Okay, as the game runner in question, I totally want to spill some tea.

The guy in question contacts me out of the blue on Discord to tell me that he won’t play my game if Cobalt staffs there. I don’t really remember this guy at all, and what’s in our chat history is that he remembers me fondly from Arx before he got banned from there.

So he’s not going to play my game because of one of my longtime friends, so I’m like, “Okay, cool.”

He continues to message me that my game will fail because he and all of his friends won’t play because Cobalt bans people, and I’m like, “Nice. I’m enjoying my small game with its awesome community.”

He ceaselessly insists that the game won’t last more than a month (it’s already lasted years, if in a somewhat dormant state), that I’ve doomed myself by hiring her, that he cannot play because if she sees his IP she’ll ban him as a matter of course, and that he’s just so sad because the game looks great and has such potential but a full third of Ares players simply won’t play a place where Cobalt has a staff bit because she’ll power game.

So this is how I learned that @Cobalt is like a ward against creepers.

Also, I asked my players if they wanted to have open sheets, and they were kind of mixed. Not a big deal to them. We’re not very crunchy. But it’s Ares. That’s something I can do in a moment if my game community so desired.

With the caveat that I am not a doctor, I would like to note that you have already explained your own peeve. You are seeing an actual doctor who is working to get you on medication that will likely treat these symptoms of depression, and you largely need to wait for them to get to the right dosage in your system to help make things better.

@Testament said in MU Peeves Thread:

…I’m on new medication, seeing an actual psychologist who is helping me get properly diagnosed…

… But I know I’ve withdrawn from pretty much, well, everyone, beyond a very small handful of people. It’s hard when I think about the idea of “Hey you should mush, you enjoy that.” But then I just think ‘but what’s the point?’…

…I’ve thought about leaving the hobby altogether, but I haven’t. I still log in, still look at things, but there’s just no desire. I keep wondering if there’s something wrong with me…

That’s almost certainly why you’ve withdrawn. Why you wish to have the desire you don’t feel.

And it might very well come back.

Or you’ll get to a point where you’re like, “Yeah, there are other things I’m enjoying more and I can choose to leave that hobby behind.”

But in any case, I wish you the best, and I hope that your doctor finds quick treatment for you so that you can get back to choosing and desiring with clearer thoughts, free from the fog of depression. Because that’s likely what’s wrong with you.

I am/was/will be running a small supernatural urban fantasy game in FS3 that is explicitly not WoD.

And one of the problems I had was people coming in with expectations that they were going to get to play WoD characters that they’d dreamt up for WoD games that didn’t exist. People who didn’t understand that I didn’t want to learn WoD because I’m not running a WoD game.

We also have the issue of all staffers being cripplingly ADHD, which means that the game owner disappears without response at times because he can’t plan his time well enough to allot for GMing. (And also, RL has been cruel over the last 5 months in particular.)

We almost drowned in an influx of players at one point, and I shut down chargen for awhile.

See, it’s a little like wedding invites. Not everyone you invite shows. Not everyone who doesn’t show RSVPs properly. So because not everyone you invite plays, you invite more than you figure will actually play. This isn’t a problem unless they all show up to play.

What I ended up doing was empowering a bunch of players to tell any story they liked, so long as it was documented somewhere. And since it’s Ares, I let them all have permission to see backgrounds with the caveat that I trusted them not to look at things they shouldn’t or didn’t want to know.

Treat backgrounds like they have spoiler tags. The information’s there, but you don’t need it, so you don’t look.

Anyway, I’m going to go take a nap. I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. We’re all fucking exhausted.

I feel like any player who cannot seem to treat people with kindness and respect on their own game is unlikely to treat people with kindness and respect on my game.

As such, she’s been “disinvited” from Under the Stars. I sent her a very polite note indicating that we did not feel that she was right for our collaborative environment, and I have heard nothing from her since.

I have noticed a certain amount of new players joining us who had concerns about her presence. She has been unapproved, and if she makes herself a nuisance, she will be Gone. Not ‘dead’, just gone. I have no need to be petty and spiteful. I do not care to be vindictive.

