@Cobalt said in Bailey Fork:

My dude.

If you had shown me the logs of CountrySingerGirl telling you she wanted it pre planned you’d get back together I wouldn’t have banned you.
That being said, I apologize for your banning, given what you’ve shown now you didn’t deserve it.

Thank you. That means a lot to me.

As I said before, I think you’ve been very fair to everyone, and had to put up with a LOT of crap, and I am truly sorry that I added to that headache.

@hellfrog said in Bailey Fork:

@bailey maybe it’s just my finely tuned MUSH DRAMA senses tingling, but idk. When I saw in the logs the other player kept asking kind of out of nowhere ‘so has he been dating since then?’ ‘is he dating?’, reader, I shook my head. Those are the flags of someone who is way more invested in having this thing lined up than they are letting on.

I think that’s a fair assessment. I was going off of what was told (explicitly “I don’t want to have my character locked down, I want to explore all of the people on the game, having this hook in the background means we have story even if we don’t date”)

HOWEVER. At the end, when you did the “you must hate me, we used to rp and then it stopped and I wasn’t sure if it was me or you just got busy”, that’s also something that pings my uh oh detectors when talking to people.

Yeah. I left it in there in the interests of full disclosure and not hiding anything. I’ve seen since then in reading some of the recent threads how that is something that can be manipulative, but really that was my trying to give her a ripcord if there was something bad from the past.

We talked through it on the Discord. Long story short - we had planned to do some RP on a different game, it didn’t happen because she stopped playing there for a period because her work got super busy, and I hadn’t pestered her on Discord because I figured it was either that (and she couldn’t) or it was because of me (and she wouldn’t want to hear from me).

But yeah, not the best look as a last line. But like I said, I am doing my best to be honest, upfront, and transparent, because I really and truly believe that I did everything in my power to be up front throughout this whole thing.

@shit-piss-love said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

@STD said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

Isn’t that the same here? With the majority assuming bad faith of anyone who tries to explain or defend themselves? I mean, there is a substantive difference in that, at least here, the admin won’t ban someone for having a differing opinion from them, but the same attitude pervades.

I can’t think of a single instance here where people piled onto someone without any evidence, let alone invented evidence of misdeeds wholesale like is going on over there on that thread.

I would counter that and say that there is a very strong dis-incentive for anyone who is accused of something to say anything here at all. If there is a narrative already established, regardless of any evidence presented in either direction, it doesn’t matter. In some cases it’s kind of like the (relatively recent) news media trick (that both sides use, this isn’t political) where someone says something and other folks report on the saying of the thing, and thus “the thing” becomes prevailing reality because it’s repeated without its basis being challenged.

All of this being said - absolutely zero reason for Cobalt or anyone else to go to another forum to defend themselves against straight up lies. Not worth the energy, most of the folks advancing conjecture have their minds fully made up, and are just using the question form for a slim layer of accountability to say “I didn’t say that, I asked if it was possible.”

And that just feeds in, like above, to the “We have a report that Person A said Person B eats poop” repeated report, without ever addressing the accuracy of the poop eating itself.

@shit-piss-love said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I find this an odd assertion considering you have your own thread here where you stated your side, were listened to, and some amount of people reading decided this exonerated you at least in part. That’s exactly how it should go. The systems works.

Heh. The thread where I was told to stop responding because it made it look like I was “fixated” despite other folks continuing to bring it up, and then making more and more assertions and “I FEEL like” conjecture (which are, ironically, pretty similar to what we’re talking about here with “I just have a “reasonable” question about my theory…”

Agree to disagree on that one.

I’m just saying, someone asked for an example, I gave an example. And I’ll take my own advice now.

@Meg said in Bailey Fork:

Yeah. Like, I would agree that the PMs started very wishy washy about wanting to tie your characters permanently together, but toward the end? No they did not. You both sounded very enthusiastically into shipping your characters.

Oh, CountrySingerGirl said flat out that she didn’t want to have our characters have a romance plot, it was (unfortunately) further back than that log history supported. And I was fine with that (I mentioned that in the log that did get posted).

I don’t remember what your story was, and of course I can’t see the discord PMs, but basing all your innocence on the wishy-washy at the start and then never checking back in seems weird?

Oh, we were checking in constantly. After the last line of this log, it was all on Discord. I feel differently about posting screenshots from Discord. I suppose I could go through and try to copy and paste the text and remove her name and such. But a lot of it was about another game and another game’s drama.

Especially since you did admit to also shipping with someone else. What were the PMs with this player when you started the other ship, too, I wonder?

I literally told her point blank, that my character was ICly pursuing the other character and not hers. She did not like that answer. That’s what has been somewhat frustrating for me, is that I was really clear and explicit with both, and was accused of “trying to play both sides”. When in reality, there was never any “present day” romance with Character A, just wistful remembrances of what could have been. And the possibility that it could come back around in the future, but “no time soon”.

I told the other Player, once it looked like there might be some kind of dating or something starting, that there was past history that could bubble up ICly in the future, and asked her if she wanted me to tell her in case it might trigger her (mostly thinking if there was an IC revelation that he was a dad). She said she just didn’t want any love triangles, and I told her that I wouldn’t do that, if he decided to get back with old flame, I’d let her know OOCly and her preference would be an IC breakup but thought that was fun RP. But at the time, I’d already told the first Player that my character was not pursuing hers, and he was ICly going to see what developed (if anything) with the other character.

That completely changed once Player 1 found out that the other person was Player 2, because of their past history on another MUSH.

EDIT: I edited this to clarify which player I was speaking with when, since I goofed and wrote the wrong thing.

@STD said in Bailey Fork:

@bailey said in Bailey Fork:

Oh, we were checking in constantly. After the last line of this log, it was all on Discord.

Never go off game.

Off game communication: not even once.

Yep. Lesson learned. Never again.

That was the only person I was communicating with from that game off game, at her request. Regrets abound.

@bear_necessities said in Bailey Fork:

@bailey My guy, I know you’re trying to prove your innocence here but this is honestly pretty yikes all around. Would I have banned you if I were the admin and you were on my game? ehhh, it would depend on the circumstances and the other party involved but you both were pretty clearly into the drama and angst until it didn’t suit you guys anymore.

My suggestion? Don’t ever get yourself into a situation where you are even remotely love triangling with two PCs unless you super trust both people, know them VERY well, and have the emotional maturity and security to handle that kind of RP. Otherwise, it just turns into who wins and who loses and it’s not fun.

Yeah. This was definitely my take-away.

Like I said, I really feel I didn’t do anything dishonest or gaslighty, I got into a messy situation and I tried what I thought was my best to communicate to all parties whenever it became relevant to do that. Compared and contrasted to some of the other threads, I had no secret scenes, I wasn’t trying to hide my RP from anyone, I was proactively telling other folks before the scenes were posted things that happened ICly.

I’ve been trying to go back and figure out what I could have done differently, and what it’s boiling down to was “I shouldn’t have gone in with that kind of hook” in the first place.

So, like I said. If I stick around in the hobby, no preplanned OOC relationships, minimal “character background history” planning, just whatever happens IC happens IC.

As good as storytelling drama is, it’s not worth the OOC drama.