Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Liberation MUSH
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@MisterBoring No. It has staff. It just doesn’t have a lot of staff. Whereas most games this size would have dozens of people on staff, there is only a handful.
Reality is, yes, it could use more, but Sun likes to keep the narrative and it’s easier to do with a few hand-picked people.
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There was a lot of back and forth on the old MSB thread about who counted as “staff,” and the idea that Sundance didn’t consider “Directors” to be staff exactly, etc. It was mostly about semantics, tbh.
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@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
It was mostly about semantics, tbh.
We never have arguments about semantics.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in Liberation MUSH:
@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
It was mostly about semantics, tbh.
We never have arguments about semantics.
I feel like NEVER is doing a lot of HEAVY LIFTING THERE, maybe more like ALMOST never, or RARELY, or–
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I wouldn’t use the phrase “arguing semantics,” I think it’s more “debating definitions” –
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I mean are we talking connotation or denotation here?
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While we’re on the topic of semantics let me move some goalposts in such a way as I hope you don’t notice and set up some straw men for later.
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Game is back up.
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Hello folks! As Alamias has said, we are back up! It happened much faster than I thought this morning. Folks are beginning to connect in.
5.161.78.92:2020
This may be temporary, and we might need to shut down for a short time to migrate, but for now, you can hop on in.
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LiberationMUSH: Announcements
Message: 1/30 Author: Sundance Thu Oct 12 2023
We’re Back 17:42:21Hey everyone,
I’m sure all of you realize now that we had some difficulties. And since you were all impacted by it, you all deserve answers. A big question I’ve been getting is how someone like Polk was able to bring the game down. And the truth is that while I knew he could bring the wiki down, I did not think he could bring the game itself down until right towards the end. So how did we get here?
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In the greater sense of things, I am wholly responsible. The buck stops with me. I had opportunities to deal with him before. I didn’t. Why? That’s what I’m going to do my best to answer:
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Polk was here from the very beginning. And while other members of the team often had life events or professional responsibilities and live in different timezones, he was pretty much available 24/7. There was a mad scramble in the beginning, with different members of the team (myself, Ambrosia and Phantasmvore) responsible for different things. I focused mainly on the player-side. Phan got the website, Ambrosia did the coding, etc. At some point in the process, Polk took on responsibility for the wiki and website maintenance. He did a few clever things. He coded a way for the game to interact with the wiki, so accounts there could be activated or deactivated from here, and he coded a web login thing for the directors to manage +jobs from afar. He wouldn’t have been kept around as long he was, without bringing something to the table.
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He generally behaved himself OOCly. No one is perfect, but we all know how this hobby goes. Surprisingly, there were only a small handful of complaints about him over the years, and he was very remorseful each time. Plenty of people here get into fights with fellow players, who then express remorse and we all move on. There was never anything serious, until just two months ago. And those specific complaints (which had more to do with him in his capacity as a player, along with several others) were unfounded. It’s true his social IQ issues made this more difficult than it ought to have.
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Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people. His only official responsibilities here recently, has been the wiki and website maintenance.
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As far as I was aware, Polk was only paying to host the wiki and website. I let him do this, since he put up a bunch’ve referral links on the site (directing to DriveThruRPG - which I didn’t even know about at first, although I asked him to make sure everyone knew they were referral links when I found out). He assured me that they were only going towards server expenses. That, combined with not wanting to give my personal information (since he was the webmaster), was enough for me to leave it alone. I had many other responsibilities here. I assumed if there were any other significant costs, I’d be informed.
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It did annoy me, when I learned recently he was bragging about ‘keeping the lights on’. I told him to not say things like that. And he apologized to me for giving that impression. Since he’s not the one that ‘keeps the lights on’ here. The people that keep the lights on here are you guys. The players who make it worthwhile for the rest of us to tell you stories. Your positivity and your creativity, are worth vastly more than the teeny-tiny amount of money required to run a server. Your time, patience and involvement is infinitely more valuable.
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I could have done more to look into all this, and consolidate more information. It was my responsibility to double check and make absolutely sure. The rest of the team depended on me to be thorough. Ambrosia and Phantasmvore did some truly heroic work to get us back up and running again. And I could have saved them a lot of trouble by dealing with Polk earlier.
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This isn’t completely out of the blue. There’s been conversations about unwinding his involvement here behind the scenes for a while now. I could have forced it last week. Instead, it ended up happening while Ambrosia was asleep half a world away. Again, I’m grateful to her for saving the day, for the umpteenth time. As I’ve told many of you I would not be doing this without her.
Where do we go from here? The domain will be back up as normal in a few hours so even those who don’t know the IP can still log back in. Hopefully the website and wiki by this weekend. It’s going to make us all double down on our commitment to getting things fully back on track here. And Polk will never be involved with this game, or any project of ours ever again. I hope at some point in his life he finds peace, because he burnt a lot of bridges with a lot of people, who did their best to help him.
she/her | playlist
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Please excuse me entirely ignoring the point to grumble “that’s ‘bunch of’”
But anyway, good for y’all getting your game back.
