Best posts made by surreality

I'm with @Coin on this one. I literally have twenty cents to my name this month, but if I happen to miracle my way into a paycheck (dang freelance art jobs), I'm all about sending what I can.

@arkandel I'm getting that read on a very small number of posts, oddly enough.

For the most part, it looks like a lot of 'I like you just fine, but I don't want to <thing> with you.'

Only a few seem to be a matter of 'I don't have any issue with <thing> when anybody but you does it.' This happens, certainly; I've been the target of it and I know I've done the same, though I got considerably better at my avoidance game over time to prevent friction in either case. (It now takes real sustained effort to break through the avoidance wall, but some people still do.)

This one isn't a hard answer in the vast majority of RP circumstances. It just isn't. Unless circumstances require it, stay out of each other's faces. You hate them? Don't join scenes they're in unless you need to be there.

Especially do not join scenes they are in to shit all over whatever they are doing; this is exceptionally poor behavior and people absolutely do it. Don't nitpick their poses with others as though they aren't even there. Don't initiate regular public discussions in shared spaces about how stupid they are (again, often like they aren't even there). It's really not hard to be better than these behaviors.

If somebody can't avoid regularly behaving this way, they're the crap actor even if Joe/Jane Whoever is 'omg so annoying' to them (or even them and others). If Joe/Jane Whoever keeps showing up in your scenes and behaving this way, say something -- to them, or to staff. Ask them to stay away from you unless it's somehow necessary, or ask staff to intervene if you can't do this.

I think part of the confusion is that we're used to LGBT, and they leave the L out of things from the outset.

To be entirely fair, I believe there was a 'girls only' game that if I'm remembering correctly was anime-themed a ways back. I never went there myself but heard rumblings about it on and off while I was on Shang.

The playerbase consisted primarily of male players, which should surprise exactly no one, for similar reasons to those @ixokai describes, just the flip side of them. Being not especially keen on the typical fetishized representations I heard about, well... yeah, sure, I could play my gender of choice and being bi I wouldn't have much of an issue, but I'm massively uncomfy with those kinds of 'I exist as a sex object and don't really understand much about what I'm even doing, tee hee BOOBS <bounce giggle bounce slippery bounce oooh>' representations, and really don't want to RP with them. I have seen Shang"Lesbians" sniffing each other's crotches in greeting and played like giggle-twit braindead nymphos way too much to want anything to do with that particular crowd. So I feel people on this front when they get uncomfy about 'fetish bait' vibes.

@mietze said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

There are some people whose interpersonal skills are that bad, though, RL and in game and it can be a pretty bad experience to deal with them until they learn to negotiate/fight more...fairly? Constructively?

This. And really, some folks are not even interested in behaving fairly or constructively because their only goal is 'get what I want'. This is especially true if they know that being an underhanded scumbag will accomplish that end, or be more likely to succeed.

In part, it's because they are think of it as a fight or a contest instead of a conversation. Any time someone makes the mental transition from 'conversation/communication' to 'fight/contest', the whole frame of reference changes dramatically.

I can have a difficult conversation involving extreme differences of opinion with someone without it being a fight, even if the subject matter isn't necessarily comfortable by default. I can fight with someone about it, too -- but the dynamic is completely different when and if I do. The outcome is likely to be vastly different as well. (Spoiler alert: it's almost certainly going to be worse.)

@Pyrephox said in Bump In The Night: A Chronicles of Darkness MUX:

I loved the premise, and only left because of my own flakiness. It's a shame to see it pass - I hope that someone else revives the idea of a mortals game - I might suggest one that covers less geography, though.

In the wake of BITN closing, I'm setting aside my other project to pick up the mortals game I'd been kicking around for a while that I set aside for BITN. (Two mortals games would have been, I think, too diluted, so it got shelved at the time; it's a niche, and not a big niche.)

There will be something, eventually. I don't think it will necessarily appeal to the same target audience, but there will be something for the die-hard mortal crowd, even if it takes some time to get there.

Seconding this; the western has been the land of all the crying, because the story is incredibly wow. Also, all the everyone crying and cracking jokes together OOC and laughing at the same time, because the people are just as wow and epic.

