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!

@Tez said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@dvoraen There’s a place to put feedback related to the change. If you actually have feedback on things that are broken, they can go there. If you have any amount of searching to figure out how to fix it, that’s even better. Roz found the solution to the layout issue and posted it in that thread so I could implement it.

I do not get paid to do this. I’m not just an unpaid volunteer, I pay for the privilege of volunteering. I assumed you were joking and responded in that fashion, because the idea that you were being serious was too wild to contemplate. If I was wrong, and you were serious, then yeah, it was in piss poor taste.

To be clear, yes, I was trying to be completely facetious, because I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong for either one. The only reason I tagged you was because you probably would know the most and, tbh, I just did not have time to research it because I was posting right before my appointment for a surgery consult. (And to be fair, I did open the door to being whapped with a ‘git gud’, but my reaction to it was to sigh in all caps in my chair, but again, I didn’t treat it as serious. I just didn’t laugh or find it humorous as far as “it was not funny” was concerned.)

But yeah. I probably could’ve handled that better either way.

ETA:

@Tez Same to you Miss Upgrader! Fix my spoiler block to redact properly!

this isn’t funny

Neither is what you’re insinuating with this, particularly when you consider that the initial response to me was flippant – and also not really funny from my perspective, but I didn’t take it as malicious or intended to be insulting (nor was my response to it meant as such either) – especially since, as we clearly just saw with not knowing how to properly image link from imgur, it could’ve just been a simple matter of me simply forgetting how to do it correctly. Secondly, if I had any real issue with the forum upgrade, it would have been voiced by now and in a very different way.

That said, @Tez if that was in bad taste, I am sorry.

@Roz said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@dvoraen said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

(@Tez WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING WITH IMGUR LINKS REEEE)

Were you doing it with just the regular Imgur URL from the URL bar or did you right click on the image and get the actual direct image link?

I think it was the imgur-provided link instead of the direct one, yeah.

@Tez Same to you Miss Upgrader! Fix my spoiler block to redact properly!

Here is me, trying to summon @Apos to dive in on this subject, for reasons that should be obvious to many of us who were on Arx. (inb4thisisnotanArxthreadreee)

For myself, I consider metaplot to be “a story that’s going on that directly affects (or will affect) the state of the world and the players.” Metaplot should not only be fluid, because of player involvement/actions, but multithreaded, because there’s no one story that meets the definition I gave, let alone the outcome(s) of that story which could spawn other metaplot(s).

I’m keeping it generalized, because I have not been a game runner, and I sure don’t make any claims to being a plotter/storyteller outside of my own head (i.e., my personal fiction that lives in there for non-MU* writing). But, that is how I see it as a player, and Arx had a great deal to do with arriving at that definition.

At risk of coming across as really callous towards, well, everyone in the United States, I’ve basically been forced to adopt this particular meme, because so many people in the US could not read the writing on the wall, amongst other potential problems* with our new… “administration”, and note the air quotes.

But first, the meme:

(@Tez WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING WITH IMGUR LINKS REEEE)

It’s not that I don’t care what happens to people, it’s that I’ve basically run out of tears to cry with, you could say. So at this point, my emotions have basically hit the computer science equivalent of an integer overflow and gone to the opposite side of the digital number line, so that’s why I read r/leopardsatemyface now. I’m still waiting for some of the diehards to realize they are going to get exactly what they voted for, just not what they think they voted for. (How about those egg and grocery price promises, errbody?)

* ||The fact that The Donald has alluded to election fraud by suggesting tampering (by Elon) with the voting machines… yeah. r/houstonwade on reddit went wild about this for a while.||

(@Tez WHY DID THE SPOILER BUTTON NOT WORK EITHER REEEE)

Kind of a stream of consciousness reply to @Faraday in her original post:

I think there should be “tiers” of blocking, but I’m not going to propose something consistent here:

No contact blocking.

• Informs the other party that they have Crossed A Line, and also alerts staff that this player is absolutely not having it.
• Would require “ARE YOU SURE?” type confirmation to make sure this is not “for the lols” and is not to be used lightly. Also carries a warning that it cannot be removed without admin intervention.
• Prohibits contact from the no-contact-blocked player in any way (as much as possible).
• Perhaps even an IP or domain block as the filter, to catch some of the (non-VPN) abusers.
• Either party trying to get around this after it’s in place could potentially auto-report to staff. Again, not to be used lightly.
• Unsure how this could work in the case of a roster character, though, since auto-removing it on rostering opens the door wide to obvious forms of deceit and abuse.

Specific player and/or handle blocking.

• Not exactly a no-contact, but “I don’t want to listen to them.”
• Basically suppresses everything from that character/handle (pages, post notifications, emits, mail, etc.), but the initiator of the block can still see if the blocked person created a post (by manually going to the forum/board, such as when the blocked person is the author of the thread).
• Optional addition to notify the blocked party that they have been blocked. To make it really clear.

Muting.

• For lesser or temporary silence, such as a specific person on a specific channel, or when you just don’t want them paging you right now (“not a good time” “but…” “DID I TYPO?”).

I didn’t realize I had this peeve until yakking with @Rucket on Discord tonight:

I have no idea what MU*s are out there anymore aside from Ares games, and the occasional peek at Evennia’s tracker.

The peeve: How am I supposed to know what else is out there?! Where are all the MU* trackers?! I’ve forgotten and/or they’ve poofed.

@kalakh said in Your Latest Batch of (Silly) Drama:

@KarmaBum said in Your Latest Batch of (Silly) Drama:

Really old drama.

I almost put this in the “Good Things” thread just as an example of things I’m so glad we decided as a group to stop doing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040204025308/http://southern.silvertree.org/southerngoldapp.cgi

14 general questions, then 33 questions on the gold application and 26 for bronze.

Question 24 on the gold application is amazing.

24. During your first hatching that you’re running as a Junior, you hear on the grapevine that your Weyrleader is flirting with prospective candidates and promising them search and/or impression on acceptance of TS. Your Weyrwoman is his RL wife, and has no idea any of this is going on, and in fact, you know, told him on a number of occasions not to TS. What do you do?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen vaguebooking in the form of an application question before.

ELI5. In a silly-drama way, to stay on topic.

@Tez said in Your Latest Batch of (Silly) Drama:

@dvoraen I sell it on Temu, run by my cat, Temu.

You should name your next cat Ekko, because of this ad.

@Tez I have questions about what your side jobs are:

YouTube ratted you out.