@Pyrephox said in Numetal/Retromux:

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

Someone once told me (paraphrased) that the primary difference between maintaining OOC respect for your fellow players after a PVP/tense situation at a LARP and maintaining OOC respect and kindness towards your fellow MUSHers in the same situation is that MUSHers are not obligated to sit in a booth with each other at IHOP at 2am after we’ve finished our scenes.

Anonymity can be a real motivator in being a serious asshole towards others – which is interesting, because I’m fairly certain we’ve all known each other (or of each other) for the better part of a decade (which is perhaps also what leads to PVP situations).

That said, PVP is a difficult one. On one hand, if you explicitly prohibit PVP in a WoD environment, it takes some of the bite out of inter-sphere relations. On the other hand, allowing for a no-holds-barred environment will make the game – from examples I’ve seen – into a tedious free-for-all. I’m not sure if it’s just my perception based on the people I talk to, but I feel like interest in PVP has dropped off in the last little while.

I used to be in a gaming club in college where a whole lot of people were Mind’s Eye Theatre players. For my money, I’d say there’s not a whole lot of difference in toxicity: lots of vicious personal enmity, gossip, blurring of OOC/IC boundaries, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and cheating. Having to look people in the face afterwards didn’t really seem to help any of it.

Fun Fact: The only time I’ve ever been reduced to literally hiding behind other people in order to get a man twice my age to stop leering at me in a public space was when I was in college, attending a campus Changeling LARP as an OOC observer to see if I wanted to join. He was, supposedly, “just doing what his character would do!” since he was playing a satyr. Again, I was an OOC observer and visibly tagged as such. As far as his ‘character’ was concerned, I didn’t exist. I was 19. He had to be in his 40s. No one seemed to think this was a problem except for me, my then-boyfriend, and the friend I’d gone there with.

So. Y’know. Do with that information what you will.

@Livia said in WoD: House Rules:

For me I think it depends on the reason for the house rules more than the rules themselves.

This, but most of all, I want to clearly see the reason for the house rule plainly stated somewhere. Why? Because if staff outlines why something was ruled that way, it lets me understand what kind of game the want to run–what themes they’re interested versus what bumps up against that, what sorts of stories they want to tell, what mechanics they do and don’t want to deal with, etc.

That makes it a whole lot easier for me to gauge what staff is looking for, or at least willing to engage with, when it comes to their interaction with players than things getting ruled on a case by case basis that can sometimes feel like, “Which GM card did you draw from the lottery? Do they like this plot? Do they like you? What mood are they in today? Is the wind blowing south-westerly and the moon full?” that can happen when you’re dealing with WoD, especially on a multi-sphere game with conflicting rules between splat, edition, and supplement.

Then again, I also tend to prefer single-sphere games specifically because they make the rule base so much easier to navigate. You may still need to HR something, but at least it’s going to be because of theme, mechanical confusion, or trying to make something work better on a MU*, instead of just, “Yeah, every sphere has a different but also overlapping skill list because screw you, that’s why.”

@Ashkuri said in Numetal/Retromux:

WOD players are you guys okay??

When have we ever been?

@Pavel said in Paid Role-Playing:

I certainly wouldn’t pay for the privilege of playing. I would, however, not object to making a regular donation to support the game’s financial running costs. If I liked the game enough to care whether it stays up or not.

But most game runners I know are wary of accepting such kindness as it can often come with the perceived problems, as regaled above, about pay to win or other kinds of bias.

ETA: Which is, I think, basically exactly the same as what mietze said above.

For awhile, a WOD game I was on had a tip jar that actually worked, but it was because the cost of running the game was relatively high, while the ask and the reward were clear and specific.

Kick in… I think it was $2? towards server costs a month and you got a very tantalizing XP. One whole XP! As a thank you. Anything above and beyond the cost of the server was explicitly stated to be beer money for the game admin and coder. Bear in mind, though, that this was a game that also involved having a fairly expensive DigiChat license. The cost of that license was a big part of why that type of game was rare and, even with the tip jar, they didn’t break even on the costs for most months of the year. From my understanding, people were (perhaps surprisingly) actually not dicks as a result, especially because the game owner was fairly explicit about what was coming in and what was going out.

With the cost of an Ares server being $12 a month, though? I honestly forget I have one open half the time.

@Sammich said in Celebrities We've Lost 2026 Edition:

@howyadoin Why not?

