Posts made by surreality

@Meg I think in the case you had specifically, I'd call it too few staffers available rather than laziness, but there are some times I've seen lazy as the cause. Sadly, sometimes 'too many' staff creates the same problem, since no one is sure who has the responsibility to do this, so you have lower tier staffers afraid to say anything without approval from on high, and upper tier ones thinking the lower tier staff will handle it.

Sometimes, things really are so black and white there's no conversation to be had. ('Is VASpider/Rex/Jeurg', for instance, at least to me. <cough>)

@Ganymede In all seriousness, Best Cat (as mentioned elsethread) once mimicked me, while I was helping my husband deal with a sudden 'omg I got twin charlie horses in my thighs!' incident. She apparently stepped and leaned on the exact spot where he needed pressure, and yowled at him, while I had the other side.

For bonus amusement, my husband is a massage therapist. (He has gotten much mileage out of this story.)

@Sparks At some point in the coming months, I may want to pick your brain a little on some of the social combat stuff you describe, and am looking at something fairly similar. (I agree with this and would like to subscribe to your newsletter, essentially, but I won't extrapolate on that in somebody's ad thread in a derail.)

@Auspice

1. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that is awesome.
2. D'awwwwwwwww! That's good taste in adorbs.

@ThatGuyThere said in MU and Alternate Channels:

Real example As much as I empathize with Surrs roof hole that would not be a reason to not allow She Who Gets Namedropped on a game. (Note there are plenty of other reasons to no allow though.)

The only reason I find it relevant is that it's a pretty clear demonstration that nothing about her has changed at all. If she was interested in reforming or 'being better', she had a decade to make something actually important right and didn't. It's not hard to get from there to 'and on a game, where nothing is real and it is not very important, she's not going to give half a fuck about the damage she does to others, either', since that's been proven out long term, too. I wouldn't expect her to go around making amends for all the game shit she's fucked up, but if she's on the 'better human being' train all of a sudden, you'd think she'd make some kind of effort along the line to make major RL wrongs right, and she's not done so. I wouldn't expect people to disallow her on a game over it happening, because duh, really, but it's a big red flag re: 'has she really reformed and changed?' that people should keep in mind.

@Meg said in MU and Alternate Channels:

ok, but I have to admit. 'Drives a Fiat' had me laughing out loud at work.

I choked on my coffee hard at this one, because my favorite RP person ever... drives a Fiat. Swear to fucking god. I laughed so hard my scar aches out of nowhere again.

@Ganymede From what I recall, she's a very kind-hearted person and tends to see the best in everyone in a very legit good person way. Especially people who seem energetic and creative, which Spider certainly does.

While we're not exactly close any more, we played together years ago elsewhere, and I'm going to be pissed if all of her work gets shot to hell by Spider getting up to her old tricks.

And the tumblr post really is a giant red flag to me that absolutely nothing has, or will likely ever, change.

I don't really think it's entirely fair to dogpile @Derp here, though, and he's kinnnnnnnda taking all the lumps for this forum-side.

He's not the game owner, and the game owner is the one who has apparently made the call, at least according to Spider's post.

I know I wouldn't feel it quite fair if I was taken to task for decisions made by headstaff that I don't really have a say in, but have to enforce or relate to others, so, y'know. Something to keep in mind here.

Thankfully, I rarely hear rumors about people doing fucked up shit RL. For which I am very grateful, actually. Almost universally, it's something game-related. It may just be tangentially game-related, but it's still almost universally game-related.

The people whose RL lives I am or have been in any way involved with -- people who have become friends, or, I guess technically Spider -- it tends to be relevant, but I avoid Spider whenever possible and the rest of the people like that are friends, so the shit I hear tends to be directly from them about their own lives and is blessedly chill.

I might just be lucky, really, in this respect, despite my glaringly shitty luck in other ways, that people don't tend to come to me with piles and piles of RL gossip about others.

@Ganymede ...in all seriousness, that's how I got my bestest cat ever.

I wanted to see her out from her cage. Mother went "I do not care that it is your birthday, you are not getting a cat. NO."

Family with grabby toddlers gets kitty out of cage while I'm standing right there.

Kitty leaps out of their hands and burrows down my shirt and into my cleavage, hiding, only to look up at me with Kitty Big Eyes<tm>, at which point I just looked at my mother.

"...sigh. Happy birthday, dear."

She was bestest cat.

@Ganymede said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

In the past decade or so, I think that players have generally adopted the policy that: (1) staff are responsible for their own games and have the authority to make whatever decisions they want; and (2) policies can be ignored where circumstances demand attention.

I think we still need work on the bolded bits, really. It's better than it was, but the bolded bit really needs work. The level of shrieking that erupts -- I do not exclude myself as a source of it as much as anybody -- over anything new, or anything people can't see past their preconceptions about, is still a pretty major issue. The race to start trying to tag people with the worst of all possible traits over fairly trivial shit is also grossly problematic, especially when paired with behavior blindness.

There's been... more of that than usual this month thus far, and it is really getting to be a concern, in the sense that it makes me wonder if it's worth sticking around or not. Not something I ever thought I'd be saying, either.

@Coin I feel, like, obligated to mention here in the visible space that she has her own thread in the locked-down hog pit for just that reason.

(Because I am a bitch this week especially. I'll totally own that.)

(I would also absolutely start a betting pool re: register a lurk account vs. beg flunkies for screen shots; 'doesn't look' not a a horse in this race at all.)

@Arkandel We also tend to have zero qualms about eating our own young, though, so. Kinda cuts both ways.

