Gashlycrumb

Gashlycrumb

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.

Gashlycrumb

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace

I was there, and was quite chummy with both Mr_Bungle and his victim.

This may be my brush with history. That and how I used to buy pot from a guy who also sold pot to Hunter S. Thompson.

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Lindaaaa is styled Lindaaaa even outside of MUdom in the GoT fandom.

“Blood of Dragons”, Lindaaaa and Elio’s MUSH, is specifically approved by GRR Martin. He even linked it.

George R. R. Martin began to write this epic series and did not make a concordance, bless him. There are interviews of him kinda bragging on this, tapping the side of his head and saying “It’s all in here.”

Westeros.org was originally the BoD’s game page and wiki. It expanded into a general fan-site with news and forums and a wiki that’s a really fantastic concordance. By 2000 it had gotten pretty good and L & E shared it with GRRM, who uses it. Or, if you take him literally in an interview, just telephones Elio about any continuity thing an author or writing team usually looks up in a concordance.

Linda and Elio didn’t work on the show, except for the Swedish subtitles. For five seasons of it they did do commentaries for every episode. As far as I know, they consisted mostly of casting complaints that came across as racist and complaints where the show deviated from the novels. It didn’t seem to go over well.

They did spend a lot of time trying to say that BoD being approved by GRRM means any other MU is disapproved. I doubt that GRRM, a TTRPG player, could fail to understand that some people might prefer another set of GMs and another in-world scenario and setting.

I had a lot of fun running Game of Bones MUSH and miss it, though it wouldn’t do now since inconsistencies with House of the Dragon would make a mess.

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@Kestrel said:

Lastly, and this may be controversial because I know the hobby loves this genre, but I think I would personally avoid horror as a central theme, based on this metastudy. And again, going back to the big fat disclaimer, this isn’t a criticism of individual tastes

I want to pick at the metastudy, though. It seems like most of the studies it references had fewer than 200 participants. No study that includes ‘The Unholy Trinity’ (Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)) should be generalised because the cultural response to those was just too damn weird. They don’t seem to consider horror sub-genres or the places where horror becomes ‘thriller’ and that bloodiest of genres, ‘action.’

From the MU angle, it may not track well because horror movie lovers and horror readers may not be the same group. Also, superficially horror themes might really be something else – WoD MUs are, like Twilight, romances with superheroes.

They did suggest that it’s a superhero-like power-fantasy + bloodshed that’s appealing to the younger and lower empathy sorts.

I do say no PC antagonists of the sort who are just going to rush into to-the-death PvP. No “I am a murderous murderer who likes to murder” character concepts, and I absolutely will GM-engineer terrible consequences to the careless murder of NPC goons.

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Archive.org may have already captured some of your game’s wiki, but it’s not terribly clever about which bits it records.

Login-only stuff like the old WORA and SWOFA are probably just gone if the one or two people who made captures don’t share them or lost them.

I lament the loss of a collection of scanned drawings I had, from back when the internet barely had pictures on it and we used FTP to exchange character art. I still have the drive they’re on, somewhere, but no way to open it myself.

From a professional archivist sort of standpoint, this has always been a problem. People don’t record a lot of everyday life, and what they do produce is often the shit we call ephemera, and gets thrown away shortly after it’s used. TTRPGs produce a shitload of it. Researchers and museum goers love it. Inexplicably, my brother has managed to keep every concert ticket stub from every show he’s ever been to since Mötley Crüe in 1986 or something. In keeping with her character, a friend has every birthday card she have ever received. You know you wanna look at that shit. Alas, digital environments make it even more ephemeral.

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Jackie the eagle.

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@Pavel I getcha there.

But if the client is lying to you, you can’t really help them explore reality. And that’s not your fault. And one thing abusers often do is present things with the roles reversed so they’re the victim who needs validation. (My ex succeeded in doing with his therapist, and with a significant portion of my friends’ group. He soon began to abuse them, so they all went, “Oh shit, G was right,” and dropped him hard, but years later some of those friends are still ashamed and uncomfortable and this is sad to me because it wasn’t their damn fault.)

