Tungsten

cool

Best Buy? Lol

All of this, plus we need a roadmap that shows where we are and where we're going.

In all reality: If the server was more cooperative and horizontally-structured rather than the anemic hierarchy it is today, perhaps there would be a shred of hope for actually working together to rebuild what we used to have in this community. From my recent experience, there are many players in leadership roles who never did anything to deserve those roles and who consistently demonstrate their incompetency in those roles. Meanwhile, people like myself are discouraged from holding any player leadership role because of the constant drama generated by those same incompetent people. That same evaluation is true of a great many staff, many of whom I have great difficulty believing their promotion was based in merit rather than nepotism. The development team, the company team, and certain members of management are the only functioning thing about the staff team in my view - and that is worrying when the staff team is as big as it is. I have said many times - the name of the game is feature parity and cooperation.

maybe i'm just not seeing this "mass exodus" if they want to go back to panda land and pay $10 to own a dog, fuck 'em

i have a good time playing when i do log on have we considered the possibility that the people leaving were going to find a reason to leave and do it anyway?

Changes

Residence Address: Underpass

Cardio

false in California, one must first obtain a Firearm Safety Certificate in order to purchase a firearm. this requires doing a class. in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois one must obtain a permit to purchase. These are issued on a "may issue" basis ever since Bruen. Each of these states also has a list of permissible firearms ("MA Compliant", "CT Compliant", etc.). These three won't issue such a permit without a safety certificate which requires going to a state-certified instructor. In New York, the permit is only for residents and does not apply to NYC which has their own special permitting system.

Prologue Far From Home The orange sun bathed the rolling hills of Vinewood, as Alessia gazed upon the vineyards and mansions owned by her betters. “Not today,” she had said to herself, wishing for simple happiness. Like most, however, she would fall short of achieving this goal. Trembling, with a pistol at her side, she calmed her nerves. She wrapped her lips around the barrel of the gun, hopeful to destroy the mess she had become. For the first time since the death of her lover, she had found a moment of peace and clarity. She had come to America at the early age of sixteen— early enough to become immersed in the culture, and early enough to become fluent in the language. But this was not her home, and she knew it. With everything that had happened, though, she also knew that she couldn’t go back. The eight years since she had run away from her home in Sicily seemed to be a lifetime ago. In a fit of rage and misfit angst, she had run off with a boyfriend who she had thought would be her protector. He had been a nice boy of eighteen— blonde hair and chiseled jaw. He had behaved with a chivalrous demeanor rare for his time, when they went abroad and found themselves in Los Santos seeking fame and fortune his knightly cordiality seemed the first to go. Within that next trying year, he had cheated on her during one of his masculine conquests— a clear attempt to compensate for his lack of manhood. Shattered by the turn of events and a world away from her family, Alessia found herself on the streets and struggling to even stay alive. With her parents her other family members abroad no longer on speaking terms, Alessia walked a lonely path. Friends never came easy, given the histrionic tendencies stained onto her like tattoos etched in blood. There was little more that she wanted other than to return home to Catania, but with everything that had happened it was a pipe dream. She hadn’t heard from her family in years— perhaps they had forgotten her, or perhaps they thought she was dead. Either way, she held onto those few memories of home in the hope of some day returning. Her luck began to turn in 2018, after two years living on the street, when she found herself in the employ of a local mechanic named Giorgio. He, like Alessia, had also come from Italy— albeit from the Northern parts she had learned to despise. Giorgio, a man of thirty, had come to America in search of opportunity. Like her, he had spent some time living on the street— and so, taking pity on her, offered her shelter in exchange for an honest day’s work cleaning up his Garage. As she cleaned, she watched; as she watched, she learned. Before long, she was working alongside Giorgio and learning the tricks of being an auto mechanic. Before long, she found herself dating Giorgio— despite the age difference, they seemed to get along fairly well. Giorgio spent most of his time working overtime in the garage, trying to pull in extra money to send back home to Italy. Like Alessia, he had poverty-stricken family back home. Unlike her, however, he had an obligation to support them with the fruits of his labor. With the little spare time he had, he would frequently spend it working on various project cars. His crown jewel was a restored 1971 Corvette Stingray, and he frequented car shows with it. Alessia knew that her new boyfriend was a bit of a braggart when it came to his project cars. His work was his passion, and he put every shred of his being into that which he enjoyed most. He was also heavily involved in the car club scene in Los Santos, which eventually led to his increased involvement in the underground racing scene. Gradually, he got Alessia involved in the scene as well. By the end of 2022, Alessia was racing one of Giorgio’s custom-built Fiat 500 Abarth and smoking the competition. Tragedy struck, however, in February of 2023 when Giorgio was involved in a serious accident while racing. Giorgio and two others were killed in the accident, the other racer was paralyzed from the waist down, and both public and private property was damaged. Alessia’s life was once again turned upside down as a result. Face still raw from the near-constant stream of tears flowing down her face, she found herself unemployed and on the street once more. As slowly as she had built a happy life with Giorgio, everything seemed to collapse in little more than a moment. She had chosen to sit the race out, and instead chose to watch from the sidelines— she should have been with him but instead watched her boyfriend die from the sidelines, completely powerless to intervene. With the last cash in her pocket, she bought a gun from of a known dealer, walked up to a hill overlooking the Vinewood Hills, and waited for sunset so she could end her enduring misery. She calmed her nerves and wrapped her lips around the barrel, then pulled the trigger. Click, no gunshot. She melted into herself and realized what she had almost succeeded in, and she cursed and screamed and swore at the world for bringing her to the edge of her own undoing. What had brought her to such a degree of despair? Was she so ready to, at the ripe age of 23, go gentle into that good night? Or would she rage against the dying of the light? Gazing off into the sunset bathing the valley in a pink and orange hue, she said confidently, “Not today,” and headed back into the city that had unraveled her. (( Images generated with Stable Diffusion XL, Realistic Vision v5.4, input prompt generated from ChatGPT 3.5 using list of key facial features. All such images are AI-generated; no real person is depicted. ))

