Posts made by Paris

@mietze It's worse.

@tnp There's nothing that a kale chip can do that a nori chip can't do better.

@aria Kale smoothies are of the devil, no question there. Salads!

@aria Dinosaur kale is ok, especially younger leaves. I absolutely hate kale but I grew lacinato for salads before it was something you could buy in grocery stores; you can tear it up and add it raw as part of a mixed green salad, or cooked as a decent green, especially with garlic, bacon, etc.

The rest of the stuff is just sulfury tough crap.

@apos Yeah. It's possible to create RP and advance other people's stories by giving them some kind of foil, if you do it right.

@tinuviel I have a few stalkers, and I know that at least one headwiz has outed me to them. It's part of why I've limited where I play. Knowing that someone who is known to be vindictive, and shares personal information about others, has access to others' IPs makes me uncomfortable.

@gangofdolls

This board half exists in order to internally communicate about badly behaving members of staff and games that create conditions for badly behaving members of staff to bless or excuse their behavior. I guess I'm seeing the contradiction of a staff member not being excused from their position here for the behaviors we sort of commonly find problematic or offensive on games...

I feel like there's a blind spot here.

This.

@surreality

I cannot say I am comfortable with her having access to player IPs on the forum, knowing how often and widely she is staff and thus has access to IPs on games as well.

And this, are my personal concerns.

@thenomain shrugs
Re: VASpider, I see a lot of similarities in this case.

Edit: one word sufficed when I used ten.

@juke said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@mietze said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

I would much rather play on a place that very stringently enforced positive behavior standards than on a place that had no such boundaries but banned a shitload or people who were problematic elsewhere.

I mean, yeah, of course, a game where people enforce standards of behavior well is a good thing.

But this is a weird post. Anywhere that enforces stringent standards of behavior is likely to ban people who have been assholes elsewhere because they have certain standards of behavior and those people are known to fail at upholding them. Pretending prior behavior isn't relevant is weird.

And if nobody knows about the prior behavior, and the person behaves, then...the point is moot, anyway.

In the present case, it was current behavior elsewhere that currently impacted and was about and toward people in-game. I think that if there was questionable behavior in the past but if, in the present, the person is behaving, then it might be worth holding off for the moment. Every case has its own quirks.

@juke said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@mietze said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

With boundaries people who have tendencies towards behaving badly can actually be enjoyable to RP with. [...] The problem is that few people want to set up or enforce those boundaries because it's a lot of unpleasant work with an uncertain payoff.

I wanna make it clear I'm just responding to this post and not as a broad commentary on the whole thread, but:

I know this happens, but I think it's the craziest shit ever. There are a lot of people out there who are fun to play with who aren't also crazy assholes who would abuse people if they were given the inch to do so.

get rid of them

Seriously, it's not like there's a dearth of good roleplayers who don't leave a trail of carnage behind them.

@mietze I always try to have multiple defining traits for my characters (even if they aren't always obvious) just to make things more flexible. But my policy is to also try to say 'yes' to RP opportunities whenever I can, even if at first it might be out of character for them to be there.

@thenomain The general action taken in these circumstances is usually no action at all, since most folks tend to like to pat themselves on the back about how 'fair' they are, instead of ejecting toxic people from their games and forums. Criticising the mob for actually calling for someone's ouster seems disingenuous to me.

Besides, Surreality often bends over backwards in trying to be overly 'fair', which I attribute to their good character in general, but that's no good when someone like Auspice uses that tendency against them.

We, as MUSHers, tend to be an empathetic lot, and thus often shy away from cracking down on serial abusers. It's necessary to be able to put oneself in someone else's shoes in order to play the variety of characters that we do, but it is too often used for certain types to get away with abusive and toxic behavior.

(Edit: I had no opinion until I recently saw the evidence of the things they were pulling. I am not down with accusations that have no proof, logs, whatever. I also find the gripings about the mob convenient, as it tries to undercut the fact that a large number of people are disgusted with her unreasonable behavior.)

@wretched said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

@goldfish Sometimes i'll even play with some metapose if i know my character is being a dick.

"<Some assholish statement>" Did he just? ... yes, yes he just said that, with a straight face even, he's gotta be sarcastic right? RIGHT? Alas, No, Grover is just a prick, apparently.

That, and being willing to roll with the consequences of one's prickishness, tend to go a long way in establishing OOC goodwill towards a 'difficult' character. Showing character growth over time helps, too.

@mietze said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

I think people can truly adore unlikable characters based on how they're written (or like in the case of a TV show, how they are portrayed), in a love to hate way. For me an example would be John Smith in the latest TV series of Man in the High Castle. Do I like him as someone who I'd love to hang out with? NO. But he IS one of my favorite characters on that show because the way he is written and more importantly the actor's portrayal of him really make him enjoyable to watch on the screen.