So much with the crying, though, oh my lawd. The good sort of 'if this was a movie everyone would have gasped right there at once out loud in the theater' moments are very much a thing. The group cheers, yep, those, too.

Cannot praise the game enough. Really just can't.

The wiki stuff from BITN -- at least some of it thus far -- is backed up for grabbing. It really was made to be stuff for everyone who wanted to use it. It's not in ready to use form (yet, and will not be for a while because I do not have time to explain things or walk people through it right now please do not ask yet) but a good portion of the wiki templates and such are safe.

<2 @SunnyJ Thank you!

1. Part of me will always be a big kid that loves playing 'make believe'.

2. Free helps. A lot.

3. Creative people are awesome, and this hobby has an abundance of very smart creative people in it. Many with kickass interesting ideas.

4. An interactive story to think about is my brain's equivalent of a fidget spinner or other tinker object for my hands when I'm not playing.

5. Brainstorming is fun. It doesn't even need to necessarily go anywhere; just the process of brainstorming or 'what if'-ing things that either never come to pass or are just background is fun to me.

@Zyrus said in The 100: The Mush:

@tek said in The 100: The Mush:

the first time i interacted with him, he started telling me about his kinks in ooc, apropos of nothing, then started posing in second person like he assumed we were gonna get our TS on. i've never left a scene so fast.

This scene was simply a bit of crossed wires from context.I had absolutely no intention of doing TS with our two PCs, ever.

Bluntly: if you're talking about your OOC sexual preferences without invitation, that isn't a case of crossed wires. Or if so, you need to consider how you're wired.

You're being told that something occurred that was unwelcome.

You should listen, and you should probably learn a thing from it.

Dismissing it and trying to hand-wave it away into nothingness by doing so is not making you smell like a rose garden, no matter how much you may want that to occur. This is the kind of shady bullshit for which there's not a hell of a lot of tolerance in these parts, these days.

Hint: If you actually had a genuine concern about a miscommunication occurring, you'd try to clear up that miscommunication rather than dismissing it out of a desire for it to simply go away.

I don't think there's anything that will ever likely make them stop. I have periods of this also. Or times when I think everyone hates me and wishes I'd fuck off. (Sometimes, these things might even be true, for all I know.)

I find that focusing on small goals is a huge help when this happens. "I want to have one chill social scene this week," "I want to attend one group scene this week," or "I want to put in that +jerb for the project my character wants to do and try to get that ball rolling." These things keep my interest, and often enough, in the course of sticking to those simple goals, I will find connections and hooks that lead to more things to do, and people that enjoy doing those things with me.

In a way, it's 'soldiering through', but not the 'stiff upper lip, pretend nothing is wrong' approach. It's scaling down some expectations and aiming for some baby steps to keep myself going. These are typically easier goals to meet, and when they're met, they are still worthwhile victories, even if they're small ones. Small ones count, too, and can very easily lead to good things.

@Zyrus said in The 100: The Mush:

I do apologize that was what it was taken as, just saying that wasn't my intention.

Better, but dude... you're still not getting it.

It's not my fault she was offended when I said she had a fine ass I'd love to plow, I meant it as a compliment! isn't really an apology. Hopefully this random example pulled out of my own ass will make the reason why somewhat more clear.

Apologizing for what you're still presenting as someone else's error isn't apologizing at all -- it's more deflection and strongly suggests a refusal to examine your own behavior, let alone accept responsibility for the consequences of it.

I propose naming all guests, henceforth, Jill.

The stuff being added to character pages is mostly 'extras'.

More or less everything you'd normally expect is there -- gallery, contacts, hooks, basic writeup. The stuff going in still is mostly... extra.

There are already some optional extras, like being able to list your aspirations on the page, so you can track them there (and ideally people will see them, and say, HEY, THAT SOUNDS COOL, LET'S DO THAT THING!) and mark them complete/etc. as you go along.

There's a sheet option that'll link you to book references and similar. It's mostly the sheet options -- because there are umpteensquillion of them to manage -- that are still going in.

Y'all can check out the sample crash testing page here:
http://portland.echoes.wiki/Character:Test

The buttons across the top are tabs to different sections.

<waves the 'just my opinion' flag>

I think one of the most important aspects of a good leader is that they create opportunities for others to shine -- as many others as possible.

