The fear of being seen as The Whiner is real. I’ve avoided reporting things that seemed non-reportable - constant and intentional passive aggressiveness, for instance - because I didn’t want to seem like a complainer who was out to get someone. Only to later find out that knowing that would have been valuable to staff.

When I started on Arx, a player pressured me to TS and then when I declined IC with reference to her sexuality he said, OOC, that maybe the right dick would fix her. I didn’t report this, because I had invited him to my room (to look at a painting we had been discussing!) so it was probably my fault and what else would I have expected. It wasn’t like he paged me out of nowhere. @sao (lovingly) bullied me into reporting and he was banned like 10 minutes later - in part because someone else had also reported him being borderline creepy but not instabannable. Would he have been banned if there wasn’t already a report about something more minor? I don’t know!

After several years, I know and trust Arx staff enough to report and let them decide what to do with it, but only because I have gotten to know them and I’m pretty sure they know I wouldn’t report maliciously. But there’s no way I’d do that immediately on a new game. It’s a tricky line to walk, for sure.

when you’re on the fence about reporting a scene for someone’s inappropriate behavior
but then the person deletes the whole log before you decide
that does not make you look better bud, but it does make up my mind about reporting

Every single log shared in order to provide proof of harassment will, by its very nature, be exposing the thing that harmed the victim. Always.

One of the fucked up things about abusers is that addressing it must involve some level of exposure of the victim. We either accept that and do what we can to mitigate it (remove the name of the victim, etc.) or we let it continue unchecked. It is impossible to address a problem if we don’t talk about the problem.

Do you all think I enjoyed having everyone read my DMs with Macha? I sure didn’t!

It’s all logs or no logs.

I want to RP but I don’t want to RP.

@crawfish don’t worry, the DMs in question are available for all to read and judge so I sleep fine at night.* some people should keep my name out of their mouths though.

• I don’t but it’s because I’m worrying about other things, like telling the waiter “you too” after they said “enjoy your meal.”

Unless chunks of RP are retconned, it wasn’t really “time wasted”. It’s a narrative, cooperative game. If things don’t work out the way you expected it can definitely suck, but it just changes the direction of the narrative. It doesn’t erase the time previously spent on a story. If I spend hours wooing another character, but in the end that character runs off with a princess instead, I didn’t waste that time. I still had the (presumably enjoyable or why did you do it) RP, and now I have material for more RP based on what happened if I want to keep playing out the story.

If the goal of RP is to make a story and have fun, the invested time can’t be wasted because it was 1) fun that you had for hours and 2) more story, just not what you expected.

Or the problem was entirely OOC and about OOC relationships and unrelated to any time spent on RP, in which case it’s just nice guy women are gumballs in a gumball machine thinking.

Nobody owes you anything in games or life, other than basic respect.

@farfalla said in MU Peeves Thread:

When you know it’s time to retire a character, but you can’t make yourself let go.

Finally giving up a beloved character and knowing it was the right choice doesn’t make you less sad about it.

@icanbeyourmuse Not to get too off track, but sex work doesn’t make someone poly. Sex workers can be monogamous. It’s just a job it has nothing to do with their relationship preferences. Polyamory is about romantic relationships. Also just as a note, the term ‘hooker’ is not preferred by full service sex workers.

@Tat said in Bannings:

If they change their behavior, great. If they don’t, then I’d ban them for continuing to behave in a way that they were asked not to, because it was harmful.

This is the #1 reason we ban people from the library. Not because of the initial thing they were doing that we had to ask them to stop doing (no mask, playing music without headphones, drinking alcohol, yelling, whatever) but because they don’t do what we ask. The vast majority of ban violations are “Failing to comply with the reasonable direction of a staff member.” Idk what my point is, here, but it seemed relevant when I started writing.

@GF

There’s a subtle difference between telling someone “Don’t be a jerk” and “Be respectful of others.”

Very true. Humans (and dogs, tbh) are much better at following positive instructions. That’s why you tell kids “walk please” instead of “don’t run”.

