After nearly 26 years of off-and-on struggle with college — and a whole list of unresolved mental health issues going on at the same time, beginning with my biological mother’s death and the subsequent mixed family drama almost a year after that — I am, today, August 1 2025, officially in possession of a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. (Today is my conferral date.)
It’s been a long road.
@HannahBananna said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
@Pavel Thankfully if you had any of the four you’d be smart enough not to start shit with someone who’s obviously always been above you. This ain’t my way of asking. My way of asking was going onto the discord server and politely asking, like an ADULT, something you are STILL proving you’re incapable of being. This is my way of continuing to be an adult and taking away the toys of people who want to be spoiled brats. Like you. Daed.
If this is your way of being an adult, you have a very misguided definition in your mental database.
I don’t have a horse in the Star Wars MU* race, but I do have a very vested interest in not hearing after the fact about how underage porn happened on a MU*.
(And yes, I do consider it EXTREMELY LIKELY TO OCCUR when underage characters and players are permitted on a MU* with an R-rating.)
You are setting yourself up for potentially serious consequences. So let me make it clear:
DO NOT ALLOW UNDERAGE ANYTHING
This is more of an “RL Ambivalence.”
So TL;DR - I basically quit my retail job because it was just getting to me too much, and a whole bunch of things involved I’m not going into. I basically got the high-risk part of the high-reward thing I was volunteered for as part of the remodel that’s going on. I was not slated for termination; that was my decision simply because I didn’t see how a personal LOA would solve anything (which would be LOA #3 for almost the same reasons as the first two).
So what’s the other side of this? I feel like I’ve not so much liberated myself so much as forced myself to confront some issues with respect to employment, and what I can and can’t do with the degree I got on my employer’s dime and finished last year. (Still hate job search, though.)
… I just have some serious deadlines due to the financial state, and the worst case scenario is I could ask for (very conditional) reinstatement to said retail job, but that deadline is about 7d tops from today.
But I feel like this got me to actually take myself more seriously instead of wallow in imposter syndrome. A few things that came up over the past almost 12 years at said job convinced me that I have… more of a handle on CS topics than I thought I did when comparing to others. And that’s without getting into vibe coding and other agent-based programming soapboxes.
So yeah, happy to start discovering myself more in a very ironic way, but also 
at the same time.
@Ashen-Shugar So let’s see if I can explain why I disagree with a metaphor. This is how your point comes across, to me:
I own a building. A crime happens in my building. I’m culpable for the crime because I own the building.
So I suddenly am expected to a) track what goes on in the building; b) had any control whatsoever about what happens inside the building.
That’s ridiculous, and most certainly not how it works in today’s society, otherwise companies and schools would be liable for the mass shootings that happen inside their areas. It’s an absolutely absurd take.
I reject the idea that I need to tacitly monitor everything that happens on a MU* I run because someone might do something illegal. That’s like saying I should wiretap my neighbors because they talked about where to hide a corpse, because I live in the same apartment complex. Oh no, they did something bad, clearly I need to have been more responsible to make sure it didn’t happen so I could tell the cops, to the point of being unethical and invasive in my methods!
No.
@Roz said in People Doing Things:
i don’t know if most arx folks have noticed the number of code contributions @dvoraen has made to arx, but i have
Preface: This is not a request for sympathy, forgiveness, or even understanding, because I have no right to ask for any of that.
To start off, I’m posting this because my brain will not shut the fuck up about it even over a week later. I’ve tried to distract myself from it, but the issue will not stop harassing me. It keeps resurfacing. I do wonder if it’s a byproduct of being on the autism spectrum and/or ADHD (and the fact I really take rejection hard), but I don’t know. All I know is that I have to get this off my chest.
I’m not going to answer questions about the details. I’m deliberately leaving out the who and where and focusing solely on the what. Some of you already know about this, because you were involved and/or can guess from my username, which I use in multiple locations (Discord and more), but I don’t want to sweep what happened under the rug and assume everything will be fine. Because it’s not, in the abstract.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I had my first experience with being disinvited from a game. I still can’t really identify what it was I said or did that led to me being approached and told I should go because of my conduct that made other people uncomfortable. There were no sexual propositions or anything of the sort, but the discussion was that my conduct on channels as a guest and during chargen had been noted, and the sum of it led to me being effectively asked to leave.
I was absolutely shocked and anxious over it, sitting in my chair reading that, because no one had voiced any explicit concerns to me saying there’s an issue until that moment, but at the end of the day what mattered was that I did something that bothered other people to the point that staff had to get involved and say this isn’t the place for you. My response was “Alright.” and that I’d take my leave, and I logged off right after.
