Great faves! What's your least fave security case?
Ah, yes, I suspected someone would ask this. Strap in for another long story, folks. I will note that this involves a person still on Iwaku, and I will be avoiding naming them or giving obvious identifying information for obvious reasons. If I find out that anyone managed to discover their identity anyway and then gave them any kind of grief for the shenanigans I'm about to explain, I will crack some skulls. Consider this your pre-emptive warning against harassment. :)
Anyway, this fun little tale began with me deciding to get drunk. It was a special occasion because I'd never actually been drunk before, because previous times I'd tried alcohol I only got a little tipsy or got nauseous before even getting that far. I decided to throw caution to the wind and drink heavily to get drunk, because I figured I ought to know what it was actually like because there had to be something to it since so many people go drinking again and again even when they know it results in hangovers and whatnot. I announced my plans for drinking to friends and staff folks on Discord, and people convinced me to do voice chatting while drunk and to read weird smut out loud as well.
Drinking night came along on August 31 last year, went well into the early hours of September 1, and it was tons of fun overall. It drew a lot of people onto voice chat that I hadn't really talked to before, plus some who hadn't really socialized with other staff people much at all. Diana joined even though she hates large group voice chats because she wanted to hear me being a drunk fool, and some other people were also drinking and joined in the fun. It was a good time, lots of weird smut read to the enjoyment and/or disgust of others... and then Diana suggested reading something involving a specific person on Iwaku. She had read some of their work before and was amused by the weird smut they wrote. Someone went and found a thread (Astaroth maybe?) and the reading began.
It was a roleplay about a guy who adopted a catboy who had been abused and such. There seemed to be a weird pet/slave dynamic going on, and it was amusingly weird. It had some romantic overtones going on between nice guy and his catboy, but then nice guy's horrible brother raped the catboy while nice guy was away. I think it was somewhere around this point in the reading that Astaroth went and made a troll notice to all of Iwaku saying people should post catboys on my profile because they're my favorite, and thus was born the running joke about me loving catboys. Nice guy brought his catboy to school with him in a backpack, and then he went to gym class or something and played basketball... by way of kicking the basketball into the goal. They noted in OOC comments that they knew nothing about basketball, which I felt was self evident. I also went into a drunken nerd rage about it because of how easy it would have been to check to make sure they were referring to the correct sport, and it went on for a while and amused the hell out of everyone in voice chat so another joke/meme about kicking basketballs started being used.
Reading went on for a little while after the basketball rage subsided (or, well, mostly subsided because there were still angry rant moments when people brought it up again), and then a catgirl was introduced to the roleplay. Where the boy had been ambiguous, the girl was veeeeeeery obviously supposed to be super young. Like child young. That brought the fun times to a grinding halt as we realized that we'd stumbled upon a fucking security case in need of investigation while just trying to have a good time. Total fucking buzzkill, but such is life. The case ended up being handed to me the next day because of course it had to go to the guy who'd done drunk reading of the material, so off I went to investigate.
It was an odd case because the rule about minimum character age in sexual roleplay has not always existed on Iwaku. The thread I had drunk-read was old enough that it was from before the rule was put into place, so it was not in fact breaking the rules at that time. This meant that I had to go look through their more recent roleplays to see if they were violating that rule after it was put into place. Rather than just searching through their entire roleplay history, I decided to look at all their activity from 2016. Even that was fucking TONS of roleplays though, because this person was prolific. I ended up having to take many days skimming through dozens of roleplays, checking for descriptions of characters and their behavior to make sure they weren't blatantly prepubescent. It was fucking grueling, SO MANY abused catboys and a ton of other odd kink material.
Finally, after getting through every single roleplay they had made a post for from January 1 through the middle of September, I ended up with a firm conclusion: they were not using child characters in their smut. Honestly, as much as we like to avoid banning people, one of the worst parts of that case was that it was SO MUCH WORK only to come up empty-handed. Like there wasn't even anything there to warrant a warning, and the only sort of questionable thing came from one of their RP partners anyway. I fucking hated that case, all the work just to confirm someone was okay, and all I have to show for that work is a spam of unwanted catboy pictures on my profile. Worst security case ever. >:[
I've never heard of a 'tired of your nonsense'. *tilts head* what is that? Some type of cat? It sounds like something a cat would be called.
