Posts made by surreality

Resolution: do my level best to not die.

(This will only make actual sense to a handful of people, but such is life.)

@Goblin It really was better than it had ANY business being. Not high art, but still way, way better than it had any business being.

Someone I know I convinced to watch some of it in spite of themselves (but will not out) put it really well: "He knows how to vampire!" Stefan, on the other hand, "does not know how to vampire." I found this charmingly on point.

My mother caught an episode once, and her commentary was adorable:
"So this is where television is hiding all the handsome young men!"
and
"So there are endless pretty men without their shirts on, formal gowns or historical costumes every three episodes or so, and there are vampires? No wonder you like this."

The husband refuses to learn character names, and thinks this saves him. Everyone gets nicknames instead. (This does not save him.)

@Goblin I just love that quote, even. It's such a grand quote.

My husband refuses to watch the show. REFUSES. WILL NOT!!! HE WILL NOT I TELL YOU!!!!!

...except when I throw it on in the background on Netflix when we're on vacation while I'm doing something else and then he's asking me every six seconds what's the deal with so-and-so because he immediately gets totally invested in spite of himself.

BUT HE WILL NOT WATCH IT! NOPE! NOT HIM! HE WILL NOT!

@Seraphim73 said in Model Policies?:

it's not going to interest all the players, but it's still good to have available so that players who are interested can all be on the same page.

I wish I could upvote this a dozen times more.

Often, the 'too much!' issue isn't the issue people assume it is. Reference-as-needed is a thing. If it's needed and it's not there, the problem surpasses someone whining that they feel like they have to read everything first, when that's rarely the case at all.

@Goblin Sooooo bookmarking that. You definitely need this one:

(The writers must have seriously loved him, it was awesome.)

I have been lucky. My only MU dreams I can recall have been either 'ooh good scene idea!' presumably inspired by whatever's going on on a given game, or...

...in the nightmare form, I am always coding. MUX coding, not wiki coding. (Sorry, Thenomain.)

(Wiki coding is a totally different set of nightmares.)

In the really horrible nightmare form, I am coding while a drama explodes and I have to mentally keep code and five or so people all having histrionic fits of flail at once that I have to mediate while everyone vaguebook snipes at each other in the peeves thread.

The above happened enough while asleep that I once had to erase 'fuck this, time to wake up' into a multi-page to the drama llamas before I hit enter, because it took a moment to remember, 'fuck, I'm awake :/' as it happened RL (sans peeve thread, iirc, but this was years ago).

What amazes me is that it isn't even the same 'woman with a gator down her knickers in Florida arrest' story I've seen referenced today.

https://theweek.com/articles/885553/best-headlines-2019

^ There's one in there, too, and... it's not the same story.

File this under 'things my father sends me that are funny for an entirely different reason', I suppose.

@Derp That's a good call.

Whatever a specific policy actually covers is only one of the potential problems.

There's the 'how the playerbase responds to any ruling about the policy and how staff handles it, no matter how fair or reasonable that is', but also:

...how the player staff has to discuss it with handles it.

This is the other gigantic landmine. How many minor issues that require a brief 'heads up' from staff explode into spectacular drama because the player being counseled -- not even punished, but just talked to and asked not to do the thing again -- explodes into a festival of flailing and macrodrama?

This is absolutely one of the worst situations to be faced with as staff -- especially by a good, fair-minded, empathic and decent-human-being staffer.

@Ganymede said in Model Policies?:

having an online social faux-pas might as well be added to "death" and "taxes" as an inevitability we all need to be gracious about.

I could not agree more effusively. The reality, though, is that there is a huge hurdle in this community re: expectations, and how people react when someone who legitimately doesn't know better behave as though they surely did and it was all intentional shitty behavior -- the gossip and bitching chain starts, and that player is often screwed.

This is a substantially larger problem, in my view, than the usual sort of offense that triggers the reaction.

Knowing that everyone is going to make a mistake about something largely means that the overseers of games should act thoughtfully and maturely when confronting a situation.

I don't believe that's something for staff alone to shoulder, in part because they can't. Staff can be perfectly reasonable and handle the initial issue without any stress on them, or the player who made the mistake, but the remainder of the playerbase has a role to play here, too: to not be shits about it once the matter has been handled.

