[Mateo] The Tale of a Millennial

[Mateo]

Mateo's Lifelong Tangent

Hey, Lords and Ladies. I'm Shane! I come here today to profess all of the bizzare and erratic ramblings of any overly opinionated guy my age, as well as discuss random things I like on the internet. Or in real life, somewhat rarely.

First, let's introduce me. I'm a nineteen year old guy living in Honolulu, Hawai'I. I have four siblings, mostly half-siblings. I go to Kapiolani Community College. Oh boy, I've given you enough information to stalk me. Anyway, I'm a little Chinese and German kid majoring in who-the-hell knows what, taking mostly humanities classes while smashing my head against the table in the face of the ideological blight that is our CC system. I really like writing. I found roleplaying when I was about fourteen and literally haven't had a single week where I didn't at least deeply desire to write a post. I really, really, really love roleplaying. A lot. Emphasis on a lot. Writing is my passion. My dream, aside from becoming an attorney in real life (which is funny since Mateo is an attorney), would be to publish a successful fiction novel.

I'm also highly political. Unlike most millennials however, I'm not a bleeding heart, I'm actually fairly moderate and really despise the mob mentality of my generation. That's probably why I prefer places like Miz where the audience is more mature and more logical. Although, I doubt many if any of us on here would agree on some of my standpoints. I may still make them though! Just be aware: I'm very political. In fact, this Scrapbook may turn into my political rantbox if I get bored enough. I'll probably just discuss really random quirky things about my everyday life for the most part, though.

I'll probably swear every now and then, if I get angry or passionate. Though I rarely get angry, if not solely "angrily passionate".

I prefer to be Shane, but you can call me Mateo if that makes you feel better. Haha.

I'm open to discuss anything in here. I'm not easily offended. Unlike most people in my gen, I don't give a bullocks about "political correctness" and "muh feelz". Go on and feel free. I'm especially open to discuss anything Miz related. I may also start making vlogs if I ever manage to think of something to talk about for fifteen minutes.

Also, I laugh at my own jokes a lot and you can feel free to picture my geeky self laughing like a maniac as I'm making my scrapbook posts, even the more aggressively worded ones.

[Caesarion]

Quitting Mizahar

I would like to begin this post by saying that I will miss all of you dearly, especially those who have been friendly and kind with me in the past. I can't even begin to compile a list of all of you, but know that I remember you and value our experiences with one another.

If any of you would like to talk to me, my aim is mitchellshanone@gmail.com

You may also email me using that same address; or skype me, though you'll have to ask for my skype name on e-mail, as it is sort of inappropriate. Tee hee.

I am leaving Mizahar for good. The reason I am posting this is to solidify my courage; I realize that if I post this, it is less likely that I will grow weak knees in the face of indecisiveness and come back. That's not to say that I hate the prospect so much, but certainly to say that I need to grow a backbone and make decisions in finality.

The truth of the matter is that I did not write on Mizahar all of these years because I liked or loved Mizahar - but instead that I liked and cared for a number of the people within Mizahar. There are people I have met on this site so important to me that I am invariably happy that I found this place, even despite my many differences with it when it comes to genre and other such things. The sad half of this is that I have honestly rarely enjoyed my time here. I love Caesarion as a character, but I have felt so much pain and tedium in writing him that I think I honestly just broke even. I never felt that I could accomplish my goals, looking at players who had been much more active than me - and I'd like to say I would be considered one of the upper-mid characters - failing to accomplish their goals.

The fact of the matter is, I love what Mizahar could have been, but despise how it has been executed; especially lately. I feel that there is a glass ceiling on Mizahar that applies equally to everyone. There are many reasons for this. The regulation of the system itself is the greatest reason - volunteer workers are taxed with so much labor that they cannot feasibly ever find the time to run plots for characters that amount to more than XP and lore rewards. When was the last time a Gnosis was given? When was the last time a major plot event happened? The Djed Storm?

