My muddy chaos demon

My peeve is me. I want to get back into MU*ing, and have not one, but two games lined up that I want to check out. (Maybe even three if for whatever reason the first two don’t work out!) Both are run by friends whom I respect and admire; whose creative projects I want to support; and whose ability to run good, healthy games that I’d enjoy I have complete faith in.

It’s just been so long since I’ve fully invested in a MU* that I feel like I’ve practically forgotten how to. I’ve been in creative lulls like this before, and I know that if I just get my foot in the door, roll up a character and get myself into a scene, it’ll all come back in an instant, like I never left the hobby at all. I’m just finding that initial step weirdly harder to surmount than it should be.

To the multiple friends who might be reading this, and to whom I’ve made empty promises about rolling up to hang out with on a MU* in recent months, I’m sorry. It’s really not you, it’s me. (A phrase I know always feels like bullshit on the receiving end, yet is legit, in this case, true.)

Marginally related peeve that I’m sure other alumni of this game can relate to: I hate the extent to which PHSD (Post-HavenRPG Stress Disorder) lives rent-free in my mind. Experiences on that game have made me intensely skittish at the very first sign of red flags on any other game I’ve checked out since, and permanently damaged my ability to put faith in game staff on the whole. It’s not the main reason I’ve been flakey about checking out the two aforementioned MU* run by friends of mine, but it has made me bail a lot quicker than others deem reasonable, on other projects, recently.

When there are so many good gamerunners out there whose proven track record makes me feel safe to put my complete trust in, it just no longer feels worth it sticking around after the first sign of trouble anywhere else, hoping/expecting things might get better or continuing to make excuses for staffers displaying strong red flags. I did that for years longer than I should’ve on HavenRPG, and I’m not prepared to do that for a day longer anywhere else.

It also makes me feel much stronger appreciation and gratitude to those gamerunners out there who’ve proven their commitment to their players’ safety time and time again. And to these boards as well, which promote healthy communities & staff practices, and which hold the hobby to a higher standard than I’m regrettably used to seeing.

There are a number of posters here on these boards who don’t know me at all, whom I’ve never spoken to one on one, whose positive contributions to this community have meant a lot more to me than they could possibly realise.

Every few days I wake up feeling creatively inspired and motivated to start something new. Roll up a new concept, join a new game/community, maybe even start my own game. The ideas and plans really turn into these full-fledged beings and worlds just begging to be written. Sometimes I even reach out to friends on Discord and let them know that I’m warming up to dive back into MU*dom or that I want to embark on an ambitious project.

Unfortunately, then I look at the date and realise I’m already late to meet RL deadlines. In the background, my mysteriously athletic Siberian Husky (seriously, how and when did my pandemic puppy get this buff?) makes her stance clear that if I’m awake enough to be sitting at my laptop, I am definitely awake enough to be giving her the first of 2-3 hours of exercise she’s owed, and no amount of focus will be permitted today until she’s been tired into a coma. And so the muse continuously dies unspent.

I miss escapism and creative writing.

The inevitable paranoia I constantly feel when friends talk shit about our other friends, and then I can’t help but wonder what they’re probably also saying about me.

Part RL peeve I suppose, but we are a gossipy hobby.

@Testament said in Bannings:

@Herja While I realistically wouldn’t expect it, I however would not be surprised if they somehow did the mental gymnastics to allow either Cullen or Dropkick to start posting there(I’m pointedly not including DWOPP in that because I can’t imagine any MSB staff being so oblivious to be okay with that). I would rate the things that Cullen did and what Hella/VK did to pretty near each other. So if they let one of them there…

Like I said, I’m not expecting but, also my expectations are exceedingly low at this point.

I would just like to say, loud and clear, in case anyone missed or somehow doubts this memo, that Cullen’s player is an actual, literal, real-life rapist.

I would love to post receipts. Dearly I would. Unfortunately that would be A) doxxing him & B) not my story to tell, not my receipts to share, and not one of his victims’ duty to publicly bare their trauma for the satisfaction of sealioning, misogynistic chodes.

I cannot adequately express the degree of livid I feel at some of the insinuations made on MSB these past few weeks; or how much it sickens my stomach to imagine that anyone would argue he deserves to be allowed back into community he’s abused for years to do it all. Over. Again.

I do not believe in second chances, not for him. He’s had a hundred already and abused them all. No.

