I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Edit: Also this wasn’t intended to be a reply to helvetica, but the log output from inuki lol.

@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:

I always find it a bit creepy when it is clear someone has someone else on watch and they start gushing over them on the channel when they log in, but haven’t even ; waved or said ‘hi’ yet.

It also kind of bums me out if I end up logging in day after day and get tumbleweeds, but there is very clearly a group that are friends and treat each other logging on like the second coming of Jesus or something.

Obviously there is nothing objectively wrong with these behaviours and people can say hi to who they want. But, it is a peeves thread and I am allowed to find the behaviour personally irritating, also!

Seconding this. Sometimes I just need a minute to get my bearings, especially if I’m coming from work, dealing with the kids, trying to settle down myself. We’re no longer in the glomps era. The age of glomp is over, the time of “hey” has come.

I hate my first week of trying to engage people on a new character. It brings me straight back to that feeling like when you switch schools, and on top of that I’ve learned that it takes me more than a handful of poses to find my character’s voice, with the end result that my ancient reptile brain tells me how awful I am while I’m trying to roleplay a social scene.

Edit: Also, I am deeply anxious about asking for RP on a channel. Intellectually I know that if no one responds it’s not a big deal, but ancient reptile brain says that all of them secretly despise me and wish I would go away.

So truly they become HannahBANanna.

I just fully finished a really tough clinical rotation today. I’m not exactly sure why I expected I wouldn’t, but I had a pretty rough time of this whole exit process. For context I worked as a clinical psychology extern at a VA residential facility for homeless veterans who often had substance abuse issues loaded on top of PTSD, depression, anxiety (typically) and serious mental illness (more rarely). Since my emphasis is in trauma, I worked with people who were highly traumatized using primarily cognitive processing therapy, but occasionally prolonged exposure in addition to substance abuse treatment. During my final staff meeting, they did this thing called Thanks & Goodbyes (T’s & G’s) which is usually done with residents graduating from the program.

The thing that got me the most was that I kind of assumed I was a background player, largely unnoticed and just nose-to-the-grindstone working with my patients. I had a large-ish case load and only taught a couple classes (dialectical behavior therapy, and CBT for Substance Use Disorder). It hit me that I kind of internalized this idea that I was separate from the team, so when people started expressing gratitude or talking about how they appreciated this or that about me I had no idea how to hold it and felt extremely awkward in the moment. I also have a history of substance use, and was very grateful to be able to help people who were currently in a material position that was similar to how I’ve lived in the past. A couple of my patients this year relapsed upon release from the program, and at least one of them died as a result of overdose following relapse, so I won’t say I did a perfect A+++ job, but I always did the best I could and advocated hard for everyone. Having been in that world, I know what it’s like to go through the sobriety/relapse cycle, and fall into an old habit that might be beyond your old tolerance.

Anyway, due to a lot of other things in my life (child, spouse, research, work), I generally feel like I don’t have space to hold the kinds of emotions that I need to have about this experience, and I need to get it out somewhere else I fall into bad negative patterns (see above). So, here I am writing about it, I guess.

People who actually act like a welcome wagon when you’re new and don’t know anybody and ask “do you want to meet so-and-so? They match your concept in such-and-such way.” It makes me feel like I joined a more natural community.

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I imagine that a lot of why my own experience was able to advance so dramatically (flying across state lines, and part of the ocean besides) was due to my being male. My dad did a decent job in protecting my sisters from abuse but there was that gender-enforced blind spot, I think. It makes sense, given that for a long time the prevailing attitude – which is thankfully on the decline – is that men/male-bodied people can’t be sexually assaulted, or it was often played for laughs in media. Gets a litle rough behind the tag.

Spoiler

I wanted to say: I’ve talked about these things in therapy before but for some reason I feel a stronger sense of catharsis from this group discussion/topic. I guess I always felt alone in my experience, even though I knew I wasn’t, so thanks to everyone for being as vulnerable as you’re comfortable with here.

Our cat has been limping for a few days (we recently had to move some furniture around and I think he might have knocked something over onto himself) so we finally took him to the ER. He’s a big indoor/outdoor boy and usually if he limps for a bit he gets better in a day or so if we move his stuff into a place where he doesn’t have to leap around. They had to have us do a drop-off and he was not having it.

