After nearly 26 years of off-and-on struggle with college — and a whole list of unresolved mental health issues going on at the same time, beginning with my biological mother’s death and the subsequent mixed family drama almost a year after that — I am, today, August 1 2025, officially in possession of a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. (Today is my conferral date.)
It’s been a long road.
I don’t have a horse in the Star Wars MU* race, but I do have a very vested interest in not hearing after the fact about how underage porn happened on a MU*.
(And yes, I do consider it EXTREMELY LIKELY TO OCCUR when underage characters and players are permitted on a MU* with an R-rating.)
You are setting yourself up for potentially serious consequences. So let me make it clear:
DO NOT ALLOW UNDERAGE ANYTHING
@HannahBananna said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@Pavel Thankfully if you had any of the four you’d be smart enough not to start shit with someone who’s obviously always been above you. This ain’t my way of asking. My way of asking was going onto the discord server and politely asking, like an ADULT, something you are STILL proving you’re incapable of being. This is my way of continuing to be an adult and taking away the toys of people who want to be spoiled brats. Like you. Daed.
If this is your way of being an adult, you have a very misguided definition in your mental database.
@Roz said in People Doing Things:
i don’t know if most arx folks have noticed the number of code contributions @dvoraen has made to arx, but i have
@Ashen-Shugar So let’s see if I can explain why I disagree with a metaphor. This is how your point comes across, to me:
I own a building. A crime happens in my building. I’m culpable for the crime because I own the building.
So I suddenly am expected to a) track what goes on in the building; b) had any control whatsoever about what happens inside the building.
That’s ridiculous, and most certainly not how it works in today’s society, otherwise companies and schools would be liable for the mass shootings that happen inside their areas. It’s an absolutely absurd take.
I reject the idea that I need to tacitly monitor everything that happens on a MU* I run because someone might do something illegal. That’s like saying I should wiretap my neighbors because they talked about where to hide a corpse, because I live in the same apartment complex. Oh no, they did something bad, clearly I need to have been more responsible to make sure it didn’t happen so I could tell the cops, to the point of being unethical and invasive in my methods!
No.
Preface: This is not a request for sympathy, forgiveness, or even understanding, because I have no right to ask for any of that.
To start off, I’m posting this because my brain will not shut the fuck up about it even over a week later. I’ve tried to distract myself from it, but the issue will not stop harassing me. It keeps resurfacing. I do wonder if it’s a byproduct of being on the autism spectrum and/or ADHD (and the fact I really take rejection hard), but I don’t know. All I know is that I have to get this off my chest.
I’m not going to answer questions about the details. I’m deliberately leaving out the who and where and focusing solely on the what. Some of you already know about this, because you were involved and/or can guess from my username, which I use in multiple locations (Discord and more), but I don’t want to sweep what happened under the rug and assume everything will be fine. Because it’s not, in the abstract.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I had my first experience with being disinvited from a game. I still can’t really identify what it was I said or did that led to me being approached and told I should go because of my conduct that made other people uncomfortable. There were no sexual propositions or anything of the sort, but the discussion was that my conduct on channels as a guest and during chargen had been noted, and the sum of it led to me being effectively asked to leave.
I was absolutely shocked and anxious over it, sitting in my chair reading that, because no one had voiced any explicit concerns to me saying there’s an issue until that moment, but at the end of the day what mattered was that I did something that bothered other people to the point that staff had to get involved and say this isn’t the place for you. My response was “Alright.” and that I’d take my leave, and I logged off right after.
I can only remember talking on public channels and paging three people, two of which I’ve spoken to multiple times on other games and/or Discord. One of those two explicitly asked me when I was getting my butt approved. I’ve come to the conclusion that matters have silently changed with the second of the two, and as such I needed to keep my distance from them, including Discord. So I chose to silently break contact, left DM groups, and have tried to not interact with them.
Anyway, I peeked at the game site, got the message my site was blocked from the portal, and wondered why I went there in the first place, even if it was just to hit the logout button. It was a stupid thing to do, but I still did it.
So yeah. I did something, the aftermath is bothering me still, and the worst part is I still can’t identify to myself what behavior of mine is the problem.
