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How dangerous is VASpider?
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VASpider is probably not physically dangerous. Emotionally, they’re a heinous person and I would steer far away.
(Also, is it ‘he’ now? I can’t keep track, last I heard they went by ‘they’.)
In Occam I trust.
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The danger Spider poses is likely not in actual violence, but if allowed, they will take over your life and destroy you mentally, emotionally, and financially. They will lie, pretend to not be themself, stalk you. They will find your IRL phone number. They will bypass blocks. They will find your other accounts. They will convince you they have changed, including months-long efforts, only to almost immediately drag you right back into abusive patterns. They will purposefully befriend your friends and then lie to you about those friends and to those friends about you to isolate you and make you dependent on them.
The kind of danger Spider poses can’t be understated - when someone stabs you, there is a clear line that’s been crossed. You can prosecute them for assault. You can go to the hospital.
What Spider does will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Following them on tumblr or bluesky or whatever is fine. As far as I know, they have vaguely progressive and positive takes on social media. The danger lies in being friends with them, and especially in letting any kind of sexual or romantic entanglements happen. Do not engage. Do not DM with Spider. Don’t go to a Discord with them in it, or invite them to yours.
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He and they both, with I believe a preference for he.
@RiotDawn said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
Following them on tumblr or bluesky or whatever is fine. As far as I know, they have vaguely progressive and positive takes on social media. The danger lies in being friends with them, and especially in letting any kind of sexual or romantic entanglements happen. Do not engage. Do not DM with Spider. Don’t go to a Discord with them in it, or invite them to yours.
Perfect. Ty. There’s no risk of any of that happening. I appreciate it.
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And this is why I don’t Discord and am selective about what I share, etc.
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I don’t know if it’s fully fair to judge someone forever for who they were in the past, but that being said, I was on a game with them a few years ago and the behavior described in these older and linked threads is still going strong.
Spider is an intelligent person. They’re self-aware. They know they have these issues. They’re apologetic and explanatory about them. But it doesn’t seem to stop the issues from cropping up, so I eventually politely severed ties and went on my way.
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@Val said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
I don’t know if it’s fully fair to judge someone forever for who they were in the past
In general, I’d agree to a point. I’d perhaps not judge someone, but would be wary of them based on prior behaviour until change has been demonstrated - simply for my own safety/sanity.
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Less dangerous than a heaping handful of other manipulative liars in the hobby.
This is not because Spider is better, but because people will believe you when you tell them Spider is being a manipulative choad.
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@RiotDawn The danger also extended to friends of people they were ‘friends’ or close with. Not just the people they “like”. It seemed as though if they felt like someone was getting “too much” attention they’d make every effort to drive them off… not only with narcissistic tactics to isolate friends but with seriously toxic and insidious social manipulation and malicious gossip for those that they felt were a threat to their “friendships”. They have done this across mediums and social platforms and over years.
They don’t have to be grooming someone to abuse them.
It’s entirely reasonable to use caution and clear boundaries in future interactions with someone like this. If they’ve changed, they will understand.
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@TNP said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
Wasn’t it Spider who lied about having cancer to get sympathy (and money?)? And Surreality would certainly say they were were dangerous as they did thousands of dollars in damage to Surr’s home and refused to pay a cent.
Holy damn, I had forgotten about that story. I remember when Surr first talked about it. I believe they said it was ‘back cancer’ or something like that. That’s probably too mean to say it like that, but goddamn, we digging up some old old WORA lore.
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I’ve only interacted with VASpider on a MU* once to my knowledge.
It was a Star Trek MUSH (I forget the game’s name) and they decided that they didn’t like my character for some reason.
What followed was my being pretty ostracized on the game and barely having any interaction with others. I just… quietly slipped away eventually.
Now, I don’t know for certain if the two things are related (VASpider hating my character and the ostracization), but given the pattern of behavior others have noted with this person… well, it is suspicious.
Of course, it could just be that my character just didn’t jive with anyone there.
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@STD Star Trek Anomaly? Early to mid 2000s?
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@Adora Possibly?
I really don’t remember the name of the game. It was mid 2000s, though, so that’s quite possible.
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Might’ve been Gamma One? Which I think was the Anomaly successor. It wasn’t a game I stuck on but it is the only place I can say I played with VASpider. I was very idle so it was not an interesting experience, but I do remember they played an Engineering character.
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@Third-Eye said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
Might’ve been Gamma One? Which I think was the Anomaly successor. It wasn’t a game I stuck on but it is the only place I can say I played with VASpider. I was very idle so it was not an interesting experience, but I do remember they played an Engineering character.
It might’ve been Gamma One, then. I do remember VASpider played an Engineer.
I played Ivy, the new generation of Long-Term Medical Hologram that the Jupiter Station Holographic Research Institute swore would never, ever develop sapience, we promise totally.
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Never did know how to feel about holograms developing sentience. Data is an accomplishment so unique no one has ever been able to replicate him, but also digital intelligence is so easy to create that the dudes who program holograms can create it on accident?
EDIT: wait this thread is supposed to be about VASpider
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Not to derail the thread, but Data was still pretty unique. His brain was physical and positronic and completely mimicked the way humans operate, whereas the holograms still had adaptive programs with much more limited resources, at least if we’re to believe Voyager and the massive memory purge they had to do to the Doctor.
But that’s a story for a different thread.
