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Oh crap. On the subject of RPs, I must admit that, for a time, I was kind of a crazy. I was part of a pretty big forum with a subforum dedicated only to RPs. Because the main forum was linked to an anime site, a lot of these RPs were really stupid Inuyasha RPs that often literally started with "i call inyasha sitz inna tree." And there were a couple of better RPers who cared about writing, story, characterization, and - horror of horrors - proper spelling and grammar. These RPers would every so often start an RP, usually limited to original characters only, with a laid out setting, overarching plot/goals, and a genuine desire to build a story with others. One time a post-apocalyptic RP was started, where pretty much every character was stuck underground in the sewers/crude tunnels because the surface had been ravaged, and also part of one of four clans (leader characters were first-come, first-serve). This left us with one of the more memorable silly writing moments where a guy tried to have his character mutiny against the clan leader (acceptable, since this was the most violent clan in-game), but needed the fight to be dramatic so had him jump onto an underground windowsill in a cave (less acceptable). I created the aforementioned clan leader character, and as this clan was the most violent I made him into a homicidal blood-loving teenage psycho. (Reasoning being that he had grown up in this world without anyone to teach him morals, and believed strongly that his natural inclination for cruel violence was okay because it got him what he wanted. Blood was always a result of him becoming happy by getting what he wanted, so in time it became soothing to him, and he would cut himself when he couldn't easily get a victim.) I was also a bit interested in acting at the time, and had some anger issues going on with my family so I retreated onto the Internet whenever I was home. I did have friends at school who are still friends with me to this day, despite dealing with me through this bout of crazy. So when I created this character I tried to really get into his mindset and live like him as much as social norms would allow. This included "slitting" my wrists with a plastic knife (and insisting it was the plastic knife that was the trigger), being cryptically "creepy" and depressed on AIM chats with both on and offline friends (because there was no blood, though I wouldn't say it outright), and trying to seem maniacally violent - not effective for someone of my height and weight. This continued for a while after the RP ended (due to the aforementioned underground windowsill incident - the other guy was so insistent on being right no matter how many people tried to reason with him, including the RP creator, that the thread was basically ruined.) and didn't end until I grew out of it - coincidentally around the same time I tried to write a Battle Royale piece involving our graduating class and got tired of coming up with deaths. It is a shameful period, and the only good that came out of it was when I rehashed the character for an English class skit and put on an apparently terrifying performance. It is very true that if you don't know a crazy, you probably are the crazy.
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Feb 20, 2012 06:03
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Kimitsu posted:Oh crap. On the subject of RPs, I must admit that, for a time, I was kind of a crazy.
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Feb 20, 2012 06:31
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/me used to know one of these muse-believing people I've dodged so many bullets in my lifetime that I should audition to be a Matrix extra.
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Feb 20, 2012 06:38
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Lady of the Beech posted:Kimitsu, the internet method actor.  How could I resist their siren call?
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Feb 20, 2012 06:47
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Man, I also have a fair number of batshit roleplaying stories, some from IRC and some from Livejournal. The big one from LJ involved an old college buddy of mine who went to LJ RP after he graduated and ended up sort of isolated; the long version is long and embarrassing, but the short version is that he played a very wish-fulfillment-y character, convinced me to play a relative of that character, got his character into a bizarre love triangle, and then basically stopped talking to me both in and out of character when my character was ambivalent about said bizarre love triangle. ... Okay, so even the short version isn't that short...
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Feb 20, 2012 12:56
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I am starting to wonder if some of us were ever in the same RPs. I used to be in to cosplaying. I still am, but I never took it as far as the Crazies do. I dressed up because I thought it was fun. I did not dress up as my Edward-muse so that I could get in fights with Roy cosplayers and wind up making out with them after some creepy LARPing session in which our muses, for whom we are conduits, came out as being gay and wanting to buttfuck each other. They are one of the many reasons I am not in to the "scene" any more (and don't get me started on that Lolita poo poo, which I was also a part of for a while.) I will admit that when I was in to RPing, that was my WORLD. My friends were in to it, too, so it was all we did during our free time. I had a LOT of free time. I could easily piss the entire day after school away by RPing in to the wee hours of the morning. There were a lot of times when it was really, really fun. I have always been in to writing stories and developing characters, locations, and plots. RP gave me the opportunity to do that with people I genuinely enjoyed talking to and writing with. I just absolutely hated the Batshit Nutterballs that populated the RPs. Like Stormy. God drat it all to hell. He could take a perfectly amazing RP that wasn't full of crazy nutjobs and just blow the place to hell with his shitstorms of insanity.
