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.

@kalakh She is perfection. Also, have some ridiculousness in exchange.

If anyone knows how to reboot a dog, that would be aces. Benny seems to have crashed.

@Testament said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Secondly, you hear about this stuff in the fringes, but never truly up front and so bold. So I really respect those who are even willing to discuss it on an open forum. It does make me really wonder why I keep partaking in it when these kind of predators exist.

So I have another post that I want to make in this thread for the folks who are sharing their stories, but it’s been difficult to write because this has been difficult to read. I need to sit with it for a little while more before I make it.

But in the meantime, I wanted to respond to ^this specifically.

This post may have started with predators in roleplaying communities, but the truth is that it isn’t roleplaying communities that are the problem. They’re just the community that we, as a forum, share. This is a cultural problem and it happens everywhere. It is a plague and it is endemic. And yes, I know what I’m saying and yes, I chose those words on purpose because this problem does, in fact, literally kill people.

My first memory of being exposed to a predator where I realized in the moment that something was wrong but didn’t know how to voice it happened when I was eleven. I was in a school play at my very small, very Christian school. Afterwards, my father told me that my friend Kim’s dad had been sitting near them and at some point during the evening, had told him that he’d “been staring at me in my dress all night because I had legs like a grown woman’s.”

To this day, I don’t know what I’m more shocked by: the fact that this man had the nerve to say something like that to my father without expecting to be punched in the face or the fact that he was right and my father, who’d been abused himself as a child, passed this on to me as a compliment I should be happy about. A “compliment” from forty year old man, whose house I had slept in more than once when having overnights with my friend. A “compliment” that just meant that I was growing up and men were going to fawn over me. I should be so happy!

That he said this about an elementary school child.

I am well and truly glad that the RP community has gotten a somewhat better grasp on this than it had when I was fifteen. I understand the urge to leave it anyway and respect the choice of people who already have. But the next community and the next hobby and the ones after that will have all the same shit, wrapped up in a different package. The only way to stop this is to fight this everywhere, all the time, and force society to change – by educating people as prevention, by creating safe spaces for those who have been abused, by punishing the predators, and by creating an unyielding aura of even a hint of this being totally unacceptable.

Is this the point where I get to whip out my notes on historical hygiene practices, from the time that abbots were complaining of Norse invaders seducing local women what with their heathen “baths” and “combing their beards” to the importance of frequent undergarment changes for proper Tudor lords and ladies?

Because I can and I will, and that is not an offer, that is a threat.

Our old man had a scare, including a very expensive visit to the dog ER. He needed to be monitored when we had errands to run yesterday, so we brought him with us.

The steps to the coffehouse we stopped at were still a bit scary, so the barista brought his pup cup outside. In a full latte cup.

@Narson said in Bannings:

@Kestrel said in Bannings:

There are actually a fuckton of literal fascists in this hobby;

There are fascists in a lot of places, alas. Fascists in gaming is an interesting area people are working on, but the far right were early adopters of online spaces (including back in the BBS days). Their methods will only ever get a small percentage of the population, but if you have so many people you can access, you can get to a much greater proportion of that small number and…well.

As someone who is super into history, Norse mythology, Crusader Kings, punk rock, and RPGs, the amount of time I have to spend squinting at people with common interests and going “Okay, but are you a fucking Nazi?” is both alarming and exhausting.

Okay, so since @Tez and @TNP asked…

(I will try to keep it short, but blame them.)

#1 - Considering it was the supposed Dark Ages, the Norse were surprisingly clean. We know this not just from artifacts found at archaeological digs, but from writings of others during the time period. Thank John of Wallingford for this particular quote:

“The Danes, thanks to their habit to comb their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their garments often, and set off their persons by many such frivolous devices. In this manner, they laid siege to the virtue of the married women, and persuaded the daughters even of the nobles to be their concubines.”

We also have grave findings of ear spoons, which were used to clean wax from inside the ears, and kept on chatelaines along with their version tweezers and other grooming items. Some evidence exists that stereotypes of the Norse as blonde relates to use of lye products in their hair. Lighter hair was considered attractive in Norse society, so the lye was used for bleaching, but it also has the added side benefit of killing lice. So this isn’t the modern equivalent of showering every day, but compared to the stereotype we have of Vikings, they were actually pretty clean.

#2 - While we don’t know how often the Tudors bathed, we do know that they had some pretty fancy recipes for both baths and scented soaps of various kinds. Full on baths were highly discouraged because open pores were obviously how infection entered the body, but a daily morning scrub with linen clothes was actively recommended, and we have the writings to prove it. Linen was also used for undergarments (which does a great job of absorbing moisture off the skin) and changed out to be washed regularly. A modern historian has followed guides to Tudor hygiene practices twice as part of a personal experiment, and you can read her thoughts about the practice.

