Sad to say there’s another one of these currently running for another member of the MU* community. If you’ve been on Ares games over the last few years, there’s a chance you know Cameron. And hey, if you won’t do it for him, do it for the cats.

GoFundMe: Help keep Cameron, his kids, and his cats housed!

@Ashkuri said in MU Peeves Thread:

I feel like this sums up several many MUSH interactions I’ve had with people over the years

The one I need to keep reminding myself of is “Your feelings are valid. But managing them is also not my responsibility.”

@Testament said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Coming back to post that Ozzy died today.

https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1947720771889205473

My local station is putting on a tribute that started at around 4PM and is running until midnight EST that’s all just Ozzy, Sabbath, and stories and interviews from fellow musicians, fans, etc.

https://wmmr.com/

@Alamias said in Liberation Drama!?:

@Aria I can log in via cell phone, so it’s definitely something IP or provider related. I wonder if I was collateral damage in an IP ban or something…

It’s possible. I have no idea who you played, but if you want to PM me, I can always ping a staffer the next time I see one online and try to ask.

@Alamias Game is still up and accessible for me.

@Jenn said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Andrea Gibson

Ohh, man. I literally have You Better Be Lightning sitting on my nightstand. I’ve never been able to make it through that book without weeping in both the best and worst ways.

@Dreampipe

But also, that seriously sucks and I’m sorry that happened to you!

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’ve had to turn the auto-convert feature off in Word for when I do my – (that is two hyphens, often converted to a dash of some kind, be it en or em. I never learned the difference.) because it was getting pulled up by the anti-AI checker on my submitted work and it’s easier to just… not deal with that.

Em Dash (—):

Roughly the width of a capital letter M. It’s used to create a break in a sentence, similar to how you’d use parentheses or colons.

En Dash (–):

Roughly the width of a capital letter N. It’s used to connect two words or show a range of numbers.

That’s literally it.

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?