This is as much an “elsewhere” peeve as it is a MU peeve but… AI art of big breasted wasp waisted highly sexualized photo real anime girls whose faces look like they were made using Toddlers and Tiaras photos to train the AI being used for your character on an ordinary MU.
I know not everyone wants to use real photos, or to pay someone to make good art of your character, but I shouldn’t feel like I’m on a government watchlist from glancing at your character’s profile. 
@De-Villefort said in Liberation MUSH:
@Aria
It might ease the nerds into being normal around women by giving them regular exposure to girl-cooties.
Or it would give said nerds a constant target to creep on and abuse and behave inappropriately with due to an inherent power imbalance of the paying customer and someone just trying to earn enough money to pay their bills.
What needs to happen is for their fellow nerdy guys to chime in and say “this behavior isn’t okay, stop acting like a goddamn incel just because Mia turned you down for a date in 7th grade.”
It’s not on women, or any other marginalized group, to help heal people actively bigoted toward them.
@eddie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
flying monkey sex pest apologist BS won’t someone think of the poor abused sex pests
IDK how to tell you this but your “friend” isn’t gonna be proven innocent, Ed. He’s got multiple accusers in this thread and all he can do is send his flying monkeys in to attack people here. It’s a bad look.
@Pyrephox said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
If you get a lot of unrelated people not under the power of the accused saying, “That doesn’t match my experience at all with this person, and I just don’t see it,” then I’m skeptical.
Please be very careful with that thinking. MU*ing is a small community. And there are abusers who are very good at hiding, very good at insinuating themselves in with other people in power, very good at picking victims, and good at making sure you become abundantly aware that there will be consequences if you speak up. Whether those consequences are real or not, the fear of them often makes victims stay silent.
Those abusers are also typically really good at making sure they only show their bad side to their victims and do everything they can to discredit those victims so that their friends will speak up in their defense.
To use an IRL example that could be triggering to some but I cannot find a spoiler tag so please feel free to skip to the next post:
I have an ex that is as good as gold to everyone around him. He’s kind, he’s generous to a fault. He speaks respectfully to his elders, holds open doors for women whether he’s interested in them or not, everyone gets ‘yessir’ or ‘yessum’. He’s the guy other guys, and plenty of girls who haven’t dated him, point at and say ‘see, nice guys really exist!’.
When you’re first dating him, you’re his princess. And he picks girls who aren’t used to that treatment, who don’t have a lot of friends, and does everything he can to get them used to it, to make it clear how no one else will ever do as much for them, will ever make them feel so special.
And then once he thinks you’re well and truly hooked, and you’re in a situation where you’re financially and emotionally dependent on him? Well. I’m pleased to say I saw where it was going before it got too bad.
But even still, none of his exes have spoken up in any sort of public way. Because to the people he doesn’t want to date, he’s as good as gold, and they defend him rabidly. And they’re everywhere within the small community he lives in, so even if you’re not under his power, you’re under his power and it’s better to either fall silent or get the hell out of town than to deal with people treating you like shit because you spoke out about their golden boy.
@GF said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
This is gross and fuck those guys for introducing sex crimes to Star Wars.
I’m not trying to be a downer but these guys aren’t the ones who introduced sex crimes to Star Wars.
You know how in the third movie there was a Twi’lek girl dancing and when she tried not to get manhandled by Jabba, he murdered her? And how Leia was in a metal bikini and strangled Jabba with his own chain?
Sex crimes have always been an unfortunate part of Star Wars, and especially in the expanded universe. Twi’lek society is literally based around slavery, especially selling Twi’lek girls to men, because human men find them exotic.
So absolutely blame these jackasses for glorifying it, but George Lucas introduced sex crimes to Star Wars a loooong time ago… which is why it attracts so many creepers.
I suspect part of the change in demographics is that nerdy things aren’t being gatekept quite as hard for women and femmes, and are more easily accessed online.