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Feb 20, 2012 16:01
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Ooh, RP stories? I can actually post something relevant, then. My first real experience with the Internet was GameFAQs, sadly enough. I used it for walkthroughs/cheats when I was a little kid, and when I was about twelve, I got the mid-90's-era family computer in my room when my parents bought a newer one. I made a Hotmail account (still use it as my main non-school/business e-mail) so that I could make a GameFAQs account, and I realized that there were such things as message boards while looking up a walkthrough for my new game, Tales of Symphonia. I made a couple of posts and saw that somebody started an RP for the villains in the game, which was my first exposure to the idea of roleplaying. I copied the idea entirely, made one for the heroes of the game, and created "My Hero Party". Good lord, that took off. I think it ended up going for nearly three years, when all was said and done. A little bit into the second year, my interest waned, but it just kept going and going and going. In my defense, one good point about it is that good spelling/grammar was the norm, and the plot/characters didn't start going off the rails until I stopped being active. I don't remember why, but for some reason, we had to leave the Tales of Symphonia main board. Maybe it had grown too off-topic? Anyway, we moved to a new board for the Commodore 64 game, H.E.R.O. At one point, a large chunk of people moved from that board to an off-site board made by one of the players, but that died a fairly quick death and they came back. Honestly, it was probably the drama related to that move and move back that finally killed the momentum for this RP. Anyone with a sense of dignity won't know that there was actually a group of people who ranked these "hidden" GameFAQs boards by their activity. Crazy enough, H.E.R.O. was often in the top-50 of those boards even though it was all being driven by a single RP, and a couple of times it crept into the top-20. Considering how many of these novelty boards there are (and how busy some of them are), that just goes to show how much time and effort was being wasted on this RP. Funny enough, my first "Internet friends" were from this RP. I made an AIM account and the first people I ended up talking to were actually these RPers, not my real-life friends from school. I still consider one of these guys a friend, though it's been a while since we've chatted. Oddly enough, there wasn't much drama from all of this in-character/out-of-character chat, though there were of course a couple of relationships between the token girls in the group and the guys. One guy nearly drove across the country to spend Valentine's Day with his e-girlfriend, but she broke up with him the night before he was going to leave. She was nuts. Of course, there were spin-off RPs. Five or six, by the time the whole thing finally slowed to a crawl and essentially died. They were very popular, too. I don't know if there were ever more than thirty or so RPers, but by the end of it there were probably a couple of hundred characters. A few people just had a couple, I had maybe five or six, and some had dozens. And most of these characters were actually used. Posts would be elaborate, featuring handfuls of characters, multiple plot threads, and half a dozen settings. There was extensive continuity and world-building. At first, we kept to the characters from Tales of Symphonia and stuck to that world, but after maybe a year or so it seems like everyone played Kingdom Hearts, and wanted to make it so that we could incorporate characters from different "universes" into the game. I was already starting to lose interest at this point, so I was fine with it. Just to give you an idea of the time and energy spent on this single RP, well, like I said, it went for nearly three years. The main "Hero Party" went on for one hundred and six threads on GameFAQs alone. Count in the dozen or so threads on the off-site board, and the maybe fifty or so total threads from the spin-offs, and you end up with approximately 170 threads. Considering that all of them except the very last ones were filled to the 500-post GameFAQs thread limit, that meant that there were about 85,000 posts when all is said and done. Divide that by three years, and you get nearly seventy eight posts a day, most of them fairly lengthy. Of course, things were much busier early on and much slower near the end. I think that a couple of times we ended up filling an entire thread in a single day. Looking back on it, I'm thankful that I lost interest fairly early on, and before it went into pure Kingdom Hearts-style nerdiness. Unfortunately, then I went on to play Cybernations and get involved with the IRC/message board roleplaying there for a couple of years, so I was still stupid. And that RPing was treated infinitely more seriously than the Hero Party roleplaying, so maybe I went into something even worse. Ugh. I didn't even like Tales of Symphonia that much. It's a good game, but nothing incredible. Edit: I just checked, and there are still a fair number of the former players chatting on the old board. They're not RPing, though. Just talking about games/movies. surf rock fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Feb 20, 2012 |
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Feb 20, 2012 17:00
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I'm probably a little late for the discussion on muses, but as a writer (or, more accurately, a roleplayer  ), I've always found it useful to... 'reconstruct' characters in my head, perhaps create a scenario, and let my imagination go. It's a useful way of overcoming writer's block, and mostly harmless.I'm now worried if I ever talk about it, I'll be confused with these people.
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Feb 20, 2012 17:30
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Colon V posted:I'm probably a little late for the discussion on muses, but as a writer (or, more accurately, a roleplayer No. Successful authors ALL do it. They all bake characters in their unconscious minds and let the "characters do their own thing" in a schizophrenic manner, writers have attested to characters having lives of their own in their head. It's hard to put down because I don't write as much as I'd like to and I've never done it, but but countless interviews with good writers show this. A particular favorite of mine is with Edward Albee. It's how many of them can make studies lifelike characters instead of chess pieces moving from plot point to plot point, cartoon caricatures, or just power fantasy heroes and bystanders.
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Feb 20, 2012 17:46
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Huh, see, I can't really relate to the "character have their own lives in my head" thing, even though I'm interested in realistic and complex portrayal of people. I mean, I can look at a scenario and say "that's not what Hrút would do", and I know whether or not I would be able to get along well if my characters were they real people, but at the end of the day I'm still fully aware that I'm the one who decided that this character has this disposition and the reason why. I'm the deciding factor in what a character's family life is like. They're still imaginary, I still create them. They drive the story, yes, but in the end I'm the person who made their decisions. The important part is that my creations resemble real people as closely as my power allows me.
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Feb 20, 2012 18:58
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SexyBlindfold posted:that's cheating, though: i'm pretty sure this isn't an actual comic but a collection of individual creepy panels the guy has done. besides, despite his commendable efforts, he's still not quite as misogynistic as muir. Yeah, those are just panels from a bunch of different comics. They don't make any more sense in context though, as a lot of them were first panels.
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Feb 20, 2012 23:16
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Colon V posted:I'm probably a little late for the discussion on muses, but as a writer (or, more accurately, a roleplayer The phenomenon is called 'living characters'. When you are writing, your characters will 'come alive' and take over, essentially doing the heavy lifting for you. They write their own dialog, have their own, distinctive voices, and very much know what they want to do. A good example of a living character is Sherlock Holmes. Doyle reached the point where he actively hated Holmes for being hard to control. Tolkien eventually came to hate Frodo for being too passive. Forester squashed characters who came to life, because he would not relinquish control. So no, you are not crazy; the characters are just doing what they should be doing.
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Feb 20, 2012 23:55
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Living Characters thing made me remember a thing from a few years ago. I don't even know if this can even be called a near miss, and is pretty lame/tame, but I figure it will tide us over until we get more from the LJ RP saga. So, a few years ago I met a girl on a dating site, and we chat a bit, and then I give her my email, and she is interested in meeting after getting my email. So we meet up, and she asks me enough times, and wants enough detail, about how I came up with email user name that I take note that its sort of odd. We sort of mutually decide there wasn't a lot of chemistry there (not enough to override 40 miles of ohio back roads separating us) it probably wouldn't work. So, she had a webcomic that I'd checked out while we were emailing (It was sort of a cutesy-surrealism with XKCD art). One day I'm bored, and see the link in the history. So I decide to check it. That day she has a post in the news feed regarding a story regarding "one of her characters, who's so strong he's like a spirit talking to me (mentions dreams about this character)", who's name was [EMAIL USER NAME] Blackthorn. He was an immortal vampire. I'm pretty sure I dodged a bullet for that and other reasons.