But I hope making that case, or at the very least making light of the notion, is worth the internet points that MSB’s new boys’ club gets to reap at the expense of other people’s trauma. A categorical fuck you. Check your privilege, “simplications”.

eggshells 🫤

Feeling like … I can only scene with you as long as I am very polite and mindful and watch my step and am on my best behaviour. Which is a very reasonable thing to expect of anyone. But also I don’t like feeling tense like that, so if RP always feels like a first date or a job interview, I think I would rather just avoid and hang out with friends who take themselves less seriously and let me fart around.

My snow dog is not enjoying the scorched English savannah right now.

I’m not sure why that photo came out with a lens flare. I didn’t do it on purpose, so I think it’s her natural radiance emanating them wherever she goes.

She is, however, remarkably well camouflaged for this weather. As you can see, in this picture she’s completely disappeared. I bet you can’t even see her now.

The last two threads on MSB serve as an excellent reminder that misogyny and Authoritarianism often go hand in hand. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and neither should be trusted in a position of power.

That was sinister to watch, but I’m glad they’ve at least revealed themselves.

simplications if you’re reading this:

I’m sorry, I fucked up. The way you showed up on MSB, the timing, and the group of posters whose statements were being mutually borrowed as fuel for each others fires, made me assume the worst about your intentions.

There are actually a fuckton of literal fascists in this hobby; Cullen for example had an iron cross as his forum avatar on HavenRPG for a while, and I’ve posted receipts elsewhere of someone going on a very explicit antisemitic & misogynistic tirade about me. On the recent thread, I also linked an example of what was basically an attack thread against me for wanting to start a pro-intersectional community for other MU*ers. So yes I am very prickly about this subject, and I like to think I’m generally good at spotting the talking points of people trying to manipulate the discourse in that direction, but in this case I misfired. Because yeah: I was there to address misogyny and victim-blaming, and in that context, the discussion about privileged groups while seemingly siding with the people doing it, looked to me like a very common tactic.

I now understand this was a misunderstanding.

Sorry I went for the throat; I was in attack mode, and attacked the wrong person.

I’d DM but lol, banned. (Which is for the best, because that was not healthy for me.)

Belittling rape, misogyny etc., doesn’t make you look like less of a misogynist, Devrex. If it hurts you that people would say this about you, then stop fucking doing it.

I called Cullen a rapist because he is a rapist. Like, I would love to share his criminal record with you, I have it right here, but it’s against the rules.

And I feel compelled to drive this point not to be hyperbolic, but because that fact has been questioned incessantly, here:

And because the undertones of MSB’s discussion, prior to me posting there to make that point explicit, very much were of the fear-mongering suspicion that Hog Pit threads might contain false accusations, and that receipts are necessary, and oh no, what if all these poor innocent souls have been damned because you all didn’t do your due diligence. These points were made in particular by Ghost, and upvoted by you, and Derp, and the rest of your sealioning fanclub.

Which by the way, I think is despicable, and dangerous. And not despicable in the sense of, ‘Oh I don’t quite like the theme of this game, perhaps I should play on a different game instead; each to their own.’ But in the sense that makes me feel compelled to say something about it because people could get hurt, have been hurt, and are hurt, by the delegitimisation of their trauma and the benefit of the doubt you wish to confer to predators with multiple accusers. Such as Rysen too, for example, which is why I assume people other than me felt the need to rebutt the comments about him, too. These are not assumptions; this has been made explicit.

By the way, Ghost, still paying attention? This is why I do not accept your apology, why I doubt your intentions, and why I bring up the fact that you’ve always done this, dating back years ago and are still doing it right now.

So don’t act like you’ve always been an ally or that it’s disingenuous of me to bring him up.

My sincere apologies to simplications for getting them mixed up in the crossfire; on the other hand, Cullen is a crypto-fascist, as is ppurg, the other dude I’ve been known to harp on in the general MU* community about being a fascist, and your mockery of my willingness to call people out on that certainly makes you look like someone who’s either in their camp or tolerant of it. Which is further backed by this thread of yours from three years ago, which was directed at me. And it’s relevant to bring that history up because you’re still doing it. The only “apology” for it you’ve offered was coupled by an untrue accusation, simply another of your classic attempts at DARVO. The aim of that was not to apologise, but to justify.

P.S.: Thanks for successfully getting the person who posted the exact account you referenced in your reddit comment, the one about him threatening to send nudes to her boss and stalking her on social media, to delete her testimony. Your actions have material consequences, and it is not hyperbolic to say so, nor to react to them.

