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.

@KarmaBum said in Your Latest Batch of (Silly) Drama:

Really old drama.

I almost put this in the “Good Things” thread just as an example of things I’m so glad we decided as a group to stop doing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040204025308/http://southern.silvertree.org/southerngoldapp.cgi

14 general questions, then 33 questions on the gold application and 26 for bronze.

Question 24 on the gold application is amazing.

24. During your first hatching that you’re running as a Junior, you hear on the grapevine that your Weyrleader is flirting with prospective candidates and promising them search and/or impression on acceptance of TS. Your Weyrwoman is his RL wife, and has no idea any of this is going on, and in fact, you know, told him on a number of occasions not to TS. What do you do?

Allow me to translate:

“My husband lies to my face about whipping his imaginary dick out after I’ve repeatedly asked him not to. You’re gonna tell me if he does it again, right? RIGHT?!?”

Cause it’s always super fun when your RP inadvertently sticks you in the middle of a real life couple and their drama.

@Warma-Sheen said in Liberation Drama!?:

It doesn’t really sound like drama so much as same ol’, same ol’ gripes that a lot of players have on games.

The only thing that adds fuel to the fire is the fact that they just ripped the post down like they had a secret to hide.

Nothing says ‘don’t let all the people in the secret sandbox learn that there are others with the exact same complaints’ like suddenly removing a player’s post on a public board and then announcing ‘Nothing to see here, folks.’

So the thing is, staff didn’t just “rip the post down like they had a secret to hide.”

They did take the post down–including announcing that they were taking it down, why they were taking it down, and having a conversation on Public with multiple players. That convo involved them directly fielding some complaints about the content of the post itself and their decision to take it down and was handled with what was, in my opinion, a lot more grace than I’ve seen most staffers have in the face of public criticism, regardless of whether or not that criticism was justified.

Frankly, I understand why Gwendolyn made that post. I’ve expressed some of those same frustrations myself–privately, including to people who took them to staff. You know what happened when a staffer heard I was upset? I got a pretty quick response reaching out to me to help with the things they could and acknowledging the things they couldn’t. I understand why some people might be frustrated by the post being taken down, but I also don’t agree. Sundance has been very public about being absent from the game. She made a post back in early October that she was dealing with a lot of stuff IRL that was pulling her away and would be back some time after the holidays. Considering that it’s January 4, that was all of… three days ago?

It sucks. I’m not going to deny that it sucks. But we were warned this was happening, I’ve been having some of the best RP that I’ve had in literal years over the last few months even with the slump, I saw staff running multiple scenes in two different spheres just last week (and no, I wasn’t involved in any of them, so it’s not like some vague notion of preferential treatment is skewing my opinion here), I can hop on grid and catch a scene most of the time that I want to, and I’ve yet to run into a staffer that wasn’t willing to help wherever they could.

I do hope the last few months seriously makes them consider spreading some decision making out a little more and adding additional staff to minimize future bottlenecks, but I don’t think anyone should be running around shrieking that the game is dying just yet.

@Evilgrayson

Yeeeeah, I’m interested in the game. And I’ve definitely played places where they continued using my writing after I left, with or without my consent. I kind of figured that anything I created was kind of a donation to the game, save the one that lifted from a site I’d been on to use on one that I wasn’t a part, and then lied right to my when I confronted them about it…

But licensing? What? What is that?

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

No call, no shows to stuff. RL comes first, but your GM or RP partner is also a real person.

There is a certain degree of lateness for online that I will ignore or not worry about too much whether I’m the one waiting or the one running late, but like…

In the last few months, I’ve sat around waiting for an hour while trying to figure out if the event scheduler hadn’t adjusted for the time change or if people just weren’t showing up to scenes they asked me to run for them. Or waiting for them to come to their own events, where a half dozen people were like, “Are they coming? Is this moved?” and then the player didn’t even acknowledge they’d blown people off.

@catzilla said in LF various WoD/CofD people over the years:

Was reading over some old logs and got nostalgic for various people I’ve RP’d with over the years and have lost contact with.

Are you the player of any of these people? Let me know, I’d love to RP with you again!

Bliss & Ruin
Can’t remember the name but a male Mekhet that ghouled my mortal after watching her get beaten up.

Ordo Nox
Succubus (ST/Admin handle)
Anathema (ST/Admin handle)
Remy the Orpheus character from Ordo Nox

Fabula Rasa
Pretty much anyone that was in the following games:
The Vegas Hunter game
Maq’s Asheville Mage game
Maq’s Anchorage Werewolf game

NOLA (whatever the latest version was)
Eerie
Muse
Nikola
Seth
Rafael

Wanton Wicked - Savannah
Too many people to list, but if you remember Eve Masterson and enjoyed playing with her/me, this is for you!

Fallcoast
Darwin (ST handle)
Tobin
Alistair
Erika
Sebastian
Rudy
Walker
Isrieal

Tarnished Reflections
Anyone from the Vampire or Changeling game!

Ohh, god. I played on, like, three of them? But it’s been so long since I was on Fabula Rasa and Tarnished Reflections that I barely remember who I played, and there were so many reboots of Wanton Wicked that I’m like, “Okay, but which one?”

@Aria said in Pets!:

On condition of his FeLV test coming back negative tomorrow…

We adopted the kitty they recommended to us - a ten year old little man currently named Steely Daniel, which is absolutely fantastic as a name but we’re generally not jamming out to “Reelin’ in the Years”.