No more do you have to walk into a comic shop or a TT gaming store to buy stuff, only for all conversation, and laughter, die as a group of nerdy guys glare at you and whisper angrily because you dared to enter their domain, like you just walked into their damn living room instead of a place of business, all for the crime of being a woman or feminine presenting person.
I would just like to say I am deeply hurt and offended at being called straight. If anyone needs me I’ll be binging queer cinema and cruising Grindr.
I know no one is meaning to undermine the experiences of those of us who didn’t grow up as girls, but I just need to address this.
That number goes higher with bisexual and gay men at roughly 1 in 4 or 25% (though some studies suggest as much as 59%) experiencing CSA.
Two in three trans girls, 66% experience CSA. As a trans woman, myself, I am absolutely one of those numbers. I didn’t “grow up a girl”, but I definitely didn’t grow up a boy. Society did everything it could to make sure I knew I was not and could never be a ‘real girl’, but my experiences still more closely resemble those of my elementary and middle school girl friends than they did any of my cishet male friends.
Plenty of people who didn’t grow up girls know what it’s really like, even if we’d desperately like to forget.
How do you propose that folks submit to this high burden of proof you’re demanding? Because logs are so easy to fake on most games.
A system like Ares means that I, as a player, can submit a verified log of what was said to the staff on a game, absolutely. I love that this option exists, as it makes it much harder for abusive people to lie about what they said.
But when staff are the abusers, or actively protecting the abuser, as is accused here, how the hell do you provide this verified proof, because the verification of the log comes from staff.
You can’t. Because admin will never just come out and say ‘Yeah, I’m protecting a sex pest.’
@GF said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:
tsohg
I am not the only one who misread this as TS Hog, I hope.
It’s my experience that when a man refers to “females” outside of a scientific or identifying context, he’s saying it because he can’t call us “bitches” without some sort of consequence.
That’s not to say that everyone who does this is a blatant misogynist who disrespects women, but it’s something to look out for in speech, especially if you’re a woman who’s dating.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of us. Thank you all for sharing your stories. They’re hard to read, but important.
With that in mind, here’s mine.
When I was 15, I met a game runner. He convinced me he was super cool, a genuinely good guy, and that he would never hurt me. I was incredibly lonely and just wanted friends.
He was 29, but he was so awesome and liked me because of “how mature” I was for my age, totally, and not because I was an ignorant, fresh faced little 15 year old who was already primed for abusers with a bunch of online friends around the same age.
By 16, he was my “boyfriend” and regularly talked about me coming to live with him. He was emotionally and verbally abusive and stole half the summer before my 11th grade year with ranting and screaming at me on the phone if I dared roleplay with anyone else, while he regularly roleplayed with a half dozen other people and had an entire harem.
But, of course, because he was my boyfriend… I wanted my friends to know him. I’m pretty sure that was an idea he fed me, looking back.
He dumped me a few weeks after meeting my 15 year old best friend whom he abused for years… Years later I found out he then “cheated on” them with a 13 or 14 year old he was trying to get to do a webcam show for him. Luckily, this kid was smart enough not to do that.
We maintained a ‘friendship’ this whole time, which I realize now was really him using my youth and proximity to other teens as a way to lure in new potential targets. (Edit: It was also him maintaining a degree of control over me because with him being my ‘friend’ I didn’t want to do anything to hurt him or cause him suffering. He was handling me.)
Years later I reconnected with some old friends online who convinced me to give the game he was running a go, since it was a theme I really liked and he was ‘rarely around’. He was still around often enough to be up to his old shit, though he was no longer targeting high school students and had matured enough to be going after college freshmen.
Eventually his abusive bullying behavior got him removed from the game and the friend group he was in, and I finally felt comfortable actually interacting and socializing with them.
But I forgot how fucking charming this asshole can be and a few years after we all cut contact, he wiggled his way back in. I started being more vocal about what he’d done and the negative impacts it’d had on me and others, and so he set about getting me ostracized from the group by forcing more interaction between us to paint me as a crazy bitch for not tolerating his presence.
