First time in years of running this server/account that my dozens of saved searches have a hit and put a post in my timeline of someone I don't follow yet.
We’ll have to wait a bit longer than planned for the premiere of HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. A specific premiere date had not previously be…
If you have not read my previous post about Blaseball and do not know what Blaseball is you need to read this first because nothing about this will make sense without knowing how this game worked:
Anyway I'm sure this is probably covered in that post, but I want to reiterate how characters in Blaseball worked. Characters, or players (but players gets confusing with the fictional sports people versus the real life players of the video game, so we'll say characters) in Blaseball consist of...very little. The game is text based. Characters in the game are randomly generated names coupled with sports stats. Over time a few other things were added (like characters could have items, or weird specific persistent buff/debuff effects) but ultimately what we're looking at is a name and some stats. Characters in Blaseball did not have characterization, did not have prewritten or generated backgrounds, pronouns, genders, ethnicities, anything
... show more
If you have not read my previous post about Blaseball and do not know what Blaseball is you need to read this first because nothing about this will make sense without knowing how this game worked:
Anyway I'm sure this is probably covered in that post, but I want to reiterate how characters in Blaseball worked. Characters, or players (but players gets confusing with the fictional sports people versus the real life players of the video game, so we'll say characters) in Blaseball consist of...very little. The game is text based. Characters in the game are randomly generated names coupled with sports stats. Over time a few other things were added (like characters could have items, or weird specific persistent buff/debuff effects) but ultimately what we're looking at is a name and some stats. Characters in Blaseball did not have characterization, did not have prewritten or generated backgrounds, pronouns, genders, ethnicities, anything. They're just names. The only "canon" story aspects are what happened in the simulation, much like Dwarf Fortress--for example, some characters were killed, got brought back via necromancy effects, etc. Some story elements happen in Blaseball, like a prescripted event that changed every character whose name was Dan into Peanut (which also led to one player becoming Peanutiel). So there's a small amount of "canon" characterization, but otherwise...we're looking at a spreadsheet of names.
It's important to know this, because you cannot approach the Blaseball fandom types the way you would the fans of some TV show. For example, there's a lot of dynamics that go into people shipping characters from TV shows, and a lot of debate over, say, queer headcanons of characters who are not confirmed to be queer in media. Blaseball is a list of blank slate names. That's it.
Jessica Telephone was one of the earliest "big name" Blaseball characters. Remember, Blaseball has 24 teams (it started with a couple less but whatever), each with...variable sized teams as time went on due to various in-game effects. So at any given time there are a few hundred characters involved in the game. Of course, some will die and be replaced, later there were ways for new players to be added (in-universe they are hatched from eggs fully formed to walk onto the field) so over time there's been a shit ton of Blaseball characters. So it takes a lot for a character to become notable in some way. In these early days, most notable characters were either due to them being extremely good players, extremely bad players, or having extremely funny names.
Jessica Telephone was a really good player. I never followed stats super closely but my memories of them in that time was that they tended to either hit home runs or miss entirely. But ultimately Jessica Telephone was good. So what do you do when a player that is on someone else's team is too good and getting too popular? You
... show more
Jessica Telephone was one of the earliest "big name" Blaseball characters. Remember, Blaseball has 24 teams (it started with a couple less but whatever), each with...variable sized teams as time went on due to various in-game effects. So at any given time there are a few hundred characters involved in the game. Of course, some will die and be replaced, later there were ways for new players to be added (in-universe they are hatched from eggs fully formed to walk onto the field) so over time there's been a shit ton of Blaseball characters. So it takes a lot for a character to become notable in some way. In these early days, most notable characters were either due to them being extremely good players, extremely bad players, or having extremely funny names.
Jessica Telephone was a really good player. I never followed stats super closely but my memories of them in that time was that they tended to either hit home runs or miss entirely. But ultimately Jessica Telephone was good. So what do you do when a player that is on someone else's team is too good and getting too popular? You boo them!
See, when Blaseball was still extremely new and the first big wave of new players hadn't hit yet, there was a lot of cheering/booing in the chat. Because, well, it's sports. That's how sports worked. But when the big wave came in, the people joining were not really sports people, they were fandom-y people. And so they found booing players or trash talk or even just cheering a little too hard for your favorite team to be rude and mean. Why can't you just be positive and be nice to the other teams? All rivalries were thought of as distasteful, all the teams should just be friends.
If you actually like sports, you find this extremely miserable.
And it's not like I'm some hardcore sports person. I don't get angry over sports. But part of the fun of sports is like...rooting for things that don't ultimately matter. Getting invested. In a way, it's kind of a game you and the other fans are playing together, you're all treating this as extremely important and you are going to put your all into saying My Team Owns, Fuck Your Team, We're Going To Beat You. It's not mean, because there's this social contract here where we all understand that we're playing this game. We all understand that saying fuck your team isn't a personal attack. We all understand saying I hope your team loses is fine and encouraged, because the other side gets to do the same. If anything, the immature people everyone hates in sports are the sports fans that are dead serious about it to the point of getting angry.
Sorry, I know all of these posts are long, but I have to slowly introduce how this community worked, because...there's so many layers to it. I can't just describe a sports simulation and have you understand why any of these dumbass fights happened the way they did without this understanding. You have to understand that this was a sports game that got absolutely flooded with players who hated sports and hated sports fans.
So anyway, Jessica Telephone was a big name character. Think a MIchael Jordan, a Tiger Woods, a Kobe Bryant. The people who love them love them, the people who hate them hate them, and that's how sports are.
But the problem is...some people weren't here to watch simulated sports. Some people were here to get horny.
A certain subset of the community really rallied around Jessica Telephone. And they started coming up with headcanons for them.
I would say writing fanfics, but Blaseball was kind of different. Yes, people have written a lot of fanfics of it, but one of the biggest sources of drama in the community is the idea that Blaseball should be treated more like SCP. Except an SCP with no gatekeeping, so everyone that had an idea about what kind of character each randomly generated name should be should be incorporated into a single idea. A fan wiki was made for people to contribute to, which was just nonstop fighting, because instead of everyone having their own headcanons, everyone had to come to a consensus on what they'd all picture in their heads.
Imagine whatever fandom you know the most about, imagine if every fanfic someone wrote had to be agreed upon by all the fans.
It's a nightmare.
Jessica Telephone was one of the first characters to start having some heavy headcanons, and the most common was that Jessica Telephone was a trans lesbian with a lot of wives.
... show more
A certain subset of the community really rallied around Jessica Telephone. And they started coming up with headcanons for them.
I would say writing fanfics, but Blaseball was kind of different. Yes, people have written a lot of fanfics of it, but one of the biggest sources of drama in the community is the idea that Blaseball should be treated more like SCP. Except an SCP with no gatekeeping, so everyone that had an idea about what kind of character each randomly generated name should be should be incorporated into a single idea. A fan wiki was made for people to contribute to, which was just nonstop fighting, because instead of everyone having their own headcanons, everyone had to come to a consensus on what they'd all picture in their heads.
Imagine whatever fandom you know the most about, imagine if every fanfic someone wrote had to be agreed upon by all the fans.
It's a nightmare.
Jessica Telephone was one of the first characters to start having some heavy headcanons, and the most common was that Jessica Telephone was a trans lesbian with a lot of wives. A lot of Blaseball headcanons were basically just focused on giving characters genders and sexualities and races, and very little else until people got bored enough to write more. So some people started calling Jessica Telephone a trans lesbian. That's fine, whatever.
So you now have two groups: you have the sports fans that were already there for sports, and you have the new fandom people coming up with little nuggets of headcanon for Jessica Telephone where she's a trans lesbian.
Now, let's remember, this game has random weather effects, such as a solar eclipse that would sometimes kill a player and replace them with a new player, with text that a "rogue umpire incinerated [player name]". So people who wanted Jessica Telephone's team to win less would really love to see their best player deleted from the game.