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Feb 21, 2012 00:19
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P.S. STILL COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MERIT
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So in regards to the LARPers with "living characters" and livejournals, did they post long, sorrow-filled obituaries for their characters, full of grief while the comments were all "aww hugs" and other such bullshit? I'm fairly certain there was some art in there and I recall seeing in-character bodypaint photos that were clearly taken in a studio. This person also referred to her character as a "voice in her head" and an extention of her personality but we pretty much chalked it down to attention seeking.
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Feb 21, 2012 00:30
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I mentioned earlier in this thread that I came close to being a "Denise," thanks to online role playing. I guess since it's the topic now, I may as well elaborate. I lived in a rural area far, far away from everything and had little to no social contact aside from family and little bits of socialization at school. I also had a gigantic imagination, and when I got into online role playing, I REALLY got into it. It became my life. Enter Dan. Dan, for all intents and purposes, wasn't somebody I knew about as he was until a year or two into this really complicated role play I got myself into. I can't go into too much detail, but there was a group of guys fighting against another group of guys. I fell really hard for a guy on one side of the fight and joined up. It was very intense. A lot of fighting, a lot of drama. And since it was my only interaction/entertainment, I felt every moment of it as if it were happening. I waited all day for these guys to show up. They were my friends and enemies, depending on what point in the story you look at, and they were the only ones I felt like I really had. Long story short, Dan confesses that every last one of them, friend and enemy both, were him. When I thought about it, it added up. Most of the big events that supposedly happened didn't happen around me. I was told about it later. And I never saw more than one or two of them at a time. He confessed that he knew how wrapped up I was in it, but kept it going anyway. I think the worst part, though, was that the guy I was in TEENAGE FOREVER LOVE with didn't really exist. This happened about eight or nine years ago, and sometimes I still get angry thinking about the fact that one person could do that to another. Three and a half years ago, a man I was dating who I met there and fell incredibly hard for (he had actually come to visit, so I knew he was who he said he was) cheated on me and dumped me for another girl there. I didn't want to see them together, so I left for good. In both senses of the word. I'm now a stable person who knows reality from fiction, and I have a great guy who is a real live person and isn't a womanizer. All's well that ends well.
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Feb 21, 2012 07:23
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I don't have time to catch up on the thread, but I thought I'd share a quick update on Denise since I had contact with her briefly. Yes, Denise/Parrier and Melissa still believe in all this. So, a couple weeks ago I volunteered for an anime convention. Don't judge me. I had ulterior motives. It's a local deal and I was on the security force since I had lots of experience moving 1500 lb beasts (I've been waiting to use this line. I drive horse carriages.). Denise was put in charge of a part of the convention, somehow. To be fair, she did a decent job. Melissa helped her a lot. Denise didn't have a whole lot of time to talk to me (unless she needed something from me), so I ended up catching up with Melissa instead. I asked how things were going, with a nod towards Denise/Parrier and an implication on both our experience of Denise/Parrier's selfish mood swings. The conversation went something like "Well, it's better now that it's getting warm out. He doesn't do well in the cold, you see. That's what makes him cranky. But once it gets warmer, he's happier and doesn't get mad as much." =/ And that's your update. Off I go!
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Feb 21, 2012 07:36
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I posted earlier but been keeping an eye on this thread. It wasn't until I realized that I had someone that could fit right at home in here. He's not a super otaku, but he is a huge Nintendo fanboy. Huge. Some details are omitted to deter Internet detectives of course. Unfortunately, most of the cluster gently caress happens on instant messaging, rather than on a website. Let's call him Mr. Despair, because when poo poo goes wrong (for him), he goes into what I lovingly call "despair mode". I met him on a game forum a few years ago, and he already was getting teased by some people on there. Nonetheless, me and a few other people talked with him and became fast friends. He was a nice guy, maybe a bit "odd" but it was mostly brushed off since he was from a place that's not too progressive in most matters. Over time, we learned how dense and obstinate he was on certain matters. We are in a friends circle of artists and whenever we tell him that something is off in his drawing, he would make up stupid excuses. Not really surprising. It wasn't until this one happening changed my view of him for the worse. It's called "Space.Plant does something a normal adult does, but Mr. Despair flips the gently caress out about it for days." A bit of background infomation. One of our mutual friends had sex with her now boyfriend and posted about it on a private journal. Mr. Despair was slightly shocked, but seemed alright...but kept asking for details of it. After that, it was all fine and dandy. Until I brought up that I had sex a year ago (for the first time!! Woowee!!1) to him in a chilled out convo. He suddenly said he felt sick, went silent and kept speaking in ellipses. Suddenly, he started RPing his current feelings. How he felt that I should've told him earlier (ie. right after it happened or on the same day) and how he felt that he thought our friendship was so close!! This new piece of juicy info shot though him like a bazooka round! He thought he didn't want to ask for further details. (Keep in mind he was typing this out for me to see.) Of course, I was making light of this, because I thought he was being overly dramatic for laughs. I playfully RPed back a bit, and telling him to "cut it out". Further pitiful RPing from him and I knew he was being serious. I tried reasoning with him but it was futile.  - Well, I liked this guy for a while and decided to do it. - Define "decided".- We decided we liked each other enough to do it a few times.- Wait...this was a multi-time deal?- ....Yes? I feel so betrayed!And on and on until I changed the subject to something else which brought him to mention that he obtained some  from this one site and it seemed everything was dandy again. Or was it?Looks like I need to split this sad, pethetic tale into parts. Part 2 will be up next when I get the time. The next part mentions the "Days After the Fallout". Now from some factoids and tidbits of our main man! - Like a Nintendo fanboy, he constantly berates its competitors Microsoft and Sony's consoles. Not surprising. His dumb arguments why the 3DS is WAY MORE BETTER than the Vita or whatever are laughable. I don't have any solid examples of this. - Is a homophobe. He hates homosexuality but not the homosexuals themselves. Don't ask me how that works. Also, to him, being gay is a choice. - He also dislikes atheists. He is a humble Christian boy that never drinks alcohol nor swears. Porn? Well, he loves it a lot so he has no worries. - Is a Brony. But he fervently denies this, as when he was little he watched this one crappy MLP cartoon in the early 90's and liked it dammit! He's not one of those stupid poseurs known as "Bronies" that jumped that MLP badwagon when a better cartoon came out. He was a male MLP fan before it was cool.  Oh, and he never even mentioned MLP at all before FiM came out, so who knows if this is true.
