So today is my first day back in the office after PTO. When I was checking my calendar last night, I saw that my boss put a meeting on the books for first thing this morning with her and with her boss. I figured something went wrong with one of the projects I was working on with the boss’s boss while I was out and they needed to get me up to speed.

Uhh, no.

Turns out that when I found out how underpaid I am compared to my teammates last summer and lodged a complaint about that, initially got an ugly response, then they backpedaled hard and asked how much I wanted, only to get turned down? That request stuck around. My boss’s boss’s boss noted the complaint and when they did mid-year adjustments this year for people on the bottom end of salary bands, he personally lumped my name in with the ones that got sent to HR. Even though I was above the cut-off percentage for consideration.

My boss called a meeting to give me a 5% raise, on top of my end of year adjustment from 2023, because of something I bitched about a year ago.

In almost ten years at my company, I have only ever gotten one bad review – one! out of almost twenty! – from a person who was my manager for all of two months. It was from someone who not only didn’t understand what my job was, but who regularly gave conflicting instructions in the same day, would ignore when I pointed this out to her, and then wondered why I couldn’t do both of these things that were in direct opposition to one another. This manager then proceeded to be mean to me for the next two years straight, all the way up until I moved to a different subdivision, and still tries to pull my current boss into almost everything I work on that she’s involved in.

Today she was forced to acknowledge that my work is fast, thoughtful, and high quality despite being related to a request that is urgent, complex, and so confusing to convey to our audience that we need spreadsheets of who gets what messaging, when, and from whom.

And she had to say the nice thing in front of an entire committee.

Including my boss.

We got another dog back on Memorial Day weekend. He was a rescue out of a terrible situation on the Texas-Mexico border (multiple infections, inch deep cuts hidden under matting in his fur, fleas, ticks, you name it) and despite being surrendered by his previous owner, we’re honestly not sure he’s ever lived in a house before.

I cannot stop laughing at the crazy-eyed reaction he has to pup cups, like the sugar high hitting his bloodstream is just the dog equivalent of this child.

I am late to the party because naps, and I think I must have missed something someone said somewhere but…

Please do not doubt someone who claims they have been abused. Not even if you profoundly dislike them. Not even if they engage in shitty behavior themselves after the fact.

NGL, I got way too drawn into Ghost’s personal life and resulting well-being about a decade ago, but it was not in the Regina George “OMG, why are you so obsessed with me?!” kind of way that Dropkick tried to portray it as later. It was in the “As extremely unlikely as it is to be accepted, I feel like I need to (with my partner’s knowledge and agreement) at least offer to put this person up in my spare bedroom because they have repeatedly expressed to me that they feel unsafe in their own home” kind of way.

I’m not going to go into more than that because it’s absolutely not my story to share, and I’m not going to claim that it justifies terrible behavior on his part because it absolutely does not. Believe me, even after confirming there was no bad blood between us – at least not about that and the dRaMa!!11!one!elevn!!! that resulted – there have been several times since then that I’ve wanted to sock the dude in the mouth.

But, like… don’t, guys. Just don’t. Not cool, and A+ to the folks who said they aren’t going to do that.

My coworker’s partner is liquidating a lot of their inventory from their Etsy shop. So today they showed up with a bag full of block printed t-shirts for me and tried to foist them off on me for free, until I insisted on paying something for it.

(Pay artists. It’s a rule, not a guideline.)

My clothes are extra queer now and I am very happy.

In my experience, abusers are going to be abusive regardless of what community, culture, or system they’re in. They will find ways to bend the rules and norms of that setting to their advantage, as well as to blame those they abuse for somehow being at fault for what was done to them. And this is true for any kind of abuse, although sexual abuse is the most egregious.

The key to minimizing this is making it clear from the outset that it’s not acceptable by the broader community as a whole, then enforcing this mandate regularly and consistently when it’s uncovered that oh, hey, surprise, this abusive person is a piece of shit. Officially, yes, but also unofficially, with a general aura of “You fuckers are not welcome here.” that is present from start to finish.

It’s not perfect, not by any means, but no system is and I think it’s the only way to balance the fact that everyone’s experiences, preferences, and desires are their own and that no one else really has the right to dictate that for others, save those who cannot possibly consent for whatever reason.

