Posts made by surreality

@thenomain There's a reason I always suggest a drink after I have to whip out the stereotypical Libra 'it depends'.

It's typically because nuance is relevant.

Nuance is also damnably hard to police.

Regarding the dogpile problem, it isn't as hard. When a number of people all express the same opinion, it may or may not be a dogpile.

Is it a group of random posters? Then probably not. You very likely have the 'someone said something stupid and is getting called out on it by multiple people' situation @Apos describes.

Is it a circle of friends all spouting the same accusation at them that is not directly based on what's written? That's the telltale sign of a gossip circle commiseration spiral dogpile, and is worthy of note.

Is it a circle that regularly goes after the same person en masse with the worst possible assumptions about them thrown around as accusations and insisting they need to 'own' all of this crap they dreamed up in their circle jerk but doesn't exist in actual reality outside their circle jerk? That may be a sign of bullying, and is also worthy of note.

It's not a difficult pattern to spot. It really isn't.

Entirely decent human beings can fall into these traps, even in the process of attempting to be the best decent human beings they can be. It doesn't make their behavior any less inappropriate or problematic, or their commiseration spiral conclusions and accusations any less faulty, or their ganging up on any less troublesome when it occurs.

"It depends" == "there is no black and white answer without further data, and the best you may be able to hope for even with further data is a very murky grey".

Policy: I'm with @Arkandel on this one; this is less about any given policy than policy enforcement. If I had to point to one, however, it's one I can't credit to a specific source, but it would be the introduction of Conflict of Interest policies. This went down during my 8 years or so off-forum, so I have no idea what game started using them under that umbrella term.

Game System: None yet. No, really. None yet hit all the points for 'works effectively more often than it drives me crazy', which is the bar I set on this one. The closest would be 'None whatsoever, with a limited pool of creative players who make stuff up on the fly and respect one another's fun.'

Setting: While I never played on it, I was around the folks developing it. Truelands. Old. Not current. Most broad and in depth and detailed original theme written to date, and I have yet to see anything come close to surpassing it.

Code: ??? There are bits and pieces from a lot of things I like. They are very specific and scattershot.

This season of Archer is shamelessly mocking Tales of the Gold Monkey.

Having seen the original as a kid, then seeing it more recently and nearly choking to death over what a horrifically racist pile of what in the actual fuck it is, I am truly relishing this, because it absolutely deserves everything it gets and then some. (Archer doesn't pull punches on being offensive but there's stuff they probably can't even reference or mock from the original because it is that fucking bad and it was being played completely straight at the time.)

My husband saw it only as a kid, and hasn't since, so while it's funny to him, he isn't choking half to death every few minutes at the references in quite the same way.

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

That is a pretty serious mischaracterization of why that thread was split. Sure, it started out as "hey doing this will make your game fail", but then people started chiming in with increasingly-hostile rants about how all MUSHes are basically derivative crap and the code for anything other than Arx required no effort. That's not civil. That's not even remotely constructive. And the final straw was someone calling me "tiresome and disingenuous", which may be mild by hog pit standards but is still pretty blatantly a personal attack. There's no justification for any of that in a civil debate.

^ This. A thousand times over. (I will refrain from going into the 'easy is hard' argument here, and how astonishing and wonderful it is that we have people in the community working their asses off to create tools that allow others to make a game with relative ease or how hard it is to do that, but anyone who has ever touched any sort of software or development project intended for dissemination rather than an individual project already knows the 'easy is hard' maxim very well.)

The reason debates don't stay civil around here is because a good many people around here don't value civility. They have stated repeatedly that they'd rather the whole forum be gloves-off.

For the record, I don't want that.

We do a pretty good job keeping the political flame wars to the politics board. Why can't we keep the MU flame wars to the hog pit? Because the people involved just can't be bothered to rein themselves in.

This is what I think should be happening, and when it's not happening, people should be reined in.

@arkandel I think this depends a lot on how one defines 'undesirables'.

People like Sovereign, Spider, Elsa, or Nemesis, who are egregiously abusive across the board and have no intention whatsoever of changing their behaviors, are definitely undesirables and I think the community would be better off without them, full stop.

If this forum is keeping these people away from games, good.

