So today is my first day back in the office after PTO. When I was checking my calendar last night, I saw that my boss put a meeting on the books for first thing this morning with her and with her boss. I figured something went wrong with one of the projects I was working on with the boss’s boss while I was out and they needed to get me up to speed.

Uhh, no.

Turns out that when I found out how underpaid I am compared to my teammates last summer and lodged a complaint about that, initially got an ugly response, then they backpedaled hard and asked how much I wanted, only to get turned down? That request stuck around. My boss’s boss’s boss noted the complaint and when they did mid-year adjustments this year for people on the bottom end of salary bands, he personally lumped my name in with the ones that got sent to HR. Even though I was above the cut-off percentage for consideration.

My boss called a meeting to give me a 5% raise, on top of my end of year adjustment from 2023, because of something I bitched about a year ago.

In almost ten years at my company, I have only ever gotten one bad review – one! out of almost twenty! – from a person who was my manager for all of two months. It was from someone who not only didn’t understand what my job was, but who regularly gave conflicting instructions in the same day, would ignore when I pointed this out to her, and then wondered why I couldn’t do both of these things that were in direct opposition to one another. This manager then proceeded to be mean to me for the next two years straight, all the way up until I moved to a different subdivision, and still tries to pull my current boss into almost everything I work on that she’s involved in.

Today she was forced to acknowledge that my work is fast, thoughtful, and high quality despite being related to a request that is urgent, complex, and so confusing to convey to our audience that we need spreadsheets of who gets what messaging, when, and from whom.

And she had to say the nice thing in front of an entire committee.

Including my boss.

We got another dog back on Memorial Day weekend. He was a rescue out of a terrible situation on the Texas-Mexico border (multiple infections, inch deep cuts hidden under matting in his fur, fleas, ticks, you name it) and despite being surrendered by his previous owner, we’re honestly not sure he’s ever lived in a house before.

I cannot stop laughing at the crazy-eyed reaction he has to pup cups, like the sugar high hitting his bloodstream is just the dog equivalent of this child.

I am late to the party because naps, and I think I must have missed something someone said somewhere but…

Please do not doubt someone who claims they have been abused. Not even if you profoundly dislike them. Not even if they engage in shitty behavior themselves after the fact.

NGL, I got way too drawn into Ghost’s personal life and resulting well-being about a decade ago, but it was not in the Regina George “OMG, why are you so obsessed with me?!” kind of way that Dropkick tried to portray it as later. It was in the “As extremely unlikely as it is to be accepted, I feel like I need to (with my partner’s knowledge and agreement) at least offer to put this person up in my spare bedroom because they have repeatedly expressed to me that they feel unsafe in their own home” kind of way.

I’m not going to go into more than that because it’s absolutely not my story to share, and I’m not going to claim that it justifies terrible behavior on his part because it absolutely does not. Believe me, even after confirming there was no bad blood between us – at least not about that and the dRaMa!!11!one!elevn!!! that resulted – there have been several times since then that I’ve wanted to sock the dude in the mouth.

But, like… don’t, guys. Just don’t. Not cool, and A+ to the folks who said they aren’t going to do that.

My coworker’s partner is liquidating a lot of their inventory from their Etsy shop. So today they showed up with a bag full of block printed t-shirts for me and tried to foist them off on me for free, until I insisted on paying something for it.

(Pay artists. It’s a rule, not a guideline.)

My clothes are extra queer now and I am very happy.

In my experience, abusers are going to be abusive regardless of what community, culture, or system they’re in. They will find ways to bend the rules and norms of that setting to their advantage, as well as to blame those they abuse for somehow being at fault for what was done to them. And this is true for any kind of abuse, although sexual abuse is the most egregious.

The key to minimizing this is making it clear from the outset that it’s not acceptable by the broader community as a whole, then enforcing this mandate regularly and consistently when it’s uncovered that oh, hey, surprise, this abusive person is a piece of shit. Officially, yes, but also unofficially, with a general aura of “You fuckers are not welcome here.” that is present from start to finish.

It’s not perfect, not by any means, but no system is and I think it’s the only way to balance the fact that everyone’s experiences, preferences, and desires are their own and that no one else really has the right to dictate that for others, save those who cannot possibly consent for whatever reason.

Final GPA for my Master’s degree. Considering there was a point when I lost track of how many times I dropped or failed out of undergraduate programs, I’d say this isn’t half bad.

@farfalla

I prefer they/them. She/her is also fine. Like, I won’t be mad about it or offended if someone uses that, especially given how complicated my own feelings about gender are and the fact that my body-type adds a lived experience I will always have thrust on me barring major surgery I don’t want, but I do get the warm fuzzies when folks at least try.

Uhmm.

I somehow got an A in the worst class in my entire program, the hell-class that I was seriously concerned about failing in the final semester before graduation, the class that had me in spiralling meltdown mode for two months.

I understand virtually nothing from this class, including how or why I got this grade, but fuck it. I’ll take it.

@Tchotchke said in Liberation MUSH:

I appreciate everyone’s thoughts. Getting that out of my system and finding that a bunch of people with an outside perspective thought it was problematic was cathartic. Thank you.