Nope, not a cat. You're awful at guessing.
So how exactly does permanent banning work? How does it keep this person that was banned from creating a different email and just making a new account?
Well, the exact mechanics that make permanent bans work have to be kept secret so people can't learn about them and thus easily avoid them. What I
can tell you is that permanent banning in and of itself just locks down that one account forever and adds some info for our ban evasion catching system to look for. Aside from the automatic things built in to catch ban evaders, we also have some simple manual methods to use to check in case those automatic things fail. Just using a new email is not anywhere near enough to get past these measures, but using the same email will definitely get a person caught because it's one of the things that the automatic system looks for. It's possible for people to slip past these methods, because no defense is impenetrable, but we're pretty confident in our abilities to catch them anyway because people are not as sly as they think.
Yes. Cookies are my favorite sweet things to eat. :D
If you could implement one system on Iwaku to mark people by your personal opinion and do it without ANY negative backlash, what would it be, and how nuts would you go?
Hrm... I think I would go with some kind of little turd icon added to their profile, or maybe displayed on all their posts like a special ribbon that is just a pile of poop. It would be a goofy one with a smiley face on it, of course. It would be a special usergroup called Jorick's Shit List and it would give them read-only access to a special subforum that contains handy guides and links to articles about how to behave in public, or how to stop being an asshole, or similar things that add up to a super patronizing way of telling them they are an asshole and need to stop. I would throw it on anyone who annoys me a lot or causes dumb problems by being a little shit, and they would come off the list once they heeded the helpful advice of the special subforum and stopped being an asshole. Oh, and there would be some temporary joke additions when I'm messing with people. It would be tons of fun for me. 8D
Where do you see yourself in ten years?
We're bringing out the standard interview questions now, I see. Probably doing the same sort of stuff, generally speaking, but with less money troubles and whatnot. I plan to use my years of steady work for my security company as solid experience for a job that pays better than slightly above minimum wage, and that should improve my life in the obvious ways. I think it's about a 50/50 chance I'll still be an Iwaku admin at that point. I'll almost certainly still be spending most of my free time roleplaying and playing video games and watching dumb crap on the internet. I'm pretty happy with life currently, so I don't foresee any huge changes, but I'm sure if I look back on this in ten years I'll be laughing at myself for being foolishly naive.
Do you want to travel the world some day? If so, where would you like to go and why?
Not really. I'm a homebody, never cared to travel and haven't particularly enjoyed the little traveling I have done.
Are you a duckbear in real life? D:<
No. >:[
How do you prioritize daily life and iwaku?
I sort of cheat the whole prioritization thing. I can have my phone and laptop out at work for like 6 hours of each shift, so instead of doing something like prioritizing work over Iwaku I can kinda do both at once.
However, outside of that cheating bit, I rank Iwaku about equal with other pastimes, and I don't really do anything specific to prioritize them. If I'm at work, I'll do things for Iwaku or watch stuff on my laptop or write RP posts depending on what I feel like doing at the moment, and when at home it's the same "whatever I feel like" but with more options added to the mix. Getting important shit done like work and paying bills and whatnot comes first, then fun stuff comes second. That's all the prioritization I do, and even that isn't solid because I procrastinate a lot.
What are three of your greatest strengths and why?
My sense of humor. It's probably a huge chunk of the reason why people like me despite me being kind of an asshole a lot of the time, and life would be so very dull if I couldn't find humor in basically everything as I do now.
My... calmness? Stability? I dunno, hard to pick the right word. Basically I almost never get flustered or lose my cool. I have weird social anxiety problems, but most people I interact with don't notice it because it's all internal panic while I muddle through seeming all relaxed. I don't get angry with people unless they've been pushing my buttons for a long time or manage to find a combo of a lot of the things irritate me the most. I've also got pretty solid self-confidence, so insults and the like tend to roll off my like they're nothing. I'm just pretty chill and in control all the time and that seems to make people calm the fuck down when they're freaking out, which has been useful for me more times than I can count.
