@Lurrr I’m not saying anything about Jackaltrade because they freely offered to out themselves by providing their information, but I would like to normalize not showing receipts. It’s occasionally traumatizing to relive that kind of thing, it’s almost always humiliating to show yourself getting degraded, and it’s very likely to result in retaliation from the accused who want to show receipts of how actually she totally asked for it. Let people give the amount of information they feel safe giving, and let the people who receive these kinds of freely-offered warnings either take the warning or not. I don’t think it’s fair to take the experience these people have gone through and add to it a burden of accepting responsibility for meeting the standards strangers need to be convinced.

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

Prove me wrong.

No. You don’t get to come in here today, from nowhere, hiding behind a veil of anonymity that hides the personal stake you clearly have in all this, and appoint yourself the sole arbiter of what are and are not the facts. If you want people to take you seriously, then behave like a serious person. If you want to bark commands like an imperious toddler, then carry on as you are, and I hope you enjoy getting treated like the infant you present yourself as.

When you have to take a mental health break from a game because your life is in a bad enough place you don’t know if you have the fortitude to deal with the game’s atmosphere and then you’re in the shower the next morning asking yourself, Isn’t the fact that you need fortitude to deal with the game kind of a red flag?

I really need to stop going back there to find out what y’all are talking about in these conversations.

Most of those two threads came off to me like people who complain about how America needs more civility in its discourse, where “civility” is code for “never protesting when someone hurts you because that might make people who support hurting you (or just lack the spine to stand up against people who hurt you) feel uncomfortable.”

“How can we heal the community,” moans man who refuses to listen to the complaints of anyone he disagrees with and immediately dismisses them as being part of a clique of people he can’t identify but whose villainous intentions he knows without question. He offers this question in an echo chamber where the people he needs to address literally cannot respond to him, because he has no interest in an answer to the question, just in appearing to be a put-upon peacemaker who is rejected by those unreasonable whisper-campaigning bitches in The Clique.

It’s enough to put my off my dinner. Fuck.

Staff who take action when action is called for.

@hobos said in Bannings:

Yes, nobody has to accept an apology. But forgiveness is still more freeing than holding ten-year-old grudges in a small community.

Please don’t do that. Don’t act like forgiveness is an act of enlightenment. It’s not: it’s a choice that a person makes after considering whether the act would reap greater benefits than it costs to withhold. I feel the only way anyone can present forgiveness as a categorical good is if they have never had to calculate whether forgiveness would put them into unsafe positions.

It’d be nice to be able to be friends and forgive each other and direct our empathy to each other.

Friends respect boundaries. If Vulgar Kitten wants to be anyone’s friend (as opposed to you wanting everyone else to be Vulgar Kitten’s friend, for what reason I can’t even guess), then she is welcome to attempt to earn it by respecting people’s boundaries and offering the acts of contrition they would find convincing. If she’s not willing to do that, then that sucks, but two to tango and all that.

@Kestrel was genetically engineered in a laboratory to be the world’s greatest warrior, but was raised in England as part of a social experiment to see if the nation’s “what would the neighbors think” culture could override her genetic programming. It has not occurred yet to the scientists that neither is the case; that Kestrel might have chosen a life of peace of her own free will and morality.

Kestrel once saved four babies from a burning orphanage. She didn’t rush into the fire or anything silly like that. Rather, she rebuked the fire sharply to stop being such a little attention-seeker, and the flame, humiliated, slinked off into a river to think about what it had done.

Kestrel posts so rarely on this board because she spends most of her time in outer space, visiting the sun. She has discovered the sun is actual a titanic labyrinth made of plasma, which she has been mapping off and on for the last three years. Many alien species are assisting her efforts in exchange for access to her data and to her music recommendations, which they seem to consider a form of currency.

Once per year, Kestrel may summon an army of gerbils to do her bidding. She does not know where, when, or how she acquired this power, but the gerbils know, and they refuse to speak of it.

Kestrel refuses to watch “white savior” movies because it reminds her of the time she personally unified China thousands of years ago. In retrospect, she wishes she’d let them unify themselves, but it’s too late to fix that now. All she can do is try to avoid the embarrassment.

@Pavel said in Bannings:

@Narson said in Bannings:

The idea that both sides don’t recognise the split is harmful? Of /course it is/.

See, I’m not sure it is ultimately.

The reasons behind the split, and the metaphorical violence behind the split? Absolutely harmful and I’m not going to deny it.

For me, the inciting incident was me making a post saying, “This piece of news hurt me very much.”

Derp replied with, “I refuse to engage you on that level, because it is more important to me to show that I am detached and intelligent and saw it coming than it is to acknowledge that this hurts you or affects anyone’s live.”

