If you've ever seen Kitchen Nightmares, you've run into the same problem I have. The show is fine, whatever, but certain episodes would have been seriously elevated if Gordon Ramsay had been allowed to just take out some of those restaurant owners. I can't be alone in thinking that, right?

Last year we at CYS brought in the New Year with Wholesome Dog's Birthday Adventure. This year... this.

Disclaimer: This gets a little rancid.

Super Bonus Challenge: See if you can deduce which page of this storygame was written by Sent!

I discovered a thing that JJJ wrote. It told me all about this quiz-making shit. I followed the instructions, even though I disobeyed JJJ's opening lines by starting this WITHOUT a basic knowledge of any of that weird scripty shit he recommended. This was low-effort as all hell, don't ever use the classic editor for anything you care about.

AQIMFTBHOIA DLC: THE UPDATE DESCRIPTION

Since some of my questions contained outdated information and I needed to make sure everything was in working order, I unpublished this thing. Since I understand this to be something that generally fucks with ratings, I'm gonna add 5 more questions so you have more of a reason to rate it again. Also, every question now has a stupid answer. These are the ones that are so blatantly wrong/non-answers that they give you negative points... Some are better hidden than others. Aside from most of the endings being revamped, there are two new endings! One is for people who're spectacularly awful at quizzes, and the other is an ending for people who go off the beaten path... By being really  bad at quizzes.

No, I will not add a thing at the end that shows your score. If you want to know your score, you have to dick-measure in the comments yourself. Drill Sergeant Nasty has always been an accurate barometer for how well you did, in my eyes.

this is a loosely satirical and somewhat more gamey version of the game that isn't really a game. thanks to the creative juices of Bardockwest. The ORIGINAL: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/randomly-walk

In a strange world where World War I hasn't even happened yet, Law and order is the only accepted form of justice. Until NOW.

Enter Mild-Mannered Clifford T. Boot, 2nd class passenger on the world-famous vessel, the Titanic. Haunted by the shadows of his war-torn past, Clifford bought a ticket to the United States of America looking for a new life. But trouble always finds Clifford, and when an innocent widow and her child are kidnapped by a cult dedicated to resurrecting Napoleon, he has no choice but to return to his old ways and save them... Because for some motherfuckers, mass tragedy doesn't come soon enough.

Why I oughtta... You better not post that six or seven more times! also MHD is beautiful and funny and talented and I quite admire her. also ban mizal

Oh shit, looks like it's finally about to happen. And at the hands of... Everyone? I would say farewell, but the only well wishes I have for this animal involve him laying at the bottom of one.

That's more than fine. No need to spend your time on the site being me, that shit's already been done.

Some other people have said more poignantly and pointedly a lot of the things I was going to say, and I'm tired and easily distracted so I'll cut to the point of my thoughts here. Frankly, this is a bewildering thread. I'm rarely mad at Will because, like, what's there to get mad about, but I feel like I've been jerked around paragraph by paragraph hearing very broad yet very damning criticisms that Will will never actually get specific about, to the point where it just becomes tedious finger-wagging at... People who are supposed to just know who they are and act with more decorum on their own, I guess. I know there's a lot more posts in this thread, where you say a lot more-- Judging by the more concise responses, it sounds like I shouldn't bother reading them because you managed to barely expand on any of the criticisms you made. I thought it was weird that people were responding like this so strongly talking about their entire histories with the site and how this place being exactly the way it was shaped who they became, because it seemed somewhat, though not entirely, out of the scope of this topic, but then I made the heinous mistake of trying to actually comprehend what you're asking for and realizing I wasted my time if this is going to boil down to "Things generally are bad, that keep happening sometimes, I think." I guess at that point the only response is "Nuh uh, the vibes are fine!"

Plenty of people come and go, but there's like 12-15 habitual posters to keep track of on a busy day here, if that. If someone said something racist or wrong you feel needs to be corrected, that's something we can discuss. But the fact of the matter is that this place we have here, didn't come from policing based on vague guidelines trying to create some ideal "vibe" of the site. The people on the site make the vibe, and you're free to disagree with how certain members are doing it. But, for the love of God, if you have a problem, disagree with them. Admittedly, like, a solution to some of the only distinct complaints you've had are instances of language being too harsh, like people being told to kill themselves, and like... I'm sorry man that ain't feasible, that's twitter and instagram at this point. It's not only the whole world, but also a part of site culture older than any one user. Like, the oldest post I even remember reading here was either End or Madglee giving a user instructions on how to use piano wire and superglue in such a way that when they walked off the edge of their roof they would be hanging upside-down holding their own decapitated head in their hands for the next person to find them.