@GF First, you’re not making it about you by sharing this. You’re recognizing that you were also a victim of abusers and manipulators, and there is strength in numbers for victims. It’s harder for an abuser to gaslight you if you have other people telling you that, no, the lights aren’t dimmer when you come in the room.

Second, you are not to blame for being a victim. You are not the reason you were abused.

If you look at @Cobalt’s tale, and I do factor into it at the end there, you can see a pattern wherein each abuser made it easier for her to be abused by the next one. That is why people who are victims of abuse tend to stay victims of abuse. Their abusers teach them how to be abused and they don’t realize that there’s any other way. That is why you cannot overcome the idea that your worth in online RP is tied to your sexual availability.

Your abusers taught you to signal your sexual availability, and other abusers know these signals and take advantage of them. It is not your fault that you have been preyed upon, though. You are never at fault for abuse you have suffered. You should work to break the cycle though, so that you do not suffer more in the future because of this vulnerability.

In any case, realizing you can break the cycle is a very important first step in actually breaking it. It took 9 years to extricate @Cobalt from her ex-husband, after all.

(An aside: the ex-husband is the one who made me realize that some men will mansplain to absolutely anyone they find threatening in an effort to puff themselves up.)

I am running a game right now, and it’s been a fantastic experience. Everyone has been very chill with the idea that we are all adults and sometimes RL makes us do some adulting, however unwillingly.

Sometimes I feel bad, because I’ve had some rotten luck RL lately, but everyone has been so understanding and kind. My game running partners have also had RL rear its ugly head, and we’ve had player storytellers step up in a big way to keep things rolling. Turns out, if you empower folks to tell stories without a lot of overhead, with a system designed for trust and collaboration, they tend to jump into it enthusiastically.

And the scenes! A character with a ghost problem has just run with it, and it’s hilarious. The characters are more horrified by human treatment of some mummies rather than the mummies themselves. And everything is just this charming dark humor in the face of the end of the world. I love it all so.

Makes me feel so good!

@Cobalt I was aware you existed, but we were not yet really friends at that point. I’d gone through a horrific breakup right before joined LA MUSH, and I think we solidified our friendship about a year or two later.

I remember the mild horror I felt when I found out your ex was 9 years older than me and I was 9 years older than you. I’m pretty sure he tried flirting with me in a subtle sort of way, but I didn’t even notice. He just wanted attention, and he kept yours by putting you in a box with no real ways out.

You are not the first person who ended up at my house when they left an ex. My mom was surprisingly copacetic about me having a “college friend going through a bad breakup spend the night” while I lived with her post Hurricane Katrina, maybe because she realized that all the girls who needed a place for the night were escaping from bad situations and needed that super safe energy. (My poor spouse sighs when I need to take in a stray in need, but never tells me no.)

@Testament said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

But like @Wizz, I’m sure there were things I saw and didn’t pay much attention to, under the idea that it was ‘just how things were’ at the time when a lot of us were young and taking part in the hobby. Had I had the knowledge and wisdom I do now, I wonder if I have acted differently. Try to tell a friend that who they were getting involved in wasn’t maybe the best idea ever. How many times I may not would have just stayed quiet.

Sometimes warning someone who has a crush on a predator helps, sometimes it works, but more often it does not.

After all, part of the grooming is reminding them that they’re mature for their age, that no one understands them like they do, that though the world may be against them, they will fight for their love. Part of the grooming is warning against warnings.

You want to be able to make a difference, and to some degree, you can: by teaching people what the warning signs of predators are, by keeping people from feeling isolated and friendless, by reassuring people that they have value. You can also make it clear that you’ll always be a refuge. That you’ll be there to help them rebuild and that there are no insurmountable obstacles to getting out.

You should not feel guilty about not being able to prevent these things. Predators design their approach to manipulate their prey and keep these sorts of warnings from working.

Besides that, being a member of this community who will not allow this sort of predator to thrive does a great deal to… well, keep these predators from thriving.

They’ll always be a problem. Every community has predators of one sort or another. But by shining light on the darkness, we make it harder for them to hide in the shadows.

