Best posts made by surreality

@mietze ...
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...that the motherfucker timed it just to send a response is probably fair grounds to request a renewal, holy cripes.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

In-sphere, there are often reasons. How many games are single sphere? Not many. There's plenty of totally thematic murderfacing to be had.

With that in mind, a bar against killing other PCs is far different than staff acting when players engage their PCs in IC discrimination based RL identity groups or barring it entirely.

I still disagree with this. I don't see them as different, save for in one way:

Generally, nobody gives a damn about killing NPCs in any given plot, unless it's someone's cherished child or similar NPC. That is not going to be the case with discrimination; if a PC aims it at an NPC in front of a player sensitive to the subject, it's still going to be a problem for them.

That said, stories like the ones @faraday described a handful of posts back are incredibly compelling to me. I think they're interesting, I think they are fantastic stories, and I don't see them as lacking depth or creating real world hurt or expressing any form of player-side vileness whatsoever.

I wouldn't roleplay them with someone who wasn't equally interested in the roleplay of that story in that way, but I completely discard the notion that they are universally damaging and worthless, garbage, or are replaceable by some other 'bastardry for the sake of bastardry'. (None of those examples involved someone deliberately being a jerk, but instead focus on someone coming into inner conflict with their upbringing or environment and learning and growing from the experience.)

The number of compelling characters this would exclude is enormous and I firmly believe we would be significantly worse off for their forbidding.

@HorrorHound I still hiss and bitch constantly they did not make it to nWoD in either version in that aspect, yes. And the conversion that was cooked up just sorta ignored all of that entirely. It gave me a major case of the sad.

I basically think Wamphyri, and run from there.

On a freeform 'do what the fuck ever' site, running with a similar concept a handful of years back, the char I was playing removed her and her partner's hearts, shrunk them down to a tiny size, and connected the veins into a continuous loop circulatory system, and wore it as a living, beating necklace. This was her idea of a romantic gesture. That's the kind of territory my brain goes mining for Tzimisce.

@Rinel The folks who truly love and care for you are gonna love you and care about you for you, whatever shape or label or anything else is attached.

Realistically... I think this community tends to be pretty dang open-minded because we're used to the idea of exploring personalities and experiences that aren't the expected defaults of our inborn baggage in the creative sense. I don't think people can do that for years and stay closed-minded for long without some serious cognitive dissonance. It's really hard to not grow some empathy. (Some people manage, but that's gotta take effort.)

(I am still all grins that there was a happy goose under 'proud' on a gif search, too, I mean seriously that's kismet.)

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

BUT this specific category of bad thing, that the majority of players don't have to deal with shouldn't be an extra hurdle to my fun.

You realize 'straight white male' is not actually the majority in this hobby?

Pretty sure female players outpaced men a long time back, and female players absolutely have this hurdle IC and OOC commonly put in their path. A number of those women are bi or lesbian. Some are also people of color.

Please stop talking to us like we have absolutely no idea what it is to face discrimination or abuse in this way. We do.

Other than @Apos, @ThatGuyThere, and @Thenomain, so far as I am aware, all of the repeat posters on this subject are women. (I am not even considering that generic dude's drive-by pot-shot post, because why would anyone.)

@Taika said in The Descent MUX:

In before rumormill:

Yes we banned someone. It was @Sovereign / Rex / Angelo / That rapey harassy guy. reasonably certain we got him before he had a chance to be gross on any of our players.

Update:

We're adding mage, and Gehenna is taking on custom goodies.

<insert effusive cheerleading here>

Edit: No, that really deserves proper imagery.

Outspoken feminist advocate chosen on purpose, because fuck that guy.

PTSD is not a wonderland of joy and delight.

It's been a pretty bad day in terms of the most common trigger. It was not fun being that terrified 9-10 year old then, and it is not fun feeling like that terrified 9-10 year old again at 46 while fighting off panic attacks and tension cramps.

But, I won today. The PTSD didn't win. It's something, even if I am so emotionally exhausted I feel like someone clubbed me half to death with a baseball bat for how terribly my body's twisted into a knot.

The shitty part is knowing the panic side of things won't let me sleep for a long fucking time yet, and I could really use it right now.

The extra shitty part is that I can't take any more ibuprofen today, and I still have to be amazingly careful ever taking tylenol thanks to the same stupid fucking liver stones that don't let me booze it up through things like today's stupid dramas.

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

People are getting personally offended by the voicing of opinions, so it seems much less a technical discussion than it is a preference discussion. I have tried to guide both of these threads into some sort of technical planning/dreaming/design direction, and each time people have apparently taken offense.

I don't think it's that bad. We can be passionate in all things, but it's not like anyone's going FUCK YOU while stating their preference, so that's fine.

