Best posts made by GF

@Lurrr I’m not saying anything about Jackaltrade because they freely offered to out themselves by providing their information, but I would like to normalize not showing receipts. It’s occasionally traumatizing to relive that kind of thing, it’s almost always humiliating to show yourself getting degraded, and it’s very likely to result in retaliation from the accused who want to show receipts of how actually she totally asked for it. Let people give the amount of information they feel safe giving, and let the people who receive these kinds of freely-offered warnings either take the warning or not. I don’t think it’s fair to take the experience these people have gone through and add to it a burden of accepting responsibility for meeting the standards strangers need to be convinced.

@eddie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Prove me wrong.

No. You don’t get to come in here today, from nowhere, hiding behind a veil of anonymity that hides the personal stake you clearly have in all this, and appoint yourself the sole arbiter of what are and are not the facts. If you want people to take you seriously, then behave like a serious person. If you want to bark commands like an imperious toddler, then carry on as you are, and I hope you enjoy getting treated like the infant you present yourself as.

When you have to take a mental health break from a game because your life is in a bad enough place you don’t know if you have the fortitude to deal with the game’s atmosphere and then you’re in the shower the next morning asking yourself, Isn’t the fact that you need fortitude to deal with the game kind of a red flag?

I really need to stop going back there to find out what y’all are talking about in these conversations.

Most of those two threads came off to me like people who complain about how America needs more civility in its discourse, where “civility” is code for “never protesting when someone hurts you because that might make people who support hurting you (or just lack the spine to stand up against people who hurt you) feel uncomfortable.”

“How can we heal the community,” moans man who refuses to listen to the complaints of anyone he disagrees with and immediately dismisses them as being part of a clique of people he can’t identify but whose villainous intentions he knows without question. He offers this question in an echo chamber where the people he needs to address literally cannot respond to him, because he has no interest in an answer to the question, just in appearing to be a put-upon peacemaker who is rejected by those unreasonable whisper-campaigning bitches in The Clique.

It’s enough to put my off my dinner. Fuck.

Staff who take action when action is called for.

@hobos said in Bannings:

Yes, nobody has to accept an apology. But forgiveness is still more freeing than holding ten-year-old grudges in a small community.

Please don’t do that. Don’t act like forgiveness is an act of enlightenment. It’s not: it’s a choice that a person makes after considering whether the act would reap greater benefits than it costs to withhold. I feel the only way anyone can present forgiveness as a categorical good is if they have never had to calculate whether forgiveness would put them into unsafe positions.

It’d be nice to be able to be friends and forgive each other and direct our empathy to each other.

Friends respect boundaries. If Vulgar Kitten wants to be anyone’s friend (as opposed to you wanting everyone else to be Vulgar Kitten’s friend, for what reason I can’t even guess), then she is welcome to attempt to earn it by respecting people’s boundaries and offering the acts of contrition they would find convincing. If she’s not willing to do that, then that sucks, but two to tango and all that.

@Kestrel was genetically engineered in a laboratory to be the world’s greatest warrior, but was raised in England as part of a social experiment to see if the nation’s “what would the neighbors think” culture could override her genetic programming. It has not occurred yet to the scientists that neither is the case; that Kestrel might have chosen a life of peace of her own free will and morality.

Kestrel once saved four babies from a burning orphanage. She didn’t rush into the fire or anything silly like that. Rather, she rebuked the fire sharply to stop being such a little attention-seeker, and the flame, humiliated, slinked off into a river to think about what it had done.

Kestrel posts so rarely on this board because she spends most of her time in outer space, visiting the sun. She has discovered the sun is actual a titanic labyrinth made of plasma, which she has been mapping off and on for the last three years. Many alien species are assisting her efforts in exchange for access to her data and to her music recommendations, which they seem to consider a form of currency.

Once per year, Kestrel may summon an army of gerbils to do her bidding. She does not know where, when, or how she acquired this power, but the gerbils know, and they refuse to speak of it.

Kestrel refuses to watch “white savior” movies because it reminds her of the time she personally unified China thousands of years ago. In retrospect, she wishes she’d let them unify themselves, but it’s too late to fix that now. All she can do is try to avoid the embarrassment.

@Pavel said in Bannings:

@Narson said in Bannings:

The idea that both sides don’t recognise the split is harmful? Of /course it is/.

See, I’m not sure it is ultimately.

The reasons behind the split, and the metaphorical violence behind the split? Absolutely harmful and I’m not going to deny it.

For me, the inciting incident was me making a post saying, “This piece of news hurt me very much.”

Derp replied with, “I refuse to engage you on that level, because it is more important to me to show that I am detached and intelligent and saw it coming than it is to acknowledge that this hurts you or affects anyone’s live.”

I replied, "You’ll never stop this, will you?

He replied, “No, and you’re wrong to ask me to.”

That is the violence I personally suffered in this split, the hurt I’ve tried to veil behind my online persona of detached irony.

So, as you say, I do not consider the split itself harmful. Even though I don’t think I’ve played on a MU* in at least eighteen months, what I feel most about the split is relief and a sense of safety, knowing he and his fanboys are out of my life as far as my forum career goes and maybe for the rest of my life. I am well shed of them. I know it won’t stop them from trying to hurt me (and I look forward to learning that someone has screengrabbed this post to bolster their argument that I am stirring the drama), but they are welcome to do what they want. In this moment, I feel peaceful, and wish them all the joy they can find in trying exact revenge on my ghost.

