#know things about snakes. those are like. the main things everyone knows . blegh

[lemonofthevalley]

i think the biggest snake inconsistencies in the manga that irritated me the most is that he has good vision (can see the moon, a small luck charm she made, etc) but then they still point out that he actually "sees" by smelling. HOW THE FUCK DOES HE SMELL THE MOON. and then also he was like "ill take care of our children no matter what" UR A SNAKE DUDE. SNAKES ABANDON THEIR CHILDREN IMMEDIATELYYYY.

[weirdponytail]

A musing on past experiences: How I contributed to the rise and fall of one man’s gaming operation/scam and learned to be myself (Pt 1, Rise)

LONGASS POST AHEAD!

About a year ago, I impulse-bought the game 7 Days To Die via Steam. It was on sale, and I had been itching for a game similar to The Long Dark. For those of you who don’t know either of the games, they both have an element of survival, though The Long Dark is in a league of its own. 7DtD, however, is an alpha stage game that mixes zombies with exploration (the main reason why I got it really. Exploring wastelands is a big draw for me), minecraft-esque building (blegh, not my cuppa), and ‘survival’ via hunger, thirst and medical requirements for day to day life in-game. 

I’d like to tell you all a story of how I went from casual player to head admin of a server to head admin with a possibility of developing and selling logos and merch for said server to quietly horrified head admin watching the server owner lose his mind to quiet saboteur and finally to a non player with a whole new heap of experience on how the world can work and, the best part, all the confidence I now show. 

I played single player for a few weeks, getting the feel for the game and picking up the console commands (’cheats’ using inputted codes and such into a nice little text line that can also read you various things...it’s hard to describe for someone as code-stupid as me) fairly quickly, as it was at least familiar from my years of playing and cheating in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. I finally got bored and ventured into the online multiplayer option, despite a deeply ingrained hatred for ‘real time’ online play where you can log out after completing a massive build/project and then come back the next day to EVERYTHING destroyed because someone found your base and raided it while you were gone. 

I puttered around a few servers, popping in and out, until I came across a server that was called (for privacy and to prevent anyone from looking them up incase they’re active again I’ll be using all fake names of servers and groups. If you find a group with these names, I assure you that they are NOT who I’m talking about!), for lack of a better fake name, ‘DedHeds.’ DedHeds, to be refered to ask DH from now on, was run by a guy who was renting several servers, used DH for early stage/newer players, and ran it all from a group/pseudo company type thing that we’ll just call ‘A Little More Grave’, ALMG. I didn’t have contact with him for a good while, but I did have contact with the Admin that he set in charge of DH, who ran the day to day stuff in game and basically made sure the rules of the server were followed while helping new players and providing a fun experience. 

Skipping over a lot of stuff, I ended up acting as a mini-admin for a while. I did my best to enforce the rules and explain the added things that we had on the server (a bot to help you teleport to and set a base location, automated protection bouncing away from player bases to prevent griefing/raids, ect) to new players, all without the tools that the bot provided to the actual admins. Right around Christmas, after I had known the head admin on DH as well as been introduced to the ‘Server Owner(SO)’ for about a month, SO told me that if I wanted to take over as head admin/Team Captain on DH, since the original one was moving to a diff server of SOs, then he’d love to have me on the ALMG team. I was ecstatic, and I eagerly accepted.

DH became my baby. I could add or remove some rules, add ‘homemade events’ to draw in players, add my own admins to help me run things, explore the bot’s available commands and limits, and punish rule breakers and griefers to my heart’s content. My main ‘job’ was to monitor players and make sure they weren’t doing things they shouldn’t that would impact the actual performance of the server, ie destroy buildings and cause them to collapse and fall which would destroy the framerate and lag the server literally into oblivion, requiring us to start from scratch at times and rebuild our network of safehouses and dole out materials to players who had been established. I was also in charge of restocking said safehouses, reading the rules to the new players on the server and providing them with basic gear to get them started.

Let me tell you. I loved my admins. I’m still friends with quite a few of them, especially after the clusterfuck of an ending went down. They all worked hard, and many times they came up with innovative solutions to problems we were having and made life so much easier. We had an easy rapport with each other, as well as our players and anyone who came in to check out our server. I had a second in command, who we’ll call M, and two 3rd in commands, V and Z. We were all also good friends with the amazing W, the main bot tech all ALMG servers used, and with the young-but-brilliant main tech, D. 

To show what kind of stuff we got up to, here’s a snap of one of my favorite moments of W introducing an unsuspecting me to a player new to the DH server:

As you can see, I wasn’t exactly the most...serious admin when it came to certain things. Apparently that was part of my charm. I was known for my sassy responses, and I eventually became known as ‘the salty one’ when it came to nicknames. At one point the password to access DH while we were rebuilding after a wipe was ‘passthesalt.’ I treated everyone fairly, as best as my obviously biased memory can recall, and often encouraged battles of wit and words when things seemed slow.

The DH staff became a mini family. I listened to the suggestions of anyone on the team, tried to implement them wherever it was feasible, gave them all leeway to deal with problems as they saw fit, and tried to treat it all as more of a group effort than a leadership-with-lackies. We all had respect for each other. We even made up a little mascot for DH, after M’s obsession with somehow combining zombie bears and snakes into a terrifying creature called a ‘bearsnake.’ We came up with a little story of M finding a ‘bearsnake cub’ called Ulysses, and built a little doghouse with his name on it and an placed one in every safehouse on DH. Using snapshots of the game environment, I did my best to ‘bring Ulysses to life’ by drawing M, who always dressed in the game’s orange rad suit, finding the little cub.

This family dynamic, I think, played into part of what happened later, and without them and their support I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

I also absolutely looooved catching people in the act of purposeful rule breaking. The collapsing building thing? That was a particular incident I won’t forget. We were mostly East Coast, so when people on West Coast or in different countries would log in while we were away they could sometimes collapse buildings like that, and we had a group that was doing it on purpose just to...I dunno, be dicks? We got very tired of it, but our bot commands weren’t working, so we just had to delete the damage where we could to try and prevent a total crash. 

It came to a head when one of my sweetest admins found that they had also been painting swastikas around the areas where they were collapsing things. While she repainted them over with flowers and choice words for them, me, M and V schemed on how to catch these fuckers. 

We eventually did a stakeout. No joke. I took first shift, from 12pm EST to 3am EST, hovering underground using our admin anti-physics to watch the area where the group had been messing with stuff. M took second, from 3am EST to 6am EST, and V took 3rd, from 6am EST to 9am EST. We all shared a discord server that we set to alert us on our phones if one of us saw something, so that we could mob them, strip them of their gear, and teleport them into a pit full of zombie bears and zombie snakes before banning them. 

We were...creative...when it came to punishments.

It was the most fun I’d had in ages, and we caught the guys at about 5am collapsing a fucking skyscraper. I even made a drawing commemorating the occasion.

We had a lot of fun. Everything was going great! 

Then we started noticing some things...and it was all a rollercoaster from there. 

I’ll have to put the rest of this in another part or two. I know it isn’t what I usually post, but I wanted to get this down before it fades away even more. Lately I started realizing just how much this experience helped me build my confidence and become comfortable with who I am and with standing up for what I believe in.