@SpaceKhomeini said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb that sounds like an…

Escplosion.

What’s sad is that as soon as I saw this and Cobalt’s reply, the name came back to me in an instant and I knew who you were talking about despite having not THOUGHT about it in years.

But yeah, searing vivid memory. Haha. Back before I realized how vibrant the meta-community was.

@Arkandel said in TV series, news, recommendations:

Then (and apologies to anyone who likes those, this is just my personal opinion!) I watched Wheel of Time or The Witcher… man. I can’t say the same thing. I don’t know the showrunners liked the original material much at all. They’re using it to tell some other kind of story kind of similar but with different beats, different directions, just… something else.

Creating a character wholecloth for the series just to fridge her in the opening episode to turn generally the most optimistic (until things happen) character into a dark, twisted, regretful, self-loathing figure full of pathos for unknown reasons was one of the worst “changes” I’ve seen in an adaptation of anything in a long time.

I ended up watching all of Season 1 anyway, begrudgingly, but don’t plan to watch more of it. That really soured me on the whole thing.

(This is re: Wheel of Time)

On the play time window** thing , another tactic which can work (and worked well for me back when I was active) is if you have a climax or a major meta plot running, break it out into multiple components. The three ring circus narrative like you get pretty commonly, but is executed really well in Return of the Jedi.

You have the attack on the forest moon to disable the shields so the ships can attack, and of course you have the climactic battle in the Throne Room. Reproduced well in The Phantom Menace as well.

Break up whatever your “climax” is into multiple components and have those stories get divvied up in different time zones.

It’s not always going to be perfect either because you are shoehorning players into a scene based around their playing time window instead of natural compatibilities, but you can absolutely structure things in that way - have a plan of attack that requires some other critical task occur before hand, schedule that during the “prime play” window of the folks who tend to play in the Australia/Asian window (12 hours or so ahead of US), and then another for Europe, etc.

And then, if you want to be really ambitious, make all of those critical components RPed live to the conclusion, and play that one async (or as Coin suggested, throw up a vignette scene for everything to write their own aftermath conclusion).

I had some good success with that in the past, but it does require having someone willing to ST in each of those time periods, or letting players free from on their own (which I am not generally opposed to either.)

**It’s not precisely timezone because you may have someone who works overnight in THEIR timezome so aligns better with another timezone.

I think having a thread like this is incredibly helpful in showing members of this community that they are not alone, even as this topic is (unfortunately) touched upon fairly often here.

I don’t know the logistics of how to implement it, but I wonder if there would be a way to make volunteers who have been through this (or are trained mental health counselors) more generally available to the MUSH community that does NOT regularly read these boards.

One of the biggest reasons these predators are successful is that they isolate their victim and normalize the behavior, and even if the victim starts to realize they may be a victim, they convince the victim it is their fault. Which makes it harder to speak up, and harder to escape.

I know it would still require some proactive effort on the victim’s part to reach out (I struggle to think of what we can do to help identify victims in the wild short of calling out the predator themselves, like the signs of human trafficking, but there is just no way I can think of), but if there were an available and well known resource, anonymous or otherwise, where victims could reach out (anonymously) just to ask basic questions of others who have been through this - “Is this red flag behavior? Should I be worried? Is this normal?” - I feel like that could help.

Like, just spitballing here, something that maybe Faraday could build into Ares that could be in all of the Ares games and push back through Arescentral and gets fielded by a set of vetted, well established and well known volunteers who could open a channel of communication.

It might be a crazy idea, and there could be a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t work, so I’m just throwing it out there.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

@Rinel
Star Wars is mostly a good example. The Jedi are for all their many flaws, people who act selflessly for the good of society as a whole.

You mean the people whose dedication to celibacy and total emotional detachment led one of their strongest to murderize them because no one would help him save the one he loved?

Super-hero based stories are of course focused on basically good people.

Have you followed super hero stories since the 1980s? Or, like, every non-MCU or DC super hero content in the past four or five years?

Firefly is a good, well known story with basically good protagonists.

Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.

My problem with the fantasy genera is that the stories who have terrible people for heroes is the standard not the exception.

This is a very narrow view of fantasy, that I can only assume is recency bias. Grimdark fantasy has certainly become extremely popular with the success of A Song of Ice and Fire, but it is a relatively newer approach. Honestly, the rise of anti-heroes in comics like Wolverine, the Punisher, Lobo, comes even before that.