The best 'leaders' I've ever played were essentially what people would think of as support personnel. They got the busywork bullshit out of the way or handled it in order to create space or remove obstacles that might otherwise be in the way of them doing so.

This doesn't mean giving people everything they want, because some people are unreasonable attention hogs. It also means telling those people no in order to allow the people who would never ask for attention opportunities to allow their characters to shine, too.

The tl;dr of this: a good leader wants everyone to have their turn to wear the tiara and will endeavor to create opportunities for this to occur. It's leadership as service, as opposed to leadership as power -- even if power is required on some level in order to accomplish the former, from time to time.

@Ghost said in Historical MUSHes:

it's really not historical but more a period-piece with adapted/selected themes.

^ Is the best one is going to get, to put it bluntly, without shit-tons of research that nearly no one does.

That doesn't mean the adaptations must completely erase things from the setting to make it unrecognizable, however, which is what people have been advocating for with the insistence that if you don't, you clearly just want to get your *ism on.

Some people zero in on that, which no one denies. They are, however, fairly rare and obvious.

It's the claim that has been regularly made is that anyone who is willing to allow these elements of the setting to exist is doing so for that specific purpose -- to be 'one of those assholes' -- and that's just bullshit nonsense.

The players who zero in on the *isms with no regard for the fun or sensitivities of other players are the ones you show the door.

@lordbelh said in The 100: The Mush:

people not making games is way worse than a game not being up to everybody's standards of perfection.

I'm not even going to address you putting words in @Ghost's mouth.

I am going to say that you need to look in the mirror, considering how you've behaved in regard to people who want to run games differently than you would personally prefer in some respects -- which involved deciding it's OK to insist that they're clearly inherently unethical, shady, and that it's totally spiffy-awesome to decry them as such without any evidence to support such claims, unless they do it your preferred way, simply because they're not doing it your preferred way.

Which you fucking did. To me. Which I have not forgotten, and I am going to bring to attention now, because it almost stopped me from making my game because of the how awful the utter wretchedness of 'it doesn't matter if there's no proof of anything bad, I think it's cool to insist there must be simply because people think differently than I do about how to do something' is to deal with.

So I will as respectfully-as-possible (which is not fucking easy right now) request that you check yourself, please.

@Ghost I think part of the confusion here is that antagonists focusing on these themes are just not a requirement in any way.

Horror handled 1902 Wild West. The focus of the story had nothing to do with these themes. They were background elements. 'Somebody who spouts *isms willy nilly' was not a character concept, not even for antagonists.

While people took these things on, they were not the focus of the story. As described a ways back, yep, people did. There were gay couples, there were non-whites. They all had shit to put up with -- but it was from background NPCs they controlled themselves, or their characters' understanding of the attitudes of the faceless mob that makes up society.

It wasn't other players throwing things at them, and it wasn't the story focus. Both of these things are relevant.

Someone making these things a focus of how they interacted with other players in the 'I wanna be a bigot!' way would have been glaringly obvious to everyone, given that environment.

I suppose anyone could have! ...but it's also relevant that no one did. It's pretty strong evidence that the 'anyone who wants to play in a setting where these things exist just wants to get their *ism on' hypothesis is absurd on its face.

Cybersphere is home to my favorite memory of a bizarre IC name issue.

Since it's cyberpunk, most people used handles.

I was playing a chick who unfortunately was named 'Michael' after her father, because her mother was a sentimental idiot and he was dead, blah blah blah.

She meets and falls for a dude, and all the while, whirlwind romance, never knows the guy's actual name until they're trading vows, and she suddenly discovers she is now...

Michael Caine.

That will never stop being funny to me. Never.

@Thenomain @Auspice Preach.

Hell, some days I wonder if I didn't end up bi because I'm so fucking picky when it comes to people, rather than the reverse. (This is... mostly a joke. But only mostly.)

(Generic) you the person either works or doesn't for me.

'Has <genital>' could never be as important to me as 'has a sense of humor'. 'Identifies as <gender>' couldn't come within light years of 'identifies other human beings as people to treat with respect and common decency as a default setting'.

People can and will make anything out to be a bad thing by skewing it and twisting it and all the rest. I don't think thinking like I do is a bad thing in this case, and it's one of the precious few things no one could ever convince me otherwise about.