@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

@Wizz said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

People Mag willing to just jump on that conclusion within hours seems pretty irresponsible unless their sources are like…the son himself, so. still taking that with a small grain of salt. enormously tragic either way, those two were absolute legends and it makes me heartsick.

Well, he’s been arrested for the murder this morning.

Yeeeeah, I was a little suspicious when the police said they weren’t looking for a suspect at the time. That usually means some variation of, “We know who it was and we’re just getting the evidence we need to arrest them.”

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

I’m just sitting here watching this with a look of vague horror on my face

AI has no concept of this. You can ask it to “write secure code” or whatever, but it fundamentally doesn’t know how to do that. I sincerely hope it does not take a rash of Therac 25 level disasters to teach the software industry that lesson again.

Yeeep. I’m not in medical research anymore, but I used to work in the office that monitored clinical trials for massive university hospital system, including training clinical research coordinators on how to maintain documentation to standard.

You do not mess around with people’s lives, livelihoods, and life savings. If you break those, there’s really no coming back. I don’t understand why we have to keep learning this, but I guess some tech bro billionaire and all his investors that can’t actually follow along with what he’s saying need the money to upgrade their yachts.

@Hobbie said in AI Megathread:

I genuinely hope this bubble bursts with the force of a nuke because at some point in the near future an AI will introduce a genuinely serious problem that requires human resolution and there’s no humans around who have the knowledge to fix it for them.

tl;dr if you let dumb AI learn from dumb AI, AI gets dumber.

I cannot “THIS!!!” this hard enough.

My company is currently on a kick of “We’re gonna teach the product managers to code their own products! And the UXers! And the scrum leads! Everyone’s gonna vibe code and AI code and we’re going to release new features so fucking fast and it’s gonna be AWESOME!”

Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here watching this with a look of vague horror on my face because 1) my company works in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country 2) is large enough that a single fuck-up can and has resulted in articles in national news publications because everyone likes to watch a giant stumble. So I keep looking at this “model of the future” thinking that we’re basically going to turn our code into a nightmare of non-functionality as hundreds of people get their sticky little fingers into it and only, like, half of them have any idea how it works. Meanwhile, the other half just shoves whatever the newest ‘agentic coding tool’ says into production because that’s what the computer told them and the computer must be right.

We’re going to get slapped with the sort of regulatory fine that could pay for 20 developers for the next five years, and then everyone’s going to stand there looking surprised.

I’m pretty sure we’re all just living in the plot of Wall-E now and I hate it here.

@somasatori said in AI Megathread:

I have actually had to unlearn using em dashes because I would do it constantly. I use a lot of parentheses now when previously I would just be like – . People have recently assumed that I was using AI (not great for clinical writing) and thus everything is over-parenthized. Over-parenthesesed?

Parenthosophized. Add it to the style guides now, please and thank you.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@MisterBoring Either @Roz or @Aria explained… somewhere up in the higher reaches of this thread. I got a cramp trying to scroll that far.

I explained it here. Roz got mad that she didn’t know the dumb reason they’re called en dash and em dash.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

You should be–if you know how to use them properly–leaving no spaces between the dash and the word

That is a style guide difference.

ETA: At least it used to be, I haven’t checked recently. But when I was first coming up in the Professional Writing Arena we used some bastardised variant of AP style that required a space between. It also did weird shit with ellipses that I didn’t approve of.

You can use spaces between (I prefer spaces between because ohgodmyeyes), but having a space on one side and not the other like our dumb brand font does is what I was talking about re: stylistic inconsistency. We use a bastardized version of Chicago style where I work that does the no spaces.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

However, various institutions are using flawed heuristics – be they AI-driven or meatbrain – to judge whether something is written by an LLM which do include em dashes and other common signs of professional/academic writing, and using those flawed judgements to punish students, workers, etc in ways that can dramatically impact their professional lives.

Funnily enough, em-dashes (along with emojis) are something that I use in my professional life to gauge whether or not something was written by an employee or written by AI. The giveaway isn’t that they’re included in whatever document, though. It’s that they’re formatted incorrectly.

Our brand standard font doesn’t like em-dashes and will format them like this-- which is both grammatically wrong and stylistically inconsistent (to the point that the forum software isn’t even auto-formatting it for me). You should be–if you know how to use them properly–leaving no spaces between the dash and the word. The professional writers will almost always catch this because it’s a clear grammar mistake. People who don’t know how em-dashes are supposed to work but had them inserted in by Copilot 365 or ChatGPT usually don’t notice the error.

