I’ve thought about making a post like this for a while. I usually decide not to because these are things I haven’t told anyone outside of therapy. I’m not sure if I’ll actually hit submit on this even when I’m done.

The tl;dr is that-- I’m really proud of how far this particular community has come when sexual predators poke their heads out. And I wish that the community we have now was the community we had when I first started mushing. And below the spoiler are the specific reasons of why I wish that.

Content Warning: Grooming, sexual assault, slut shaming, and various unpleasantries.

Spoiler

There are so many predators that lurk not only in the MUSH community but in other roleplay communities. And I am just so fucking thankful, that we’ve decided as a community to not allow this shit to fly anymore.

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, victim blaming, and narcissism.

I was not going to “name and shame” because I didn’t really want to deal with the mega-freak out that will becoming my way. But that was cowardice on my part. So here we go:

A log was presented to me of Mackenzie ICly attempting to seduce another character that was high on drugs. This is sexual assault. Full stop. And it is against the rules of this game. Further more when told OOCly that sex wouldn’t be happening in character Mackenzie player posed a “joking” disappointment. Then after that, the scene that followed to the “next morning” was so full of gaslighting, victim blaming, and a classic narcissistic spiral that I was left deeply disturbed OOC.

She proceeded to roll dice to convince her victim, IC, that they had had sex after for a very large portion of the scene. Where she ICly berated and talked down to her victim. And yes, that was all IC, but given I clearly laid out in my policies that sexual assault RP is not acceptable it is not ok. And, further, I 100% guarantee that this player was not doing this with the OOC knowledge she was RPing out the gaslighting and abusive of a victim of potential sexual assault. It came across, very much, that she was OOCly upset she was told no for tinysex and so was going to punish the player who turned her down with nasty IC drama.

When told to leave IC she refused to do. and her final pose was so overwrought with narcissistic manipulation I legitimately had a flash back to abuse suffered by an RL ex-partner.

This was 100% the final straw. It is 100% RP I did not want to facilitate.

I don’t know what about the theme here drew this type of player, but no one should have to deal with this sort of BS. And if I’ve facilitated a theme that makes people think they can do this? I will not continue to facilitate it.

To continue to name and shame:

I have been told (by more than one person) that Mackenzie@Pack was Macha@MSB.

Could people just, like, not be creeps?

@Gasboy said in Coming Soon: The Pack an Ares Game:

@Cobalt That’s a bummer? What happened?

I’m closing the game because I have gotten tired of playing whack-a-mole with the bad actors in the community.

I am busy with RL that is true, but I had plans to jump start the game once I got moved into new house.

However, increasing number of complaints have been filed about numerous players-- not just one. That it became obvious to me that there is something in the theme itself that draws out a certain type of player.

And ngl, the final straw was something reported to me that was obscenely traumatic to read. To the point that I couldn’t facilitate a game where that type of shit went on, even in private scenes.

Tl;dr: I’m closing because the theme attracts creeps and I’m tired of bouncing them off the game one by one.

The whole part of “my experiences with Cobalt tell me she just wanted Isaac for herself” is hilarious because I had Isaac on my “to be watched” (and honestly should have just banned him) list.

But it feels like a reflection of Derp himself. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve likely done some mean girl shit over someone I wanted to RP with in the past. I started mushing when I was 17 (if you don’t count my brief stint on a MUCk at 13). I was also living with someone who groomed me and kept me isolated from any sort of social contact out of mushing.

But I’m not in that situation anymore, and I’ve had a lot of time to grow and heal and try to be a better person.

I don’t think Derp has ever really sat himself down and tried to improve himself. I can’t say that banning someone for getting too close to a potential TS pattern, but it’s telling he thinks that of a known woman game runner.

I feel called out.

FWIW I got the game back up today. Thank you to Tat and Faraday (who I am not tagging so they don’t have to ride this roller coaster) for helping me figure out how to do that.

-.-

@KarmaBum No.

So, a person came to me and said “a group of us were talking and we were wondering if you would give us a copy of the db”

I said, sure with some conditions. I would need full transparency on who would be taking over so people would have time to opt out and have their data removed from the game.

Turns out the loudest voice in the group was Machakenzie. I said “yeah, no, I would just remove every single character, log, and player build before I let anyone have it if she’s involved” because I’m not about to let her have access to people’s ip.

I made a post on the game saying if someone wanted it, it’d be will be there would be some strings attached. And I’m not sure if posted this part or not but after discussing it on the ares discord came to the decision that it would be more work than I wanted to do to expunge the dB sufficiently to hand it over. So instead I would just help someone install my config files that don’t have anyone’s info on them onto their own game.