Now, how do you think this goes when the sports people start chanting, say, "incinerate Jessica Telephone!" while some percentage of the playerbase is thinking of her as "the only trans woman in Blaseball"?
The problem is, the sports people aren't getting into the fandom stuff. Like, completely disinterested and not really paying attention to what the fanlore people are doing. It would be like going to my parents, who watched The Walking Dead, and trying to make them engage with some Tumblr user's high school AU TWD fanfics. It means nothing to them and they don't care, they're just watching the show, some hyper specific fandom content is something they know nothing about and don't care about finding out about.
So the sports people keep yelling "incinerate Jessica Telephone", and the people writing fanfic about Jessica Telephone Trans Lesbian are FURIOUS.
Suddenly, the sports people are transphobes. Homophobes. Based on something a few random fans made up out of thin air that they did not interact with whatsoever.
People start saying "they only call for her to be incinerated and nobody else because they hate trans people. They hate lesbians. It's obvious."
Lots of problems here: first of all, a lot of the people they were mad at were trans people. And/or lesbians.
Second, a lot of the people calling to Incinerate Jessica Telephone have literally never even seen any of these fanfic posts. They only hang out in the watch party chat and don't see any of this external stuff. Kind of hard to hate Jessica Telephone for being a trans lesbian when you don't know that anyone has ever uttered the suggestion that Jessica Telephone is a trans lesbian.
Third, the calls to incinerate Jessica Telephone predated any of this fandom stuff.
"But wait, didn't you say something about people being horny, what was that all about"
Right, so there's an extra layer here. At least a few players were extremely, extremely horny about Jessica Telephone, a woman they made up in their heads.
It's important to note, Blaseball's discord is considered a 13+ discord. The rules say it's PG-1
... show more
People start saying "they only call for her to be incinerated and nobody else because they hate trans people. They hate lesbians. It's obvious."
Lots of problems here: first of all, a lot of the people they were mad at were trans people. And/or lesbians.
Second, a lot of the people calling to Incinerate Jessica Telephone have literally never even seen any of these fanfic posts. They only hang out in the watch party chat and don't see any of this external stuff. Kind of hard to hate Jessica Telephone for being a trans lesbian when you don't know that anyone has ever uttered the suggestion that Jessica Telephone is a trans lesbian.
Third, the calls to incinerate Jessica Telephone predated any of this fandom stuff.
"But wait, didn't you say something about people being horny, what was that all about"
Right, so there's an extra layer here. At least a few players were extremely, extremely horny about Jessica Telephone, a woman they made up in their heads.
It's important to note, Blaseball's discord is considered a 13+ discord. The rules say it's PG-13, and you cannot talk about sexual stuff like AT ALL. Actually, you weren't even allowed to swear, you wouldn't get banned for it unless you did it a ton but a bot would remove any posts with swears.
Now consider that this handful of Jessica Telephone fans would constantly be posting how much they want Jessica Telephone to sit on their face, to step on them, make out with them, etc. And guess what happened when people reported these posts for breaking the no-NSFW rules?
That's right, they're homophobes! They must be! Even though, again, the people I know reporting these posts were fucking QUEER PEOPLE. Lots of queer people do not want you posting sexual things in servers that allow kids that explicitly have rules against it.
Eventually, despite the complaints that this is transphobic and homophobic to tell people to knock it off, they get the message that they have to knock it off or they will get banned. So what do they start doing? They start skirting the line with innuendos. Suddenly Jessica Telephone is "my wife". Wink wink. I want her to...."cuddle" me. Wink wink. I hesitate to use the word dogwhistle for something like this, but it was clearly being done as "code". The people who yesterday were saying I want Jessica Telephone to bend me over are now saying they want her to "cuddle" them.
This gets reported again, because, well, its' not ideal to have people in your community who are trying to skirt your rules about sexual content. However, the mod team...doesn't seem to understand the actual problem. They think the problem is just "people don't like it when you say Jessica Telephone is your wife" instead of "you are deliberately trying to push boundaries as far as you can get away with". So they make a rule saying you can't call a player your wife. That they never enforce, but makes a lot of people mad, accusing everyone of being puritans and insisting it obviously isn't' sexual to say wife (when it isn't, unless it's in the context of you substituting sexual stuff with 'wife' as a form of code).
So now the transphobia/homophobia accusations get ramped up a thousand times more, because now there are accusations that people don't want to hear "Jessica Telephone is my wife" because it's mostly women saying it and these people are anti-gay marriage.
Again, can't stress enough, I was one of the main people reporting these things, I am a goddamn lesbian. I don't hate gay marriage, I hate creeps in servers who want to push the boundaries of sexual content when it is banned.
I tell this story because I and other "Incinerate Jessica Telephone" people were basically called homophobes/transphobes forever. Despite a lot of us sending such reports being women, being gay, being trans...a few people in this community decided that because they invented their own fanfiction for this game, everyone was beholden to what they made up, and thus anyone who had other thoughts about it hated queer people. Months later, people would just remember "oh, that user is homophobic" based on this.
I tell this story because I see this on social media all the time, including fedi. Someone is labeled as A Bigot, and that just gets repeated ad nauseum, to the point where most of the people saying it aren't even sure why people say it, but they repeat it too. And if anyone actually went back and looked at why these accusations started, they'd go "this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard". But nobody does. And there's an idea out there that someone saying "no, I'm not a homophobe, that's stupid" is just being defensive, and they probably did do it and are just trying to control the narrative. When, no, some accusations are just dipshit nonsense.
Blaseball repeated these types of accusations over the stupidest things you could possibly imagine (see my Zimmerman post from the original thread, and it gets stupider than that) over and over. Many totally upstanding good people in the community left because they were labeled some sort of bigot by people who were just mad that they didn't care about their fanfic.
I spent what, 3 years in this community? Watching this bullshit? So I hope this explains why I am skeptical of accusations of bigotry online without investigating it myself. It's extremely easy to just say "believe marginalized people" online, but sometimes these accusations aren't even coming from those people. Sometimes you're getting third or fourth hand accounts. Sometimes people literally do lie. This is the internet, this isn't a community full of people you know and trust, you're often getting info from total strangers, and no, you don't have to trust total strangers. I don't think you should ignore such reports, but I think if they're coming from some complete stranger on the internet, you should find out yourself what's going on.
Oh, by the way, the top two Jessica Telephone Hornyposters?
One of them eventually got kicked out of Blaseball because she refused to stop posting sexual content. We later found out that she was kicked out of the Friends at the Table discord for the exact same thing. She feels both incidents were cases of transphobia and lesbophobia i
... show more
I spent what, 3 years in this community? Watching this bullshit? So I hope this explains why I am skeptical of accusations of bigotry online without investigating it myself. It's extremely easy to just say "believe marginalized people" online, but sometimes these accusations aren't even coming from those people. Sometimes you're getting third or fourth hand accounts. Sometimes people literally do lie. This is the internet, this isn't a community full of people you know and trust, you're often getting info from total strangers, and no, you don't have to trust total strangers. I don't think you should ignore such reports, but I think if they're coming from some complete stranger on the internet, you should find out yourself what's going on.
Oh, by the way, the top two Jessica Telephone Hornyposters?
One of them eventually got kicked out of Blaseball because she refused to stop posting sexual content. We later found out that she was kicked out of the Friends at the Table discord for the exact same thing. She feels both incidents were cases of transphobia and lesbophobia instead of...her making people massively uncomfortable with nonstop sexual conversation in discords that don't allow it where people asked her to stop.
The other one? Engaged in a harassment campaign against a player on their Blaseball team because they had different headcanons than other people (and did things like reporting them to the mod team for misgendering, implying that they were misgendering other players, when it really meant they were using different pronouns for characters they had different headcanons from). And then ultimately was outed as a sex pest who sexually harassed multiple people in the community and was kicked out everywhere too.
