MU Peeves Thread

[Pavel]

[Bessarion]

I wasn’t going to reply, but I also don’t want to be spun up into another forum bogeyman.

I wasn’t lying about who I was. I was existing anonymously. There is a difference. Lying is what I did when I was dysregulated, reactive, and poorly medicated six months ago. I chose a new handle when I started my new game because I wanted to run a great game and prove that I’ve done the work and that I’m actually working on the behaviors that have hurt people and made them uncomfortable in the past without people assuming the worst of me. I think anyone on that game will be able to say that my behavior and gamerunning style speak for themselves.

I am not denying most of what you folks have said. You had interacted with me during some times when I had poor emotional regulation, improper medication, bad ideas about what made good RP, and my trauma and anxiety (yes, I am Jewish, and I have had to deal with Christmas-related trauma and I am now aware of how to deal with that) were activating all over the place and splashing onto those around me. I’m not going to get into the specifics of how and why I was behaving the way I was on SR because it really doesn’t matter, but I am not proud of the way I behaved back then, and I am not proud of the way I behaved in September.

I wasn’t seeking any of you out and lying about who I was to get close to you. I wasn’t going out of my way to interact with any of you. I was minding my own business. Running my game. Tried to join Shattered to play with some of my friends who were there. If I interacted with any of you, it was peripherally and neutrally in a public scene. I wasn’t bothering any of you, and believe me, those of you who don’t like me? I want to interact with you as little as you want to interact with me.

You all said to do better. So I got help and I was doing better. I only joined this forum to promote my game, against my better judgment. I never should have engaged or posted at all beyond my game ad. That’s on me. I guess I have a distinctive writing style.

All I wanted to do was run my dumb little worm zombie game and play magic flying ponies with my friends and avoid people with whom I had bad blood. I actually have mended a lot of fences over on my game and it’s been really good for me and has given me a lot of perspective.

@farfalla was right. None of you are obligated to be my learning experience. That’s why I was doing my own thing and trying to let my work and behavior speak for me.

Other people make new handles or choose not to link for various reasons, including people who are legitimate bad actors. I think I understand how this must look, given the trauma that all of us have with fuckery in this hobby. I’m not denying that I have caused harm, but I am not a bad actor. I am someone whose mental illness has become other people’s problems in the past, which was not okay and I have been learning the skills to make sure that doesn’t happen again in any of my social interactions, online or off. I am also someone who you guys find annoying. Maybe I got a little excited and chatty on channel sometimes. I am still learning how much is okay and how much is annoying. That’s something I still need to work on, and I am actively learning how to manage that. As an autistic woman who didn’t get diagnosed until her thirties, there’s a lot of things I am still working on.

I own my behavior and I think the work that I’ve done on 6ix Remains and wherever else is showing that I am making a good faith effort to not be the kind of person I don’t want to be.

So if you are on my game and want to leave, that’s fine. I am not bothering any of you, other than posting in the same threads as you on this forum. I’d appreciate if you’d do me the same courtesy of leaving me alone as well, like I was trying very hard to do for you folks.

[Narson]

@Bessarion I’m sorry for whatever problems you have, and I don’t think we know one another.

I will say there is a disconnect between ‘I wish to do better’ and ‘I want to interact with people from this group as little as possible’ and then joining under a new pseudonym to invite people (in a community with those you wish to fervently avoid, and who wish to avoid you) in an open call to a space where you have power. That’s fishing a bit too close to where you lobbed the nuclear waste into Lake Springfield.

None of which is to say that’s malevolent or whatever, but as you say, maybe not best with hindsight.

[Bessarion]

@Narson It was one of a couple of places where I advertised my game. I advertised it here because it’s the forum with the most activity and the most traffic. There are more people who post here than the ones who have a personal issue with me, and I’ve gotten some great players that way. Maybe it was a bad move. It probably was.

When I was writing in the second person, I wasn’t speaking to everyone. I was speaking to the individuals who have issues with me, and I am not painting myself as an innocent maligned victim. I behaved very poorly, and they are well within their rights to not want to interact with me. If it ever happened that someone I knew didn’t want to interact with me made a character on my game, my plan was to just give them the same shot as anyone else and interact neutrally and fairly and only when necessary. This isn’t because I am dying to play with them, but out of fear that they wouldn’t respect my privacy if I told them who I was. I was scared of this, but it’s a small community and I figured I could just live and let live and run plot and not be their friend and just let them do their thing. I wasn’t expecting to get any traction at all, honestly, and I’m proud of the safe, friendly, cooperative culture we have been building. I’m worried that I’m going to lose this all now.

