Posts made by Thenomain

@Ghost said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

@Thenomain said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

there's a lot of implication in your questions and conclusions that a dictator, even a benevolent one, is worse than a quorum.

Not really.

It could go either way.

"It depends?" No kidding? Tautologies gonna tautology.

Take MSB for example. @Arkandel releasing it to some kind of public ownership makes no sense, but what's interesting is that this group is a socio-political movement of sorts based on the importance of such a group to exist to protect people. While Ark has final say on admin level decisions for the space, the decision has been made to let the group decide what it wants itself to be within certain guidelines they feel are reasonable. Ultimately, @Arkandel owns MSB as a space, but does not take the position of leadership/ownership of what is discussed here.

Dude.

Pronouns.

Clarify when "this" is referencing two entirely different points, please, because now someone is going to add the "Duck Season/Rabbit Season" GIF.

Ultimately, @Arkandel owns MSB as a space, but does not take the position of leadership/ownership of what is discussed here.

No, but he has the tools to do so at a moment's notice. Though he and Ganymede may not take the steps to enforce this, they own this space.

"Leader" is another matter. I mean, c'mon, it's Ark. "Leader?" Pff, hah!

In short, on the topic of intersectionality

Except the topic is not "intersectionality". The topic is "discussion groups". You've said nothing that can't apply to any discussion group.

Which brings us back down to this:

• Does the creator intend to retain sole final vote on all decisions and ultimately decide what the group is or isn't about?
• Or does the creator take the approach that a socio-political topic such as intersectionality or a safe space is something that their own opinions or ego shouldn't dominate?

And I still say there's something very wrong here, either whether it's a false analogy or black-and-white once the words "ego" and "dominate" come in.

It could go either way.

Or.

It could go a little of one way plus a little of another, depending on the moment, the mood of the room, the consideration of the things going into it.

Ark and Ganymede step in from time to time, as they see needs fit. Sometimes we manage to convince them that something needs to change, sometimes they tell us that they're not going to change it. The Advertisement board is my most recent evidence, but damn if there are more options besides "do what I want" and "completely hands-off".

@Arkandel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

@Thenomain said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

What I'm reading here is that a "quorum of like minded individuals" can maintain a space if they have a vote of no-confidence on its current leader.

Worse - it can make a moderator depended on the current political climate to continue doing their job.

I'd assume that the quorum fills in for "the current leader". The Clique Effect is going to happen no matter what; it's a question of if you'd rather people trying to influence a single person with a single ideology, or a number of people with maybe the same and maybe not and may already be arguing with one another about what is best for the community.

Even with a quorum bad mistakes will be made (c.f. Stack Exchange and Wikipedia), making the space less "safe". Sure, people should be wearing their big-girl pants, but the conceit of the Intersectional MU* Community seems to want the place to be safe from attack.

This is IMO its first mistake. Even people with the same goal are going to approach it differently, and these people are going to disagree with one another. Knowing the difference between "disagreement" and "attack" is, well, something that the leadership is going to have to deal with on a pretty regular basis, later if not sooner.

People be cray.

@Ghost

I've been struggling with a reply to this for a good ten minutes now, so I'm going to throw this against the wall to see what sticks. I'm aware it's not a well-formed argument, but I find your implied (or inferred!) logic flawed.

What I'm reading here is that a "quorum of like minded individuals" can maintain a space if they have a vote of no-confidence on its current leader.

I would like to counter than a group of individuals, even if having the best interest, can ruin a community as quickly, if not quicker, than an individual leader.

If the question was "will you step down if that's the best thing for the community", fine, but there's a lot of implication in your questions and conclusions that a dictator, even a benevolent one, is worse than a quorum.

@Auspice

I keep trying to come up with a funny answer, but I keep coming back to: Who is Ruben's avatar?

@Auspice said in General Video Game Thread:

If you preorder the deluxe one you get a stop sign item.