Final GPA for my Master’s degree. Considering there was a point when I lost track of how many times I dropped or failed out of undergraduate programs, I’d say this isn’t half bad.

@farfalla

I prefer they/them. She/her is also fine. Like, I won’t be mad about it or offended if someone uses that, especially given how complicated my own feelings about gender are and the fact that my body-type adds a lived experience I will always have thrust on me barring major surgery I don’t want, but I do get the warm fuzzies when folks at least try.

Uhmm.

I somehow got an A in the worst class in my entire program, the hell-class that I was seriously concerned about failing in the final semester before graduation, the class that had me in spiralling meltdown mode for two months.

I understand virtually nothing from this class, including how or why I got this grade, but fuck it. I’ll take it.

@Tchotchke said in Liberation MUSH:

I appreciate everyone’s thoughts. Getting that out of my system and finding that a bunch of people with an outside perspective thought it was problematic was cathartic. Thank you.

Dude, my friends and I left that game over way less awful shit than that. And while I sometimes miss my character and regret the amount of setting material I wrote up for a staffer that was very shortly thereafter replaced by a hypercontrolling weirdo…

That policy (? bbpost? whatever it is?) is so beyond the pale that no amount of nostalgia would be worth going back. I suggest taking Roz’s advice and noping the fuck out of there.

@somasatori said in Historical Games Round 75:

@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:

The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.

I think that this is a good point, but man, some of these ancient grudges are 100% still around. From my own experience, they also tend to manifest in very strange ways and usually when you might not expect it (especially as an American).

Dude, from 1993 to 2018, North Macedonia was officially entered into the United Nations under the name The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Because they were fighting with Greece about who got to be Macedonia and who got to be Macedonians and whether or not there was the potential for annexation of one state by another. You might assume that this was all the result of the Balkan Wars in the early 1900s and the regional conflicts of the early to mid-1990s, which were absolutely the central point of contention.

But, like, you also had national governments throwing around references to what names had been used and where the borders were during the Roman Empire.

Some Roman guy who died in 150-whatever BC scribbled some stuff on a map after Rome conquered Greece and literally two thousand years later, people were using it to say “Hey, fuck those people over there in particular.”

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:

Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.

Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

Maybe.

I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play.

I have, on two different games about ten years apart, run into entire groups of people playing actual, literal neo-Nazis. Both instances were disturbing, but the second instance was particularly strange. Somehow, my character – who was Jewish – got painted as the asshole for not wanting to deal with some dude walking around with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo.

But even weirder than that? I found out after the fact that one of the women in the group was someone I’d known for a years. In fact, it was a friend I’d lost contact with. A friend who I’d had long conversations with most of a decade earlier about how she was never going to play a black character again after dealing with a guy on the White Wolf mods who had sent out a really gross email including a lot of stereotypes about black people and then got very much called out on it by, like, half the Mage sphere. Long conversations about how upsetting that was for her because she was no longer comfortable playing characters who looked like her because of that incident.

To this day, I don’t really know how I should feel about that or if I even get to have an opinion on that, because her feelings on the subject are entirely her own and not something I get to dictate. But needless to say, I was shocked to discover that one of the most racist characters I’ve ever encountered on a game, with a player that took umbrage to people not wanting to interact with a group of neo-Nazis, was played by a person of color who had previously felt personally victimized by racist stereotypes proposed in RP.

(Also, sorry if the quotes got busted. Phone typing sucks.)

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

This is a huge part of why I opted not to open that game–not because I don’t agree with you, but because I do.

My original intention wasn’t to muck with The -Isms or the timeline at all, trusting that the vast majority of the player base wouldn’t engage in anything so egregious and that the few who’d come in with the worst intentions would be obvious and easy to boot from the game.

It was the very first question I got being “But what about the racism?!” that led to me to a bit of a knee jerk reaction of “Well, I’ll just lift it out. Blah blah blah, players imagine all sorts of crazy stuff, they can imagine this, too.” Especially since, given the OGoA setting, there would be plenty of other horrors for characters to come up against.

It was my attempts at presenting historical examples and this person who is intelligent and insightful and whose opinions I generally trust going nowhere that ultimately changed my mind. Despite evidence to the contrary, it seemed like they just couldn’t be convinced that while this was the predominant attitude of the time, it wasn’t universal and it would be perfectly reasonable and also historically accurate for people to play characters who didn’t hold those views.

