Best posts made by SparklesTheClown

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

A POC (person of color) is any non-white person.

That's not as helpful as it may seem, honestly. Since 'whiteness' isn't solely the providence of those with white skin. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards... not white, but White.

Anyone who wouldn't get racially profiled in the U.S or just entirely banned from the country by conservatives is white by the general American definition of POC. I hope that helps.

Update: I have a therapist appointment for the 8th, which is the day before my birthday.

My best friend and another friend practically had to pull teeth to get me to make the appointment, but I ultimately did it.

The worst thing I ever saw was on Shang, I think I mentioned it here before, where years ago this dude walked into the square and started speaking in the most outrageous way possible, like something you'd see out of a racist meme comic, and was dropping N bombs all around. It was absolutely wild. My brain felt as assaulted as when I attempted to watch Revenge of the Fallen.

I'm single.

I have 3 packs of McDonald's Szechuan sauce.

And this baby:

DMs are open.

I have no issue talking to anyone who wants to have a genuine discussion or who raises genuine concerns. I however have pretty much no real patience for what I can only describe as venting at people with no actual aim or goal and implications that "no, it is in fact everyone else who is wrong and being uncivil".

Like, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of us are over 30, and we're in a goddamned writing medium. You can't say "i'm not pissed" while making frothingly pissed off posts lashing out at people and showing literally zero desire to actually engage with what they're saying beyond your ability to vent at them on your own terms.

I legit could care less about this "oh, I'm actually being quite civil, the fact that I'm popping off at people is just your opinion. As you can see, by my using this clearly civil tone, it negates the fact that I'm approaching people with literally the least respect possible".

Like dude, this isn't Facebook, you can't say you're being civil while very obviously not even being remotely civil. We're all here, we can all read, you can't handwave shit. You're either being civil or you aren't, and you aren't, you can't speak it into existence. So I have no desire to engage with this childish nonsense. Anyone who has approached me like an adult human being in this thread has gotten the same in return. I'm not entertaining this "oh yeah I'm gonna be a disrespectful asshole and if you don't like it then fuck you" nonsense.

Like if you're gonna be a whole ass then be a whole ass, but at least own it and stop trying to act like you popping off is something I or anyone else needs to sit here and respect as if you're just sitting there calmly and respectfully expressing your point of view, when literally goddamned everyone can see that you aren't.

That's the last thing I have to say on it. If you can't chill and be an adult I'm just gonna block you and be done with it. There's too many people in this hobby who are like fucking 40 and still acting like we're in high school. I used to pop off and be a piece of shit on WORA because I was an immature 25 year old with a bunch of goddamned psychological issues. So when people who are usually freaking twice my age come at me as literally anything less than an adult, I'm not going to sit here and entertain them as if the behavior is normal.

So, as far as @bored goes, either chill and act your age, or don't expect to be addressed anymore. I'm not gonna sit here and be civil with someone who can't do anyone else the same courtesy. And if you're gonna pull that "ohoho ad hominem I win" shit on me, tough titties I could care less. If you come at me with a certain kind of energy and don't have the self-awareness to understand the social consequences of your own actions, I quite honestly don't know what to say to you.

I'm not gonna sit here and teach an adult who is probably twice my age proper social conduct because they felt the need to rush to the aid of some dude making strawman arguments and got mad about it for reasons far beyond my capacity to understand.

Anyway I'm gonna yeet myself out of this discussion for a few hours. I'll be back later when presumably graves have been dug deep enough for me not to care anymore.

This shit is delicious.

It tastes like jolly rancher or Fun Dip powder.

Shit is fucking amaaazing.

Also Smirnoff Grape is amazing. I had that first. You've gotta try it. It doesn't even taste like alcohol.

Also today my SC-880 came here's a picture of it.

Anyway that's my Four Loko gold review.

Also it's Valentine's Day and I'm single DM me. I have a Google info box, if you google Duan Sparkles I pop up and everything. But don't listen to my EP it's trash I can do way better now thanks.

Stats:

32
Too Black Too Strong like the Hideki Naganuma song says: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlCK5RWO54E
Incredible Punching Force
Did not die when making friends with Rinel
I no longer eat poison food.
Have money.
I have 15 Sonic the Hedgehog games on Steam
3 packets of Szhechuan sauce i give up on trying to spell that
I appreciate all body types
I protested the government while wearing all polyester.

Okay those are my stats.