Oh, come on. Even if the story of Robin Hood could be boiled down to “nobles fighting,” there is clearly a depiction of class conflict within the narrative. It’s not “medieval Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos” because of the structural differences between the Loxley family and the stratification of medieval English society in terms of the ruling class’s power in serfdom.

I’m certainly not going to say that Robin Hood wasn’t a member of the bourgeoisie – he held many privileges that his outlaw companions never had and could likely send himself back into upholding western imperialism in the crusades if he wanted, but he achieved an understanding of class consciousness within the context of the story.

Even if he hadn’t stolen from the rich and given to the poor – and indeed, he does not in some versions – a guerrilla force standing against the monopoly on power that the state (in this case, the sheriff of Nottingham) held over the proletariat would serve as an appropriate propaganda of the deed which, in many ways, can be its own reward. Robin Hood even wholly being a selfish hero (e.g., get back my stuff so I can do a feudalism on the locals, save my girlfriend), does not detract from the material symbolism involved which is why it became an enduring myth in the West.

@Wizz said in Liberation MUSH:

but like if your default state is “shitty unless” your problems are much, much deeper. It took most of my 20’s to realize some dudes in my tight-knit group of friends didn’t need long talks about how we were raised to think a certain way, because they were beyond talking. They actively thrived in and enjoyed their shitty views, and that is just the unavoidable depressing truth about a lot of “proud nerd” men.

Along with their probably life-long misogyny, “proud nerd” men are also, at least in my experience, extremely hostile towards LGBTQ+ people (and I would say especially towards their male friends/gaming partners who come out to them, I’ve gotten the “oh gross! are you going to hit on me” reaction from them more than anyone else that it made me zoom back into the closet), and there’s definitely a certain cohort of dudes who really love to say they’re not racist, but…

I always come back to this time when I was just starting college in the early 00s and joined a D&D club, where someone cornered me to tell me about their homebrew world that had an “only humans” gimmick, but there were still racial modifiers. That certainly wasn’t the only time that I heard some fucked up racist shit from gamers, but it was definitely the most egregious outside of WORA.

@HannahBananna said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

@Adora said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

Pffft… ffffft… HAHAHAHA
This ain’t RuPaul’s best friend race, and just because me and you both fit under the Rainbow Umbrella doesn’t mean we’re gonna be besties. I support you in that you should be able to love or fuck whoever you wanna love or fuck (or NOT love or fuck, if you’re aro/ace, you belong) but you being LGBTQIA doesn’t mean you don’t get held to account for your bullshit by other LGBTQIA people.

YOU ARE BEING HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS. STOP BEING BIGOTS, BE REAL PEOPLE, STOP INSULTING THE LGBTQIA+ COMMUNITY BY PRETENDING TO BE PART OF IT WHEN SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS DECXIDES TO HOLD YOU ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR DUMBFUCK ACTIONS, TROLL.

YOU ARE WHY I HATE STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

Fuckin’ LMAO.

I feel like Hannah set a new record in going from zero to showing their whole ass.

I guess it’s heartening to know that WoD games have remained consistent over the years.

@Wizz My daughter is about 2 and tells me “piggy back” so I’ll kneel on the ground. Once I’m down there, she hits me over the back with her little plastic baby chairs. I’m anticipating she’ll have a wonderful career as a professional wrestler.

Been thinking about this post since yesterday, and for a general game, I would say I just want everything that Pyrephox said combined with what Pavel said. Although I am in North America, my work and life schedule is such that the only time I have to myself is when I am doing the revenge bedtime procrastination thing from like 8pm to 2am. Also a lot of what was said by these two are things – and what I will mention – are what I learned as points of failure from developing The Reach. I’ve noticed that the WoD MU* community (I don’t have a long enough history with other genres, so maybe this is also true in other themeparks/genres) is the lack of failing forward or learning from mistakes. Often we just repeat the same problematic behavior from before. Anyway, this isn’t a “Please Soapbox Your Opinions on MU*s” post, so here we go! I tend to play a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse and Fate games these days, so I think my opinions are colored by that:

Game Runner/Staff Stuff

Spoiler

Theme stuff (a lot of this will be WoD-ish, but could apply to others)

Spoiler

Mechanics

Spoiler

Okay, that’s probably enough.

