There’s no joy to be got in posting over there. A known bad actor with a thread hundreds of posts long came in spewing her bullshit and they not only treated it credulously but started making up narratives that could paint others in a negative light.
That site is the grease trap at the bottom of the MU* community. Everyone who is not a complete piece of shit has moved, and posting there is just for that clown show to pick apart in a safe space for them.
simplications if you’re reading this:
No hard feelings. I felt awful that you got banned. If I’d read what I wrote from the perspective you had, I would have wanted to scream at me too.
I didn’t really understand what I was getting involved in. I’m not gonna say y’all over here are nice, but you don’t seem like you have malice.
Whenever I hear that awful people like Macha have friends I just wonder what kind of person stays in the orbit of someone like that. Ghost answers that question. Imagine being a simp for Macha.
lol set the record straight to the five people that still use MSB
I don’t think anyone here wants to play a bigot or have bigotry-related RP. I do think there is a meaningful difference between This is the real 1920s with everything that means but we’re not going to have themes of bigotry in scenes and This is a different 1920s where bigotry has been solved. That distinction is going to be important for some groups of players (either way).
@RedShoes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
The game’s goal right now is to focus on the Time Jump in to the future, and that’s what we ultimately hope to keep the game’s direction entirely aimed toward.
lol this absolute narcissist shit right here. Kind of had to expect it since we had an actual flying monkey show up in real-time in a thread about a missing stair. It’s got to be wild being on the inside of a cliche and imagining you’re going to gaslight an entire forum full of people with finely tuned bullshit detectors.
I really like that you laid out a narrow focus for the themes and tone you want in the Thematic Integrity section. Nothing takes me out of the gritty futuristic economic horror or whatnot faster than getting a message delivered by Fluffles the Rainbow Colored Corgi.
I think it’s impossible to approach this issue without first deciding what you want to incentivize, most importantly whether you want to see generalist or specialist characters. The mechanical solutions for each are going to be complete opposites.
@Roz said in ETO Drama Fork:
@shit-piss-love You can find all the context starting here! It was a wild conversation spanning many pages, but it was at least a contained conversation.
What I needed in my life today was a half dozen full on belly chuckles and this delivered, thank you.
edit: I had almost stopped at him trying to shame people for having boundaries with “Mind you, you have to soft verify you’re over 18 to play on this MUSH.” and I am glad I didn’t because it just got better and better. Don’t you love it when you can smell someone’s belief structure through the internet?
double edit: Holy shit I need to find a way to work “I wouldn’t have to mainsplain if ya’ll would stop being wrong about the facts.” into my future conversations.
@Vulgar-Boy said in Thenomain’s GMC Code:
I wanna be have a MUSH and have 100 players so I can have 100 friends, and no one can say no to being my friend.
You didn’t have to go right for the throat like that god damn
@Griatch said in AI Megathread:
But yeah, for professional artists, I fear the future will be grim unless they find some way to go with the flow and find a new role for themselves; it will become hard for companies not using AI to compete.
This is what I expected, but the first people that made me start considering the positive effects of AI on the field of professional art are my friends who are professional artists. Most of them seem really happy with adding to their toolkit. Concept Art in hours what would previously take them days, or in the same amount of time being able to do significantly more iterations resulting in what they feel is a better final product. The takeaway I’ve got from conversations with them is that it will come down to quality of studio whether they use AI tools to level-up the art departments, or attempt to replace them. But as one said “An AI isn’t going to take my job. It will be a professional peer who knows how to use AI better than me.”
@SpaceKhomeini said in AI Megathread:
For sure, generative AI as a replacement for real artistry is a grotesque insult, but until we start deciding that artists and people in general should be allocated resources to have their needs met regardless of the commercial viability and distribution of their product, we’re just going to be kicking this can down the road.
Absolutely. I’m in no way endorsing the destructive effects AI is going to have. I just don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle with technology. There doesn’t seem to be a good way out with our economic model. We could be living in a world filled with so much more beauty and culture.
@dvoraen said in AI Megathread:
@SpaceKhomeini said in AI Megathread:
@Faraday said in AI Megathread:
@bored said in AI Megathread:
Thrash and struggle as we may, but this is the world we live in now.
Only if we accept it.
The actors and writers in Hollywood are striking because of it.
Lots of folks in the writing community are boycotting AI-generated covers or ChatGPT-generated text, and there’s backlash against those who use them.
Lawsuits are striking back against the copyright infringement.
Again, to be clear, I’m not against the underlying technology, only the unethical use of it.
If a specific author or artist wants to train a model on their own stuff and then use it to generate more stuff like their own? More power to them. (It won’t work as well, because the real horsepower comes from the sheer volume of trained work, but that’s a separate issue.)