It's almost like people who severely defend their right to post sexual content in places full of minors that don't allow that content may have boundary issues!
But who knows, maybe I'm just a self hating lesbian.
@NoraReed I don't know if it was around a character or if she was just hornyposting about her life in general, I just know she was asked several times to stop because people were uncomfortable and it wasn't the place for it and she didn't.
And I didn't get much else out of her side of things because her side of things was "FATT is run by transphobes and they hate lesbian sex".
@NoraReed I don't know anything about FATT but I know a lot about fandom communities and I know a lot about the people I've seen in other communities that were also FATT fans...and somehow I find it hard to believe that it is a community full of people who hate lesbian sex.
I was done with this post but I want to add a little bonus content here:
The "wife rule", which was made fun of in the community for a long time before I started posting on Twitter the history behind it and how it was the mods that misinterpreted what the problem was (I had several people after go "oh wow actually you were right it's not silly like I thought")...there was kind of a gap in there. The mods said they were going to make a rule on it, and then it kind of lingered a bit before they actually did. So it was in limbo for a bit whether posting about Jessica Telephone being your wife would be banned or not.
And this is important because it led to maybe the first in-joke meme my friends and I had for Blaseball. The mod team posted an update about some other rule or something, and pinned it, which prompted one very concerned Blaseball fan to ask a very important question in desperation: "and the wives?"
@BillySmith @ifixcoinops I said it in my original Blaseball post, but it bears repeating: my retellings of what I saw in this community are my own stories, and they're biased in the way anyone's stories are biased by their own experience, but at the end of the day, this community was so fucked up it warranted a GDC talk, and that counts for something.
@BillySmith @ifixcoinops One day I am going to find someone with vault access so I can see it, because I can't justify paying that much to watch one talk, but at least you can see the slideshow for free.
@BillySmith @ifixcoinops at the end of the day though I was there for all of it so I can pretty much fill in the gaps from just the slideshow, I remember what happened and what went wrong lmao
@BillySmith Dang I saw I got pinged in my notifs and I looked at the first post and went "This is gonna be something for my Neverending Community Management Thread isn't it"
HEY DAN LOOK, FRESH PILE OF INTERNET OVER HERE, GET YOUR STRAW
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith listen when i first saw your management thread i linked it to my friends and went "look, it's a list of every single mistake blaseball made"
Like almost everything you said "don't do this" about was something they did that went bad.
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith honestly I really felt for The Game Band, the actual developers, because they were not expecting an explosion of thousands of users at all, but I cannot express just how unprepared they were for this KIND of user. They were prepared for sports people and maybe horror fans. Not fandom people who constantly complained about the game having horror in it despite being a horror game (and often complained about the amount of sports too).
Like here's the best way to explain how unprepared they were for this particular kind of userbase:
A massive amount of that first influx of new players was Homestuck fans.
The members of The Game Band at the time had never heard of Homestuck.
This is a bad combination for community management.
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith yeah basically imagine that your game just launched, and has a few hundred very happy players who love what you're doing, and then two weeks later 2000 new people show up who love homestuck and they hate what your game is about and hate how it plays but they want to write fanfics about your NPCs. And then they keep complaining to you that you need to "fix" your game because they don't actually like your game and never did.
@BillySmith Homestuck fans are zombies, seriously. Everything they interact with, they want to turn into Homestuck.
Which begs the question of why they're looking at MY THING instead of Homestuck, which kinda suggests that these are the people who got banished from homestuck for being too into homestuck
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith see I was never into it, but I know people who were, and I've heard from them that Homestuck went a very similar way, where the fans basically wanted more and more ownership of it, they wanted it to be THEIR thing. They wanted full control over someone else's story. That's exactly how Blaseball went. They didn't want it to be a scary horror game where people died and it made them sad. But they already started laying claim to all of these randomly generated names where, if they could just get in there first, they could invent the characterizations everyone gets pressured to interact with. It was basically a way to create OCs but force people to look at them and care about them, and a certain type of user really latched onto that. They just didn't like this pesky video game that a team of dedicated people really wanted to make getting in their way all the t
... show more
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith see I was never into it, but I know people who were, and I've heard from them that Homestuck went a very similar way, where the fans basically wanted more and more ownership of it, they wanted it to be THEIR thing. They wanted full control over someone else's story. That's exactly how Blaseball went. They didn't want it to be a scary horror game where people died and it made them sad. But they already started laying claim to all of these randomly generated names where, if they could just get in there first, they could invent the characterizations everyone gets pressured to interact with. It was basically a way to create OCs but force people to look at them and care about them, and a certain type of user really latched onto that. They just didn't like this pesky video game that a team of dedicated people really wanted to make getting in their way all the time.
The ownership thing...probably warrants its own post but the brief version is stuff like "a handful of fans of each team that decided they were more important than the other fans would insist that if you wrote a fanfic about one of their teams players you had to run it by them first". Or stuff like "the person who roleplays Jeffrey Sillyname on Twitter will be mad if you draw him with blonde hair so you better talk to them before you do anything". And then, I kid you not, it got all the way to people who ran roleplay accounts saying that it was unfair that the game devs were profiting off of their fan labor, and that the game was only successful because of all the free advertising they did.
Cannot stress enough, what I am saying is that people with roleplay accounts that they made without anyone asking them to with all of ten followers who are people who are already overly invested in the game felt that by roleplaying on Twitter, they were advertising the game, and thus should be given a literal paycheck.
Also Blaseball ran at a loss basically the entire time which is why even with a massive outside investment they ended up having to close down in the end. So these people were mad that they weren't being paid by a company in debt to roleplay some character nobody has heard of on Twitter for their own amusement. They literally said they deserved to be paid for their "labor".
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith There was a LOT of talk about "fan labor" in this community. Just BEING fans was seen as fan labor, because, well, your social-heavy video game wouldn't be anywhere without being played right! In a way, the players are the ones doing all the real work!
Takes like this were just...constant. People who drew fanart that like a dozen other people looked at that nobody asked them to draw thought they deserved a paycheck. People who ran fan discords that literally made the community worse and more hostile thought they deserved a paycheck. If someone drew a peanut on the back of a napkin, they felt they had done work that warranted a paycheck.
Because at the end of the day, it's easy to see why they believed this. It's because they never actually played the video game or cared about it. They cared about the fanart, or the fanfiction, or whatever fand
... show more
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith There was a LOT of talk about "fan labor" in this community. Just BEING fans was seen as fan labor, because, well, your social-heavy video game wouldn't be anywhere without being played right! In a way, the players are the ones doing all the real work!
Takes like this were just...constant. People who drew fanart that like a dozen other people looked at that nobody asked them to draw thought they deserved a paycheck. People who ran fan discords that literally made the community worse and more hostile thought they deserved a paycheck. If someone drew a peanut on the back of a napkin, they felt they had done work that warranted a paycheck.
Because at the end of the day, it's easy to see why they believed this. It's because they never actually played the video game or cared about it. They cared about the fanart, or the fanfiction, or whatever fandom stuff they were doing. But they didn't engage with the video game. So of course to these people, that was all that mattered, the fandom. They genuinely, genuinely believed that out of the tens of thousands of players, everyone was there to look at their fanart and not to play the video game they signed up for. And this attitude drove the people who wanted to play the video game out of all the major spaces for this game, which made them feel like that was even more true.
@BillySmith You know I've gotta salute you for this series of posts and your attitude throughout, it's very clear that this was a big deal and a big part of your life that imploded in a horribly messy and hurtful way that you are clearly aware is, from the outside, objectively hilarious
@BillySmith I have an absurd story about having to undergo several dozen rabies shots that I can't get through without laughing, I imagine this feels similar
@ifixcoinops It requires a different flavour of community management, as there's a large in-person element, but i regularly point the management thread to the members of London Hackspace.
