June 2022 archive

It isn’t a weekend without a re-AOL update, folks.

Developers and programmers (I do the front desk sort of stuff in the Discord chat, and in re-AOL chatrooms when I see that there’s a need for it, like helping people download and install the client, answering questions, getting answers to questions, facilitating conversation, the whole nine) have been working on some back-end fixes to problems like “hanging SNs” — where, after disconnecting, it would still say that you “were logged in”, which a mod could fix by booting your screen name off so that you could actually log in yourself — and the occasional doubling up of screen names in the People In Room list. We still have… screen names that do that, but the things I’ve mentioned are already happening less than they were, which is awesome! And there’s the occasional “missing line”, where when someone tries to send something to a re-AOL chat it just doesn’t send, but that’s happening less than it was. (Later, we’re going to get Slingo and Splatterball!)

This is the fun of alpha testing, though. And programming during the alpha stage, too. We squash bugs.

Should any of this have surprised me, though?

The posts that I make about re-AOL and my experiences with predatory behavior on apps and sites like Discord (and within the gaming community as more of a whole, but also something that I expected getting into it int he first place) continue to have significant traction as per details on my internal tracker. I tend to hold back comments on those posts so that the people who participate in that predatory behavior don’t have opsec (OpSec? Opsec?) on “fresh blood” or “new blood” as they might like to call it… I’m not going to give them other people’s contact details and, in doing so, hand other people over for them to inflict that sort of behavior on. If people want to own up to their predatory behavior they first need to stop… doing predatory things, cutting it off at the source. But I don’t have faith in a lot of these people actually being capable of doing that if any of you know what I mean, so I don’t expect them to actually do so, and I don’t expect an apology or significant behavior changes out of any of the individuals whose behaviors I have touched on.

As stated in more than one post at this point, there are reasons that I am extremely reluctant to meet people off of the Internet in person. Under the right circumstances I might be willing, such as conventions and… safer places to do these meet-ups in, but I’m not just going to pick and choose random people to meet up from the Internet with (I have a whole story prepared on that, and I’m eventually going to get around to it).

Dudes who parasocialize are just creepy.

Although this seems to… come with being a girl gamer, it doesn’t mean that I have to put up with it.

No one said that I had to like it.

I’ve had at least one person admit to saving pictures of me (that I’ve publicly posted on social media, but this sort of behavior is highly inappropriate to begin with, especially if you’re a man doing any of this to a woman) on their computer, hate-watching my streams and taking screenshots of me while I’m live, making fun of my children and me for being disabled, and — along with a friend of his — actually telling me that I should end my own life and murder my children. These are not the kind of people that I want to be interested in me in any capacity because this behavior practically screams stalkerish incel, is cruel and unnecessary, and is usually the precursor to other, worse behaviors that tend to at least attract the attention of law enforcement. I screenshot some of his Tweets and posted them on Twitter, especially if he ever actually follows through on anything that breaks or would break the law, or — the worst of all, God forbid — actually attempts to do something to me in person, or succeeds. This is the kind of world that we are living in, folks…

There are reasons that I am uncomfortable with meeting a lot of people from the Internet, and this practically screams all of them. I wouldn’t mind going to a few conventions or meet-ups that I already know are, or would be, safe, but I still have difficulties wrapping my mind around meeting someone that isn’t from this area who’s from the Internet in person. Once I find a more subtle way to post about it to avoid it being searchable, I might post about the one long-distance relationship that I at least tried to be in, finding out that his family was hiding critically important things from me and… other people in general, and had to be the one to report them to various authorities. They seriously wanted me to keep these things “secret” for them.

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