General Discussion

[AlexiCat]

Yeah, that certainly was pretty shitty on your roommate's behalf, Alexis .
Hope you've been doing better since.

Yeah, things are good now, but my roommate got back together with his ex, so being roommates is significantly less fun now

[Luca]

Yeah, that certainly was pretty shitty on your roommate's behalf, Alexis .
Hope you've been doing better since.

Yeah, things are good now, but my roommate got back together with his ex, so being roommates is significantly less fun now

Your living situation is now like the turning point in a teenage drama 

[Casimir]

I've been wondering.
Is the Discord server still a thing? I can't manage to find any links to it wheresoever so I figured I'd just ask

[Emily]

I'm sure it exists in some form, but here is nicer :3

[Casimir]

Is that Denver? That's absolutely stunning like, I wish I could take photos like that here

[Emily]

Canada, actually :P

[Casimir]

Wait, have y'all finally moved?
I really haven't kept up recently, that's amazing! Congratulations

[Casimir]

Also, my parents forced me to get my hair cut and now I have damn dysphoria, bloody brilliant lads
'Yeah, that cut you had made you look between a boy and a girl' yeah no shit that's why I had it
Leaving the hairdresser's and walking in the street gave me fecking anxiety, I'm never doing that again.

[Luca]

Is the Discord server still a thing? I can't manage to find any links to it wheresoever so I figured I'd just ask

Missing links was kinda the goal. It turned out to not be the environment we were looking to be in or sponsor on this site. For the people that absolutely wanted it, it's still up but closed off, so it will probably be closed eventually a la Halo 2 servers. I agree that forums are a better format for sending messages. The only real exception that I've found is that they're less useful for things that happen in real time, which is why I've stayed in the card trading server while everything else has had some substantial changes.

Welcome back to the forum! Remember hair always grows back and your parents won't run your life forever~

[AlexiCat]

Hi, can we get a new rule that requires posters of ambiguous sun pictures to explicitly state whether it's a sunrise or sunset? Thanks.

[AlexiCat]

Merry Christmas, friends! 

[Emily]

Merry Christmas Alexis  I hope you had a great day.

I hope everyone had a great day, in fact!

[Casimir]

Hey there friends!

I hope you all had a great Christmas. I'm actually quite excited for the new year coming around since I get to sit down and log the good and bad things in my year to weigh them out. One of the things I've resolved to do this year is learn to draw a bit since that's really something that I feel the lack of almost every day.

Overall I'd say the year was full of ups and downs even though the downs had the upper (lower?) hand most of the time. There have certainly been some things, even a lot, which I feel gratitude for, most notably getting back into writing and Japanese.

I really want to look at the night sky ere clouds arrive to hide the stars <3

[Emily]

Hi Cas 

You know what you inspired me to do? On a forum I was part of for about 12 years, we used to do threads talking about what the previous year had been like, and what we were hoping to do in the new year. Reasonable goals, though, not normal vapid resolutions. I'm gonna make one ^-^

[Luca]

For bookkeeping purposes of hyper-important events:

Are you a cat person or a dog person?

Cat person	4 (50%)
Dog person	1 (12.5%)
Birdperson	2 (25%)
Centaur	1 (12.5%)
No preference	0 (0%)

Now that I'm a bit more comfortable and settled, I think it's about time that I annoy everyone with another obnoxious flurry of posts...

Enjoy another shitpost poll added to this topic.

[Emily]

So I'm going to write up something a bit more substantial soon for the announcement at my ascendency, but first I want to say something here. Community is a tricky thing to make work. A community where the majority of people don't care can't work. It's just not possible. And I'm afraid that's what this community has become: a loose confederation of people, the majority of whom don't give a shit about being friends with anyone else.

The chat is poison. I hedged my bets about saying that for some time, but I believe that in my new role as an Administrator, I should be more forthright on what I think. The problems with Discord are too many to easily list, but the thing I hate most about it is that it rewards laziness. Calamity Refuge is built on being environmentally-friendly, open-sourced, not being tracked or treated like cattle by large corporations. Those things are incredible and so rare on the modern internet, and I think they should be valued higher than most people currently do. I want people to see this place in the same way that I do, and to put as much effort and thought into it as I do.