If we are defining 'undesirables' as 'anyone who doesn't agree with me about everything, gets snippy once in a while, and fucked something up once in 2002', on the other hand? Bluntly: the people defining 'undesirables' this way need to grow up and recognize that their personal dislikes are not indicative of broadly abusive and toxic behavior that is detrimental to the community on the whole.

There's a difference. It's valid, and it's relevant.

It's worth mention: all three of the mods here are people I think have good heads on their shoulders, and are well-intentioned people who do their best to make ethical choices in their role as moderators.

Just... maybe divide up the tasks, then? If there's disagreement about how different things are handled, divide up the tasks into 'we can all more or less agree that X should be handled in Y manner, and <mod> is best at that, so that task will primarily be <mod>'s wheelhouse'.

Y'all might get a little further with that approach, or at the very least, it would mean that when X situation crops up, if it's always handled by <specific mod>, folks will have a better idea of what to expect.

(Yes, this is separate from generic posting, and should be. We're all entitled to a shitpost lawlgif here and there, an unpopular opinion or criticism, and whatnot, including the mods when not in their role as mods. The collective we forum-wise should try to be the smart people we are about telling the difference.)

@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I'm coming off terribly because I REALLY care about this, and I'm worried and concerned and a little afraid of what ultimately this is going to mean.

FWIW, you're not coming off horribly at all from where I sit. You're another of the people who has been here for-fucking-ever and has seen the evolution of things here.

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

There are people here that have, in my opinion, gone on crusades against others to assassinate their reputation on a board with little or no accountability.

This is absolutely the case. It has some nuance to it, however, and that's important to recognize.

Some people are acting out of hate and sheer mean-spiritedness. Those examples are rare and often obvious. They still do damage, and as it stands, that damage is permitted to stand, even if it is a full-on campaign of slander and outright lies.

That is not and should never be OK. I'm not talking about matters of opinion, here. I may think someone is acting like an ass and say so; someone else may disagree and say that as well, and frankly, that's fine, and should remain fine. That's a difference of opinion.

We have seen things that aren't differences of opinion stated as wholly unsupported fact about others. We've seen people accused of concrete actions without evidence, and those accusations stand without challenge. Whether someone speaks up to say 'that isn't true' or not, if that person is not in the board gossip circle, they are frankly fucked nine times out of ten.

And maybe let's stop pretending that isn't happening, too? That there isn't a group of people 'in the know' that are communicating broadly outside the board about any given issue, and then when it comes to the board, those not in that rumor mill are completely at a loss about what the hell is going on? Because it's obvious. The evidence is everywhere. Someone speaks up and gets a chorus of 'we all know what you did!' while the rest of the board is left scratching their heads and trying to figure out what the actual problem is.

Go back to ye olde Internet Drama and You and look at the description of the commiseration spiral. It's textbook. Practically the entire gripes and peeves thread looks like this now in the chorus of vaguebooking posts and responses to them, save for the old saws we have been banging on about -- pose length, idle times, purple prose, etc. -- for an actual generation now.

This starts to cross the line into the 'accusation without evidence' territory as well. And don't think I don't understand how it comes about; it is right there. There is usually something that spawns it, but that something is only known to a select few -- and the rest of us get our heads torn the hell off for commenting objectively on what is actually being presented here, which does not include that, often with substantial attacks on anyone who comments. That's utter bullshit, y'all. Wake up to it.

We could shove all of the mean-spirited jibes and personal insults into the closet, and we could tell everyone "hey, it's okay to be shitty in the closet, but be nice out here because the folks that cannot or unable to defend themselves will surely not be affected by whatever vomit you spew in there," but we all know -- we all should know -- that this is not the case.

I agree with this to a point, but only to a point. Were it not for the circumstance described above re: glaringly obvious outside commiseration spiral going on somewhere that often leads to piling on and wild accusations, it would be a lot easier for people to speak up for themselves. As it stands, the same circles jerk each other off over the subject and behave as though whoever is commenting has access to all the information they do, rather than the information that has been brought here and presented here. And at that point, it has been brought here, so people are going to comment. If you're going to rip someone's head off for commenting 'because they don't have the whole story', you better be prepared to deliver it rather than casting aspersions on them or making wild-ass claims about how they're terrible fucking people in some way or another for reacting based on the information available to them.