I'm more looking forward to the severed arm (as a skin or not).

These people really know their fanbase.

Me: Oh wow, Bloodlines 2 is up for preorder everywhere!
GOG: Available March 2020
Me: ... Nevermind.

There are a few things I will pre-order (CP2077 will be one of them to support everyone involved), but with a whole year of lead-time? Yahno.

@Auspice said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

Because I fear it would be based on personal feelings/opinions and clash of personalities as opposed to 'this person did actually treat people of minorities poorly.'

I'm taking a wait-and-see approach.

Because I really doubt it will immediately affect anyone who posts here, and almost nobody I know who still Mushes. And also because "my house my rules" is always Rule #1 on anyone's project, so nobody should be chewing their fingernails in fear.

And we well know that even if there's a minor infraction against a Soapbox poster's sensibilities then we will hear how horrible it is, covering up the things that are antithetical to its goal.

@Arkandel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

It's not leadership or rules that I suspect will be their biggest challenge, it's the echoing chamber effect.

I agree.

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Okay, now some serious responses:

@Pandora said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

[Things] that happens outside of a game's in-house systems (mail, pages, messenger) is nearly impossible for staff to police.

Even things on-game are difficult to police. An experienced staffer (or someone who can see the shape of things instead of the literal nature of things) can use the same methods of managing problems based upon on-game behavior as off-game behavior.

We (Emmah, Troy and I) did this on The Reach twice. Once it even stuck.

When this is okay to do is an entirely different question. We're not talking about a game, here; we're talking about behavior to and about "intersectional" issues on a private chat server. I'm imagining Wora For Non-Straights. Its own rules can easily straightjacket its ability to have honest discussion about difficult or contentious issues, or to have discussions with high-strung personalities.

IGU kind of worked, but they did get caught in the loop of defending its own rules against otherwise reasonable, if sometimes snarky, discourse. Not as bad as Electric Soup; that place ate itself in months.

You're now accepting the burden of being yet one more place where vulnerable people are wearing a target on their back without the protection of staff aid should things go pear-shaped

This is a very subtle and interesting point: Kestrel has designed a discussion group around people who see themselves as vulnerable. Some vulnerable people do lash out when they feel attacked, making the pear all on their own.

Personally I think the answer is to say this: "We are here for X reason, and to discuss X in a reasonable manner."

Or as Kanye brought into the Soapbox vernacular a while ago, "We don't do that here." Just with a follow-up as to what we do do here.

Do do.

Scooby dooby doo.

It pains people like me that Soapbox doesn't have a more clear focus than "eh, whatever, just don't burn the place down", but that's Soapbox. IMC (I'm calling it "IMC" now) has a much clearer purpose. I can see, like Surreality and others, that the rules of the community can stop the administration from maintaining it, but we also forget the #1 rule of any private group: My group, my rules.

Which is why Tempest got a million upvotes for questioning Kestrel's personality.

Because no matter the rules, this hobby has proven over and over and over and over again that the rules don't matter compared to the administration enforcing them.

@Tinuviel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

@Rinel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

There seem to be a vastly disproportionate number of us Louisianans in the hobby.

Worst. Purchase. Ever.

Are you kidding? Without the purchase you'd have no New Orleans, and far less likely to have Interview With the Vampire and therefore no Vampire RPG or World of Darkness or WoD Mushes or...

...oh god, you're right.

@Jaded said in General Video Game Thread:

Anyone keeping an eye on Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR has stated that it will not be an exclusive for any launcher

This is good enough. Not that I mind the Epic Launcher (it's now not as bad as I first experienced), but it's the far, far inferior to Steam's launcher.

(Though if you really want to support CDPR, buy it on GOG. Though @Insomnia or your favorite streamer.)

@Arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:

That's true but Microsoft is doing the same thing and they have plenty of gaming street cred by now. Amazon is throwing their hat in that race, and their deep pockets shouldn't be discounted.

