Best posts made by reversed

"MUSHing is dying" seems to be another way to say "I no longer am young or free enough to obsess about it for every waking moment, and thus the hobby must be in terminal decline because my friends and I all have adult responsibilities now."

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Talk about a dishonorable discharge.

I'm ethnically honky, but have found myself being complimented on how I've played POCs in the past. It's always kind of blown my mind, because in my mind all I've been doing is "playing a character who fits into the IC situation." But like, when I played a Sabbat vampire who was a 6'3" very dark skinned African-American man, what people seemed to be saying was "thanks for not playing a gangsta rap BlackedRaw.com stunt cock from The Hood." (Then again, this was a game with a low bar, where there was another vampire whose character concept was "angry black woman" whose channel title or alias or something was 'Black Lady.')

For a while, I had the above character while also playing a petite irony-poisoned milk-white-skinned California-girl vampire, and the ways that the same players would seek out interaction on that character over the black male character were a trip.

As far as "agency" goes in a game, I find that I'm generally satisfied if I'm playing a tree, and I fall in a forest, I make a sound.

Which can mean a lot of different things based on the game, the game OOC culture, whatever. But I think most people can make do with being a grunt in the trenches -- what will turn most people off is being a grunt in the trenches who is invisible, inaudible, and no matter what they try, leaves no trace in the minds of anyone that they were ever there.

"Still bisexual but now annoyed" is how I'm going to describe Ember on Arx from now on, because it works regardless of context or situation

@Pacha said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Ominous

On the subject of roster games I know there have been problems in Arx, for example, of people taking non-white characters off the roster and just rewriting them as white. Though I believe staff there have cracked down on this a lot.

I don't recall ever seeing a specifically non-cishet roster character on Arx. There are plenty of characters that specifically mention heterosexual stuff "He was always flirting with ladies" or so forth, but I can't remember ever seeing a roster character specifically written as LGBT.

Backtracking the thread a bit here, because when I read this little section of the thread (not just @Pacha's post, but the ensuing discussion) it got me thinking a bit.

I was already in the process of drawing up some ideas to add rosters to Redreef, and decided to just go for it and make one of them no-maybes-about-it transgender. Because, well, someone had to be the first, I suppose, so hopefully there will be more.

Answering questions about Arx lore and code on channels

@Roz said in [NSFW] Erotic RP Concepts:

@reversed said in [NSFW] Erotic RP Concepts:

@thesuntsar said in [NSFW] Erotic RP Concepts:

I'm not falling for this. This is going to be another thread where @reversed almost convinces me they don't know what TS is.

This time I don't know what vore is, please explain.

get OUT

Kind of the opposite of vore from what I've heard, on the streets

So far we have 1. a username taken from a 1990s first person shooter, 2. a thread about getting new blood to sign up for MU*s, and 3. a post in the RL forum about how working in "the hood" led to guns being brandished at him.

C'mon, don't even play the game this time, just sweep him aside and move on.

I have no idea if I can reasonably blame The Great Large Boi Height Wars on WoD Garou players but it feels like I can get away with it, so I will.

Katarina:

Ember:

I can absolutely say that there has been more than one occasion where someone's dogged determination to flex their "see, this is what it's REALLY like to be a woman" bona fides in every possible OOC conversation has led me to conclude beyond any doubt that they're a man posing as a woman out of horniness.

Well, it looks like you weren't able to figure out how Encyclopedia Brown solved the mystery of "who @reversed plays" and had to skip to the answer in the back of the book. That's okay. There's no shame.

CURRENTLY-

Arx:

• Ember Redreef, blood bitch (July 2019–)
• Katarina Valardin, Paul Katreides (December 2019–)

Liberation MUSH:

• Cassandra Clover, sunshine-noir Hollywood P.I.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

IN THE RECENT PAST-

Arx:

• Cassandra Laurent, Legate of Dragon Age: Inquisition (November 2021–March 2022)
• Ronja Sandreef, pirate-raised daughter of a Baron (May–December 2019)

City of Hope:

• Cheree Crowley, adopted childe of the Sabbat Archbishop
• Daniel Freeman, ex-CIA Sabbat santero
• Kiki, "95% waging a one-man war on unsucked cocks"
• Sasha Crane, Pentex-affiliated health food CEO
• Wendy Mullen, sullen psychic

Empire State Heroes:

• The first player of Harley Quinn, X-23, and Zatanna (roughly March–July 2019)

Gray Harbor:

• Eden Fitch, rookie Washington State Park Ranger

Heroes Assembled:

• Rachel Leighton, a.k.a. the costumed crook-for-hire Diamondback (Spring 2020)

Liberation MUSH:

• Chanel Duvall, Baddie Haqim
• Cheyenne Spare, HVIC of Santa Monica
• Matilda (Mattie) Diet Coke, your little hoodrat friend

Star Wars: Chontio:

• Inspector Cazh Coul, Pantoran detective turned drunk

Let's all take a moment and appreciate the orb in @egg's avatar.

Anyway, I'm not sure what else I have to add on the topic, but I feel bad shitting up the thread with jokes. I guess I'll just say that for me, at the end of the day, thinking critically about the character you're playing is a good thing, and being able to recognize when something is weird and not-so-okay is likewise a good thing, whether it's White Wolf 1990s edgelord un-PC-ism, the white-folk-favoring bent of barbarian fantasy stuff, the "faith an' begorrah!" stereotype dialogue of your favorite X-Men comics, or Lovecraft stories all being (in the words of a podcast) "a white man goes insane after learning jazz exists." You don't have to stop liking WoD, or barbarian stories, or the X-Men, or Lovecraft, but you should be able to at least not pay the weird not-okay shit forward when you use that stuff as inspiration.

As part of my current job, I took an online course in what boils down to communicating with people who are in "crisis mode." Not life or death crisis mode, it wasn't a course in counseling people who are having psychological crises or suicidal ideations or anything like that. But "crisis mode" in the sense of: they're fed up, they're at their limit, and even if they want to take in new information their emotional state might get in the way of actually processing or digesting it.

Since taking that course, I've on-the-sly passed some of the handouts and course notes to friends on MUSHes because while the course was in no way related to managing online roleplaying relationships, the basic principles of "dealing with people in crisis mode" have been surprisingly helpful to them in figuring out how to handle... well, not to put too fine a point on it, but MUSH drama.

One of the things in the course handouts I've shared with people is a thing on how to communicate with people to make sure that while you'll do the best you can, there are specific things that you can and can't do. It's less about red tape and more about "I'm not your magic bullet, I can't guarantee your problem will go away at a flick of my wrist, but I can support you as we work together to solve it."

Sometimes it's been successful for the friends who have needed it. Sometimes not so much (there was one person who reacted to that attempt to gently set a boundary by logging off in a huff of hurt feelings). But I think for anyone who struggles with this kind of stuff -- whether it's a staffer who feels like the players see them as a vending machine, or a player who feels obliged to take on the problems of another player even if they don't have the spoons for it -- that reading is, at the very least, an affirmation of "you don't need to kill yourself for this online roleplaying game stuff, and it's not your fault or obligation if people keep taking and taking and giving back nothing."

I don't really want to link the actual documents themselves because it gives away a bit too much about my RL work than I'm comfortable having out in the open on MSB, but I'm sure there are other resources regarding the same topic that are out there online. Maybe this weekend I'll have a look.