@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

How much worse would it be to have to experience harassment and also be swiftly booted from the game because the harasser false reported you first and was believed without question so that you got banned and couldn’t report him? No thanks.

oh my god, what a horrible hypothetical situation to imagine, surely it must happen all the time since we hear about it so often

Like. Dude. Even in just the ten years I’ve been on the various incarnations of this board, I could only count on one fucking hand the number of times we saw someone report a false report that wasn’t almost immediately dismissed with ridiculous ease because it was just the dumbass abuser themselves trying to cover their tracks.

This is such a non-problem versus the enormous issue of harassment in the community that it makes me actually angry people push so hard like this to make reporting and being believed so difficult. This is not a court of law and collecting this irrefutable body of evidence y’all always seem to want is literally the last thing on the mind of someone being stalked, abused, harassed, etc. It’s an enormously stressful and honestly embarrassing experience that can leave you too scattered, not to mention staffers like Cujo and the flying monkeys the abusers surround themselves with magically always seem to decide that it’s never enough anyway.

My son’s teacher reached out to me on a conference call with his principal today very concerned. There were some legitimate reasons, but one of their items of evidence of inappropriate behavior was a “drawing of Satan.”

His class was tasked with drawing Nutcrackers after seeing the play, and…

This is the picture, loooooooool.

It’s a goddamn Super Saiyan from Dragon Ball.

Never change, Utah. I am honestly annoyed that they escalated this in particular BUT ALSO I have been cackling like a swamp witch for a good fifteen minutes since she sent it to me. I needed that laugh so bad.

When I was a teenager playing a Final Fantasy game, instead of simply OOC fading to black during romantic scenes where sex was heavily implied, I would write these elaborate little…intermission paragraphs (???) where a “chibi” version of my character would drag a protective curtain/screen/etc across the fourth wall, and then take a little smoke break or whatever before pushing it back off stage for the post-coital pillow talk. Every time.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHY I DID THIS, I AM SO SORRY

@kalakh said in Bannings:

derp, this thread’s anger summed up in two words:

we are not a community.

We were.

Not to dismiss that anger at all, but just to speak for myself, I always considered complete and utter dipshits like Derp and Ghost to be the narcissistic and annoying outliers in an otherwise pretty decent and engaging group of people that they just happened to desperately seek to belong to. To be frank everyone who kept me coming back to the boards for five years or whatever are more or less here now.

Y’all didn’t lose the community, you lost a website and a few bad apples. Personally that’s just one big ¯_(ツ)_/¯ to me, even if it was one of the shittier ways it could have happened.

I am bummed Gany made the decisions she made, that’s certainly disappointing from someone I have had a lot of respect for, but hopefully she sees the light someday. As for the other pigs wallowing in the mud back there…I mean, nothing of value was lost imho and I always figured they were bound to drop off under the weight of their own toxicity eventually.

Hope you all can find some healing in getting away from all that.

Alucard is very camera shy and always tries to scoot off when I’m taking pictures, but I finally managed to capture this beautiful portrait featuring his magnificent whiskers, lol:

@hellfrog

The “oh I gotta do some MANLY LIFTING from my TRUCK for my WIFE” is really what makes it for me. It wasn’t enough to lie, it had to be some macho shit too.

They all just randomly came and piled on top of me.

Guess I just…live here forever now.

@KarmaBum

Seriously, though. I don’t think I have seen a more fucking weaselly response in…ever?

@RedShoes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

All sexual harassment claims are taken seriously though, and if deemed valid, and actively a serious burden, then expect that player to get banned.

Oh, it’s not enough that it is “valid,” a claim also has the mountain to climb of proving that is actively a serious burden.

I just…what. Actively a “serious” burden. So, what, people who aren’t harassing…enough(???) just skate on by, according to that standard.

It can’t be said often enough, fuck that dude.

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

my big guy loves to just come flop back and nap like this on my tum, it’s such a bright spot in my life

@Pacha said in Empire Discussion Thread:

However, Ada does also come across as a little thin-skinned here. It does feel like she has jumped to the nuclear option very quickly. If that is her definition of brow-beating, she should prepare to feel that way a lot with the average MU crowd, honestly.

gonna disagree pretty firmly. I do not at all think that behavior is typical of the “average” crowd. I have MU*'d for a vast chunk of my life, and while I have certainly met a LOT of people who were pushy, disrespectful, or just straight up walking talking asshole, I have met tons of people who weren’t just fun, but considerate of RL and respectful enough not to cross a line like that – or at least never more than once; everyone starts somewhere, learning is a lifelong process, etc etc.

what you would call thin skinned, I would just say is having a strong boundary against shitty behavior, and it’s going to set a pretty clear precedent for what is and is not an acceptable way to approach Ada. I honestly would prefer more staff to have a very clear and hard line like that, because the only places I ever played where childish assholes were the average were where the staff were too inconsistent and let that kind of incredibly fucking irritating immaturity fly.

it’s their table, you’re a guest, act like it. it’s not hard.

