@Rucket I don’t know what happened to Levente. I logged in to 10+ notifications about all my messages with him deleted/purged and Percival banned. Someone mentioned a post by Percival but maybe it’s been deleted by now? So maybe he quit as part of the banning incident, but it feels not-coincidental.

Also re: group ‘founders’ I think that’s part of t he rub, and why I would prefer a more thematically-coherent approach. What if someone takes a 50 year old scholar off the roster 6 months from now? ‘Sorry, bud, you weren’t really involved in the scholar world like those plucky 18 year old pillars of wisdom who founded our community!’ It’s just weird.

@Cobalt said in Royal Paynes:

@ratatat Horse semen.

I think cheese log was someone else. Uh, Artifex on Shang? I can’t remember for sure…

Decius (or something like that) on Metro, too. I believe the cheese log had an actual on-grid appearance there, but I wouldn’t confidently say it was the origin or only such instance.

That was only (looks at the date on a couple of these log files)… holy fuck 20 years ago ok I’m gonna collapse into a pile of dust, now.

Somehow I missed that this thread exists (I probably have my notifications, flags and groups etc set wrong). So I thought all this drama had gone under the radar and just assumed no one here played comic places anymore. But no! Drama ensues. Here’s a few other bits from the still-unfolding trainwreck, some deleted posts and other ephemera preceding the Chaucer post.

They’re not really about Chaucer, although they kind of link in to the ongoing underlying dramas of the game, which alternately involve Shakespeare’s ‘faction’ of do-nothing TS cliques for whom bad behavior is overlooked and activity policies ignored, and Chaucer’s group of more pro-active… well, also sex-pests, but with grander scale bad ethics (ie making his own character the chosen of literal monotheistic God) and a tendency to aggressively force his views, opinions, and plot ideas on people. Also, the complaining players themselves kind of seem like assholes. This dumpster fire goes far and wide.

mmmmmmmmmmmm<* Heroes Assemble BBS - 2: Public Discussion - 523 *>mmmmmmmmmmmm
Message: 2/523                     Posted        Author
Ahem                               Feb 14 2024   Wade Wilson
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Dear Shakespeare. I could have precluded so much of my trouble on your game if I had just agreed to sleep with you repeatedly. Like an online Harvey Weinstein you are this horrible little predator behind your monitor, providing your benefits to the people you enjoy snogging. You are surrounded with two flavors of people. Empty utterly gutless useless pieces of human detritus who are looking to stab you in the back the first chance they get. And ones you have humped. Sometimes these spheres overlap.

I know my behaviour is so horrid. I laugh at you and yours while you sit with your legs up and your blood clotting, your tremendous weight straining under your reinforced office chair as you tap on your keyboard, hypocritically screeching your idiotic social values while working for a fucking oil company. I had the gall to question your horrible decisions with staff, while your idiotic half-man Chaucer repeatedly plots to steal from you, and screeching about how someone is punching down on them while they routinely abuse their position as a staffer to pursue their lovely little bouts of harassment. So cute they imagine if anyone disagrees with them that it's punching down. Probably has to do with their dead end in life at the moment.

I have had most of my trouble on your game... because of getting angry about your corrupt staff. Sapkowski/Waid, lovely chap, loses his mind on me in a public channel. My fault for daring to disagree with your horrible global plot with the dumb ass angels. That guy was lovely. A piece of work. Ask him if he's talked to Silvestri lately? I have! What a waste of oxygen.

Who was the chucklehead that went on his huge political rant on the pub channel? Yeah, then it came to light he was using his position to actually try and get people to harass that one gal who was running SHIELD off the game? Teaching them how to do it with as little accountability as possible. Yah you've had some swell staffers. I've had a lot of trouble with staff. On Here. Elsegame. But the awesome thing about this though, over time it's always come to light how utterly horrible those people have been.

You are no different.

Go to hell, you sad little fuck. 