Until the rise of grimdark in the 1990s, most fantasy followed the same basic tropes, and probably 75% of them were Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

Pug from The Riftwar by Raymond Feist
Belgarian from David and Leigh Eddings
Various simple folk in Shannara by Terry Brooks
The Heralds from Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey
Literal engineers and smiths from Recluce by LE Modesitt
All but one major POV char of the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

With the exception of Belgarion as a “hidden heir” these were tradespeople, thieves, warriors, etc, and almost all of them fundamentally good people, even the thieves.

Now tell me how many upright noble truly good redeeming people were on Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly.

@Rinel said in Concordia Thread:

It’s a bummer, but it won’t drive me away from the game by itself. I’m here to play with other humans. Folks using AI for their roleplay is a total dealbreaker, of course.

Waaaaay back in the day (we’re talking late 90s) there was an AI experiment being run by a PhD student in Canada where he was training an AI to MUSH. After having “her” play a character on a couple, he started up his own Star Trek MUSH to have a more controlled environment, but never told any of the players.

I remember being shocked when I found out, because I had no idea (I wonder if I looked back now, knowing how ChatGPT and such works, if it’d be better able to do a Turing Test) and never would have suspected.

Probably not as shocked as the guy who was TSing “her” on the regular, though.

(I only dodged that bullet because apparently I wasn’t even interesting enough to get an AI to TS with me back then. Talk about a hit to the ol’ ego.)

@Cobalt said in Neitherlands:

@Prospero said in Neitherlands:

Back when I was active and running a game, I had suggested to Faraday that there should (IMO at least) be a mechanism to remove unshared / private scenes as part of the newpassword/idle/roster process, either automatically or manually by staff.

https://aresmush.com/tutorials/config/scenes.html#delete_unshared_scenes

Well, yeah, but that’s universal. You would need to reset the time to delete unshared scenes to shorten it, wait for cron to delete those scenes, and then adjust it back.

I was hoping for a “flush” button that doesn’t need to wait on cron, and doesn’t impact the MUSH wide.

EDIT: Or use the scene flatten command and delete the scene or the poses, but one of the characters involved has to do it. So either ask scene partners of the rostered character to do it, or newpass it, claim it as a staff person, delete the scenes, and then put on the roster. Clunky workaround.

@Jenn I am so sorry to hear that.

Back when I was active and running a game, I had suggested to Faraday that there should (IMO at least) be a mechanism to remove unshared / private scenes as part of the newpassword/idle/roster process, either automatically or manually by staff.

I was the one who initially discovered that page conversations weren’t wiped and reported it, and Faraday was able to address pretty quickly. At the time, I hadn’t realized that unshared scenes were also kept.

Given what unshared scenes often consist of, I felt the idea of someone walking into a roster game and seeing that sort of activity with their new character might be off-putting.

Although I realize there’s not an easy solution, because if you erase the scenes you’re taking them away from other players who participated. So I had suggested something like unlinking unshared scenes when the character object is cycled, but I’m not sure THAT is a great solution, either.

But I am so sorry this person keeps finding new ways to victimize you.

@Nobody-0 said in Neitherlands:

@Tez Absolutely. Anybody publicly sharing IP addresses around is not a friend to any community of any kind. I may disagree with @Prospero over the identity of someone, but I’m glad he’s not handing IP addresses around willy-nilly.

You and I are not “disagreeing” over the identity of someone.

You asserted that someone was made a staffer of a game (to which you have not addressed your relationship in any way, despite being asked - funny how “receipts” can go both ways, and you’ve provided zero) and have been now authoritatively told that no, said person was not a staffer of that game. No staff bit was reassigned. No handle was linked and unlinked. It did not happen.

As I said. It’s possible you’ve confused an NPC named Jane with a player whose PC was named Lane and whose handle is shjade, but that’s the best I can come up with based around what you’ve said.

But in making this assertion, you are dragging two legitimately decently players through the mud and associating them with a bad actor. If you have any evidence beyond your recollection of an event that I am telling you did not happen, please post it up.

Or stop and let this one go (ideally with an apology to this two players).

Go against chookitypok all you want - they sound truly awful. But don’t drag innocent unrelated people in over a mistake. Thanks.

(To avoid adding extra words to this thread, I’m only to respond further if there are actual receipts provided at this point to back up this incorrect assertion.)