I cannot recall a moment since I have been here that someone has felt truly satisfied with their progress in a meaningful way; that they accomplished a major goal. Yes, the search for the goal is what matters to some, but the fact is I am willing to say that it is impossible to achieve these goals. Most of the time when a character grows skilled enough to execute their desires, a great invisible barrier blocks them from it. And I've seen more than a few great and powerful characters get banned for trivial reasons and minor disagreements, leave due to pedantic e-drama with absolutely no basis for its existence, so on and so forth.

And before anyone questions my idealism - claiming that it's an issue of all RPs, no. That is not true. I have found an RP in the two months I've been gone from Miz where I have progressed more than in my three years here, and yet in a fun, balanced, healthy and believable way. It possesses a welcoming community and is devoid of drama. And honestly? I think it's more active than here, too.

This isn't to bash on Mizahar; this is my observations. This is the truth that I see, being someone who has experienced many things and witnessed many perspectives. I have seen the drama, seen the bans, seen the stunted characters, seen the ridiculousness that we all see but choose to ignore for our own sakes.

I will be brave, risk a ban, and say that I personally believe this is greatly to the fault of Gossamer. We can all bite our tongue and hide the truth of what we know, but this is simply true. People on my new RP site were formerly mods on here, some of them from as early as 2009, and we all know the truth. I will likely be banned for stating this. I will not go further as to explain the root causes of my belief as to why I so strongly disagree with Gossamer's methods. All I can say is that I know many of you agree with me; I've known it for years, but like many of you I was very afraid to speak out when in reality, freedom of speech and transparency are important virtues on any corner of the world or online - if Mizahar was open to conversation, debate and discussion, even including the fact that many of us greatly disagree with the 'establishment' of Miz because many of us see the stunting behavior within it -

If this sort of thing was allowed, if I did not get banned for making this post and this post deleted, which is possible, then this site would improve and we would be happier as role-players. We could have a healthy moderating community. This communist, North Korean mentality everywhere on Mizahar (inb4 get banned for comparing to North Korea) is something many of us oppose yet tolerate. And why?

Why do we tolerate all of this? The bullying, the unfair bans... stuff like calling Kailey a skank, a bitch, an attention whore by Goss (oh and I knew she was Taylani before anyone because she had a similar writing style - but didn't say anything on that assumption because I knew she'd be banned, even though Taylani was banned for no reason in the first place).

Why do we tolerate it? I KNOW many of you thought the way Kailey was treated was unethical. She is not a skank or anything of the like. She has always been extremely nice to the people she's spoken to, as Kailey or Taylani. And to speak of her like that after banning her - so she can't say a thing to defend herself, and your version of the truth becomes 'history' - is significant of a tyrant. But that's not surprising. So I ask, why do we tolerate this?

Because we're masochists or something, I dunno. Whatever. You guys can feel free to disagree with me, yell at me, hate my opinion; but I know a lot of you really agree, and won't say anything. And that's not to inspire a mass Mizahar quitting spree. I'm not trying to destroy or hurt this website. I'm speaking based on transparency. I dislike the censorship and hostile assault on people's character - as well as the mob mentality that often comes - with disagreeing with certain prominent people on this website.

And yet, I'm not afraid anymore, because there's a lot websites that are just flat out better than Miz. RPG Directory, fellas. RPG Directory. Or ask me if you want a recommendation - I have a real good one.

I'd like to say goodbye to all of you. I'll be saving this on a google doc incase it gets deleted. I'll miss you, Mizahar. For the most part. We've had our disagreements.

Also, Tarot, I think you should change staff. There are tons of good people who would be willing to take the burden; many good staff have been turned away but would come back. If I got banned, I'd come back if I knew that Miz became more happy towards conflicting opinions and adaptive to human creativity. After all, isn't that what we're really after?

[Gossamer]

I'm truly saddened that you are so misguided. I've pulled your logs and looked at what you've actually said over time and many many things you believe have happened haven't happened at all or were not at all like you thought. It's understandable. I haven't always been transparent. But I have been recently and I'm not going to let your poisonous scrap stand on its own. And since no one else has responded, I will.

Your stories and claims aren't the truth. In fact, most of them aren't even remotely close to the truth. Where's your proof? Where are your facts? I don't see any.

