@Pavel said:

@Aria Did this revelation happen in the same way my family usually reveals big bits of our history, in that the preceeding conversation was absolutely unrelated?

Not at all, though she’s definitely done that to me before. My favorite is when it’s about my own childhood medical history and things that would’ve been great to tell my doctor any time in the last twenty years.

“Wait, what do you mean the right side of my face could’ve been completely paralyzed during ‘those operations’? What operations?!” and then tells me some horrific thing that happened when I was two and is shocked to discover I don’t remember it. Because, y’know, I was two. Meanwhile we’re deep into the “Guess who died?!” years and it always turns out it’s, like, her neighbor’s sister’s pastor’s hamster. Of all the things rattling around in her head, clearly that’s the important information I need to know.

All my life, I was told my grandfather came from coal miners who were so poor that at varying points when he was small, he and his brother picked waste coal from the culm banks on the edge of their town…

And tonight I found out that all of that was true.

But what was also true was that his father served as a borough councilman for their small coal town. And that at one point as a councilman, my great-grandfather gave testimony in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins. His name is stamped in the trial records of a landmark SCOTUS case that resulted in a ruling which has been a fundamental legal principle for nearly a century.

Needless to say, it seems like my mother forgot to mention a few things.

Gloria Steinem, feminist journalist and activist.

I met her twice. She was a lot funnier than you might expect.

@Testament said:

Testament said:

Wrong 80 year old, Death is getting blind.

I REPEAT MYSELF. WRONG 80 year old.

Yeah, I have SOME FEEDBACK I’d really like to give the universe on Death’s performance lately.

Always and forever a favorite:

Aria said:

Y’all also look to have a couple of weird bots in the user list that I went ahead and reported. But I dunno, maybe someone actually does want to buy the best hair transplants in Pakistan from really real actual human Zoey Draven.

@Tez Nothing seems broken, but we once again have some truly spectacular bots in the user list. My current favorite is “Wilford Overby #9”, which is clearly such a common name that we must have multiples of them here. The online casino with a profile page that’s written entirely in Filipino has a fun banner, though, so that’s a nice touch.

Sadly, the forum would only let me report a few of them before it decided that I must be the actual bot. Am I even real, you guys?

@Pavel said:

Tempted, now, to write some passive-aggressive code snippet that looks for the words ‘how do I’ on a game’s Help or Newbie channel and just pages with “have you tried fuckin’ lookin’ it up, champ?”

ETA: I’ll be nice and make it only send for characters created 30+ days ago.

coughcough

https://letmegooglethat.com/

@Tez said:

@KDraygo said:

Because that’s the path of least amount of work for HR and probably exposes to the company the least amount of risk to a successful lawsuit.

Absolutely not. They should be firing him. They are exposing the company to wild amounts of risk if he does anything in the future.

im in hr

Yeah, not a lawyer here, but if this guy keeps it up and RightMeow is documenting everything meticulously – particularly HR’s refusal to actually, y’know, do fuck all about him – I believe the magic words are “hostile work environment”, at least in the US. That’s when you call an attorney.

P.S. – The consult call about whether you have a case or not is free.

@RightMeow said:
Again, I don’t feel unsafe. I think he’s a creep, but I already thought that. It just… doesn’t sit well with me and I’m not fully sure why since again, I’m not having a reaction personally.

Because there have been zero actual consequences. He behaved badly, in a way that was personally violating even if “iT wAsN’t AcTuAlLy DaNgErOuS!!!” and isn’t receiving so much as a reprimand as long as he talks to someone about his feelings. I’d literally bet money that your brain is sitting there going, “Ohh, so shitty men get to be shitty again without anything that even vaguely resembles accountability. Cool cool cool.” and just, like, hasn’t articulated that clearly to you yet.

Aria said:

“I use Copilot to prep for all of our 1:1 meetings!”

If you need Copilot to walk you through a weekly 1:1 meeting with your direct reports about their work capacity, current projects, and career goals because you’re incapable of holding that conversation on your own, I think the wrong one of us is the manager here, friend.

This same manager just got caught committing (fairly minor) fraud and freely admitted it when being investigated. Instead of being fired, HR said he could be given a verbal or written warning depending on what his manager wants. It doesn’t even have to be written!

Meanwhile I spent yesterday morning gentle-parenting him through fixing a mistake he couldn’t grasp the implications of. Even though it’s basic information he should’ve understood about key functions of our work more than a year ago, before he’d even finished his first 90 days in job.

I am going to scream.

@Wizz said in MU Peeves Thread:

isn’t the, uh…point of TS that it’s still collaborative writing, tho?

I mean, ideally yes? But I also just kind of assumed that if someone has such rampant disregard for the other person that they’re lying to get TS, the whole “other person” part really isn’t factoring into the decision-making anymore, anyway. Like if your goal is to get off without really caring what you have to do to manage it, there’s faster and easier ways to go about it that don’t involve being awful to other people. They can be more ethical and more efficient with their smut!

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’m somewhat baffled they don’t just go to sex games or Gdoc porn with a friend but…idk I am not an expert in these things.