I think that to really go anywhere we need to acknowledge that the Hog Pit didn’t exist just to protect against jerks and predators. Sometimes you just wanna rant about a peeve. Sometimes you really need to tell someone they’re wrong about something. Sometimes you wanna make memes about something negative that happened, so you can laugh about it. Sometimes it’s just fun to argue. I do not believe this makes the people engaged in that cruel or mean or bullying. I would argue that the majority of the hog pit was that kind of thing, but the things we remember are the big blow ups.

It’s extremely normal to want to talk about our shared hobby, and it’s extremely normal to have complaints about things in the hobby, and it’s extremely normal to sometimes complain or rant about it. If you’ve never complained to your friends about the guy in tabletop who’s always in his phone (I’m that guy), or gotten pissed off by all the messages about buying gold on an mmo - well I commend your inner zen. But it’s not a terrible thing to discuss something including negative aspects.

As for how to navigate where those discussions cross the line, idk man. Try not to type things you’d regret in the morning, I guess, but that does depend on a certain level of self-awareness and self-control.

I don’t think everyone is entitled to my civility, kindness, or respect - though I try to start from there. But there’s a bug gulf between that and cruelty or intentionally hurting people. We can try and live there, when we get to levels of disagreement that verge from ideas into fundamentals, as others have discussed.

I forget my point but my point is we can allow that most mu* forum engagement is just because it’s enjoyable. It doesn’t need to have a higher moral purpose.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

I will say that lots of what people are picking out as accents, like cannae and dinnae etc aren’t actually just accents, they’re elements of Scots. A language (or dialect, depending on your definition) all its own.

Agreed. But that kind of supports the point - we’re RPing in English. I neither speak nor understand written Scots. Just as no one should start writing all of their dialogue in Italian.

@shit-piss-love I don’t have an example to offer, but yes… ish. I cannot just read the pose and understand it. I have to stop and parse each word. So technically I can read it, but I can’t read it just like a regular pose. I’m not talkin’ about dropping some Gs or whatever, but the heavy ones.

@Meg said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’m glum about a circumstance that I can’t really talk about with anyone and it’s just one of those things where I wish I had some no-judgment RP therapist to vent at. I feel dumb about it, but then also angry and hurt and offended and sad and scared/anxious. The answer is to walk away, but I don’t want to walk away. Meh. I’ll get over it.

hey, hey. pick me. i no longer RP, but i used to so i get things. i am also non-judgey, i swear. and i make a good therapist, i’ve been told!

no, pick me! @Tez says I give good advice

@KarmaBum is this about me???

Me and @hellfrog and @Rathenhope being elitist and wearing hats.

@farfalla said in MU Peeves Thread:

When you know it’s time to retire a character, but you can’t make yourself let go.

Finally giving up a beloved character and knowing it was the right choice doesn’t make you less sad about it.

@helvetica Top tier! But also the scene where your character and mine were in the gardens and engaged in miming to identify a musical instrument and I used the word ‘sackbut’ a lot.

@Pyrephox said in Enjoy the Reads!! (Admin: ETA a content warning. It's THE LOG from The Pack thread.):

But then I start thinking…what if it’s spammed logs posted to every thread with no rhyme or reason to it? What if it’s one post, but it’s hardcore underage bestiality TS? Hell, what if someone starts trying to shut down threads by posting random logs to them in hopes that they’ll get derailed, drowned?

Those examples are of behaviors that would violate BMD’s rules. The action taken wouldn’t be about the log itself.

Every single log shared in order to provide proof of harassment will, by its very nature, be exposing the thing that harmed the victim. Always.

One of the fucked up things about abusers is that addressing it must involve some level of exposure of the victim. We either accept that and do what we can to mitigate it (remove the name of the victim, etc.) or we let it continue unchecked. It is impossible to address a problem if we don’t talk about the problem.

Do you all think I enjoyed having everyone read my DMs with Macha? I sure didn’t!

It’s all logs or no logs.

@Roz has long ago muted this entire thread.

Edit: oh that was the whole point.

In that case @roz! Hey @roz! Someone is being wrong on the internet.