MU Peeves Thread

[Pavel]

@farfalla said in MU Peeves Thread:

Also just as a note, the term ‘hooker’ is not preferred by full service sex workers.

That’s definitely a regional/cultural thing. It’s widely used in the community out here.

“The community” meaning the sex-work community.

[farfalla]

@Pavel I am not a sex worker in any region, so I don’t know personally, but I have heard sex workers ask other people not to use it. They use it themselves, but I don’t get to say it. Etc. So it’s easy to just err on the side of not hurting anyone, yk.

[Pavel]

@farfalla said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pavel I am not a sex worker in any region, so I don’t know personally, but I have heard sex workers ask other people not to use it. They use it themselves, but I don’t get to say it. Etc. So it’s easy to just err on the side of not hurting anyone, yk.

Oh, absolutely. Simply commenting on the neat differences between cultures, not trying to prescribe use.

[junipersky]

Bought new phones today because mine is overheating like woah.

Why does my galaxy s22 feel lighter and cheaper than my s9 did? I can’t decide if I trust it more because it isn’t as heavy and glass-y. Or if it just feels easy to bend and break.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

On popular request: The story of the girl who thought she was marrying my partner.

So, this was back in the 1990s – 'round 96 if I remember correctly. The date matters because cybersecurity and whatnot really wasn’t a big thing yet. Partner and I both played on LegendMUD.

Partner hung out a lot with a chick from Detroit and her friends. I had my crowd I went stabbing things with so nothing unusual there.

One day, a large care package arrived. Chocolate, a vinyl with ‘our song’, Red Sox kit (partner has no interest in hockey), scented candles.

In retrospect, this is where we should have started to question but, we weren’t really sure what to think.

Then she announced to partner that she’d bought the plane tickets and was arriving in a couple of weeks. Couldn’t wait to get married!

That, of course, rang all the alarm bells and set off an investigation on the game – where I was a builder at the time so I had a pretty decent rapport with the admins.

Partner had complained a few times that they lost gear or logged into the game somewhere else than expected. They’re a forgetful type though, so…

So the admins looked through paging history and private correspondence. And it turned out that some other guy from Denmark had been logging the character in and, to be blunt, convinced this American girl to come to Denmark to marry him.

This is where the obvious question is, how the hell can I trust partner to not be the culprit? Well. To be just as blunt again – partner’s English levels aren’t up to what those pages and letters contained.

Needless to say there was quite an uproar. Girl accused partner of abuse and gaslighting – other guy denied everything – and obviously, the trip to Europe was cancelled, more so when girl found out that partner and I were in fact already married.

[tsar]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in MU Peeves Thread:

On popular request: The story of the girl who thought she was marrying my partner.

So, this was back in the 1990s – 'round 96 if I remember correctly. The date matters because cybersecurity and whatnot really wasn’t a big thing yet. Partner and I both played on LegendMUD.

Partner hung out a lot with a chick from Detroit and her friends. I had my crowd I went stabbing things with so nothing unusual there.

One day, a large care package arrived. Chocolate, a vinyl with ‘our song’, Red Sox kit (partner has no interest in hockey), scented candles.

In retrospect, this is where we should have started to question but, we weren’t really sure what to think.

Then she announced to partner that she’d bought the plane tickets and was arriving in a couple of weeks. Couldn’t wait to get married!

That, of course, rang all the alarm bells and set off an investigation on the game – where I was a builder at the time so I had a pretty decent rapport with the admins.

Partner had complained a few times that they lost gear or logged into the game somewhere else than expected. They’re a forgetful type though, so…

So the admins looked through paging history and private correspondence. And it turned out that some other guy from Denmark had been logging the character in and, to be blunt, convinced this American girl to come to Denmark to marry him.

This is where the obvious question is, how the hell can I trust partner to not be the culprit? Well. To be just as blunt again – partner’s English levels aren’t up to what those pages and letters contained.

Needless to say there was quite an uproar. Girl accused partner of abuse and gaslighting – other guy denied everything – and obviously, the trip to Europe was cancelled, more so when girl found out that partner and I were in fact already married.

Whoa

[YetiBeard]

Very much not the point of the story but Red Sox kit (partner has no interest in hockey) made me laugh out loud partially because the Sox are baseball but mostly because it really drove home the point of how little partner cared about them.

[Pyrephox]

Romance is a hard one for me.

I enjoy flirtation and romantic tension, and a lot of my characters can be flirty and or quietly pine for someone they have a crush on, because those feelings are just delicious for me.

But I’m generally not all that interested in either a blissfully happy romantic relationship //or// a jealous/cheaty romantic relationship, IC. A relationship that has some very interesting challenges or inherent struggles that are tied to a greater, more adventurous plot? Absolutely! But honestly, even people who like IC ‘drama’ tend to be more on board with “oh no, my/your character has fallen for someone else! What do?” than “Our characters may be into each other, but we also stand on opposite sides of this divide that can’t be handwaved away or overcome with the Power Of Friendship - what happens to our relationship when we have to oppose each other’s ambition?”

I tend to consider romantic RP to be just another avenue for interesting plot and IC excitement, and because I do like conflict and tension, I get very, very wary about people who seem too invested in the “love story” between two characters.

