@Floof said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve been trying to just be like fuck it guess I’ll just be awful then! But it’s SO HARD.

Cheering you on. This is why my mother wrote “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” on her piano.

It’s irritating that “It’s only a game,” so often comes up in the context of, “You’re wrong to have hurt feelings about it,” but seldom in the context of, “Relax, you’re allowed to suck, it’s not your Ph.D. dissertation.”

Play for fun. With typoes, grammatical errors, and another beer if you want. You don’t have to impress people. I’ve had a lot of fun with people whose characters have orbs. Some of them have even been limpid pools. I’ve had fun with players who have limited English vocabularies and used me as a thesarus. I’ve had fun with players who regularly fall asleep at the keys. I’ve had fun with players who are emergency services workers and just dissapeared mid-scene.

And also, give people a break. Don’t dismiss them as sucky just because they don’t impress you the first time you see them. Let people enjoy the hobby instead of feeling like they shouldn’t show up if they’re not at the top of their game that day.

Also, people. You don’t suck. I’ve been playing these silly things since, uh, 1994 and I have yet to meet a MUer who could not write bestselling novels for John “See Jack Litigate. Litigate, Jack, Litigate” Grisham if they’d just get paid enough to try. I have RPed on MUs with Jim Butcher and Neil Gaiman and neither of them developed the gushy “they’re just the best RPer” groupies that your average staff-alt gathers. Hell, Gaiman essentially said it was too hard.

Hateful bigot James Dobson.

My dear friend who, one Sunday morning while working at a Denny’s, deliberately poured hot coffee directly onto the crotch of hateful bigot James Dobson, is quite well.

Ahhh.

Heh. My peeve is this idea that long = good when it comes to writing.

Having genuinely worked as a professional editor, I assure you, it ain’t so.

The other problem I have with the people who write novels is that they give too much to react to, they advance the scene so much with their poses, that I’m left being like, I wanted to explore this one thing in this pose, but they’ve already moved on past it in their own pose that posing back an concentrating on that thing when they’ve already moved on from seems pointless.

In RP, this. Very much this.

Abelard looks down, embarrassed, and carefully sets his beer glass back in the ring of condensation it left on the table. “So, yeah,” he says, biting his lip, “That’s why I fucked the ocelot.”

Camille has arrived.

Brigid is sitting with Abelard at a table. She looks at him with compassion and says, “That must have been awful.”

Camille comes in and makes her way across the dance-floor, attracting attention with her boss moves and demonstrating all the latest steps. After the song ends she sashays swishily over to where Brigid and Abelard are sitting. With catlike grace she springs onto their table, kicking over a glass. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” she declaims loudly, “I started typing this pose, and civilizations may yet rise and fall before I am finished!” Twirling gleefully, she leaps away, singing, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! "

Abelard stares as time collapses to a pinhole. When his inexplicable lethargy passes and he is able to react he picks at his shirtfront, noting ruefully that the beer splashed on him by Camille’s kicking feet has dried to an indelible stain.

Brigid says, “What the fuck.”

Very often either all the other PCs are frozen in time while the “great writer” fillibusters, rendering the dialogue disasterous, or it’s five hundred words describing how the trail of smoke from Camille’s cigarette swirls slowly and majestically about in the still air of the stinking and stuffy dive bar until it forms an elegant Rorschachian type image that resembles a tiny man standing outside a giant vagina wondering if he should go inside or not.

Edited for typoes and to add: Don’t feel bad for writing badly while gaming, either. Have fun, this is play-time. You’re probably not even close to as bad as you think, anyway.

For fuck’s sake, if you are using a published RPG, don’t make a fucking house rule that directly contradicts the published rules after some poor player made a choice based on the published rules, and then force them to live with their “IC consequences.”

Peeve of the Day: When you don’t even want to be in a scene half that big and probably wouldn’t join if you had a choice, but you still feel bitter that your character can’t go. WTF, brain.

I wear a glittery enamel pin-badge that says ‘MAKE IT GAY YOU COWARDS’ on my hat.

Today a stranger started some sort of right-wing rant at me, assuming I’d agree, but then spotted this delightful bit of flair, shut her mouth, turned around and walked briskly away from me.

What joy!

The worst thing about social RP is that tedious twit who responds to your channel-chat call-for-RP by paging you a lecture about how they don’t like social RP, implies that it’s your very favourite and that you’re an inferior player for liking it, and gives you a weird sort of ultimatum to the effect of ‘I will RP with you but only if you keep it at least seventy-five percent plot and less than twenty-five percent social or slice-of-life’ and then refuses to bring any plot-elements to the table. You want to say, “If I wanted lazy and demanding I’d set myself up as a dominatrix and be on FetLife, not MUs, go fuck yourself,” but you’d get banned.

I feel very fortunate that the comic-book and gaming store of my teens did almost always have a woman at the counter.

And very fortunate that now most of the gaming stores in town are places where hot trans girls want YOU to play Magic: The Gathering with them.