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Feb 21, 2012 22:02
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Space.Plant posted:- Is a homophobe. He hates homosexuality but not the homosexuals themselves. Don't ask me how that works. Also, to him, being gay is a choice. So basically, all these kids that desperately pray for God to change them, that hide and suppress their true feelings, that endure tons of failed relationships with the opposite sex, that deal with harrassment and mockery and threats and the occasional beating and murder... it's just a choice, man, and you can hate that choice while still "loving" the person. Because it's like drug addiction, or something 
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Feb 21, 2012 22:11
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Ugh, all this talk of muses and RPing reminds me of one of the weirdest fricking situations I've ever gotten myself into online, throughout the years. So like any teenage girl, I was into yaoi at the time. I frequented a message board called Yaoi no Hentai and it was besically a place to post stories and have people comment on them. I posted a couple of my own, but they weren't all that creative, since we're all women posted about dudes bonking all the dirty stuff always happened in the same order and the only thing that differed was the pairing/situation leading up to it. Anyways, at some point I made friends with an author I thought was particularly excellent, and we'd chat back and forth a lot on AIM. She was a 35 year old housewife and a little off, but still fun to talk to. And then, one day, she asked if I wanted to write a yaoi fic with her. I was thrilled, because it was kind of considered an honor to co-write with the popular authors. So we'd just brainstorm a situation and a plot and bang out a story, right? Nope, she wanted to roleplay it. A 35 year old woman and a teenaged girl, cybering as two gay anime guys. Needless to say, I got creeped out pretty fast. That, combined with my overactive imagination actually thinking about what went on, eventually turned me off from yaoi for good.
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Feb 21, 2012 22:16
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DarkHorse posted:These two often go together (well, the first point and being Christian). The phrase I've heard bandied about is "Love the sinner, hate the sin." It only makes sense in the context that sin is a conscious choice to go against what God wills. Yep, I heard that quote before. Your post reminded me of another tidbit about this guy: - He never had a real romantic relationship (He's currently in his mid-20's by the way) and admits this is because he is too shy. That is understandable. I honestly didn't start dating until I was 20 due to shyness myself, but I gathered up my confidence and courage to do so. For him, though, it seems he never really wants to try to better himself in that subject, and probably wants to women to come to him. Speaking of relationships, he's in an on-and-off one-sided Facebook relationship with a super paranoid girl from half-way around the world. Every now and then you see them calling each other pet names and all the mushy stuff on Facebook. Ask him about her though, and he denies it. "She's not my girlfriend! There's not a spark between us!". I say it's one-sided since it's mostly her idea and his spine usually turns to silly putty when around girls and their demands.
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Feb 22, 2012 00:29
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Ask Me About Dating A Girl With Jrockers In Her Head I just remembered a huge part of the whole muse thing. When a muse would come out, it was called 'projecting'. I think this was a word that came from May or Star, but I could be wrong. It's Not Like A Cult (fallout from the break up/attempts to sever from the 'muse community') After I broke up with Janelle, I was subjected to a bevy of voicemails, text messages and IMs, mostly from muses of hers that were dating mine. What was going to happen? Would they still be allowed to be together? I could offer no real answer. I knew I would be accused of severing things so completely after so many years, after all, our muses were separate from us and our issues, so why make them suffer just because of what we were going through? When a muse 'faded' (ie, the player stopped feeling the character's voice, or lost interest in them and played them less, usually in favor of someone new), it was tantamount to the muse dying, and muses would grieve over the loss of their friend or lover. Simply refusing to play the muse any longer would be considered just like murdering the character, crushing their voice and no longer allowing them to live and be with the people they cared about. Of course, a situation of a muse fading and disappearing held tremendous leverage, and so it wasn't uncommon for a muse to disappear for a short time and then come back from the supposed dead. I wanted to avoid too much melodrama so I tried to be vague and not commit to an answer about whether or not I was going to quit muses entirely. Even if I had wanted to stay, though, I was rapidly beginning to understand that the world of muses and Janelle's world of emotional abuse were too intertwined for me to ever participate in one without the other successfully. Shortly before the break up, a friend of mine, Cleo, had IMed me. I mentioned to her that Janelle had read my e-mail (my fault for leaving it open on my PC, of course, though she literally never touched the thing usually) and discovered discussions Star and my muses were having together and drama had exploded about it. Cleo was also part of our little RP group, but I had always been closer to Cleo than Cleo was with Janelle. Cleo never had her muses project and admitted she was a little uncomfortable with the sexual aspect of it - she just really, really liked Jrock. While Janelle and Cleo at first got along quite well, even running a panel at a local con together for several years, Janelle eventually decided that Cleo hated her, probably because of Cleo's unwillingness to participate in projecting, none of Cleo's muses being romantically invovled with hers, and Cleo's visible discomfort with muses and projecting. In spite of Janelle's protests that she didn't like hanging out with Cleo, she didn't like me hanging out with her either, complained of being bored the whole time, and often decided against hanging out with Cleo when invited. Just the same she also hated when I would hang out with Cleo. Cleo was a good source of support and sanity, a touchstone who knew the references when muse life got too crazy. Unfortunately, Cleo moved away to Japan to live the dream and meet her favorite Jrockers instead of just pretending to be them, which I am proud to say she did. I kept in touch with her, and it took Cleo saying over AIM, "I hate how she talks to you, I always did. I think she's abusive." and my response of "No, no, she can't be abusive. I simply don't want her to be." to really open my eyes to how bad things had gotten. When I privately told my friends about the break up, Cleo was the first to congratulate me, saying that soon, like her, I would be glad to have put a huge distance between me and the muse stuff. However, when Cleo did mostly-leave, she was treated with disdain by many in our group. People were petulant and hurt over her decision to leave though with different timezones and a lot to do at her new job, it was a logical decision to drop the game. These people were my friends, some of my only ones in the horrible last few years of my life. Could I handle leaving with out the excuse of flying across the ocean? Responses to my break up and the implications of me soon leaving the muse scene broke up into these responses: 1. You had to do what you had to do. It'll be sad if you and your muses leave, but I understand why you have to. 2. You're wrong about Janelle, you're wrong about muses, and how dare you say that they might not be real. You should not make your muses suffer because of something you two are going through. I remember very vividly receiving a phonecall one night shortly after the break up, and sitting on the floor of my room being subjected to around