I think I might’ve recently RPed with Jill on a game that has very limited/no OOC? Does she do that? Because I’ve never met her in the classic Guest sense, but I recently had a very weird scene, between two female characters, where that sort of exchange took place IC before I got weirded out and bailed.

I really gotta know if I’m the only person in the world who thinks the new season of HotD is just not good. Legit questioning whether it’s AI-written or something.

I don’t watch many shows these days, so I’m probably super late on the uptake, and I’m sure this has been a thing for a while …

But someone recently recommended I watch a show on Amazon Prime, so I did, and now I’m mad to realise suddenly there are ads and I have to pay extra on top of my membership to remove them??

Don’t I already pay for unencumbered viewing with the Prime membership itself? smdh. fkin bezos.

(Yes I know this is very much a first world problem peeve.)

EDIT: For anyone with the same peeve — swapping from AdBlock to uBlock Origin did the trick.

@Testament said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I am begging game-runners to stop using ChatGPT.

I AM BEGGING PLAYERS TO STOP USING CHATGPT.

I’LL STOP USING IT WHEN GAMES STOP ASKING FOR DESCS

Disclaimer: If it wasn’t obvious; this is a joke, I use it to get ideas for a desc and then actually write one. As much as I absolutely loath to write it.

Although this is a joke: I do think that the advent of AI has done one small favour to the MU* genre, which is expose a lot of the drudgery that people don’t want to do. If people are so unmotivated to write or read prosaic descs that one could literally replace them with AI-generated slop, and in the minds of some people that would be better, then those are aspects of the game that might be superfluous.

I think this is a bigger problem on MUDs than MUSHes, but there are games where instead of walking in and posing, "Kestrel arrives on the scene, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. She looks around curiously and then waves to Testament", I would have a white T-shirt and jeans as codified objects on my person, that can be examined. And because some people think more prose is always better, there can be a cultural expectation that your character isn’t properly presentable unless each of those objects has a paragraph describing them. Even though no one cares, and no one is going to read a paragraph describing a white T-shirt. It’s a white fkn T-shirt, what more is there to say?

That’s the stuff I see people delegating to AI a lot now, and that’s my peeve. We should just rethink outdated cultural norms, instead.

People who are consistently always nice to staff.

… And only to staff.

@GF said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

@Roz “Politics” seems to imply viewpoints that people can disagree about in good faith. Alex Jones is simply an ongoing denial of objective, observable reality who has never spoken in good faith in his life. That it’s “controversial” to say so blows my mind.

Agreed about Alex Jones, however,

@GF said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

I didn’t want to go there because I’ve been trying very hard lately to identify and curb my prejudices, but yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought they meant. Being a minority is political, so you mustn’t discuss your life because it will make “normal” people uncomfortable, but “normal” people can chat shit about you because that’s not political.

I belong to a minority group (that’s a disproportionate target of hate-crimes in the UK & US) where it’s increasingly being castigated as some variation of:

@Apos said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

far right wing extremist and conspiracy theorist

[not by Apos, just borrowing the phrase] to say that I have a right to exist without being killed or raped for my nationality & ethnicity.

I am not right-wing, never have been, and no one who knows me would’ve ever accused me of being right-wing until under a year ago. Not because my values have changed, but because society’s goalposts have.

In an age of rampant disinformation, what’s considered “disagreeable in good faith” is a highly ephemeral standard.

I’m a highly political person, but I would rather have a no politics rule, even knowing how unfairly it’s applied to minority groups including my own, than have to repeatedly bash my head against a wall in a hobby space because someone fell hook-line-and-sinker for some TikTok disinfo and is now convinced that anyone who disagrees with them about it is a right wing conspiracy theorist engaging in bad faith.

This applies especially to historical & geopolitical topics, where education is paramount, and not guaranteed.

Théoden

Even though this never used to be a thing, in the modern world I’m realising I basically forget that a MU* I was playing still exists if it doesn’t have a discord.

eggshells 🫤

Feeling like … I can only scene with you as long as I am very polite and mindful and watch my step and am on my best behaviour. Which is a very reasonable thing to expect of anyone. But also I don’t like feeling tense like that, so if RP always feels like a first date or a job interview, I think I would rather just avoid and hang out with friends who take themselves less seriously and let me fart around.

Seeing friends who were mistreated on other games go on to start their own creative projects, and join staff teams where their labour is appreciated & admired, gives me immense contact joy.