I feel like it’s damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

[KarmaBum]

@Bessarion It feels duplicitous.

Your reasons are your reasons, but I think you’d have had a tremendously better shot at restoring good faith if you’d done so without the ‘lie of omission’ first. It feels like you tried to pull a fast one, and that doesn’t leave me with a great deal of confidence that you’re ready to own your past and incorporate it. It’s just not a good look.

In pretending it didn’t happen, you were making us all complicit in what you are not accepting as dishonesty by asking us all to pretend we believed it.

It’s not a good way to start fresh.

All that aside, I truly am glad you are in a better place in your life.

[Bessarion]

@KarmaBum And if I tried to even BREATHE as tek, I would have gotten roasted into the stratosphere. You know this to be true. I never would have been able to do anything anywhere without anxiety and fear that people would see the handle and remember me only for my worst days.

I’ve been mending a lot of fences and my stupid, naive plan was to run a great game and then be like, “See? I said I would do better and I did better.”

I wasn’t seeking you out. I wasn’t causing trouble. I wasn’t getting emotionally dysregulated and reacting to my brain’s funhouse mirror distortion of reality. I get now how this was triggering for you folks and I’m sorry that I caused this. Part of my autism is that I have a hard time anticipating how people will react to things, and I miscalculated.

I was just trying to do my thing in peace. I wasn’t going to bother you or your crew on Shattered. I was going to play with my friends who are there and tell my stories. I’m sorry that I made you uncomfortable when you realized who I was. I never, ever want to make anyone uncomfortable.

In the past, I had a bad habit of what my husband calls Being Angry On The Internet. I would spin myself up. I would lash out. I would do dumb shit.

I picked a new handle because I was afraid, and I was ashamed.

[sao]

@Bessarion I actually think you would have had better luck as tek than as pretending to be someone else.

[Roz]

One of the difficulties in “starting over” in this hobby is that – if you have a big issue or something like that, the sort that would generally inspire someone to want a fresh start, you probably actually don’t at all know who does want to avoid you. You may know some obvious folk if you had overt OOC conversation about the fact, but in that sort of situation, there’s doubtless a number of other people who are actively avoiding on a quieter basis. So you can say that you’re avoiding the people who want you to avoid them, but the reality is that there’s just a big space there of the people you don’t know to avoid, even if you’re operating under good intentions of wanting to give people space.

@Bessarion said in MU Peeves Thread:

@KarmaBum And if I tried to even BREATHE as tek, I would have gotten roasted into the stratosphere. You know this to be true.

I actually think you may have been better served maybe taking a bit more time and actually returning under the same name. Sure, people who don’t want to play with you wouldn’t have joined your game, but that’s already what you want. At that point, you get folk who are comfortable trying out a game of yours, and you can get judged on how it goes. Rebuilding reputation takes time, but I think you may have done more damage to your efforts there with the multiple monikers.

[hellfrog]

@Bessarion said in MU Peeves Thread:

If it ever happened that someone I knew didn’t want to interact with me made a character on my game, my plan was to just give them the same shot as anyone else and interact neutrally and fairly and only when necessary.

Ok but this is deceitful. People who don’t want to interact with you are not hoping you will give them a fair shot, they are hoping you will not hide who you are - so they can not interact with you.

[Bessarion]

@sao @Roz Yeah. It was a misstep and miscalculation. But it was not done with any bad intentions. I’m not blaming my autism here, because I am more than just my neurotype, but I am very, very bad sometimes at predicting how people will react to things.

I did it because I was afraid. I did it because I am trying to keep my cortisol levels down because I’m in the middle of fertility treatments and I selfishly didn’t want to have this conversation. I thought I could just do my thing and do better and disappear into Bessarion and leave tek behind. It was a miscalculation, and I fucked up.

[KarmaBum]

@Bessarion said in MU Peeves Thread:

And if I tried to even BREATHE as tek, I would have gotten roasted into the stratosphere.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

Rebuilding reputation takes time

It may not be what you want to hear, but it is nonetheless true. We all have reps. All those reps are a mixed bag, and you have to accept that. This hobby is too small and has been going on too long to try to get away with this nonsense.

Six months from now, if your game is still going strong and you haven’t gone batshit? That will kick so much ass, because a zombie game would be cool AF!!