In the meantime, I got a message that Mackenzie was asking the original person about it to get an expunged version of the dB. At which point said person gave me a heads up and said “I don’t want to be in the middle of this anymore”.

This may make me seem like a heartless Bitch, but boy it would be nice if people would stop telling me they are going to go cry because of MUSH drama.

It evokes more of a desire to back away from the person telling me than sympathy. And I try to be kind to people OOCly.

But for fucks sake…

@GF said in MU Peeves Thread:

I wonder which I would judge myself less for: stealing a celebrity’s image to use as a PB, or using an AI-generated image that I can be pretty confident stole its contents from some artist’s work.

As a bit of a devil’s advocate here:

Not touching on the subject of AI imagery b/c that’s still a really sticky mess that I’ve not solidified my feelings on.

When it comes to using celebrities as playedbys I really feel like people get too hung up on it. Saying that you’re “stealing” a public available image is a little bit insulting. When we use celebrities as playedbys we’re not, I fucking hope, going out and finding our favorite celebrity and taking a picture of them like some sort of weird paparazzi stalker. We’re finding publicly available imagery.

We are then saying ‘this is kind of what this character we write about looks like’. We don’t make money off of it. We are not stealing royalties from the celebrity by using their image as an inspiration. Because this is a free hobby that the only money involved is hosting the servers and the domain names. Players aren’t paid for their writing, staff are not paid for providing games.

It is fair more harmless a hobby than say people who do twitch streams of tabletop RPG and use celebrity images to represent their characters. Or say steal images from artists. Or even so far as to commission a fantasy rendition of their favorite actor as their character. That to me crosses a line.

What we do in the hobby is a hobby that is creative and transformative and none of us are making money off of it.

(If you are somehow making money off of MUSHing, please tell me how.)

Like, I’m not trying to start a fight or say I don’t get your point-- I do. You don’t liked celebrities used as playedbys and that’s fine for you to have that stance. But the new byline that we’re stealing from actors by using them as a media representation of characters we write about kind of irks on me. We’re not stealing anything. There’s such thing as fair use and transformative works but also we’re not stealing b/c we’re not profiting off of them.

Meanwhile, Willow thinks she is a cat….

I appreciate the support from the community greatly. I feel terrible for Character X, because imagine sitting through this scene.

I’ve done that in the past, RP’d out scenes I wasn’t comfortable with because the other person was a) a friend I didn’t want to make mad at me, b) a staff member or staff member friend I didn’t want to make mad.

I appear to have acquired an orange. Or maybe an orange acquired me.

He snuck inside and now will not leave.

Woah, I took a nap for a couple of hours and the train rolled off the tracks like Charles was chasing them.

A couple of things:

1. Thank you again to everyone for the support. I appreciate it. It is nice to know that I wasn’t overreacting or being overly sensitive because of my own personal experiences.

2. This hasn’t put me off of running a game. It has, currently, put me off of running shapeshifter-centered games. I do have an idea for a new game that I’m idly workshopping the theme/setting for with friends and peeps in discord. But I’m moving in literally a matter of days, so I’m not really in the space to start actually doing the work to make it be something other than an idea in my head.

3. I do not believe anyone was blaming me for creepers being around because I opened a shapeshifter-centric game. I do, however, agree that there is something about shapeshifter-centric games that appeals to creepers. Most likely all the fiction out there where shapeshifters are primal, alpha, dominating creatures. I thought I had done enough to combat this when I wrote my theme files and that those sort of social hierarchies did not exist in my game world, but apparently I did not.

@Wizz said in MU Peeves Thread:

Common peeve but I kinda wish there was a paradigm shift and live scenes stopped being such a focus on most games. I just can’t do three hour blocks anymore, for a lot of reasons, and it’s hard not to feel like I’m somehow being rude when people ask for them on channels and I can’t jump in.

Meanwhile, my peeve is when I do carve out time to do a “live action” scene and people take an hour to pose. I don’t have a lot of time and my attention span isn’t great anymore.

I’m 100% ok with async or slow pace scenes.

But if I’m trying to actively storytell and there is a person who its their time to pose and the last person hasn’t posed in half an hour I start to think about all the other shit I could be doing and start to get antsy.

What the actual fuck.

I think I should report my coworker to HR…

More of a lol than a peeve but:

When attempting to get me fired from storytelling for a game— maybe make sure the game runner hasn’t known me for going on 20yrs and knows my strengths and faults way better than you and how to manage them?