Okay, so, I feel like an asshole right now and I’m super embarrassed to post this so I’m going to do it quick and dirty.

I was just plain rude and shitty to @Pavel in a dumb post about a dumb thing I don’t even really have feelings or investment in yesterday. One of the things I’ve been trying to learn to do over the past year is recognize when I’m just in a cunty mood so I can withdraw from people and communities I actually care about how I am perceived in, of which this is one of few for me, and… I didn’t do that.

At all.

I followed this group to this place from that other place specifically because of certain people choosing to be here, to share and contribute their thoughts and feelings and opinions and suggestions, and @Pavel is actually one of them so I would like to apologize for randomly, unfairly, and just grossly being nasty for literally zero reason.

I’d also like to thank them, and some of you others, who even bothered to put this place together despite the fact that moderators tend to take an unfair and unwarranted amount of shit from people because I do care about this place and I do not want to be one of those people who makes those volunteering their likely scant free time away from work and family and school and who all knows what else to even do such a thankless, shitty job as moderating.

I understand this is/was probably a bigger ‘issue’ to me than to @Pavel or anybody else, but I’m really fucking good at reflexively lashing out and really fucking bad about owning it as soon as I realize I’ve done it, so… here. This post.

My RL peeve is, as usual and far too often, my own fucking self. My sincere apologies and I will not do it again.

So, even though (or maybe because?) I wasn’t really part of the mass forced exodus from MSB, I’m going to make a couple of observations about why this topic is probably more healthy than not.

1. One of the major problems I keep hearing in the posts of the people grieving the loss of their community and long-time friends is that the bans and breaking of MSB leaves them needing a proactive way and place to vent, which this has become. As opposed to a serious tail-chasing ‘fuck MSB in its neck’, what I’m seeing (YMMV) is more like ‘fuck MSB for banning me for engaging in conversations in the very same way I/we/they had for literally years’. This seems to be leading to conversations even within the thread that hash out how setting out different behavioral and engagement expectations will form a healthier community, and I think that’s a good evolution.

2. As a person who has… I want to say two? maybe three?.. solid, 30+ year old grudges, against family members to boot, that I just can’t seem to let go of and that have absolutely shaped me and my perceptions and interactions as an adult, in hindsight I realize if I’d been able to pop the zit (so to speak) of those relationships with other people of different levels of empathy and perspective, I’d be a better, healthier person with far less conflict under my belt. I think this thread is those people popping their collective zits, which may be carrying a gross metaphor too far but which I think, in the end, will actually minimize the amount of resentment people who feel that they have been persecuted, bullied and defamed out of their community. That’s a win for this forum, and their/our future interactions, period.

So, I mean, TL;DR - while wallowing too deeply in anger, insult, and bad feels for too long isn’t going to be cathartic but detrimental, a benefit having other people who went through the same thing coming to build the new community acknowledging what actions led to the necessity of the splinter and what about the construction of the original community led to that is a net gain for everybody.

This is such a stupid peeve, but…

There are, upon conservative estimation, no less than eight MILLION baby spiders in my kitchen. AND THEY’RE USING ONE OF MY CATS AS A FUCKING BUS.

Hey, asshole* in the game that looks for new names on WHO and then slides into private messages with a bunch of nonsense, followed by ‘sorry if I seem flirty’…

Just. Fucking. Don’t.

It’s easy enough to finger you* and see that your* PC has been on grid a million years yet is somehow MUCH smaller than my two day old one, that they have attained zero promotions in their organizations, and together with this low-effort ‘trawling the newbie pool for TS’ fishing expedition, the lack of effort visible in your* shit spelling, grammar and punctuation just makes it a hundred times more puzzling and infuriating that you* expect this to fucking work.

About the only redeeming quality you* showed was in not flipping the fuck out (as expected) when I told you* to fuck off with that shit, but the fact that you* get to be a slimy shit and I’m the one that has to worry about being harassed off this game by yet another incel or incel-adjacent fuckstick still pisses me off.

*Not aimed at anybody here, none of you would do this. I just needed to vent.

This is Cullen/etc behavior. She is a stalker. She is a creeper. She lies to trick people into intimacy. She lies about people to punish them for refusing to provide that intimacy. She manipulates emotionally. She gaslights. I could go on and on and on about each individual thing she does that they do that everybody who isn’t coming from Planet Blame the Victim is instinctively repulsed by, but I’ll leave off here.

It’s like they literally share a fucking playbook.

