Posts made by Kestrel
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
Even though this never used to be a thing, in the modern world I’m realising I basically forget that a MU* I was playing still exists if it doesn’t have a discord.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
eggshells 🫤
Feeling like … I can only scene with you as long as I am very polite and mindful and watch my step and am on my best behaviour. Which is a very reasonable thing to expect of anyone. But also I don’t like feeling tense like that, so if RP always feels like a first date or a job interview, I think I would rather just avoid and hang out with friends who take themselves less seriously and let me fart around.
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RE: Good things in Mushing
Seeing friends who were mistreated on other games go on to start their own creative projects, and join staff teams where their labour is appreciated & admired, gives me immense contact joy.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
Watching a known jerk continue to do jerk things in the MU* community and feeling unsure about whether it’d be the right call to just let people know that’s a known jerk. Idk, do people deserve second chances if they wanna be anonymous? … atm I’ve settled on the feeling that maybe it doesn’t really matter whether people know who they are or not, since the culprit seems eager to dig their own grave on a brand new identity anyway.
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RE: Stupid Memes
I dropped out of my psychology degree a decade ago for this exact reason.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
I’m super guilty of “accidental revenge” with async scenes. I say I don’t mind if the other person needs extra time, but the longer they take, the longer I take. And then it eventually snowballs from them taking 24 hours between replies to me taking 48.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
The above discussion is why I will not have logon messages if I make a game.
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RE: MUSIC ADDICTIONS
I think I’ve listened 20 times in the last 24 hours since it was released.
Also, hyped for The Tortured Poets Department to release on April 19th. Midnights turned me into a Born Again Swifty.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
I hope no one hates me for this, but sometimes I avoid greeting anyone on channels, because I feel obligated to greet everyone otherwise.
And I’m not ASD, I swear, but this is one of those social norms I could live without. I would way prefer a frosty atmosphere where people skip greetings and just talk about whatever’s pertinent. (Maybe this is why most of my friends are ASD??) Idc if you’re weird and have no etiquette, just page me out of nowhere to game. That’s fine.
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RE: Good things in Mushing
I saw a tweet today about the historic MUD genre and laughed.
I think people don’t know that we’re still around.
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RE: On PvP and permanent injuries
My opinion on this topic is fairly moderate, but I’m going to advocate for side B because I’m not seeing it represented here so far.
There are a few problems with games which discourage or heavily restrict PvP:
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I think that the definition of PvP is broader than what most people mean when they use the term, and games which claim to eliminate/discourage PvP merely relegate it to shadier, passive-aggressive and OOC forms which are harder to deal with.
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Not having PvP means that any sense of stakes/consequences for character fuckups are relegated to staff responsibility; since they’re often spread too thin to deal with every instance, it leads to a lot of obnoxious and immersion-breaking behaviour where people can talk shit, but not get hit.
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It is my opinion that all stories require conflict to be engaging. In the absence of player conflict, staff or the game mechanics must be responsible for delivering conflict instead. Although on the whole staff’s intentions are going to be more trustworthy than those of other players with a stake in said conflict, it’s also more work for them to spoonfeed, which means there’ll usually be less of it, and PvE opponents can be a lot less challenging for players who enjoy the sort of long-term chess-match rivalries. It also incentivises unhealthy social dynamics in pursuit of staff attention.
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Games which discourage conflict, and therefore minimise loss, are better at protecting player sensitivities concerning positive OOC self-image through their character’s positive image. This means characters are more likely to be self-inserts, which can feed into unhealthy attachment and blurred IC/OOC boundaries. In my opinion, this also results in less interesting storytelling, because I prefer to interact with flawed characters dreamed up by versatile players. YMMV on this one. It’s why I avoid L&L and Superhero games, and lean more towards gritty settings.
The ideal unicorn game for me would be one which allows for PvP, but where:
- The rewards for engaging in PvP (if they exist at all) do not create a zero-sum game between opponents.
- The community is strongly story-oriented, and conflict is therefore not driven by the desire for mechanical gain.
- Strict policies govern healthy communication between players, and are enforced by staff.
My favourite players are ones who love to play-wrassle.
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RE: How dangerous is VASpider?
It’s not fun to be stalked/harassed by a mob of racist/queerphobic weirdos online, even if you feel no shame in your identity. Also the kinds of people who would do this needn’t actually say anything about you that’s remotely true in order for it to be potentially damaging, or at the very least upsetting.
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RE: How dangerous is VASpider?
@Adora said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
I remember the bad old days where being a racial minority or LGBTQ could get you targeted by an angry mob on a MUSH and get you run off, which would then carry over to WORA/SWORA/whatever other stupid acronym they felt like at the moment, and it might get you an Encyclopedia Dramatica style wiki page that could accuse real world minors of harming children for playing characters that matched their real age on a supposedly teen friendly game, all because their 16/17 year old male characters held hands in a public scene. (Meanwhile the two 45+ year old straight men playing 14 year old lesbians [one of them Jubilee with triple D cup breasts who’s obsessed with Transformers, the other a vampire Jean Grey who’s also Dark Phoenix somehow, also with triple D cup breasts] making out on the pool table were fine, of course. MUs were for the male gaze, not the male gays!)Reluctant to derail this thread, because I want to be clear that what I’m about to say is not about Spider, whom to the best of my knowledge I have never encountered in the hobby.