@untitled said in Neitherlands:

To be fair, it’s not like you’re offering much more, but I also don’t see people beating it into the ground in a way worth a 500 word essay that still doesn’t introduce actual evidence, either.

I’m not going to post their IP addresses, sorrynotsorry.

Admittedly, I’m a wordy mf’er sometimes.

Honestly, was just trying to understand what Nobody is confusing here, because I genuinely like to think the best of people and assume there was something they were confusing, but I can’t fathom how these two are in any way connected/conflated. (EDIT: Is it maybe that Xayide was playing/posting as the NPC Jane (Chatwin), and you confused that with Lane, the PC played by shjade ?)

If anyone can tell me how to find audit logs in Ares of handles being attached, I’ll gladly provide that to the court of public opinion. I’m at a loss for what evidence I can offer to refute an accusation with no actual evidence.

EDIT: It appears that handles are added to the log file, but it appears that only three weeks of log files are maintained, so it’s likely purged. Sorry.

@Nobody-0 said in Neitherlands:

@Prospero That Shjade and idreamofflying are the same person is not a question nor even guesswork. I was there. I saw the staff bit when it was created. I saw that its handle was originally Shjade on the game’s web site. I saw that it switched to idreamofflying. I saw the continuity of posts from said staff bit when that changed happen. Shjade is idreamofflying.

What are you even talking about?

I can only assume that you are confused and mis-remembering things.

Who are you that you “were there” and saw a staff bit “created” or handles change hands? What “continuity of posts” are you talking about?

Seriously, I am sure that you believe that you are doing your best to try to help the community, but I promise you there is something wrong with your recollection. Whether the bits/player objects/what have you were piloted by two different human beings or not (although as noted, they came from vastly different non-VPN IPs) , those were two distinctly different players, connections, handles, etc. I have no idea why you would have any reason to believe they are connected other than an inaccurate memory or maybe some bizarre Ares glitch? But I don’t know how the handle would have been assigned incorrectly to shjade, and I’ve not seen that happen in ares (nor evidence that it happened on Brakebills).

Shjade/idreamofflying being chookitypok is not something I’ve personally witnessed, but people who knew the same person under both names across multiple games are flat-out stating she is.

I haven’t read through all of what is going on in this thread, but unless I am mistaken you are literally the first person to bring these two (different) people into this conversation and accuse them of being this third person. I haven’t seen anyone “flat out” stating that either of them are chookitypok, although I would be curious to see what evidence anyone has that either of those identities are associated with chookitypok. As I said, it would surprise me greatly based upon the allegations, but I don’t know anything definitive about chookitypok to be able to assert one way or the other.

Given the enormous trust deficit she has accrued, her denials (which I note she relied on someone else to provide) ring very, very, very faint.

You are assigning a “trust deficit” from chookitypok to two completely different people and using that trust deficit to then discredit them. Without having at all established that:

A) These two people are the same person
B) That same person is this third person who has the trust deficit

Look, I’m all for calling people out for their cretinous behavior if we can point to them specifically, but I think we’ve also all seen that spuriously connecting someone to another person is detrimental both to those people falsely accused and the community as a whole.

Again. I don’t know jack shit about chookitypok. But I do know that shjade and idreamofflying are not the same person (and I would really ask that you provide some semblance of evidence about that if you actually have it because I’m always willing to admit if I’m mistaken, but every single bit of evidence I have says the contrary, and all you’ve presented is a memory of a handle changing hands several months ago), and I strongly believe that neither of the two of them would engage in the behaviors that chookitypok is alleged to have engaged in.

EDITED to ADD: I’m not even sure what you are implying about “relying upon someone else to provide” - I don’t even know if either of those players are on these forums. I became aware of the accusation that you made that they were the same player and that they were also this other person, and elected on my own to refute it. As far as I know, neither of them are even aware of this discussion going on. Which is probably for the best, because who wants to know about this kind of drama going on anyway.

@DrQuinn said in Neitherlands:

@Prospero said in Neitherlands:

EDIT2: Confused who these other two people were being accused of being, and corrected that to read chookitypok - my apologies

I mean it seems pretty clear that chookitypok is also inuki so.

Fair. I wasn’t following along with the entirely of everything and the person who alerted me to all of this pinged me to say I got it wrong in the post, so I corrected because I didn’t want to contribute to any further confusion, if I was wrong.

