Best posts made by Arkandel

@tsar … He was in a fucking dresser drawer.

The whole fucking day. While I was outside freezing my ass off looking for him, and stressing the fuck out.

Motherfucker.

My twenties back.

When I think of a MUSH I think of the fun I used to have, the crowds I used to play with, the themes I enjoyed.

What I am probably really expecting, though, is to still be the person I was at the time with that kind of free time in my hands, the novelty of doing this new thing, and a lack of cynicism which I likely no longer possess.

I don’t want to take sides. And I have received a number of messages on Discord asking me to. It’s not my place to do so any more.

But I will say this. It’s made me a bit sad. For a very long time I enjoyed the idea of a single forum open to everyone in the hobby where we could all either speak our minds or - worst case scenario - be able to coexist with those we didn’t like.

Now the community seems fractured. Hopefully it is a problem that will fix itself.

So… I am still sad about this state of affairs. When I was part of the hobby I worked hard to ensure it doesn’t come to this. I suppose it’s what it is.

Gus thanks you all for your concern.

I’m kidding, he isn’t. He only wants to know if you have treats, else he’ll go take another nap.

@Das-Auto said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Nothing’s changed. He’s huge about his image, and his snapback to something he doesn’t want to do is always along the lines of “what would people think?”

I don’t know this game or its staff.

What I do know is the type of person you’re describing tend to just love getting their dirty laundry exposed over mediums they can’t control.

@Pavel Also agreed.

One of the biggest issues in our hobby (and probably all gaming-related communities) is the sunk cost fallacy. “I’ve spent so much time in this, I can’t stop now!”

And it hits both ways.

Players stay in MU* they’re getting mistreated (or at least have little fun in).

But also players burning out overstay their welcome and become toxic or unpleasant to be around because they don’t want to quit well after they should have.

@IoleRae said in Bannings:

That’s really not a fair request to make of him, he’s stated he doesn’t want to pick a side.

Just to explain that part though - which I think is fair.

I went to Ganymede, who’s been a friend of mine for many years, and someone whom I had (and still have) great respect for, to ask for a favor. I needed someone to take over MSB for me since I no longer played played on MU*. Gany accepted, which was great since otherwise I’d be screwed - I didn’t have a Plan B.

Now, what kind of absolute fucking asshole would I be if, a couple of months later and during the first time Gany got into hot waters, I got myself involved? Right after I ‘quit’ at that?

It’s not about MSB or MMU… BRMUD… BR… whatever the hell this forum’s acronym is. I don’t care.

But if I have a few friends left in the hobby it’s probably because I don’t go around stabbing them in the back.

This is my peeve. There are many like it but this is mine.

So, TV series where the producers or showrunners don’t seem to like, or care about, the original material. There have been several of these so obviously I’m pretty subjective about what was done ‘badly’ or not.

The reason I remembered to post, and the latest culrit, is Resident Evil. It’s gotten horrible reviews. The director has openly stated he hadn’t played any of the games in the genre.

Before that it was Halo. More or less the same deal; Master Chief’s helmet doesn’t seem to stay on (and amusedly the interwebs are aghast about how often his butt is shown, which is probably a different type of peeve) but even the story has diverged… significantly from the original material.

Before that - pardon my teeth grinding - it was Wheel of Time. Thematically it was a mess; integral parts of the mythos were changed drastically or barely included, character relationships were introduced or chopped apart, and the showrunner stopped listening to Brandon Sanderson after the first 4 episodes - there are reports he’s distancing himself from the show now.

I don’t understand why companies like Amazon would go through the expensive process of purchasing a license for an existing fandom then hire people who want to do their own thing. If that thing (whatever it is) is good to begin with then what kept them from launching under a new brand?

What makes the waters extra murky is people jumping into the debate with unrelated issues of their own. For example I don’t mind or care about the added racial diversity into Wheel of Time; go for it, but give me a story that makes sense. However a sizable part of the complains end up being borderline racist and it makes me feel dirty to have those folks agreeing with me. Dammit.

</endRant>

@SpaceKhomeini said in Great game concept, but failed execution:

If I see any place with 3000 pages of crunchy theme procedure (let alone anything that looks like a fucking technical manual) my immediate response is “log off and never come back.”

See I’m with you there but from the opposite perspective.

Let’s take Lord of the Rings. I’m not uh, a casual fan. I adore the setting and I consider myself pretty well-read in it. I’d do well in a trivia contest.