One rumor that comes to mind immediately which you are spreading is that I removed Founders. I did not. I have never had that power. There is only one person that does, and that is Tarot.

Another is that Mizahar isn't my site. It's very much my site. Its Tarot's site too. It's Gillar's site. And its anyone's site who's put blood sweat and tears into it. I personally own the domain names and Tarot hosts the game itself on his personal account and handles the finances. So I'd honestly say Miz has ran for as long as it has because of Tarot's coding and my blood sweat and tears. Who's put more time in here? I have by a whole hell of a long shot. You get butthurt by Cayenne and Colombina's inactivity here, but Cayenne had very little development on Miz and time in to begin with and Colombina left when she started a family and got super busy. Anything else said is just rumor and not based on fact.

There's a lot of rumor and speculation about a whole host of things - most of which is conjecture and has come from you without an ounce of fact- and I've been very tolerant of it because I honestly know how young you are and that your life hasn't been the greatest. We take that out on things we can control and we often, as humans, blame problems on anyone else but ourselves. In this case you've blamed your failure on Miz on me. I think that's sad, but it is what it is. You had friends here. You lost many of them too with your actions. And truth be told, if people were honest with you, I think it would be a huge reality check.

You make your goals here come to life by hard work. You can't sit back and expect a mod do everything for you. That's just like how you have to reach out and make your own happiness in life. You have to love yourself, your friends, and your situation in order to be happy. You didn't do that here. You expected everyone to do it for you. I hope you do go to this next site and start over and truly be that guy you seem to think you were here. Support folks. Be honest with them. Tone down the anger. Fact find before you cast stones. If you start behaving on your new site like you have here, those 'friends' you've made in the last three months won't stick around. Why? Because if you talk about people behind their backs, the people you are talking too viciously about others will assume you are doing the same thing to them. And then trust is broken. And when you break trust, there's nothing left.

I'm not going to ban you. But I will give you a warning. Advertising is against TOS. Please dont do it. You have been doing a lot of recruiting in chat lately flashing your new site around. Regardless of who you are and in what situation you are in, this is really in bad taste. If it keeps happening, your name will go grey.

Good luck. I hope you find everything you desire. And I hope you do a whole heck of a lot of soul searching and growing up.

[Caesarion]

Firstly, I am young and I've had a hard life. That's true. But I can say, as the greatest authority on relaying my own life to others, that life right now may be hard but it is not unhappy. I am happy. If I were unhappy I would grip at straws and try to maintain my links to places and people, even if they were toxic. I would maintain my link to Mizahar because I'd be afraid that I would lose friends/etc that would clearly be necessary . . . if I were unhappy. But that is not the case. I have clarity. And I don't need anyone presuming my current situation or my happiness, when they don't have any knowledge of my situation; knowledge reserved for people that really know me, that I like and trust. And regardless of what you might have said, which was silly by the way (one, because I don't recall losing any friends on Miz - I still talk to most people I've talked to on here and two, because it implicates that you've been gossiping about me which kind of makes you seem like a drama stirrer rather than me), I am not in some desperate position where I'm angrily trying to get out my frustrations by attacking people. I don't blame you for anything regarding my success or happiness. I'm not that type of person, and people who know me would say that. I always blame myself for my own failures. Sometimes I blame myself for other people's failures. I'm not someone who likes to project. This isn't about my failure.

I never really liked Miz very much, but even despite that I'd certainly say I did not fail. I have never felt that I failed. If ever I left it was because I was busy or just didn't feel it, or didn't enjoy the system. This time around, I was progressing quite well and a lot of people wanted to RP with me. If you think I was truly bothered by anything that happened on here, to me in particular, don't. It's simply untrue. There's no point in deflecting this to make it about me. The part beyond my leaving is not about me, it's about Mizahar and you. That's why I didn't post anecdotal evidence when I could have, not just from my own experiences but from others. I didn't bring up anything in particular, so asking me to post evidence is pointless. If I had actually made a claim about you that applied to a specific situation, then I would have posted evidence. The way you treated Kailey was open for everyone to see, and that can't be rescinded. That doesn't need evidence. Taylani being banned for no reason is here: http://www.roleplaygateway.com/directory/view.php?id=243

Ctrl+ F to find her post, Taylani Shayna. And considering Taylani's reputation to those she's spoken to, as opposed to yours to people you've spoken to, I'm far more willing to believe her story over yours. Especially since she had no reason to lie at that point; already banned and all.