It’s the same with emojis. The ones that you can make in Microsoft programs using keyboard shortcuts or from the available list in Teams have a totally different visual style than the ones that ChatGPT, Writer, and other LLMs spit out. If they show up in a piece, it’s almost always a dead giveaway that someone copied that content from an LLM into Word, Outlook, or Teams, and literally every time I’ve asked someone if they used AI to write that after seeing an out of place emoji, they excitedly confirmed they did.

The thing is, I’m not a manager and I’m not HR. The only repercussions they’re going to face from me judging something as “AI wrote that for them” is me making a bitchy little face behind my computer. If anyone else notices, they’ll probably be praised for being more efficient–right up until someone in leadership wants to know why something isn’t right.

Needless to say, I have a lot of Big Feelings about AI because my company uses it, I’m expected to write about what we use it to do for the public, I’m expected to write about how to use it better for our employees, and people think it can replace parts of my job. Which it can! And does! Often poorly. Especially when people don’t understand how it works, what it actually does, or that artificial intelligence is a terrible misnomer and it should likely be called ‘automation’ instead.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Ashkuri said in AI Megathread:

No one is coming for the em dashes

That is just literally untrue. People have targeted it so much that it’s been widely dubbed the “ChatGPT Hyphen”, and there are a bazillion articles written about how it’s a “tell-tale sign of AI use” by people who don’t know better.

I am not saying that the Wikipedia article was made in bad faith. As you note, it has many sensible disclaimers. But there are just too many people looking for “shortcuts” to identifying AI writing, and they’re liable to summarize and/or quote out of context without the necessary nuance.

I probably shouldn’t be sitting here laughing, but like…

I rattled off five different things I do in my writing that would probably get it flagged as AI, three of which are things I’ve been professionally trained to as part of published and in-house style guides. And now we’re arguing about “OMG em-dashes!” again, which is… summarizing and/or quoting out of context without the rest of the nuance.

Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Tez said in AI Megathread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Just as a note, many (if not most) of these “signs of AI writing” are in fact signs of professional writing as well.

The so-called “ChatGPT Dash” is just the em dash, widely used by pro authors and well-known in Emily Dickinson poetry. Rule of three, “has been described”, parallelism… most of these are common writing tools that many people just weren’t aware of before. ChatGPT is able to imitate those tools because it stole the published work of actual writers.

This. So very much this. I write professionally not as an author of novels or biographies or anything like that, but in the world of corporate communications. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of both externally-facing articles online and internally-facing intranet articles that I’ve either written or edited over the last five years in this job.

As I scan this article about signs of AI writing, I can see no less than five things that appear in my writing either because they’re a personal writing habit (m-dashes, rule of three) or because they’re in my company’s internal style guide (disclaimer-like language as a result of regulatory rules we’re adhering to, items being treated as proper nouns, excessive use of bold face when referring specific form fields or product titles).

Anything I write personally, I don’t use AI for at all and generally refuse to touch. Knowing my writing style, though, I’m just waiting for the day someone sees me using the MS Word autoformat for an m-dash (–) out of pure habit and accuses me of using ChatGPT to RP.

Anything I write professionally would almost certainly be pegged as written by AI, despite the fact that I have access to three different LLM products at work and largely refuse to use them–unless I’ve gotten a last minute request from a level of leadership I can’t delay. Even then, I use it to spit out a very rough draft at most, which I edit significantly.

On our team of seven people, one of my teammates consistently receives praise for her adoption and advocacy of AI tools. She’s also recognized by our boss’s boss as the team’s worst writer. I largely refuse to use them and am generally regarded as the team’s Luddite, and also get consistently praised as our best writer. The irony isn’t lost on me, but it does seem to be lost on management.

I’m sure this is some sort of big scandal, but all I can think is:

“Jesus Christ, I barely have the ability to make an alt–as in one!–on top of the one character that I have on one game. The last few times I tried, I either never finished CGen or went IC all of, uhhh, twice. Who has the energy and executive function to have multiple OOC identities with multiple alts for each of them?!”

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Yam

Once we all had anxiety, or we had emotional/mental fatigue from being the person who did the who-where-aboutwhat? scene-organising labour too often.

Now we can top those legit reasons off with the fact that some get away with treating asking for RP as a violation of boundaries and a bannable offense. So yeah, who’s asking these days?

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone banned for asking for RP unless it was someone they had a no contact with and were approaching on another alt.