She should be subject to the same day-glo biohazard paint job those players have been given, and the same reflexive responses - including banning, even pre-emptive - that they are.

It blows my mind that anybody can argue any differently.

Disclaimer: I’m not intimating anybody here is doing that, because aside from fucking @hobos who has legitimately zero credibility to me from incidents pre-dating that, I’m not seeing that here.

I’m so not as deep as everybody else answering here, but I’ll throw two cents in because I care to…

I’d quit the old board a little under a year ago because of Really Fucking Bad real life shit slapping me across the face with the idea that the time, energy and care I was wasting engaging with toxic, obsessed people dragging my name into shit on said board from a game I hadn’t touched in a year could best be spent on literally anything else with a far better return on investment.

I found out about this board because things calmed down enough for me to want to see what games were poppin’ and I checked that board to find out it was basically turning into a pre-Reddit-purge incel sub at lightspeed. While some of the personae engaging in doing that were absolutely zero surprise to me, what did surprise me was who ended up deputized to deal with that and the attitude the deputizers took about it. That blew me the fuck away.

I’m not sure who said ‘believe people when they tell you who they are’, but it’s a pretty solid statement, and updating myself on ‘the state of the community’ before finding this place was really just me watching a few people - with shiny new ‘Admin’ tags - screaming out who they are at the top of their lungs. Not only this, but their actions were speaking even louder even than those words - bannings, unbannings, weird ‘mobbing’ of people who dared question or disagree with that screaming in groups with other new people sporting shiny new ‘Admin’ badges - something I think is actually still going on there, to be honest.

I guess I’m using a shitton of words to say simply if the moderators of the community start shouting from the community’s rooftops that they have no respect for a majority of the community, in between spitting at and sniping members of that same majority of said community that they personally detest because the powers of their shiny ‘Admin’ badges make them feel empowered to do so, people are going to tap out again.

I have no idea how WORA or whatever you guys called it was, but I really didn’t think MSB was such a horrible place. I mostly lurked after initially engaging in the thread that brought me there and motivated me to register in the first place, with little spates of shooting my virtual ‘mouth’ off when I felt a situation warranted my input, but by and large I participated because I didn’t think it was a terrible place where terrible people were allowed to engage in terrible behavior unrestrained, because terrible people weren’t running it.

Even the Hog Pit wasn’t so much ‘gloves off’ as I feel like some people have tried to portray it in the past few months, nor do I feel that its existence is why that community fractured - I think it’s merely a convenient scapegoat so (primarily) the people running the show and (secondarily) the people still participating can feel good about themselves even though their sandbox is basically empty now. In their whole Moral Panic about The Clique, they’re now just a little clique, and that’s fine, they’re happy like that and the people who aren’t have moved on.

TL;DR is really the fact that just the existence of this thread, without ‘Admin’-tagged people packing up to loom over every post with an ‘ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SAY THAT??’ attitude more or less proves that this community was created to be and likely will be quite healthy and open to myriad viewpoints, because the people running it and participating in it are making that a priority.

Running… okay sneaking around a grid furiously looking for some shop, any shop, that has something appropriate to add to my new PC’s wardrobe that I don’t have to figure out the crafting and coloring systems of an unfamiliar game to make and zooming by someone who was AFK but kind enough to ping me apologizing for being AFK then finding out they’re open to my stupid questions about basic mechanics AND they give me a short scene.

So, I’m not a big anime fan at all but being interested in what my kids are interested in so that I can keep in touch with who they are and whatnot has always been a huge thing for me. All my kids have issues with anxiety, and things like letting one of them show me ARG videos all night on YouTube or another play me all the latest RnB music+videos on YouTube or Spotifywhen they can’t sleep or a third mixing random weird marbled paints for us to flick all over posterboard we lean against walls so they can detox from the daily torture in high school were ways I helped them work through shit that sometimes they wouldn’t even detail to me.

Fast forward ten years, everybody’s married, has kids, are struggling with serious mental health issues or the fallout from such, and it just tickles me to no end that my son calls me up to tell me about this wicked bad new anime (the last one was Vinland Saga which I fucking LOVED so he’s hoping to make it a streak) then does the math and realizes he has time to get over here and watch it with me before he goes to work, while I’m alone in the house and a bit under the weather.

TL;DR I fucking love my kids, man.

@Tez said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:

@sao Doesn’t really seem like the same feel, exactly. It’s like – frustration-anger vs outrage-anger. I bet there’s an emotion wheel for this.