That left me sitting there thinking that my options for running something in the time period would effectively be:

• Erase the history of this very real oppression that people experienced and those that fought against it.

• Neglect the history of the people that fought against that oppression and potentially expose players to really awful prejudice and abuse.

• Write a guide that would effectively boil down to “Okay, But How Much Racism is Cool versus How Much Racism is Too Much Racism?” with all of the ick I feel even typing that, nevermind the potential for any of it to be taken out of context or implied to endorse at least some terrible things as acceptable.

When I realized that none of these seemed like very good options, or at least not options I was comfortable with, I couldn’t move forward with the game. Not because I don’t think those stories are worth telling, but because I think they need to be approached with a level of awareness that I’m not sure I trust a mass of strangers to consistently demonstrate on a public game.

@Ashkuri said in Missed Settings:

@Aria said in Missed Settings:

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!”

This comment made me go and read through this thread about MU* historical accuracy again. I guess some players find it disruptive to delete The -Isms from a historical setting, some find it disruptive not to delete that, and (like your friend and yourself) these types don’t easily mesh together.

To be fair, if they’d been pointing out the need to develop a divergent history or something, I think that would’ve been entirely reasonable. If they’d been pointing out that intersection of early labor movements with fights against racial injustice, this also would’ve been an excellent point! Wanting to see those things included in games instead of lifted out as if that solves everything, I totally get. But this was like…

“It’s Appalachia. Of course all the characters are going to be horrifically racist. Because it’s Appalachia!”, effectively painting all of the people of an entire region as a monolith of unvaried views or possibility for nuance without exception. And, like, that’s just not true of any single point group of people literally ever or history wouldn’t have gone the way that it has. Hence the examples I was providing. For every predominant view and systemic issue that’s historically accurate, there’s also counterpoints to it that are historically accurate without having to engage in presentism.

But! I digress, and if I digress anymore, this should probably be Historical Accuracy Argument #385 or something.

@somasatori said in Missed Settings:

The same as above, but leveraged towards The Strange and some other Monte Cook projects as well. Even stripping away the Cypher system altogether, things like The Strange or Old Gods of Appalachia seem like they’d be great MUSH fodder and you could probably do OGoA with something like FS3 given that the main characters are rarely supernatural themselves. Some of those other radio play style podcasts would be cool as well: the White Vault, Magnus Archives (also a Monte Cook project), and so on.

I was, at one point, actually actively working on an Old Gods of Appalachia game with the full intention of using FS3 and then stealing some of the inspiration available to me in the OGoA game system. (There is a published one. I backed it on Kickstarter awhile ago.)

My plan was to set it in a mining town to allow us to both mix the eldritch horrors aspect along with some of the politics of the labor movement so players could contrast the ancient horrors beneath the earth with just, y’know, people? Kind of the way 28 Days Later has zombies but those soldiers are also just as scary and threatening?

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!” and I was like, “Well, if I’m asking players to imagine a world in which the bones of the earth are full of unknowable monstrosities older than mankind itself, maybe even older than the world itself, I’m pretty sure I can ask them to imagine a world that’s just not inherently shitty to people of color.” And they were like, “But people will be confused without the racism because of historical accuracy.” And then I pointed out a whoooooooole bunch of examples of coal miners in Appalachia banding together across racial lines and they were still like “BUT PEOPLE. HISTORICAL ACCURACY.” and I took that to mean “BUT THE RACISM.”

And then I decided that if I couldn’t persuade one single person that we could probably just, y’know, not include 1920s style racism and generally be fine, with less people being offended by the erasure of it than the allowance of it, this was actually a terrible idea and promptly gave up.

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria said in Your first game?:

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria My very first scene on New Bremen my character was meeting her new packmates (on New Bremen you had to start in a pack so there was basically LFG/PUG packs on the game).

She walked in on one of her packmates cuddling/kissing a Pookie. In their animal form.

@catzilla I don’t remember that rule, though I’m not sure if it was because it didn’t apply by the time I made my Fianna or if it’s because in Werewolf, I mostly played a Kinfolk…

…who was the mate of Sturm Magnarsson. Ohh, god, the horror stories I could tell that came as a result of dipshit late teenage me being like, “Well, she has Survivor as a Nature and he’s the alpha of the Fenrir and he’s asking for her, so it makes sense IC.”