That’s all.
I don’t feel like copy-pasting from MSB, so I’m just going to go into recent history as I can remember it, with a few special mentions.
UPDATED - Feb 11, 2024
Current
Inactive
Past
* Everywhere I transplanted Svoran (most of them WoT games), it was for character research. “How does he think and react to X situation?” In my personal writing, Svoran is the one character where I could not get into his headspace without character research. Plus, I could not figure out how grumpy he was on average, and to whom, why the fuss, etc. I think I’ve finally figured him out, but this was a 20+ year endeavor to iron him out into his current form in my writing.
MU*ing has been a godsend with figuring out character mindsets, to the point I stopped doing character research because my writing felt more mature as far as figuring out how to write people as people, if that makes sense? But for a while, I was playing some characters from my personal fiction of Aldera to try and figure them out. The irony of this is: THEY ALL CHANGED DRASTICALLY DESPITE THE RESEARCH. (Now, they’re nothing like the “researched” versions were.) Go figure.
@crawfish I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this:
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I LOVE THEM
I just want a tl;dr of what dragon colors and styles mean, since I haven’t read any Pern books.
I used this same GIF when someone mentioned it in Discord who has - as far as I know - no relation to MU*dom or this board at all. Caught me off guard.
@Roz said in Re: Dies Irae:
@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Pavel
I’m old! Gotta keep up with the kids lingo! In simplest terms, “You should play with me and not /them/ because I’m better at everything.”Also “I’m not like other girls.”
yeah it’s an intensely sexist meme lol. i’m gonna side-eye anyone using it sincerely
Don’t forget the favorite response when called out:
“But I’m also one, so it’s okay if I use it.”
@somasatori I’m guessing this is basically a lockstring variant you’re using for filtering out the accessibility of these hints/mysteries/clues?
@Rucket said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@dvoraen said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@Tez So what I am hearing is I should make puppy-eyes at Tehom to do this for Arx II. Over Aion knows how many months.
cries in database schema
These are lying eyes and no one should trust them! Anyway, the real mini game should be a jumping puzzle. Everyone loves jumping puzzles.
Using ASCII-art minis that you created/painted?
@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:
I will say that in my time there, I never had much an issue with Scylla, personally, but I know others did. I think people have long memories in this hobby and reputations aren’t easily repaired, regardless of how you go about it. If anything, people just wait for a chance to use reputations and prior bad acts against you years/decades down the road. So sometimes, despite doing decent stuff in the present, you’re doomed to fail for your past mistakes and then… whatever you’re working on in the present goes down with it.
@Tez said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@dvoraen said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@Tez So what I am hearing is I should make puppy-eyes at Tehom to do this for Arx II. Over Aion knows how many months.
cries in database schema
No one should ever make puppy-eyes at any coder for anything. If I want these things, I* will make them myself.
*claude
looks at spoiler block
mmhmm
Anyway, you misunderstand. I’d be the implementer, seeking permission to put it in.
The argument: “Jayus would want us to BUILD THESE MINIGAMES.”
@Tez So what I am hearing is I should make puppy-eyes at Tehom to do this for Arx II. Over Aion knows how many months.
cries in database schema
@Yam said in Strike Systems:
@Tez 1 strike for you, expires in 4 minutes.
What happens if we strike the strikes?
I will be taking no questions.
@Tez said in Re: Dies Irae:
@dvoraen shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no ai inquisition shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i’d rather talk about it from general code practices to understand rather than a blanket ai bad shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Not my intention to go on AI-bad with that statement.
Any code you do not write that comes from a third party is something you have to scrutinize. Otherwise, Node.js, for example, would not have tools that literally scan the libraries you use in your app for (known) security vulnerabilities and tell you about them. (These are not “scan for AI-code tools” either.)
I’m going to make a very limited response on the subject of “AI” code:
Do not blindly trust it. Period.
You have to vet it for security vulnerabilities and a whole slough of other things. Remember, these are not trained off of the best-of-the-best code — unless someone wants to start releasing training data proving otherwise — and “codebots” will likely not know how to deal with project-specific situations.
