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.

@Gashlycrumb said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

So I tried to get it from Chewy, and they said I needed to mail the paper Rx to them. I didn’t want to wait the extra week for this.

Ohh, yeah, I’ve had to deal with Chewy Rx before, too. You can mail a script in if it’s not urgent, but they’ll also do the whole ‘enter it online and call your vet’ thing for most prescriptions. We get our dog’s prescription food and immunosuppressants from them, but had to jump through the same hoop of calling them to ask what was up, being told our vet didn’t answer, then having to call the vet and get them to call Chewy even though our vet was the one who said to use them for cyclosporine because it’s so much cheaper. The upside is that once they get what they need, they’re fast. I’ve almost always had them ship out same day or next day and get here within 48 hours from shipment with no extra charge if I was spending more than $50, which our dog’s food and meds are.

@Gashlycrumb said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

But why the hell is it happening to my DOG? I’m paying out of pocket. I’m paying extra for expedited shipping. And I still can’t get four dewormer pills, ffs. Call up my vet, tell them my dog’s shedding tapeworm proglottids, they get me a rush-appointment the very next day, but it’s been three weeks dicking around trying to get somebody to fill the script and I am still waiting for it to get here.

Are you using Wedgewood? We had to use Wedgewood for our senior cat’s methimazole for years and I despised them. The only, only good thing about his passing was thinking I’d never have to deal with them again…

Until our vet had to prescribe compounded antibiotics rather than the regular kind for our dog that’s been struggling with other major health issues since March. It took them over three days to even acknowledge they’d received the prescription from the vet, let alone do anything with it. But hey, it’s cool. It’s not like my dog has an uncontrolled infection or anything while they’re sitting around with their thumbs up their collective ass.

We had better experiences for mail order prescriptions with Covetrus, but I’ll warn you they were also way more expensive.

A lot of times I’ll use Pinterest, but the endless stream of AI that Tez mentioned is really getting on my nerves.

Other times, because my characters tend to pull a bit of inspiration from this over here and that over there and then maybe a touch of this movie or that song slapped on top of it, I already have someone vaguely taking shape in my head. So I’ll look back at what I drew inspiration from and see if there’s someone from one of those sources that fits the vibe, even if it’s a side character or a similar piece of media.

If I’m making characters with someone, they’ll get pulled into the decision process to make suggestions or veto something if it reminds them too much of someone they know, a PB they used, or a standout character from another game. I recently vetoed one of the names on a friend’s list because it was the Shadow Name of a Mage that I played for, like, almost four years. It just would’ve been weird to be on the other end of that and I want to show my friends and RP partners the same courtesy.

@Pavel said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

@insomniac

The alt text for this image is fantastic.

‘A close up of a man with a mustache and a suit.’

I, uhhh, I think someone missed some important details here.

@Jennkryst said in New Registration Freeze:

Ghost is really upset he hasn’t killed both boards, huh?

I highly, highly doubt that’s him as I’ve never known him to just casually drop slurs like that…

But man, there’s nothing like a 1500+ word screed about a hobby you supposedly haven’t engaged in for ten years to prove how well-adjusted you are and that you are model of self-awareness and detachment that everyone else should aspire to.

@Juniper said in What happened, man?:

Half of these words are made up, I swear. It must be tough living in such a bizarre self-made delusion.

For some stupid reason probably related to deep-seated self-loathing, I decided to go and look up some of those made up words myself to see if any of this made sense.

What I discovered in my three minutes of Google was that the vast majority of them are actually slurs, but the sort that gets (yes) made up by deranged little subcultures as a means of communicating with each other, sort of the way incels use “Chad” to mean something specific. I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed. I thought being a gaymosexual was kind of funny, like the opposite of shouting no homo.

@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Jonathan Joss, voice of John Redcorn in King of the Hill

God, the announcement from his husband was heartbreaking to read.

@Jenn Seriously, I was just telling a friend as we looked at the thread, “I’m sitting here in a Forever Antifascist t-shirt, putting rainbow stickers in my planner. Ain’t nothin’ subtle about this.”

Honestly, while I understand why people are upset…

I also have to admit that I laughed a whole lot at the one post that’s still up. Not because I think that what OT The Real was doing was okay, but because there’s some part of my brain that’s like:

“Ohh! Dude. You called me a gay communist? Cool. That means you were listening. So anyway, about the next point on the AGENDA…”

(ETA: I have no idea what his other posts said. I really do hope that they didn’t hurt anyone.)

