MU Peeves Thread

[hellfrog]

@Buttercup said in MU Peeves Thread:

Mind you this doesn’t really bother me now but /I/ would never post a log like that. I am way too self conscious about my writing

[Snackness]

Me, an introvert, trying to play an extrovert.

[Polk]

@Snackness That’s me playing characters that drink and curse. It takes effort and I very often just forget.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Polk That’s me playing characters that don’t drink or curse.

[helvetica]

@Snackness that’s me playing someone not in charge

[Snackness]

@helvetica lol same. I’m an introvert but DO WHAT I SAY!

[Wizz]

I’ve always been convinced people can hear me internally screaming behind the keyboard anytime my character does anything forward or outgoing, looool

[Ashkuri]

I wish people would just ask for rp

“I don’t know if people want to rp with me” Ask.
“There are no open scenes on this Ares game” Ask if anyone wants to start one.
“I’m always the one that asks” Good. Continue asking.
“I’m bored” Ask if anybody would like to do something.
“This person said we should connect but they didn’t set it up.” ASK THEM.
“I have an idea but I don’t know if anyone will like it.” ASK ASK ASK CMON NOW.

This whole hobby only functions when enough people are willing to ask each other to rp that something happens ever

ASK THEM.

[mietze]

As someone who is often an asker I’ve got to say that it is unsuccessful a soft majority of the time. Not because people are mean, and there’s the usual about of just timing and stuff–but a lot of times I think people get hung up on feeling they don’t have anything to contribute/they’re rusty/shy/whatever. I 100 percent understand and hope its not because my RP sucks or people think I’m uninteresting!

But I would encourage people to accept invitations given too. I am an extroverted person by nature but it still really gets me down to regularly hear crickets. I think if someone is putting themselves out there especially if its a personal invite then its nice to maybe take a chance and accept especially if its a general reluctance rather than the specific person who’s inviting you! It is hard to ask for RP and I feel a lot of empathy for people who really just can’t. But just because someone is more equipped to do the asking doesn’t mean that a lot of turndown or just silence isn’t also awkward.

And especially on ares games where channel convos hang around for a long time I think its really intimidating when you know the LFRP channel is going to preserve all the 5 times in a row you’ve asked for RP and got no response! I personally think it intimidates shyer people from asking. This is just a systems thing and nobody’s fault.

These days that I tend to take male PCs I also try not to ping female pcs frequently bc I as a female player have had male presenting folks sliding into pages in a way that made me feel uncomfortable and I sooooo don’t want to make anyone else feel that way.

That being said I’m playing on an ares place and I love including people!

[Sillylily]

My internet* apparently dying while I’m in a big scene.

*Edited to update: … the games connection

@cobalt Boo, bad timing. Thank you for the heads up!

[Cobalt]

@Sillylily If you’re talking about Arx, no the game is down for everyone.

[Cobalt]

Appears to be back up.

[mietze]

I love the ares system, I have love faraday’s combat systems for like…longer than ares has been around I think. I love how accessible it’s made running a game. I love the integrated wiki and the web play is frankly phenomenal and easier and more intuitive IMO than most client-only games. But I’ve always struggled to figure out why it’s so hard for me to process stuff much of the time and more importantly why I tend to have a massive, unexplainable surge of anxiety on almost every game on it I’ve played.

After spending a couple of years very frustrated and wondering why on earth I could not seem to cope on just about every ares game I’ve tried in recent history…I finally had a revelation. For the vast majority of my mushing time, I’ve been on games where sometimes logs are nice but not required (unless it’s an event, or like…I dunno. On TR where certain proof was required for training logs or PrP credits, or whatever. So knowing something was going to be formally logged made it kind of a “you better be ON so that you don’t make a fool of yourself published for the world to see.” I like the sensation of being On every once in awhile. Like I wouldn’t want to have a job public speaking, but I’ve always enjoyed the adrenaline kick and afterglow of running a general meeting of the PTSA or giving presentations, running a work meeting, ect.

I realized that the process now of HAVING to fill out a log form before RP even starts just to RP triggers that needing to be ON feeling, even though I wasn’t even aware of it. ALong with all the anxiety. I realized the reason why I did not feel that way on the battlestar games I’ve played (which used the FS system!) was because although there was a built in logging system on the last 2 I played, the game was run like a classic one where people RPed on a navigatable grid, and then IF for some reason someone wanted to log it they’d initate the command in the scene. You didn’t set up for presumptive logging before you could even get people into a scene.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to be that way (I know on Testament’s game I totally ran around on a grid space without setting up a scene) it’s just the standard on most is using the web to set up that scene.

