she/they
KB is right. There is nothing to be gained. There is no understanding to reach. There is no communication to be had. The other night I was so profoundly disappointed in what has become of a good place that I was honestly pretty bummed out.
It is what it is. They are what they are. Let them be. And leave them there.
Hi, guys:
Any posts elsewhere will be moved to this thread.
This is not a thread for arguments or nasty debates. We will be closely monitoring and moderating this thread in a way that we usually do not.
This is a thread for grieving, sharing resources and help for people who are impacted by all of this (which is all of us, but some more than others).
I’m just glad Ghost is there to lead the way to a brighter, more positive future.
Let’s not be reductive genitalia-essentialists about gender no matter where we are in the forum.
I think it’s pretty obvious why HannahBanana has been banned, but just in case it’s not obvious, I don’t care where you are: ablelist language isn’t okay, gatekeeping sexuality isn’t okay, none of this is okay.
https://forum.aresmush.com/t/v1-0-0-released/923
I don’t know if you guys have heard about this new fangled MUSH server called Ares–
Ares has brought a lot of new life into the hobby. I’ve watched people who hadn’t even logged into a MU* in their life launch and run games. Congratulations to @Faraday, and THANK YOU!!
While users can create new threads, they cannot create new categories. I believe that’s what you mean when you say new boards, yeah? We made a conscious choice not to include a politics category when we created this forum and right now that is not changing.
Politics isn’t a team sport. It’s life or death for many of us.
It’s not that we don’t think it’s important, so we won’t make space for it; in many ways, it is TOO IMPORTANT. This is especially true given the hands-off moderation stance I’d rather see on this board. We just don’t have the time, bandwidth, expertise, capacity, etc. to be able to moderate those discussions.
I’m sorry.
@Dreampipe said in Bannings:
There are actually a fuckton of literal fascists in this hobby;
There are fascists in a lot of places, alas. Fascists in gaming is an interesting area people are working on, but the far right were early adopters of online spaces (including back in the BBS days). Their methods will only ever get a small percentage of the population, but if you have so many people you can access, you can get to a much greater proportion of that small number and…well.
As someone who is super into history, Norse mythology, Crusader Kings, punk rock, and RPGs, the amount of time I have to spend squinting at people with common interests and going “Okay, but are you a fucking Nazi?” is both alarming and exhausting.
Seconded. I’m a white dude and it’s sometimes really anxiety inducing to talk about those kinds of interests without feeling like, “guys I swear I just like the stories, I’m not a white supremacist”. Double whammy because I also like power metal.
At least a lot of them usually don’t take long to go mask-off. I remember people using SS designs in medieval games like Mordhau or Chivalry. No it’s not a pair of lightning bolts, I know what you are.
Look, I can’t lie. I would use a pair of lightning bolts because I think lightning bolts look cool.
AND THEN I WOULD BE FUCKING MORTIFIED WHEN SOMEONE TOLD ME.
Pour one out for everyone born in 1988 who is innocently making very poor choices about their usernames.
I am glad that we have largely left behind all-white games in the L&L space. I think the expectation that most people have is that you will see a diverse cast of characters. I appreciate that about Concordia, particularly where they have course-corrected with their pantheon. I think they are doing some other interesting things in that space, too.
There is maybe no perfect way to handle the issue of cultural diversity and real-world inspirations, but I still think that what they are doing is worth an upnod. You got your Targaryens, sure, and your red-heads, and your Romans–
But there is also a house that has clear East Asian influences and one with South Asian influences. I grabbed one of those from the roster because I am always dying to see something – anything, please, god – that isn’t just your standard Western French-British-Something take on fantasy. Then I ran into players who maybe had been expecting something more Western in the house, so I popped in a request to get more clarity. I wanted to know what staff’s intent actually was, and I like the answer I got.
Rather than directly copy and paste real-world cultures into the game, they’ve made a choice to draw on multiple places for inspiration to avoid generalizing, tokenizing, or fetishizing any real-world culture. In this case, yes, the house has elements of North India, but also Moorish Spain. I’m kind of curious if there’s a connecting thread of thought in that they were both extension of Islamic power at times, what with the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire in North India, but I haven’t sat them down for details – and I actually enjoy classical India better so DON’T FEEL THE NEED TO DRAW THAT LINE ON MY ACCOUNT.
Right now, at this moment, all I really care about is that they are doing something different, something interesting, and something coming from a place of curiosity and thoughtfulness. I wouldn’t say that they are a perfect game, and there’s choices I wouldn’t have made, but holy fuck please I hope more fantasy L&L games in the future draw from a wider well than the tiny Western European fantasy well.
Some stuff on grid vs web scenes forked into it’s own thread here: https://brandmu.day/topic/644/grid-vs-web-scenes/10
@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:
TEZ, THIS IS OFF TOPIC, fork me if you want.
fork u
(from https://brandmu.day/topic/643/rp-safari-pacing-styles/80)
Also banned: just watch me, a certain hunger, Sub-Zero, Hatsune Twe, kittypilled, smoke break
@MisterBoring I agree. I think that’s the only position that matters.
Well, except maybe also ‘I don’t want to RP with AI, and it’s against the rules, so people using AI are breaking the rules, ban them.’
@somasatori said in AI In Poses:
Even the staunchest “LLMs reduce the mental load/writing barrier on the player to dig into the story” advocates have to admit that would be a useless future for the hobby.
No one has to admit anything and YOU CAN’T MAKE THEM!!!
@somasatori This is inaccurate to how they would actually respond. I was actually just saying this elsewhere, but the technology changes RAPIDLY, and we are fooling ourselves to think that is what it looks like, or that what we recognize now we will recognize in six or even three months.
@somasatori Yeah. It looked like AI to me and it’s not the only game out there that looked like it had AI content to me. I don’t personally care as much about code, probably bc I’m not a coder, but the content is the heart and soul of it for me, and it sucks to see.
@Jumpscare said in AI In Poses:
@Tez said in AI In Poses:
I saw a lot of people going ‘oh no, people might think I’m AI’ on the other thread but no examples of anyone actually getting incorrectly flagged. I think these are strawmen. Have we seen it happen?
I put some of my writing for room descs into an AI detector. Almost every one was marked as AI. Then I tried some from a former builder who I know was using AI (but I hadn’t honed my personal detection methods well enough to spot it, and we’ve since removed all of her descs). And it came back as not AI. This was back in early 2024, though, so maybe detection methods have improved in almost 2 years.
I think a lot of us can say this about things we’ve written. Sometimes, especially because as a hobby we do often write a lot , and often in the areas these datasets are trained on, the way that we write CAN look sus. Lord knows we do, and have, and did raise this concern in the other thread.
But has anyone actually disciplined you for the things you’ve sincerely written, though? That’s the case I’m actually interested in, not the anxieties people have that they might accidentally get flagged as AI and banned on an off day. I just don’t think that’s happening.