I’ve also discovered that since I instituted a quiet rule that my PC doesn’t get romantically involved with any other PC who spends less than half the time showing interest in my character’s thoughts/goals/feelings than they do either talking about themselves or talking about how much they want to bang, the pool of people who would even be eligible for romantic play has shrunk immensely.

[Testament]

@Pyrephox Any kind of romantic storyline should be supplemental to the character’s story and development, not all-encompassing. When you’re IC relationship is pretty much how the character’s personality is defined by, that’s the kind of thing you don’t or shouldn’t be involved in.

[Herja]

@Testament I think that if someone is only interested in romantic RP, that is perfectly fine. The problem isn’t someone wanting the romance to play a big part in the story. It is about everyone being upfront about what they are looking for. If one person is mostly interested in playing out IC romance and the other is more interested in adventure, then that is just an incompatibility. I don’t think we need to go as far as to say that someone who wants to RP romantic plots is wrong. It’s just not what you want to do.

[tsar]

I love a good love story.

I don’t even have a particular type that I enjoy more than the others. They all have a draw, and if the other writer is fun and invested and not trying to start something weird OOC, I’m cool.

[Testament]

@Herja I’m not saying it’s wrong, I should note, my previous post perhaps came off a bit more blunt than I was expecting. I just think these are the kind of things that need a certain level of OOC discussion so that everyone is on the same page. For what people’s expectations are and what they’re looking for. By no means am I going to poo poo on people who’s main drive or focus is that kind of RP. But I do think before you have characters step into that kind of character arc or storyline, that you need to talk about what it is you’re looking for.

[KarmaBum]

I’d rather want than get. I like to pine. But it’s hard to make that happen on M*s 'cause people will usually IMMEDIATELY 100% BE INTO YOUR PC TOO!!! if you show so much as the faintest inkling of interest.

I should probably talk more OOC with people about my intentions, but then I feel like that lessens the tension and whatever let’s just bang and get it over with.

[Herja]

@Testament okay but that is not what the post I was responding to said at all. You said that no one should be super invested in romance and that is should only be a side story not the main. If you were just meaning for you, that’s fine, but your post seemed like it was placing romance stories as lower than other types of stories. It sort of smacks of the sort of shit that ‘serious readers’ give romance readers even though romance is the most popular book genre.

[Third Eye]

@KarmaBum said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d rather want than get. I like to pine. But it’s hard to make that happen on M*s 'cause people will usually IMMEDIATELY 100% BE INTO YOUR PC TOO!!! if you show so much as the faintest inkling of interest.

I don’t like to pine but I like a slow burn, especially in terms of Feelings, and people want to be insta-true loves or insta-besties after one bar scene in ways that take me out of the RP. It is all down to OOC communication, which I’m still figuring out how to do particularly well. 90% of my issues with RP partners are down to mismatched expectations that were just never hashed out because a 5 minute conversation is hard, I guess.

[tsar]

@KarmaBum said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d rather want than get. I like to pine. But it’s hard to make that happen on M*s 'cause people will usually IMMEDIATELY 100% BE INTO YOUR PC TOO!!! if you show so much as the faintest inkling of interest.

I should probably talk more OOC with people about my intentions, but then I feel like that lessens the tension and whatever let’s just bang and get it over with.

I can see that, yeah. For me I find that the emotional drama (story? Saga? SOMETHING) doesn’t have to be immediately over after the first intimacy.

But I also prefer playing PCs for awhile, and some of my favorite ships were long term relationships where the characters were friends as much as they were romantically involved.

That said I’ve had some really amazing writing partners the last few years, so I’m probably spoiled in that those people all had very well developed PCs.

[Testament]

@Herja I guess that sort of plays into what I perceive as super invested. And I think I’m letting my own preconceived notions bleed into my opinion from the fact of the number of bad experiences with this kind of RP that I’d rather forget about. Because I didn’t have those necessary conversations beforehand. And that’s on me.

I don’t want to invalidate romance arcs, and if that’s how it came off, I apologize. I had a kneejerk reaction to it, because I wasn’t trying to suggest that I didn’t think one type of RP should trump or is better than another, regardless of what that is. I could make the same statement about wanting to do anything but combat RP, that it should be supplemental and not all-encompassing. I think it’s good to have variation, that all those parts make up a good experience and integral to the whole. That’s just my opinion, not some statement that my opinion is more valid than anyone else’s. Really, it’s not.

[KarmaBum]

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

For me I find that the emotional drama (story? Saga? SOMETHING) doesn’t have to be immediately over after the first intimacy.

Oh fo sho. I’m just much better at inventing roadblocks than… uhm… whatever people do when they RP relationships for more than like five scenes.

I can come up with reasons to keep PCs apart all day long. But those same reasons feel gratuitous to me when they become reasons to stay together.

Give me two PCs that just can’t figure it out, and I’ll play that shit forever. My favorite ship of all time is Mulder & Scully.

[sao]

I love slow burn. One of my most recent ships was slowish burn and unstoppable force / immovable object. But now I’m just bragging because I’m spoiled rotten.

[Pavel]

@L-B-Heuschkel This is like an opera.