The ethics of lying to get into someone’s virtual pants aside (always wrong, always creepy)…

If someone is desperate enough to be a fucking weirdo about it, even the sex MUs and Gdoc porn aren’t necessary. Every time I see the bizarre lengths that people go to get TS, I’m like, “…Y’all know AO3 is free, right? Like, you can read a nearly infinite number of horny words with basically zero effort. Same with Imaglr. Or with PornHub. You can go have a wank without bothering anyone, if you go do it over there.”

But I dunno. I just think it’s funny that there’s some part of my brain pointing out that not only is their behavior morally wrong, it’s also inefficient.

@Pyrephox said in MU* Wishlists:

Annnnd banned. Sorry about that, folks.

Awww. I kind of wanted to keep them like particularly stupid pets.

@hellfrog said in AI In Poses:

@NotSanni ok but how are people in this hobby deluded into thinking anyone else will think LLM writing is good? The game in question is not a minecraft server, it’s a real MU with real MUers who have been writing for years.

I mean, have you seen some of the shit that’s swept through BookTok and become insanely popular among a crowd of people who ostensibly love the written word and pride themselves on the volume of material they read? I think we may be conflating “I want to consume high quality art” with “I want to be entertained” here and while there is definitely overlap between the two, that Venn diagram is not just a circle.

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

My two cents? If you don’t have a handle, you have something to hide, and my brows immediately raise. I feel that way about everyone, players or admin, but I give players way more grace because I know not everyone wants to slap their handle on right out of the gate and sometimes it’s nice to have a haven alt.

I also don’t link my handle, though I admittedly tend not to play on Ares games very often or very long.

If people want to know who I play, I’m generally willing to tell them – when asked directly. But I want it to be a conversation. I’ve had two different instances of two different men behaving in ways that are genuinely Not Okay that carried on over the course of actual real life years. After that, I’m just not comfortable having that sit out there publicly, oblivious to who may be accessing it. I want to know who’s asking and why. And if the answer is so they can avoid me, then that’s okay, too.

@Ominous said in BSG Reactica:

They didn’t have a plan. “They” being the writers. The Director admitted as much in one of the Director commentaries for the first season in the DVD set, and the moment I heard it I lost all interest in the series. Babylon 5 had established how one pulls off a well-planned sci-fi series a decade prior, and that numbskull thought he knew better.

B5 is always, always, always my comparison point for shows that just completely shit the bed on pulling together the mystery that they’ve been dragging out for however many seasons. It got messy towards the end because they were cancelled and then uncancelled, so rushed through the ending of all the main arcs in Season 4 and then built Season 5 largely out of things that were supposed to be hinted at… but that was network fuckery. Not the writers. Otherwise, it would’ve been about as close to perfect as a show with '90s costuming and the same repeating shots CGI visuals can possibly be.

And writing a show with central mystery works the same way as designing a game with a central mystery. You don’t have to know all the details right away. They can stretch and grow and shift with time. But you absolutely have to know the answers to the Big Question going in. It makes everything else consistent and solves plot problems more often than you’d think when you can go, “Does this contradict the Big Answer? If it breaks the Big Answer, it doesn’t belong in our story.”

@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:

At the VERY MOST, I could see them using their PC like, ‘hey I found this spooky rock, can you guys go investigate it?’

But then again, a NPC could do that as well.

This one doesn’t bother me at all, especially if there’s a good IC reason for it – like being the head of an org. If someone leads an org, they’re running plots for the players in it, and the role of their PC in said plot is essentially The Quest Giver? They’re doing their job in character and doing extra to contribute to the game OOC. You go, Glen Coco.

@RightMeow said in Real life happy:

As my return to school isn’t a big deal to anyone in my actual life, I just wanted to share because I can. I am about halfway through my estimated timetable on my degree. I am double majoring with 18 credit semesters while working management for 40+ hours. I’m in accelerated courses to achieve the goal faster. I just got my certificates to say that I have again maintained my dean list holding that I’ve had the whole time and a merit award for taking part in the student insight committee.

That is all. I return you back to the game opens, closes, and dramas.

Thank you for reading.

From someone who was also an adult student carrying a full-time course load while working a full-time job for something like seven years over two degrees:

What you’re doing is incredibly hard. Anyone who doesn’t think it’s a big deal doesn’t know what they’re talking about. You should be enormously proud of yourself.

@Kestrel said in RL Peeves:

And I’m just tired, boss. I thought people using AI to RP for them was bad enough. Now I got an RL friend delegating social interaction to ChatGPT too. I don’t consent to this shit. I don’t want to interact with pristine slop, I want my unique human friends back.

“I use Copilot to prep for all of our 1:1 meetings!”

If you need Copilot to walk you through a weekly 1:1 meeting with your direct reports about their work capacity, current projects, and career goals because you’re incapable of holding that conversation on your own, I think the wrong one of us is the manager here, friend.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

The real contest was to try to write a desc that would scroll anyone’s screen, contained as many treasured cliches like ‘sparkling orbs gaze into your soul’ as you could pack in, yet did not tell the reader anything about what the character actually looks like.

Eyes: Sparkling, soulful and impid, but of undetermined colour. Hair: Luscious and cascading, but of no particular colour or length. Skin: Flawless. Height: Graceful. Shape: Exquisite and touchable. Age: Blooming.

This feels like the advanced version of me complaining about how much I hate writing descs: “I don’t know. S/he has a face and stuff. It’s probably fine.”