Best posts made by saosmash

Faraday is a class act and a half, and she won't even take money for the work she does for this hobby even when people are trying to throw it at her.

This is a hobby. If you treat it as a lifeline instead, your levels of intensity are going to be uncomfortable for others.

Game staff are not therapists. Fellow players are not a support group. Boundaries are important.

@crawfish You gotta be careful with those dance rolls, tho.

I'd like to offer a proposal that we collectively move on because no one is ever going to persuade anyone on this subject. Derp will always champion the alleged abuser vis a vis "easily forged" logs and women randomly discrediting people for some reason, and a large portion of the forum will always choose to throw accused abusive men out with the garbage assuming no value lost.

The only difference that we see here is that we're supposedly in the constructive part of the forum, but I see nothing constructive in continuing to flagellate this particular dead horse.

Surely there's some other expectation management that we can disagree about that won't come back to this old chestnut.

I agree with @Tinuviel: we're arguing about hypotheticals that grow increasingly extreme and I strongly suspect that in practice, despite different philosophies, the way each set of people actually handles a complaint about harassment or stalking would be similar.

It's only the edge cases where we would differ, and we don't actually have an edge case to discuss here, just a philosophical difference in approach -- and I suspect it's not even that wide. It has to do with what the burden of proof would be on a harassment complaint - how much evidence you need that a thing is happening prior to action. And we frankly don't have the language we would need to define what quanta of evidence would be sufficient, because we don't know, because it's extremely situationally dependent, and most of the language I personally have for handling sufficiency of evidence comes from an extremely nonanalogous forum.

I wouldn't act with a report alone, probably, absent any other evidence - depending on what you mean by act. But I would at minimum flag a player who had a report enough to start paying attention and start looking for other warning signs; an fyi if you will. Because I trust reporters in general as I believe there are so many internal and/or social barriers to reporting that most reports are genuine.

But I do also agree in philosophy with @farfalla that the harm done by mistakenly excluding a not-wrongful actor from a game I'm running would be a lesser harm than mistakenly continuing to include a wrongful actor. Perhaps it is only this harm analysis that separates the two philosophies? Perhaps it isn't.

Start demanding composure checks from the blase. Bet you half a dollar they aren't sheeted for it.

Mabelle made a great event last night. I was super impressed with all the effort SEVERAL players went to to do prepared poses for performances etc. Good job erryone.

@phaedrus It's much easier to rewrite reality when the other witnesses to your behavior are forced not to speak, yes.

I mean. No one HAS to date. I have deleted my OKC profile within a couple weeks of making one every time because yeah ... it sucks.

Maybe one day I'll meet somebody but I'm 35 and haven't gotten around to it yet so I guess it just isn't that much of a priority for me.

Least I got a kitty.

Slow burn is where it is at. I share your frustration with the desire to rp relationships etc on fast forward. I don't know that I have a constructive solution for how to get the twain to meet though.

@too-old-for-this OH SHIT Goodwill is such a good idea for this extra blood pressure machine. I bet someone who could really use one might find it there.

I'm not interested in playing without continuity and overarching story. I find that boring. Shrughands!

I think that the fact that every single conversation about this becomes a demand for more evidence that it happens instead of a review of the massive screeds of evidence that it happens is a problem. Ten women should not have to say the same thing before it counts the same as one man saying "I've never seen this happen."

Whether there is a community is a fact question, not an opinion question. There is a community. It is present.

Whether you are part of this community is also a fact question, not an opinion question. You are. Thousands of posts. Empirical evidence. We are all familiar with you. We are even familiar with this argument about how this isn't a community because this is not the first time we have had this conversation.

Whether you intend on engaging in this community or whether you like being a part of this community or whether you like the community are all opinion questions about which your opinion matters, and you are free to have those opinions about no and no, and no; it doesn't change the facts.

This confusion between opinion and fact grows more and more prevalent these days but it doesn't actually change the true relationship between opinion and fact.

@surreality I'm a defense attorney with blue streaked hair!

I mean ... I'm not approving anybody to play Ramsay Bolton on a game I run, because that character exists to be an edgelord rapist.

Oh my gooood the immediate page thing. This is the equivalent of being pounced the second I walk in the door. Whyyyyyyy.

Sometimes a scene is just good. It's quiet and atmospheric and in character and good. It doesn't have to be long or epic and dramatic to remind you why you're still in this hobby in the first place.

It helps reduce the frequency and somehow it has helped me to identify it more when it is happening, somehow, than before I was on meds, and made it easier for me to use self help / self care tools. The first step is being aware but that's not the only step. Also "you're just being crazy right now stop it" is the first reaction from me to myself when I am having an issue like this and that is one of the least helpful things you can do. It's more like "I think this valid reaction I am having is being substantially overblown so let's work on finding something else to focus on" or ... idk there are a number of them but it DOES come down to keeping my shit from becoming other people's problems.

The danger of being reliant on your friends is that you can put yourself into a position where you are asking people for reassurance constantly or even just distributing too much emotional labor to people you care about and creating an imbalance in your friendships that are most important to you. I'd never tell anyone not to talk to friends. But therapists are literally paid to help with emotional labor and also are more qualified than most friends.

I've spent some time thinking about this. I know I used to be nervous about apping male characters on new games because of the stigma I expected as a cis, heterosexual woman playing gay or bisexual men. But I eventually got over this because I discovered over time that as long as you demonstrate that you are playing people who are people first, as opposed to sexuality-shaped kinkboxes of whatever dimension, people who are worth RPing with will RP with you, and people who are assholes will be assholes.

I do play a lot of bisexuals. I can be a boring straight white girl in my real life, there's no need to explore that in my RP. I used to play straight boys sometimes, but eh. I've written a few ace characters and received occasional forays into people who don't "get" why you would do that or I guess ... want to "convert" your ace character, which isn't really how anything works, but people do it to real ace folks all the time so I guess it's ... verisimilitude??

On Arx, did run into several people playing (or playing about) nonexistent homophobia, similar to people playing or reacting to nonexistent sexism. Frustrating when people try to sandbox away the parts of the theme that make it interesting and/or enlightened.

Mostly, otherwise, I've lately played on a lot of small games and haven't gotten a lot of shit OOC or IC for sexuality-related things because I'm largely playing in small groups with people I trust not to be assholes. And occasional issues with, I guess, bizarre and idiotic rumors being spread about me and the sexuality of my characters behind people's backs, but it's got the T-shirt on that at this point.