I’ve been on benzos for my panic attacks for the last 20 years. They’ve been sedating and miserable but have been the only thing that have done the job. Worse, any temporary lapse in them meant I’d be a quivering pile of sobbing withdrawal.

With the help of a psychiatrist, we found something else that worked, finally. An anti-seizure med, of all things. Sure, why not. Not questioning it. It works.

And after a grueling stepdown process over the course of the last year, rife with mini-withdrawals, I’m finally fucking free of benzos.

And that feels just enormously great to say.

I walked away.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s going to be any changing minds on that board, and I was twisting myself in knots and refreshing the damn page every few minutes for several hours. That shit ain’t healthy, especially for a place that isn’t going to reciprocate.

I’d rather focus on making content here.

This means there’s probably an anime thread in your future, for which I apologize. ( Except I ain’t sorry. )

There was some confusion about Bingo earlier in the thread.

I’ve had a few weeks to sit with my thoughts, and I must say that I’m actually really grateful that this story had a concrete, definite ending. I’ve never actually seen a story through to the extent that I have with Arx. There are inevitably some loose threads that never got tied off, but not every thread really needs to be.

Every other MU* I’ve been on has just sort of fizzled out like a friendship that’s run its course, but I’m really grateful that this ended up feeling story-shaped from beginning to end. It’s not an ‘ending’ for the characters, and I’m left to tantalizing daydreams about what happened after the curtain fell, and that’s a valuable thing to have.

I haven’t had a panic attack (or even the threat of one) in almost three weeks since I started my newest medication. The absence of that is like being able to breathe again. I hope it keeps up this way.

At work all day:

“Haha, oh man, it’s gonna be so cool to do XYZ with my character(s) when I get home.”

At home:

• Cleaning
• Making dinner
• Spending time with loved ones
• Giving pet all the scritches
• Social Media
• Check in on people on Discord
• TV
• Tired

In bed:

“Wait a minute, I didn’t do the thing I meant to at all! Well, I bet tomorrow…”

3 MONTHS LATER

“Shit.”

I whinged and complained about it in the complainy threads so much that it felt like cheating not to post the resolution:

After a year and a half, I got top bid on a house. And I’m so excited and terrified for the parts that come next, but the hunt is finally over!

After one of my colleagues departed and I got saddled with a lot of extra work, I sat my supervisor down and basically told him that I knew I was being undercompensated. He said he’d do his best, because he wanted to keep the team together, and because we kick ass together (True.)

Four months went by. I started browsing Indeed and such on the regular. Pretty much resigned myself to a 5%ish increase, and it wasn’t going to cut it to stay. Last week, I finally got news from him.

Promoted. New Title - better title than I suggested. 30% raise. 30. Percent.

Remember how I said I wasn’t having panic attacks? This is the closest I’ve come to one, sitting through that meeting, because apparently my body has forgotten how to process extreme amounts of joy. Teared up in the meeting. I had to scamper away directly after the meeting and run into the bathroom and squeal into my hands.

My life feels like it’s starting to come together, all of the sudden.

I was being a shit to Derp and Reimisu, but that’s because they fucking well deserved it for trying to invalidate trauma responses. How this translated into me being a big mean bully is fucking beyond me.

Immature? Yeah, I’ll own that, but only because they were breathing down my fucking neck with their own dogpiling.

I’m frustrated as hell. Like, I legitimately just want them to realize that they’re creating an echo chamber. With pMonique, Derp, Devrex and Reimisu loitering there, a rather insidious one, at that.

Just fucking meh.

Nothing for it.

And now my fucking anxiety is eating me alive because I suck at confrontation.

Rant about the topic, rather than ranting at anyone in this thread:

I loathe the notion that receipts are necessary for any complaint to be taken seriously. Like, especially if they’re of an embarrassing or sexual nature, like… no.

In my case, I divulged those receipts with someone I trusted, they made the call along with a literal avalanche of evidence to ban someone creepy, and no one is fucking entitled to it.

Just fuck everything about that mindset. I know the natural retort is that it’s a slippery slope which can quickly devolve into witch-huntery, but consider also that it’s a slippery slope to making victimized and abused people put their darkest moments on display just to satisfy the internet’s fucking Id.

Fuck off.

@kalakh GarouMUSH, when an entire hive of giant hornets were corrupted and rampaging, and the only way to get them to stop was to kill the queen and smuggle out the uncorrupted queen larva, and my coward of a ragabash stealthing through the entire complex tunnel system, grabbing the queen larva and bolted like he was carrying a football and running for his life while being trailed by hornets while all the fighty types kicked ass outside of the hive.