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@STD said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
@Third-Eye said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
Might’ve been Gamma One? Which I think was the Anomaly successor. It wasn’t a game I stuck on but it is the only place I can say I played with VASpider. I was very idle so it was not an interesting experience, but I do remember they played an Engineering character.
It might’ve been Gamma One, then. I do remember VASpider played an Engineer.
I played Ivy, the new generation of Long-Term Medical Hologram that the Jupiter Station Holographic Research Institute swore would never, ever develop sapience, we promise totally.
Gamma One.
I vaguely remember Ivy, and I can tell you it wasn’t all because of Spider but a lot because Rapier didn’t like the way the character was played. Why he approved it when he didn’t like it is beyond me, but Rapier had Ideas about how things would go and he’d make your life miserable if you didn’t do things his way ask @Tributary .
As for Spider playing there, they played under the radar for a while and then it came to light and because Rapier refused to remove them from the game it broke his long term OOC/RL friendship with Starfleet (an ex of Spider), and in turn broke my friendship with him as well as I fed into what Rapier would say to justify choosing Spider over Starfleet.
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@Cobalt said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
@STD said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
@Third-Eye said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
Might’ve been Gamma One? Which I think was the Anomaly successor. It wasn’t a game I stuck on but it is the only place I can say I played with VASpider. I was very idle so it was not an interesting experience, but I do remember they played an Engineering character.
It might’ve been Gamma One, then. I do remember VASpider played an Engineer.
I played Ivy, the new generation of Long-Term Medical Hologram that the Jupiter Station Holographic Research Institute swore would never, ever develop sapience, we promise totally.
Gamma One.
I vaguely remember Ivy, and I can tell you it wasn’t all because of Spider but a lot because Rapier didn’t like the way the character was played. Why he approved it when he didn’t like it is beyond me, but Rapier had Ideas about how things would go and he’d make your life miserable if you didn’t do things his way ask @Tributary .
Huh.
That’s entirely new information for me. I had no idea that any of Staff had any problem with the character. I made sure to run it by staff before I even went for the charbit and ask if the idea would fly. Staff seemed quite helpful and enthusiastic about the character if my vague memories are in any way accurate.
Mind you, I think I mostly dealt with Starfleet, so maybe that was the reason?
Still, though, it baffles me that Rapier wanted people to be telepathic and just discern his desires without actually talking to anyone.
Do you happen to recall what it was about Ivy that Rapier didn’t like?
As for Spider playing there, they played under the radar for a while and then it came to light and because Rapier refused to remove them from the game it broke his long term OOC/RL friendship with Starfleet (an ex of Spider), and in turn broke my friendship with him as well as I fed into what Rapier would say to justify choosing Spider over Starfleet.
Interesting. I was completely oblivious to any of this.
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@STD said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
Do you happen to recall what it was about Ivy that Rapier didn’t like?
Doesn’t matter. Rapier had these ideas of how things were going to go, and when things didn’t follow his script, he got passive aggressive and sulky.
Boo-hoo, you torpedoed my favorite NPC, he sulked, and I was like, eh, your NPC knew the risks when you set up this plot this way, and it’s not my PC’s job to bail your NPC out of the choices he made, and why are we even having this conversation it’s a goddamn NPC and your habit of playing it like a PC doesn’t actually make me sympathetic.
And then later, he was like, describe for me how you’re going to fight this evil Bird of Prey jargon, jargon, jargon and I was like, uh, can I make a tactics roll? Because I had to look this shit up on the Star Trek wiki. My character has points in this; I don’t. And he was like, no! Describe how you’re going to attack these things! And I was like, fuck you, no, tell me the difficulty on the tactics roll, fuckhead. So he set the difficulty to pretty goddamn hard, and I hit the roll, and he sulked for the rest of the session.
He also got mad at me for doing statistics on his dumb dice system. Even with plenty of points in Tactics, the odds of hitting that target difficulty were 1 in 6 (about 17%). And when I published a couple of graphs that let people easily visualize where it wasn’t worth putting more XP into something, he ranted and sulked at me. I was like, dude, this is just math, and it’s not cheating to do math. Also, this isn’t school, so if I wanna let my friends copy my math homework, I’m gonna.
As for Spider playing there, they played under the radar for a while and then it came to light and because Rapier refused to remove them from the game it broke his long term OOC/RL friendship with Starfleet (an ex of Spider), and in turn broke my friendship with him as well as I fed into what Rapier would say to justify choosing Spider over Starfleet.
Interesting. I was completely oblivious to any of this.
Of course you were. Because it was all pretty indefensible. Abusive relationship on top of abusive relationship, essentially. Also, as I recall, Spider used his/their/her feminine? wiles to get Rapier to give Spider money he couldn’t afford to give away.
Rapier was delusional and hugely convinced of his own cleverness, and Spider played him like a children’s piano: easily and to the chagrin of all in hearing range.
Which once again comes back to why Spider is dangerous. Spider finds the weakest link and manipulates and uses it, making everyone else in range miserable and/or annoyed.
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@Tributary said in How dangerous is VASpider?:
And then later, he was like, describe for me how you’re going to fight this evil Bird of Prey jargon, jargon, jargon and I was like, uh, can I make a tactics roll? Because I had to look this shit up on the Star Trek wiki. My character has points in this; I don’t. And he was like, no! Describe how you’re going to attack these things! And I was like, fuck you, no, tell me the difficulty on the tactics roll, fuckhead. So he set the difficulty to pretty goddamn hard, and I hit the roll, and he sulked for the rest of the session.
Hit’em with the ol Picard razzle dazzle.