I think for therapists it’s kinda like that thing where opiate addicts try to sue doctors who prescribed for them based on their lies about pain. The doctors turn around and sue them for fraud. (This is why, in more recent years, those transphobes who think it’s a gotcha to ‘prove’ that gender-affirming care is over/wrongly prescribed by lying about their gender to a doctor and getting a script, as if not having magical truth-detecting powers is malpractice, have just written dumb articles about their fraud where they don’t mention their informed consent form, and not gone to court.)

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@Kestrel The online support-groupies I used to groupie with. Some of them were, for whatever reason, unable to go no-contact, and of that set was a subset who played Emotional and Verbal Abuse Bingo. There were quite a lot of cards made up where each little square was some common hurtful behaviour. It was a Thanksgiving event to compare results and ‘win’ chocolate bars. You might play it with your family.

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@Pavel said:
Yeah, that’s fuckin horrible, incompetent, and unethical therapy. Sadly common, but that’s not how it’s meant to be.

It’s horrible. I’m not sure what a therapist could do about it, though.

I would guess (maybe because I’m naive and actually tend to think well of people until they really prove otherwise) that ex’s therapist is competent and ethical, but what’s he gonna do when the client lies and/or withholds so much relevant information that it’s a lie all but technically? The complaint of “My partner got mad at me and kicked me out of our shared house for an hour,” sounds terrible and is believable. “My partner stopped me from physically abusing a cat and insisted I go outside and cool off,” would be accurate, but the therapist isn’t likely to guess that. Ex’s therapist totally caused harm this way, but I can’t blame the therapist.

Ex’s mom’s therapist did similar stuff, and helped MiL harm me, too. Eventually that therapist did figure it out, and the result was really classic. MiL actually said, “My therapist says I have Borderline Personality Disorder and described it to me. It’s true, but it’s really disrespectful for her to have said that, so I fired her.”

There’s probably some super-expert therapist out there who teaches other therapists how to deal with this, but it does sound like a hell of a challenge and a special skill.

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@RightMeow What @Aria said.

Also because you are probably at least somewhat aware that therapy generally does not teach abusers not to be abusive. It teaches them to use concepts and terminology from therapy to be better at abuse and victim-blaming. The therapist’s job is to improve their client’s, in this case the abuser’s, well-being. The therapist isn’t working for you or everybody else around this guy. So “I will reach out to my therapist about this” is pretty much the opposite of addressing the problem. Really it goes, “I will talk to my therapist, who will almost certainly give me reasons I am not really in the wrong here and help me more effectively reverse our roles so you’re wrong and what I did is no big deal.”

Returning to @Wizz’s mention of narcissists, that’s what mine did. And came home to tell me that his therapist said he was healthy and I was the abuser. Because I was “withholding affection to be manipulative” (ex evidently didn’t tell therapist that the reason I slept on the couch every night was because ex was too damn clingy and I can’t sleep when I’m being crushed and coated in sweat, and because ex would sleep with his hand on my junk and then randomly SQUEEZE in his sleep, which was fucking intolerable, and because ex snored and refused to even try anything to stop it but just denied it, and because ex would hit the ‘snooze’ button a dozen times every morning, resulting in an hour-and-a-half of non-sleep for me regardless of if I had to get up that morning. And so on. My furiously yelling at ex to get out of the house and take a walk one day was also listed as abusive behaviour on my part, and of course ex didn’t tell Therapist that I did that because ex was holding the cat by the scruff of her neck and punching her and my failing is really that I didn’t try to beat him senseless, which would have at least been slightly fair, since he had only 35 lb on me rather than the 145 or so he had on the cat.

Anyway, yeah, that’s some ol’ bullshit, this guy shouldn’t get away with this crap.

I don’t think deleting the photo makes the harm not real.

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@Wizz BTW, you are not alone. Drop me a line if you want to compare recovery notes and such.

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