Real Life

Welcome to Spoopy Town

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Good Morning Friends! Sometimes I have an idea that gets stuck in the back of my head, and then I share that idea with a friend… and they convince me to make that idea happen. This is one of those times. I’ve talked about how the paranormal and macabre is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, and how I deeply enjoy watching various ghost hunting youtube videos. I’ve discovered through my posting about things… that there are a lot of others out there that also enjoy this sort of thing. It is at this point that I joined forces with my good friend Jaedia and then shortly thereafter Rini to bring this project to life.

I get that the very last thing we all need in our lives is “Yet Another Discord”, but I offer you humbly… yet another Discord to clog up your sidebar. Basically, this Discord has two focuses… discussion of the Spooky as an Entertainment medium, and the Spooky as the unknown and unknowable. We’ve divided up the categories in such a way as to separate the Fiction from Non-Fiction type discussions.

This list is of course subject to change, but right now it looks a little something like this:

  • Spooky Entertainment
    • Creepypasta and SCP
    • Films and Series
    • Books and Comics
    • Args and Tabletop
    • Video Games
    • Music and Stage
  • The Paranormal
    • Cryptids and Monsters
    • Ghosts and Investigations
    • Folklore and Legends
    • Other Unexplained
  • Harmless Conspiracies
    • Unexplained Visitors
    • Historical Mysteries
    • Other Dimensions

If this seems like your sort of thing, then I welcome you to join. First I guess let’s go over the rules. When you join our Discord you are presented with a Server Rules channel and in order to progress further you have to accept the terms. I feel like they are pretty straightforward but cover a lot of bases to protect our members.

Server Rules

Hey Friends! Welcome to the Spoopy Town Server

I love the spooky, paranormal, and unexplained, and am a pretty big aficionado of Horror as a genre. The goal behind this server is to create a comfortable and respectful place to explore those topics. Coming from a place of respect is the most important goal of this project because there are lots of different ideas about what goes bump in the night. We are not here to judge, but also not here to force our own belief systems upon others. If that sounds like an interesting adventure that you might want to embark upon then I suggest you keep reading.

In order to maintain the right vibe we have a few rules that we expect our members to follow. This community is universally supportive of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals. This community is also targeting adults as some of the themes we discuss might be scary, confusing, or harmful to those under the legal age of eighteen.

Here are some of the things that we will not tolerate:

  • Anything Illegal
  • Discussion of Current Politics or Religion
  • Racist, Sexist, Ableist, or Homophobic Remarks
  • Inappropriate uploads, profile images, names, or emojis including:
    • Sexually Explicit
    • Violence/Gore
    • Racist/Sexist/Ableist/Homophobic
  • Abusive Behavior; Bullying, Trolling, or Name-Calling
  • The promotion of Cryptocurrency or NFTs

Content Warnings

To ensure everyone’s safety and comfort within the borders of Spoopy Town, please utilize the content warnings and spoiler tags within the server. While this is not a way of skirting the above restrictions, it is a helpful tool for discussing certain things within the context of paranormal events. Here are some examples of topics that you should be mindful of, but for anything outside the bounds of this list, I suggest you use your best judgment.

  • Suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol and Drug Use
  • Sexual Assault
  • Violence/Abuse
  • Well Known Phobias

If that sounds like the sort of place you are interested in hanging out, we would be more than happy to have you. Like I said before when you first join, you will be presented with the rules above, clicking the Yes button will give you access to all of the channels. Clicking the No button will place you into The Void without access to anything… and I am afraid it is a somewhat permanent choice. If for some reason you accidentally clicked the wrong button, ping me and I can reset your account back to the default state.

Anyways that is a lot of introduction but here is the link to the server. Enjoy… or don’t whatever is cool.

Corrupted Azoth Tree

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Good Morning Friends! It was a wild weekend between the Muskrat and Twitter and the fact that my Mastodon 4.0 instance that I love… is unsustainably popular. On Friday afternoon Stux the admin of Mstdn.social closed the doors when we crossed the 100,000-user threshold. He had been advised by his host that they could not reasonably scale up that instance any further. Unfortunately he did not also close down the ability for users to send out invites to their friends… and as I have talked about before when it comes to MMORPG servers… it is extremely important to be in the same place as your friends. The end result is that another 11,000 invites went out before finally shutting down that loophole.