two or three hour's worth of nonsensical rhetoric from Star, someone I had thought to be a kind and compassionate ally, someone I always sought refuge in. She seemed like one of the kindest, sanest people I knew until it came to the subject of muses. She was deeply offended when I finally blurted out, "It's like a cult! You draw people in!" And it was. I had personally witnessed this in several friends of mine, excluding attempts to get Cleo to be further drawn in. Mimi, Sarah and Alex were all friends of mine I'd met in an RPG chat, and Mimi and Sarah were successfully sucked in to playing Jrock and having their lives revolve around muses (I will talk a little bit more about the process in Don't You Think You're Getting A Muse For Him?). Sarah had in fact lost her virginity to Janelle while projecting in a car as boys from the Jpop boyband w-inds. Janelle was visiting her in Portland - another trip I had not been invited on, though I had known Sarah longer and Portland was not far, my work commitments and lack of money prevented me. At least that was the reasoning at the time, in retrospect I don't know why they couldn't have planned things so that I could come along. I mean, aside from the fact they at least had the decency not to bang right under my nose that time (they did at other time, later). Mimi, who was rather shy and naive, was not comfortable with the idea of projecting for a long time. Mimi was actually Janelle and my roommate, and I considered to be like a sister I never had. The absolute final straw in the whole ordeal was Mimi taking me aside a morning after we had all gotten drunk, and I had retired a bit early due to the alcohol making me depressed and work the next day. Mimi tearfully confided that Janelle had encouraged her to project one of her muses, and that they made out. It was obvious she was guilty and considering Mimi's rather fragile mental state (she had extreme problems with her OCD and social anxiety, and tended to react to things with fear and panic and was only barely beginning to understand sexuality at all), I wonder to this day how complicit she was. The fact that not even Mimi was off-limits to Janelle drove me to thoughts of self-harm and suicide, realizing that with Cleo out of the picture Janelle had seriously attempted to sleep with every female friend I had, and behaved extremely provocatively with all my male ones. Alex had moved to the Seattle area from far away. She is someone I had known online since we were both 14 or so, and I worked very hard to make her feel at home since she didn't have a lot of friends in the area. Once Janelle caught wind that Alex like RPing, she immediately began to encourage muse behavior with her, even though Alex only played original characters. Janelle began to encourage her to allow her characters to project, and attempted to get frisky with her at one of the numerous drinking parties we held at our apartment. When Janelle got a job that required training in Bellevue, where Alex lived, Janelle stayed with her for a week. By all reports, it didn't go well. Janelle complained of boredom, and said they argued, but I don't remember much other than that. I sort of assume something went terribly wrong, because not long after that, Alex stopped speaking to me entirely and started avoiding me. There's a small chance it was because I simply wasn't as interested in the MMO we played together than she was, but I have a hard time believing that Janelle's pushy insistence that Alex project her characters didn't factor in. When I pointed out that Janelle had pushed people who might not have been interested into having muses, and said it was like a cult, Star shouted at me. I had never heard her shout about anything before. She said it absolutely wasn't a cult, and yet her explanation of what muses were was indeed very mystical. In spite of what I had believed to be a very strong friendship (we had as much fun together as we did as muses), I stopped speaking to Star more or less entirely after that. As I began to withdraw from the 'muse scene', my friendships with people who were more involved with Janelle than me dissolved almost immediately. When I confronted Sarah about how hurt I'd been about her sleeping with Janelle, she said she didn't think I had a problem with it, and Janelle had said it was fine with me. However, I remember Sarah had asked me my feelings about it. I didn't exactly put my foot down like I should've, but I do recall saying it did bother me, but I didn't see how it could be helped. I honestly don't know how that kept being misinterpreted as 'totally fine with everything'. Janelle would get poisonously angry and offended if I so much as implied this was a situation of her cheating on me, or sleeping with someone other than me. Even if had been, she said she had the right to be with other people because she was pansexual, which I understand is horseshit by regular pansexual people standards, since she shouldn't have insisted I stay with her even though I'm monogamous. But that didn't matter because all of these muses were all having separate relationships, totally independent of her. She had no interest or attraction to Sarah at all - which I am willing to believe but actually makes the whole idea grosser, because I think she was just attracted to the idea of easy sex with someone with low self-esteem - but if their muses wanted to be together, why, she had no right to interfere. I would like to say I remained close friends with the people who were more loyal to me and supportive of my decision, but it turned out we had less and less to talk about. I attempted to get involved with games without the muse drama, or let people 'see' their muses by playing on AIM or on LJ with them, but the spirit and motivation were totally gone, and Janelle often tried to get into games I was in under pseudonames. Eventually, I became embittered with Jrock entirely, and to this day rarely listen to the dozens of CDs from bands I used to love as a teenager, even the ones I bought on a school trip to Japan that have other memories connected to it. Even though I forgave Mimi for her role in everything, especially since she helped me get all my stuff back after Janelle kicked me out of the apartment, I simply could not look at her with the same eyes any more. Janelle did attempt to win me, or at least my muses back, for quite some time. I would receive dozens of texts, messages or calls from muses asking for their respective partners, begging to know if such or so muse was gone forever. A typical message would go something like this: "Hi, is Kyo there? This is Emiru. Please let me speak to him. You can't keep him from speaking to me! I need him, how could you do this to me?" It was awkward to say, hi, no, I have to think of myself now. But the strength of everyone's belief in muses kept me hesitant to flat out tell Janelle or anyone else that muses were indeed fake and I had the right to stop 'allowing one to live' at my will. They really did seem to so sincerely believe that muses were a part of them that was real. Surely I had no place to judge, since I had participated in the lifestyle for that long, even if I had always secretly questioned it. I finally severed ties with Janelle near-completely by mailing her back the cellphone she had given me on her plan (without asking me, by the way, she was tired of not being able to have her muses sext mine, and the call quality of my pre-paid plan) one day after she called me about 8 times in the span of 12 hours. Some of the voicemails were from muses, and some were from her, insisting we could not discuss things via e-mail only, like I discussed, and I was being cruel. I thought I was doing the right thing by trying to get up the money to help her pay to end the contract, but after that I was done. She was lucky I didn't leave her with a tremendous bill. I did make the mistake of sending my new cell number to a few people like Sarah (though I did grow a spine and completely sever with her not long after) and Mimi. About six months later, I got a call in the wee hours of the morning that was little more than Janelle sniffling and breathing hard, having obviously been crying. I knew exactly who it was, hung up, and developed a phobia of phone number unknown to me. One of my