Send tweet

@surreality I could see myself enjoying things significantly more if a MU*'s rules specifically treated social combat as equal to physical combat in terms of needing an ST. It's ridiculous that we have disputes like people literally treating social rolls like telepathy, which would be easily solved if ST intervention was accepted as a normal aspect of social combat.

It's about to go the fuck down.

While back in the WORA days, WORA discovering a MU* could sometimes actually be the literal death of a MU*, due to all the general emotional toxicity that the forum would put on staff, MSB seems to actually make a significantly larger attempt at being constructive.

I mean, a lot of people in the hobby don't even know that MSB exists, which to me is a good thing, because it means MSB isn't being this Death Star of toxicity.

While as with WORA, I still consider MSB to primarily be a WoD thing rather than a MUing in general thing, I've noticed that MSB can have a positive influence on a new game rather than what was, in my opinion, WORA's almost universally negative influence on anything that wasn't WoD (because WoD people for whatever reason, came to accept a baseline level of toxicity, which is fucked up).

I say this as someone who literally hated WORA with a goddamned passion, so I like to think I lack bias.

I've been in the house for over a year, only left the house properly maybe five times, aside from taking out the trash and stuff. Like, this is mostly due to an anxiety breakdown (again), but like how can someone just be bored in the house? To me that just means they don't have hobbies.

I certainly think that there are better ways to gain the same feeling of sheet advancement as XP offers, I just think that since so far a lot of the alternatives to XP haven't really caught on or necessarily given a lot of people the same feeling of achievement as XP, it's seen as a permanent standard.

And while I don't claim that my solution will work or even necessarily be considered all that great, I do think that there is value in trying and discussing.

So, the Optional Realities or whatever thread got me to thinking, there are very common newbie mistakes that people make. I made all sorts of mistakes. I'll go through some of those mistakes and allow it to serve as a guide to general productivity.

1. Having no idea what the hell this place is for.

I had no idea of the particular tone or overall expectations of posting in this community. I assumed that everyone would be nice to me because I was new, and that things I said wouldn't be poked at so hard, or interpreted too negatively.

This was obviously a mistake. If I expected these things early on, I'd have quickly learned when and when not to engage, and how to engage in a way that wouldn't blow up in my face immediately. But this is only one half of that particular problem, because...

2. I panicked.

When I got the initial negative reaction, I reacted with panic and didn't know what to do. So like any good mammal, I got defensive and decided to act as such. Becoming a wounded animal meant that everyone smelled blood in the water, so it was down hill from there.

Of course, there are solutions to these things. Often those solutions are terrible, so of course I chose one of the most terrible solutions possible...

3. I tried to be my interpretation of the community.

As a wounded mammal, I obviously interpreted the community in the most horrific light possible. Of course, this -is- a cesspool of scum and villainy, it's not as bad as it seems when you're a wounded animal.

When faced with the fight or flight response, I often choose fight at the worst possible opportunity and in the worse possible way (IE: "Keeping It Real", a psychological flu-like infection that can strike at any moment).

When I became my interpretation of the community, I started trying to be arrogant about all of my RPing experience, and treat others as inexperienced "noobs". Being a douchebag obviously backfired further and more horrifically, rather than making people like me.

Go figure.

So I declared the community to be a wasteland of sorrow and chaos, and decided that the only way to get my ultimate revenge was to strike back...

4. The Rise of Professor Chaos; or, how to troll while being yourself.

In a last ditch effort to poison the well that rejected my attempts to drink from it, I decided to unleash the full force of my stream of consciousness upon the land. As I had no idea how to actually troll, but I knew that not filtering my thoughts would be irritating to most anyone, I decided that it would be the best possible revenge.

Japanese idols, wrestling, reports of watching The Tribe, ignoring the topics to instead respond to my interpretation of reality. It was the ultimate last ditch effort to become the ultimate evil and drive a stake through the hearts of the living.

Of course I regret when I made it personal by going at @Thenomain that one time, this was the moment I realized that I was becoming consumed by myself. Drowning in a pool of being free to express one's self in ways that no mortal man was ever meant to experience.

And then I got really bored and got myself banned by doing the only thing I was told not to do.

5. It gets better.

Almost two years removed, I ultimately reached my current method of approaching the community. A method I hadn't tried before but is ultimately the most ideal approach that I've found. An approach that would work well for people who find themselves frustrated by the alien atmosphere of this community.