So unfortunately things are sluggish as hell and the timeline on the server has been running roughly an hour behind real-time as an army of worker processes churn furiously through messages. Stux also manages Mastodon.Coffee which is his attempt at creating an English language only server, and due to the overloading of Mstdn spawned a brand new server called Masto.Ai. I’ve been sitting here this morning trying to decide if I do the right thing for the community to lessen the load and migrate over… or if I just deal with it until enough people get frustrated to drop the total number of active messages. I had hoped the next time I migrated would be to something I was running for myself. I recently picked up Aggro.Chat for such a potential project but don’t have any of the pieces in place yet. It feels like running your own instance is the Fediverse equivalent of Homeownership.

Apart from social media nonsense, I’ve been spending as much of my time as possible doing super chill things in New World. Saturday morning was a delightful time as I chilled out talking on the Fediverse while running my favorite Iron routes. I am not entirely certain why I go off on tangents but suddenly I decided to catch my Engineering up to Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing. Essentially for leveling purposes, I am opting to only use a single high-tier material at a time. Most patterns have a required item… so for example, if you are making a Starmetal sword, you MUST include Starmetal into that pattern, but the other types of materials are variable and you can even use the lowest tier available. This means since I am leveling up Engineering on Wyrdwood at the moment, I am going to use nothing but the lowest-tier leather, cloth, and metal. That also means that I still need to run those lower-tier routes that I find so relaxing.

At this point, both Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing are over 150, which means I can make high-end Orichalcum items but lack the skill to really reliably hit anything of significant item level. Engineering is rapidly catching up and one more push should take me up to 150. Logging is so tedious, but right now my jam tends to be throwing on a YouTube video and grinding away peacefully. I’m using a few specific banks as swap space for current projects, and everything else… is crammed wherever I have room. At some point, I need to set up a system as I have over on Valhalla where specific banks are for specific items. Maybe I should log in there and scribble down a list of what went where so I can copy the methodology to Themiscyra. I’ve legitimately not logged into Valhalla at all since the re-roll, nor have I really had the desire to do so.

I’ve also been out exploring a lot and with that have come some interesting drops. Firstly it appears that every single named mob still has a chance of dropping pretty much any legendary crafting item. So far I’ve gotten pieces for a bow, blunderbuss, and void gauntlet, and unfortunately none of the items that I really care about deeply. Thankfully for Sword, Greatsword, and Shield I picked up the Item Level 600 patterns from the Halloween event. One thing that I really enjoy is how noticeable it is now when you get a named item drop. They all have a bright outline on the item as shown above and have a glowing effect. Essentially when you see an item like this, they will always drop with the same stats and can in theory be farmed from that specific boss.

There are a bunch of really weird places in the world. We all know there is the giant Azoth tree in Brightwood that is guarded by the Angry Earth folks. There is a grove full of not-quite Azoth trees down in Edengrove, which are also guarded by Angry Earth. However in Mourningdale, there is this weird glowing tree that has been corrupted with a bunch of miners working around it, and I am wondering if it also used to be one of the giant Azoth trees like from Brightwood. It makes me wonder what that area of Mourningdale might have looked like before it was corrupted. Would it have also been something more akin to Edengrove?

Speaking of Edengrove, there are a few places where it is just breathtaking to view the various monuments that dot the valley. I’ve not gotten as into the lore of New World as I have other games, but my working theory is that Edengrove and more particularly the Garden of Genesis is the heart of what remains of the original civilization that claimed Aeternum it’s home. The Angry Earth is all that remains and now guards once-sacred areas against the intruders that have come to the shores over generations. New World has clear indications of areas that were settled by different civilizations, but Edengrove has always seemed like it is much older and features a glimpse at maybe what the entire island looked like once before the attempts at colonization.

I’m continuing to largely play in cycles of either going out into the world and gathering resources or sitting down and grinding through crafting levels. This seems to be a really good pattern for me, but soon now that Ace and Vern have hit level 60… it will be time to go out exploring some of the more dangerous areas. I’ve quested through most of Ebonscale Reach and am working on clearing out Edengrove… which would lead me to start on Reekwater next. The money fountain has dried up a bit, only because the quests themselves take much longer to complete and there are far fewer of them. I still have that strong desire however to make the yellow quest markers disappear from my world map.

I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.