I'm not afraid to post my evidence. I simply don't desire to make this about drama. I know you love saying that people like to stir up drama, but I really don't care. I wouldn't want anyone to get involved in this. This isn't drama anyhow, not by my book. This is a disagreement. Of opinions, of the way we interact, so on and so forth. Please don't condescend me an insult my personal character by saying I'm naive, sad and deflective. That really isn't the case. Also, I have quite a lot of friends and I don't have the reputation of being a backstabber, so there's no point trying to make that the story either.

My scrapbook is not poison. If making assumptions about others, and perhaps even voicing opinions about them that targets their personal character, is poison - then you are the greatest poison this website has ever encountered by a thousand times, since you've done it to so many people without hesitation . . . and certainly not punishment, when you should have been punished and had your motives, facts and temper questioned but the fact is you control too much power to be checked at this point. Which is poison. And yes, I understand that Miz is far more your site than ours, but I'm not saying you don't have the authority; obviously you do, I just think you should have more human decency, and I also believe the website would be a lot better if you had a lot more said 'decency' - I mean, how many great mods have left due to disagreements with you? Even just since I got here, it's probably been in the dozens.

You're not helping your website with your attitude. Saying this is my own insecurity is a pointless waste of time. You should try introspection. I do it all the time, and so even as the wee little teenager I am, I've made hundreds of friends, lifetime friends among them, while living in an abuse-filled ghetto and have managed to escape said ghetto. I've matured quickly. I don't need your condescension, and you don't need to bother with it. Introspection is what you should consider.

Also, that's fine. I've given people my email if they want the website link. And quite a bit have asked. I think we're all capable of choosing if we want to RP somewhere, since our lives outside of this website (and on this website for that matter) are our own.

[Gossamer]

That's probably the whole heart of the issue right there. You are picking and choosing who's word you decide is true and who's word you take as fact. Using Taylani as an example is a horrid one because there are a great many people around who were here when she was made AS of Kenash and witnessed or were part of the uproar of all the stuff she did in that city in a period of a week that earned her ban.

She wasn't banned because of her rp actions. She was banned because of her moderator actions.

And there are a great many people who PM'd me outraged by their grades when she was made a grader under a false identity here on Miz here recently and was banned again. She ran through hundreds of threads, grading them, in just a few short days, and really awarded almost no one fair XP. It was such a typical Taylani style shitstorm.

It's also telling that she was soooo angry when she was banned as her moderator (and posted her very negative review) and then she returned this year having found no other place better than Mizahar. If it was SOOO bad why was she back?

I can only think you've never (thankfully) experienced betrayal by someone on an RPG site completely falsifying an identity and a sob story (Tony and his dead wife comes to mind) to gain attention and sympathy. I hope that never happens to you either. It's happened to a lot of us. She lied about her identity, her situation irl, and about everything about herself and that was proven by people coming forward and displaying her facebook page, her logs, and all the things she'd always said which was untrue.

I could have cared less about her RP. Her drama was not my drama and I did not even begin to make it my problem. But you seem to have adopted it as a banner and are marching under it faithfully when so many people here know the truth both about that situation in the past when the review was written and the situation that went down just recently. She deserved every name I called her in my scrap and a lot more.

But again... you've washed your hands of Mizahar and moved on. Be happy. If your willing to buy in to these things and state what you've said, then you really don't belong here.

Mizahar is my dream. I rallied the Founders to do this. I put years of blood sweat and tears into the site and will continue to do so. That's not going to change. I'm not going away any time soon. I'm responsible for the skill system, the gnosis system, and wrote a great many of the lore articles. I'll write more things too now that life has leveled out and drama has eased off.