Some people lose perspective from being online far too much.
@BillySmith @ifixcoinops I sent it to someone who runs a discord for people in the city next to where I live and lets' just say that a lot of stuff got cleaned up and tightened up after that and it has been a lot less problems in there since, they thanked me big time for it
@BillySmith @ifixcoinops I have a lot of thoughts on internet moderation, because i"ve been in a ton of communities and I've gotten to the point where I can see decisions being made where I go "oh this will just lead to X" and sure enough it leads to X. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on how a community should be run to cause the least problems.
And yet the only community I run is like two dozen people I already know, because I listened to step one in the thread which is just "don't".
I can have a very good sense of how internet communities work and how moderation works and also know that I would not be the right person to pick to do it. The problem is the people who don't know that about themselves.
@BillySmith TBH I think the only people who ever set up internet communities are the people who don't know how much of a ball-ache it is to run internet communities and have to figure it out as they go along, nobody gets out of it unscathed
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith I did technically help run a 100-ish person blaseball discord. But it was pretty quiet in terms of active users and the rules were pretty hardcore, so very little day to day moderation had to happen.
First of all, no discussion of fanlore, that was the reason we made it, to make it a place for people to talk about the game as a video game and not as a fanfic project. Because it was getting impossible to discuss it in the main discord, you couldn't talk about wanting to get rid of some character for a better player on the team because someone else on the team thinks that that player is their soulmate. But no discussion meant none, you couldn't sit and complain about fanlore either, it was treated as non-existent.
Second, we took the same approach to discussing other blaseball communities. It was not a place to complain about the main discord, o
... show more
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith I did technically help run a 100-ish person blaseball discord. But it was pretty quiet in terms of active users and the rules were pretty hardcore, so very little day to day moderation had to happen.
First of all, no discussion of fanlore, that was the reason we made it, to make it a place for people to talk about the game as a video game and not as a fanfic project. Because it was getting impossible to discuss it in the main discord, you couldn't talk about wanting to get rid of some character for a better player on the team because someone else on the team thinks that that player is their soulmate. But no discussion meant none, you couldn't sit and complain about fanlore either, it was treated as non-existent.
Second, we took the same approach to discussing other blaseball communities. It was not a place to complain about the main discord, or other people's side discords, or what people were talking about on Twitter. You could share posts made by the devs that were about the game and that was it. Otherwise it would become a drama server, and while that could be fun, we already had one of those with our friends and nobody should be foolish enough to make a public one.
Third was no off topic discussion. Can't talk about the news, can't talk about your pets, can't talk about Final Fantasy. It's for discussing blaseball the video game and that's it. You can joke around, you can say "Blaseball's new whatever reminds me of this feature in this other game", but if you weren't discussing blaseball you needed to be.
These principles were all it took to make the community a pretty well oiled machine. I only really remember one moderation incident in particular, and it was actually one where we had to ban a friend of ours for not following the rules. Which is why I have very little patience for moderators that treat their friends differently than other users, if you aren't willing to make your friends follow the rules, you're a bad mod. And we've done it, so I can say that.
The irony is, despite all of that, we still had someone from one team lurk in the server since day one and still tell people in other servers that it was a drama server, that it was for talking about how much you hate fanlore and how much you hate fandom. When...that was explicitly banned. We never talked about that. We talked about voting strategies and stats and who was going to win the season. So again, you can see how I don't trust random people online anymore. They knew they were lying, and yet people ate it up.
@ifixcoinops @BillySmith oh yeah there were definitely a lot of blaseball fans that kept comparing it to Night Vale, especially the younger ones that liked causing problems
Your colleague was happy to have missed the endless stream of messages on the company chat, so we sent them a "here's what you have missed" email to remedy this.
Jealous of the Toronto people who have the ability to see Jenna Ortega in Finestkind this week. Hopefully worldwide cinema releases will follow soon. #JennaOrtega #Finestkind #TIFF23
Ok, so I'm trying to use some relays to help with 'discovery', since on a single user instance I basically only discover what I already know and sometimes only what I wrote myself. So far it is not that much of a success. Of the three relay types I tried, one worked (the rust one), one failed (the fedi-buzz one) and one said it worked but failed (the go one).
Great interview with Lindsay Armaou of B*Witched, talking an hour long about fame, becoming a pop band, image, the hectic schedules, breaking America, being dropped by the label and then starting up again and now decades later still going on. I have been and still am such a huge fan of hers, since before their first single was even scheduled for a release and I was afraid after that first time I saw them I would never hear from them again. Then their first four singles each entered the charts at number one and they became a record smashing (not literally) band. #LindsayArmaou #B*Witched
Lindsay and I spent a fascinating hour together talking about her time with hugely popular girl band B*Witched. We spoke about fame, the industry and the ban...
A thing she says in this interview that I didn't know is that they had already written the third album and were waiting for a call from the label to inform them about the release date of the first single. But when the label did call, it was to drop them. #LindsayArmaou #B*Witched
Stephanie Leonidas posted some photos of an upcoming film of hers on Twitter and Instagram. The posts don't say which film, but she captioned it "Donna", which according to imdb is her character in 5lbs of Pressure. #StephanieLeonidas #5lbsOfPressure
The point of this graph is to show that a human being on a bicycle is a more energy efficient way of getting around than the way (some/most) other animals do. I like that.
But a human by itself is quite energy efficient too, according to the graph. We evolved for walking and running long distances, so no surprise. But maybe not so nice that an airliner comes out pretty well too.
Painted some walls today. Overall it went well I think. But weird how paint so much wants to go onto things that aren't supposed to be painted, like me.
A problem is that now the contents of the wardrobe, and parts of the wardrobe, are on my bed waiting for the paint to dry so I can move it back. This is not going to happen today, so I've got to find somewhere else to sleep tonight...
It has happened often enough that I fell asleep on the couch watching tv, only waking up in the morning, so I guess this unplanned thing is going to be planned this time.
In the US they seem to have a bail-what-you-want system, like pay-what-you-want, where you negotiate your bail before you make an appointment to arrest yourself. Though this seems available only to a certain type of people.
I'm about the rectify an omission: I haven't seen Dollhouse yet, even though it stars Eliza Dushku. I'm going to watch it now. And yes, I'm going to put the disc in the player, I'm not just watching the pictures on the cover as on the photo. #ElizaDushku #Dollhouse
I only know popular science / scifi, but I like the tube idea. If you throw away one end of the tube really fast, like the speed of light, the tube will automatically get longer, probably allowing you to hold on to the other end comfortably. The examples in popular science usually involve ladders instead of tubes, but it may be transferable. Then, if you throw it even faster like over the speed of light (there are some people that say this is impossible, the trick is to ignore them), it will break the limit of causality and any messages you shout into one end should be encountered by you before you shouted them. Maybe with some weird Dopler effect. And maybe I'm wrong...
Hey Science, I need a tube in my kitchen so I can shout "butter, you dickhead" into it and I'll hear that two days ago when I'm standing in the middle of the supermarket thinking "what was I out of again?"
I was hoping that all the water delivered by the storm over Mexico and California and heading north, would help putting out the fires in Canada. But apparently with the storm disintegrated by then, expected to just miss the right areas and the ferocity of the fires going on, the expectation is that it's not going to help...
PeerTube tries to keep a view count on the videos, but the monitoring on the cdn shows that there are definitely more times the video files are accessed. Mostly by me, and maybe all the other requests are just bots, but PeerTube doesn't count them. #PeerTube
I really like this film. I keep changing what I would mention as my favourite film (I have a list) but a long time ago the subject of favourite film came up at work and a colleague of mine and me at the same time said Bridge to Terabithia. Which is such an odd thing to happen, as it's not even that that many people have even heard of this film...
I'd say this film isn't that much underrated, as just not rated because it is quite unknown.