Bluntly, that's not good enough. There's a reason I keep asking for a wholly constructive dev-specific forum where the bullshit behavior is reined in, and the bullshit behavior isn't just people flinging 'FUCK YOU' around. In fact, there have been plenty of instances in which someone acting like a giant asshat in a constructive discussion probably should be told 'FUCK YOU' and then roundly ignored thereafter to allow the discussion to continue in a productive fashion.

(Tangent: y'know what would kick ass? An 'ignore <poster>'s comments in this thread' option that isn't a straight-up ignore. There are some folks wholly awesome some places, who are walking disaster zones when it comes to specific subjects. /end tangent.)

There are however two issues here:

1. We don't really have a proper example of a telnet-less MUSH at the moment so any criticism of that is premature. Judging its potential by other web games which aren't even trying to do something similar to how a MUSH does things is flawed.

Ares is close, and it's very nicely done on the whole from what I have seen. I have not tinkered with the web interface because I like my MUX client and have things color-coded to visually separate them out conceptually/etc. to help my ADD brain cope with and sort the data flood properly.

And if you don't mind guys, a personal note at the end... it's expected that people will stick to what they know. We're a conservative bunch, and highly critical as things go. There's no way there won't be 'ohnothisiswrong' complaints no matter what is actually done, or (as @surreality has correctly sighed over at times) even over anything that's considered.

I don't think it's wrong to consider -- or attempt -- all of these things. Web interfaces, web integration, Ares, Evennia, etc. The doomsaying exists on all sides: "We'll all die unless... " can end with "...we stick to what we know!" or "...we change dramatically!"

Some reasonable design points surface in these discussions. All of them take advanced knowledge to implement, even if it's only partial implementation. And it's very clear that partial implementation is just not fucking good enough for some stompy feet, and bluntly, that's where a rousing round of 'FUCK YOU' is well-deserved and in fact the appropriate answer.

This hobby has come a long way, no matter how 'dated' it is. Every step along that way was, typically, a small step. It was not a quantum leap; it was a partial implementation that grew and evolved until it became something far more feature-rich and elaborate. Every time somebody shits all over a partial implementation or new direction someone is interested in exploring because it's not the quantum leap they asked Santa for when they were five, there's good reason I wish Santa would give them that pony they asked for that same year so it could kick them right in the fucking head, because this attitude is so egregiously ignorant of the reality of 'how things actually work' that it displays a sincerely galling measure of entitlement, selfishness, and brazen stupidity.

That places a higher onus on developers here. Not only do people need to be good with code but they need an extra thick skin to handle all these gripes without wondering too much why they're doing all this extra work for what sometimes seems like an unappreciative community. This is not the case. We are far from unappreciative. It's just that some voices bitch louder than many others praise.

No, I'm afraid it really isn't just that. I'd like to think it is? But it isn't. There was a time I would have agreed, but that time has long since passed.

There are... three people, I think? Who have seen the stuff I've actively been working on. One's not even on the forum. It's not going to get posted to the forum, either, until I'm done with the things I want to do with it and they're working how I want them to be. Would there be times that input would be helpful? Probably -- but the input generated here lately, even in the constructive areas, is far too full of the doom-saying, hand-wringing, and spoiled-child wish-listing for me to consider it worth my while to filter through all of that wretched chaff in search of wheat.

That chaff is demoralizing as hell, and it is not just a case of 'grow a thicker skin'. It is a lot of goddamned work, and it takes real positive energy and the ability to hope that it will make things at least just a little better in order to even attempt one of these things.

You can have an armadillo hide, and still have all of those necessary resources of positivity and faith in what you're doing sapped away from you fast by all of that bullshit, because it's exhausting and pointless, and soon enough, you're exhausted and the whole thing seems pointless, too.

People sure loved to mock me for dropping my project early in the year after -- in the constructive section -- it got attacked with both barrels and I got attacked personally in genuinely disgusting ways. They still do it, and it's very clear they very much enjoy doing it. That? That's what the thick skin is for: recognizing those people for what they are and blowing them off, ignoring them, and soldiering the hell on in (generic) your ass-kicking combat boots. (Mine are NewRocks, motherfuckers. Don't mess with the wedding boots! Ahem.)

Now, I can tell you this much. That I wasn't able to handle:

• people who apparently can't follow clearly-worded directions to save their lives
• think they're exceptions
• don't respect the actual question asked even in the form of the barest lip service from post one
• make statements that are demonstrably false as evidence that the sky is definitely going to fall
• sling around personal attacks in a space not remotely appropriate for that
• make fun of someone because they like different themes than the person doing the mocking
  ...did tell me: this is not the time I should be working on this project, it's something that's important to me, and because it's something that matters to me, this shit is stressing me out rather than chilling me out.