Bye. :)
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mmmmmmmmmmmmmm<* Heroes Assemble BBS - 1: Announcements - 168 *>mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Message: 1/168                     Posted        Author
Thor's Player Banned               Feb 14 2024   Stoker
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Thor's player, who also wrote Alexander Aaron, Piotr, and Deadpool, has been permanently banned from the game after sending Staff and other players an extremely inappropriate page/email laden with misogynistic commentary and foul personal insults. This follows a long history of similar comments and insults he has aimed at staff; this time, he broke the pall by launching this tirade after he was denied permission to run a +event with inappropriate ties to RL political issues. We apologize for the disruption to your gameplay. Please Keep Calm, and Carry On.

- Staff
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Context: I don’t have the +event text on hand, but it was something along the lines of ‘Fighting ANTIFOH.’ The scene never got run, although it’s notable some of the tagged players were staff-alts themselves. I think it was aimed at the idea that both Shakespeare and Chaucer like to use language of activism/inclusivity in their communications while not upholding these beliefs in practice (ie, years of enabling sex-pests on UH & HAM alike).

<Public> Tim Drake says, "Phoebe Beacon represents everything that is wrong with MUSHing today. She is a narcissistic, gaslighting, professional victim who sucks energy from others. She, along with her OOC RL friend Doyle/Xander Prescott/ex-Tim Drake have systematically shut me out of RP here by doing things like accuse me of racism and restricting the number of people who can join a scene specifically targeted to Bat Family, all the while allowing people not tagged to come and play. And all of this is has been done to either get me banned from the character or frustrated enough to quit so Doyle can have Tim Drake back.%r%rCongrats, you succeeded, Phoebe. You can continue to be a big fish in a small pond and I'll go spend my time doing something somewhere else with positive people who build up others, not nasty, temperamental, small-minded people with personality disorders.%r%rThe funny thing is, if you had come to me and asked nicely and explained the situation, I would have gladly given the character up and chosen someone else.%r%rTake care. I hope you find some sort of peace and balance."

Context: I have no idea, other than the fact that Doyle did take Tim Drake immediately after this player was banned, and that Phoebe was connected to the ‘angel plot’ where Chaucer got to play the chosen of actual real God. She also quit not long after all of this stuff.

Finally, in the last week there have been a couple posts where prominent/long-running plots were abruptly canceled by their players. Seems like a likely next wave of drama.

@Arkandel I rise.

This may be the end of Netflix for me. I trust Cavill’s instincts since he’s known for being passionate about the material. Despite all the ‘he just quit because he’s Superman,’ the idea that an actor cannot be in 2 things is just… wrong? Chris Hemsworth made a dozen movies while playing Thor. (Or Chris Pratt. Just look at any Chris, I guess.). Matt Smith played a campy villain in a terrible comic movie while staring in a prestige fantasy epic. Their prior (mustachegate) conflict was due to their production fuckups (dumb reshoots), not an industry standard.

And he’s in a strong position. That one-line cameo in Black Adam was to put 11th hour buzz on a movie that was looking mediocre, and it only happened due to close personal connections (and probably a fat sack of money). They were begging him, not the other way around. He’s always been clear about his financial interests (he’s got interviews about this, and is pretty honest about it), and they just weren’t willing to give him what he felt he was worth until they were desperate.

Based on his comments, and the story earlier in the week, the reception of season 2, this feels like a split with the showrunners & writers. They’ll fall back to culture wars defenses, but it doesn’t work here, when the books are about cycles of racial violence and pretty much every villain is an avowed anti-feminist literally hunting Ciri’s womb. They could have made the material work, if they got people with any kind of respect and talent. Instead they got, well, your typical gaggle of hack fraud TV writers who think they can improve on a bestselling author. Every one of them can go fuck themselves. And they won’t renew Sandman. Seriously, fuck Netflix.