I want people to care, and I really think the majority of our current assemblage of people don't. I'll work on that, but I also should say that I wish the people who don't actually want to be genuine and friendly and talk to one another would just leave. Then those of us who remained could actually be a community.

[Luca]

It's Saturday, January 11th, 2020. In a few weeks, I will have been the Arch-Administrator of CalRef for three relatively insane years. In that time, I've made a lot of stupid blunders and bad decisions. I've had a lot of ideas that were based off of observations on how communities existed in a semi-organic state and within the confines of a certain set of predefined rules connected to human behaviour. Many of those observations were wrong.

A number of attempts to get things going as before did not work out, in part because of how the current incarnation of this place came to be. Although Sylae willingly passed her title onto me, questions lingered about whether or not it was her or I that was abusive in our relationship and drove the other one away. This was a conflict that I never intended to make public in the first place, but one that hangs over me like a cloud, still to this day for several reasons. Not the least of which is the few number of members who used to come here. In a private discussion that I had with Sudanna recently, we reached the conclusion that drama snapped social ties which were strained from years of smaller conflicts that were never really resolved.

No one person could have prevented the collapse of Old CalRef, because everyone had a hand in it in different ways. And yet. And yet, I still spend a significant and unhealthy amount of time every single day thinking of nothing more than how all my friends are gone and dead and all of it is my fault. This makes work here difficult for me, hopefully you can understand. It's been very bad on my mental health, and has at times led to issues with my physical health as a result.

Because of its odd ties to the past and my own difficulty with understanding social issues and where even developing on the technical aspect can't happen without some kind of emotional impact, I think I'm not as effective to move things on as we've needed. And that's not to say that it can't be done, but certainly it is to say that me, alone, believing in the concepts that CalRef is supposed to be around for doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. That is to say that things are not working. They're not CalRef, they're another place that we've created to be lonely. And those things have to go.

Maybe axing things will be something we will never recover from and that we will kill the whole place outright. It's happened before. But after having spent so much time putting everything I have into trying to keep things alive, it's only killed me as a result. I just feel as though everyone is so disconnected, not only from me but from everything in general. And, I think, because of that, the lingering thoughts of "all my friends are dead" is what I'm left with. Nothing has really replaced how close things were before.

And in many ways that makes me compromised as an admin because it sets unreasonable expectations and limits how much I can start over.

[Natalie]

This is a copy of the message I posted in chat, as I feel it's relevant to the conversation. I'll write something more specific later.

~

A lot has been said and written about the core problems with Discord as a platform: the shallow relationships it fosters, the gamification of social interactions, the malleable nature of a community's culture, etc. That's all top-down stuff. I'm not really here to talk about that. The unspoken and much more interesting question is "How does all of that actually affect a community?"

In the past, the CalRef Discord server provided a hub for a small core at a time when there was little active development going on outside. For a time, that server was CalRef. That time has come to pass. The distance that's formed between the members of this community is painful. Perhaps it's been magnified by the split in communication between the forums and chat. Perhaps it's because it's trivially easy to not be your best self in an instantaneous chat setting, and those instances which may otherwise be throwaway comments make the atmosphere less tolerable to others. I'd love to be able to understand what exactly has happened here, but I don't see much value in spitballing right now. Because I wasn't able or willing to hanlde this sooner, the consequences are here and we have no choice but to address them now, regardless of the cause.

At one time in the past, we made the decision to delete a potential secondary Discord server, fearing that it would siphon too much activity from the primary chat and leave two lifeless twin communities. It's time to make that same determination. Barring intervention from the arch-administrator, the CalRef Discord server will be deleted on Monday, January 13, 2020. The primary site of activity will become the forums at http://calref.cc, and this is where we'll continue to connect with one another and foster a closer sense of community. I hope everybody will be willing to follow us over and give it a shot. For those who won't, I think you'll at least understand why this is necessary.

[Luca]

Unrelated from the last bits of dismal reflection of the concept of Discord vs. Forums vs. IRC, I'm interested in using more of our abilities to work on environmental issues, irl. At the moment, I'm thinking about replacing the creative commons logo at the bottom right for almost all of you (which is discussed in the CoC anyway), with a logo-link to Ecosia.

Since it's free advertising, I'm reasonably sure that they will not sue me for doing so. Thoughts?

[Emily]

I think that's a great idea, and a really great starting point for launching further environmental ventures. Getting people used to passively generating new trees is good.