And this feeds into the same circle jerk, which by now would put the yiff-flood from College Humor's 'Furry Force pt. 3' to shame for the amount of... what it releases into the community. (Which I'm not linking, you can look it up on youtube when you're not at work.) Those wild-ass claims and nasty assumptions get discussed and tossed around and treated like fact because -- hey, same thing -- there's nobody there to disagree, no one there to offer up actual facts to contradict them, etc.

People here are for the most part very capable of defending themselves from unreasonable attacks when they are not a tidal wave of circle jerk yiff jizz, which is increasingly the case. This isn't weakness. This isn't dodging a bullet. People can dodge metaphorical bullets; this is like shrapnel grenade launchers.

The problem is that, like Fight Club, expecting no consequences from that is foolish, and the sheep are understandably anxious.

I wouldn't call anyone here a sheep, unless directed toward those 'blindly following whoever barks the loudest'. Many of the people who have been voicing concerns have been in this community since its beginning, have survived a hell of a lot of shit-slinging and awfulness, and are still here speaking up about things they think are important, still calling bullshit where they think it's warranted, and voicing views broadly accepted now that were outliers back when without backing down an inch. They are anything but sheep.

I agree about the matter of consequences. I have certainly pissed off more than a few people here over the years for things I have actually said or done; I don't think ill of them for being pissed off at me for it if they are. That's up to them. Making up a lot of gross bullshit to pile on top of that to bully, threaten, and try to frighten, hurt, or shame someone into silence is something else entirely.

Everybody here probably has some fuckup or another they're ashamed of, regret, etc. For the most part, people own that. Making up things out of whole cloth -- supported only by gossip circle speculation reinforcing itself -- and trying to force those labels on someone is different. Just because someone could gather up a dozen people to say, "Bob fucks camels on the weekends" doesn't mean Bob needs to own fucking camels on the weekends if he doesn't fuck camels on the weekends, and we're seeing a lot of that pattern of late. It's a problem.

How to address it? I have no idea. Policing things that happen off board is not only not possible, it's just not something the mods should be asked to even attempt. 'Back your shit up before you throw it' being called out, though, regardless of where it's happening on the board, is something we should all be getting better at calling out, because it's something that is not happening enough to even slow the roll of this behavior, which only seems to be gaining momentum rather than being recognized as the problem it is.

I think this idea has merit, but I'm going to wait and see on execution to see if it's ultimately a good idea or not.

A suggestion? If you have to address something that is hostile and remove it and subsequent commentary, do so. I would rather see this done as a series of 'this post is deleted's with a followup of 'If y'all want to have a discussion in this tone, start a new thread in the Pit'.

Not move the existing posts, but leave a record (even with the text blanked) with who was going there and crossing the line, even it's all blanked out.

We talk a lot about patterns of behavior here, and being blunt? More or less everyone understands that patterns are relevant. If the collective group sees the same names blanked out on the regular, that's not nothing.

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

An alternative, I suppose, is to put out the general warning post that things are, or have been, out of hand, and any posts thereafter get deleted. But I'm not sure if that addresses the problem, or if that would, for whatever reason, encourage to be as shitty as they can as quickly as possible.

I don't agree with this idea at all. It goes precisely how you fear it will and we've seen it already. There are people who have been banned at this point for ignoring all the rules and making completely unfounded attacks and accusations all over the forum, and while the posters in question are gone (for now, since none of the problem children ever seem to stay that way), their attacks on others remain.

That's really not OK. That's not 'speaking truth to power in a neutral space when the powers that be are corrupt and something needs to be said for great justice'. That's intentional personal character assassination of a poster based on absolutely nothing but a desire to do harm by another with zero facts or evidence, only an excess of bile and hate.

So long as all of that bile and hate gets to stay? No, all that's going to do is make the place look awful. For those of us who have become punching bags -- and there are quite a few of us -- I think I can safely say we're sick of being treated like canaries in the coal mine on this front, and having all of the attacks on us grandfathered in to remain forever in perpetuity, while all other posters will be safe from this going forward.

Yes, that's going to require some house cleaning. No, that's not any fun. It doesn't mean it isn't a real issue that creates not just an appearance of unfairness, but actual unfairness unless it's tended to.