On condition of his FeLV test coming back negative tomorrow…

We adopted the kitty they recommended to us - a ten year old little man currently named Steely Daniel, which is absolutely fantastic as a name but we’re generally not jamming out to “Reelin’ in the Years”.

I am trying to convince insomniac that his name should be Sir Catrick Stewart, instead.

He has a snaggle toofs and a wonky eye that we’re hoping is just some glaucoma and will be taking him to our regular vet ASAP to confirm.

Look, people can talk about how toxic and broken the community is and don’t get me wrong here - there are definitely people that are bad actors, there are behaviors that are problematic, there are persistent attitudes that I wish would just fuck off and die already.

But… I have had people in the community help me out during a pet emergency. I’ve sent groceries and home furnishings to people in the community. I’ve had people help my husband get a job. I’ve reviewed and rewritten other people’s resumes. A handful of MUers I know are literally the only people who try to use my pronouns correctly and respect my identity, including literally all of my family and almost all of my friends and definitely every single person I work with.

There is just as much, if not far more, good than there is bad – just like in most every community. And yes, you should point out the bad. You should try to fix it. You should make a space safer and more welcoming.

But if the only thing you seem to see is the bad, if all you can focus on is the bad, if all you can talk about is the bad…

I dunno, boo. Maybe the problem is just that you need something to constantly rail against so you can make yourself feel superior?

Dear Dr. X -

I am asking you to cancel my appointment for Tuesday, March 7.

Based on the fact that a caveat that you do not test for <medical condition> was not only included in, but emphasized in bold in the email that I just received from you, I would assume that this is a recurring issue. I would strongly suggest that your office communicate this more clearly to your network of nearby referring offices, as well as to your own employees.

Please note that prior to making this appointment, I was advised that your office does test for <medical condition> by my referring doctor and specifically indicated to your receptionist that I was seeking testing for <medical condition> when I called in December to schedule this appointment and was told that I needed to fill out a battery of forms (which I should note I then didn’t receive for a week) before they would place me on your schedule. I specified it again in January when I called to confirm that I had completed and submitted them, but hadn’t heard back from your office, and was advised that your next available appointment wasn’t for several months.

If your staff had been able to communicate this the first time I spoke to them, it would have saved me multiple phone calls, clearing my schedule for a full day for a battery of testing, rearranging several financial payments to accommodate the nearly $2,000 that I would owe after my insurance coverage, and months of waiting only to find out now, three days before my appointment, that your office would not be able to help me with diagnosis or treatment at all.

It certainly would have saved your team this unkind, though not undeserved message.

Sincerely,
Aria

@Roadspike I do appreciate the clarification, but also want to let you know that my “Okay, buuuuuuuut…” squinting gif was absolutely meant to be a funny commentary on how frustratingly necessary that is in the aforementioned hobbies and not at all an accusation. I’m in fact vaguely mortified if it came across as me suggesting I think that of you and deeply apologize.

@Whisky Yes. Yes, I do remember. I was actually thinking of that as I was posting about CK3 in particular, in a “JFC, we spent way too much time eyeballing that dude and trying to figure out if the thing he had hanging up was, in fact, a Nazi symbol we weren’t familiar with or if it was something that looked cool and he was just weird and awkward in that way many gamer nerds are weird and awkward.”

@L-B-Heuschkel The people who have co-opted Norse mythology and Asatru are on the list of folks I will gleefully troll with a heaping pile of “Well, actually…”-ing.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh, you’re into Thor? Let’s talk about the story where he dresses up as a pretty pretty lady in a pretty pretty dress and gets married, and how funny it is when Loki is trying to explain the bride’s eating habits. Hee!”

“Hey, what about that time that Loki turned into a horse? A girl horse, I mean. And then girl-horse-Loki got knocked up. Odin has Sleipnir’s fantastical speed because Loki was his mommy. Awwww.”

“Man, everyone talks about Valhalla, but Folkvangr sounds like a way better deal to me. What? You don’t know what Folkvangr is? So actually, Freya received half of the valorous dead and actually had first pick of the half she received, and they got to go spend the afterlife hanging out in a field with the goddess of love and beauty sex, which I bet is a pretty awesome party. It was the ones who were left that went to Valhalla.”

“Ahh, yes. The All-Father, Odin One-Eye. The knowledge and power that he gained by giving up that eye was actually seiðr and while both sexes do engage in it at varying points in the historical record, it was largely considered to be a feminine trait and a feminine practice, with the men who practiced it very much breaking a taboo. So what’s so interesting about Odin is the very thing that made him so wise and powerful was the blending of the masculine and the feminine in a single entity and…”

…then sit back and watch their faces turn red and their heads explode.