After nearly 26 years of off-and-on struggle with college — and a whole list of unresolved mental health issues going on at the same time, beginning with my biological mother’s death and the subsequent mixed family drama almost a year after that — I am, today, August 1 2025, officially in possession of a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. (Today is my conferral date.)
It’s been a long road.
I don’t have a horse in the Star Wars MU* race, but I do have a very vested interest in not hearing after the fact about how underage porn happened on a MU*.
(And yes, I do consider it EXTREMELY LIKELY TO OCCUR when underage characters and players are permitted on a MU* with an R-rating.)
You are setting yourself up for potentially serious consequences. So let me make it clear:
DO NOT ALLOW UNDERAGE ANYTHING
@HannahBananna said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@Pavel Thankfully if you had any of the four you’d be smart enough not to start shit with someone who’s obviously always been above you. This ain’t my way of asking. My way of asking was going onto the discord server and politely asking, like an ADULT, something you are STILL proving you’re incapable of being. This is my way of continuing to be an adult and taking away the toys of people who want to be spoiled brats. Like you. Daed.
If this is your way of being an adult, you have a very misguided definition in your mental database.
@Roz said in People Doing Things:
i don’t know if most arx folks have noticed the number of code contributions @dvoraen has made to arx, but i have
@Ashen-Shugar So let’s see if I can explain why I disagree with a metaphor. This is how your point comes across, to me:
I own a building. A crime happens in my building. I’m culpable for the crime because I own the building.
So I suddenly am expected to a) track what goes on in the building; b) had any control whatsoever about what happens inside the building.
That’s ridiculous, and most certainly not how it works in today’s society, otherwise companies and schools would be liable for the mass shootings that happen inside their areas. It’s an absolutely absurd take.
I reject the idea that I need to tacitly monitor everything that happens on a MU* I run because someone might do something illegal. That’s like saying I should wiretap my neighbors because they talked about where to hide a corpse, because I live in the same apartment complex. Oh no, they did something bad, clearly I need to have been more responsible to make sure it didn’t happen so I could tell the cops, to the point of being unethical and invasive in my methods!
No.
Preface: This is not a request for sympathy, forgiveness, or even understanding, because I have no right to ask for any of that.
To start off, I’m posting this because my brain will not shut the fuck up about it even over a week later. I’ve tried to distract myself from it, but the issue will not stop harassing me. It keeps resurfacing. I do wonder if it’s a byproduct of being on the autism spectrum and/or ADHD (and the fact I really take rejection hard), but I don’t know. All I know is that I have to get this off my chest.
I’m not going to answer questions about the details. I’m deliberately leaving out the who and where and focusing solely on the what. Some of you already know about this, because you were involved and/or can guess from my username, which I use in multiple locations (Discord and more), but I don’t want to sweep what happened under the rug and assume everything will be fine. Because it’s not, in the abstract.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I had my first experience with being disinvited from a game. I still can’t really identify what it was I said or did that led to me being approached and told I should go because of my conduct that made other people uncomfortable. There were no sexual propositions or anything of the sort, but the discussion was that my conduct on channels as a guest and during chargen had been noted, and the sum of it led to me being effectively asked to leave.
I was absolutely shocked and anxious over it, sitting in my chair reading that, because no one had voiced any explicit concerns to me saying there’s an issue until that moment, but at the end of the day what mattered was that I did something that bothered other people to the point that staff had to get involved and say this isn’t the place for you. My response was “Alright.” and that I’d take my leave, and I logged off right after.
I can only remember talking on public channels and paging three people, two of which I’ve spoken to multiple times on other games and/or Discord. One of those two explicitly asked me when I was getting my butt approved. I’ve come to the conclusion that matters have silently changed with the second of the two, and as such I needed to keep my distance from them, including Discord. So I chose to silently break contact, left DM groups, and have tried to not interact with them.
Anyway, I peeked at the game site, got the message my site was blocked from the portal, and wondered why I went there in the first place, even if it was just to hit the logout button. It was a stupid thing to do, but I still did it.
So yeah. I did something, the aftermath is bothering me still, and the worst part is I still can’t identify to myself what behavior of mine is the problem.
