Posts made by surreality

@mietze That's how I hear it used now. In the 80s and 90s? No.

@eye8urcake said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

I just can't call it pansexual, I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too old but I accept an all-inclusive meaning and like how @Pandora explained it - attraction is about the person, not their genitalia, for me.

^ This this this this this.

You're not alone in this, and I've spoken to other folks who have the same eyetic. This... did not just mean what you're describing as I was growing up. (What you describe applies to me, too.)

What that word used to describe? No. (It's meaning was a lot more, uh... expansive -- men, women, anything in between, other species, fruits and vegetables, farm implements... -- to put it delicately. If someone is happy with that, no shame! It's just not me.)

So I have a massive fucking twitch about people trying to shove the term down my throat now. I get that 'language evolves and changes', but damn, that word had connotations that were anything but OK. If people want to reclaim it as a label these days? Go for it; I assume the modern meaning when someone mentions it, but goddamn. Not a team shirt I'm gonna wear, no matter how in fashion the label may or may not be.

@Cobaltasaurus Yeah, I feel this one, too.

I don't stress about it as hard as I might have once, though. It nags and needles some, but then... hey, I am female. My me-ness is as legitimately female as anybody else's femaleness.

I identify as bi RL, by which I do explicitly mean 'gender is just not a factor of attraction for me, I'm into someone or I'm not, and that person could be anything on the gender/sex/etc. spectrum/moebius strip/hula hoop'.

I tend to play women, because I'm crap at playing men. The majority of my characters aren't what many people would consider especially feminine, either. Sometimes they're 'sexy', sometimes they're not, sometimes I think they are and other people don't agree, also vice versa, and so on. This is simply how it is for me; I neither lament or celebrate it, it's just 'what works for me'.

I would like to be able to say I play bi characters, or lesbian characters, but I pretty much don't. I would like to be able to say this isn't because of the number of cringe-inducing male played lesbians and bi women in the hobby, but it is. It really is.

Are there giggletwit horndog bi or lesbian women RL? Of course there are. I am not interested in relationships or intimacy with them RL, either.

No, dude, most women I know don't actually think about sex all the time. Most women I know don't talk about how much they want to bang someone or would rather bang this person or that person on first introduction. Maybe I hang with some boring-ass girlfolk, but I don't think that's the case. I do not view everything through a lens of 'do I wanna fuck it' even though technically everyone could qualify without a gender/sex filter; consistently, I have seen men playing bi or lesbian women approach the world this way. There are myriad reasons I can think of that could account for this disparity, from men thinking of sex more often than women do throughout the day to men not having the social conditioning women do to hide their sexuality and sexual feelings under threat of being slut-shamed, but regardless of the cause, this difference stands out to me like a flare in ways that are a complete nope-o-rama to the notion of approaching the subject at all in play at this time and likely for the foreseeable future.

That's GRRRARRRRRRR #1: A lesbian is not a quirky lounge lizard with a vagina. Stop acting like it.

Grar #2 emerges because so many of the guys that do this go on about how 'they do it right' or 'they are too enlightened to fall into those fetishistic traps' and so on, while blatantly ignoring that difference in social conditioning re: sexuality that men and women experience is proof they are not so fucking enlightened as they think.

They may not be 'pursuing the porno fantasy' directly, but ignoring this reality does effectively ramp up their porn-o-meter substantially. While the 'men think about sex every seven seconds' thing is complete bullshit, what little research has been done suggests it's about twice as much as women do. (Same goes for thoughts of food and/or sleep. So we are not thinking about these things as much, either! Grar! Ahem.) So, y'know... 'twice as much' is something people notice. And if you're going for sex twice as often as I wanna go there? Yeah, you can see the problem, I'm sure.

And the NyQuil is winning, so this ramble ends here for now, to... maybe be finished later when the horrible snotmonsters fuck all the way off. Augh.

Dear neighbors:

I hate you less than most of our neighbors, which is saying something.

Normally, I would cherish the smell of your brand new fire pit you decided to break in tonight... all night long... since before dinner time... with no sign of it abating as we near midnight.

I have the plague, though, and I can barely fucking breathe. I get winded walking down the hall I'm so gunked up.

I am, to put it mildly, not in a state in which I enjoy the very strong smell of fire pit and thick smoke in the air, and I smoke clove cigarettes goddammit.

I cannot taste or smell this clove cigarette, but I am choking on fire pit.

All the side-eye, normally cool neighbors, all the side-eye.

-The Art Hermit on the Opposite Corner

@Ganymede All the hugs, if welcome, and all the bourbon either way. I am so sorry.

The helplessness is awful. And it's damnably unavoidable because it happens so fast. They're fine and then they're just not, and while it means no extended suffering for them, the helplessness sucks and it hurts.

The only consolation we can really have there is that that's a hurt for us, and not them. And, well... that counts for something, even if it doesn't really help or ease it any.

I am getting really fucking sick and tired of being asked to have extraordinary measures of understanding and empathy for people who cannot be assed to demonstrate so much as a smidgen of it themselves.

entrancing ocular elipses

sensual spheres of spectation

piercing peepers of perception

...come on, everyone, we can surely top that.