I can only remember talking on public channels and paging three people, two of which I’ve spoken to multiple times on other games and/or Discord. One of those two explicitly asked me when I was getting my butt approved. I’ve come to the conclusion that matters have silently changed with the second of the two, and as such I needed to keep my distance from them, including Discord. So I chose to silently break contact, left DM groups, and have tried to not interact with them.
Anyway, I peeked at the game site, got the message my site was blocked from the portal, and wondered why I went there in the first place, even if it was just to hit the logout button. It was a stupid thing to do, but I still did it.
So yeah. I did something, the aftermath is bothering me still, and the worst part is I still can’t identify to myself what behavior of mine is the problem.
That’s all.
I don’t feel like copy-pasting from MSB, so I’m just going to go into recent history as I can remember it, with a few special mentions.
UPDATED - Feb 11, 2024
Current
Inactive
Past
* Everywhere I transplanted Svoran (most of them WoT games), it was for character research. “How does he think and react to X situation?” In my personal writing, Svoran is the one character where I could not get into his headspace without character research. Plus, I could not figure out how grumpy he was on average, and to whom, why the fuss, etc. I think I’ve finally figured him out, but this was a 20+ year endeavor to iron him out into his current form in my writing.
MU*ing has been a godsend with figuring out character mindsets, to the point I stopped doing character research because my writing felt more mature as far as figuring out how to write people as people, if that makes sense? But for a while, I was playing some characters from my personal fiction of Aldera to try and figure them out. The irony of this is: THEY ALL CHANGED DRASTICALLY DESPITE THE RESEARCH. (Now, they’re nothing like the “researched” versions were.) Go figure.
@crawfish I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this:
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I LOVE THEM
@Roz Ok but which of these six bears would you vote for if they were the candidates? This is very important to the theme of this thread.
This is more of an “RL Ambivalence.”
So TL;DR - I basically quit my retail job because it was just getting to me too much, and a whole bunch of things involved I’m not going into. I basically got the high-risk part of the high-reward thing I was volunteered for as part of the remodel that’s going on. I was not slated for termination; that was my decision simply because I didn’t see how a personal LOA would solve anything (which would be LOA #3 for almost the same reasons as the first two).
So what’s the other side of this? I feel like I’ve not so much liberated myself so much as forced myself to confront some issues with respect to employment, and what I can and can’t do with the degree I got on my employer’s dime and finished last year. (Still hate job search, though.)
… I just have some serious deadlines due to the financial state, and the worst case scenario is I could ask for (very conditional) reinstatement to said retail job, but that deadline is about 7d tops from today.
But I feel like this got me to actually take myself more seriously instead of wallow in imposter syndrome. A few things that came up over the past almost 12 years at said job convinced me that I have… more of a handle on CS topics than I thought I did when comparing to others. And that’s without getting into vibe coding and other agent-based programming soapboxes.
So yeah, happy to start discovering myself more in a very ironic way, but also at the same time.
I want everyone’s opinion of what counts as gritty realism GO
My self-inflicted RL situation. passes over mic
@Meg does a picture even count as a shortrel
Yes, if it’s a game of hangman where the word guessed was “shortrel.”
@Tez If our roles were reversed, I would not have been able to resist making the Blade Runner GIF with “I do hope you’re satisfied with our product.”
@voiceinthevoid Please tell me you at least reported that before leaving. I went hurk in my chair.
I completely understand that this will be a deal breaker for some people. I am sorry to lose anyone over it. I would still rather be upfront about what the game allows than have somebody discover it after investing time into a character. Nobody will ever be forced to roleplay anything they are uncomfortable with and players will always have the option to fade to black.
How is the bolded an opt-out in any way shape or form if the ftb insinuates that it happened to that character anyway, meaning the topic is likely coming up later which means they’re… still roleplaying about it? Because let’s be real, I don’t know of anyone who can just black hole memory that kind of event to the point it doesn’t become relevant later in any form. (Ignoring supernatural things being involved, obviously.)
One of my take-aways (personal regrets) from being on Concordia is that the thread’s question of children NPCs also applies to pets.
Because I was a menace about my cat, and looking back I think it was pretty clear I more often than not failed to add much of substance to a scene with him involved.
@hellfrog Sometimes, when the moon is in the right lunar phase, I get intrusive thoughts saying “I want to see the receipts of things like that.”
And then I come to my senses because I don’t really need to lose further faith in humanity or intentionally make myself nauseous from the ick they likely contain. (To say nothing about how I have absolutely no right to ask for them, let alone be shown them.)