@Warma-Sheen

just for the record, that kind of context paints the interaction differently and would’ve been important to have, but my impression isn’t entirely changed. in your op, you said:

@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:

That’s the log in entirety. Nothing left out. That was it, completely. So be careful if you’re there. Don’t ask questions about policies or procedures. And definitely don’t communicate if you receive mixed messages and are confused.

And no, there were no other incidents that preceded this. It was just this from start to finish. One and done.

so yes, it did initially come off like just out of the blue you got very upset and impatient over small delay, which is not reasonable.

having your expectations set to a different standard and then watching them not be met with no explanation can be frustrating, I’ll give you that, but it was still only a difference of a few days, and this was the first time it had happened? so the way you approached it hit me as very unpleasant especially given that it was, like you said, your very first conversation about the issue.

try not to miss the forest for the trees, like. life happens you don’t have context for, this is something Ada was providing out of pocket at no expense to you, a little friendliness and patience goes a long way.

@Faraday

it wasn’t just canceling the jobs, it was that entire exchange. as Ada called it, getting browbeaten like that over something incredibly minor, to me, reads like a big red flag for what was only going to be an escalating series of headaches and selfish behavior down the road, and showing a player like that the door early really doesn’t seem like a bad move to me.

if you want a GM at your beck and call, just to be frank, there are professional paid online tabletop services that offer that you can go and find very easily. they’re advertised everywhere.

@Faraday

canceling a bunch of other jobs out of frustration because one hadn’t been responded to in less than a week just feels like really entitled behavior in 2025, and definitely doesn’t feel like a polite follow up to me, but ymmv.

@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I cancelled a bunch of others cause having a bunch of actions open that we’re being addressed was really making me feel a kind of way.

you complained that job 18 had been open longest and she points out that it hadn’t even been 5 days? that is looney toons, dude.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 again and gdi I just want my chromed-out hijinks, choom. 🥺

it’s such a rich well for stories about a society on the edge and the battle against nihilistic excess and exploitation. I’d love to see a smaller game that really focuses on a specific group of anti-corporate runner cells, who are trying the line between sticking to their ideals and surviving, while public sentiment and massive companies often dead set against them. players would all belong to these cells so would all be loosely affiliated and expected to work together, but could run their own side shenanigans as well.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

However, I think FS3 is just so flexible that it can adapt to any number of settings, and also, there are some experts who have got the combat on it down to such a science that most things can be “made to fit” FS3 even if it isn’t their intended/natural home.

this is specifically what I find frustrating in play – you will never forget that FS3’s being bent out of shape to accommodate something it wasn’t meant to do and that just takes away a lot of the fun for me. I enjoy the “game” part of “roleplaying game” as much as the RP.

Ares is wonderful, I am glad it’s easy to set up and run for so many people and yes, 1000000% I am happy that there are still games out there for that reason, but I think the perception a lot of people have that FS3 = Ares and how few try the other plug-ins is just personally a bummer.

almost every single Ares game, existing and in the works, using FS3 just because it’s what people have gotten used to by necessity.

love and respect FS3 for what it was intended for, and I know this probably sounds ridiculous to anyone who just doesn’t care that much about systems, but personally, it kills my enthusiasm immediately whenever I visit a game’s site for the first time and see it in the wiki for supernatural/fantasy settings. I find the “square peg, round hole” of it all really frustrating.

@somasatori said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

“The staff lost interest in this MUSH and let it fizzle out so play with them at this other one where that absolutely won’t happen again”

As a wise thinker once said: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on-- shame on you. Fool me, uh – you can’t get fooled again.”

I mean, to be fair, the game ran for a few years. that’s a pretty common lifespan. ‍️

I played pretty briefly and it seemed like a good setup, even if I didn’t much like what they wound up doing with the Jedi and Force and all that thematically.

@MeToo

what happened??