When you know you caught the plague your husband brought home by the weird inverse sensation of your ears popping.

@Arkandel said in Historical MUSHes:

Another factor to consider is, as a whole, MUSH-dom doesn't do subtlety very well.

This hasn't been my experience at all. Sure, some people fuck it up as you describe, but they're not what I'd consider typical of the hobby. They stand out more because crappy experiences always do.

Movies and books can actually portray this kind of villainy to add some depth and set a tone without making these aspects the every scene's sole focus.

So can players on a MU.

PCs often don't.

Sure they do. What both goldfish and I recounted is not the behavior you describe at all. We did not stop existing from one page to the next.

Far more so when their players are disingenuous about their characters' purpose in the game.

Not sure what you're getting at here, unless it's going back to the 'all people OK with these themes existing just want to get their *ism on' principle, which is nonsense, with a 'they're just in denial about it' insult cherry on top. Hoping that's not what's intended so it would help to clarify this.

@Pandora Well, I can't tell if you're joking about being upset about it or not entirely, but I sure as hell wouldn't fault anyone for wanting to slap the stupid off of whoever pulled that one out of their ass.

I am the wiseass that would get instantly banned thereafter for saying something like, "Spoiler alert: there are no fairies anywhere else, either, Peter Pan." (And commit canonical wholesale fairy genocide by choosing to disbelieve.) <cough>

@faraday Oh, I don't disagree. It's just that this notion that 'anyone who wants a game that doesn't scrub these things out of existence is only doing so because they want to engage in bigotry'.

That even without policy, no one went there? Says a lot about how ridiculous that argument is.

@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.

@Ghost See, this is what people insist others do. As in, 'this is the only allowable way'. And I am just not remotely down with that, because it again makes 'playing something with elements of actual history' NOT ALLOWED.

If people want to do that? Go do that. Have a blast, sincerely, please do. But leave people who decide to do something else the fuck alone.

To the generic crowd that behaves this way: Just stop with this bullshit insistance that anyone who DOES NOT DO THAT is an RL *ist troll. It's divisive garbage behavior. The hobby is not solely composed of extremist SJWs and trolls, full stop. Stop acting like it is.

@Arkandel said in Historical MUSHes:

And while The Pianist is a static work of art that narrates events within a specific context and tells a specific tale. MU* simply don't work like that due to their interactive nature.

...and yet, you can't tell the static work: "Hey, too far, scale it back." You can when it's other players interacting, which is a benefit of the interactive nature of MU.

@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.

@egg Well, I mean, you're welcome to think it is just a bag of assholes, obviously, but I think it would be ridiculous to say that staff allows what I've described because of an inherent desire to be sexist/racist/ableist/homophobic/etc. RL.

Also, women store heat in the body core. Men in the extremities. (Blame evolutionary adaptation if you must.)

Our extremities are typically where the sensory organs live.

@egg It's definitely a lot more tolerant than real history in terms of game play, which is a good thing.

It doesn't attempt to rewrite it, though, or pretend the horrible shit wasn't real, or a fact of life in some respects.

This is because the players are not assholes. It's really that simple.

My PB is Not A White Girl. This has been relevant in some way or another in every story she's been part of -- even the one set in the future.

In the modern day, she was 'the mixed kid'. Not fully fitting in was relevant and formative for the character. Knowing that if the shit hit the fan in various respects, the 'sameness' wasn't going to be as relevant as 'the otherness' was also relevant. The rich white kids were likely to treat her like 'the help' as someone not white (this did not come up IC, but it was relevant to the character), and the native island population wasn't going to see her as an ally against the white invasion as she was part white, so she may as well be all white.

In the future setting, she was a hospitality robot designed specifically to have a mix of various ethnic features in an ambiguous blend to have similarities to as many potential people as possible as a commonality to set them more at ease.

In the old west (1902), she was a hot mess of everything the white population disdained (single woman well past marriageable age still unmarried, mixed race, born out of wedlock, actual witch, possibly a lesbian so far as the town knew) and she was very aware of how precarious her position was. This absolutely did come up IC, and not in a way that involved anyone treating her like garbage. She was addressed by the sheriff at one point, and promptly freaked out before realizing he was asking for her help. She ended up deputized eventually -- but it was never lost on her for a hot second that she would not normally be on the comfortable side of the bars based on the typical prejudices of the era alone.

...and so on.

I wouldn't blame someone for not wanting to be mindful of these things in the course of play, or wanting to play in a space in which they don't matter. I do take issue with the insistence that creating a space in which someone can do this means someone is *ist.

Again, this comes down to a basic reality of the players are not assholes more than anything to do with realism or historical accuracy. There have been a few instances of people going places other players found uncomfortable -- not in terms of 'someone treated my character in a *ist way', but in the 'this portrayal is kinda fucked up' sense some people have described -- but a tap on the shoulder about it seemingly resolved this rapidly, since... yet again, it all comes back to the players aren't assholes. (And that had nothing to do with historical accuracy or the lack thereof.)

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

UPDATE: Someone stole my catalytic converter. Cut it right out of the exhaust system. In the middle of the night. In my garage bay. Next to two much more expensive cars.

<just stares>