I put that shit down to save for a later time when I could deal with those things more effectively, because it was clear that no one felt the majority of those behaviors were wrong. (It's not what I'm working on now, either.) After all, what is the first thing we tell someone in this hobby when shit's going badly or RL is stressful? "Take a step back, recognize you're not in the right mindset for this right now, and come back to it later." But boy, howdy, do we love making fun of somebody for actually doing that, and that's spectacularly shitty, too. I get mocked for choosing to shelve it 'til later, too, still, despite the fact that this is absolutely the correct response -- people just really seem to enjoy interpreting it in ways that are deliberately intended to be as hurtful or harmful and insulting as possible.

That, in itself, should be eye-opening. Every single one of those behaviors, had it happened on a game, would show up in the Peeves thread as demonstrative of shitty behavior, and rightly fucking so, and we would all be piling on to talk about how shitty that behavior is.

So, no, 'thin-skinned developers' are not the fucking problem.

Please wake up to this one, because the struggle is real, man.

@lithium ...maybe let's not go there in a farewell thread to a member of our community... ?

So, I ordered a slimline pen for the tablet because I have tiny mutant child man hands and big fat pens exacerbate the cramps. It was worth it after realizing 'yes I like this'.

The pen came with a case, how nice!

Er.

I had a moment in which I realized there was surely not a single woman on the design team for the Wacom pen case, because one is expected to be able to use this to take the pen along wherever, in a purse or laptop case or whatever.

...yeeeeeeeeeahno. Not doing that. (In any sense.)

Really glad my mother didn't accidentally open that amazon package. I cannot even imagine the amount of 'I SWEAR IT ISN'T WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE OMG MOM SRSLY!' would have rocketed me back to being a teenager in the worst possible way. (I can't help this happening sometimes. Our address is super vague, and so all packages and bills and whatnot goes to the folks, who are next door facing a cross street with a sane people address without perpetually lost mail.)

@faraday said in The trappings of posing:

Long poses, short poses, inner monologue... whatever. I don't care as long as it's interesting. A good scene is like a tennis match - you have to serve something your partner can hit back.

Honestly? This.

Some people rock at a thing I might normally dislike as a default, so I'm rarely going to say 'I hate it when... '

...except second-person posing. Don't. Just don't. If only for the nightmare of editing those logs -- or worse, seeing them posted unedited, oh gods. That's probably the one I can't ever forgive.

When it comes right down to it, I can even deal with snarky metaposing back and forth with someone I know and trust well and I know they're doing it OOCly in well-intentioned humor. (Namely, if the players have an amazing rapport and but the characters hate each other and the players are having comedic fun with that -- and it's usually really obvious when this is the case.)

For fellow children of the 80s.

@aria ...so much agreed.

My mother is such a prude she can't watch open-mouthed kissing on TV/in movies without wincing.

Regardless, when #2 dropped trou in GoT, she immediately paused the screen, looked at me pointedly and clearly upset, and just deadpan insisted: "I feel cheated right now. Do you feel cheated right now? Because I feel cheated right now." I have rarely ever laughed so hard or been so surprised.

I love me some Ed. I had him as an NPC on an old project, though, if it's any consolation!

@GreenFlashlight I also just... just... I see absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with their hair. Their hair is fine. It is fine. It's FINE.

And OH MY GOD of all the things to demand. It isn't adequate PPE, it isn't food, it isn't shelter, it is such a profoundly trivial bit of vain bullshit that it makes me want to buzz their heads to see if all that hair that's so clearly a problem is clogging whatever brain may be under it from proper function.

These people leave me gibbering in Even Cant with wild gesticulations enough to puy my grandparents' entire generation of Italian siblings -- they were each one of eleven! -- to shame, and that is truly a lot of emphatic hand gestures.

@ominous said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

The popularity of Minecraft, Subnautica, Day Z, Ark, and Don't Starve contradicts your supposition that players avoid menial tasks.

And none of those games are MU*s. Which is relevant.

@lotherio said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

@kanye-qwest said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

doing a secret santa in a fantasy garbage world where everyone is starving.

Ask troops deployed overseas about this; I've been there. Doing this and exchanging MRE bits might give them a sense of normalcy in a world were their buddy could die in a couple of hours. Sure, it might just be an 'hey, its Christmas back home merry christmas, I owe you a present ...' Sure, some of the troops might think its stupid and think the person doing it is stupid, but that one moment of offering a gift when really, you don't have squat to give, is sort of that 'remember how it was before we were in this shit' moments.