@Pavel said in Baldur’s Gate 3:

@Cobalt My inner therapist saw Lae’zel and was instantly “There’s something good in there… but I’m not going to use my genitals to get it out.”

Alexa, show me advice that would have been useful in my twenties.

@cobalt I really appreciate you making this post and that you were able to get out of your relationship. I’ve been thinking about this post all day as we share a fairly similar experience. Hiding behind a spoiler for similar CWs.

Spoiler

Anyway, also don’t want to make this about me, so I’ll skip the remainder of the details. Like @tributary said I was able to notice the cycle at one point and shored up the vulnerability as best I could. I’m glad that the MU* community seems to have made a firm stance against this sort of behavior.

@GF said in RL Peeves:

@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.”

I definitely feel this. Earlier this yeae I had a some light headedness, some wheezing, a cough, with difficulty breathing. He did my weight and got my BMI (as bullshit as that metric is). I’m pretty short (5’5") and my BMI came up as 30.1. I was told that I was having bad acid reflux due to weight, which can cause a cough. I pointed out that my daughter had a similar cough about a week prior and that I thought there were other kids at her daycare who were ill. No change to the prognosis. He prescribed me rx strength Prilosec.

Anyway so I wound up in urgent care because I had COVID.

@DrQuinn So a lot of this is because insurance is a headache to deal with as a therapist. Often insurance will require you to provide them with your progress notes as well as your intake summary. Some private practice folks I know who work with the bigger firms will also have a required “case consultation” with them (bogus term since case consultation is intended to be between mental health workers or physicians) where an underwriter will evaluate whether therapy is progressing properly. Insurance companies also pay less, from a materialistic perspective. As Marxist as I am, I still have $250,000 of student debt and that’s about the average these days.

Additionally, most outpatient therapists don’t use instruments to track progress. In inpatient (and at my current intensive outpatient place) we use various metrics – typically the GAD-7, PHQ-9 or BDI, and PCL-5 – to evaluate for anxiety, depression, or trauma symptoms respectively on a weekly basis. The return rate in inpatient and IOP is pretty low, probably natively around 40% at the VA, and we get about a 60-ish% return rate where I am now, so it’s a lot of hounding people “did you fill out the weekly form? Don’t forget to fill out the form” because it’s often a requirement by insurance companies.

In California, we have the mental health parity act, which is generally a good thing as it prevents therapists (or “coaches” in the worst case scenario) from practicing non-evidence based treatment. However, it also allows insurance companies to say “you’re going to use CBT for this patient.” Even if you’re working with, say, a person who has bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder and would better serve them by using DBT or (maybe) acceptance and commitment therapy, the insurance companies know that CBT has a wife body of literature showing it to be effective insofar as it becomes a shotgun approach to treatment. CBT is effective for many things; CBT is also very ineffective for many things. CBT has an added benefit for the money people of having between 12-16 sessions for clinically significant change (with specific illnesses).

Research backs up the use of CBT as well. Depression and anxiety are also the most common mental illnesses in the US (probably the West in general), and usually receive the lion’s share of attention by researchers, who will typically use CBT because it’s quick to implement and fairly easy to learn, which means we have a research corpus that includes so much research on the effectiveness of CBT and a lot of papers that have to reiterate that ACT, DBT, CPT, TLDP, AEDP, other alphabet soup acronyms, etc. are as effective if not moreso than CBT in specific situations and within cultures. I didn’t touch on culture, but that’s just another big blind spot in the field.

None of this is intended to be an excuse, but a remonstration of the American medical and mental health system. All of this sucks and we’re aware.

@Pavel said in Liberation MUSH:

@Pyrephox said in Liberation MUSH:

24/7 availability is NOT a good thing

Absolutely, available 24/7 for the kids for instance -

Sleep when the baby sleeps.
Eat when the baby eats.
Cry when the baby cries.
Study when the baby studies.
Write on your dissertation when the baby writes on his dissertation.