That said, I have seen someone go to staff and complain that they were being harassed by someone who they were trying to avoid, but who frequently asked them for RP or who often popped into rooms they were in to try to catch a scene. The thing is, there wasn’t a no contact and place and they’d never expressed to this person that they didn’t want to interact with them for fear of being seen as rude or as a bully–which is totally legit and a reasonable concern!

But. A big ol’ but here.

At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication, which is hard enough in person when there’s also body language and facial expressions and tone to pick up on. Text has none of those things. Don’t drop hints, cross your fingers, touch your toes, and hope the other person clues in to what you’re (not) saying. Say what you mean. You can be nice about it! But say what you mean. The internet is not going to burn to the ground if you tell someone “Oh! Thanks for the offer, but I’m not really up for that.” or even just “No, thank you.” the way we were all taught when we were, like, five.

@helvetica said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

@Aria My mother is touting a picture of him holding me as a baby, today.

I’m gonna miss that dude! I rarely go to fancy restaurants, but I feel like every time I ever do… he’s there, out with one or more beautiful twinks. smh. single tear drop.

I met him a couple of times and was just showing a friend the photo of me and @insomniac meeting him at a standing room only Green Day show, like, ten years ago. I didn’t realize he was live when the pic was snapped. He put me on air talking about how I’d been listening since I was 14 and when I was off at college and they weren’t broadcasting online yet, my mom’d put the phone up to the radio on Thanksgiving Day so we could sing “Alice’s Restaurant” all together and horribly off-key.

Pierre Robert, 70

Pierre was a radio legend. He’d been on air since 1981, so almost anyone who ever lived in the Philadelphia region and listened to rock knew who he was. The man was so beloved by locals that any time he was covering a concert, the line to meet him would be almost as long as the line the meet the band. His love for music was legendary, as was his hilariously painted van “Minerva”, which was older than I am. His complete inability to keep to a schedule became a running joke that his audience dubbed “Pierre Standard Time” and his radio show frequently ran over just because he was jamming out and having a good time. He founded charities to fight food insecurity, launched city-wide holiday traditions, promoted small local bands, was willing to use his platform to cut off musicians who took extremist views or did a Philly audience dirty, and was always, always happy to stop and snap a photo with listeners.

For folks in Philly who love music, this one’s a kick in the teeth.

@somasatori said in Historical Games Round 75:

@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:

The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.

I think that this is a good point, but man, some of these ancient grudges are 100% still around. From my own experience, they also tend to manifest in very strange ways and usually when you might not expect it (especially as an American).

Dude, from 1993 to 2018, North Macedonia was officially entered into the United Nations under the name The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Because they were fighting with Greece about who got to be Macedonia and who got to be Macedonians and whether or not there was the potential for annexation of one state by another. You might assume that this was all the result of the Balkan Wars in the early 1900s and the regional conflicts of the early to mid-1990s, which were absolutely the central point of contention.

But, like, you also had national governments throwing around references to what names had been used and where the borders were during the Roman Empire.

Some Roman guy who died in 150-whatever BC scribbled some stuff on a map after Rome conquered Greece and literally two thousand years later, people were using it to say “Hey, fuck those people over there in particular.”

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:

Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.

Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

Maybe.

I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play.

I have, on two different games about ten years apart, run into entire groups of people playing actual, literal neo-Nazis. Both instances were disturbing, but the second instance was particularly strange. Somehow, my character – who was Jewish – got painted as the asshole for not wanting to deal with some dude walking around with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo.

But even weirder than that? I found out after the fact that one of the women in the group was someone I’d known for a years. In fact, it was a friend I’d lost contact with. A friend who I’d had long conversations with most of a decade earlier about how she was never going to play a black character again after dealing with a guy on the White Wolf mods who had sent out a really gross email including a lot of stereotypes about black people and then got very much called out on it by, like, half the Mage sphere. Long conversations about how upsetting that was for her because she was no longer comfortable playing characters who looked like her because of that incident.

To this day, I don’t really know how I should feel about that or if I even get to have an opinion on that, because her feelings on the subject are entirely her own and not something I get to dictate. But needless to say, I was shocked to discover that one of the most racist characters I’ve ever encountered on a game, with a player that took umbrage to people not wanting to interact with a group of neo-Nazis, was played by a person of color who had previously felt personally victimized by racist stereotypes proposed in RP.

(Also, sorry if the quotes got busted. Phone typing sucks.)