@mietze I just… don’t bother to share all the logs.

They generally time out after awhile if you don’t share them, and I feel no loss from that. And I never bother filling out the scene information when I start a scene. In fact, sometimes having to fill out that information to share the scene means I don’t bother sharing.

Also, I try to do as much as possible from my client and treat the web portal as a wiki to a large degree. This makes it feel a lot more familiar. I mean, I do check the portal if I’m working on a second scene async or I’m away from home and want to poke at an async scene, but for the most part, I try to do one traditionally paced scene at a time.

So I mostly just set up scenes in Ares so that I’ve got convenient scroll back to reference, and if you think of things that way, you might find it more chill. Look me up for RP. We’ll try it.

@Roz said in Bannings:

@Jennkryst said in Bannings:

@Meg ESPECIALLY since they are still likely locked and invisible to anyone who wants to investigate just what the fuck happened.

It actually looks like the Hog Pit has been reopened even for folks without logins.

When I asked Ganymede for a copy of the database to preserve for posterity, she refused, insisting that MSB was fine and she had it covered. (I presume so that I did not set up a ‘competing’ MSB somewhere.)

I said, “Okay, well. Can you just set the Hog Pit readable so that people do not require accounts to see it? That way, the history is all there for reference.” And she conceded that this was an acceptable compromise.

I’ve used this one for the past 3 years now. The paper is nice and thick, and I use the lined undated paper in the back to keep journal and notes. I use fountain pens, and generally there’s no ink bleed.

@Pavel My character Sorrel, a character whose concept is almost entirely wound around singing and swords, has lost her voice twice as a consequence for poking Powers That Do Not Appreciate Poking. The second time was milder: 13 RL days of whispering and being unable to sing. Inconvenient but manageable. The first time was bad, though. She couldn’t make a sound due to what I referred to as an ‘abyssal throat infection’. And it was fun for awhile, but also it got frustrating OOCly as well as ICly.

And staff was cool about it. They told me to get a PRP run wherein a small group of us took some additional risks to go to a shardhaven and extract the throat infection, essentially. And I did. The player who ran it was extremely excited to do so, and even nicer, staff fast-tracked the approval because they knew I was OOCly frustrated and because I’d been a good sport about it OOCly. (I hope, at least. I was trying to be a good sport about it.)

@mietze I just… don’t bother to share all the logs.

They generally time out after awhile if you don’t share them, and I feel no loss from that. And I never bother filling out the scene information when I start a scene. In fact, sometimes having to fill out that information to share the scene means I don’t bother sharing.

Also, I try to do as much as possible from my client and treat the web portal as a wiki to a large degree. This makes it feel a lot more familiar. I mean, I do check the portal if I’m working on a second scene async or I’m away from home and want to poke at an async scene, but for the most part, I try to do one traditionally paced scene at a time.

So I mostly just set up scenes in Ares so that I’ve got convenient scroll back to reference, and if you think of things that way, you might find it more chill. Look me up for RP. We’ll try it.

I am/was/will be running a small supernatural urban fantasy game in FS3 that is explicitly not WoD.

And one of the problems I had was people coming in with expectations that they were going to get to play WoD characters that they’d dreamt up for WoD games that didn’t exist. People who didn’t understand that I didn’t want to learn WoD because I’m not running a WoD game.

We also have the issue of all staffers being cripplingly ADHD, which means that the game owner disappears without response at times because he can’t plan his time well enough to allot for GMing. (And also, RL has been cruel over the last 5 months in particular.)

We almost drowned in an influx of players at one point, and I shut down chargen for awhile.

See, it’s a little like wedding invites. Not everyone you invite shows. Not everyone who doesn’t show RSVPs properly. So because not everyone you invite plays, you invite more than you figure will actually play. This isn’t a problem unless they all show up to play.

What I ended up doing was empowering a bunch of players to tell any story they liked, so long as it was documented somewhere. And since it’s Ares, I let them all have permission to see backgrounds with the caveat that I trusted them not to look at things they shouldn’t or didn’t want to know.