One person in the friend group literally told me ‘it was almost 20 years ago, why don’t you just let it go already?’
And maybe if it’d just been me he’d been abusive to, if he’d been the only person I’d been hurt by like that, if he hadn’t tried to convince me to make a goddamn sex tape when I was 17 with the 15 year old I was too traumatized to do more than hold hands with? Maybe I could have let it go.
But he was just one of a long line of abusers that started way too young and didn’t end until I was in my fucking 30s. I blew up the friend group, let everyone even tangentially involved that they were upset because I refused to spend time with a pedophile who groomed me and countless other kids online, and cut contact.
It sucks, but I don’t wanna be around people who can overlook that sort of behavior, especially when he was literally soliciting minors for illegal materials.
@Xenon said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
These warnings are helpful for anyone still wading through the swamp that is this hobby, but there are always going to be people who are just trusting enough, or perhaps vulnerable enough, to fall victim to expert manipulators and abusers.
There’s also the fact that there’s a history of assholes associated with precursors of this site (some of which were even run by VASpider himself!) targeting people they don’t like for smear campaigns, for reasons as simple as (insert bigoted excuse here), so lots of people simply don’t trust this sort of thing because of past experience.
TLDR: people remember what WORA was like and view any heir to it or place where more than a few of the old faces from there congregate with suspicion because WORA was a rancid cesspit and if they aren’t here to see that this is nothing like that, why would they trust us?
The rest of this is behind a spoiler tag because I’m rambling and feel it’s important enough to save but my main point has already been made.
Were I someone who was a minority and being “targeted by a hate thread” like this (I hope the sarcasm is dripping here, but if it’s not, it should be so pretend I said something more clever), I’d be doing my best to spin it that it was because you all were transphobic assholes who only hated me because of trans misandry, and use any example of someone misgendering even by accident as proof of it, and I’d have instant doubt for anyone who I want to manipulate into taking my side.
And there’s people who’d believe it, because we know how fucking cruel the world can be to LGTBQ people. We need look no further than all the anti LGBTQ laws popping up like the world’s worst game of whackamole.
Of course, we know this isn’t true, VASpider really did all this shit and more, but if the only place I’d seen it was somewhere like here (or I didn’t even know this site existed, for example) and I gave VASpider a chance and he abused me, it’s still his fault for abusing me. I could go back to him every day for fresh abuse, but he’d still be the one choosing to hurt me.
(I also remember VASpider allowing this behavior in places where he wielded power, and even engaging in on it occasionally, or at least having a good laugh at the target’s expense.)
@GF said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
your victims need to see people pushing back against your grade school attempts at manipulation, so they know we believe them and not you.
This part. I believe the people who’ve come forward and spoken about their awful experiences. I’m sorry you’ve had to do that. I know it was hard speaking out. Thank you. I believe you.
@Pyrephox There’s also a tendency to play characters that are of a racial and or cultural minority (from what I’ve seen it’s mostly Mexican or Native American) that are ex military middle aged men or older. Ruiz was a Mexican man, for example, who was ex military. I want to say he was a sniper in most incarnations, but I could be mixing that part with someone else.
His characters are usually bisexual men who are at least partially closeted about that bisexuality, may have had male lovers during their military days but it was super secret stuff, and from my observations he tended to favor male characters around his age but female characters that are much younger.
Like, 48 year old man going after 20 something girls while dating men that were his peers. That’s not to say that he wouldn’t go after some cute young guy, but his typical prey (and yes, he treats them as prey) are players of 20 something girls. I get the distinct impression he’d go younger than 21 if most games didn’t have that as their youngest appable age, now.
The biggest thing is the harem building, though. He’s not happy unless he has at least three people clinging to him at all times, and seems to actively enjoy hurting his roleplay partners OOCly with his IC infidelities.
None of these things on their own mean Ruiz/Ocelot. Goodness knows there are other bisexual disaster harem builders out there (Hi, Macha) but those are the biggest red flags for me, personally. I see ex-military Latino or Native American man, I interact politely but with extreme caution. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt while keeping an eye out for red flags.