@Herja Arx, Pretty much anything having to do with Sydney’s family, but definitely the final moments of Petraea hit me like a gutpunch, and having her lose one of the last little shreds of her family far more quickly than she expected to was absolutely gutting. The writing was on the wall that she was terminal, but having that timeline move up from ‘maybe a year or so’ to ‘this is happening today’ was just so shocking, and everything that played out in those last moments was just awesome to witness and be a part of. And really, what’s the point of having long hair if you can’t wail and scream and saw it all off in a moment of loss?

Let’s see…

PridesMUCK, finally taking revenge on the person who killed my character’s mother, only to find that vengeance was hollow and just made her feel empty and dirty.

RedwallMUCK, the entire earthquake event, rallying together with survivors to try to make sense of the disaster and plan what was going to happen next, with a bunch of people who really didn’t hang out together living in close refugee quarters, and the ensuing squabbles.

Super Robot Tensei MOO, when my taciturn, logical, and otherwise completely emotionally unavailable character was told that the former leader of the cult of personality that made her join up with the military that led to her being complicit in war crimes (yay!) was too useful to the faction she was a part of to have tried for his crimes or executed, and she just lost. Her. Shit. At the leader of said faction, snarled, cursed, cried, threw her ID badge on the ground, gathered her things, and was off the station and was off into the sunset by the end of the night.

…So, yes, I think I like my big melodramatic payoff scenes an awful lot, but I think that’s part of the joy of character dramas!

@howyadoin said in So, probably don't want to browse MSB right now:

Oh no my what about my hog pit nostalgia

Ah, the cause of several of my anxiety attacks while playing Arx because I thought people were talking about me. (And they almost never were.)

@Alamias

Oh, nice, I’ve had my eye on this one!

In hindsight, I was really waaaaay too young to be on the wild west internet of 1996, but roughly around the same time:

• Redwall MUCK - For when I needed to be a total edgelord and brood in the shadows or have swordfights with ne’er-do-wells, whilst being a squirrel, the objectively best Redwall species.
• Furcadia - I was blown away at the idea that you could RP with a graphical representation of your character, and spent so much time making ‘Dreams’, and stealing all of the pillow objects and hoarding them in a single building so no one could sit down.
• Prides MUCK - I also really loved The Lion King, but was intimidated by the rules of TLK MU* when I looked that up. So, this felt like a better fit. A very mixed bag of great players and infamously bad ones.

I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.

Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?

It would so be my jam, right about now.

Are we talking about purely IC reasoning?

Because in my experience, avoidant behavior is often less about not wanting to butt heads with different character ideologies, and far more often to do with not wanting to deal with a player who has proven that they are difficult to interact with.

As for cliques, I think it’s something of a losing battle to try to dismantle the human desire to tribalize, and one we’re unlikely going to solve within the confines of a text-based RPG.

I thought about this thread when I was in a scene where someone was clearly struggling to get their point across.

You know the type, the RPer who’s a little bit new and is flailing a bit, has some phonetic typos, and is coming off a bit flat, but they’re very earnest about it.

This thread made me appreciate that they’re clearly putting in the effort to write their own stuff rather than just slamming it into ChatGPT to try to keep up.

Struggle on, new writers. We do see you improving with every session.

@tsar

Not sure what you’re in to, but for uplifting shows that still have an emotional core, it’s hard to go wrong with A Place Further Than the Universe.

Four girls, for various reasons, deciding to set their goals on joining an expedition to Antarctica. There’s some emotionally charged scenes in it, but for the most part, it’s about finding yourself, and the things that motivate you.

Alternately, based on the action-heavy stuff you mentioned earlier, you might want to check out Mob Psycho 100, if you haven’t. Turns the entire idea of power progression on its head. It, too, is about self-actualization (With a whole bunch of fights in there, too.) There are no side characters or throwaways. Every single person has their own shit going on, and even characters or archetypes that most shonen fare would introduce and then forget about, the show circles back on. The fighting, while present, is not the point. The point is to become a better person, and to put in the work.

Some stuff happened and I’m staring down the barrel of an eye-wateringly large dental bill. Financing is reasonable so I’m not entirely fucked, but hey America? Can we stop pretending teeth aren’t part of our overall health?

Fuck’s sake.

@L-B-Heuschkel

Wait, is this a thing? Oh, fuck AI. That’s how to give sentences flavor! Nuh uh. A million percent not changing.