Treat backgrounds like they have spoiler tags. The information’s there, but you don’t need it, so you don’t look.

Anyway, I’m going to go take a nap. I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. We’re all fucking exhausted.

@tsar Check this bit out. It goes on for a few pages, and I brought screenshots to the party.
https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/53/mu-peeves-thread/1701?_=1695511552641

With the caveat that I am not a doctor, I would like to note that you have already explained your own peeve. You are seeing an actual doctor who is working to get you on medication that will likely treat these symptoms of depression, and you largely need to wait for them to get to the right dosage in your system to help make things better.

@Testament said in MU Peeves Thread:

…I’m on new medication, seeing an actual psychologist who is helping me get properly diagnosed…

… But I know I’ve withdrawn from pretty much, well, everyone, beyond a very small handful of people. It’s hard when I think about the idea of “Hey you should mush, you enjoy that.” But then I just think ‘but what’s the point?’…

…I’ve thought about leaving the hobby altogether, but I haven’t. I still log in, still look at things, but there’s just no desire. I keep wondering if there’s something wrong with me…

That’s almost certainly why you’ve withdrawn. Why you wish to have the desire you don’t feel.

And it might very well come back.

Or you’ll get to a point where you’re like, “Yeah, there are other things I’m enjoying more and I can choose to leave that hobby behind.”

But in any case, I wish you the best, and I hope that your doctor finds quick treatment for you so that you can get back to choosing and desiring with clearer thoughts, free from the fog of depression. Because that’s likely what’s wrong with you.

@Cobalt Chontio was Ares with the Star Wars… you know, I dunno what system it was, but it was very Star Wars. It was cool, though!

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

Ironically, this is because of, as you put it, ‘information transfer and learning’. Without the context it is too likely that the average person will read the sentence and assume it to mean that ChatGPT is functioning like my theoretical program, copying large blocks of text and merely swapping around some words a bit without acknowledgement given to the original writer, as opposed to them understanding that what you are saying is that it does not provide references to where its information has come from.

Are you suggesting that ChatGPT does not just regurgitate paragraphs it finds on the internet? Because it certainly does. Ask @Faraday about how it just vomits up stuff from her website when asked about Ares.

@bored If you replicate an artist’s exact steps with paint and brush on canvas, you still wouldn’t have an original work. You’d have a copy. It wouldn’t be original at all. Indeed, it’s one of the ways the Renaissance painters trained their apprentices. There are paintings which were collaborative efforts and those where it is not clear who actually did the work.

But paintings are not done in pixels. Really, most original digital works only consist of pixels in that they are a model of paint. The value of digital art comes not in its representations on storage media but in the original idea expressed by the artist. In this way, they are just like paintings in that only the one who put the original composition together gets credit for creativity.

Image generating AIs are essentially creating collages of other works, works that they largely are not licensed to use. And while collage can have value as an art form, the fact that something is a collage is part of its acknowledgement as a creative work.

AI is just statistics. There’s nothing intelligent about it, really. AI just looks at the statistics surrounding patterns and does some math to model those patterns.

These tools are not new, and they are not as poorly understood as a lot of fans seem to think. I have a textbook printed in 2006 that has exercises for students to write neural networks, among other things.

Many aspects of biological memories [as compared to computer memories] are not understood.

In 1943 McCulloch and Pitts recognized that a network of simple neurons was capable of universal computation. That means that such a network could, in principle, perform any calculation that could be carried out with the most general computer imaginable. [More precisely, such a network can calculate any computable function int he sense of a general purpose Turing machine.] This attracted a good deal of interest from researchers interested in modeling the brain.

Giordino, Nicholas J. and Hisao Nakanishi, 2006, Computational Physics, Second Edition, Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.

The first edition came out in 1997, and if it’s in a textbook, it’s not cutting edge. None of this is cutting edge. It’s really just that now we have the processing power to do the calculations required and the memory in which to store it.

That said, I found it impossible to land a job in data analytics despite having masters degrees in math and physics because (in part) people seem to love the idea of math and statistics being far more mysterious than they actually are.