Had this linked to me on Discord, made me lol:

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

@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.

@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

@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.

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

• Concordia - Alistair (& Ser Silvertail)

Inactive

• Luminiferous Aether - Anthony

Past

• Various Wheel of Time MU*s - Svoran*
• The Fifth World - Jor
• Crossroads - Svoran*, Jaeden
• Flight of the Golden Crane - Jaram
• Kushiel’s Debut - Piers
• Arx 1.0 - Bhandn

* 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

I just want a tl;dr of what dragon colors and styles mean, since I haven’t read any Pern books.

@Pyrephox I would advise you not to force it, as someone who’s been in this position for a number things (although my depression tends to help a bit here). Point being, I was trying to force my enjoyment of games (not just MU*s, any games), and I ended up becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Months passed of this and I eventually got tired of that feeling and took the plunge to step away.

About two weeks ago I suddenly had the urge to restart one and it’s enjoyable again. Because I’m not forcing myself to sit down and do it; that’s for schoolwork.

On a MU* note, I’d all but quit from lack of drive. I wasn’t planning to start any new characters or anything, but one day virtually out of nowhere a character concept dropped into my head, latched on like a barnacle, and I find myself excited to take him for a spin when the time comes.

But again, it wasn’t because “Oh I HAVE to do this”; it’s because I let it come to me. Did I want to play games and other MU*'s while feeling in a slump? Yes. But forcing myself into something to try and enjoy it felt like work, and that’s completely counter to the idea that it’s for fun.

So yeah. Give yourself permission to take those steps away and if it comes back to you and excites you again, yay!

@dvoraen said in General Video Game Thread:

Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 Release Date Trailer

Well, I know what I’ll be doing on April 24th.

I don’t normally endorse these kinds of videos, but…

XBox Deep Dive into Expedition 33

(ETA)“This team gets it.” is basically where I’m at. I mean, even just talking about why there’s a world map I was like: snap point(/ETA)

Also, I would go gay for the Creative Director because of his accent.

@Meg said in Meg's Mu* Mist:

Updated. Trying to get back into this lil hobby, this quaint what did you call it? RP? Are you sure? Well, if you are sure you want to call it that. Sounds a little sexual tho.

meg I couldn’t decide whether to do a “one of us” GIF or the “come play with us” creepy girls from the Shining to try and sound sinister. Please advise.

@Solstice said in General Video Game Thread:

@dvoraen It’s been quite some time since I saw a trailer, raised a brow, and immediately set a reminder for the launch date on my phone. That looks like it could be pretty damn rad.

Go back to my first post (in this thread) on the subject. This is how I feel about the score:

Does everyone remember, idk how long ago now, when “olestra” was the biggest thing to hit food and all over the news (and the various rumors about it)?

I feel like “powered by AI” is along those lines, and I’m like, “ok. In 2025 olestra is something I never hear about anymore, so when can we get past the excessive AI push that probably isn’t really AI or as revolutionary as they claim?”

Folks I’m concerned. I think @Rucket may have been taken over by an AI.

ARE YOU OKAY? Use 1 for yes, and 0 for no. Matrix code will be confirmation of needing to run anti-virus on you.

Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 Release Date Trailer

Well, I know what I’ll be doing on April 24th.

@Tez said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@dvoraen There’s a place to put feedback related to the change. If you actually have feedback on things that are broken, they can go there. If you have any amount of searching to figure out how to fix it, that’s even better. Roz found the solution to the layout issue and posted it in that thread so I could implement it.

I do not get paid to do this. I’m not just an unpaid volunteer, I pay for the privilege of volunteering. I assumed you were joking and responded in that fashion, because the idea that you were being serious was too wild to contemplate. If I was wrong, and you were serious, then yeah, it was in piss poor taste.

To be clear, yes, I was trying to be completely facetious, because I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong for either one. The only reason I tagged you was because you probably would know the most and, tbh, I just did not have time to research it because I was posting right before my appointment for a surgery consult. (And to be fair, I did open the door to being whapped with a ‘git gud’, but my reaction to it was to sigh in all caps in my chair, but again, I didn’t treat it as serious. I just didn’t laugh or find it humorous as far as “it was not funny” was concerned.)

But yeah. I probably could’ve handled that better either way.

ETA:

@Tez Same to you Miss Upgrader! Fix my spoiler block to redact properly!

this isn’t funny

Neither is what you’re insinuating with this, particularly when you consider that the initial response to me was flippant – and also not really funny from my perspective, but I didn’t take it as malicious or intended to be insulting (nor was my response to it meant as such either) – especially since, as we clearly just saw with not knowing how to properly image link from imgur, it could’ve just been a simple matter of me simply forgetting how to do it correctly. Secondly, if I had any real issue with the forum upgrade, it would have been voiced by now and in a very different way.

That said, @Tez if that was in bad taste, I am sorry.

@Roz said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@dvoraen said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

(@Tez WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING WITH IMGUR LINKS REEEE)

Were you doing it with just the regular Imgur URL from the URL bar or did you right click on the image and get the actual direct image link?

I think it was the imgur-provided link instead of the direct one, yeah.

@Tez Same to you Miss Upgrader! Fix my spoiler block to redact properly!

Here is me, trying to summon @Apos to dive in on this subject, for reasons that should be obvious to many of us who were on Arx. (inb4thisisnotanArxthreadreee)

For myself, I consider metaplot to be “a story that’s going on that directly affects (or will affect) the state of the world and the players.” Metaplot should not only be fluid, because of player involvement/actions, but multithreaded, because there’s no one story that meets the definition I gave, let alone the outcome(s) of that story which could spawn other metaplot(s).

I’m keeping it generalized, because I have not been a game runner, and I sure don’t make any claims to being a plotter/storyteller outside of my own head (i.e., my personal fiction that lives in there for non-MU* writing). But, that is how I see it as a player, and Arx had a great deal to do with arriving at that definition.