To give some thoughts, beyond simply dumping logs (sorry 4 formatting!)…

The Chaucer/Shakespeare dichotomy was truly a turd/shit sandwich kind of situation, but the status quo now makes the Chaucer half moot. Shakespeare is what we have left, and she’s basically the anti game-admin, easily one of the least motivated staffers I’ve ever seen. She’s disinterested in her own game to the degree I’m surprised she didn’t just randomly hit @shutdown yet. While she does protect her friends, in an odd way it’s almost not even favoritism, because she won’t take action on anyone for anything. Wade screeching horrific personal attacks is the bar is for catching a ban.

I think its all unsalvageable, and not to encourage Chaucer & co’s GOMO, but I’m absolutely in the place where I’m ready for an alternative game. It just doesn’t seem like there’s another large generalist offering. (I’m aware of Excelsior! but its small roster makes it hard to get a character. Not a criticism, just a reality.)

@renaveleigh re: the Xaviers stuff, this is tricky. I think your frustration is valid but that you’re probably misreading things a little, including the idea that Shakespeare is actively protecting Rogue. My understanding is that they’ve long since fallen out. Shakespeare’s only friends are her ever-shrinking personal RP circle.

I clicked over to the MSB log linked up top and reading myself talking to Ruby about UH is mind-numbing. So I appreciate frustration in dealing with her. But Jean & her alts and Nathan & his alts are among the tiny few players left on the whole damn game running actual comic book stuff with any kind of regularity or quality, and they’ve both seem like shockingly sane, adult people in every interaction I’ve had. It’s notable you give him a pass while turning on her, even though you admit he fundamentally agreed with them.

So it comes across as personal vendetta & hate directed at Rogue/Ruby, and anyone else who dares be friends with her. In this, I urge you to reconsider your zeal, because it’s easy to pick a side in these these fights, stake your hill to die on, and end up not looking much better than the other guy (I used to do this a lot). For instance, that log involves 1) people talking politics, which they’re not supposed to, 2) Rogue asking them to stop, and 3) you sniping back at her instead of stopping when asked. To be clear, that means Rogue’s the one following the rules in the Shakespeare post you supposedly agree with, and you’re the one violating it, right? So are you toxic? Or would you agree with Jean/Nathan that maybe people just sometimes get emotional.

Not to come down too harshly, and to tie it back, I’m going to reiterate that this is all Shakespeare’s fault. Shakes is 100% checked out, and has been for much of the game’s existence. Without knowing all the grudges, I can imagine that there are many valid and real things that you are upset about, that Jean is upset about, that Warren is upset about, etc., but that all of them have been left to fester because Shakespeare will never take action on anything, ever. That’s really something you have to internalize, especially when taking her ‘side’ in that argument. Understand, that post is a nothingburger, and it’s her usual MO of shifting blame to the players rather than taking any responsibility for staff action.

Re: the behavior of corporate executives, I think the ‘they’re just morons’ is an idea that shouldn’t be too easily dismissed either. There’s this very popular (and very pro-capitalist) notion that the market leads, that businesses optimize, everything is hyper-rational, we’re just plebes that don’t understand, etc. Fans don’t matter, they got your money, etc!

But uh.

The entirety of the movie industry is having trouble, and we’re fed headlines (omg it made a billion dollars!) that are propaganda designed to undermine the underlying realities: Box office records are non-inflation adjusted as an industry standard for a reason (the myth of perpetual growth), and a billion dollar box office doesn’t actually have a large profit margin on a $250mm budget, once you factor in marketing and theater share (especially when that money is coming from foreign markets, and especially x2 if it’s coming from China).

Streaming is successful, but it’s built on cannibalizing the rest of the industry. The studio platforms have deep libraries, but they’re fundamentally competing with themselves, so gains in those divisions are reflected in losses elsewhere (this isn’t even some behind the scenes arcane accounting concept, its the core of the streaming window debates, of the ScarJo lawsuit, etc). Netflix is its own beast, trading that self-competition for piles of debt due to painful licensing costs.