This. Since the example provided is zombie apocalypse, look at The Walking Dead. There are examples of this. All of them are pretty potent. There are plenty of very good examples of people desperately trying to cling to normalcy. There are definitely hookups -- and the potentially horrifying consequences of 'what happens if someone gets pregnant in a world like that'.

@ominous said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

I want survival mechanics in my MUs. It was one of the main selling points of Firan for me and why I dabbled in Carrier RPI. Most normal MUs just devolve into BarP time otherwise, and I can do that in real life. Maybe it's a sign I should be RPI-ing it up instead of playing MUSHes.

Possibly. Which is no slight -- if that's what you like, that's where you're going to find it more often. People like me find this burdensome, choresome, and a complete barrier to entry due to limited play time.

@thenomain said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

Why shouldn't I keep making WoD games until the end of time?

Obligatory: because a lot of WoD doesn't work well without heavy mods from tabletop and allows a lot of things that the anonymity of the internet invites serious abuse of many of its systems in a way that face to face play does not.

Broadly: A lot of MU* players are story-focused. The biggest part of story readily available to people that focuses exclusively on their story is typically going to be social RP, whether it's forming social bonds with people through getting a job, getting drunk and spilling a secret they didn't intend to, or getting laid, etc. All of those things directly focus on and involve that character's story directly and require zero input from anybody but other interested players.

Instead of focusing on giving people things to do other than that, or creating grinds people have to go through to get anywhere, focus on giving them social/downtime options that incentivize focusing those activities -- from the secrets to the screwing -- that are relevant to the setting and themes of the game.

@Rinel ...yes, it's a thing.

Also:

Me: <stares into fridge>
My brain: You want literally none of these things.
Me: What do I want, then?
My brain: You want cherry pie.
Me: I don't have cherry pie.
My brain: Refuse to eat anything until you get cherry pie.
Me: I will literally die.
My brain: FINE then, have a string cheese.
Me: This is not cherry pie. <still staring into fridge as if cherry pie will magically materialize>
My brain: Well, die, then?
Me: <grabs random pudding/yogurt/flan/something that is neither cherry pie nor string cheese and stomps back upstairs>
My brain: You now have a food.
Me: <gets distracted by something on the screen, forgets the food is there until fading into drowsy>
My brain: <observes the sad, lonely, uneaten food> This is what you get for not being cherry pie.
Me: Fuck this, I'm going to bed.

@nightshade said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

Yes, some people. Meanwhile RfK died under the avalanche of interested players. Meanwhile, there's ~400 people on Arx. Let's not wonder why and what the difference might be.

And some people wouldn't touch Arx, or RfK or Firan (while they existed) with a bargepole for the same reasons.

Your experience re: sandbox setups is, bluntly, not the experience I've had on them as a player or staffer in any way. Further, there is absolutely no such 'general agreement' that games should (or should not) have metaplots.

So, uh, maybe try to avoid spouting out 'fuck your absolute authority' while acting like you have it to speak from yourself when so much of what's coming out of your mouth is so easily demonstrated to be false.

Protip: it is entirely possible to like what you like without demonizing other things, especially when you're doing so with with demonstrable falsehoods. People tend to take you a bit more seriously then, too.

@silentsophia This year's cold/flu thing is especially like that. 2-3 days of sheer hell, 2-3 weeks of lingering gunk and bleah.

@arkandel Yes. YES. Exactly.

And the people who want the TS and don't get it due to FtB are often very keen on trying to angle for this kind of misery as 'consequences' that are more long-lasting and gag-inducing than the TS would have been in the first place.

@ThatGuyThere said in Retail "Horror" Stories:

then tell my manager if I am scheduled for a Monday again I am done. That Friday we get the schedule for the next week.

I had one of these at a (different!) department store the first year I was in college.

Semesters change, my availability changes. My (snotty, classic mean girl breed) manager calls me into her office and says, "You are going to need to think long and hard about what's important to you, college, or your job," while making it clear she thought working as a part-time contigent in a crappy department store trumps a college education in some universal order of importance.

She was also aware I'd moved all the way across the country to attend said college, so this was especially funny to me for some reason even now.

There is still a part of me that wishes I had managed to somehow get a pic of her face when I just nodded emphatically and without missing a beat said, "We have department stores back in Delaware, actually, so I'm afraid it's going to have to be the college," and she really did just splutter, baffled, until she came to her senses just enough to, deflated, say, "Well, I guess you can go, then... " and I smiled and nodded and walked out without a worry in the world.

I did not move my ass across the country to work at a regional Macy's chain, lady. Holy jeez. Still makes me giggle.

Quitting that job got me six months of best job ever, though, so less than zero on the regret scale. (Other than not being able to get a picture of her face.)