Best posts made by surreality

...wait, there are people here not starting out from Pooh on any normal week?

"Well, golly, I would, but I'm just a silly woman. That's totally beyond my ability! Everybody knows women can't do that, it comes with the tits."

Quarantine?

Meet quarantoy:

I have only wanted one of these for half my life or thereabouts, but... there's finally a cheap one that isn't crap.

Did not wake up this morning knowing this existed, or this would be possible for the long-long-long time I'd accepted it probably would end up being for ages now.

S'cuse me, I got a rabbit hole to joysqueal into for a while like a tween at a boyband marathon.

@VulgarKitten said:

@surreality said:

Acting like staffers with ethics are rare as unicorns on the hoof is pretty amazingly ridiculous, which is absolutely how @VulgarKitten's post comes across, especially in how... myopic it is in regard to how most MU* staff corps actually function.

So wait. I'm sorry. I think I just hallucinated. My post that says "which, of course, doesn't always happen." comes across like staffers with ethics are rare as unicorns on the hoof? Sounds to me like you're viewing this through a certain lens. A lens named 'I'm probably guilty of this so I'm going to react strongly right now'.

(I'm not even the one who downvoted you for that one, so I'm going to giggle a lot right now.) This tactic is exactly the kind of behavior I was describing: casting aspersions based on foolish assumptions. Thank you for being an example?

I told you precisely how you were being myopic: you assume knowledge and authority to act, both of which are not something you can assume about any staff structure. Both are required to get something done in the case you describe. 'Gives a crap' quickly becomes irrelevant if either of the other factors aren't running in your favor.

And really, see below, 'cause HR covered the rest of this quite neatly.

@HelloRaptor said:

How does this relate to anything to do with logs? I mean, everything is dependent on a non-corrupt staff. If your starting point is corrupt staff, you're already in a shit place.

We were talking (at some point) about how ineffective logs can be. This was an example. Uh. Duh.

Though you're right on one point: I do actually take this shit seriously, though not because of any guilty conscience. (Like I said, nice try there.) I take it seriously 'cause holy shit have I seen whiny princesses screech and flail about how they're being persecuted when the persecution is 100% in their head and they are actually the aggressor and abuser to you and others, staff and player, for months on end, because they have lost any and all touch with reality and you're the staffer who doesn't have authority to deal with them on your own. Really, considering the boatloads of drama you've managed to create over a character name across two MU*s and at least one forum for even thinking this is some kind of major issue at all, honey... don't think where you fall on this particular scale of 'batshit crazy person with a persecution complex' is a mystery to more or less anyone with so much as half a brain.

Duh, indeed.

@insomniac7809 I saw mention of this one when I braced for the morning news check. I just called my husband in to listen to it with me because I suspected -- and was not wrong -- that I would simply be raggedly screaming and gibbering incoherently at the screen and thoroughly unable to explain why for several minutes.

It's more, uh... fun when we're both doing that, anyway.

Are we at the point of doing reaction videos to these press conferences yet? Because while I wouldn't be doing it, I sense a major opening here.

@Sparks I can really only answer for myself here, but if I play a Vulcan badly, it may annoy some fans or make me unfun to play with -- but there are no actual Vulcans in the world that could be hurt by my bad performance. There are real PoC/etc.

@Auspice I kept waiting to see someone some day on Shang be a human bra, holding up someone's giant boobs while trailing dutifully along behind them, but alas. I mean. You'd think somebody would be into that? Not me, as either end of that train, but. I would have hi-5'd them in spirit.

Also, ohgods I had a point that prevented a nap and by the time I got to the screen I forgot what it was until now.

A good point of reference for anyone who doesn't understand the 'well-intentioned but is afraid to get things wrong in an offensive way'?

White Wolf -- back in the oWoD days of OMFGWTF were they thinking?! -- was trying to incorporate everyone and everything in part to 'invite everyone into the game'.

It, uhm. Yeah. It did not go so well, regardless of the intention.

Those of us who lived through that era of gaming, well. There is a hell of a cautionary tale right there.

@Derp If I was hot and thin enough to pull off that look without going all Ursula Under The Sea, I would. I so would. When I asked a professional corsetier once upon a slimmer time, I think the words he used were 'I would want to consult an engineer'.

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

they forget that it is possible to like Star Wars without getting mad about whether we'll ever see Hugo Weaving play Talon Karrde.

^ This sums up the reason I just happily enjoy things and squeal about them here in the TV/movies/etc. thread or recommend them to friends once in a blue moon now. Too much 'if you don't know what color Jane's shoes were in season 2 episode 23, you're dead to me, lying hater infiltrator' in any given fandom.