If there were ever a lesson in “It’s what my character would do!” blowing up in a player’s face but in exactly the wrong way from how it should, that was it. That was it right there. No, little baby Aria. No. You tell more people to fuck off when they start getting weird at you. (Adult Aria, too, honestly.)

That name kind of rings a bell but I don’t think I ever properly played with them. I did play a Shadow Lord kinfolk that was mated to a big shot PC named Aldrich something? I can’t think of anything the player did but the PC provided a bunch of drama/trauma for my kinfolk (in what I remember as a fun way).

Dude, if you’re talking about the PC that I think you’re talking about–and I might be wrong here since it’s been twenty years–he was awesome. The player was from Brazil, learned most of his English RPing online, and was still a better writer than 90% of the people I’d run into. We lost touch over the years, but I still tell stories about him and his Vampire PC in the VtR reboot as prime examples of how to play an asshole without being an asshole OOC.

Aldrich/Chris March/Eduardo, wherever you are in the ether?

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria My very first scene on New Bremen my character was meeting her new packmates (on New Bremen you had to start in a pack so there was basically LFG/PUG packs on the game).

She walked in on one of her packmates cuddling/kissing a Pookie. In their animal form.

@catzilla I don’t remember that rule, though I’m not sure if it was because it didn’t apply by the time I made my Fianna or if it’s because in Werewolf, I mostly played a Kinfolk…

…who was the mate of Sturm Magnarsson. Ohh, god, the horror stories I could tell that came as a result of dipshit late teenage me being like, “Well, she has Survivor as a Nature and he’s the alpha of the Fenrir and he’s asking for her, so it makes sense IC.”

If there were ever a lesson in “It’s what my character would do!” blowing up in a player’s face but in exactly the wrong way from how it should, that was it. That was it right there. No, little baby Aria. No. You tell more people to fuck off when they start getting weird at you. (Adult Aria, too, honestly.)

@Pavel said in Your first game?:

@Aria I never did play the DigiChats, at least not for any length of time that made them stick in my memory, but I’ve heard that they were a layer of hell all unto their own.

I played on the oWoD ones until they rebooted them with the release of Vampire: the Requiem, then played/staffed on the nWoD ones until they shuttered entirely in 2008? 2009? Somewhere around there. So basically almost their entire lifespan.

To be frank, they had their problems. Sometimes particularly horrific problems, usually caused by the ratio of players to staff and thus the reduced ability to catch unpleasant shit unless it was really, truly egregious. The worst bits of WTF that I could recount from those years are definitely, uhhh… let’s go with ‘special’, including the guy who was single-handedly responsible for the 18+ age rule for exactly the reason you’re thinking.

That said, they also had their high points and their charm that I look back on fondly, and they heavily influenced my views on staffing, some of which I still hold to this day. I’m not going to pretend every staffer there was awesome or lived up to, like, basic decency, let alone professional standards… but the vibe is very different when you’re working on what ultimately amounts to a marketing tool for a company than a private game. And I think in a lot of ways, the level of accountability that was supposed to come with it was better, at least when they had rolled over to the nWoD games and I could see behind the curtain. I wasn’t staff for the oWoD bits, which is where I remember the worst of the really questionable stuff happening and can’t speak to the behind the scenes there save what I was told by friends who were.

Also bear in mind it’s been a decade and a half since those games closed, so I may be looking at them through rose-colored glasses. Especially because I got to travel internationally because of them, still have a few friends I made on them 20-some odd years ago, and know three different couples that met on them that are still married–including me and my husband.

@Pavel said in Your first game?:

@Aria said in Your first game?:

It’s like I did everything in reverse.

You didn’t even go through the Firan gauntlet. Gosh.

I did not! My first Lords and Ladies game was actually Arx. Unless you count a DigiChat based Legend of the Five Rings game that opened alongside Wanton Wicked, which was a privately owned WoD game modeled very much off of New Bremen in terms of game and website functionality.

The unmoderated WoD server hosted by White Wolf, before they opened up their moderated New Bremen setting, way back in 1999/2000.

They used DigiChat, a Java-based interface that ironically looks a bit like the Ares web portal, what with clickability and sidebar navigation. I wasn’t on an actual MU* of any kind until Haunted Memories in 2011 and wasn’t on a Pern game until the 2020s. It’s like I did everything in reverse.