I've been on probably dozens of games that require email, due to it being a general norm in some areas of the hobby. I've never really seen anything bad come out of it. Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

@Thenomain

Being like "I don't give a shit about other people's kids" is half the reason that anti-vaxxer shit is a thing, so it's hard to sympathize with it. I'm not saying it isn't on some level the nature of our society (particularly American society) to default to "ignorant and selfish as hell" a lot of the time, but just because I can empathize with it doesn't mean I sympathize with it.

To me there's an order of magnitude of difference between "Fuck your kid's life because I can't get my kid to eat a different kind of sandwich", and "I won't give your kid food because I don't have the resources to take care of your kid too". I can sympathize with the latter, but the former is just, like, fuck these people, to me.

As far as my "human race" statement, I don't disagree that this is scientifically correct, I'm in particular mocking the way that certain people express the sentiment in certain contexts. I've seen enough of you in discussions to know that you wouldn't express it in the way that I'm mocking, at least that's my general optimistic assessment because you seem like someone who thinks very critically.

While I'm not saying that you can't have a preference for not giving out or just having an extra email that you use for unimportant shit, the strong resistance to simply giving an email is still one that's very strange to me. It's one that I've literally only encountered here and WORA, like, even outside of the hobby it's not a thing I've really heard before. I've heard of having separate emails for different levels of importance for things (IE: A porn email, a business email, a general personal email, etc, which is what I do), but like... the super strong resistance to having to give an email out at all, which is one of the most super standard things on the entire internet, is really, really weird to me.

Maybe it's a generational thing that I just don't get. Sure, there's a ridiculously unlikely chance that your email could get mishandled because the headwiz is a moron (re: The Linkedin thing, who uses a personal email for handling apps? That's fucking ridiculous), but it's such an infinitely mild inconvenience, on top of being an unlikely one, that the fact that it's even being debated seems like having a strong opinion about M&M colors or something.

Of course no one uses their business email to sign up to MUs, or literally anything else on the internet, because it's a business email (if you're using your business email to sign up to random shit on the internet but have a strong opinion about MUs, I don't know what to tell you), but since when is it controversial or even unlikely that people have alternate emails to use for unimportant shit? Obviously normies don't, because they don't know wtf they're doing at any given time, but they're generally not the sorts of people who take up RPing, let alone MUing, and are half the reason phishing exists.

How does literally anyone survive on the internet, even outside of the hobby, with one email address? And not just a burner email, but like, if you don't have two or three permanent email addresses, that's kind of a problem.

Having only one email is a security concern that I'd address before even considering the mild inconvenience of giving an unimportant one out to a MU.

Incidentally, I actually give out my casual shit email to MUs, which is actually the second oldest active one I have (I got it when you still needed to invite people to Gmail). It's not my business email, porn one, or any of my branding ones, it's just for random casual shit. I have yet to receive any spam from a MU on it since 2005 when I got into the hobby and first had to use email in it, and I'm certainly not going to get scared away by wildly exceptional but still incredibly mild cases.

Well, I was staying out of this happy funtime discussion, but, my perspective:

While I think all of these "white nationalists" as they like to be called, are garbage human beings, I also don't believe in hitting them, because, as much as people hate to hear this, that makes average people sympathize with them before actually hearing the crazy racist bullshit they have to say. It makes your Average Joe dude go, "Wow, this is just like the time a black person was mean to me, I guess all this white nationalism stuff must have some weight to it".

Granted, my experiences growing up in Philadelphia has painted my impression of what the average person and the average person's perspective is, that's just generally how I personally expect it to go. I think hitting these people will only give them more supporters and make them even more sympathetic to people who are just the average everyday level of racist you expect most people to be. I'd rather not push them over that far, I prefer the racism I have to be around to be at a level I can tolerate.

I want all of these "white nationalists" to be on camera saying the most racist shit possible, so that I can have a video to point to and go "See, this is what's wrong with all this shit".

I incidentally also don't want the Confederate flag banned, I'd prefer to know what kind of neighborhood I'm in, or what kind of people I'm dealing with, so I can back the fuck up and go no where near it. I prefer literal goddamned red flags so that I don't get caught in a situation where I can't tell if I'm entering a literal racist town where I might encounter a literal lynch mob or something.

It's true that the South and Midwest scare the shit out of me, and this might be an exaggeration, but I'm just being honest about how I feel. When you know damned well that there are millions of people out there who would kill you without a second thought, and probably think it was fun and hilarious, yes I am going to be prone to being terrified of an entire region of the country, no matter how reassuring people try to be about how it's "not that bad".

Swimming with goddamned sharks is also not as bad as most people make it out to be. Are you gonna go do it?