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@Roz I mean, from what I’ve been told. There have been many complaints over the years. Even if that is false, how can she ignore his public facing bigotry over the years and his banning from most if not all of the other active games recently?
This whole post feels disingenuous. “I’m at fault, but I swear I didn’t know Polk was that bad!”
Except for a large majority of the community who were aware that he was, yes…that bad.
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@SuspectHound okay everyone keeps talking about how polk is banned from ALL THE GAMES EVER. what games has he actually been banned from??? i think i only coexisted with him on one game that he’s been gone from for years
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@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
And while other members of the team often had life events or professional responsibilities and live in different timezones, he was pretty much available 24/7.
has this level of involvement ever not been an enormous red flag?
I understand there are people whose life circumstances mean their social outlets are limited, but like…nearly all the people who are permanently online in the hobby have been, in my experience, deeply uncomfortable to interact with. they almost always just get incredibly weird and emotionally invested to a very unhealthy degree.
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@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
@SuspectHound okay everyone keeps talking about how polk is banned from ALL THE GAMES EVER. what games has he actually been banned from??? i think i only coexisted with him on one game that he’s been gone from for years
I saw him banned from a game called Modern Nights. He was a mage PC, had a huge public meltdown. That was right around the time Liberation was just going to open.
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@Pan Recently was banned from COH too from what I heard from someone who was there.
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@Wizz said in Liberation MUSH:
@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
And while other members of the team often had life events or professional responsibilities and live in different timezones, he was pretty much available 24/7.
has this level of involvement ever not been an enormous red flag?
I understand there are people whose life circumstances mean their social outlets are limited, but like…nearly all the people who are permanently online in the hobby have been, in my experience, deeply uncomfortable to interact with. they almost always just get incredibly weird and emotionally invested to a very unhealthy degree.
Even if your circumstances limit your social outlets, might I suggest still logging off often enough to get a break from being Online All The Time. It is amazing how some time to decompress from the assault of all the Online Things does amazing to ground yourself and your attitude.
Otherwise, you get people like Polk who are like ‘yeah it’s totally reasonable to try to hold a game hostage so that some online person thousands of miles away will say on a public channel that she trusts me’. Which-- you know.
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@Meg Reading the logs of the goings-on for the Public channel alone, I kept thinking: “this is surely all a sign of a stable genius” and getting more and more amused/afraid/concerned.
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@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
- Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people.
Well, that’s just not true. He very much did unethical things as Director.
Sundance(sun) pages: There’s two elements to this. The first element is 1) Polk should absolutely not have disapproved you on his own initiative. He knew that the moment he did it, and he already apologized to me in page about it, before I sat down. I had him immediately re-approve you, since I’m the only one who can carry out OOC discipline here.
I won’t say she’s just flat out lying. Maybe she just forgot, but he was definitely unethical as Director. Maybe she didn’t consider that situation because, in her view, she fixed it? (She didn’t actually fix it, she just reversed his decision, which still left a host of problems. Not the same thing as fixing it.)
But…
If she did just forget, I gotta tell ya, it sucks to have been so severely fucked over by Polk in the exact same temper tantrum, table flipping way and then forgotten about by Sundance like you never existed and didn’t spend months of your life researching, writing, and on a few occasions driving through LA in order to desc half of her ginormous, unnecessarily large grid to give her 200+ grid spaces and builds so that as many spaces and builds as possible were as accurate to the actual RL locations as they could be, all the way down to neighborhood blocks that had no notable features except for how much graffiti and trash were visible or how many and what types of cars were parked on the street. Granted, I did all of that willing and no one asked me to do the extras, but it is too much to expect that you and the reason you left the game not be forgotten about? Apparently, that might be.
So… hopefully it wasn’t the latter. That would blow.
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@Wizz said in Liberation MUSH:
@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
And while other members of the team often had life events or professional responsibilities and live in different timezones, he was pretty much available 24/7.
has this level of involvement ever not been an enormous red flag?
I understand there are people whose life circumstances mean their social outlets are limited, but like…nearly all the people who are permanently online in the hobby have been, in my experience, deeply uncomfortable to interact with. they almost always just get incredibly weird and emotionally invested to a very unhealthy degree.
That was the first thing I said to myself when reading this. 24/7 availability is NOT a good thing. Even if someone is not working or involved with family for whatever reasons, it suggests that they have put far too many psychological eggs in one hobby basket and that is going to end badly somewhere down the line.
Look for people to work with who have boundaries and other things in their lives they value. People who can make a commitment and keep it? Sure. But also people who know how to balance their time and investment.
