Spoofing that stupid “rpg consent form” helped me decide what I most dislike about it: it’s adversarial. It’s the exact opposite of friends and strangers coming together for a shared narrative fantasy experience, replacing it with an attempt to control the experience for others.

You don’t sit down with a group of friends and say, “you can’t say or do anything that bothers me, including but not limited to everything I’ve marked on this form”.

You don’t sign up for a 1920s Call Of Cthulhu game at a con and say, “you can’t discuss blood, gore, torture, police, claustrophobia, racism, sexism, kissing, hurting animals, forest fires, or thirst”.

About the only scenario where the overly-specific contents of this form could be useful is if you were a teenager who just moved to a new town and wanted to join an open game at the local hobby shop without getting eaten alive by a group of total assholes. Who would just use your answers as ammunition to make you run off in tears, so maybe not there, either.

So I inverted it.

“Cheesecake. Cheesecake never changes.”

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I’ve made a modest revision to that “rpg consent form”…

Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea, please write on the board a thousand times:

Therapeutic Role-Play Is Not Gaming.

UPDATE!

Someone has responded with the treatment it deserves:

This is a DM-less narrative RPG. Before play commences, players need to have read and filled (anonymously) the RPG CONSENT FORM. If any items where ticked, then do not, I repeat DO NOT, play the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE FREEFORM RPG.

The object of the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE RPG is to create a romantic scene that tried to break from the normal tropes and cliches. Here is how to do this.

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Proof that the stars are aligning to seal our doom is the announcement of a new Hogan’s Heroes tv series, sure to destroy my few remaining childhood memories.

In which Shion learns a new survival skill, opening up the possibility of an exciting career in the soapland industry.

“Let us never speak of this again.”

And by that I mean the war on users filling up file systems.

When I got into this business, it was whack-a-meg, as undergrads discovered Usenet binary newsgroups and the “zurich” ftp site at MIT, and tried to be clever about hiding their stash.

Over time, it became whack-a-gig, and largely moved from porn to work-related stupidity, such as tarball-based version control (bonus for having multiple sets of tarball, compressed tarball, and unpacked source tree), two-year-old copies of Production logs (often with an accompanying set of tarballs…), laptop backups including music and video libraries, etc, etc.

This week it’s whack-a-terabyte, as I try to figure if there’s actually a legitimate reason for the accounting share to have multiple folders that are each larger than the entire company’s 13-year source-control history…

For obvious reasons, Kemineko doesn’t post new work as often as the more cheesecake-oriented Pixiv artists.

Unrelated and amusing, I just got a variant on the “I hacked your account and recorded you watching porn” scam email. The content is the same, but the subject line includes emoji (🍆✊💦) and the body text is mangled with similar-looking Unicode characters (“I ίɳfected your ɗevίce”, etc). The, um, “thrust” of the message is familiar nonsense.

(sending it to an email address at a vanity domain that has never had any kind of account or password associated with it just adds ❄️ing to the 🎂)

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