I’ve been having a lot of issues lately I think mostly due to post-covid issues where a lot of the cognitive stuff I struggle with is very pronounced right now. So frustration with “why the hell am I shutting down/why is this so freaking difficult it shouldn’t be” has been really bad the last few months. I was able to play on an ares game that had signficant modifications so that frankly it really didn’t even look like one, but it was small and by invite for awhile. So needing to set up scenes before RPing was less of an issue because I knew everyone and it probably didn’t trigger the feeling of needing to be “on”. Once it opened up, i found myself with rising anxiety in many respects when that was triggered.

I know a handful of folks who like me have been mystified for a really long time about why ares games didn’t seem to work for them even though all the elements are things that they, like me, adore. I wonder if maybe even if it’s not necessarily conscious if maybe the 100 percent log/display might add to a sense of pressure that at the time just is mystifying as to where it came from. Or maybe I’m weird!

The strange thing is that I don’t really care to hide RP that I do. I really don’t understand why I feel performance anxiety when I know even the littlest baRP will be flung on the website. Nobody cares. I think the percentage of people who read every single log available is relatively small and like…they’re not going to expect every pose to be fine epic literature quality. But I have been wondering for a long time why my already slow processing speed was slowing down even more on those games and mitigating strategies that had worked on tinymux games and on Arx for years and years just seemed to not be as effective on ares, and sometimes the freeze ups were worse even in the middle of a scene. (I already know that the 24/7 lingering pages/many chat thread conversations plus channels and everything else scrambles my brains, but it happens in scene scenes too and I know I’m slower because on ares I can also see the minute count of how long I take to pose.)

I’m hoping maybe now that I realize where a lot of that anxiety is coming from, maybe it’ll go away. I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced perhaps something similar. But it is a relief in a way, that I have a reason that makes sense. Vs wondering why anxiety creep just kept happening more and more, even on places that were chill and full of people I adore and who like me in return.

[Tributary]

@mietze I just… don’t bother to share all the logs.

They generally time out after awhile if you don’t share them, and I feel no loss from that. And I never bother filling out the scene information when I start a scene. In fact, sometimes having to fill out that information to share the scene means I don’t bother sharing.

Also, I try to do as much as possible from my client and treat the web portal as a wiki to a large degree. This makes it feel a lot more familiar. I mean, I do check the portal if I’m working on a second scene async or I’m away from home and want to poke at an async scene, but for the most part, I try to do one traditionally paced scene at a time.

So I mostly just set up scenes in Ares so that I’ve got convenient scroll back to reference, and if you think of things that way, you might find it more chill. Look me up for RP. We’ll try it.

[helvetica]

@Tributary I also treat the portal like a wiki, and play from the client. I’ve found it very hard to stick on games where client-side play isn’t supported. I have enough tabs open for work and something about having a tab open for ongoing channel chatter just… doesn’t translate as fun to my brain.

[Pavel]

@helvetica At least for me, I need the flashy-flashy of the taskbar that a client provides. I’m often doing a half-dozen other things to keep my ADHD-addled brain occupied, and if I don’t get the flashy the concept of “remember to check the thing” just evaporates from my mind.

[Third Eye]

@Pavel
I’m primarily on Ares games these days but I still find the notifications and other quality-of-life features significantly better enough in client I’m almost always connected there. I find portal-only play very…I’m never sure how much someone solely there exists on the game at any given time? I’m sure ‘remember to check the thing’ is part of it.

[Roadspike]

@mietze I think a lot of what you said speaks to some of the anxiety I’ve been having myself. I don’t know if it’s exactly the same, but there’s definitely a mental barrier to entry that shouldn’t be there (because like @Tributary said, you don’t have to share the scene) but is. I think it’s the tiniest barrier, like a slightly-raised floor at a doorway, but with everything else going on in real life, I just don’t have the spoons. I don’t know if this is something that can or should be designed around because there are plenty of workarounds (you can always start a scene from the client in a room without all of that info just with the scene/start command, for instance).

I think it may be part and parcel of the fact that in the last year or two, most everything feels harder, and I have fewer spoons.

[Pyrephox]

@Roadspike said in MU Peeves Thread:

I think it may be part and parcel of the fact that in the last year or two, most everything feels harder, and I have fewer spoons.

This part is it for me. I just don’t have the energy. And that is my peeve. I miss RP, but…

[sao]

yeah… the spoons issue is real.

For me, having the client open is better because my internet gives me weird socket issues and I am surrounded by sad picard for basically no reason all the time.

Sometimes I’m not smart enough to open the client, and then i lose a pose and have to rewrite it because I randomly went to sad picard in the middle of writing it.

Yam watched this happen to me in horror. “Sao!!” she cried. “You need to at least download a browser extension that will save your text!”

I didn’t.