I've known a girl like that once, who could make all kinds of things happen by just telling about them. Somehow she could see something, comment about it but probably twisted it somewhat towards the fantastical, and tell it so convincingly that that's what everybody saw as well. Or maybe these things really happened, I still don't know.
We may have witnessed a bodged bank robbery where the robber was running away and chased by the police, just missing his rendez-vous with the getaway driver. Or maybe there was a jogger, who knows.
Bridge To Terabithia is a really nice mix of fantasy situations and real world problems, where neither is just the backdrop for the other. #BridgeToTerabithia
You'd expect Zooey to be credited in the music section of the film, and she is. She plays the music teacher after all. But AnnaSophia is too! The music video on the extras is even her song.
It is a really sad film in the end due to the sudden twist. But this is actually autobiographical for the writer of the book it is based on, and for her son who is the screenwriter here. It was him who when 8 years old suddenly lost his best friend, which then gave the mother the impossible task of helping him make sense of it. So she wrote a book about it. And he much later made a film of it.
I should really change my profile picture. It was meant as a ridiculous form of a bathroom mirror selfie (hence the shower curtain), but it comes across as some pretentious photographer. Pretentious, moi? And also not a photographer, not more than everybody is.
Reading a question on some forum where someone asks 'what is this insect and what do I do about it' and some expert answers what kind of insect it could be and advices her to catch one and send it to some institute for better identification. I'm not sure that's the kind of 'do about it' that she had in mind.
An eye-opening thing was when back in university our club had a talk by someone from a gambling company. Without thinking it was in any way weird (that was the chilling thing) he was listing the characters they had bought in various tv shows. So yeah, even the smallest thing that's happening in your soap or series may only be there because someone lobby group payed for it. I think back to that each time some character has a sudden but unknown disease: awareness campaign.
I think these magic eye pictures may be some kind of conspiracy, 'The Emperor's New Clothes'-style, where a few people only pretend to 'see it'. Though if you're following WelshPixie you already know what it's going to say...
Cross your eyes they say... What if your eyes are already crossed? Instructions on such pictures say to 'start with your nose touching the image where the picture should be blurry', so I guess my nose is too long or my nearsightedness too strong...
Content warning for those without stereo vision: we can't see this so don't waste your time.
This may be relevant to the strike as the article points out. I think if Netflix were to create a film by replacing writers and actors with AI, we would be legally allowed to copy it.
Of the two things I was supposed to do this morning, I've done one finally this evening (the one I was actually planning to do two weeks ago) and did another one I had decided not to do yet.
“The Peripheral” has been canceled at Amazon’s Prime Video, Variety has learned. The news comes despite the fact that Amazon renewed the show for a second season back in February.…
Reposted from Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoLLm7vMnlI/). Jenna Ortega is the brand ambassador for Adidas Sportswear, a brand new brand from Adidas.
Jenna Ortega showing how she and her family watch the World Cup. This was part of the publicity for Adidas Sportswear, of which she's the brand ambassador.
(I finally found a way to share the video unlisted, in a rather indirect way, using another account and my PeerTube. Original link in video description.) #JennaOrtega #Football #AdidasSportswear
Jenna Ortega for Adidas Sportswear, watching a football match on tv, cheering, hiding behind the couch, and all the other emotions. Reposted from Instagram reel by adidaswomen and jennaortega, copyright Adidas and Jenna Ortega.
The World Cup final is soon and Jenna Ortega shows how to do it.
This was part of a photo shoot for Adidas Sportswear, of which she's the brand ambassador.
(I finally found a way to share the video unlisted, in a rather indirect way, using another account and my PeerTube. Original link in video description.) #JennaOrtega #Football #AdidasSportswear
Also interesting how part of the biopic touches upon misusing the name of famous people by publishers, then the film has Maisie Williams in a tiny role so they can use her fame.
lori
in reply to lori • • •If you have not read my previous post about Blaseball and do not know what Blaseball is you need to read this first because nothing about this will make sense without knowing how this game worked:
hackers.town/@lori/11098149803…
Anyway I'm sure this is probably covered in that post, but I want to reiterate how characters in Blaseball worked. Characters, or players (but players gets confusing with the fictional sports people versus the real life players of the video game, so we'll say characters) in Blaseball consist of...very little. The game is text based. Characters in the game are randomly generated names coupled with sports stats. Over time a few other things were added (like characters could have items, or weird specific persistent buff/debuff effects) but ultimately what we're looking at is a name and some stats. Characters in Blaseball did not have characterization, did not have prewritten or generated backgrounds, pronouns, genders, ethnicities, anything
... show moreIf you have not read my previous post about Blaseball and do not know what Blaseball is you need to read this first because nothing about this will make sense without knowing how this game worked:
hackers.town/@lori/11098149803…
Anyway I'm sure this is probably covered in that post, but I want to reiterate how characters in Blaseball worked. Characters, or players (but players gets confusing with the fictional sports people versus the real life players of the video game, so we'll say characters) in Blaseball consist of...very little. The game is text based. Characters in the game are randomly generated names coupled with sports stats. Over time a few other things were added (like characters could have items, or weird specific persistent buff/debuff effects) but ultimately what we're looking at is a name and some stats. Characters in Blaseball did not have characterization, did not have prewritten or generated backgrounds, pronouns, genders, ethnicities, anything. They're just names. The only "canon" story aspects are what happened in the simulation, much like Dwarf Fortress--for example, some characters were killed, got brought back via necromancy effects, etc. Some story elements happen in Blaseball, like a prescripted event that changed every character whose name was Dan into Peanut (which also led to one player becoming Peanutiel). So there's a small amount of "canon" characterization, but otherwise...we're looking at a spreadsheet of names.
It's important to know this, because you cannot approach the Blaseball fandom types the way you would the fans of some TV show. For example, there's a lot of dynamics that go into people shipping characters from TV shows, and a lot of debate over, say, queer headcanons of characters who are not confirmed to be queer in media. Blaseball is a list of blank slate names. That's it.
So, here's Jessica Telephone.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops reshared this.
lori
in reply to lori • • •Jessica Telephone was one of the earliest "big name" Blaseball characters. Remember, Blaseball has 24 teams (it started with a couple less but whatever), each with...variable sized teams as time went on due to various in-game effects. So at any given time there are a few hundred characters involved in the game. Of course, some will die and be replaced, later there were ways for new players to be added (in-universe they are hatched from eggs fully formed to walk onto the field) so over time there's been a shit ton of Blaseball characters. So it takes a lot for a character to become notable in some way. In these early days, most notable characters were either due to them being extremely good players, extremely bad players, or having extremely funny names.
Jessica Telephone was a really good player. I never followed stats super closely but my memories of them in that time was that they tended to either hit home runs or miss entirely. But ultimately Jessica Telephone was good. So what do you do when a player that is on someone else's team is too good and getting too popular? You
... show moreJessica Telephone was one of the earliest "big name" Blaseball characters. Remember, Blaseball has 24 teams (it started with a couple less but whatever), each with...variable sized teams as time went on due to various in-game effects. So at any given time there are a few hundred characters involved in the game. Of course, some will die and be replaced, later there were ways for new players to be added (in-universe they are hatched from eggs fully formed to walk onto the field) so over time there's been a shit ton of Blaseball characters. So it takes a lot for a character to become notable in some way. In these early days, most notable characters were either due to them being extremely good players, extremely bad players, or having extremely funny names.
Jessica Telephone was a really good player. I never followed stats super closely but my memories of them in that time was that they tended to either hit home runs or miss entirely. But ultimately Jessica Telephone was good. So what do you do when a player that is on someone else's team is too good and getting too popular? You boo them!