I've had a PC since I was thirteen (that's 2001), and immediately started making sure I obscured personal details about my identity online. By the time I was about 14 or 15 I started using secondary emails because I realized it was probably dangerous to use my main email on shady websites. Hell in the late 90s before I had a PC, damned near everything I watched on TV told me how I was gonna get snatched if I didn't take the internet very seriously. I think the generation under me is used to thinking of the internet as a very safe thing, while the generation before me isn't used to thinking of the internet as a thing you prep to be on.

Then again, my generation also invented telling naked women to put shoes on their head, and unintentionally created a political climate in which the Nazis could return, so what do I know.

I apologize for my behavior the other day.

I think I'm gonna withdraw from the greater hobby at large for the time being. I'll only be in one MU due to irl connections.

I won't be responding to anything, so just assume I don't see anything after this post.

I don't think I'm ever gonna change, and I'm tired of this endless cycle of fucking up and being crazy.

I'm still working on my game but I don't think I'm the person who should be running it, because I don't think anyone would want me to, so I might just make it as an art project, I don't know. If there's a major update on that, I'll post again.

That's all, later.

Because of my irl experiences (I live in Philadelphia), I spent my first years in MUing hiding my race because I was terrified people would hate me if they found out I was black. Though it wasn't because I thought people were racist, it was because I had it hammered into my head that being black was an inherently bad thing >__<. (I got better)

So, if nothing else, I do understand the fear, even if I've only experienced a few race things in MUing.

I forgot what it's called, but there -is- a commercial RPI out there. I wish I could remember the name, but it's pay for perks. It's one of those hardcore RPIs that doesn't even have an OOC channel, barely any means of OOC communication at all to be honest.

But as far as meaningful RP, that's the thing, in MUing we have a misconception that we're the height of RP. But I think the vast majority of RPers are like me. They'll RP in a goddamned pit of dirt and it won't be much different from being in a MU for them. If MUing didn't exist I'd still manage to find a way to roleplay long plots with lots of people and such. It's not really a MU exclusive thing.

Really, the challenge with drawing players into MUing is actually showing what the benefit of doing it would be to begin with. I guarantee that you could go to some random forum RP or IRC RP and explain MUing, and they'll say, "Well I can do that anyway, why should I care about this?"

Actually introducing MUing as an alternative that people have an incentive to actually give a shit about when they already have a means of RPing is a challenge. Being able to explain what MUing is would be the first hump. It's very difficult to explain what it is to people who haven't done it before, and it's extra difficult to get people to invest in writing a long ass app and learning the different commands and stuff. I would focus on learning how to do an elevator pitch for particular MUs for people who have never even heard of the hobby.

A lot of people have the misconception that people left the hobby to go play MMOs. But the truth is that there's a massive well of people doing text based roleplay, it's extremely common and always has been. They're absolutely everywhere. The only reason MUs aren't full of these people are two reasons:

1. They have no idea that these things even exist because, again, we only advertise within our own community. We barely take advantage of social media or anything, like so many non-MU roleplays do, we're pretty much invisible as a community. We're not dead, we're invisible.

2. Creating MUs is extremely difficult. Anyone can start up a chatroom, create a forum, start some RP Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook group. But the entry to creating a MU is absolutely massive and requires either knowing a coder, having the patience to learn how to create one, paying for space, and a bunch of other stuff.

As long as MUs are difficult for most people to create, and as long as we have the attitude that they shouldn't become any easier and that everyone should be willing to sit down and learn all of these things, then we're going to remain behind the times. If there was some super easy plug and play way to get MUs up and running, I guarantee it would absolutely dwarf the current community in size.

The concept of our community isn't behind the times, dead, or outdated or whatever. It's simply entirely inaccessible. If we were a pie chart we'd probably be like the 2% of internet text role-players who inexplicably put up with limited options rather than go out there and just put together whatever RP idea comes to mind, then just invite people to it. You can't do that here without a huge buy-in.

There's no point in fixing our visibility issues until we fix the cost of entry for future creators. And when we do that, there will be more options for future players, who are likely only not MUing because there's really not much variety at all. Somewhere out there is a creator with a dream of creating an Aliens vs. Terminator MU, even though they've never heard of MUing, and it's not going to happen because they feel intimidated by all of the honestly unnecessary coding effort that goes into creating one.

How do we address these issues? I have no idea. But I would say that rather than dead, these are what our community's actual issues are. There are simply easier ways to have text-based role-play than MUing. Make MUing easier and you solve the basic problem.

Now I'm going to go watch Alvin and the Chipmunks.