You can be, and usually are, the change you want to see in the world here. The older set of members were shaped by the internet of the 2010s and specifically the way that the wild west style of internet before it collided with the smarmy debate club style of more insular literary forums of the era. A lot of us had to jostle for our position in a rigid hierarchy or actively revolt against it to establish a place here, and the chips on our shoulder served us well, since there were no active mods and the only means of moderation at the time largely sprung from community effort to make the place so hostile to undesired members that they voluntarily stopped logging in. On a lowkey level, that's kind of still how people are banned because this site was coded by clockmakers in 1536 and there aren't many other ways of ensuring people don't return. But we don't have to be nearly as vitriolic (or really care that much) anymore, since anybody who is a moron but no longer entertaining will be far more inconvenienced by having to make a new account than we'll ever be by pressing a button. That's also just us, users from that general span of years.

Just us. Notably, not the new users, who admittedly I don't know as well. But I've lurked enough to know folks like Fabrikant, Flux, Clayfinger, and definitely Avo and UD, really aren't much like that. Sometimes older members egg them on and they have barely any idea what to do, it's like watching people who speak different languages bicker in pidgin. So I know this generalized sense of something being wrong and "disrespectful" sure isn't pointed at the masses.

There is a newer set of active members in this community who either are moderators or participate in moderation themselves-- Mystic, Gryphon, Sherbet, Gower, who came to this site long after the height of ugliness and were not shaped by it. Or maybe they just didn't let it shape them, I dunno, I'm senile and sometimes everything during and after 2016 feels like one very long year to me. MHD is also like, ridiculously nontoxic, and she's been here pretty close to the height of what I would say was one of this community's most toxic eras, like a bottle of baby shampoo floating in a tub of bleach. They notably don't participate in this sort of thing and don't care. But this notable shift in the trend for CYS mods arose naturally from these people being good contributors who are thoroughly pleasant to hang out with.

But let me tell you something, natural selection didn't cause flying squirrels to evolve simply by killing all the squirrels who didn't jump far enough. There had to be squirrels with the mutations necessary to gradually develop those fucked up wing flaps in the first place. A reductive process does not produce an improved environment unless the environment is already good minus some part that you'd prefer to be removed.The members who have made this a tangibly nicer place did not magically come from tone policing, the vibe shift arose from their own jolly participation, steering the existing camaraderie from our shit-talking to things that are frequently more unambiguously good. These people are cool and I like them, and I'm glad that they make up the proportion of the community that they do. It's actually kind of funny how well we all fit into this kind of symbiosis when you look at it purely from that perspective. It feels weird to only expect one facet of these people all the time just because some people in the community are more like that than others. I dunno how you expected us to interpret that other than a very frog-in-throat nervous sort of "fuck off with that whole general thing maybe I guess if you want to".

If something happened or was said that bothered you, by all means speak plainly about what happened. And be precise with your criticism or you're going to get hostility from basically everybody, because if nothing else, people are going to be mad that you beat this far around the bush and then started talking about, what, being advertiser friendly? On this gormless website? The reason we're here is because we don't have to be advertiser friendly. If there were some nazi member around that you wanted to call a piece of shit, by all means. People would have lined up to join in! But the waffling makes it kind of a them problem.

Or, maybe, now that I've been thinking about this situation for way too long trying to conceive of what in God's name the point of it is, the fact this thread started with waffling about insanely broad generalities and only got wafflier before it started spinning out into weirder and more detached suggestions from there, I'm guessing this was more Will's attempt to diplomatically leave the discord after he got burned by the spice and decided sticking to contests and the occasional forum post like he had been prior to the discord was more his speed. There is no appropriate social script I can think of for "This party isn't my tempo, I think our relationship is better at a certain distance". I would have appreciated the bluntness because then I wouldn't have needed to dissect a 170 post thread for this message at 4 AM. But Will is the first to ever do it this way, and it's clear he doesn't have that in him. All told I still think he's a good egg, even if he's said nothing in the three posts I read, because this is the interpretation I have chosen to project onto that tv static. I hope that this mutually awkward exchange doesn't permanently burn through all his good will (pun intended) with his community and he continues to contribute at his own pace. There are many positive descriptors for Will11, "in touch" has never been one of them. I'll leave the accuracy of this assessment to people who have actually been more directly involved in the conversation, though, because so far my attempt to hear Will out has yielded a certain restless annoyance, so I'm giving this thread a pass unless I notice the opportunity to do something funny.

It's only the natural response when I'm regularly assaulted by vegetal dogwhistles

I like how she turns into flesh when she finally touches the L*ghtoid for real.

I have summoned a Mormon in front of these people, and despite them being able to talk to it themselves, they still do not believe.

He refers to the Ars Goetia, a book in the occult Christian tradition which teaches that a righteous magus can conjure demons, and bind and coerce them to perform benevolent or useful acts. In other words he is saying that you are threatening to commit sorcery.

There is a strong sherbian energy to this

I wouldn't know because I'm always aware of my tongue