I MU*'ed for decades and never once felt the slightest inclination to joining a Middle Earth game. Not for any other reason but - I don’t trust other players to not fuck it up, and thus, my own perception of it. I don’t want to meet flirty, horny Elves or homicidal min-maxing Dwarves looking to kick ass in Khazad-dûm.

Furthermore, being a self-aware enough snob about this I’m acutely aware I’d be no fun for others to play with in that setting, either.

The company I work for went pretty much full remote back at the beginning of the pandemic. Now and then when the situation allows/demands it some teams return to the office for a day or two, and on such occasions we all see each other. In some cases it has been years we haven’t seen each other in real life, but only worked together over Zoom meetings and Jira tickets.

I must say this. People look better these days. They look healthier; some lost weight, others got more time for themselves, or to spend with their families. They all had stories of gardening, renovating their homes (to some that meant ‘new decks’ and others ‘I learned how to make shelves and built them for my living room’), or hiking trails walking their dogs - and of new dogs they got to actually hang out with during that time.

All of this because they no longer had to spend two hours every day commuting back and forth. Because for lunch they got to sit on their couch and eat home-made food instead of grabbing a candy bar from the work fridge or going for a Big Mac across the street simply because they had no time for anything else. And because if they had ten minutes to kill between meetings they could spend them with people they love rather than work-friends who wanted to talk about their projects anyway.

Working from home isn’t always great but it’s so much better than the alternative.

Of course YMMV.

Look at the bright side of life! If there are fresh creeps then that means there are also fresh players coming into the hobby.

The way I always read it is that the true tragedy of the story is Morpheus wants to be better. He can be better. He has it in him; there are moments where he is genuinely… well, human.

But he’s also such an asshole. Too proud, too stubborn, too stuck in his ways. He’s good enough to make people care for him and then he fucks them over when they do - sometimes because they do.

He knows this. He wants to change. He can’t.

Privilege is so easy to obtain. It makes well-meaning people so blind (and non-well meaning ones… worse).

We have a weekly basketball run at work in the evening at a facility paid for by our company. It’s a very mixed crowd in terms of ages, departments and backgrounds, and as such it’s quite fun. It’s nice to have a break from the grind and hang out with the folks you work with on a regular basis as well as meet ones you don’t.

Lately the idea has been floated to watch an NBA game. I ran a poll on our corporate chat about whether folks would prefer doing so at a sports bar or at the Scotiabank Arena, and it was pretty much a 50/50.

While we were discussing it, one of the developers insisted we should go watch the real thing. I pointed out the obvious, that there were concerns that might exclude some people who can’t afford it.

His response was “What? Come on, it’s just $200, it’s not like we’d get courtside seats!”.

Dude. $200 is a lot of money for some people. Not everyone makes six figures. Not everyone is in their mid-twenties, with the disposable income and freedom to spend it. And making someone feel bad for not being able to join is the opposite of what this activity is meant to do.

He meant well, he’s a good guy, but it got me thinking.

@Pyrephox Frankly if their license was more transparent - meaning they didn’t allow themselves to modify it at any given time, retroactively - I wouldn’t be as concerned.

Right now it only impacts the high end third-party creators. But that can change. They’ve given themselves a whole lot of wiggling room. The threshold may be $750k today (and again, that’s revenue rather than profits, so it’s not as high as one might think at a glance) but they can make it $7.5k instead if they wanted to.

Although administrating a forum and running a game are completely different things there is some commonality in the fact you sometimes have to pick your poison and live with what that means.

The model I liked to use was to not rely on authority at all. Being an admin meant only stepping in when shit really hit the fan (‘a troll is making openly racist comments’) or for general boring tasks like moving or merging threads to their appropriate categories. You can’t overuse power you don’t allow yourself to have.

However there were side effects. Some users felt singled out, for example, targeted by bandwagons, and unless the level of moderation itself was changed - which would alter the dynamic - there really wasn’t much I could do. Stepping in to correct this sort of behavior is inherently subjective; I would be using my judgment on who is going too far, or what remark is too mean or personal.

Now, as it was pointed out in this thread’s original message when it comes down to it, someone has power over the server. That person ultimately controls the forum.

However forums - as you are seeing - are easy to spawn. It’s the community around it, voting with its feet, that’s much harder to control.

In my humble opinion that’s who ultimately holds admins accountable. It’s y’all. Take responsibility, don’t tolerate bullshit, respect the thankless work admins are doing and that’s about all you can expect.