Best posts made by Pandora

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Pandora said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Tinuviel said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Pandora said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Tinuviel said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Pandora said in Separating Art From Artist:

@GreenFlashlight said in Separating Art From Artist:

I really hope I'm misinterpreting you here

You are, and that's okay. People who understand the words I typed get it.

Oh, no, in that example you're just being stupid. I agree with the general idea that people shouldn't seek to ban or otherwise prohibit works, but the quote you offered doesn't attempt to do that.

Your opinion is noted.

There's a difference between "It's not a name I intend to pass on to future generations" and "Nobody should ever at all ever mention this person again ever." The former is fine, if stupid. The latter is bad.

Censorship begins with someone's personal views on a work or body of works. Like I said though, your opinion is noted. We're not in the Hog Pit, I'm not going to derail the conversation getting into why arguing with someone calling everyone's opinions stupid is not a great use of my time.

I happen to think Margaret Atwood is an overrated writer, and I like the show adaptation better than the literary original version of the Handmaid's Tale. I share her political views, I just find her prose and plot unengaging.

Do you think this personal opinion is cause for concern that I might want to censor her?

I also think Twilight and EL James are overrated writers, for entirely different reasons. I think their works are misogynistic.

I didn't like the new Ghostbusters, not because it was feminist, but because it was a bad film.

I'm not trying to censor any of these things. I don't enjoy them, each for entirely different reasons. Some out of disgust, some out of boredom, some because I have a different sense of humour.

Sounds to me like the one trying to censor people is you. No one's allowed to have opinions if those opinions are political?

OK, Boomer.

I'm not going to divorce your empathy-seeking sentiments here from the fact that you practice Cancel Culture and would happily see authors that you politically disagree with censored if anyone could get away with it. You're either being facetious, disingenuous, or dishonest here, and I'm not for it. Unlike @Tinuviel, I don't find your opinions stupid, I find them disagreeable and yet alarmingly popular.

@Tinuviel It's called being HOPEFUL.

@Tinuviel Party registration, IIRC. Nothing about your actual ballot is public, that'd be madness. I read about some Republican politician whose campaign would send out a mailer with names and voting records of people who hadn't voted yet and a friendly 'reminder' that if you don't vote, your name and party affiliation will be added in the next one, and it'll be sent to all your neighbors. Savage.

@Tinuviel I keep posting here, so.

This is a strange derail, guys. But since we're here, let me just add this real quick: I live in England now, and just before this recent vote, I got the most CHARMING mailer, on glossy paper with bold colors and bold all-caps print advising me that if I was considering voting lib-dem, just DON'T, because every election they say they're close, and they never are, so ffs don't split the vote and just VOTE LABOUR unless you like losing to the Tories so goddamn ALWAYS. Obviously the language is hyperbole, but that's basically what it said, with helpful charts and graphs that showed how terribly the liberal democrats always lose after lying and saying they're polling well.

I can't vote here as a non-citizen, but it tickled me to death; American mailers are much less abrasive, usually.

@Tinuviel said in Privacy in gaming:

@Pandora That's love, masochist.

FTFY.

@Tinuviel said in Separating Art From Artist:

anything useful has been beaten out of it with sticks

True, but historically, when has that stopped a conversation on MSB, ever.

@Derp said in Privacy in gaming:

Realistically? They're gonna do this one way or another. I can't police what someone wants to do in their private Discord sandbox. All I can do is make sure that when on the game itself, they adhere to the policies.

Actually, they're not. Not unless you've decided to let them. I've never seen any sort of egregious thematic breach on a game where staff is openly watching. This can likely be attributed to any number of factors, but one of them is certainly the idea that people care more about your theme, your rules, your expectations, and impressing you when they know you're watching and actually care about the story they are telling.

I know plenty of people love the idea of sandboxing in their little corner of a game, but a lot more like the idea of being seen and mattering, which is why people swarm staff characters and metaplot hooks, etc. Imagine if, to make people feel included and as if they matter, rather than having to hump staff's leg for a pat on the head, staff could just see their thematic conversation with a newbie in that bar that one time, and appreciate them for it.

@Tinuviel I'm going to bed, PM me if I get more upvotes than you and/or OP, that's all I really care about obviously.

@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:

That is a reasonable way to look at it, but it's not one that I share. If someone suffers public shame as a result of being banned, so be it; however, I know a handful of people who have been banned which I do not considered to be either shamed or besmirched by the act. Sometimes, a ban comes down because a player simply cannot work with staff for one reason or another.

I find this curious. If a player simply cannot work with staff, why are they banned? Have they actually done something wrong? If not, a ban seems silly and excessive. If so - well, then that's the shameful thing they've done, and why banning them is still textbook public shaming.

Unless of course there's some sort of example of a situation in which someone is banned, having done something legitimately deserving of a ban, but no one thinks any less of them as a player/staffer as a result. But I do not think this is possible, as a banning smacks very much of 'Leave and never come back!' as opposed to 'Sorry it didn't work out, maybe one day!'

End of the day, circling back to the original point, I mostly just feel a bit of exasperation toward people that can't separate art from the artist. Every artist that has the good fortune of releasing multiple and varied works into the mainstream will inevitably transgress against pop morality, and its up to us as rational, thinking people (citation not forthcoming) to determine whether or not their works can stand alone to be appreciated divorced of the artist's beliefs - and in the case of modern artists, if in fact their beliefs are actually at all problematic as a logical conclusion as opposed to because the Twitter mob said so.