Then after I saw that the inuki poster here seemed to be the runner of Neitherworld, so was probably the same person.

Like I said. I have no involvement with that person or Neitherworld, I don’t really much care about the arguments involving Neitherworld, but I do have enough insight to weight in on the pretty clearly incorrect assertion about shjade and idreamofflying, and felt compelled to share that.

But this clearly shows that I shouldn’t be at all further involved, since I know less than Jon Snow.

@Nobody-0 said in Neitherlands:

Just to keep things fun, it should be noted that chookitypok is also [idreamofflying]

I think there is some significant confusion going on here, and I’m not entirely sure how the “detective” work is going on to make these connections, BUT:

I am fairly confident that idreamofflying and shjade are two entirely different people. Their IP addresses are not VPNs, are from vastly different places geographically, and their entire style, OOC and IC, are extraordinarily different. Also, idreamofflying is an extremely long-standing member of the MUSH community with as far as I have heard nothing but a stellar reputation as a reputable person from many, many people that I know and trust, and I’ve seen nothing from what interactions I’ve had with Shjade to think, personally, that the player would engage in any of these activities either.

So while I cannot vouch in any way, shape, or form for who chookitypok is or is not (other than to say that the behavior I’ve seen described in this thread is wholly inconsistent with what I have seen from the two of these others named), I can with fairly good authority confidence state that the two of them are NOT the same person (unless they are the most convincing manipulator I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen PLENTY).

Which, IMO, calls the rest of your “detective” work into question.

(Not looking to dive into any further debates or anything - there’s a reason I left the hobby - but I don’t like seeing good people slandered by conjecture and whatever else, it happens far too often to folks here.)

(To be clear, as far as I know I have never interacted with chookitypok, I’m just basing what I’ve said above on the allegations made on this thread.)

EDIT: Changed “authority” to “confidence” because that’s a more accurate term
EDIT2: Confused who these other two people were being accused of being, and corrected that to read chookitypok - my apologies

FYI, since it hasn’t been mentioned so far in the thread, a deleted thread can be restored by either the OP or users with the “Topic Management” power. It is not lost forever if deleted, it is in fact just archived where only the OP and Topic Management users can view it.

In case that reframes anyone’s thoughts on the topic - If the admin feel that a topic should not be allowed to be deleted (to hide dickery, or because there was robust and useful discussion that followed it) they can restore it without much problem or loss to the community.

At least in my mind, with those risks negated, I don’t see the harm in allowing an OP to delete a thread which was either put in the wrong place or is having dramatically different results than what they intended (but not deleting it maliciously or to hide any wrong-doing).

@Arkandel said in Would you roleplay with AI?:

@Prospero What if the RP provided by NPCs was there to supplement and enhance scenes rather than to be on an equal footing as a PC?

So think of an AI bartender in your local IC vampiric hangout rather than an actual Kindred. Its purpose would be to offer some dialogue and color instead of driving a plot per se; roles most players would find boring to play but they might be neat to have available and play with, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that would be great as well. Sometimes providing a bit of a seed for something to be RPed, something to play off of. Maybe help those “what do we RP” kind of situations, they can just go and interact with the AI and see what happens.

Like I said, I think there are some very good potential applications for AI, but it would need to be well known and documented and would need to be just as you say - a more convincing and interactive NPC.

@Arkandel It’s an interesting question. I think that if a MUSH were to have clearly delineated AI NPCs that could be engaged with, it would be a way to supplement people’s RP if they wanted. Could allow GMs to come up with story ideas and let an AI run with it so players could get the scenes they wanted, and not have to rely upon the energy of a STer to do it. But that’s about the only scenario I’d want to see it in a MUSH - a clearly defined AI STer facilitating a scene.

Interesting note - there was a MUSH some years ago that was started up as part of an AI project. The developer of the AI created a few characters on a couple of different games to help the AI develop a personality for role playing, and then created an entire MUSH an an experimental petri dish to see how it would be able to handle the interactions with other players (none of whom initially knew that one of the “players” was an AI).

I’m not entirely sure where that research led, but I’ve always thought back to that and wondered whether or not, at some point, we’d start to see that more commonly.

I will say based recent news around some of the commercial AI “partners” (Replika et al), there is a fairly large audience for people who would play entirely with an AI.