There's a lot of pathos that can be mined from nonverbal reactions that offset, undercut, or inform people's villainy; Rufus Sewell is a master of that, but we RPers can do so as well, yep.

@surreality I think that's pretty clear. People are just identifying the cause of the drama and want something done about it.

@botulism said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@arkandel I felt the same way recently, that in order to ask someone to leave I had to catch them breaking an actual rule.

Then I realized it's perfectly valid to do it because someone is a shitty person who bullies and hurts others, even if they don't do it right in front of me on my game. This hobby is toxic for a reason - we tolerate toxic behavior from toxic people out of a misguided sense of fairness. No one has a right to play on a game.

In the 90s, I ran a game that I really loved. The staff were pretty solid, the theme is one that I'm still fond of.

On it was a player that I had gotten semi-involved with, and I went out to visit them for a few weeks. He turned out to be a lying, predatory jerk that targeted vulnerable people, and I only escaped him, and sexual assault, because of a friend.

When I got back home, I informed my staff that I was going to kick him off the game.

"You can't do that just because a relationship went bad."
"It didn't happen on the game, so it doesn't count."
"You can't let personal feelings get involved."

I stepped down as God, amidst a bunch of accusations that I was a PHB. Word got back to the guy and his friends, and he got a ton of sympathy. I figured that I wasn't the only one he was going to target, isolate, and assault, so I figured I'd be vindicated eventually, but it still hurt.

Several months later, it was discovered that he'd used the game to target a very underage player, was actively grooming them to run away from their family and go stay with him. He didn't, in part because I, who lived in the same town as the player, went over and shared my experiences with them. They weren't entirely convinced, but (with the help of others, I won't claim sole credit) eventually cut it off with him.

Ever since then, if I KNOW, with logs, screencaps, etc, especially from multiple players, that a player is toxic and actively does things to harm people, I have no qualms about kicking them off any game I run-- even if they don't do this shit on my game. I consider that part of my responsibility to my players and MUSHing in general.

VASpider has hung on for years because of this, because people, as the God of PernMUSH once said to me, would rather hew to the ILLUSION of fairness rather than the harder reality.

Take responsibility for the hobby and the part you play in it, MU* Soapbox admins. Do the right thing and drop Auspice from your staff.

(Edit: typo that annoyed me.)

@ghost said in Meanest (But Funniest) Thing You've Done in a Game:

• "Hey, are you guys doing anything tonight? Because I'm totally into this band you probably don't know about, the Jamie Lannister Pornography Experience, they're kind of like a melange of Anthrax, old-school Lady Gaga, and Tibetan throat singing, and if you're cool you'll probably go."

I want to hang out with this guy at this exact concert. Just hide the PBR.

@caryatid Tempest named names first, while I discussed the behavior, and the atmosphere won't improve as long as you allow stalkers to use this board to harass people. If you're going to blame me, instead of addressing ongoing stalking, then you are part of the problem.

@thenomain said in Make MSB great again!:

@paris (et al.)

Ironically, is this the place for this discussion?

I was going to make it brief until Tempest decided to target Botulism and justify Cupcake. Since Cupcake loves to bring up Bot in unrelated threads, and nobody complains then, why not?

@tempest Cupcake accused Botulism of harassment, because Botulism is someone she herself harassed on the Reach, as soon as she figured out that Bot had been one of the players that she had formerly targeted. She has also, several times, tried to dig in who I played, including asking about it 'innocuously' when I first started posting here. It is widely known that Cupcake was Pomona at the Reach and led the 'Welcome Wagon' in the fae sphere, and ended up chasing roughly 20 players off the game, most of them LGBT, and isolating a bunch more. She, along with Prudence and William, proceeded to harass a friend of mine after they quit, on social media, for close to a year, making threats and insults if said friend spoke to anyone. (Said friend, a new MUSHer, quit MUSHing entirely after that and had to make all of their social accounts private, and eventually had to set up redirect services for their IPs.) Cupcake minimised their involvement, but they did name themselves and their IPs matched.

I went into all of it in great detail, and the admins here just shrugged. My inbox then exploded with multiple folks telling me that they had also been subjected to similar and ongoing harassment by Cupcake, but did not want to post publicly for fear of being targeted on games where they both play. I am NOT going to post those names, which several folks requested, because that would be outing victims of stalking. I have not outed who I was on the Reach for the same reason, though I have set myself up for direct shit here because I won't stand for her targeting Botulism every time she can.

As long as this continues to be ok, and as long as you guys keep enabling it, this site will rightfully keep its lousy reputation. The fact that they're ok with YOU targeting players by name and shaming them here, same thing. I'm not at all surprised that you're trying to protect Cupcake.

@tnp I am not wrong, and was not told I was wrong, about Cupcake.