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You may have noticed that I bailed on hosting a game, and requested a self-ban immediately after.
Over that time period, I’ve had a long and hard think over the issues surrounding that decision, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a good cultural fit for MU.
Which is…disheartening, to say the least, as no other site even comes close to having as many active IM/UR players in one place – but the facts of the matter really won’t change, no matter how sad I am about them.
I mean, I’ve always felt like the weirdo with wacky ideas that people just sort of tolerate. I was always confused as to why I could never play here with the efficacy I should have despite all my efforts to adapt, or why people seemed to react to my game ideas so negatively – at best, with mildly curious indifference, despite my obstinate apologia.
It never occurred to me until now that the problem wasn’t with you all.
It was with me.
In the past, I only ever dug into the history and development of MU on a surface level – often questioning its putative position as a home for all communities, and even once deriding its beginnings as (I’m paraphrasing here) “copy and paste 2+2”.
What has become increasingly clear to me after breaking this pattern and actually talking things out with people here is that, in most of the ways that matter, I was wrong. The players of MU have largely reached a consensus on what kinds of games they want to play, and how they’d like to play them. What gets played on MU today is largely a product of genuine, organic, and democratic selection.
Sure, there’s still a bit of variation, and partner forums are not subject to this to nearly the same degree. The point I’m trying to make is, nearly all of it is out of my range now. The cultural ground has decisively shifted. The contemporary consensus has left me in the dust.
And hey – that’s okay. You are not obligated to bend one bit to serve the whims and comfort of some random old head. I don’t think I’ve ever respected that principle, at least not here, and in a big way, this post is my apology to all of you.
There are basically two options for me to find my own place in this new landscape:
Try my damndest to assimilate to it, handing the steering wheel to other people on MU, and shelving most (if not all) of the game ideas and philosophies I’ve accumulated over half my life.
Take a long, arduous, multi-year climb up Clout Mountain in an attempt to eventually change the culture and have games resembling what I want to host and play become common.
This decision really comes down to the fact that, if I'm being realistic, neither of these are tenable for me – at least not at present. I know how obsessive I am, how deep-seated my issues are, and how poorly my tentative first steps on both of these paths went before. So neither of these are realistic or sound investments from my POV. Not when I have so much other $%#! to worry about.
You all have long deserved more respect from me than I’ve given, and sometimes, respect looks like stepping back and letting you do your thing. This is one of those times.
But what does this actually mean?
No, I’m not going to completely disappear from the site. That would be me throwing a big depressive tantrum, and I’d like to think I’ve grown beyond that now.
I will still be around the Turbo and Popcorn circuits, as time and energy permits.
I am not opposed to being invited to games with long deadlines (5 day cycles or longer), but considering how spare and basic they are likely to be pending the Light guidelines finally changing, there’s no guarantee I’ll be interested.
If you want to play with me for real, I highly recommend you find me on Giraffe Boards.
And finally, I fully plan on continuing to contribute/share my written words here. Not only do I want to continue the stories I’ve previously written here (and perhaps even serve as “flavor-artist-for-hire”, if I can ever get the lead out) – I also have some ideas for MUniversity Articles in the works, and/or just general esoteric IM/UR discussion material.
If written well enough, some of the latter might serve as a roundabout way of effecting some of the cultural change I longed for, or they might not. This decision has giving me the joyful liberty of not caring either way, as long as I can make it interesting enough for you!
So I guess it’s more bittersweet. Like a good chocolate! (Which I could really go for right now.)
In Conclusion
Y’all keep being your awesome selves! I’ll definitely try to be an awesomer Kai!
Last edited by Kaiveran; November 18th, 2022 at 11:01 PM.
Unless i'm mis-reading then this post is around just the types of setups you'd like to run. Nothing to apologise for there. I'd signed up for a few of your setups that I couldn't get to play in the past iirc, variety is great. You do you; but you if you wanna keep hosting, i'd say give it a go every once in a while.
fwiw you’ve always struck me as a cool, kind and creative person even though i don’t know you well and it seems like you have a lot of interesting ideas for games even if they don’t quite gel with MU’s playerbase
glad you’re still sticking around
Last edited by Hally; November 18th, 2022 at 11:17 PM.
Originally Posted by staypositivefriend1602730070
(#19)
tfw i cant mindmeld with hally this game
Originally Posted by ran
How To Tell If Your Hally Is An Alien Shapeshifter:
- Apply moderate but steady pressure d1 and observe their reaction.
- If your Hally is genuine, you will notice a distinct morphing of their facial features into an "anime" or "chibi" style resembling the kaomoji (〃＞＿＜;〃), their arms will turn into fingerless drumsticks and begin rapidly vibrating up and down, and they will emit various phrases such as "no bulli!" and "give me space!" and "but why!"
- On the other hand, if your Hally remains in a photorealistic human form and responds calmly with phrases like "That's unfortunate, but I hope we can work together!" and changes the subject, you have an alien shapeshifter on your hands and should quickly excuse yourself and break the glass on the nearest eod flamethrower.