I like descs. I like writing them. I like reading them. I hate it when it’s a link to a picture.

But as a staffer I wasn’t looking for writing quality in your character desc or your BG. I just wanted them to show that your character belonged in the game world.

I don’t think you can do Chekhov’s Gun on a MU, you never know what will become relevant. Or what major super obvious thing you’ve been pointing at with your whole character-concept will somehow, against all the odds and the conventions of fiction, never matter.

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, her eyes may harken back to bygone timeless memories hidden within pools of mystery, but what color are they?

IDK about you but eyes harken back to bygone timeless memories isn’t an automatic AI flag to me. I’ve seen descs like this since the late 90s?

Yeah. Back in the early '90’s there was a WORA thread challenging to people to spoof this – write the most unweildy, long, screen-scrolling purple desc you can write, without it including any basic information. Hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, height, weight, age, and if you were really good at it, appearant gender, all obscure. Actually I doubt ChatGPT could do it so well.

@catzilla Yeah, that’s the new innovative method of MU GMing. Respond only to the players you feel like responding to. Get really huffy when someone outside that set asks for timely reponses. Take their request as a hideous accusation. Claim you didn’t mean to ignore them, you’re just really swamped running the game and you’re doing your best. Castigate them for giving you a hard time when you’re doing your best. Don’t actually try to do better by them. Say you will, though. Pretend you don’t know that +requests are numbered and people can do math and figure out that you’re swamped by three requests a day. Pretend you don’t know that people can see you on +where RPing with or GMing the players you feel like responding to for three or six hours several times a week while not providing +request response that will take you five minutes. Punish players who complain that you’re unresponsive by refusing to respond to them. Complain about your inexplicable inability to retain players. Complain to your friends about the killjoy players who destroy the vibe by asking you to be responsive instead of leaving. Blame them for your inability to retain players.

The strange delight I feel when students suffer from autocorrect.

This week, there were a lot of nasty analyses and nasty generalisations.

Bud Cort, dammit.

Michael Parenti

@Wizz Maaan I wish I felt like I missed something after reading that.

@hellfrog Yep. But also note that making unfair and non-interactive bad shit happen to PCs is legit unfun. It’s their responsibility to work it out, and they don’t get free rein to lash out at people because of it. BUT regardless, the shitty thing about unfair non-interactive shit is that it’s unfair non-interactive shit. It wouldn’t be just fine if the mark would only shut up and pretend it’s fine.

Like everything else, it depends.

I want bad stuff to happen to my PC, because I want stuff to happen.

But.

Is it fair? It sucks the fun right out of it when it’s shit like, “The House Rule I just invented means that the action you took before I invented this rule and told you about it was not the ordinary way of things, but a crime for which you are now in deep trouble.”

Is it interactive? It could be that as a story element the Bad Stuff is in fact A Gloriously Epic Trauma Conga Line, but if it’s all off-camera it’s insufferably frustrating, not fun.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most players who respond badly to bad stuff happening to their PCs have had experiences of unfair non-interactive bad stuff being used to shut them out of the game.

@Trashcan It is part of ‘Turnitin’ which is pretty widely used. I have no idea if it’s one of the ones you’ve listed here, or which one if it is.

Part of what’s exasperating about it is that it doesn’t give me any clue as to why it is tagging segments as “likely AI generated” so even if I don’t spot some way that makes it seem likely that it’s wrong, what possible use is it?

It would be ironic to the point of grotesque in the context of a class where I spend the whole time saying, “Why do you believe that?” and “Prove it,” and “Where’s the evidence?” and “Does that research methodology work? Do you think the result mean what the reaseachers say it means? Did the newspaper report say it means what the researchers said it means?” and so on. After that I’m gonna roll up and say, “Hey, a computer program using semi-secret methodology to detect AI says you cheated, so did you?” to a student?

I get @Faraday’s comments about people trusting computers in a weird way, but I guess I don’t share that, because I feel like I may as well draw tarot cards and just say anybody who gets an inverted swords card cheated.

I’ve got this AI detector thing and I hate it with the hatey black hate sauce.

No, you stupid thing, 100% of this student’s paper isn’t likely to be AI, I’ve watched him building this argument for twelve weeks.

Say, what, this one’s paper is also likely all AI? Who the heck tells AI to do APA formating so creatively wrongly?

Yeah, right, this is so likely all AI, the student fed the assignment into AI along with the instructions, “Write this in the style of someone who doesn’t know how to write an academic paper trying to write an academic paper.”

I really hope other instructors are not taking this daft thing seriously.

Oh, it’s a troublesome character even if you remove the ableism.

Deep in my little black heart I have this desire to app a comics game as the demon Baytor, a sort of tube with teeth that shouts “I AM BAYTOR!” a lot and does little else.

This is a bad, bad idea, obviously bad. It might be okay if I made sure Baytor could only be found where it’s found in the comics, working as a bartender at a certain pub, completely easy to avoid, and treated it as a sort of NPC I depict while playing a reasonbly PC-written-PC primarily.