Dude, my friends and I left that game over way less awful shit than that. And while I sometimes miss my character and regret the amount of setting material I wrote up for a staffer that was very shortly thereafter replaced by a hypercontrolling weirdo…

That policy (? bbpost? whatever it is?) is so beyond the pale that no amount of nostalgia would be worth going back. I suggest taking Roz’s advice and noping the fuck out of there.

@Pavel said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

@insomniac

The alt text for this image is fantastic.

‘A close up of a man with a mustache and a suit.’

I, uhhh, I think someone missed some important details here.

@Jennkryst said in New Registration Freeze:

Ghost is really upset he hasn’t killed both boards, huh?

I highly, highly doubt that’s him as I’ve never known him to just casually drop slurs like that…

But man, there’s nothing like a 1500+ word screed about a hobby you supposedly haven’t engaged in for ten years to prove how well-adjusted you are and that you are model of self-awareness and detachment that everyone else should aspire to.

@Juniper said in What happened, man?:

Half of these words are made up, I swear. It must be tough living in such a bizarre self-made delusion.

For some stupid reason probably related to deep-seated self-loathing, I decided to go and look up some of those made up words myself to see if any of this made sense.

What I discovered in my three minutes of Google was that the vast majority of them are actually slurs, but the sort that gets (yes) made up by deranged little subcultures as a means of communicating with each other, sort of the way incels use “Chad” to mean something specific. I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed. I thought being a gaymosexual was kind of funny, like the opposite of shouting no homo.

@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Jonathan Joss, voice of John Redcorn in King of the Hill

God, the announcement from his husband was heartbreaking to read.

@Jenn Seriously, I was just telling a friend as we looked at the thread, “I’m sitting here in a Forever Antifascist t-shirt, putting rainbow stickers in my planner. Ain’t nothin’ subtle about this.”

Honestly, while I understand why people are upset…

I also have to admit that I laughed a whole lot at the one post that’s still up. Not because I think that what OT The Real was doing was okay, but because there’s some part of my brain that’s like:

“Ohh! Dude. You called me a gay communist? Cool. That means you were listening. So anyway, about the next point on the AGENDA…”

(ETA: I have no idea what his other posts said. I really do hope that they didn’t hurt anyone.)

@Pavel I haven’t answered it yet, but one thing I was considering when looking at it was definitely, “Well, yes, while I can think of examples like this on more games that I’ve played on than not, a lot of those examples happen to come from WoD games because I’ve played in that genre more than any other.”

So that would definitely skew my own answers. Meanwhile, though I’ve since played a few L&L and even a Pern game, I avoided them for a really long time because in the WoD communities that I came from in the late 90s and early 00s, they tended to have really bad reputations among the playerbase, specifically around spotlight hogging and IC/OOC emotional bleed. Kind of ironic, really.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

@Aria I mean I’ve only done a tiny analysis on this preliminary data but if I said Kruskal–Wallis H test (H(6) = 16.24, p = .006) would that be exciting enough?

I mean, you were supposed to laugh at me comparing p-values to the kid who brings in cookies but doesn’t want to share with the whole class, but yeah, dude, a p-value of .006 is pretty surprising, at least to me. How many responses have you had?

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

(including saying p-value to sound smart)

Don’t start talking about null hypothesis testing in front of everyone unless the p-value is large enough to share with the whole class.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

@Gashlycrumb I’ve got a couple of working sub-hypotheses, but thematic spillover is definitely one I’m tentatively hopeful for. Not that I’m “hopeful” about any being right, but you know what I mean.

For the interested, here are my general hypothetical reasons behind my overall thesis:

Thematic Spillover, where the tone and emotional content of the game world shape how players interact OOC;

Systemic Enabling, where the structure of the game makes certain behaviours easier or more rewarding;

Norm Internalisation, where patterns of behaviour become normalised within a specific community culture;

Demographic Affinity, where different genres attract different types of players with differing tendencies; and

Legacy Culture, where older habits and traditions—both good and bad—are carried over from game to game.

ETA: Obviously this isn’t a super serious research study, results won’t be conclusive or even generalisable (that is to say applicable to a population larger than, but including, the participants). And these hypotheses aren’t the only possible answers, but if I wanted to check every single thought I’ve had on the topic I’d be doing a doctoral study and I don’t hate myself that much.

If you’re not familiar with Geek Social Fallacies, you may want to take a look at that, too. It took the White Wolf game servers by storm back in the early '00s and they’re generally something that I think are applicable to a broad swath not only of genres, but hobbies and subcultures. I’ve been in this hobby since '99 and I’ve seen the behavior in the thread where you first mention this idea happen in World of Darkness games, two different permutations of Five Rings Online (which was Legend of the Five Rings), I saw it on Arx, I saw it on two different Ares games with very different themes…

And honestly, I’ve seen some of the worst offenders that I’ve known in the 20+ years I’ve been hanging around doing this on different games, with different systems, and different genres. My guess is norm internalization, but with norms that are older than my time in the hobby and, in fact, are probably older than I am. (They said while quietly eyeing the SCA.)