I think the best solution is to recognize that a player making a faux-pas is a person, that people make mistakes, but that there are certain mistakes that breach common sense and that these mistakes cannot be condoned if you want a player population to remain. And the best way to communicate this sort of policy is to tell players: we will do what we believe to be fair and consistent to the best of our ability to provide a welcoming player community.

I would put the latter bit thusly, to account for the points raised above: the administration will do what we believe to be fair and consistent to the best of our ability to provide a safe and welcoming player community and expect all participants on the game to behave in the same fashion.

@Arkandel said in Model Policies?:

a MU*'s culture is shaped way, way, way more by what is actually practiced rather than what is written down in some help file.

I agree with this, but this is precisely why you have to tell people.

I have said the following what feels like a hundred times by now, but all points remain 100% relevant:

Culture varies from game to game. In an RPI, for example, code will prevent you from entering a room and stealing everything inside if you're not supposed to be able to do that. On a MUSH, this would be considered incredibly bad form despite little or no code preventing it. Similarly, one may join any scene freely in some games, while an invitation is required on others and anything else is considered to be barging.

So, yes, you have to tell people. This is going to require some measure of detail. Part of the reason for that is that a good policy document shouldn't just say 'don't <thing>', it should explain -- or provide a link to an explanation of -- why this matters and how ignoring it negatively impacts the game and others on it. Not having any idea how something could be harmful and thinking something is just silly and arbitrary is one of the most common reasons for policy to be ignored, not 'is just a jerk'.

This shit is not automagically intuitive. People don't psychically download it at the login screen.

Re: the social issues factor, this also varies wildly from place to place. Some are PG-13 or no profanity allowed. Some are a free for all. Some games are run by sexists, racists, and anti-semites; we've seen them advertised here on and off. People coming from those environments may be perfectly decent folk -- hell, they may be leaving because they find that distasteful! -- but on such places, 'the line' is skewed so far in a different direction that the 'normal discourse' there is unacceptable elsewhere.

This is incredibly tragic.

Suicide or not, goddammit, I will be happy when the 'it's just the internet' isn't a way people who bully, harass, and torment others online excuse their behavior, or minimize how truly Not Fucking OK their garbage behavior is. No one deserves that. No one.

Jesus fuck, this shit again? Really?

This is generally my take on it, too. Have a neighborhood/area/part of town, vs. street layout.

Re: why you may need more than one room: everybody assumes that if you're in your home with someone on +where, you're fucking. It doesn't matter if you're fucking, it doesn't matter if you're picking navel lint and chatting OOC about your favorite TV shows, people are going to assume this. If you're just in 'Jane's House', people are going to assume this more than if, say, you're in 'Jane's House - Ritual Library', when 'Jane's House - Bedroom' is something that would arguably exist.

This doesn't mean -- barring communal residence or business -- you probably shouldn't make a one room permanent build for the property and then temproom up your kitchen/bedroom/kinky sex lair/whatever else, but that's one reason I understand too well as a reason to want more than one room.

(tl;dr: assholes assume shit and act like assholes on account of that assumption, that isn't fun, this hobby would be vastly improved by a lesser quantity of assholes and assumptions)

I am marginally pro-OOC room, for one specific reason: I'm not someone who grabs a pile of friends to start off on a game. I usually go alone, even if I ask others to join me there after feeling it out, if I've decided to stick around.

A notable measure of 'how comfortable I'm going to be in a space' is seeing how people relate to each other OOC when not in a scene. Seeing that people are joking around and friendly in downtime is reassuring when shit hits the fan in a scene, and something dramatic or tense goes down in that I usually find it easier to engage someone (IC in potentially tense subject matter, or OOC if there is an issue) when I have observed them behaving in a chill, friendly manner with others in the playerbase.

There are obvious exceptions to this -- if they're only friendly to their in-joke circle, for instance, or only engage those people even when many others are present and chatting freely -- being the big one. The new one on me was someone going on effusively about what a great time they were having doing something that was making me utterly miserable, which made me feel like I could not approach them to say, "Yeah, your super fun times, please knock that shit off." It was a big problem, but it is also in that category of what I'd call 'rare exceptions', in that it's happened all of once in over 20 years.

