Posts made by Rinel

If you are having trouble falling asleep, and you like to read, drag yourself out of bed and go into another room to read. You want the bed to be associated with sleep and sex. Sleep hygiene is important!

Also, get f.lux.

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Rinel Also excuse me, I totally tried to bang Rinel.

Wait... what

More substantively: your post is really good. Playing a black American is probably the thing I'm most afraid of doing. Living in Louisiana and seeing secondhand how fucked everything is just makes me feel like I would have to do a prohibitive amount of research on almost everything. But I am probably oversensitive due to working in one of the worse environments as regards racial equality (criminal law).

And as someone else pointed out, even good faith portrayals can call to mind blackface if you stumble.

@Ominous said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Rinel
Limps and atrophied limbs don't exactly make people's fun bits feel tingly.

It's just one mangled, shriveled, withered leg! Sure, it makes horrible popping sounds when she bends her knee; just get a squeaky mattress.

No love for wounded warriors ;_;

@RightMeow

I'm not a psychiatrist and will be unintentionally giving you incorrect info in this post. You should go to a psychiatrist who will explain this to you correctly.

So you know dopamine? It's one of the reward drugs in the brain. It makes doing things feel good. If you have an executive function disorder like ADHD, you've got dopamine issues. Most of the time, with ADHD, your little dopamine brain factories aren't producing enough dopamine. So what you do doesn't feel rewarding like it does for other people.

When you're a kid, this manifests itself in the stereotypical ADHD ways. You aren't actually more energetic than other kids. It's just that sitting and reading quietly or figuring out a math problem is giving everyone else hits of dopamine, and you aren't getting any. So you do what does give you that hit. You fidget. You act out. You tend to do physical stuff. It gets you the dopamine reward other people get more easily.

For adults it's more complicated. No dopamine means no willingness to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe you procrastinate constantly. You need the anxiety of an impending deadline to kickstart your executive function (ADHD is an executive function disorder. So is OCD), because you don't have proper dopamine regulation.

And then, sometimes, you get explosions of dopamine. The factories go haywire. Burstfire reward hormones. The thing you're doing is so rewarding. It's the best thing ever. All that dopamine you haven't been getting is crashing into you like a tidal wave. Why would you ever want to stop doing this thing?

...ever heard of hyperfocus? Yeah. Burst fire mode.

So, ADHD drugs. What they do is to get the dopamine factories running smoothly. You get the same hits as everyone else. No more shortages. No more explosions. Just a steady flow like it's supposed to be.

How they do that is completely outside of my ability to explain, but generally it involves overclocking the factories a bit (this is why benzodiazepines are really bad for ADHD; they slow down the already malfunctioning dopamine creators). There are non-stimulant medicines on the market, but they're newer and less numerous.

@GreenFlashlight

I don't see the problem here.

All of this talk about people getting involved in drama about sex makes me think I put off really unapproachable vibes. I've had that happen precisely once, and it wasn't stemming out of organic RP. A friend and I decided to try something and a third party got upset.

Now I just have to figure out whether my unapproachable vibes are of the awesome variety or of the not awesome variety. Am I an imposing tiger or am I stinky cheese

@Kanye-Qwest said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Do I play a good man? IDK, but it's fun for me, so I do it.

Word, but I think there's a really important difference here between you, a woman not particularly caring whether or not she portrays a man well, and some other person, a white person not particularly caring whether or not he portrays a black man well. At least as far as it relates to real life settings.

I'm not saying that every second of a POC's life is filled with ANGST and DRAMA and RACISM. I'm just saying that, you know. The way my black friends are talking right now is really different from the way my white ones are, even the white ones who are really good and respected allies.

EDIT: On Arx, of course, these things mean fuck-all, because you in particular did so much work to make it a safe place, for which you do not get nearly enough credit.

@egg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Play a POC, it wouldn't kill you.

The character I've roleplayed the most in my life (Rinel Tern, theologian, literal Godbotherer, and generally cantankerous individual--come get into a fight with her on Arx today) is brown, and when I'm playing MMOs I tend to make my characters POCs.

Here's the thing, though. Those are fantasy worlds. It doesn't matter if my Jane Shepard is black, because by the time of Mass Effect it's species that matters, not race. It doesn't matter if Rinel looks like someone from India (except that maybe she'll not sunburn as easily?), because Arx is actually color blind.

But Marion, my second-gen Chinese immigrant character on Gray Harbor? I like Marion a lot, but playing them is hard. I have functionally no idea what it is like to grow up Chinese on the West Coast. I read a story as a kid about a girl who was embarrassed that she liked to eat fish eyes. I went to high school with a lot of first, second, and third gen immigrants (this is probably the most helpful thing). I try to read up on general cultural trends. But in terms of that lived experience?