Local as Psuedo Guild Chat

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Right now it feels like I am splitting myself between two “games”. The first being of course my whole re-roll nonsense over in New World. The second is engaging with the explosive growth in the Fediverse community. There have been mass migration phases in the past, and I’ve seen five of them to my memory since joining in 2018 including the one I was part of. However, we’ve never seen anything close to the level of migration that is happening right now. There is a bot over on one of the crypto bro instances that tracks incoming users on an hourly basis, and while I don’t follow it for reasons… I think we have all been keeping tabs on it. Right now the fediverse as a whole is seeing a growth rate of somewhere between 1200-1500 users an hour… and that is a 24/7 tick of new incoming users.

Our admin Stux over on Mstdn is super transparent about the growth our instance has been experiencing as well. This is one from yesterday showing that since October 5th, we’ve gained just shy of 20,000 new users. I’ve done Patreon options my entire time on the Fediverse, first with support to Elekk.xyz and now actively supporting Mstdn.social each month. However, with the influx of new users, I’ve felt like I needed to chip in a little extra on the side to help out. It isn’t much but I figure when you were personally paying around $500/mo in hosting charges that anything helps. The weird thing about all of that is… I would never pay a dime for anything Twitter provided, but I am more than happy to help out the human beings running the Fediverse. Of course, no one is expected to pay a dime, but I figure if I am going to use something I should support it.

I will say that all of the activity has wreaked havoc on my actual in-game time in New World. The Mastodon client bloop sound is so contagious and happy that I have to alt-tab over and look to see what is going on. I’ve also found myself spending my time laying in bed waiting for the melatonin to kick in serving as a part greeter and part technical support as I surf the local feed. That is one of the things that makes the experience of the Fediverse so wildly different from Twitter. You can say ANYTHING publicly on your instance and it is going to potentially garner interactions because everyone on that instance can and regularly does check the activity feed. It makes the entire experience feel like local is some sort of guild chat, and federated is general chat… often with similar results. The weirdest thing that happened yesterday is Kathy Griffin “rolled” on our instance, but there is a limit to how much impact a single user can have.

It has been a wild week and typing this… I just realized that it has only been a single week. So much shit can go off the rails in so little time when it comes to Twitter. With layoffs looming on the horizon this morning for the folks at that company, I sort of expect the migration will only pick up momentum from this point forward. At this point, I have at least spiritually migrated, even if I have yet to nuke my Twitter account. It isn’t where I am actively spending my time and on average I am poking my head in once or twice a day to see if anyone has messaged me. That account is mostly a punctured balloon that is slowly letting out air as follow-for-follow mindset folks notice I deleted them in my culling over the weekend. It will be interesting to see what happens now, given that the Fediverse is not exactly the sort of place for brand building and marketing… and seems to aggressively reject both.

One of the things that I do think is a shame, is how focused the news seems to be on Mastodon. The is a specific reason why I keep referring to it as the Fediverse and not by that single platform name. ActivityPub is a protocol that the Fediverse operates on, and your window into that world can look like so many different shapes. if you want a more blogger-type experience then maybe Write Freely is your jam, or if you really like Instagram and are more visually focused… then PixelFed is your home. If you like creating music then maybe FunkWhale or video maybe PeerTube, and in all cases, you can communicate with everyone on any of those platforms (pending there is an active federation between your instance and theirs). I prefer using a Tweetdeck-like interface, so Mastodon/Pleroma-based instances fit the bill for me personally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to view the Fediverse through those parameters.

I figure I will close out the week… and this blog post with a Gracie palate cleanser. She has figured out how to climb our entertainment center and crawl into the cloth boxes… shown is her in the box on the top shelf. Now she is trying to figure out how to climb out of the box and get up on top of the entertainment center… a place we previously thought safe from cat “intervention”. Maybe we won’t have a tiny Christmas tree up there this year… time will tell. Anyways basically the point of this post is that I am greatly enjoying this influx of new people into the Fediverse because everyone seems to be so damned grateful to be away from Twitter. It is refreshing to just have chill human conversations with strangers again, and it reminds me in so many ways of hanging out on IRC and talking to completely random people for hours.

This might not be everyone’s jam, but it certainly seems to be mine. For those still on Twitter, I wish you luck in the coming strife. If you have any questions about the Fediverse in general, I am poking my head into my Twitter account periodically so feel free to DM, or of course, drop a line below in the comments.