@Runescryer Even if it’s not that creepy fuckface, it sounds like it’s a creepy fuckface and either way, needs dealing with.

@eye8urcake said in A Constructive Arx Thread:

Is there a yoke on changing the home property/properties owned by roster PCs when you first take them? If so, what do you do to get things fixed when they’re super broken/misspelled/ugly/etc?

Squee, it’s fixed, it’s working, I figured it out, or… something.

I closed the ticket I opened, and think it likely resolved with a reboot, but at any rate I’ve managed to sort EVERYTHING out just as I like it so thank you to everybody who answered even if I’m not entirely sure what fixed it!

@Testament I don’t think we’ve ever directly interacted (I could be wrong, my memory is shit in general and this past year isn’t one I’m fighting to keep hold of, in all honesty) but I’ve paid attention when you post because you seem like a pretty cool person who has seen some shit, as they say, and I always find myself rooting for you when you open up.

Good luck with all the planning, I’m really hoping your spouse-to-be gets that one special perfect (for her, whatever form that takes) day, and that you get to eat all the glorious pie you want without shame or recrimination.

Honestly? Good for them, I guess.

They’ve taken a pretty lively community that was interesting to read even without actively participating and turned it into smoking wreckage that they now seem laser-focused on pretending is some sort of triumph. As someone completely uninvolved who always kept a vague eye on MSB after self-banning, I honestly think that petty, immature ‘hookers and blow’ comment over there today pretty much says everything needing saying about what’s left over there for those who choose to continue dropping by.

I’ll be over here.

@kalakh Has your vet checked for a serious calcium deficiency and looked at your little old powder puff’s thyroid function? I assume yes, but decided after a mental tug-of-war to post this anyway because my dog, at age 15ish, started having seizures that traumatized everybody (including the cats) about 3 years ago and our vet found out something-something-thyroid was draining her calcium to horrifically low levels and after a 3 day visit she was sent home with temporary anti-convulsive medications and orders to give her 2 Tums a day.

Two. Fucking. Tums.

You’ve likely already had this looked into but I couldn’t sit back and not suggest it, so hopefully it’s not rude or overstepping bounds or looking like I think you/your vet don’t know what they’re doing.

She’s a cutie pie and these photos of her made my morning, so thanks

@crawfish said in MU Peeves Thread:

Please don’t end our romantic scene by telling me OOC you have marital problems and this is why my scene with you was so great, because now you can take it with you to the shower.

Just. No. I will -never- be comfortable with you again. Ever.

ETA: I might get awkward and laugh it off and thank you but I will -never-. Ever. Be comfortable. Again.

I have this scraggly-ass old lady cat named Gordon who’s a shaggy, baggy, bony, but ultimately happy and KNOWS SHE IS QUEEN OF THE WORLD tabby cat and her ‘thing’ when I’m not attentive enough is to leap like a gazelle back and forth over my laptop + lap until she gets the attention she wants. If it’s a snake SNACK she wants, when I stop typing or whatever, she immediately sticks a nose in my pocket.

She’s a pretty cool old cat. Just as pushy and snitty as her mom.
ETA: I do not keep snakes in my pocket. Silly typo.

@sao

ETA actual thoughts:
In my experience, limited as it is, it would’ve helped to ‘incentivize’ specialization if the staff and/or PC-run plots had prioritized specialized characters instead of rewarded the jack-of-all-trades builds in their plots. Instead, people who invested in specs were shown it would give them a better chance of inclusion to widen their foci rather than narrow them.

I guess I’m saying generally speaking, people choose the jack path because the jack path gets them opportunities.

Aww. My first peeve in this shiny new place.

I feel like I need a cupcake with a candle or something!

So, the peeve - crawling out from the wreckage of the past year (shit, it’s only been nine months… whatever, six/half dozen…) to toe-in-the-water some games, and having the first one I manage to get into show itself as having a shitty playerbase two days later.

Gee, I wonder why you only have 16 people, max. Could it be that 12.5% of them are dicks to new players?

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

The nerve of that person. We are fairly sure it is someone who got denied a cat and were taking revenge.

Thus proving how right you were to do so, so at least someone that petty and shitty didn’t get one of your animals.

@BloodAngel When my kids were like ‘OMG MOMMY HOW DO WE DANCE AT SCHOOL FUNCTIONS AND NOT LOOK LIKE DIPSHITS’ this was what I taught them.