I think you are only able to accurately cast stones and make judgements when you go out and do something similar. Until then, your just a person who falls prey to The Dunning-Kreuger Effect. I hadn't even heard of that until today when someone read your scrap and kinda chuckled about it then AIM'd me and turned me on to the concept. It's nice to have a tidy little box to fit the disgruntled yet uniformed into who think they have clearly viewed all angles and analyzed the situation. Yea. Google it.

[Gossamer]

I think I’ll just leave you with some advice instead since I know you will keep reading this thread.

1. Decide whats worth picking fights and arguing over. You have again and again stated that Mizahar is NOT something you enjoy or like. You stated it was about the people here instead and that you’ve moved on already to something bigger and better. Then why return? Why subject everyone to your angst and recruit like hell in chat? Why? Because you miss us and you miss the world and the site. If you didn't, you wouldn't keep coming back. No one would. That means you should probably stand by what you said (we don't matter and basically we suck) or else you aren’t fooling anyone and you’ve already rendered what you’ve said insincere.

2. Just argue over things that can be really well measured, like facts and stats, not values and beliefs. You are trying to force your beliefs on this site by posting in your scrap the blatant attack on me. Your argument fell apart as soon as I stood up for myself and started talking about the facts. The facts being, of course, that you are talking about things you weren't a part of and don't know anything about. Feelings, like you keep stating, aren’t really quantitative things and tactics you can believe. More often than naught we project what we believe is true on everyone around us so you see allies in people that are just trying to not hurt your feelings or take sides. After all, when it relates to this situation they are here and not where you’ve been for the last three months.

3. Timing is everything. This argument and these facts would have held far more weight BEFORE you left the game for three months and before I asked someone close to you (back then when you decided to 'take a break') and older than you to please have a discussion with you about your maturity on the site and about your incessant gossiping. Now you claim I'm the gossip and then say I project my actions upon you. Wrong. Everyone knows who stirs the pot when they sit in chat which was my initial motivation for reaching out to someone I respect and asking them to have a talk with you about trying to act a bit more adult. I know that made you mad. I know that motivated you to leave. But it had to be done. You aren't the first person I've asked someone close too for a favor from and to speak up. The difference is you ran away instead of owned your actions and tried to be a better person. Others have stuck around, thought about what they've done, and changed for the better. Some of those folks are even still here. I realized it embarrassed you. It embarrassed you because it was true. You missed your opportunity there, and waiting three months to vent that built up anger won't cauterize that wound. Its always going to be in there, festering, isn't it? That's why you came back.

4. Remember, if you are a teen, your brain has not yet fully formed. Yes, this means you. It won’t in fact until you’re around 25. I’m talking about the frontal lobe. That means you’re arguing with only partial amount of a full brain and truthfully it shows. Google says "The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that controls important cognitive skills in humans, such as emotional expression, problem solving, memory, language, judgment, and sexual behavior. It is, in essence, the “control panel” of our personality and our ability to communicate." Yea. You aren't acting like those are all fully formed and wired together right. Give yourself a break and some time.

5. Use critical rules of engagement. That means make the argument about the here and now. By bringing up the past, things you weren’t even involved in and thus don’t know jack or squat about, just makes you look stupid. Your going on heresay and most of the witnesses aren't even here to interview anymore. Get your own facts and statistics. Don’t throw someone’s well-made argument BACK at them saying they are proving your point when you in fact didn’t bother to do so with your own argument to begin with. That’s any one of about ten fallacies. A good debate class in college can help you sort that stuff out. I highly recommend one... or any number of books.

6. And finally, argue only if you can come to an agreement or seemingly get closure. If you don’t want closure, don’t proceed with the bitching and whining and above all the argument. You are in fact FINALLY doing what you should have done in the first place and that is take your toys and go home. Good for you. It's about time. Blaming your butthurt brought about by your own actions on someone like me is never a win win situation.

7. Don't argue with someone that runs a site. There's really nothing smart about that.

I hope you take this advice to heart.

[Ruari Darkwind]