Why is Birdsite a Thing?

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve been talking quite a bit about the Fediverse or as the media is damned determined to refer to it Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is the software that most ActivityPub federated instances run, and the flagship instance is run by its originator Mastodon.social. Side note: I would never suggest anyone create an account there because it is a bit of a mess that is constantly struggling to maintain itself… both mechanically and from moderation terms. I refer to the whole proceedings as Fediverse or the community of websites that federate with each other utilizing the ActivityPub protocol. While most sites run Mastodon there are also a lot of sites running Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, or Funkwhale just to name a handful of alternates each designed for their own purposes. While we have a habit of referring to things by the “brand name” version… I personally am going against that practice here.

There are a lot of things about the Fediverse that come off as odd to someone migrating from Twitter. I’ve talked about this at length in a number of other posts, already so I won’t labor those points now. One of the almost immediate quirks you will notice on day one… is that most people are extremely reluctant to ever say the word “Twitter”. You will see it referred to as things like “Hellsite” or simply “That Other Site”, but most commonly you will see the term “Birdsite” used. At this point I am used to it since like I have said before, I first came to the network in 2018 during the Wheaton Exodus. While I do not have the exact reason for why the popularity of the term has taken hold, I will attempt to give you my understanding and why I chose to adopt it myself.

The WoW Tourist Problem

This is something that likely only MMORPG veterans are going to understand, but when a brand new game launches it is inevitable that general chat will be filled with an endless stream of fights about World of Warcraft. It is natural for something new to be compared with the industry leader, but it also gets really annoying when you are trying to experience something new… and you are constantly being reminded of the thing that you are not actually playing. To be truthful this is one of the big reasons why I almost always turn off general chat in any game alpha/beta that I am testing because I know without a doubt there is going to be a pissing contest between those who hate World of Warcraft and those who seem required to defend the game’s honor.

For all of the folks being transplanted into the Fediverse from Twitter, there is always going to be a group that is sick to death hearing about it. They have moved on past it, and keep getting dragged by chat back into dealing with it. Sure you can say “well just don’t read local or federated feeds” but a lot of the experience of the Fediverse is the browsing nature of being able to read what people you are not following are saying. Being on an Instance is in many ways like playing an old-school MMORPG with a fixed server population. While every Instance is effectively an island… the other folks are your neighbors on that island. Even if you don’t follow each other, you notice the folks who are regularly chatting.

The Trauma Problem

I’m a CIS White Man, and when I use twitter I have the privilege of not really drawing the attention of many attackers. Sure I got some DDOS attacks during the height of GamerGate for some comments against it on this blog, but I’ve never had to suffer any real lasting consequences of my social interactions. That was not the case for a lot of folks on the margins of what was considered acceptable by certain segments of society. There are folks who live on the Fediverse now that came there to escape torrents of abuse that they received on Twitter. The Trans community especially has been actively hunted down and made to suffer by conservative groups on Twitter, and now for some… the mere mention of the platform brings up deep-seated trauma.

This is the reason why I try not to use the word Twitter while on the Fediverse, and have adopted the local custom of “Birdsite”. I don’t really personally care one way or the other, but I know the decision of choosing to buck this custom means that I might be causing someone else out there unintended harm. On Twitter, your voice only carries as far as those who are actively following you. On the Fediverse your voice is out there in an unknown number of federated feeds. Basically, I worry about how my actions might impact someone else out there, and if I can make a simple change that means nothing to me personally… I am going to always err on the side of doing less harm.

I Care About My Impact on Others

Ultimately at the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that I care about my potential impact on others. There are a lot of words that I used to carelessly use before knowing how tangible their impact was on unintended targets. I’m thankful that I have had friends willing to call me out on my shit, and as such, I have evolved constantly as a person to adopt better practices and abandon those causing harm. For me, it was never about being “woke” or some sort of performative action, and entirely about being a better person. While it is unlikely that someone is going to call you on using Twitter regularly, I personally made the choice to stop using the term while on the Fediverse.

It is my way to adopt the customs of the environment I am in, so long as those customs are not harming anyone. It was a simple choice for me. It was not a hill I was willing on dying on, because I had no real attachment one way or the other. Four years later, I just sort of do it as a relfex without even thinking about it.