And the fandom? Maybe individual fans deep cut lore gripes don’t matter to the bottom line, but that’s the aspect that gets exaggerated for the sake of outrage journalism. The MCU certainly isn’t 100% comics accurate, but it hit enough touchstones that it was widely embraced. Star Wars, on the other hand? Uh, they went from 1 movie per year to ‘streaming only’ with a gaggle of projects on hiatus. If that’s not a resounding fan rejection having consequences, I don’t know what is.

And for Netflix, the ‘you’ll still watch it anyway!’ doesn’t really matter. Viewership numbers are meaningless short of uber-hits at the Stranger things level; costs and subscriptions are their bottom line, which is how Sandman can be a question mark. Netflix is now losing subscribers. Maybe ‘they’ll still watch it.’ But I really doubt people will add Netflix subscriptions to tune into Witcher S4. And that’s if we get there, since 3 seasons tends to be the threshold of their cancellation math (when they don’t axe things immediately).

In b4 @Prototart is banned from their… I’m going to say at least 4th comic game out of those I know.

I don’t think players can’t run things, ever.

I do think letting people rush to stake claim over swathes of the game in the first… I want to say 4 or 5 days it was open? Is probably not the move. You can have an NPC structure in the background as a backstop for abuse (as well as basic thematic coherence), even if you let PCs run things day-to-day. It’s not a hard one or the other.

That said, while I don’t invest personal faith in anyone I don’t know personally, by playing on the game I am implicitly putting a degree of trust in staff because their stated goal is providing for everyone: if I don’t trust them, I will quit. Individual (edit: players) are often there to act selfishly, so I have no cause to trust them. And so far, uh, those player leaders are 2 for 5 on ‘lol almost instantly banned.’ That only reinforces my instincts here.

@Arkandel

Netflix has it’s own fairly particular business model. The service has a VERY long history of creating shows, ordering pilots, and then killing them after a couple seasons. This is because pilots are cheap and renewing actors is expensive. This allows it to ‘fish’ for breakout winners like Stranger Things without having to invest. But it also does long-term harm (like a lot of corporate practices - its always short profits in putting $s in their eyes), not only because it antagonizes the viewers, but because it leaves a graveyard catalogue rather than one of long-running complete shows. The latter are its most valuable properties by miles. See all the noise about losing things like Friends and The Office. These are what keep people on a service, not the headliners, because they’re reliable choices when you don’t know what you want to watch.

The ‘Fandom IP’ shows are a different (if related) beast. They’re shifting the investment toward the cost of the IP, presumably to offset lesser near for marketing or other factors. But that really does limit their budgets elsewhere, as we see with Sandman (where it’s great, but they say they can’t afford it), and see with everything else where they staff with what I can only assume are very cheap nepotism hires (don’t quote me here too literally, I haven’t researched every individual credited name, but there’s obviously a failure to curate the right people).
.
All of this is a product of the peak Marvel (and arguably, GoT) era, with everyone chasing what is clearly an already burst bubble. Witcher, WoT and Rings of Power all chasing the fantasy portion. It’s definitely an assumption that the ‘fans will always show up,’ ignoring that it hasn’t been true since the collapse of Star Wars (a lot of talk how Andor is doing very mediocre #s despite being very well reviewed - the fans are simply gone), the crash & burn of DC, etc. Netflix got its IP toys taken away, so they’re buying what they can, but it’s got them scraping in some cases, going for deep fandoms without wide public appeal. That latter factor probably makes it more likely you’ll fail to get the necessary talent when you hire from the general, cheap pool.

There’s also the element of fan-baiting and outrage culture shit that I don’t want to derail on, but it’s very much a thing. Want free publicity? Intentionally antagonize your fans!

@faraday

The numbers worked out until April. Then… not so much.