@Pavel I haven’t answered it yet, but one thing I was considering when looking at it was definitely, “Well, yes, while I can think of examples like this on more games that I’ve played on than not, a lot of those examples happen to come from WoD games because I’ve played in that genre more than any other.”

So that would definitely skew my own answers. Meanwhile, though I’ve since played a few L&L and even a Pern game, I avoided them for a really long time because in the WoD communities that I came from in the late 90s and early 00s, they tended to have really bad reputations among the playerbase, specifically around spotlight hogging and IC/OOC emotional bleed. Kind of ironic, really.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

@Aria I mean I’ve only done a tiny analysis on this preliminary data but if I said Kruskal–Wallis H test (H(6) = 16.24, p = .006) would that be exciting enough?

I mean, you were supposed to laugh at me comparing p-values to the kid who brings in cookies but doesn’t want to share with the whole class, but yeah, dude, a p-value of .006 is pretty surprising, at least to me. How many responses have you had?

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

(including saying p-value to sound smart)

Don’t start talking about null hypothesis testing in front of everyone unless the p-value is large enough to share with the whole class.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

@Gashlycrumb I’ve got a couple of working sub-hypotheses, but thematic spillover is definitely one I’m tentatively hopeful for. Not that I’m “hopeful” about any being right, but you know what I mean.

For the interested, here are my general hypothetical reasons behind my overall thesis:

Thematic Spillover, where the tone and emotional content of the game world shape how players interact OOC;

Systemic Enabling, where the structure of the game makes certain behaviours easier or more rewarding;

Norm Internalisation, where patterns of behaviour become normalised within a specific community culture;

Demographic Affinity, where different genres attract different types of players with differing tendencies; and

Legacy Culture, where older habits and traditions—both good and bad—are carried over from game to game.

ETA: Obviously this isn’t a super serious research study, results won’t be conclusive or even generalisable (that is to say applicable to a population larger than, but including, the participants). And these hypotheses aren’t the only possible answers, but if I wanted to check every single thought I’ve had on the topic I’d be doing a doctoral study and I don’t hate myself that much.

If you’re not familiar with Geek Social Fallacies, you may want to take a look at that, too. It took the White Wolf game servers by storm back in the early '00s and they’re generally something that I think are applicable to a broad swath not only of genres, but hobbies and subcultures. I’ve been in this hobby since '99 and I’ve seen the behavior in the thread where you first mention this idea happen in World of Darkness games, two different permutations of Five Rings Online (which was Legend of the Five Rings), I saw it on Arx, I saw it on two different Ares games with very different themes…

And honestly, I’ve seen some of the worst offenders that I’ve known in the 20+ years I’ve been hanging around doing this on different games, with different systems, and different genres. My guess is norm internalization, but with norms that are older than my time in the hobby and, in fact, are probably older than I am. (They said while quietly eyeing the SCA.)

@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

Oh, this shit absolutely happens everywhere. It happens in my game.

I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.

It was absolutely started as that, or at least I chimed in as that, because they’re not containing their behavior to one little corner that can easily be avoided by just not being on That Specific Game. I’ve seen it personally across two games, heard about it on a third, and given their appearance on other community hubs, expect it to be expanding into Ares games soon.

But BMD is BMD and will do with a topic as it likes!

@bear_necessities said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

o continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single locatio

Why wasn’t this person banned? I mean, instead of catering to someone, just ban them. Sounds like a lot of this could be avoided with liberal usage of the banhammer.

The two of them were both early alpha players on the game and one of them ended up on staff. Like EvilGrayson said, there are a lot of good things about these players. They’re friendly, they’re engaging, they write well, they’re helpful. I wouldn’t have fallen for it otherwise. It’s only once they get a modicum of influence or control that this behavior comes out–just like VASpider.

I repeatedly warned the gamerunner that the Ares community is pretty collaborative, so it wouldn’t look great for them if it got around that they were letting people very publicly dunk on another game and their staff, that it might cause problems if they ever wanted help, but like…

They only seemed to take me seriously after I left and warned them that these two were swiftly turning Song of Blood into ‘Shang with Plot’, which I’m sure would honestly be a very popular game! But it also seemed like it wasn’t what the gamerunner was going for re: game culture, and by then I think it was too late.