However I feel the need to stress that what you describe here as “the bad old days” still goes on today, or that I’ve at least seen extensive, verifiable screenshots of it occurring as recently at least as 10 months ago. Not in the MUSH community, that I know of, but very much a thing on MUDs and especially RPIs. There was an explicitly neo-Nazi Discord server with members spanning multiple MUDs, who made it their active mission to do as you’re describing.
This is just to say, be aware and be wise. Our hobby isn’t that big and it does still happen, under the table in certain corners of it. I believe MUSH are generally not their preferred targets these days, because games which discourage PvP and encourage OOC collaboration provide little incentive for this kind of behaviour, and make anonymity untenable.
In general I think the safety advice concerning Spider applies here also: just be careful what kind of information you share about yourself online with people you don’t know.
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RE: Elysium /MUSH
@Artemis said in Elysium /MUSH:
“Those “Laws” state that if you feel the desire, physical and otherwise, to do something then you should be allowed to do it.”
bruh this the purgeit’s argentina
EDIT: Bad taste, sorry.
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RE: Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent
@Rucket said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
Working 60hr weeks since mid-November, finally told to go back to normal 8 hour days and then shit happens and now its time to go back on the overtime train.
This isn’t at all legal where I live, and I just want to say that I feel intense sympathy, and anger, on behalf of everyone I know who goes through this in a country with such lax workers’ rights protections.
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RE: How dangerous is VASpider?
@SpaceKhomeini said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
A friend of mine sent me a vaspider tumblr meme last year. Said friend had never mu*d ever.
I laughed until I cried because this world is too fucking weird,
Your friend and I must move in the same meme circles.
I don’t have any experience with VAS that I know of, they way predate my forays into MUSH, but I’ve seen their posts on social media, double taked, then tapped a more “in the know” friend to confirm it’s the same one.
Weirdly small world tbh. I guess the same traits that would predispose a person towards staffing a text game would also lend themselves towards small-time internet celebrity status?
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RE: Good things in Mushing
@RightMeow said in Good things in Mushing:
We are obviously overlooking the main reason to play a smoker… the ability to set your annoyance’s stuff on fire.
Right?
Is this just me?
You make me want to take up smoking.
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RE: Pose Sizes
Specifically about the dialogue thing:
I’m typically a paragraph/multi-paragraph RPer, but I also tend to play laconic characters. Not always — some of them are bubbly — but usually. I really like to focus on body-language, non-verbal communication, because my characters often have something to hide. So their only reply might be “no”, but there’ll be a lot of twitching, shifting about, sour glances, and that to me is more fun than just launching into a detailed verbal statement.
If I get asked 5 questions at once in a scene, I will do this annoying thing where I typically only reply to the most recent or most pertinent one. Then I’ll go to some length describing how my character seems confused/overwhelmed, opens their mouth to answer one, but then loses their train of thought and struggles to find the right moment to interrupt.
It pains me to make anyone feel excluded, so I do try to make a point of describing that my character noticed even if they were distracted, but like @sao said, I just find it too jarring if the conversational flow feels unnatural. Then again, this is also why I tend to prefer smaller scenes.
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RE: Song of Avaria
So I’m trying not to inject too much bias into this, but here it is:
I fully agree with everyone saying, “sometimes a paragraph is called for, sometimes just one line”, etc. That’s true, but it’s also not what the staff of Avaria said, nor an issue I’ve perceived on the game.
I’ve not seen anyone doing multi-paragraph emotes in public scenes on that game. On average people toss two-liners at each other, and long by that game’s standards would be one paragraph (5-7 lines), which I’ve mostly seen in one-on-one. I personally switch happily between modes.
That staff felt the need to raise this issue tells me that a flexible approach is not what they want. Because the debate wasn’t about “paragraph vs one-liners”, it was “both are fine vs one-liners only”.
I personally can’t get over the fact that staff said this:
For me, too much emphasis on writing detracts from the immediacy of the acting, and from the sense of inhabiting my character.
And that it was part of a longer post expressing discomfort and anxiety around people who care about writing pretty, and that waiting “minutes” on a response was deemed too much. I’m not predominantly a MUSHer, I play MUDs just as happily, and I consider a 2-3 minute wait to be somewhere between fast and average.
The above tells me that this is not a game for people who enjoy creative writing. Even though I think it’s possible to play this game with that goal in mind, and that a lot of the code and design choices would support it, staff having said “there are other games for that” in response to “what’s wrong with both, what harm is this doing”, and expressing that people who care about writing make them unhappy/anxious, is why I used the words hostile fit. You would be showing up to an environment where your intentions are expressly unwelcome.