supportive internet friends from the muse community did some easy internet detective work and found out that there had been some kind of big fallout between her and the Rachel-from-MN, complete with de-friendings on LJ, and a drops and de-friendings of muses in the RPs the day she called me. I'm not sure what Janelle hoped to get from me, or if it was one of her muses calling me, distraught. As for me after that, I was a wreck for a lot of reasons. It had not been an easy four years, there was a lot of personal family trouble going on, and due to some of Janelle's scarier behavior, I'd jump ten feet if someone interrupted me making a sandwich in the kitchen (on top if it all, she had an eating disorder, and complained of feeling fat in comparison to her beloved muses). Having so many of my close friends betray me like that, and my best friend who hadn't been involved moving away from college that next year was pretty hard, and for a long time I never thought I would make another friend. Ironically, I found a very close friend in an unexpected place: Janelle's former roommate from college, whom I had kept in occasional touch with (I'm also internet friends with one of her ex girlfriends whom we attended a con with). We bonded over having to deal with the crazy, telling each other the other half of stories and events we witnessed, and became extremely close friends. Years later, I have lots of great friends, though I still struggle with being attracted to women who don't give a drat about me, with the help of my therapist I'm coping with my PTSD and trying to learn to value myself. I am still involved with online roleplaying but I'm rather cynical about the drama side of it and refuse to get involved. The word 'muse' still sets my teeth on edge, as does a majority of the music associated with the muses back then. My stance on whether or not they real has done a complete 180, and I now believe everyone involved was simply telling themselves whatever it took to keep on going with things as they were. They could not act in a certain way, so they wanted to create someone who could because they couldn't give themselves permission. While many of the people involved struggled with mental health (Mimi had OCD, Sarah depression or bipolar disorder, myself PTSD, Janelle probably BPD, and many other people were diagnosed with depression, bipolar, or had eating disorders) and troubled home lives, most of them perceived reality in a completely lucid fashion other than things involving their muses. And most of them have, as far as I know, completely given it up over the years. I have no idea what Janelle is doing now, or if she still believes. I've made a concentrated effort to avoid news of her, though while we were both using LJ, she would visit my locked journal once in awhile (there's a tracking feature that can show you who's visited your journal, logged in). Last I heard - probably two years ago - she was living with Sarah. Mimi moved away, and while we've met a few times since then, things were strained, and we had trouble talking to one another. I've run into Janelle a few times, at the local con and in the city, but it's been some time. My best guy friend ran into her at her work as a concierge, where she attempted to chat him up and lend him her umbrella, but he got away as soon as he could. He said she looked and acted exactly the same, and he thought she would probably work up to asking about me. She was very friendly with someone whom she always complained of me hanging out with because he 'hated' her. Whew, writing this whole thing out is pretty draining. Next time, as per requested I'll do Don't You Think You're Getting A Muse For Him? If that isn't too lengthy, I'll also talk about Muse Behavior And Projecting, otherwise I'll do that next time.
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Feb 22, 2012 02:32
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Space.Plant posted:Yep, I heard that quote before. Your post reminded me of another tidbit about this guy: Oh thank God. Until you got to the Facebook relationship I was almost sure you were talking about someone I know. On the other hand, this means there's multiple types of this one guy out there.
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Feb 22, 2012 02:36
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slow dive posted:Ask Me About Dating A Girl With Jrockers In Her Head Holy hell you are lucky it wasn't as bad or crazy as that Final Fantasy house  There wasn't any 'gifting' of money or expensive jrock items, were there?
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Feb 22, 2012 02:47
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Lyz posted:A 35 year old woman and a teenaged girl, cybering as two gay anime guys.
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Feb 22, 2012 07:12
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I used to be big into Roleplaying. I did a lot of really minor stuff, coming up with characters not related to any game or movie, and just messing around with other peoples characters. I guess the one thing that reminds me that I was sane enough to do this with out being a total weirdo, is that no matter how hard I tried. A bit of myself always shone through in my characters, until at one point they were nothing but me with special powers. After I got fed up with making characters and roleplaying in a traditional sense. I just random started going into the chat rooms and posting things like. " Your all in a dark forest. In the distance you hear a rumbling in the distance" Then run characters through "campaigns". It was a lot of fun. Except for three people. Guy number one insisted that no matter what happened his character was the winner. No. Matter. What. It even ended up with me getting PM's from him, with him yelling about how I am loving him over and his character should obviously be able to do this super awesome thing because he has blah, blah, blah power. He was one of the more tame people to be honest, never threatened me or anything like that. The second person was a chick, who was constantly "Dating" every single person on the website. It wouldn't have been a big problem, if I wasn't a moderator on the site as well. I would log off for the night, wake up go to work, and come home and log on to chill. Only to find about a hundred messages from her, starting innocently with things like. "Hey me and X Broke up recently. Can I send you some chat logs from after we broke up were he was threatening me?" Then get worse and worse as the night went on, threatening to kill herself if I don't answer THIS VERY MINUTE. Mind you, this entire time I was sleeping as her messages got more and more insane. The last person, was this guy who everyone said was a huge "man whore" (Or as much of a man whore as you could be when your not really talking to people in person, and it's entirely on the internet) The problem wasn't him necessarily, the problem was the fact that no matter what I did, no one would believe me that his "lecherous" ways weren't against the rules. It got so bad that at one point I put a huge notice on the website, In big black bold letters that said " I DON'T CARE THAT X CHEATED ON YOU WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND/WAIFU/IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND. STOP TELLING ME TO BAN HIM" -Jimson I honestly don't see how people could get as invested in these imaginary worlds as they did. It was kind of disturbing, just HOW much faith they put in this imaginary relationship, with the hopes that at the end of the day they would turn out to be happy and mega super in love. I finally left the site in flames as a huge troll. I think at one point someone got banned for calling someone a dirty wetback, or something terrible like that. They kept telling me to go on some cam site and they would beg to come back on the site. They were crying... on cam... About a website that was a minor part of there lives. Needless to say I screenshotted that poo poo, and put it up on the website. I am still perma-banned to this day. I feel terrible for doing it, and potentially humiliating someone who was only trying to bring back something they really enjoyed, but really?! How can people be THIS invested in this fake imaginary life?