That’s all.
I don’t feel like copy-pasting from MSB, so I’m just going to go into recent history as I can remember it, with a few special mentions.
UPDATED - Feb 11, 2024
Current
Inactive
Past
* Everywhere I transplanted Svoran (most of them WoT games), it was for character research. “How does he think and react to X situation?” In my personal writing, Svoran is the one character where I could not get into his headspace without character research. Plus, I could not figure out how grumpy he was on average, and to whom, why the fuss, etc. I think I’ve finally figured him out, but this was a 20+ year endeavor to iron him out into his current form in my writing.
MU*ing has been a godsend with figuring out character mindsets, to the point I stopped doing character research because my writing felt more mature as far as figuring out how to write people as people, if that makes sense? But for a while, I was playing some characters from my personal fiction of Aldera to try and figure them out. The irony of this is: THEY ALL CHANGED DRASTICALLY DESPITE THE RESEARCH. (Now, they’re nothing like the “researched” versions were.) Go figure.
@crawfish I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this:
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I LOVE THEM
I just want a tl;dr of what dragon colors and styles mean, since I haven’t read any Pern books.
@tsar said in RPing with Nobody:
I first started RPing by joining PernMUSH and posing into empty rooms.
“Banain sat down at the table and watched the other people eat.”
Eventually someone saw me on +watch and joined me, lol. That person introduced me to RP, explained how the commands worked, and is the reason I’m still bothering all of you today~
Okay, I’m going to go to the bar and watch the person at the table doing <something> to show I didn’t read the pose about what they’re doing and just wanted an excuse to be in the room for everyone to give me xp/noms, because I was being that interactive and not actually just RPing with myself.
ETA - I just had a cursed thought occur to me. Does that count as RP voyeurism, where you just watch other people do a thing IC that you don’t (intentionally) interact with, not because of your character intentionally being a wallflower or the like, but you as the player just “pretend” to be there engaging?
@Rucket I’m sorry, but a real Astartes is not a shut-in, and engages with the God Emperor’s Creation.
I am going to briefly opine from the opposite end, which is that I have major selective shyness about breaking the ice for RP’ing with specific characters and players. This is still true today, which is why I have only one scene on Elliot at The Becoming despite knowing people there, some for much longer than I thought I did!
There are other factors involved, especially for those of you who have given me feedback during Arx days might recall, but I mentally squirm sometimes trying to work up the nerve to just say hello about setting up RP. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the autism side coming in to play, despite the “high-functioning” part of that diagnosis.
This post is (not) sponsored by Walmart. But I do like some of the sassy shirts I find in mens’ wear from time to time.
Let’s start with the one for the cat parents here:
And yes, you might have seen part of my face. Or double-chins. Or both.
@Meg Oh Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeg~ Your dream job (role) has apparently landed in Among Us.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/945360/view/497205194887529404
Make sure to tell @Tez about it so you can both fight over who gets to be sussying or sussssssying (<- sibilant because reasons).
@Tez said in MUing Snacks:
@dvoraen This is more true than not. I go to Trader Joes and buy a shelf full of pickle chips for Roz, a bag full of mochi rice nuggets for Pto, and all the focaccia bread Yam could want.
I couldn’t find a good GIF that was either:
OH NO THEY’RE BACK AGAIN
or
some sort of cashier meme
I was very disappointed by the results I searched for.
More on topic: I generally have a variety of snacks (not all at the same time):
@Tez said in MUing Snacks:
Straight up some days we have a whole drawer in our fridge devoted to Sargento snack trays.
I’m just trying to picture how you all do the shopping when it comes to the snacks, under the assumption that everyone wants something specific to them.
@bear_necessities We need to start a scene where we walk into a bar and immediately ignore all previous poses about everyone else is doing, etc.
And we’ll write them with ChatGPT using an absurd prompt that we both use, just to see how much it diverges. lol
(I am not being serious about actually doing this.)
@Pyrephox What if we RP’d about becoming AI’s IC? A transhumanism plot, etc.
full circle gif here
@Gashlycrumb And since it was likely sent via post, it could have ended up in a mailbox.
Therefore, “it’s my dick in a box!” Cue SNL skit.