Bellossom, Bubbles, and @Hally. doing a little flower dance. travel agent who doesn't work on commission. knows she's pretty but loves being reminded. tries to maintain a vegetable garden but isn't very good at it.
I'm going to apologize for this one in advance but I hope you'll all humor me for a little while. This is a champs level game after all and I can't help but try and post in a way to properly honor the occasion. Who knows when I'll be back in this situation again.
I don't think it's a secret for most of you that my track record in reading Hally has been rather … well … awful thus far in our games. I did have one specific game where I recognized Hally was a villager and confidently (and happily!) let the world know. They flipped wolf. After our Syndicate game together and then Anni (both of which saw me find Hally's eod wolfy and press there) I wanted to make a concentrated effort to finally read that slot correctly.
I spent some time today combing through recent-ish games this year of Hally's. The wolf game on the Org website, the Vig game over on the Syndicate one, and all sorts of mashes/smaller games through MU as well. Rocks fall, Anni, Homestuck, CoV, etc. You get the picture. All in all there were 16 different games I pulled isos from. I then went and ran through the isos extracting all the day one posts from the first half of the day, labeled them as W or V, and ran them through a bit of a homemade database that would do a few different things for me. One of the things was to make a word cloud which would count the number of times each word was used in these isos and make the word larger the more frequently it was used. For example:
Anyways, I separated the wolf isos from the villa isos and then removed things like articles (a, the, in, an, etc) as well as player names as those aren't really super relevant to our investigation and cross referenced them to see if anything word usage stood out as alignment indicative in the top 10 most common words. While there were small word choices favored it didn't seem super significant. What WAS significant were two other things:
One: While specific word choices weren't very telling I did notice a definitely trend of elegance in the wolf isos. The words may change but the idea remained the same. In wolf ISOs Hally had a habit of using larger, more elegant words whereas in the villa ISOs Hally just talked more casually. I'll call these Posts Exceedingly Elegant as we continue.
Two: Villager isos were much more full of observational posts rather than inquisitive ones. The wolf iso was full of open ended questions requesting elaboration. Not just directly to a specific player but also towards the thread at large asking if it saw what Hally was seeing. Meanwhile the villager iso was full of more pointed statement. It was telling the thread what Hally was seeing and making sure everyone understood. The village iso had a higher frequency – by a significant margin – of Posts Of Observation.
Again, I really want to get this right so I didn't stop there. Science isn't science until you write it down after all. I went ahead and charted the percentage of posts as a villager and as a wolf for both posts containing an elegant word and posts making observations. It's a bit crude but here's the quick jot down I made to visualize it:
So I wanted to see how this one was shaping up. Remember, these were all taken from the first half of day one isos which we've made it past here. I went ahead and ran through Hally's iso from this game, plotted the elegance and observational percentages on the chart, and ran the following equation to try and determine the exact percentage chance Hally has at being a wolf:
(Posts Exceedingly Elegant as a wolf)(Posts Exceedingly Elegant here) + (Posts of Observation as a villager)(Posts of Observation here) = the mathematical chance of Hally being a villager here (do 1-this for wolf obv).
Which looks something like this:
(Posts Exceedingly Elegant as a wolf)(Posts Exceedingly Elegant here) + (Posts of Observation as a villager)(Posts of Observation here)
Unless i'm mis-reading then this post is around just the types of setups you'd like to run. Nothing to apologise for there. I'd signed up for a few of your setups that I couldn't get to play in the past iirc, variety is great. You do you; but you if you wanna keep hosting, i'd say give it a go every once in a while.
Meow, I see and appreciate your support!
But it is a lot about playing, too. If it's a turbo/popcorn my hangups tend to disappear and I can just have fun riding the wind whichever way it blows. If I really wanna give you a fair sporting game, however, it's gonna need to be me doing some in-depth figuring at my own pace, which really isn't possible at 36/12 or thereabouts! The deadlines just sit in this weird middle ground I can't get my head into, at least not if I want to play responsibly.
@Beskar @Kajot
It looks like my replace-out basically punted the game for y'all, as I expected. I'm deeply sorry, and if you never want to play with me again I totally understand.
(Un)Fortunately, you're gonna have a lot of time to think that over, because this will be the last game I play here – at least until I'm in a much more stable place IRL.
The turbo-charged environment of MU makes playing even a game at this pace overshadow everything else in my life, even – or, more often, especially – when I can't keep up with it. And after the mental health crisis I suffered that made me bail on you, I realize that's no good. If I'm to survive the coming storm, I need to be laser-focused on the safety of both myself and the ones I love. Which means that this, regrettably, becomes a dangerous distraction.
So again, apologies everyone. But this just isn't working out at present. Hopefully we meet again when I'm in much better straits and actually have the time and energy and lack of constant existential dread to go HAM.
Love y'all. :heartinhands:
In light of this, I have left the MU server and wish not to receive any invitations to games (Turbo/Light or otherwise) until further notice.
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Originally Posted by litten