@coin @cupcake They're doing a pretty stellar job on complex characters, which is always great -- and can't really be relied on when the presumptive 'draw' of a show is going to be the wire combat. They're also still doing a really good job of keeping everyone in the land of shades of grey rather than black and white; that some of the characters are actively struggling with this and some aren't at various points is another contrast that I don't see enough of, and is something I missed dearly when Black Sails sailed off into the sunset. (Bajie wins hands-down for me on this front as the character I'd most want to hug and punch often at the same time.)

We're seeing more and more of this, and often from the cable networks and streaming services. It's less melodramatic hand-wringing soap opera and more realistic in terms of the struggles people actually have.

...also, the general visual design for what I mentally dub 'the murder twins' is so damned beyond OOH SHINY to me that my inner costumer squeaks and trills any time they're on screen.

@tinuviel The concept behind it all was more or less as a tool for people to find the RP they're looking for, and help avoid things that are going to cause major expectation mismatches (and usually drama).

All of them are set up to be optional save for things we're used to from various +finger stuff already: general preferences (things like pose length and speed and style), availability (timezone if someone wants to share that, general 'office hours' notes, typical times available to help people schedule things to be inclusive as needed), and GM/ST preferences (if someone is interested in running scenes for others -- like, 'I like to run small teaching scenes' or 'I like to host party events' or 'I enjoy running spirit interactions', and so on).

@tinuviel They're definitely a lot like hooks, just focused on a specific subject area. (There was a long list of them.) They also cross over a bit into player preferences and goals, though, in a way hooks typically don't.

They include story ideas, but are focused more on being an explainer/place for limits and goals a bit more than I typically see in hooks, which tend to be more like:

• Joe is a motorcycle enthusiast. Does your character ride, too?
• Jane is a jeweler. Need something custom? Hit her up!

...etc.

@kanye-qwest It kinda depends on how someone goes about it.

I wouldn't, for instance, advocate something with the kind of detail that is in Shang's +kinks setup for any game that isn't focused on that content.

A general 'here's a spot for player+character prefs for this' that would let someone write something like these examples, though, is more useful and doesn't quite go there into 'OMG WAY TOO MUCH TMI!':

• My character really wants to become a mother, and is looking for a baby daddy. I'm not really interested in pregnancy RP, though, so on the player level I'm not pursuing the same goal as the character and expect to have her attempts fail.

• I'm OK with most adult content, and can't really be offended by language. If you have any sensitivities about it, let me know and I will happily avoid those subjects and stick to the language you prefer.

• I'm really not into TS. While I'm not opposed to romantic RP, when it comes time to get into the nitty gritty, I will always fade to black without exception.

• My character is a super flirt, and that may make it seem like she's always thirsty for your character's nethers. This is nothing but an act because she's really insecure and immature about this kind of thing, and will freak out and run if anybody actually ever takes her up on it.

• My character is pretty kinky, and is into a lot of controversial things, but most of this happens offscreen in downtime. I'm OK with RPing these things with other players in small doses, but it's not something I want to dedicate much of my game time to when I have time to play.

@tinuviel Dammit. I would have totally even tried to play a dude for that.

@tinuviel Dude, if your wang spouts coffee, it's ONNNNNNNNNNNN, just sayin'.

@tinuviel Not gonna lie, the horrible part of me just did a spit-take over this. Because that would be a thing. And the horrible part of me would laugh. It would laugh really fucking hard.

@vulgarkitten Or 'omfg I don't TS and everyone in this room wants to fuck me shit shit shit RUN FOR THE HILLS'.

I don't see this one as a code problem. I really don't. If someone wants to try that, more power to them -- but it's not something I'd personally implement.

@arkandel said in Let's talk about TS.:

@surreality said in Let's talk about TS.:

It never failed to stun me how many people would try anyway if told this, up to and including using dice to attempt to force the issue, regardless of the reason. It similarly never failed to stun me that they'd be stunned I would want nothing to do with them after that.

