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.
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
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
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!
@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Rinel find me a person in this hobby who doesn’t read a peeve and think ‘this is about me, isn’t it?’
I was supposed to spend most of today working on schoolwork, like getting caught up on my reading. Instead, I spent most of the day in bed and a little bit playing games.
I’m so tired of feeling tired.
I didn’t realize I had this peeve until yakking with @Rucket on Discord tonight:
I have no idea what MU*s are out there anymore aside from Ares games, and the occasional peek at Evennia’s tracker.
The peeve: How am I supposed to know what else is out there?! Where are all the MU* trackers?! I’ve forgotten and/or they’ve poofed.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1044720/Farthest_Frontier/
This is a survival simulation game where you start with a group of villagers and try to build a thriving settlement. It has a number of subsystems for managing the affairs of your village, including food spoilage, home desirability*, raiders, villager diet, crop rotations for your fields, resource production, seasonal changes (certain items grow in certain times), and more I’m forgetting.
I enjoy it. It’s a puzzle to be solved, figuring out how much food and firewood you need to produce to survive the winter months, when to not plant your fields, where to put your industrial/undesirable buildings (villagers don’t want the compost yard or saw mill near their houses, for example), and all this you have to balance with protecting your settlement from external threats. I lost all my gold to raiders because I did not protect my village at all, because it costs money to maintain guards and my income is crap (another system you have to juggle). 
It’s $30 USD on Steam and Early Access, but I dare say this is one of the most feature complete games that has entered Early Access. It has some hiccups where the game will freeze for a few seconds (background thread taking over, perhaps?) but the gameplay is very much there and it’s not sparse. I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth, despite the hefty early access price tag.
* If your buildings upgrade and don’t remain desirable, your villagers will abandon them and would rather be homeless during winter rather than live in a house. lol
And for the Arx people that see this, I leave you with this picture of our Dominus making sure he can wash his hair:
@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
I hate you with all the fire of my soul if I set being at the bar and you pose joining me at a table.
joins @tsar at the table and immediately demands to know all of history from the beginning
@junipersky I… was not aware of this. It does not change the fact that you are liked and appreciated and that we’re hungry for every kitten picture you post.