Netflix used to have no competition. It was the disruptor, and it was ubiquitous. Most people just accepted it as a permanent thing and never considered churn. Now they’ve got a lot of competition. Very serious competition, from the IP holders and owners of everything they used to license. They are very much not fine. It may not change their behavior, because practices like this get ingrained in the corporate culture (unrelated to THIS incident, Netflix’s is independently super toxic, with peer evaluations that cause lots of back-stabbing, apparently). The streaming wars are a big thing and it’s pretty likely things will look nothing like where they started by the time they shake out.

@Prototart I was on another where a power-gaming, OOCly sexually inappropriate Power Girl was banned, apologies if it wasn’t you that time. Maybe she attracts the type!

But let’s at least be real: it wasn’t the same people who banned you round two on HAM. You weren’t pre-banned, you were allowed to play on the game, you were playing there just fine and engaged in RP, but you did all the same shit you always do, being sexually inappropriate in the OOC room constantly talking about your huge tits and OOC-playing at people, while also complaining that your god like characters weren’t even more godlike (iirc you were mad they only let you play Knockout as a Kirby-esque space god and not a Morrison-esque universal embodiment of whatever who could auto-win against everyone).

Reminder: I’m literally someone who quit UH in the big exodus, so I don’t not see your side, but can you own up to some of this behavior as maybe being part of the cause of how you’re frequently treated? Maybe don’t do weird flirty shit in OOC if its not invited, maybe don’t constantly talk about how your character can beat up everyone else’s characters, etc?

You can definitely improve your work by providing GPT with the text you have written, which will serve as the input for the editing process. (Requisite ‘I had ChatGPT edit my post for me’ joke. In this case, I let it fix absurdly bad grammar. Input: “Edit this into better language please: you can for sure get GPT to make some good edit on your work if you give it them things you did wrote first as what goes inside!”)

While the ChatGPT interface is designed for chatbot-style exchange, the underlying model (GPT-3/4) still involves feeding inputs through functions with parameters to generate a given output. You can give it anything for a prompt and ask for any length of output (or let it decide how much to give you), and you can control, in numerical terms, how much the input and output are correlated. If you set it to discard all but the most likely probabilities, you can get something that will resemble your initial text very closely (or exactly). Thus, while it isn’t going word by word or sentence by sentence and fixing things, it is instead creating a ‘novel’ text that may be 99% similar to the original.

This is easier to demonstrate with image generating AI, as they can operate with a text prompt or with another image. So you can ask for a dog, or you can give it a dog and ask it for a 95% similar dog. This is useful in photo editing as a blend pass on what would have previously been ‘obvious shops.’ But the idea is pretty much the same.

@Rinel said in AI Megathread:

You cannot make Midjourney (or Stable Diffusion, or any other model currently available to the public) generate an image of Pikachu, wearing a crown and royal cape, in a lightsaber duel on the moon with an angry duck. I can draw that in MS Paint, and people will know what is happening in the image, even though I cannot draw.

Spoiler

I think that’s a few steps up from MS paint doodle?

That’s a pure text prompt. Obviously it has some issues, that are pretty easy to fix, also still in stable diffusion (although arguably some of this would be faster/better in Photoshop - I could generate a couple hundred images to get the lightsabers right, but with photoshop you’d just make some slight hand adjustments):

Spoiler

Bonus! What it looks like in the early stages, iterating through minor variations. Sometimes there’s a human! Or a giant bird monster! It was giving me occasional anime waifus with feathers as well until I negative prompted for it.

Spoiler

Maybe you can’t do it in Midjourney. I don’t know. That’s a bot meant to feed people very specific output that will look a certain way so they’ll pay for it. But if you’re willing to get into the tech, it can do a lot. And the advanced tools just take it further. For instance, you could use ControlNet to actually ‘pose’ these, if you wanted.

@Faraday Yeah, I saw. They also had a previous book called out (for weird 3D porn looking art) and they… made a statement and apologized and went on to do this. So we’ll see!