See, when Blaseball was still extremely new and the first big wave of new players hadn't hit yet, there was a lot of cheering/booing in the chat. Because, well, it's sports. That's how sports worked. But when the big wave came in, the people joining were not really sports people, they were fandom-y people. And so they found booing players or trash talk or even just cheering a little too hard for your favorite team to be rude and mean. Why can't you just be positive and be nice to the other teams? All rivalries were thought of as distasteful, all the teams should just be friends.
If you actually like sports, you find this extremely miserable.
And it's not like I'm some hardcore sports person. I don't get angry over sports. But part of the fun of sports is like...rooting for things that don't ultimately matter. Getting invested. In a way, it's kind of a game you and the other fans are playing together, you're all treating this as extremely important and you are going to put your all into saying My Team Owns, Fuck Your Team, We're Going To Beat You. It's not mean, because there's this social contract here where we all understand that we're playing this game. We all understand that saying fuck your team isn't a personal attack. We all understand saying I hope your team loses is fine and encouraged, because the other side gets to do the same. If anything, the immature people everyone hates in sports are the sports fans that are dead serious about it to the point of getting angry.
Sorry, I know all of these posts are long, but I have to slowly introduce how this community worked, because...there's so many layers to it. I can't just describe a sports simulation and have you understand why any of these dumbass fights happened the way they did without this understanding. You have to understand that this was a sports game that got absolutely flooded with players who hated sports and hated sports fans.
So anyway, Jessica Telephone was a big name character. Think a MIchael Jordan, a Tiger Woods, a Kobe Bryant. The people who love them love them, the people who hate them hate them, and that's how sports are.
But the problem is...some people weren't here to watch simulated sports. Some people were here to get horny.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops reshared this.
lori
in reply to lori • • •A certain subset of the community really rallied around Jessica Telephone. And they started coming up with headcanons for them.
I would say writing fanfics, but Blaseball was kind of different. Yes, people have written a lot of fanfics of it, but one of the biggest sources of drama in the community is the idea that Blaseball should be treated more like SCP. Except an SCP with no gatekeeping, so everyone that had an idea about what kind of character each randomly generated name should be should be incorporated into a single idea. A fan wiki was made for people to contribute to, which was just nonstop fighting, because instead of everyone having their own headcanons, everyone had to come to a consensus on what they'd all picture in their heads.
Imagine whatever fandom you know the most about, imagine if every fanfic someone wrote had to be agreed upon by all the fans.
It's a nightmare.
Jessica Telephone was one of the first characters to start having some heavy headcanons, and the most common was that Jessica Telephone was a trans lesbian with a lot of wives.
... show moreA certain subset of the community really rallied around Jessica Telephone. And they started coming up with headcanons for them.
I would say writing fanfics, but Blaseball was kind of different. Yes, people have written a lot of fanfics of it, but one of the biggest sources of drama in the community is the idea that Blaseball should be treated more like SCP. Except an SCP with no gatekeeping, so everyone that had an idea about what kind of character each randomly generated name should be should be incorporated into a single idea. A fan wiki was made for people to contribute to, which was just nonstop fighting, because instead of everyone having their own headcanons, everyone had to come to a consensus on what they'd all picture in their heads.
Imagine whatever fandom you know the most about, imagine if every fanfic someone wrote had to be agreed upon by all the fans.
It's a nightmare.
Jessica Telephone was one of the first characters to start having some heavy headcanons, and the most common was that Jessica Telephone was a trans lesbian with a lot of wives. A lot of Blaseball headcanons were basically just focused on giving characters genders and sexualities and races, and very little else until people got bored enough to write more. So some people started calling Jessica Telephone a trans lesbian. That's fine, whatever.
So you now have two groups: you have the sports fans that were already there for sports, and you have the new fandom people coming up with little nuggets of headcanon for Jessica Telephone where she's a trans lesbian.
Now, let's remember, this game has random weather effects, such as a solar eclipse that would sometimes kill a player and replace them with a new player, with text that a "rogue umpire incinerated [player name]". So people who wanted Jessica Telephone's team to win less would really love to see their best player deleted from the game.
Now, how do you think this goes when the sports people start chanting, say, "incinerate Jessica Telephone!" while some percentage of the playerbase is thinking of her as "the only trans woman in Blaseball"?
The problem is, the sports people aren't getting into the fandom stuff. Like, completely disinterested and not really paying attention to what the fanlore people are doing. It would be like going to my parents, who watched The Walking Dead, and trying to make them engage with some Tumblr user's high school AU TWD fanfics. It means nothing to them and they don't care, they're just watching the show, some hyper specific fandom content is something they know nothing about and don't care about finding out about.
So the sports people keep yelling "incinerate Jessica Telephone", and the people writing fanfic about Jessica Telephone Trans Lesbian are FURIOUS.
Suddenly, the sports people are transphobes. Homophobes. Based on something a few random fans made up out of thin air that they did not interact with whatsoever.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops reshared this.
lori
in reply to lori • • •People start saying "they only call for her to be incinerated and nobody else because they hate trans people. They hate lesbians. It's obvious."
Lots of problems here: first of all, a lot of the people they were mad at were trans people. And/or lesbians.
Second, a lot of the people calling to Incinerate Jessica Telephone have literally never even seen any of these fanfic posts. They only hang out in the watch party chat and don't see any of this external stuff. Kind of hard to hate Jessica Telephone for being a trans lesbian when you don't know that anyone has ever uttered the suggestion that Jessica Telephone is a trans lesbian.
Third, the calls to incinerate Jessica Telephone predated any of this fandom stuff.
"But wait, didn't you say something about people being horny, what was that all about"
Right, so there's an extra layer here. At least a few players were extremely, extremely horny about Jessica Telephone, a woman they made up in their heads.
It's important to note, Blaseball's discord is considered a 13+ discord. The rules say it's PG-1
... show morePeople start saying "they only call for her to be incinerated and nobody else because they hate trans people. They hate lesbians. It's obvious."
Lots of problems here: first of all, a lot of the people they were mad at were trans people. And/or lesbians.
Second, a lot of the people calling to Incinerate Jessica Telephone have literally never even seen any of these fanfic posts. They only hang out in the watch party chat and don't see any of this external stuff. Kind of hard to hate Jessica Telephone for being a trans lesbian when you don't know that anyone has ever uttered the suggestion that Jessica Telephone is a trans lesbian.
Third, the calls to incinerate Jessica Telephone predated any of this fandom stuff.
"But wait, didn't you say something about people being horny, what was that all about"
Right, so there's an extra layer here. At least a few players were extremely, extremely horny about Jessica Telephone, a woman they made up in their heads.
It's important to note, Blaseball's discord is considered a 13+ discord. The rules say it's PG-13, and you cannot talk about sexual stuff like AT ALL. Actually, you weren't even allowed to swear, you wouldn't get banned for it unless you did it a ton but a bot would remove any posts with swears.
Now consider that this handful of Jessica Telephone fans would constantly be posting how much they want Jessica Telephone to sit on their face, to step on them, make out with them, etc. And guess what happened when people reported these posts for breaking the no-NSFW rules?
That's right, they're homophobes! They must be! Even though, again, the people I know reporting these posts were fucking QUEER PEOPLE. Lots of queer people do not want you posting sexual things in servers that allow kids that explicitly have rules against it.
Eventually, despite the complaints that this is transphobic and homophobic to tell people to knock it off, they get the message that they have to knock it off or they will get banned. So what do they start doing? They start skirting the line with innuendos. Suddenly Jessica Telephone is "my wife". Wink wink. I want her to...."cuddle" me. Wink wink. I hesitate to use the word dogwhistle for something like this, but it was clearly being done as "code". The people who yesterday were saying I want Jessica Telephone to bend me over are now saying they want her to "cuddle" them.