Hey, you. Yeah, you, the one reading this. No, I don’t know who you are. Doesn’t matter for what I’m about to say, and if you think it does, you are incorrect.

You’re cool and the people who deserve you like you for who you are. Got it? You better, because if I catch you saying otherwise, you will be in trouble.

Good. Now go on, get outta here. Go conquer the world. You got this.

@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

If this is how you treat people who are trying to help, I can start to understand why no one tries to help.

This is not how I treat people who are trying to help. This is how I treat people who come to this thread to defend themselves and their reputations first and foremost, then claim later that they’re trying to help but also have no capacity to help because it’s out of their hands. It’s how I treat someone who, as best I can tell, only said he wants to help so that he can be absolved for his inaction because he claims to have good intentions.

I am aware that it is more constructive to be patient and coddling, but the plain fact is I do not always have the fortitude for that, and people who are complicit in a culture as bad as AoA’s apparently is do not deserve it. They can be granted it by the grace of the person offering it, but they’re not entitled to it, and I frankly question whether there’s even a point given how hard it seems to be for anyone involved to perceive the victims as full human beings.

And I’m not helvetica, but I’ll answer a couple of the next few points anyway.

If he’s someone with influence on that game how does it help to remove himself from the game?

It doesn’t, but it does grant him the absolution of responsibility he seems to be asking for. You can’t be blamed for outcomes you have no part in.

It definitely helps all the hurt/angry people that would like to see the place fail as revenge, but it doesn’t actually help the game itself in any way.

I ask this seriously, not rhetorically: who cares one way or the other if the game fails? So what? Why should we prioritize the health of the game over the health of the people hurt by its staff and players?

Wow. That scene was so vile it was genuinely hard to read. I eventually gave up because ew. I really can’t blame you if that one scene alone was enough to sour you on your own game forever, because something about it really gets under the skin.

@Third-Eye Last weekend my sister said to me, “Thirty years ago doesn’t mean 1970,” and I’m still a little mad.

To me, it’s more like a break-up. When you break up with someone, you don’t keep their pics in your phone, you don’t keep their texts, you don’t keep going back to your favorite dating spots; because if you do that, you never move on.

If we’re broken up with MSB, then let’s be broken up, you know? Take some time to work on ourselves and learn to be alone again, then start looking for a new girlfriend–okay, maybe the simile is getting away from me, but I think the first paragraph is still solid.

@Kestrel said in Bannings:

The last two threads on MSB serve as an excellent reminder that misogyny and Authoritarianism often go hand in hand.

I did notice how concerned certain parties seem to be that whatever replaces the Hog Pit going forward must make sure that harassers be allowed to argue back, while people accusing harassers must bring receipts or else be in violation of the new code of conduct. Definitely got a sense of “bitches be crazy, we need to protect men from their hysterical accusations by arbitrating whether they actually experienced what they say they did.”

@hellfrog said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

It only takes one false accusation to be acted on to break down the trust of an entire community in all directions and destroy the environment

So how many instances would you say it takes to ruin community trust when the event is someone being harassed and made to feel unsafe and unwelcome?

Judging by the OP, more than eight. One sexual predator is worth at least eight victims, and probably a lot more depending on what kopecup means by “several.”

Putting it in numbers like that may have convinced me to leave this hobby forever. Of all the ways pretending to be elves and vampires and space samurai should be, this shouldn’t be it. This shouldn’t fucking be it.

Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you, Age of Alliances. I know I shouldn’t say that because anger just makes them defensive and entrenched and blah blah blah, but no one in a position to change that culture is capable of seeing me as a full human being anyway so I don’t know why they would care about my opinion to get mad about in the first place.

I’m going for a walk or maybe just to play in traffic, I don’t know.

(Don’t worry about me. That last part was a joke intended to indicate how fucked up all this is and how exhausting I find it to have to navigate r*pe culture even when pretending to be a goddamn Jedi. I am going to leave the computer and do a good hard think about my life, but I’m not going to do anything sillier than possibly break the terms of service for this website by telling a game to get bent. Moderators, do with that what you gotta. I understand and accept my punishment.)

I was looking for an appropriately humorous meme image to post here–maybe the one about “what the Kentucky Fried fuck”–but honestly, humor isn’t appropriate. This is gross and fuck those guys for introducing sex crimes to Star Wars. I used to watch these movies with my mom, you know? We’d bond over renting a VCR and a copy of Star Wars, and these human-shaped piles of crusty socks have to go and be creeps about it.

Nothing says “I am the only adult in this room” like a bunch of all-caps posts swearing at everyone who doesn’t uncritically and unconditionally support you.

@Aria said in RL Peeves:

I’ve reached a point of strongly recommending that more patients (especially female patients) look their doctors in the eye and go “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Last year, I started having breathing problems. My O2 saturation was going down to high seventies; most people get delirious in the eighties, but apparently I have stern lungs. Good for me. Anyway, I went to my PCP, told him my symptoms, and he said, without conducting any tests, “Oh, you’re just too fat to breathe. You need to lose weight.”

Later that week things got worse, so I went to Urgent Care. In ten minutes they diagnosed me with bronchitis. They gave me half a week’s worth of steroids and the problem went away.

I never got up the courage to ask my PCP what the fuck is wrong with him, but I did ask to be transferred to another doctor.

Queers. I recently found a game full of them, and I can’t even describe how it feels to be surrounded by people who know what I’m talking about.