Had this linked to me on Discord, made me lol:

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

• Concordia - Alistair (& Ser Silvertail)

Inactive

• Luminiferous Aether - Anthony

Past

• Various Wheel of Time MU*s - Svoran*
• The Fifth World - Jor
• Crossroads - Svoran*, Jaeden
• Flight of the Golden Crane - Jaram
• Kushiel’s Debut - Piers
• Arx 1.0 - Bhandn

* 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.

@Pyrephox I would advise you not to force it, as someone who’s been in this position for a number things (although my depression tends to help a bit here). Point being, I was trying to force my enjoyment of games (not just MU*s, any games), and I ended up becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Months passed of this and I eventually got tired of that feeling and took the plunge to step away.

About two weeks ago I suddenly had the urge to restart one and it’s enjoyable again. Because I’m not forcing myself to sit down and do it; that’s for schoolwork.

On a MU* note, I’d all but quit from lack of drive. I wasn’t planning to start any new characters or anything, but one day virtually out of nowhere a character concept dropped into my head, latched on like a barnacle, and I find myself excited to take him for a spin when the time comes.

But again, it wasn’t because “Oh I HAVE to do this”; it’s because I let it come to me. Did I want to play games and other MU*'s while feeling in a slump? Yes. But forcing myself into something to try and enjoy it felt like work, and that’s completely counter to the idea that it’s for fun.

So yeah. Give yourself permission to take those steps away and if it comes back to you and excites you again, yay!

@Hobbie You mean you don’t want me to tell you your post was PoWeReD bY AI like has been thrown at us for every. single. fucking. thing. that’s on a computer these days?

But on the serious, I’m 100% with you. Tired of seeing Gemini, Copilot, and all the others flung at me as if they’re trying to honeypot me with the latest tech buzzwords*. I don’t need AI to do my job for me; I do need AI to do things for me that are far beyond my capacity. Like massive quantities of data analysis and collation.

AI is way oversold and way underdelivered, and I dare say that the “AI” products being thrown out are not, strictly speaking and technically (pun!) actual AI, but more a heuristic algorithm like pathfinding algorithms such as A*.

* ETA - It’s so bad I just had this comparison come to mind: “They’re acting like MU* sex pests pretending not to be sex pests.”

I need to know what everyone who has finished Clair Obscur — Expedition 33 felt about the story right meow.

(No spoilers. FEELINGS ONLY.)

I had a lot.

33/10 story.

@DrQuinn said in Pretty Princess Simulator:

Just don’t ever have the Royal Heir played by anyone. No one has ever seen them. They’re off fighting a war/building treaties with other people/etc. And while they’re gone, their family has just decided to get them married.

Then they appear at the final event to select the person by…points, cards, gossip, whatever.

lmao

I’m just picturing this from the perspective of a BIG REVEAL scene at the end of the “season” so to speak.

Staff-played prince(ss) shows up all “YOUR MAJESTY I’M HOME!” “GREAT, YOU’RE NOW MARRIED TO <name>!” All of the court gasps at realizing this is who they’ve been scheming over. What that sentence means is the whole point I’m trying to make here.

I also like “the bubble.” It was one of the reasons I became really engaged in Concordia, for example. Coming up with Alistair’s cat was a happy bonus to that. That cat was a built-in bubble for me, because I could just make up vignettes/short stories about him. >.>

As to the “burst bubble” status, so to speak? I don’t think I could even opine upon this, to be honest, and I’d be preaching to the choir and/or broken-recording what’s already been said in this thread. The people that will stay, will stay, and for their own reasons: plot involvement, friends they enjoy IC and OOC interactions with, bar rp, and so on.

Personally, I don’t think a game should “entice” people into playing via anything other than the theme and any game-specific features/rules its runner(s) want to have.

In other words, the game should speak for itself.

@Snackness said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

We are trying to figure out if my mom is “actively dying”. Dementia fucking sucks.

;.;

There’s been some side-eying given to a family member in my case as well, because they have been saying and doing certain things that seem like a precursor to it, or outright misremembering if not forgetting certain things.

@Faraday said in Why MUSH?:

There are plenty of styles of online RP, from forum PBP to freeform discords to hybrids like Storium. What do you like about MUSHing specifically?

It’s a very selfish reason, in my case:

To try and prove I can write. I like the imagination component and the dynamic nature of RP with other people. It’s very stimulating to my brain when I really get into things.

Unfortunately, it has also made me something of a snob.

Recently finished FF7:REBIRTH for PC.

15/10 OST.

Can’t say more because don’t want to spoil anyone.

@Roz said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65

RIP good sir. I will always remember you from Willow as Madmartigan, let alone Top Gun.

@dvoraen said in General Video Game Thread:

Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 Release Date Trailer

Well, I know what I’ll be doing on April 24th.

I don’t normally endorse these kinds of videos, but…

XBox Deep Dive into Expedition 33

(ETA)“This team gets it.” is basically where I’m at. I mean, even just talking about why there’s a world map I was like: snap point(/ETA)

Also, I would go gay for the Creative Director because of his accent.

@Meg said in Meg's Mu* Mist:

Updated. Trying to get back into this lil hobby, this quaint what did you call it? RP? Are you sure? Well, if you are sure you want to call it that. Sounds a little sexual tho.

meg I couldn’t decide whether to do a “one of us” GIF or the “come play with us” creepy girls from the Shining to try and sound sinister. Please advise.