Creating a sporking organization.

"They are obviously either dumb or malicious. It is not possible for reasonable people to have all the facts and still disagree with me."

"Whenever someone misrepresents me or my arguments, I must contest their arguments until they back down. Failing to do so would be the same as agreeing that they are correct. Because of the stress these continued arguments cause me, I see these misrepresentations as an active attack on me and my sense of self, and will respond as such."

False dichotomy, all-or-nothing fallacy. "Either my pain matters, or other people's pain matters. If you prioritize their pain, you don't care about me at all and you think I'm the worst person ever."

Note how especially in a close relationship, like a parent-child or romantic relationship, this would bait a sympathetic "no, you're important to me, I love you" responses, and probably shut down the argument. This is less likely here because there is not the same context of emotional attachment, but the pattern is similar.

"You need to give equal time to both sides of the argument. Ignoring my side is unacceptable, no matter what my side is. If you ignore my side completely, you're saying that I don't matter as a person."

I am positive that there are browser extensions to handle that. Or possibly, like, don't repeatedly request exhaustive debugging if that's not actually what you want. Exhaustive debugging equals longform essays.

 

Does anyone have a useful method for marking things to come back to? Just doing a quote-add interferes with my ability to do other things in the thread until I take care of the one thing that needs more thought.

That's not really close enough to what happened. The problem was that they put so many constraints on me that it would have required me lying to get out of it. I respect the need for quality, but I don't think it's repeating the points when you're going to ignore them.

 

One of my friends is a member of a historical re-enactment society that requires both active time/money commitments and background checks to participate. If they got denied membership because they're not willing to put the money into it, they wouldn't be justified in stalking the society for years after getting denied.

 

Hey look, you actually wrote a half decent apology! Pity it wasn't for anything you've done.

No, because him punching people in the throat is an overreaction so it wouldn't be a lie. He responded with excessive force to someone who wasn't actually a threat to him. It doesn't matter that he has headfuckage saying people coming up behind him ARE a major threat, punching people in the throat is a disproportionate response.

What I mean about "soaked in bullshit" is your tendency for fauxpologies. If you'd like, I can bring up specific examples. Things that on the surface look like apologies (they include the word "sorry") but either shift the blame ("I'm sorry they upset me too much for me to be reasonable" is a fauxpology) or fail to address the problem at all. ("I'm sorry I'm a stupid idiot who can't do anything right and should just die" is an absolutely EGREGIOUS fauxpology)

It makes you sound disingenuous, manipulative, and petty. And then you fail to apologize for things you should actually apologize for.

Here's a basic, user-friendly guide to apology crafting. I suggest you take a good, long look at the fauxpology section, "don't say these other things either," and "Remember SBAM: Stop, Back up, Apologize, Move on"

Also note that it says nothing about intent. If someone was hurt by your actions apologize. Don't argue that you shouldn't have to apologize because you didn't ~mean to~ hurt them. They were hurt by your actions, you apologize.

Also: other people not apologizing doesn't mean that you don't have to. My abusers never apologized to me. But guess what? When I fuck up and hurt someone, out of ignorance or accident or because I've been pushed into a corner and started lashing out at whoever I can reach? I fucking apologize. The waste of otherwise valuable organs that stabbed my dad? Never apologized. Dad still apologizes when he punches people in the throat.

 

Correction: "Sorry I ended up punching you" is passive language and bad apology crafting. Almost let that one slip by. Gonna have to dock you ten points. "Sorry I punched you" remains optimal, though the explanation of "dude I told you not to come up behind me" stands. In the guide, again, remember the difference between explanations ("I have a largely involuntary response to people coming up behind me and when I asked you not to this is why- I meant it. I am sorry for punching you, however.") and excuses ("You can't blame me for punching you. You're the one who came up behind me. I'm sorry, what was that? I can't understand you through the bruised trachea.")

 

While I generally agree with things here, I think the communication issue is much more important than people think, and things might be helped a bit by using more plain language.

 

It was a mixture of both. From their end, it seemed quite reasonable. I was told that I had to use a specific pair of characters. I started working with them and ran into problems, but I didn't know what those were yet. I try to say "Hi, I'm having a problem" and then waited to see how they reacted before I explained. Later, I was going ahead and explaining the problem and got ignored.

As long as I wasn't sure what was wrong with those characters, I could not tell the PPC that I was dropping them. If I realized later that it just took a minor character tweak, I felt I would have gotten yelled at for picking them up again.

Plus that stupid "You need to interact" rule was really getting on my nerves and making it hard to think straight. Especially when they kept yelling "you need permission!" every time I tried to ask a question about canon.

That was the one logically-impossible thing that I was expected to do. I had read some things that were contrary to canon, but were marked as canon. So if I read the story about the janitor who was told "no" when he asked to become an assassin (or the other two characters who were told "no" and assigned to different departments at first,) I was still supposed to realize that the administration lets everyone be an assassin if they want to.

Plus they wouldn't explain their reasoning for instructions. If they had said "You need to use your other team because we want to see the team you're going to write stories about" instead of "you need to use your mains" I could have explained that I was planning 3-5 stories with the not-main team before I started on my mains, and maybe gotten clearance to use the first team for my request.

 

It's the "Do I know you?" criterion, which is basically supposed to avoid people just showing up and making a Permission request the next day. Which, IMO, might be kinda stupid because if they're a good enough writer, why not, I guess. (Though obviously, there's kind of a cultural fit element, which is one of the main problems here)