So I’ve been on the games that EvilGrayson is referring to in regards to this players, which means I’ve witnessed their behavior, I know who they are, and I can vouch for all of it and more.

Why?

Because I’m embarrassed to say that I was stupid enough to fall for it for a little while.

I saw these people utterly smear someone in what I believed to be a just campaign against a sex pest who was getting away with it, because said pest was (perceived to be) female and their target was (perceived to be) male, only to watch them turn around and cozy up to that player IC and OOC on the next game. Initially, I was happy to see them do it not only because I was one of the recipients of the pest’s weirdness, but because the pest’s primary target was a character with far less social standing by the theme of the game and would’ve had a very hard time pushing back. I later realized that they weren’t trying to use their standing to help someone who had less influence then they did. They were relishing making a public display of their own influence to people they were trying to impress at the time and anything that vaguely resembled taking a stance was little more than virtue-signaling, something to be discarded as soon as it was inconvenient.

I have personally asked one of these players to stop accosting me for TS because it was making me uncomfortable, an act I felt obligated to apologize to them for if I somehow misled them, only to have them respond by telling me that they were so proud of me for setting a boundary and then promptly make a “joke” about how I can’t control what goes on in their head and they’d continue imagining us in IC threesomes. I played this off as something funny to minimize my discomfort in the moment, a tactic that anyone who has been harassed or abused will be familiar with as way to end the encounter as quickly as possible. Every woman who’s ever been harassed on the street or in a bar knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I watched these people out staff alts without their knowledge or consent and, while most of these alts don’t seem to be a particular secret on the game in question, they also weren’t public. The entire point of providing this list? Proving how many staff characters they were connected to and even romantically involved with as a means of not only influencing the sphere IC, but the game OOC. As someone who supported corporate executives for more than a decade, I can only describe this as the digital equivalent of standing in front of a shelf lined with pictures of shaking powerful people’s hands. It’s not subtle and it’s not supposed to be.

I listened to complaint after complaint from one of these players about an entire sphere on the game, all centered on how the entire playerbase was not only toxic, but specifically homophobic and ableist. While I won’t deny that are problematic players and behaviors in that area of the game, I later found out the majority of the people they were naming and shaming were actually their former TS partners, who they were now turning against for committing crimes as egregious as distancing themselves from the player, setting up boundaries, or–and this is my personal favorite–paying more attention to their other partners in a scene that was specifically about celebrating said other partner. As someone who is both non-binary and neurodivergent, I find this one particularly repugnant. There is a vast difference between ‘people being prejudiced’ and ‘facing the consequences of repeatedly being an asshole’, despite this player’s insistence that any animosity they faced was purely them being victimized and never the result of inappropriate behavior.

There’s a laundry list of other issues that I can point to, from spilling character secrets about people from one game in open spaces on another, to repeatedly claiming that no less than three people were obsessed with them in alarmingly direct parallels to Regina George, to continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single location. It is, frankly, somehow the most spectacularly insidious yet overwhelming set of behaviors that I’ve seen since VASpider and DownWithOPP. Worse yet, they now seem to be expanding out of WoD MU*s and into the world of Ares, where I expect them to only continue behavior I’ve now seen them engaged in on three different games. If you’re a game admin and you’re concerned? Reach out. I’ll provide the details that I can.

@Jenn

REMINDER: You don’t really own any of your digital content. You pay for access to it, which Amazon can shut off whenever they feel like.

In this case, Amazon/Kindle users will no longer be able to download and transfer their ebooks beginning on Wednesday, February 26. This matters because if Amazon decides to pull any of the content on their site after that for any reason, including censorship? There goes your stuff. That you paid to be able to read. Which is bullshit.

(And that’s without me even launching into a screed about digital rights management, the increasing amount of information locked behind paywalls, risk of long-term knowledge loss, or possibility for narrative erasure that sounds a lot like… dun dun dun politics.)

Want to maintain access to your stuff? Download it now. You can follow this tutorial. It doesn’t take long. In my case, I wanted to save the files on my laptop and had to download the Kindle reader app as a result, but all that did was make a filepath for them on my computer. I can still use Calibre to convert those files out of Amazon’s proprietary format and into .epub files that I can use on non-Kindle devices.