My intelligence. I know, I know, egotistical asshole alert. Seriously though, I can say with no doubt in my mind that I am smarter than the vast majority of people. Note that by "intelligence" I'm referring to it in the academic sense, the whole bundle of things like pattern recognition and problem solving and abstract thinking and capacity for retaining learned information and so on that people try to test for with things like the IQ test (which I do get fairly high scores in, but I'm basing my "I'm smarter than most people" thing on personal experience rather than test results). Book smarts, basically. I know there are a lot of other kinds of intelligence that people will bring up whenever someone talks about the classic nerd type of intelligence, and I'm fucking awful at a lot of those things, but I've got the nerd shit down. It helps with everything from writing well to coming up with reasonable solutions to complex problems. I haven't really harnessed it and made anything of my life because of a critical motivation deficiency, but I figure my life would be significantly worse if I also lacked the brains, so it's gotta be one of my main strengths.
Do you like watermelon with salt? Do you even like watermelon at all?
I don't like actual watermelon, because the texture is fucking disgusting. Watermelon flavored candy is great though, for what it's worth.
Who do you think typed this question out?
Some asshole who thinks they're clever.
Will there be more contests in the future?
I hope so! It depends on people coming up with good contest ideas and then doing the work to implement them. Currently we have MISC and the Writer's Showcase Soiree running on alternate months, but I would love to see alternate contests pop up and run at the same time. I know I saw someone floating the idea of a poetry contest somewhere, but I don't know if that went anywhere. I would definitely like to see more contests happen, but I personally don't have the time or desire to run another one while I'm doing MISC, so I don't actually have much control over it.
I should note, however, that contests don't have to be staff run. If regular members want to organize some kind of contest they are welcome to, and if they've got their shit together and have a decent idea then we're likely to support them and help them out with things like site-wide notices about their contest.
Did you have a favorite subject in high school?
Yes. I almost want to be an ass and not tell you what it was because this question only asks IF I had one, not what it was. I'll be nice though. My favorite subject was science, though English was a very close second.
If you took college, did you have a favorite subject there too?
Yes. I have the same dickhead urge here for the same reason. I loved the chemistry classes I took in college, definitely my favorite at that level without a close second.
Do you prefer to have your booty slapped or just grabbed?
If I must have my ass assaulted, I'd prefer a slap. Make contact and get the fuck out of my personal space, don't make an ordeal out of it. >:[
Do you remember your first beer? :p
Oh hi. Either I know who you are, or someone else is being a tricky little shit with this old Roleplayer Guild meme question. Hrm.
Anyway, yeah, I do. I was a kid, maybe six or seven years old, and I hung out with some of those bad influence kids parents are always worried about. There was this old lady who lived in our apartment complex, and she was the kind of person who would scream at kids to shut up and fuck off even if they were sitting somewhere quietly and bothering nobody. One day we saw her get home and start bringing her groceries in from her car. One of the bad influence friends saw she had a case of beer sitting in her trunk and convinced his brother to go snatch it. The kid did it, ran up as she entered her house with a couple bags and grabbed the case and just hauled back to where we'd been hanging out around the corner of the building waiting for him. We fucked off with the stolen beers and went to the other side of the apartment complex where there was this little field hidden from the parking lot by some bushes, and we all tried drinking some beer. They were glass bottles rather than cans, and I THINK the box/label were gold and blue so I'm thinking it was Corona. None of us could stand the taste, so we ended up smashing all the bottles against the wooden fence at the back of the field. XD
Quick! I spilled tomato sauce all over your favorite shirt?! What is your reaction to this mutiny?!
Whatever, my favorite shirt is old and wearing thin in the armpits, and it's red anyway so it's probably fine. I don't care.
Stabbing, choking, or blunt trauma?
Depends heavily on the context and who is on the receiving end. Stabbing is the preferred answer in most scenarios I can think of, so I'll go with stabbing.
Do you know the muffin man?
No.
Do you think Toshi Station went out of business since Luke never picked up those Power Convertors?
If it did, it was a shit business that was going to fail soon regardless. That's what they get for being dumb enough to open up shop on a crappy desert planet like Tatooine.
Forget anonymity!
Beavis and Butthead, or Ren and Stimpy? >_> This is a totally opinion altering question. Choose wisely!
Ren and Stimpy was one of my favorites as a kid, so that's my choice. I never watched much Beavis and Butthead, but it was alright.