nice

marcus lee

Fair enough. Perhaps I’m seeing the forest for the trees. With this information, the policies are a bit clearer.

My fellow community members: I have a trend that perhaps has existed for a long time, but that I feel is important to address. As we all know, Game Admins also roleplay but do not submit reports in the Report Player section when they encounter rulebreaking in a roleplay scenario they are involved in. I do not intend to criticize or disrespect, I simply wish to start a conversation about what it means to be a staff member as opposed to a "regular player" and how we can reconcile these differences for the benefit of the community as a whole. This brings me to the question of what I call "private reporting", or a trend I have seen growing where members (or even staff) contact a Game Admin privately over discord, forum PM, etc. instead of using the Report Player section. For me, his has resulted in being brought into multiple Direct Message conversations and group chats to discuss potential rulebreaking by one or more parties involved in a situation rather than hashing it out in the public Report Player area. In my view, settling disputes in this way undercuts the Report Player process and creates two parallel systems of "justice" - one for staff, and one for the commoners. Ultimately, I believe this is an unhealthy practice to continue in the community and I propose the adoption of a much more horizontal, equality-driven methodology. ----- My core question is this: Should Game Admins be permitted to resolve their accusations of rule breaking privately (via PM), when everyone else must make a Report Player thread? First, i'd like to steel-man the "pro" position-- It looks bad as a community when admins are reporting regular players. From the outside, it might also make administrators seem powerless. The benefits of this are clear - it makes the staff team appear more cohesive and unified when admins are not ruling publicly against admins. After all, this is why reports against staff are handled privately - we don't want to put off the impression that any staff member is incapable, because in truth most staff are the most capable and dedicated members we have in the community. In the reverse, however, it hurts transparency when reports are handled this way. At the end of the day, we are all players and we ought to all abide by the same processes. If I am roleplaying with an off-duty administrator and they want to accuse me of rulebreaking then such a report ought to be handled the same way any other report is handled. From my perspective, staff who are not actively performing their duties ought not get any special privileges such as private reporting because it creates two distinct "classes" of player when ideally we should all be equals. Obviously, there must be some kind of private process to report staff so there aren't constant reports from people who got admin jailed or banned - but when a staff member is the accuser, I simply don't see why they should be able to resolve that accusation privately when everyone else has to do it in public where the whole community can see. ----- When a Game Admin is not performing their duties, they ought to be viewed much like an off-duty police officer - having the same rights and privileges as anyone else until they put the uniform on again. Transparency, mutual respect, honesty, and trust are the core tenets of any thriving community whether in real life or digitally. If we want our community to be healthy, thriving, and strong, then we ought to view each other more as equals instead of viewing Game Admins as a sort of de-facto aristocracy with a different system of justice. I sincerely hope this topic is not locked outright, because it is a genuine intention to have this discussion for the betterment of the community at-large. Ultimately, I am interested in seeing what the community thinks about "private reports" - perhaps i'm delusional, maybe i'm completely wrong and off-base here. Even then, however, we ought to discuss this because the community belongs to each one of us who volunteer our time as players, as application checkers, as rule enforcement, or even as managers/owners.