My peeve today:

There’s nothing like trying out a new character and getting completely subsumed into the story of a new place to make you really, highly aware of how burned out you are at your old stomping ground. The disparity in activation energy is astounding.

Not to tmi but I have pneumonia, the doctor says I need to spend the next 3 days in bed, and I still wanna RP my idiot werewolf, but I can barely even manage to get up the gumption to log in and read mail on a place that has been my primary game since September 2016.

I’m tired and I’m sorry.

@eddie this ain’t a court of law, playing on a game is not a right, and you ain’t defending any innocents, pardner

But also that’s not how a court of law works

If you cannot trust the staffers on the game you’re on, consider leaving.

If you can trust the staffers on the game you’re on and you know that and are dealing with reactions in yourself that are not based on what is happening now, keep working on yourself.

Just try to be mindful of that and don’t blame the person trying to work with you now for shit some scumsucker did on X game 11 years ago.

Edit to add: I don’t think this is a problem now-staffers can actually fix. Coin is right that you shouldn’t be a dick but like… seriously, there is no one who can resolve someone’s anxieties about this except themselves.

Honestly, the ending times at Arx have been such a positive community experience. Even people that I’ve never really jived with - it doesn’t matter, everyone is in this together, I love watching all the big event scenes, seeing years of play hit these culminating points. Obviously nothing is perfect, but the feel of being part of a community and all of us caring about the same ending is really powerful and a great note for a game I’ve played on for a long time to go out on. Thanks to everyone for vibing.

P.S. BAT!!!

What evidence are you looking for here? Runescryer suspected someone of being DWOPP, indicated they thought it was DWOPP. Lithium came forward, says I was this person, I’m not DWOPP, how dare. Lithium definitely was the person who came forward and said I’m the person you’re saying is DWOPP and I’m not.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with any gamerunner going “I don’t want to deal with these people anymore, let’s chuck them all out the door.” More gamerunners should do this.

P.S. literal laugh out loud at Macha getting banned for not leaving a thing alone when she’d been told to leave a thing alone

as previously stated, good day

I WANT TO PLAY BUT I DON’T WANT TO START OVER IN A NEW PLACE WHERE I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING

My 16 1/2 year old cat is gone and I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to be OK.

Good thing in mushing: other people reacting to a big dramatic thing you did as a big dramatic thing.

But, well, I told them I would wait for them to finish reviewing before I made any decisions, since that was their request. What they’ve demonstrated is that their review was conducted according to some bizarre internal metrics that banned @Narson for saying basically the same thing as @Meg who they rescinded the ban on, while simultaneously deciding that Ghost is a part of the community they want to keep but not @Roz or @tsar –

In short, a part of the community I will be putting behind me and not returning to.

But the attorney in me is super annoyed about the total absence of transparency and failure of standards or logic.

I am glad that the original wildly unjust ban was reversed, though.

I also dislike Lithium and all of my memories of my experiences with them are bad and I think it’s fine to defend themselves from being compared with DWOPP.

And I also read the pages and I don’t think Warren comes off as the asshole in that convo at all. And I was very prepared to believe they would, because I remember the bone-deep relief I felt when Lithium was banned from Arx (sorry, Arx out of season, I accept the penalty).

I also think it’s not a good look to decide to publicly compare someone you’re in an OOC/IC tiff with to DWOPP.

But I remain firm in my original belief that more gamerunners should look at drama between multiple players that they don’t wanna deal with and just go “bye” like this.

@helvetica Look at that PUNAM

I mean, if you could show me a pvp game that DIDN’T devolve into players being shitty OOC I would probably be fine with it. It’s just that every time I have been on a game with PVP elements, players were shitty OOC and tried to game systems to “get” other people’s characters regardless of story, whether it was trying to exploit times that people were offline in order to fuck with their stuff, using staff access to cheat their way to better stats / gear, etc., or just… being incapable of their character losing ground on anything without turning into a toddler throwing a tantrum.

If a player is toxic, PVPing them is a terrible idea anyway, btw. If someone is awful, I don’t want to play with them regardless of whose character is going to “win” the interaction.

Pvp doesn’t drive story conflict, it drives player conflict.

Characters with conflicting goals creates interesting situations. Players with conflicting goals creates butthurt. I am just too old for this shit.

@Dreampipe nooooo Zeus why

It doesn’t come up because the impact is minimal. There’s no likelihood of confusion that it’s an authorized licensure and no one is making money on it. People who make money using their likeness know - assuming they know or care that online RP exists - that it does not cost them anything for their face to be used in this fashion because it is not an area of business that it would earn them any money. Essentially, is it morally correct to “steal” someone’s face for this purpose? Probably not, but also who cares? What harm exists here?

Basically if you want to use AI PBs go ahead, but this idea that it is somehow morally superior because no real people are involved is disingenuous. The only choices that are free of contention are drawing your own shit, paying to commission an artist to draw your own shit, or not using an image at all and just writing descriptions in this writing hobby. Otherwise we are all making choices that have points of compromise.

Honestly I find that so valid. I haven’t managed to de-enmesh myself from amazon even though I 100% believe it would be the morally correct choice.

Yeah like… this isn’t so much about the IP implications of this use case of the tool – I do not think anyone on God’s green earth really cares where we get the pictures we use to supplement our games of let’s pretend as long as we make no money. It is the fact that the tool itself was trained in a violative way that makes it gross. Taking pictures of actors and going “now kiss” is something you can do without impact, but using a tool to do it that can only do it because it was fed a bunch of stolen work is qualitatively different.

BUT I don’t think anyone HAS to care about it. I get that there is a limited supply of fucks to give and God knows i seem to have a lessening supply daily.

@MisterBoring It’s not the fact that it is for profit that makes it theft, no. What makes it theft is the stealing people’s work and feeding it to the training data of the generative AI.

Pretending that commercial generative AI models aren’t walking databases of art theft is just disingenuous at this point. Like I think most of us have at least poked at them at this point, myself included, and I am not going to hate on people for yielding to the temptation to use the convenient and available thing, but let’s not engage in reality distortion about what this is.

@junipersky I hate to say it, but even though permanency is super important to kids, the likelihood is that the court will terminate and then the parent will immediately appeal. I dunno about yours but our department typically won’t finalize adoption while appeal is still pending because it is SUCH a mess if lightning strikes and a term is reversed. If they aren’t warning you about this, beware optimism.

I’m sorry you’re going through this – reminds me of a time we had to stop mid term and do a mistrial because a parent testified that they were high on the stand. Had to start over 5 weeks later in front of a different judge. Term trials are very hard to schedule especially in jurisdictions without a lot of court availability. Winceing at that failure to subpoena because I have been in that boat-- sometimes IDK who my witnesses are until my dependency parent shows up with them at the term trial and demands we let them testify. Our AAG used to let them because she knew a witness like that was unlikely to hurt her case against the parent and the failure to offer evidence could give them grounds for that appeal.

I hope I am wrong and your final orders are actually final but it sounds like there’s some obstinacy, so. Fingers crossed for you.