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Feb 22, 2012 09:01
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One of the annoying things about roleplayer friends is that they come in two flavours. The first is the somewhat more casual player, who'll head off to a LARP once in a while and has a few costumes and poo poo tucked away somewhere, but is able to basically maintain some semblance of sanity. Then you get the "I live roleplaying, I breathe roleplaying, it's roleplaying all day every day on the hour every hour" variety. Now, I actively avoided the second type, although some friended me on facebook and I accepted because it was a useful tool in being able to know which gatherings to avoid and which ones were worth going to, as well as knowing which parts of Auckland are worth staying away from on which weekends because I keep getting invited to these loving things for some reason. Besides, aside from constantly talking about Morebutts or whatever the gently caress, the ones I know are generally harmless and some can hold a non-roleplaying conversation if the planets align in a certain way once in a while. What really pisses me off though, is when I'm having a conversation with variety 1 and variety 2 comes along, variety 1 will just drop the conversation and suddenly start talking about some imaginary character. It wasn't just me that was subjected to this. It was pretty much every non-LARPing friend that they had. It's pretty much why I more or less don't talk to anyone that I know for a fact is a LARPer. The most interaction I have with them these days is to pretty much mock them on Facebook, implying that anyone who cosplays is a paedophile or just demanding an explanation as to what the extra goggles and gears do on any "steampunk" poo poo that they build and post photos of. edogawa rando fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Feb 22, 2012 |
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Feb 22, 2012 09:44
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The best I can chime in with is that a girl, in the throws of passion, demanded I call her Dorothy Catalonia. And if you're wondering, she was the opposite of greasy blob. Gundam W hosed up an entire generation.
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Feb 22, 2012 11:50
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As the thread has moved on more towards RP and the like, some memories have surfaced about a strange group I bumped into during my time playing MMOs. It also touches on a lot of what I read in the TvTropes thread. I was maybe 16 or so at the time. I got involved in an emulation project with some other players, essentially replicating the server side so people could set up private servers (I did all the zoneID mapping). At the time I joined up with the team, one of the other members got booted out, a girl I'll call Jessica (I had her real name in here but seems she's still active, internet detective etc) who basically bullshitted her way into the group (she had no technical skills whatsoever) and only brought drama. Turns out that Jessica knew someone from my guild, a male to female trans who was heavily into the RP scene in the game. The game was very friendly to roleplayers, with loads of cosmetic gear, physical emotes and plenty of ingame locations. Anyway, Jessica was quite unhappy about being kicked and told everyone who would listen that she was making her own video game and that we should all get in on it. My guild mate had known her for some time (not in person) and word is that she was some sort of millionaire (the exact details were always hazy, I don't think this was true) so she would finance it. Great, sure, why not. I was always keen to build on my technical skills and it seemed fun. The various 'positions' were split up amongst the 5 of us. 2 of these other members didn't really say a great deal, more on them later. poo poo I don't even remember what I was meant to be doing because every meeting would devolve into circlejerking 'worldbuilding' by Jessica and my guildmate. In absolute tiny tiny detail. The solar system this mythical planet is in has 3 suns, fine I guess. I don't think the orbital patterns of the sun, the exact chemical composition or whatever fuckery has any real impact on a game but this is what they would spend hours talking about. And forget trying to get involved in that, it wasn't my 'area' and anything mentioned would be dismissed. Until it later turned up as one of 'their suggestions'. Through all of this I kept in contact with my broski who was running the emulation project, we had a great time at the expense of Jessica who, it turned out, kept making new IM accounts to bombard others in the team with unpleasant messages. Angry angry person. Eventually the worldbuilding sessions moved on to roleplaying in this fictional universe, any thought of actually turning it into something tangible went out the window. This was one of those IRC RP's where people take turns typing out massive posts. Apparently I was a weird cyborg dragon who was sometimes a guy (???). It didn't take long for them to get annoyed at my posts. 10 lines describing how a character walked across a road, followed by 'I set x on fire, because I'm a dragon right?'. I more or less became an observer, because drat this was hilarious. Eventually these chats turned into orgies of cyberhumpage (not so hilarious) in graphic detail, copied and pasted in their entirety to the emulator bunch. As computer security was an ongoing interest of mine, and given that Jessica hosted the IRC server at her home, I had a poke around her system and turns out that the 2 others who were so quiet (except during internet_sexy_time) were her the whole time. On top of that, she wasn't a she, she was in fact a dude, 20 years older than she claimed. Now I don't have a problem with transgender people, mtf, ftm, whatever-to-whatever, but it seemed Jessica was just a persona rather than an actual person, he was a guy who just happened to pretend to be a girl and have a bukkake party, where they were simultaneously 3 of the participants. The guildmate knew some of this. Anyway I abandoned the pair, there's only so long something can be funny before it just becomes tiresome. I didn't care about either of them so no long drawn out severing, just blocked and done. The emulator didn't happen, we had it working, item generation etc (no mob AI yet)but I think the lead dev torched it due to some legal nonsense. No imaginary fairies or voices in anyones head I'm afraid.