@Sunny IMO, there is already an outlet to share those kinds of things with the folks who want to hear them: pages.

@RightMeow I'm definitely one of those people that spells out a lot of things, so in a way, I want to offer the perspective I'm coming from on that.

Not everyone's an old hat at this. New people come in all the time, and we have some weird community norms to folks just trying to learn what they are. That ends up making people feel like they're expected to know things they don't, and they have no idea why anyone would do that. (I know I end up spending the most words on 'why this can create a problem', rather than 'grar if you do <thing>, you are a jerk!')

Even with that, things vary a lot from game to game. Is it a strict pose order place? Is it a place where everyone poses in past tense? Etc. This stuff isn't so much policy, it's more... 'this is a guide to how we do stuff on this specific site'. It tends to get lumped into the policy section of any given site since it tends to include things like alt limits/etc.

There's always that asshole who is all, 'it isn't written down as not being OK!' when they do something they know to be shitty and want to get away with it, and are trying to shift blame/make you seem like the unfair one as a staffer. It's childish and stupid, but it's common as blades of grass, unfortunately. Sometimes these tantrums are being thrown because someone does feel they're being unfairly punished because 'nobody said that wasn't OK', too.

It's kinda no win from the staff side on this.

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Model Policies?:

I don't want to do that at the expense of having some people think they have to hide or put up with low grade aggression and/or bigotry to make 'socially conservative' people comfortable.

If people are engaging in low grade aggression and/or bigotry, toss them right out on their ass.

Please. Truly.

I am not being flippant or sarcastic in the least here.

There is no greater statement of support than staff taking action to say: that is not welcome in my living room, there is the door. No policy will create a feeling of safety anywhere near as effectively as action taken to remove people who violate the intended peace and comfort zone of that space.

One of the reasons I've long been very anti-politics/issues/activism (from anyone about anything) on games is that it isn't the purpose of the game, and it can create an environment that makes the game less effective as the kind of game it is.

A lot of people come to these games to engage in a story that is not about their real life, even if we sometimes chat about our real lives in the 'living room' of that space. It's IDEALLY not a social space where we briefly and rarely play make believe in between talking about our real lives and feelings; that's a flip of the intent, being 'this is a place to tell stories together that aren't about the real world or the real us, even if we should feel comfortable chatting socially in downtime without fear of being treated poorly based on who we are'.

The more a game becomes about the socializing living room (OOC room/channels/etc.), the less it becomes a game, and the less effective it is as a 'break' from dealing with that real life reality/a form of escapism/etc.

Don't get me wrong here; I think the 'living room' is very important to the health of a game. Part of that, though, is how much focus it has as compared to the story and RP going on.

For instance, if I go to a game and everyone is just arguing identity politics all the time (which still happens even if everyone is mostly on the same damn page about them in that group, gods fucking help us), I'm not getting to play that game, and I'm not getting something I can't get here on MSB or literally anywhere else on the internet.

That game is giving me absolutely nothing I can't get everywhere else, and I have no reason to be there.

This stuff will take over if you let it, and that's the end result (after the inevitable flame wars and arguments and hurt feelings, none of which are good, either). It may be a lovely, wonderful, amazing social circle full of people you absolutely adore! ...but it's not a game any more, and people trying to run a game need to be conscious of this.

@Roz Yeah, those were the ones I did catch. I get lost in fantasy names a lot, which doesn't help.

It seemed like they were aiming for less a gimmick (like, say, Irreversible or similar, which rely on it) and something more like Pulp Fiction, where events aren't in sequence, but relayed in layers that add depth to the previously shown scenes. I do think this tends to work better in a movie with fewer scenes than a season of something, even if it's a short season, but I've seen it done well for seasons of things, too (Hannibal is a great example, but it is more an exception than the rule).

@Roz Yeah, one of my issues is that I'm usually doing something else while binge watching anything, and glancing up and down throughout to some extent, so if they're visual cues especially, I can miss them on a first watch through.

(For some reason I decided to take up needlework again a bit over a week ago and was trying to chart a carpet or something in photochop if I have my RL timing right, to give you some idea.)

I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to 'make sure people know when things are happening unless that's the gimmick you're going for', admittedly.