is a real dearth right now of 'wod style' games where you can app into an urban fantasy setting and have magical powers or whatever available from the outset and I think this is what it has tapped into and appealed to.

This looks like a fun game. Very good luck to the makers and those who made it in before it closed. I hope it turns out to be a lot of fun.

To those who missed out, we all know that MU people are notoriously flakey, so I am sure there will be some spaces before too very long.

Awww! I was on SOI many many years ago but I always played for team evil, so I probably never ran into you!!

<-- Artur

Volcica! Yes! We Volcica!