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Feb 22, 2012 13:33
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Farbauti posted:I more or less became an observer, because drat this was hilarious. I think I was one of those people at one point in my life, too. The problem comes when you don't grow out of that phase. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Feb 22, 2012 |
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Feb 22, 2012 19:00
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If you're a lawyer, which I am, you soon find out that a fair proportion of the people who get involved in serious legal disputes do so because they are absolute nutters who just will not compromise on some point or other. I think that's what some of the people mentioned here will grow up to be, although probably not the anime-obsessed, living in a fantasy world types. The one who really sticks in my head was a lady in her sixties who got into a dispute with her tenants because they, as they were quite entitled to do legally, were seeking to acquire her freehold. Basically, she wanted me to make this all magically go away so she could sell it and retire. I couldn't, and any attempt to explain this basically led to ranting and raving from her. It culminated in her phoning me up and literally screaming down the phone at me like an enraged toddler. Eventually, I just put the phone down on her - she wasn't interested in letting me say anything, she just wanted to scream. I also vividly remember a meeting with her and her husband, who she basically told to shut up whenever he opened his mouth. I felt sorry for him. At least I didn't have to go home with her. Sorry - no crazy RP players. And the crazy anime fans I knew online are all well-documented on the TV Tropes thread anyway. General Panic fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Feb 22, 2012 |
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Feb 22, 2012 19:53
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Colon V posted:I'm not sure whether the fact that you find that incredibly weird, but I barely blink says more about you, me, or the internet as a whole. Oh it weirded me out as a teenager, but now (especially after this thread), it's just like "...eh." I'm sure most of the best yaoi fanfic authors were just bored housewives.
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Feb 22, 2012 20:39
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General Panic posted:... For the non-lawyer (non-<region>?) goons here, bolded part means they were basically trying to buy her house/complex/whatever, right?
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Feb 22, 2012 22:24
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LiveJournal RP was a very, very weird animal, even when you discounted the crazy players (not an easy thing to do, mind, because they were goddamn everywhere). There were "rules" common to pretty much every game there that I've never seen anywhere else. The weirdest, and to me, the most irritating, was that making up your own characters was considered a BAD thing. If you dared apply for a game with a cowardly, middle-aged, ordinary human with no superpowers who just happened to not come from an anime, "OMG MARY SUE!" Meanwhile, characters like Goku, Dream of the Endless, hell, even capital-G God? Totally acceptable and not overpowered at all. The LJ RP community also thrives on drama. If you're not making it, you're sitting on the sidelines rooting for something nasty to happen so you can post a play-by-play to the latest anon-meme/rant community/secrets community, etc. Constructive criticism was discouraged, and passive-aggressive anonymous sniping was considered the norm. Bonus points if you can use your character to act out OOC grudges against the characters of players you don't like. There were actual, honest to god cults of personality that formed around the nastiest, most sociopathic people because "They're not afraid to tell it like it is!" I don't really have much in the way of specific stories though. The cult leader in our game, Julie, eventually had a meltdown and banned everyone she didn't like from the RP's IRC channel, which eventually led to the game disbanding. Oh, and then there was the member of Julie's cult that I knew in RL. She had a meltdown and accused me of RPing with people Julie didn't like because I was in love with them. 
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Feb 22, 2012 23:30
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General Panic posted:The one who really sticks in my head was a lady in her sixties who got into a dispute with her tenants because they, as they were quite entitled to do legally, were seeking to acquire her freehold. Can you explain to me exactly what's going on with that situation (and what country this story takes place in)? Lady was renting property, and tenants were trying to buy it? (I don't want to derail, but i'm really curious and you don't have PMs)
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Feb 23, 2012 00:57
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Guesticles posted:Can you explain to me exactly what's going on with that situation (and what country this story takes place in)? Lady was renting property, and tenants were trying to buy it? No, please go ahead. I don't know if it's just me, but the RP stories have been really boring.
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Feb 23, 2012 02:07
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Blinkman987 posted:The best I can chime in with is that a girl, in the throws of passion, demanded I call her Dorothy Catalonia. And if you're wondering, she was the opposite of greasy blob. Gundam W hosed up an entire generation. Out of all the characters in Gundam Wing, she wanted you to call her Dorothy when you made love? A lot of these stories are sad and disturbing, but that's just plain odd.
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Feb 23, 2012 03:17
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Wandering Knitter posted:Oh thank God. Until you got to the Facebook relationship I was almost sure you were talking about someone I know. On the other hand, this means there's multiple types of this one guy out there. Wait, you mean a very shy mid-20's guy who hasn't dated (there are lots of those around, though) or a homophobic Nintendo-fanboy in his mid-20's that never dated? These RP posts makes me glad I never really had the interest in RPing. Showing slight interest to do so in front of a (ex)friend let the gates open for him to pester me a lot about it. Like asking me when I'm going to join this certain RPing IRC channel, when will I be confortable RPing, ectectect. I slowly stopped talking to him and then blocked him.
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Feb 23, 2012 04:35
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Space.Plant posted:Wait, you mean a very shy mid-20's guy who hasn't dated (there are lots of those around, though) or a homophobic Nintendo-fanboy in his mid-20's that never dated? Both! In fact now that I think about it I know several people who match that description. At least 3-4.I need new friends.
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Feb 23, 2012 05:50
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Colon V posted:The problem comes when you don't grow out of that phase. I did some digging and the guy is still active, still doing the same thing. Roping people into imaginary worlds with the promise of something better, getting them to invest time and money, and then when the praise inevitably dries up, he moves on leaving behind badly coded husks of PHP, mspaint concept art and desolate forums. So far I've found 4 more 'in development' games and a couple emulation projects that 'she' was involved in. It seems that he uses this female persona to get in then takes the role of queen bee, keeping the circlejerking going by declaring x the President of their mythical company, y the CEO, hell make 2 people CEO's and everyone have a fancy title (this happened). Eventually though it all seems to fall apart. A sad note: on one of the deserted forums for a game that never happened, there was a lonely post from a girl months after everyone had jumped ship, evidently she had been duped into getting involved. She was asking why no one visited anymore as she had spent time and money getting the site built etc.
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Feb 23, 2012 14:38
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Farbauti posted:as she had spent time and money getting the site built etc.
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Feb 23, 2012 14:46
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