@GreenFlashlight I mean, maybe she's mad that somehow she found a hat and a dress that coordinated perfectly and fucked it all up with a horribly clashing necklace? Because finding something that so perfectly matches that hat or that dress is no small feat, the colors are not common combos by a mile.

Also, that hat is more than most skirts. I mean. Seconding 'how can you even be grumpy in that hat, how?!'

Unless it's a 'lost a bet' hat. I would not totally discount that as a possibility. Or 'omfg that evil cow over there has an even larger hat and it just put someone's eye out, now I seeeeeethe with envy and rage'.

...or someone else showed up in the same hat. "And that's when I shot her, your honor."

@Tinuviel They still happen in the US and they're pretty gross. They are absolutely offensive.

They are just not lethally dangerous, like the visual stereotyping so often is.

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

@Aria Make them a mix tape and send it to them anonymously: Music to Fuck To.

Make double damned sure it includes this.

I'm going to double to expand on that, because it's actually something we see very often in MU.

For instance, I have seen exactly one Italian character since 1996 that was not somehow mafia-affiliated. ONE. It's the same for Russian characters -- except in that case, I haven't even seen the one that isn't somehow involved in organized crime. Not all Roma live in wagons, either. When there are less offensive stereotypes on 'My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding' than are common on MUs? You know that shit's really bad in our hobby.

Yes, people, this is really offensive shit. Yes, it does affect people in real life, and we should think twice before propagating it.

I'm also going to second what Gany's saying here; I've seen it in friends up close, even if it's not within my own family. I do include that in 'lethally dangerous', at least in my head. The friend that was impacted the most was from Taiwan specifically, but the pressure he was under was extreme. Even as clueless high schoolers in the 80s we could see it, and...

...that brings me to another point. I really don't have a ton of empathy for people who 'don't see it'. I need to work on myself on that, but it aggressively frustrates me. Again: clueless high school students in the 80s could see examples of sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and other bigoted gross all over the place without any trouble. Less enlightened time, even!

But these things are not fucking subtle.

I genuinely do not understand how people 'don't see them'.

All the things and all their permutations? Yeah, people are not going to be aware of all of them -- . Maybe it's gone underground enough, or people have become so much more socially segregated since then? I mean, I get most people's lunch table probably didn't look like the model UN (if it consisted of class clowns and art/drama folk and cheerful geeks, just of all demographic descriptions), but holy shit.

I mean, I grarred about this in the irks thread, but... still, grrrrrrrrrr. All the people insisting there are no systemic problems and that society is all fair and equal and bigotry-free seem baffled that 'they can't choose a date for something that doesn't fall on the anniversary of an *ist atrocity of some kind, because there are so many of them'. Holy fuck, people. Does that not demonstrate that there is, indeed, a fucking problem?

ETA: Adding cat for Gany.

@Rinel Finding out much later in life is so, so hard for exactly these reasons. Going back and looking in shock on the struggles that needn't have been so damned hard... yeah. It's explode with tears crushing and infuriating all at once. Consider all the virtual hugs ever offered.

@il-volpe said:

Now, here, we have this thread because on the Optional Realities/Project Redshift we've got @crayon redefining a MUSH to mean, not a game that uses the MUSH codebase, but any game, regardless of codebase, which displays cultural standards that he associates with MUSHes that follow cultural and code-use standards that are highly unusual for MUSHes.

...which is so gaggingly stupid it makes my eyes water. I'm sorry, I know we're in the semi-constructive section, but this let me totally redefine a thing and then act like everyone who agreed on the old definition should know what I'm talking about nonsense is exactly the sort of thing that leads to the sort of communication breakdowns that more or less turned the thread that spawned this one into a giant clusterfuck of mixed messages and confusion.

As mentioned before, if I started referring to a black and white cat as a Holstein, and people suddenly asked me what the hell a cow was doing lounging about in the sun on my windowsill, I would, perhaps, consider the possibility that my repurposed use of terminology was inherently problematic.

I will be a motherfucking adult and not pick up the phone on which my husband is having an argument with a friend of his about whether we should just let piles of people die for the economy...
...that I'm pretty fucking sure started over 'when are you going to come back to the D&D game?!' that she hosts...
...that is 2 hours away in New Jersey...
...near where he normally works -- as a massage therapist, which no one in NJ is doing right now...
...in a specific hot zone area.

While my father is still running a fever, which I heard him tell her.

I will further be a motherfucking adult and not ask him, "So, how grateful are you that you married me and not that hot mess of WTF?"

...but I really want to do both, holy shit.

@carma I am really glad to see people coming around to this. I'd set up a similar system for on-wiki preferences that players could set and add notes to as needed, and it was a lot more controversial at that time. Definitely go for it with this.