I am trying to convince insomniac that his name should be Sir Catrick Stewart, instead.

He has a snaggle toofs and a wonky eye that we’re hoping is just some glaucoma and will be taking him to our regular vet ASAP to confirm.

Random Update on This Cat:

I do not know why it took this dude five months to get adopted. He’s fucking awesome. Adopt old pets, guys. They’re great.

@dvoraen said in Real life happy:

@Aria said in Real life happy:

Today I was called “an affront to the system” and I have never been so flattered in my entire life.

Did you ask “how many systems?” and flutter your eyelashes?

I did not. I blinked and said thank you.

Today I was called “an affront to the system” and I have never been so flattered in my entire life.

@Tez said in Real life happy:

@Aria Are you me???

Yes. You’ve been the sheet with two little eye holes cut into it this entire time.

@SockMonkey said in Real life happy:

@Aria Look at you go!

Honestly, it’s really exciting but it’s also really, really annoying for one specific reason:

I spent more than a decade floundering as an administrative/executive assistant, where I had almost all of the same skills that I have now, but was frequently dismissed and overlooked as “just” an admin. To the point that I literally had an executive in a room full of thirty people berate a high level sales rep for not understanding the rules engine dictating our substitution guidelines by her saying “It’s not that hard. Even Aria can explain this and she’s just an assistant.” (Note: It actually was hard, it was really fucking hard, which was why most of our reps went through a day and a half of training about it. The fact that I was explaining it to the head of sales for the entire West Coast should’ve been a mark in my favor, not against him.)

It took one person taking what was perceived as a “chance” on me in 2019, by giving me a lateral move, when I’d spent years managing budgets and projects and writing executive comms and and and and for this to happen. And then I got promoted in 2021. And 2022. And this month.

There are probably ridiculously talented people in your (and I mean general your, not you SockMonkey!) organization that are being overlooked because they don’t fit the mold–they made some mistakes when they were young, or had life commitments pulling them in other directions, or don’t play office politics well, or changed careers…

Take another look. Give them a chance. They have more to prove than the hot shit upper middle class kid with the MBA whose goal in life is to be and “industry disruptor” and who thinks driving a Tesla qualifies as a personality.

I just got promoted for the third time in less than four years.

More real life funny than real life happy, but…

Today, one of my coworkers accidentally made the most wildly inappropriate comment at me and I cannot stop laughing.

I went to see Bush over the weekend. Today, I wore the shirt I bought at the concert to work. She was trying to tell me that she really liked the shirt and the outfit that I put together, but instead she said:

“I keep looking at your Bush, Aria. I really like it!”

It is only by the grace of God that I managed not to blurt out “Thanks! I grew it myself.”

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

You can access it here.

My answer to the optional last question was “hire a regular person to try and read your books before you publish them.” But mostly I just want that job for myself.

Man, when I staffed their game servers, I volunteered for that job and they still wouldn’t let me do it. Not even just proofreading. Don’t worry! They have an editing service…

Then they published a book with a typo in the fucking title.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Roz ONYX PATH!!!!!!!!!

White Wolf – not Onyx Path, but ehh – is currently doing a community survey that will impact the future of their games as both TTRPGs, actual plays, and video games.

You can access it here.

@Juniper

Fun Fact: If you get the right kind of IUD, you can enjoy the benefits of not getting pregnant AND not having a period.

A+. Do recommend.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Aria Faraday’s is live, it’s on Ares Central.

Ahhh, thank you! The old link I had for it died years ago, but I never bothered worrying about it because I’d switched to Arx and Ares games that logged right from their site.

Are there any log cleaners still around like the one that used to be on the Ares site a decade ago?

I recently started MUing on a game that DOESN’T use Ares or seem to have any code that logs scenes. I’m RPing and manually saving and cleaning all of my scenes for “lasts”, like a fucking savage. Just… what?

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.

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

So, in the last couple of months I got to witness closing arguments in the NYC of Trump. My son and I went on an epic near 30-day road trip and visiting seven of the ten greatest national parks (Rocky Mountain, Tetons, Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite, Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon). Been an amazing journey.

But today in the line to get my box of bagels the cashier looked over to me and gave me a senior citizen discount, she let me know and I was horrified – I am 44.

So I went white early (late 30’s) and I can’t not sport a beard. I’m bald and keep my head shaved.

Should I dye the beard back red to its natural color? Or is that just a horrible decision for men?

I’m with the ‘enjoy the discount and don’t worry about it’ crowd. However, it’s your body and if it’s bothering you…

I wouldn’t go full beard dye. One of my former bosses used to dye his very white hair back to its natural dark blond shade and it was striking enough that I could always tell when his wife had done it for him that weekend versus when he was due for for a touch-up because of how much the color faded and how unnatural it looked for the first week.

I’d go with using a beard comb to apply it to some hair but not all of it and blending colors. (Kind of like highlights, but for your face?) I say this because my father-in-law is a natural ginger who, in the time I’ve known him, has now gone completely, solidly, kids would go ‘Santa!’ at him if he weren’t such a thin man levels of white hair and beard. But for the first decade I knew him, the blend of natural red and white looked blond and I - along with a lot of people - had no idea he was going gray at all. It wasn’t until I saw his wedding picture with my mother-in-law that I realized he actually had bright red hair and apparently, that was a response he got all the time for about 15-20 years.