I replied, "You’ll never stop this, will you?

He replied, “No, and you’re wrong to ask me to.”

That is the violence I personally suffered in this split, the hurt I’ve tried to veil behind my online persona of detached irony.

So, as you say, I do not consider the split itself harmful. Even though I don’t think I’ve played on a MU* in at least eighteen months, what I feel most about the split is relief and a sense of safety, knowing he and his fanboys are out of my life as far as my forum career goes and maybe for the rest of my life. I am well shed of them. I know it won’t stop them from trying to hurt me (and I look forward to learning that someone has screengrabbed this post to bolster their argument that I am stirring the drama), but they are welcome to do what they want. In this moment, I feel peaceful, and wish them all the joy they can find in trying exact revenge on my ghost.

Hey, you. Yeah, you, the one reading this. No, I don’t know who you are. Doesn’t matter for what I’m about to say, and if you think it does, you are incorrect.

You’re cool and the people who deserve you like you for who you are. Got it? You better, because if I catch you saying otherwise, you will be in trouble.

Good. Now go on, get outta here. Go conquer the world. You got this.

I am in such a level of denial that I’ve spent the last three days saying to myself, “Maybe Biden will remember the Supreme Court said he could send in Seal Team 6 and no one could do anything about it.” I accept my denial: I know it’s a protective device to keep me from processing an amount of stress I can’t handle, and the delusion is here to help the pressure bleed off.

But in another way, this denial is almost scarier than reality because Jesus fucking Christ how is this the world where an octogenarian assassinating his political enemies to hold on to power seems preferable

@hellfrog To each her own!

Silent Hill 2.1 doesn’t suck. Not great, but it doesn’t suck. It’s fine. It’s probably even better than okay. That’s more than I expected going in.

@Mushling-0 said in Inuki Ban Thread:

Do we have to go radio silent on bad actors if they are having mental health issues? That is a complicated question and one I don’t have the answer to.

It’s context-dependent because everything is, but as I’ve said in the past and will say again, I’d be hurt and insulted if people let me get away with stuff because of my mental health problems; because that would mean they don’t respect me enough to have faith I can behave responsibly.

@SockMonkey Not at all. I haven’t watched anything with Jared Leto since the whole “mailed dirty condoms to other actors” thing.

@Warma-Sheen I went to a chicken place ten years ago and got food poisoning I won’t describe here because even now it’s upsetting to remember the physical distress it put me in.

Not every cook at the restaurant prepared the meal that made me sick. The servers had nothing to do with it, nor the cashier. Most likely the people who weren’t on shift at the time had nothing to do with it, and I’ve no idea if management did. Maybe the supplier did and maybe they didn’t.

You could argue that by not going back to that restaurant, I’m unfairly punishing the people who had nothing to do with me spending hours doing, well, never mind what I was doing. But I don’t care. I don’t owe them my business after getting briefly hospitalized from eating their food.

Same general principle applies here. I doubt anyone has gone to the hospital because of Retromux, but so what? I’m not the means tester who decides how much suffering is appropriate for a given response. If people have a bad time and don’t feel safe playing there, then they have my full and unreserved blessing to go somewhere better for them. Life is too damn short.

@DrQuinn Oh, definitely in this case the mods did the right thing. Whether the implied threat was sincere or not, it was still a death threat against a member of this community, and I think that’s unacceptable even if the death threat is against oneself. I’m only putting in my two cents about rules regarding health issues, and hopefully I’m also acknowledging that I can’t and won’t judge if the admins do not choose to accept the responsibility of another person’s continued existence just because they want to keep a board for bitching about make-believe vampire and superhero games relatively civil.

@Third-Eye I mostly disagree about creating a rule regarding mentions of suicide and bans. Suicide is a health problem, and health problems can’t be treated as having a “one size fits all” solution. A rule that anyone who mentions suicide in this or that context may help people who need to take a step back, but it may also harm people who are genuinely reaching out to a group of friends or a community they feel safe mentioning their problems to.

I think these kinds of problems have to be dealt with on a case by case basis rather than with some sweeping policy. But at the same time, I say I mostly disagree because I can see someone arguing that my position puts the forum’s moderators into the position of being de facto health care providers for people experiencing the most harrowing, intractable health problems imaginable, and I’m pretty sure none of them signed up for that job.

@inuki said in Numetal/Retromux:

I understand why people commit suicide over cyberbullying.

I am genuinely sorry you are dealing with those feelings, and I hope you reach out via whatever resources are available to you for help.

Well I guess I’m going to eat a great big plate of my feelings tonight.