If MJ were only trained on a database of work from artists who had opted in and were paid royalties for every image generated? (like @Testament mentioned for Shutterstock - 123rf and Adobe have similar systems) That’s fine too (assuming the royalty arrangements are decent - look to Spotify for the dangers there).
These tools are products, and consumers have an influence in whether those products are commercially successful.
Right now at work I’m having a horrendous time dealing with upper management who are just uncritical (and frankly, experienced enough to know better) about this sort of thing.
“ChatGPT told <Team Member x> to do thing Y with Python! It even wrote them the script!”
Me: Uhh, do they have any idea how this works? Or how to even read the script?
Dead silence.
I’m not letting this go on in my org without a fight.
Please tell me you’re documenting this, because this is a security breach waiting to happen, or other litigation.
At work we were recently talking about AI Hallucination Exploits. Essentially, sometimes AI-generated code calls imports for nonexistent libraries. Attackers can upload so-named libraries to public repositories, full of exploits. Hilarity and bottom-line-affecting events ensue.
@mietze I’d like to think I am one of the latter people you describe but who knows. Like I said I care about consent, and I don’t go around looking to clobber scenes and steal the spotlight, I’m not looking for special treatment and I see RP as a collective activity. I just like to take a position a few degrees off of the norm but still within theme and have enough rough edges or diverging opinions or whatnot that I can make something that I find interesting happen. I have a lot of thoughts on the topic but it’s quite a tangent from the thread.
I think we’re just going to see writing and graphical art go the same way as physical art that can be mass-produced. I can get an imitation porcelain vase mass produced out of a factory for $10 or I can get a handmade artisan-crafted porcelain vase for $1000. They may seem alike but a critical eye can spot the difference and some people may care about that.
@STD My experience was more that if you are playing a character whose goals run at odds with the norm, and you’re trying to do it in a way that respects the consent of others, your situation is that you will succeed at nothing unless those others consent to lose. And that happens so infrequently as to be essentially never. You can be an antihero/villain/difficult person that other people really like to play with but that doesn’t translate into success of your goals. The prevailing group play style in MU* is “we’re all here to collaboratively beat the bad thing” and any kind of rock in the shoe, no matter how fun to RP with, is going to get iced out of actual impact.
@somasatori said in But Why:
I think, in a way, it’s important to have people play villainous characters to allow people to play heroic characters.
Hi it’s me I’m the person who plays exclusively non-heroic or outright villainous characters. For me personally I think it is that in my 30+ years of RPing I’ve GM’d 90%, and so my default mode of operation in RP is to try to be some kind of motive force that gives others players something interesting to work with. That can be outright villainous but it can also mean being an iconoclast in a world of true believers, and lower class character (with class consciousness) in a high class world, or a criminal in a world of rules followers.
Tangentially, this preference is also what has turned me off MU* over time. This could be a whole other thread but going against the grain (ie. from my perspective, providing the Conflict that makes narratives interesting) has a high chance of provoking an equal OOC reaction that gets you gatekept.
@shit-piss-love said in But Why:
edit: idk where the line is here can the whole site just be R&R please
I mean, 100% to everything else you said and I know this comment was probably supposed to be purely facetious but still
Yeah mostly I was just trying to throw some salt and pepper on my last sentence in the paragraph to maybe avoid a rules infraction.
@Testament said in But Why:
The argument to me feels more like moralistic grandstanding than anything else.
Yeah that’s where I land. Like I have my personal prefs of what I want to play and in what genres. Others have theirs. “You are bad for wanting to play this type of character and/or in this genre” is just bargain basement self-aggrandizement.
I’m actually gonna go a step further here in disagreeing with the OP. I also think it is Absolutely Fine and Good to play an evil, serf-oppressing, conflict-profiting, violence-dispensing, privileged aristocrat who is actively engaging in Bad Things. The assertion that it is only morally defensible to play Good Folk Doing Good Stuff is puerile and trite. Engaging with such a role is no different from reading through Antony Beevor’s Fall of Berlin.
This hobby allows for a lot more than simply playing heroic characters. Playing an unheroic character can be a vehicle for exploration of the human experience, and can be equally valid whether or not that character goes through a redemption arc. Our world is complex and built on circumstance and context; it can be interesting to explore ideas like “why good people do bad things” or “what drives someone to rationalize acts of evil” or even simply “what is the internal experience of someone who is put in a position with few options that don’t hurt someone”.
Even more simply, narratives are built on Conflict. Villains (and I am using broad terminology to describe what is a very wide spectrum even before contextualization) serve narratives by prompting Conflict. Heroes with no Conflict just sit around and have tea parties (obligatory: playing TeaMU is a morally defensible activity even if i personally find it boring af).