Also, it bears saying... I actually have it written down in a policy file (because I do have a policy file for everything, almost properly-used-literally) that people should feel free to bitch and gripe and complain and smack-talk the shit out of me, any place I run, etc. on the forum here, without fear of reprisal.

Reason being, if I am actually fucking up, I want somebody to call that shit out. If they don't feel comfortable bringing it up privately -- and if they think I'm fucking shit up out of malice or sheer stupidity it's reasonable to expect they won't be super inclined to bring it up with me privately -- this might be the only way I ever find out, and I'd rather find out than let the problem linger. Explanations can be offered or action can be taken as needed to rectify the problem at that point, but I feel it is seriously better to know so it can stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting resolved somehow.

@Arkandel This is one of the reasons I'm a fan of the 'timeout' temp-ban, actually.

Sometimes, it really does become clear that someone is doing themselves (and often others around them) harm when they're stuck in this kind of position and don't have either the self-awareness or self-control to not log in and just explode everywhere.

At that point, the game environment is genuinely not healthy -- for them and those around them -- and sometimes a couple days to a month of 'forced vacation' is a necessary reality check.

(Also, yeeeeeup, that situation is not improving much. Fingers crossed and all... typically because I'm knitting like a fiend instead of coding wiki shit lately, but I digress.)

@Arkandel I'm at that point where I would have been happy if I got back 5% of what I put in, and was still getting consistently let down for a period of several months.

It's partly my own damned fault; there are decent folk I adore who were interested in doing things, I just had reached a point that was a few miles, rather than paces, past the inevitable line we never realize is there until we've crossed it re: our personal limits, I just managed to overshoot that fucker with a sonic boom this go 'round, and the faith and hope and optimism and confidence all got jettisoned somewhere along the way like discarded booster rockets at launch.

This is a thing, too, and it's one worth mention: one of the reasons people go apeshit and become a living nightmare on games is when they don't recognize this has occurred. There's a reason I am absolutely not playing anywhere right now, even though I have bits built in a couple places I could play. There have been times I have not been self-aware on this front, and while it was a hell of a long time ago now, I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for an instant for hating me hardcore if they only knew me from back then, or that was their only experience of knowing me/etc.

@Tinuviel There's a difference, I think, between bitching about somebody or venting and harassment or cheating, and it's a pretty important one.

Maybe it's just that I don't tend to take second-hand views on people to heart very often (which has absolutely gotten me burned for it; I mean I let Spider live in my house, ffs), and tend to judge for myself, I dunno, on the gossip front.

The instances I'm thinking of involve things like fellow staff on a game doing things like trying to influence me to deny apps from people they don't like, or give those people grief over things I'd never give anybody else grief over. It's the difference between bitching and people expecting me (or someone else) to take action based on their bitching in a way that's negative, and unjustified, to the target, in most cases. Which is a pretty easy line for me to draw, at least.

Scream up a blue streak about how much you hate JoeBobMonkeyPants, get it out of your system, but don't talk about how you wanna cheat him out of something, or create extra hurdles for him as a staffer that no other players deal with, tell me about how you enjoy harassing him (seriously people have done this, what in the actual fuck, people?!), or try to get me to join in some crackpot scheme to drive him off the game/etc.

@Arkandel said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

But having said that it IS damn hard to not have that subconscious expectation regardless. You're doing all this shit, it can't really have been for nothing... right?

Right?

...while completely off-topic for this thread, that seriously sums up the reason I'm at least temp-retired for the time being.

There really is a point at which the whole 'faith in humanity' thing gets completely scragged once in a while in regard to this hobby.

@Tinuviel I would genuinely love to be able to go the 'if it's just more evidence' route on this one, I really would.

Unfortunately, I have known a handful of people who are so vastly different on the game than they are in alternate channels, purely because they actively rely on the 'but it didn't happen on the game!!!' defense.

As in, I have been mid-page convo with someone, and had them shift immediately to skype to add heavy duty smack-talk to the conversation, actually stating they're doing so 'so it isn't happening on the game and they can't get in trouble for saying/doing it'. Then they flip their shit if ever it gets mentioned on game because it caused concern, trying to make me the bad guy for calling them on straight up lying about it once they're back on the MUX. Zero conscience about the lying, all the blame shift on the 'how could you ever repeat that!' ("Because you're lying and cheating, duh.")

Needless to say, while I will keep the most trivial confidences to the grave 99% of the time, I am not somebody to brag about how you cheated, harassed someone, etc. to, because I have zero respect for that behavior. I won't mention it unless it's harming someone (myself or someone else, and usually if it's just me it takes a lot to get me to give enough of a fuck to say boo), but seriously... people should not tell me this kind of thing if they want it to stay quiet. (Personal shit, no matter how embarrassing about whoever? Doesn't matter if I love them or hate them, that doesn't get relayed, period. That is just non-cool.)

These folks were an unfortunate wake-up call about it all. It's not suddenly not cheating, harassment, stalking, or abuse due to change of venue. Evidence still has to be there, but the venue from which that evidence comes ultimately makes no difference.

I don't care where the exchange happens, if it is related to the game and involves participants being abusive, I would take it seriously.

"I made sure to contain all of my stalking to skype!"
"I only discussed my plan to cheat in email!"
"All I did was rally a mob to hunt down my OOC rival on the forums with lies about what they were doing!"
"I was only harassing them in gchat, not on the game itself!"
"I just defaced their wiki, it's not like I did anything to their PC!"

^ If anybody considers the above something that means their behavior is suddenly peachy keen because it happened off the MUX/MUSH/MUCK/MOO/Evennia/etc., a heavy duty reality check is in order.

Evidence is obviously still required, but change of venue is NOT a defense.