And we're seeing the fracture of Steam just as we've seen the fracture of Netflix. So unless Google pulls an Epic (or the positive side of that: a Nintendo Switch), the developers won't want to partner with them for any level of exclusivity.

Maybe they want to show the game companies that they have the infrastructure, but Amazon is so far ahead of them in that race that Google is on extremely perilous ground. They need to take the--honestly extremely slight--momentum that their market announcement has given them and push that snowball into an avalanche.

Search, maps, home automation assistant. This is all Google does so much better than anyone else that they can feel confident in their stability. Gaming? Google has bungled almost every other project except News and I guess you could say Android (though I would stay it's not a finished product).

As for hardware companies, they're either shitting their pants right now or already counting on selling directly to cloud data centers which in a way might be a good thing for them - way less customer support needed, for example, and fewer models of machines to put out every year.

The only hardware infrastructure company that should be shitting their pants right now should be Intel, because they fell asleep on their pile of gold and let AMD slip in with its Ring of Invisibility. The big server companies are of course fighting tooth and nail, but this fight started with AWS, and then Angry Birds, and has only been getting bigger from there. I don't know how much of this server architecture is based on Intel chips, but I'd bet a dollar that even a little research would reveal "less every day".

No, what I see out of Google is a proof of concept that was most recently tried by the Nvidia Shield. If Google is positioning their...thing to the end user, it will assuredly fail, save for the fluke of Casual Gamers which very well could long-tail it to serious position. They could very well be trying it as a way to worm into the collective conscious over iterations, like how the Microsoft Surface started as a crap not-laptop-not-tablet and is worthy of almost its current pricetag, or the Apple TV was nonsense generation over generation until the lightbulb went off, but this relies on Google sticking with a concept longer than a year.

And I'm still kind of bitter about Wave.

@Arkandel

It will be decades, or at least a decade, before the current generation gamers give up on hardware, and hardware manufacturers will do everything in their power to stay relevant.

It’s the next generation of gamers that Google should be eventually aiming towards. Google hasn’t shown the patience for anything but data collection, and those things that go directly into that business. Casual gamers could carry the short- to medium-term, but for now streaming boxes are still a loss leader at best.

That the entire business world is poised to make subscription model de facto across all industries (lead mostly by Netflix et al and Office 365) is why companies won’t give up.

Google is not positioned to answer VR gaming, which will replace PC gaming about the time we get to where Google is aiming now.

@Auspice

Well it’s fucking stupid.

There is no single sexuality that doesn’t have its shitlords. This has nothing to do with the sexuality, but with humanity.

That bisexuals get treated this way for being bisexual is strong evidence to this conclusion.

My system should work on Penn. I know that @skew converted it to Rhost, but Penn and Mux are much more similar.

If nothing else, you can see how I did it and extract the basic roller.

https://github.com/thenomain/GMCCG

Edit: Oh, did you mean D&D 5e or Vampire 5e?

@Derp said in Mux Logger Objects:

@TNP

It's MUX, so the Rhost version won't work I don't think

Depends. These days probably not, but need a link to the code.

I am constantly surprised at the antagonism that bisexuals get. Here is someone who is more open to physical encounters than most people. What the tribalism fuck is going on that this is a bad thing.

—

Gany: Would have hit on your female character if you were on more than once a week for twenty minutes.

Just sayin’.

As a reminder, discussions are now supposed to take place somewhere but the Advertisement thread.

@Cheesegrater

Clearly that book written in (checks) 1995.

Wait, really? 1995? There's got to be an appendix containing languages PHP is better than.

Like Mushcode.

And Pascal. Just sayin'.

@grapenut

Cool.

Having a structured programming language do the heavy lifting is well worth it, to me. Scraping a news file is trivial in comparison, and the only reason I scrape it is because I capture more information than I use.

Google gets into the streaming video games market.

I’ve seen Microsoft invent and support propriatery DRM standards longer than most of Google’s projects.