Yeah, there are assholes everywhere and also in the hobby. I think in that light it's a good thing we continue to beat the ol' dead horse of "state your limits and stick to them" since clearly someone, somewhere is still getting away with it or they wouldn't still be trying the 'ICA=ICC' gambit of throwing the dice then forcing others to TS-or-else-they-are-bad-players.

The sad fact is that we aren't wholly there yet. We still have arguments on the forum from time to time about how having limits of any kind is a sign of a bad player among otherwise reasonable people.

Almost universally, the very first post on this viewpoint will go right to the extreme caricature of someone who 'just isn't willing to ever let anything bad happen to their character ever and always has to win'.

Yes, the collective we know this sort of player described above exists in the hobby. They are far more rare than the person who says, "Hey, I don't want to write TS <about specific act or kink>." Conflating the two is not appropriate as they are not the same thing at all*, but it tends to happen from step #1/post #1/etc.

This has a real chilling effect on issue reporting; if you think you're going to get a staffer who slings that argument in your face and labels you the bad player, yes, you should probably leave that game, but you leave that game knowing other people are going to be left to deal with the same thing. Plenty of players have found themselves faced with that attitude -- which demonizes them for things they aren't guilty of -- when they are seeking assistance in an uncomfortable position.

Think about this realistically for a moment and you'll likely begin to see the real scope of the problem: "I am feeling gross and pressured, I went to staff to ask for help, and instead of helping, they called me a bad player and enabled the creeper who has no respect for my player-side limits."

How likely are you to approach staff again, even on another game, after this happens? In many cases: much less, if at all. This is a fairly common scenario to encounter as a player, and we talk a lot here about being willing to approach staff with these things, and people needing to speak up to staff after an attempt to handle it themselves in a mature and responsible way doesn't work. We also talk about how many people just 'put up and shut up' and put up with bad behaviors far longer than they should and don't report an issue until it is a morass of indecipherable chaos that has gone on for weeks or months, and I think this is a glowing neon sign as to one of the reasons why.

We (the collective) need to work on that.

• It arguably can be if the player trots out this same argument on everything they encounter they don't like, but barring evidence of that, the accusation is extreme, inaccurate, and completely inappropriate.

Actual answers, both what I've done historically and what I think I would do now if I get back to things again.

#1. If for whatever reason, it's off the table, I make sure to mention it. This could be because I was with someone at the time who was not OK with it RL, it could be because I wasn't in a headspace in which I felt like exploring those themes at all; while the reasons varied, it's a typical enough expectation that it may occur that if there's some reason it absolutely will not no matter what, I have said so up front.

It never failed to stun me how many people would try anyway if told this, up to and including using dice to attempt to force the issue, regardless of the reason. It similarly never failed to stun me that they'd be stunned I would want nothing to do with them after that.

#2. I always would ask about this if I saw a scene veering in that direction -- basically, the point at which someone was pressed against the wall or clothes were hitting the floor and unless something drastic intervened, the direction was very obvious. I am almost impossible to offend with language choices, but know others are not the same. I don't care what style someone runs with (even if in some cases, the language choices are more hilarious than the hotness I'm sure whoever along the way intended) and will generally play along unless it crosses into territory like, say, referring to my character as a slut/whore/trash/etc. in metapose (in the same way that player behavior would annoy me in any other context), at which point I will say something, and I will say something the first time it happens. If it happens again, I'm out, and I'm done.

#3. I'm leaving this one mostly alone because if I don't, I am going to rant in a way that is completely inappropriate for this part of the forum because... reasons. Needless to say, though, if you tell me you're totally into a grand epic story better than anything ever, and when you discuss the events of that story it is literally (used correctly) nothing more than a laundry list of who has enjoyed your genitals and how and how many times and how much they enjoyed it, I am not going to consider your epic tale of tail to be on par with Lord of the Rings. Nor should I.

If someone doesn't want to play with me because I don't want to TS them, it's not something I consider a great loss.

#4. I like the prefs setup I've described various times to be a good first step. It gives people neutral ground for basics without awkwardness or confrontation. If people have questions, they have a place to start the conversation, if one is needed, and having a place to start is a huge help.

Unspoken #5. The sad truth is that you can't assume someone isn't a total asshole or sociopath just because things start out well or they seem nice, even if they seem totally fine and sensible for years. Be careful, and trust your gut. If something feels off, say something.