@faraday said in Staff’s Job?:

@Pandora said in Staff’s Job?:

The job of staff as a whole in any text-based game is to maintain the code, theme, and community standards through all of the back-end tasks that players do not have access to,

It's as decent a generalization as any, but it's still not quite accurate. [...]

It just varies a lot. There's no other way to put it.

Students and teachers may overlap in duties (passing out pencils, deciding who gets to use the swing first, monitoring attendance or participation, grading tests) but at the end of the day, there is a difference and it isn't definitive to say it varies - the teacher is the teacher and the student is the student.

Same goes for Staff vs Player in terms of responsibility, or as taken from the name of the thread 'job'. If a game goes down, who do players look to? Staff. If there is a disruptive theme breach? Staff. If a plot conclusion needs a game-wide emit? Staff.

Players can help, it is a community after all, but at the end of the day, staff's job is to keep everything running in all of the ways that players cannot.

My favorite new author is a struggling young artist & I started supporting him on Patreon last year, in October. The tier I subbed at gets you a handwritten thank you card, a bookmark, stickers, and the best part - a collectible fridge magnet in the shape of one of the cans of the canned human meat they eat in the cannibalistic post-apocalyptic setting of the novels: "Good Boy" made of healthy young people, "Foi Ras" made from the liver of people that were force-fed corn, etc. It's grim, I love it.

Anyway! I subbed in October. So that's October, November, December, and now the end of January. I didn't get any of the things in the mail! I was so miffed, and since I finished reading all the books to-date anyway, I cancelled the sub and added the reason was not getting the tier stuff. This was like 2 days ago. TODAY, I get a package in the mail from him with all the stuff and a personalized note apologizing that it took so long and including some extra freebies - including the full set of the magnets!

I feel terrible for being an impatient asshole, but I'm too fucking embarrassed to re-sub. What do I do? So annoying!

@Lotherio said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

That said on a mu I will show concern once, if that's a trigger and they tell me to get the fuck out, fair enough, I'm not there to counsel or help. I'm not writing them off, I'll respect their online space.

@Lotherio said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

If they told me to piss off and leave them be, I'd do just that and write them off as not to waste my time with concern again.

Emphasis mine. In either case it's entirely up to you what you do, I completely agree that we're not on these games to be anyone's counselor. It's just a bit of a conflict of statements here; if you're going to reach out in the first place, it wouldn't hurt to take into consideration the timing, if in fact your initial goal is to help.

@crawfish These are all so gorgeous I would struggle to pick just one. Bang-up job, seriously.

@Lotherio That's awesome, I definitely don't have the temperament to do what you do so I appreciate you all the more for it. I wasn't casting aspersions on your desire to help in the MU* context btw, I was pointing out that while you may be trying to help, plenty of people reach out in that same way trying to be instigators or gossip-gatherers & it's hard in a moment of high-pique to tell the difference.

The song 'Closer'. Everything about this song is so chill, and it makes me happy in the sort of way only pop music can.

Also, alcohol. My department at work is sneaking mini-bottles into our local bowling alley tomorrow, we're going to get trashed and roll gutter balls and razz the show-offs that actually try to do well and I'm going to demand they play Closer and it's so nice to actually love your job, which I realize I do. So there.

I might be on my way to being drunk. I don't work Fridays, I can be drunk on a Thursday afternoon. I love that, too.

@GreenFlashlight said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora My only thought is that these measures can only be successful to the degree that staff can be trusted to enforce them without bias. I can't tell if that's a separate issue from your proposal, but I don't think it is, because the idea has to be enacted within the culture we operate in.

Can you offer a bit more detail? What sort of enforcement are you looking for from staff? Or do you mean in terms of the negotiation when the players can't come to an agreement? Because I feel like if staff on a game cannot enact unbiased player mediation when requested, your roleplay experience isn't safe on that server no matter what system is in place.

My bestie Chief got me the instax mini 8, and it is just the cutest thing ever in the world. I had a Polaroid when I was younger and I was grumpy it wasn't a new digital camera so I used it for like, one pack of instant pictures, never picked it up again, and promptly lost it or broke it or something. Fast forward to 2016 and all things retro are 'fetch' right? Well this thing is as lo-tech as could possibly be, there's not even a zoom function, lol. It's adorable though, and it turns out EVERYONE loves instant pictures, every time you take one everyone in the immediate vicinity wants to see how it came out, my coworkers were utterly obnoxious about it. So anyway, this is today's RL thing I love.

@GreenFlashlight said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora I mean it has been my experience that telling staff my boundaries have been violated is more likely to result in nothing* being done than something, which makes me wonder how effective red cards would be.

*or worse than nothing, but I don't want to get into that again right now

Ah, that's unfortunate. This is meant to inform the other player that your IC boundaries have been violated, and that you no longer wish for the scene to continue. Generally speaking, staff would only be involved if the other player contacted them to say you were using RED in order to break a rule or avoid ICA=ICC.

I think what you're referring to is more in-line with someone crossing OOC boundaries & staff failing to respond adequately, and unfortunately there is no system other than walking away that can deal with staff failing to uphold their end of the player-staff agreement.