That said, he may be changing his character playstyle as this has become familiar in recent days.
@Roz
Okay, then we can add homophobia and transphobia to her list of sins.
(CW: transphobia and homophobia)
So, this is all off vague memories and conversations with players more closely involved, but:
She told a bunch of LGBTQ players the day after the Pulse massacre that they were being “too gay” (meaning affectionate with each other, not posing hardcore gay sex) on an OOC team chat channel and driving off straight guys she wanted to date.
One of the “too gay” players responded, “Today of all days? Have a little fucking sensitivity! Our community was attacked, X Player has a friend that isn’t responding to texts or Facebook messages who was performing there last night, and LGBTQ+ people are hurting! Don’t be homophobic!”
This turned into her accusing everyone of biphobia, bi erasure, and misogyny. When X Player (the trans girl) defended others by saying she hadn’t experienced misogyny with the group, Brielle told her something like, “Of course not, you can’t experience misogyny since you’re not a real woman.”
Now, here’s the kicker. This whole time nobody knew Brielle was bisexual, because she’d never said anything, never showed any interest in a woman, etc.
She (rightly) pointed out that it doesn’t matter, because she’s still bisexual, whether or not anyone has noticed her interest, and that they shouldn’t have assumed her sexuality. Just because they’d never noticed her interest in women didn’t mean she wasn’t bi.
Staff smacked her down hard for her homophobia and transphobia, and she either quit or got removed from her FC that was in the group because this was after a dozen or so tantrums because a couple of the male FCs were in same sex relationships, and she especially disliked X Player, because her non-binary character was in a queer relationship with one of the male FCs she wanted.
She threw a big fit about this one because, get this, “he wasn’t even a little queer in the source material and shouldn’t be played as anything but straight… because he’d never shown interest in a guy before.”
She failed to see the irony, but the character came out as either gay or bi a few months later in source material. IDK which but he was dating another guy.
Unfortunately, staff let her keep her other FC for another six months to a year and it was a nightmare trying to get any roleplay done with the group she was in, because every scene it was like she wasn’t reading what you wrote, she was replacing it with what she WANTED you to have written.
It’d be like:
Jessica timidly knocks, very softly, on the front door. She asks, in barely above a whisper, "Is anybody home?"
And she’d respond with:
Becky leaps to her feet as Jessica kicks in the front door while screaming profanities and death threats. Becky grabs her shotgun and heads down the stairs at high speed to fight the demon!
I am exaggerating only slightly, here. I wish I wasn’t. The reason most of this is second hand is because I got as far away from her as I could once I realized who it was.
@Jenn said in Liberation MUSH:
not getting that “upgraded” transaction from their investment as a friend suddenly means the friendship is meaningless and they’ve been slighted.
This lootbox SUCKS.
Pffft… ffffft… HAHAHAHA
Oh my god she was being serious about the LGBTQIA community being super supportive, like…
Have you actually ever actually been around another LGBTQIA person in your ENTIRE life? Sure, we support each other when there’s a bigot going for our throats, but when there’s no enemies present, honey, the claws come out. I’ve seen gay men get the crap beat out of them because they made the mistake of glancing at someone else’s boyfriend a little suggestively. I’ve seen drag queens become WWE referees at IHOP at 3am trying to stop fights, only for someone to spout a racist slur and get flattened, immediately, by said drag queen.
I’ve also seen a drag queen take off her wig and use it as a flail against someone who was just being bitchy to her, so…
This ain’t RuPaul’s best friend race, and just because me and you both fit under the Rainbow Umbrella doesn’t mean we’re gonna be besties. I support you in that you should be able to love or fuck whoever you wanna love or fuck (or NOT love or fuck, if you’re aro/ace, you belong) but you being LGBTQIA doesn’t mean you don’t get held to account for your bullshit by other LGBTQIA people.