This gets reported again, because, well, its' not ideal to have people in your community who are trying to skirt your rules about sexual content. However, the mod team...doesn't seem to understand the actual problem. They think the problem is just "people don't like it when you say Jessica Telephone is your wife" instead of "you are deliberately trying to push boundaries as far as you can get away with". So they make a rule saying you can't call a player your wife. That they never enforce, but makes a lot of people mad, accusing everyone of being puritans and insisting it obviously isn't' sexual to say wife (when it isn't, unless it's in the context of you substituting sexual stuff with 'wife' as a form of code).
So now the transphobia/homophobia accusations get ramped up a thousand times more, because now there are accusations that people don't want to hear "Jessica Telephone is my wife" because it's mostly women saying it and these people are anti-gay marriage.
Again, can't stress enough, I was one of the main people reporting these things, I am a goddamn lesbian. I don't hate gay marriage, I hate creeps in servers who want to push the boundaries of sexual content when it is banned.
I tell this story because I and other "Incinerate Jessica Telephone" people were basically called homophobes/transphobes forever. Despite a lot of us sending such reports being women, being gay, being trans...a few people in this community decided that because they invented their own fanfiction for this game, everyone was beholden to what they made up, and thus anyone who had other thoughts about it hated queer people. Months later, people would just remember "oh, that user is homophobic" based on this.
I tell this story because I see this on social media all the time, including fedi. Someone is labeled as A Bigot, and that just gets repeated ad nauseum, to the point where most of the people saying it aren't even sure why people say it, but they repeat it too. And if anyone actually went back and looked at why these accusations started, they'd go "this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard". But nobody does. And there's an idea out there that someone saying "no, I'm not a homophobe, that's stupid" is just being defensive, and they probably did do it and are just trying to control the narrative. When, no, some accusations are just dipshit nonsense.
Blaseball repeated these types of accusations over the stupidest things you could possibly imagine (see my Zimmerman post from the original thread, and it gets stupider than that) over and over. Many totally upstanding good people in the community left because they were labeled some sort of bigot by people who were just mad that they didn't care about their fanfic.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops reshared this.
lori
in reply to lori • • •I spent what, 3 years in this community? Watching this bullshit? So I hope this explains why I am skeptical of accusations of bigotry online without investigating it myself. It's extremely easy to just say "believe marginalized people" online, but sometimes these accusations aren't even coming from those people. Sometimes you're getting third or fourth hand accounts. Sometimes people literally do lie. This is the internet, this isn't a community full of people you know and trust, you're often getting info from total strangers, and no, you don't have to trust total strangers. I don't think you should ignore such reports, but I think if they're coming from some complete stranger on the internet, you should find out yourself what's going on.
Oh, by the way, the top two Jessica Telephone Hornyposters?
One of them eventually got kicked out of Blaseball because she refused to stop posting sexual content. We later found out that she was kicked out of the Friends at the Table discord for the exact same thing. She feels both incidents were cases of transphobia and lesbophobia i
... show moreI spent what, 3 years in this community? Watching this bullshit? So I hope this explains why I am skeptical of accusations of bigotry online without investigating it myself. It's extremely easy to just say "believe marginalized people" online, but sometimes these accusations aren't even coming from those people. Sometimes you're getting third or fourth hand accounts. Sometimes people literally do lie. This is the internet, this isn't a community full of people you know and trust, you're often getting info from total strangers, and no, you don't have to trust total strangers. I don't think you should ignore such reports, but I think if they're coming from some complete stranger on the internet, you should find out yourself what's going on.
Oh, by the way, the top two Jessica Telephone Hornyposters?
One of them eventually got kicked out of Blaseball because she refused to stop posting sexual content. We later found out that she was kicked out of the Friends at the Table discord for the exact same thing. She feels both incidents were cases of transphobia and lesbophobia instead of...her making people massively uncomfortable with nonstop sexual conversation in discords that don't allow it where people asked her to stop.
The other one? Engaged in a harassment campaign against a player on their Blaseball team because they had different headcanons than other people (and did things like reporting them to the mod team for misgendering, implying that they were misgendering other players, when it really meant they were using different pronouns for characters they had different headcanons from). And then ultimately was outed as a sex pest who sexually harassed multiple people in the community and was kicked out everywhere too.
It's almost like people who severely defend their right to post sexual content in places full of minors that don't allow that content may have boundary issues!
But who knows, maybe I'm just a self hating lesbian.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops reshared this.
Nora Reed
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to Nora Reed • • •@NoraReed I don't know if it was around a character or if she was just hornyposting about her life in general, I just know she was asked several times to stop because people were uncomfortable and it wasn't the place for it and she didn't.
And I didn't get much else out of her side of things because her side of things was "FATT is run by transphobes and they hate lesbian sex".
Nora Reed
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to Nora Reed • • •Nora Reed
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to lori • • •I was done with this post but I want to add a little bonus content here:
The "wife rule", which was made fun of in the community for a long time before I started posting on Twitter the history behind it and how it was the mods that misinterpreted what the problem was (I had several people after go "oh wow actually you were right it's not silly like I thought")...there was kind of a gap in there. The mods said they were going to make a rule on it, and then it kind of lingered a bit before they actually did. So it was in limbo for a bit whether posting about Jessica Telephone being your wife would be banned or not.
And this is important because it led to maybe the first in-joke meme my friends and I had for Blaseball. The mod team posted an update about some other rule or something, and pinned it, which prompted one very concerned Blaseball fan to ask a very important question in desperation: "and the wives?"
lori
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to lori • • •Billy Smith
in reply to lori • • •I can't even begin... 🤦♂️
@ifixcoinops
lori
in reply to Billy Smith • • •@BillySmith @ifixcoinops I said it in my original Blaseball post, but it bears repeating: my retellings of what I saw in this community are my own stories, and they're biased in the way anyone's stories are biased by their own experience, but at the end of the day, this community was so fucked up it warranted a GDC talk, and that counts for something.
gdcvault.com/play/1028760/Comm…
Billy Smith
in reply to lori • • •@ifixcoinops
😮 🤣
lori
in reply to Billy Smith • • •lori
in reply to lori • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •@BillySmith Dang I saw I got pinged in my notifs and I looked at the first post and went "This is gonna be something for my Neverending Community Management Thread isn't it"
HEY DAN LOOK, FRESH PILE OF INTERNET OVER HERE, GET YOUR STRAW
lori
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@ifixcoinops @BillySmith listen when i first saw your management thread i linked it to my friends and went "look, it's a list of every single mistake blaseball made"
Like almost everything you said "don't do this" about was something they did that went bad.
lori
in reply to lori • • •@ifixcoinops @BillySmith honestly I really felt for The Game Band, the actual developers, because they were not expecting an explosion of thousands of users at all, but I cannot express just how unprepared they were for this KIND of user. They were prepared for sports people and maybe horror fans. Not fandom people who constantly complained about the game having horror in it despite being a horror game (and often complained about the amount of sports too).
Like here's the best way to explain how unprepared they were for this particular kind of userbase:
A massive amount of that first influx of new players was Homestuck fans.
The members of The Game Band at the time had never heard of Homestuck.
This is a bad combination for community management.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •@BillySmith Only replying here to say I'm about a third of the way through the thread and this is DELICIOUS THANK YOU
Also OH NO IMPROBABLE ISLAND GOT OVERRUN BY HOMESTUCK FANS IN LIKE 2012 AND IT WAS LIKE A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS
lori
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •@BillySmith Homestuck fans are zombies, seriously. Everything they interact with, they want to turn into Homestuck.