I am not exaggerating when I say that it is easier to get into the head of Rinel Tern, a woman who literally punches demons, magically sees the movement of the wind in the sky, and yells at 800-year-old avatars of death and destruction for being rude than it is to play Marion. I don't mean this to say "oh wow people of color are totally alien and not understandable!" I mean it to say that if I fuck up on Rinel (and boy have I fucked up), I'm just someone who doesn't understand Oathlands culture. If I fuck up on Marion, I run the risk of being really offensive.

That doesn't mean I won't play POCs in real-world-adjacent settings. Obviously, I'll do that. But white folks should be aware that it deserves time and effort.

@Ganymede

I'm sorry. That's miserable. This at least is just a statement of the facts, so it's less that I Can't Do It At All and more it's my first time doing it and I'm doing it in federal court AAAAA

GERMAN RESISTANCE NUN WOOOO

Eta: the idea of RPing a fascist makes me wanna barf.

So a week and a half ago my boss told me he would do a difficult and time consuming thing for the writ application I'm working on. It significantly alleviated my anxiety.

On Monday he told me he's too busy to do it and that my law clerk should send him a rough draft of facts for him to review that night.

Today he reviewed the law clerk's work, sent it to me (it wasn't good), and asked me to do the difficult and time consuming thing.

During the phone call with him today he asked "are you sure you're ok doing this?" I said "you're too busy and nobody else knows how." He said "that's true." I said "then it doesn't matter how I feel."

So now I'm back where I was a week and a half ago, with literally nothing done on this, and instead of having two weeks to do it I have two days.

oh gosh oh god what do I play what do I do does everyone do magic are there too many magickers can I be a german runaway nun

This game looks amazing, but even the census has me totally overwhelmed. I would like to play a religious German leftist, but I see there are very few Germans being played. Is that a general no-go because of people being fashy?

I just want to roleplay a person in this world.

@mietze

FWIW, my panic attacks were normal for 7 years before they began to involve crushing chest pain and shortness of breath. So it may just be that--but I'd still explore the options everyone is talking about.

OH FOR JUST ONE TIME
I WOULD TAKE THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
TO FIND THE HAND OF FRANKLIN
REACHING FOR THE BEAUFORT SEA

Stan Rogers is everything. Gorgeous songs? Stan Rogers. Hopeful songs? Stan Rogers. Resolute songs? Stan Rogers? Horribly sad songs? Stan fucking Rogers.

And of course hilarious songs too.

Oh, and I like Mika.

@Kanye-Qwest

This sounds amazing. I'll ask.

@Macha

Thank you. I'll ask.

Well, I've been given some options going forward.

Good news: my psychiatrist is really smart and up to date on all the latest neuropsychiatry and pharmaceutical studies.

Bad news: anxiety and ADHD medicines do not play well together.

By "do not play well together," I mean that benzodiazapenes make ADHD worse by depressing all neural function, including the mesocorticolimbic projection, which is what makes dopamine, well, work as a positive motivator. And ADHD medicines hyperactivate the HPA axis, which regulates stress.

So I get to choose between extreme lack of productivity, which is starting to affect my job performance even if I've managed to keep it hidden from others, and extreme, unrelenting terror that makes life literally unmanageable.

Meanwhile my bosses have literally no idea of what's required for the imminently due deadline, keep telling me to take time off because they're worried about my mental health, and don't have the ability to help me do what needs to be done because they never reviewed any of the materials I sent them weeks ago in order to learn it.

I want to quit everything and cry for a week. The only good news is that I'm so terrified of driving that if I ever actually become suicidal I can just get in the car and go to New Orleans because I'm convinced the constant panic attacks will kill me. Boom. Instant exposure therapy.

Or, you know, death.

It's fine. This is fine. Everything is fine. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

This is not my beautiful house!

@Kanye-Qwest

I'm so sorry. You're worth a ton.

My parents never said anything half so cruel to me, but lazy was so frequently said that I've just known it was true for over half my life.

@dvoraen said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

There's a lot I'm leaving out, here, but sometimes I hear certain sounds and I wonder wtf was that.

Just casually bring up safewords around her in conversation and see how she reacts

(do not do this)

Double posting because I need to vent

@Kanye-Qwest said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

It has helped me immensely to have a Neuroscience doctor tell me : You are not just lazy. Your brain is atypical.

I spent most of the afternoon of my diagnosis crying for this reason. It was just too much to process emotionally, especially given how many times I'd been told I was lazy by parents, teachers, and professors. I distinctly remember my Ancient Greek professor telling me "you aren't bad at learning vocabulary; that's just a narrative you've constructed for yourself."

That little joy was prompted by me coming to him and asking for advice on how to learn vocab because I was struggling with it (and always have, in every language I've studied. I have studied five languages).

Fuck you, Esposito.