But you have to accept that you just reset the timer on that by lying me. That’s part of your rep now.

[helvetica]

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

I actually think you may have been better served maybe taking a bit more time and actually returning under the same name.

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Bessarion I actually think you would have had better luck as tek than as pretending to be someone else.

I actually think this was fine.

[Bessarion]

@hellfrog Yeah. I fucked up. I framed it as “me being the bigger person” when I was trying to navigate this, because the way I was thinking about it was this – you folks don’t know me from Adam. If I ran into you on the street, you’d have no idea. You don’t know me as a person. You do know the behaviors of mine that you have seen. I figured that if I wasn’t behaving that way and if I was not trying to buddy up to people who I knew didn’t like me, I was doing good.

I did not set out to be actively deceitful. That was not my intention. However, effects are effects regardless of intention, and I seem to have made people upset and uncomfortable with my actions. I am sincerely sorry.

[sao]

@Bessarion If all of this is sincere, and a mistake, etc – why do you have a rule on your game against doing this exact thing that you appear to be doing?

[Bessarion]

@sao The intention of the rule is about lying about who you are to try and get close with and interact closely with people who don’t want to interact with you, a la DownWithOPP. I was not doing that. I was playing with new players to help them get accustomed to the grid. I was playing with my friends who had apped there.

On Shattered, I was specifically avoiding people who I knew didn’t want anything to do with me. I was not buddying up to them. I joined to play with my own friend circle who is playing there.

If I had been trying to get in with KB and their crew or sidle up to someone else who doesn’t like me, that would be a different story.

[KarmaBum]

@Bessarion Real advice: Stop replying at this point.

[Bessarion]

@KarmaBum I will. I just wanted to make clear that my intentions are good and that I don’t have anything to hide, and clarify this misunderstanding of my rule and how I perceived the tenor of my own actions. I was also afraid that if someone asks me a direct question and I don’t answer, I would start being accused of more duplicity and I was having a hard time navigating how to handle that.

[Testament]

@Bessarion said in MU Peeves Thread:

I did it because I was afraid. I did it because I am trying to keep my cortisol levels down because I’m in the middle of fertility treatments and I selfishly didn’t want to have this conversation.

So whatever, I’ll say something, because I’m going to tell you to stop at this point. Because you’re getting wound up. And I’m telling you, stop.

When you apologized to me, I forgave you. I considered the matter closed. But I didn’t forget, decided it would be easier to keep my distance and be polite, and that’s the thing. I never held animosity, but trusting was a bit harder, I’ll admit that.

But also? The only person you’re beholden to is yourself. You’re not responsible for how I choose to feel after it. It’s on me to change my opinion. That’s it. Full stop. You don’t owe anyone anything. You apologized, now you just have to live up to that, so at this point the only person you’re letting down is you. End of discussion. Don’t do better because you want to make amends, the amends will happen because you did indeed try to be better.

And if those people still can’t or won’t get over that? Fuck’em. Seriously, they’re going to think whatever they’re going to think and there’s no point or use in trying to do otherwise. You’re wasting both yours and their time, sad as it might seem, but there are more productive ways to apply your time, like your game, or simply focusing on you. It’s a hard thing to remember that not everyone is going to like each other in a hobby. That’s just the way it is. Not everyone here likes me, and I don’t lose sleep over it.

And that goes for anyone with a ‘rep’. You’re not here to appease everyone. You do what you can to be fair, but yeah, we’re going to screw up, and there isn’t not a single person on this forum who hasn’t been an absolute shitheel to someone at some point. You can either be better and the situation will eventually just be set aside, or people will hold a grudge for whatever reason, justified reasons or not. But again, you’re not beholden to that.

Was it a mistake to hide yourself again? Yeah, probably it was. I really hope you’re honest in trying to improve and better yourself. I really sincerely do. I hope you can shove this in my face at a later date and I’ll eat crow on it.

Be better, but be better for yourself. Anyone who doesn’t like that? Fuck’em.

[bear_necessities]

@Bessarion you’re being disingenuous and it is bothering me that you keep @ting KB when I was the one who called you out, I am the one on Shattered, and I am the one who doesn’t want anything to do with you.

Good luck with your game. I hope you can prove everyone wrong. This isn’t a great start to it.

[sao]

@bear_necessities to be fair, aren’t you and @KarmaBum basically the same person just like @tsar and @Snackness?