Which begs the question of why they're looking at MY THING instead of Homestuck, which kinda suggests that these are the people who got banished from homestuck for being too into homestuck
lori
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@ifixcoinops @BillySmith see I was never into it, but I know people who were, and I've heard from them that Homestuck went a very similar way, where the fans basically wanted more and more ownership of it, they wanted it to be THEIR thing. They wanted full control over someone else's story. That's exactly how Blaseball went. They didn't want it to be a scary horror game where people died and it made them sad. But they already started laying claim to all of these randomly generated names where, if they could just get in there first, they could invent the characterizations everyone gets pressured to interact with. It was basically a way to create OCs but force people to look at them and care about them, and a certain type of user really latched onto that. They just didn't like this pesky video game that a team of dedicated people really wanted to make getting in their way all the t
... show more@ifixcoinops @BillySmith see I was never into it, but I know people who were, and I've heard from them that Homestuck went a very similar way, where the fans basically wanted more and more ownership of it, they wanted it to be THEIR thing. They wanted full control over someone else's story. That's exactly how Blaseball went. They didn't want it to be a scary horror game where people died and it made them sad. But they already started laying claim to all of these randomly generated names where, if they could just get in there first, they could invent the characterizations everyone gets pressured to interact with. It was basically a way to create OCs but force people to look at them and care about them, and a certain type of user really latched onto that. They just didn't like this pesky video game that a team of dedicated people really wanted to make getting in their way all the time.
The ownership thing...probably warrants its own post but the brief version is stuff like "a handful of fans of each team that decided they were more important than the other fans would insist that if you wrote a fanfic about one of their teams players you had to run it by them first". Or stuff like "the person who roleplays Jeffrey Sillyname on Twitter will be mad if you draw him with blonde hair so you better talk to them before you do anything". And then, I kid you not, it got all the way to people who ran roleplay accounts saying that it was unfair that the game devs were profiting off of their fan labor, and that the game was only successful because of all the free advertising they did.
Cannot stress enough, what I am saying is that people with roleplay accounts that they made without anyone asking them to with all of ten followers who are people who are already overly invested in the game felt that by roleplaying on Twitter, they were advertising the game, and thus should be given a literal paycheck.
Also Blaseball ran at a loss basically the entire time which is why even with a massive outside investment they ended up having to close down in the end. So these people were mad that they weren't being paid by a company in debt to roleplay some character nobody has heard of on Twitter for their own amusement. They literally said they deserved to be paid for their "labor".
lori
in reply to lori • • •@ifixcoinops @BillySmith There was a LOT of talk about "fan labor" in this community. Just BEING fans was seen as fan labor, because, well, your social-heavy video game wouldn't be anywhere without being played right! In a way, the players are the ones doing all the real work!
Takes like this were just...constant. People who drew fanart that like a dozen other people looked at that nobody asked them to draw thought they deserved a paycheck. People who ran fan discords that literally made the community worse and more hostile thought they deserved a paycheck. If someone drew a peanut on the back of a napkin, they felt they had done work that warranted a paycheck.
Because at the end of the day, it's easy to see why they believed this. It's because they never actually played the video game or cared about it. They cared about the fanart, or the fanfiction, or whatever fand
... show more@ifixcoinops @BillySmith There was a LOT of talk about "fan labor" in this community. Just BEING fans was seen as fan labor, because, well, your social-heavy video game wouldn't be anywhere without being played right! In a way, the players are the ones doing all the real work!
Takes like this were just...constant. People who drew fanart that like a dozen other people looked at that nobody asked them to draw thought they deserved a paycheck. People who ran fan discords that literally made the community worse and more hostile thought they deserved a paycheck. If someone drew a peanut on the back of a napkin, they felt they had done work that warranted a paycheck.
Because at the end of the day, it's easy to see why they believed this. It's because they never actually played the video game or cared about it. They cared about the fanart, or the fanfiction, or whatever fandom stuff they were doing. But they didn't engage with the video game. So of course to these people, that was all that mattered, the fandom. They genuinely, genuinely believed that out of the tens of thousands of players, everyone was there to look at their fanart and not to play the video game they signed up for. And this attitude drove the people who wanted to play the video game out of all the major spaces for this game, which made them feel like that was even more true.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •Billy Smith
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •☝️ This. :D
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Billy Smith
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@ifixcoinops
Or the story where on one band tour, i got banned from all of the cooking by giving the entire band and crew food poisoning. :D
Quote from the front man during the middle of a gig: "I thought that i farted then i felt it running down the back of my leg..."
Billy Smith
in reply to lori • • •@ifixcoinops
I've been recommending that anyone wanting to become a mod, has the management thread as required reading first. :D
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Billy Smith • • •Billy Smith
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@ifixcoinops
It requires a different flavour of community management, as there's a large in-person element, but i regularly point the management thread to the members of London Hackspace.
Some people lose perspective from being online far too much.
GoodNewsGreyShoes🔞
in reply to Billy Smith • • •@BillySmith @ifixcoinops Any chance I could get a link to said Moderation thread?
Absolutely fascinated by the Blaseball discourse, and incredibly curious about a list of management advice that starts with "Don't" 👀
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to GoodNewsGreyShoes🔞 • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to GoodNewsGreyShoes🔞 • • •lori
in reply to Billy Smith • • •lori
in reply to lori • • •@BillySmith @ifixcoinops I have a lot of thoughts on internet moderation, because i"ve been in a ton of communities and I've gotten to the point where I can see decisions being made where I go "oh this will just lead to X" and sure enough it leads to X. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on how a community should be run to cause the least problems.
And yet the only community I run is like two dozen people I already know, because I listened to step one in the thread which is just "don't".
I can have a very good sense of how internet communities work and how moderation works and also know that I would not be the right person to pick to do it. The problem is the people who don't know that about themselves.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@ifixcoinops @BillySmith I did technically help run a 100-ish person blaseball discord. But it was pretty quiet in terms of active users and the rules were pretty hardcore, so very little day to day moderation had to happen.
First of all, no discussion of fanlore, that was the reason we made it, to make it a place for people to talk about the game as a video game and not as a fanfic project. Because it was getting impossible to discuss it in the main discord, you couldn't talk about wanting to get rid of some character for a better player on the team because someone else on the team thinks that that player is their soulmate. But no discussion meant none, you couldn't sit and complain about fanlore either, it was treated as non-existent.
Second, we took the same approach to discussing other blaseball communities. It was not a place to complain about the main discord, o
... show more@ifixcoinops @BillySmith I did technically help run a 100-ish person blaseball discord. But it was pretty quiet in terms of active users and the rules were pretty hardcore, so very little day to day moderation had to happen.
First of all, no discussion of fanlore, that was the reason we made it, to make it a place for people to talk about the game as a video game and not as a fanfic project. Because it was getting impossible to discuss it in the main discord, you couldn't talk about wanting to get rid of some character for a better player on the team because someone else on the team thinks that that player is their soulmate. But no discussion meant none, you couldn't sit and complain about fanlore either, it was treated as non-existent.
Second, we took the same approach to discussing other blaseball communities. It was not a place to complain about the main discord, or other people's side discords, or what people were talking about on Twitter. You could share posts made by the devs that were about the game and that was it. Otherwise it would become a drama server, and while that could be fun, we already had one of those with our friends and nobody should be foolish enough to make a public one.
Third was no off topic discussion. Can't talk about the news, can't talk about your pets, can't talk about Final Fantasy. It's for discussing blaseball the video game and that's it. You can joke around, you can say "Blaseball's new whatever reminds me of this feature in this other game", but if you weren't discussing blaseball you needed to be.
These principles were all it took to make the community a pretty well oiled machine. I only really remember one moderation incident in particular, and it was actually one where we had to ban a friend of ours for not following the rules. Which is why I have very little patience for moderators that treat their friends differently than other users, if you aren't willing to make your friends follow the rules, you're a bad mod. And we've done it, so I can say that.
The irony is, despite all of that, we still had someone from one team lurk in the server since day one and still tell people in other servers that it was a drama server, that it was for talking about how much you hate fanlore and how much you hate fandom. When...that was explicitly banned. We never talked about that. We talked about voting strategies and stats and who was going to win the season. So again, you can see how I don't trust random people online anymore. They knew they were lying, and yet people ate it up.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to lori • • •