literally just a throwaway

And yet, I have never abused a child. I have zero interest in having a sexual or intimate relationship with a minor. Because all of what I mentioned above is just writing. It's fiction. It's not real.

You can believe me or not, but the reason I know that writing contentious content doesn't make you a fucking pedophile, is because I write contentious content myself, i don't abuse kids, and you're never going to convince me otherwise. I have been writing this kind of thing almost as long as I have been roleplaying (Over ten years!) and I have never in my life had an inappropriate relationship with someone underage. Most of my roleplay partners for the past few years have been 25+, actually, as it turns out, and I prefer it that way. Young, immature partners are annoying to write with. So stop trying to convince me. I'm living proof that it isn't true.

I've had to stay quiet about this matter for so long for a number of complicated legal reasons. I'm not going to talk about those, because they're between Cherp administration and their lawyer. My hands were tied, but now they're not. It's time to address the elephant in the room. I do in fact believe the Thell sockpuppet theory. I, as someone who has worked with Thell for a considerable length of time on two separate projects, have seen a distinct lack of evidence that Insolent is or was a real and separate person from Thell.

two adults engaging in Daddy/Mommy and little play in an IRL BDSM scene

two adults rping a daddy/mommy and little over RP

And especially after a few times of making a genuine effort only to be rejected, or just have things fizzle out and fail? You invest less and less in each new match, and start looking for reasons to cull them before they hurt you. So just like tinder, cherp is full of people who aren't looking for sustained, consistently rewarding connections with people. It's full of people who are low key disdainful of other users, but rely on them for the validation high of getting new matches. And just like tinder, I don't think the majority of people in this situation will realize or admit it.

Because people aren't getting on cherp (or tinder) saying "I'm just gonna match with some losers and ghost them to feed my ego." What this actually looks like, when people are doing it unintentionally, is getting a rush from a new match, and then feeling a "low" right after, because the match itself is the "high" you were actually chasing. But you assume the "low" (especially combined with other "negative" feelings, like the anxiety/apprehension of introducing yourself to a stranger and seeking their approval) is actually a "bad vibe" and try to find some failing, some fault, some red flag, to justify rejecting this person so you can return your focus to seeking the actual exciting part, getting new matches.

And just like tinder, the handful of people trying to use this app to connect to other humans for its intended purpose, are genuinely putting their best selves out there and having it rejected over and over again. Sure, it's not real rejection because their partner was never actually interested in them, never actually interested in anyone, their partner got what they wanted from them when they matched and then villainized them for wanting anything at all. But it still hurts like real rejection, and they're still stuck, kinda, because in spite of how much it sucks tinder is still the best way they've found to get dates.

So yeah, idk, maybe when you're at the point where you genuinely believe that your partner in a collaborative writing project expecting you to be willing to talk to them, at all, about said project, is an "appalling" amount of entitlement? You should consider whether you even like to RP.

Courtesy of Thell --

Last week we talked about user accounts and said that this week we’d talk about the new software stack, so let’s do that. On both new and old Cherp, the core technologies are staying roughly the same - we use PHP as the backend language that handles all the server side logic. This interacts with PostgreSQL as our database engine, and Redis acts as a caching layer between the two for information that takes a little while to get but that’s accessed often; things like your unread count, chat status, etc (Coincidentally, this is also the cause of the ghost unread bug - it caches your unread count for 24 hours unless it changes, but grace period and account deletes don’t decrement the counter. More on that in a minute). On the frontend, we currently use React, an abominable monstrosity that we’re glad to be dropping. Let’s talk about PHP first. Cherubplay was originally written in Python, but nobody really knew enough Python to fix that code up when it started breaking. As such, current Cherp uses PHP 7.4. This is about to leave active support meaning it’ll be receiving security updates only, meaning that for this rewrite, we’re switching to PHP 8. Right now, we’re coding with 8.0 in mind, but by the time we release, we’ll be on 8.1. It’s quite likely that we’ll be able to upgrade through all the 8.x versions after this with little issue. On top of PHP, current Cherp uses a microframework called Slim to provide some API routing stuff. For new Cherp, we’re using Laravel, something most PHP developers reading this will be familiar with. Personally, I prefer the older system (albeit with some major code touch ups needed), but that’s because I find MVC as a paradigm overly convoluted for what it does - but given Laravel is extremely widely used, and will make recruiting new devs easier in future, that’s what we’re going with. It gives us a lot of tools to work with, and so far, is making some things easier and some things harder. React is what you use right now to see the site. It’s awful, and we hate it. It’s a Javascript framework created by Facebook. For the new version, Laravel gives us a set of tools called Blade that lets us write the frontend in PHP. On top of this, there’s also a system called Livewire that we’re adding - this uses Blade as a basis, but adds some fancy dynamism on top so that you can have a similar experience to what you already have with dynamic elements. This way there’s a lot less Javascript involved, which means it’ll be easier on your computer and, if you’re one of those users who use mobile, your battery won’t drain as fast either. PostgreSQL (or Postgres, nobody can apparently decide how to refer to it) is the database we use. SQL is widely understood at this point by most techy people, but for those unaware, it stands for Structured Query Language. Ignore the people who tell you it’s pronounced “sequel”, they’re wrong and should be shunned (EDITOR'S NOTE: This opinion is incorrect). The most popular databases of this type are Postgres and MySQL (or MariaDB, a fork of MySQL that has a nicer license and which you should really be using instead). MySQL/MariaDB is a lot more popular than Postgres, but Postgres has a lot of extra flexibility. Most people don’t need this, but current Cherp uses Array datatypes. Arrays are very powerful, but - whether it’s just because of the way PHP forces you to use them and they’re better in other languages, or because the datatype itself kinda sucks - they’re absolutely awful to work with. For the rewrite, we’re keeping Postgres - even without using any of the advanced features, it’s powerful and fast, and if you give me 10 minutes alone in a room with it, I can make it do some impressive things. What we are doing is getting rid of arrays, and moving the stuff we use them for into a separate table. It’s one of those things that’s paradoxically both messier and cleaner, but it’ll reduce the load on PHP when it has to explode or implode the arrays when pulling/pushing to the database. Redis is also staying, though exactly how much use it’ll get right now is

debatable, and can only be answered once we’ve learned a little more about how Laravel handles things. Right now, we use it for login sessions and, as mentioned, caching. For those who don’t know, caching is where you store something that takes a long time to get to a faster place so it can be called faster. For example, let’s say I log in for the first time in a while. When I log in, the top bar needs to show how many unread chats I have, so it asks the database to count how many chats have me as a participant. Then, it filters these to find ones where my chat_status is marked “unread”. Then it gives the count back. Each step of this is slow, and takes time. It’s also something that’s requested on every page load, so rather than do it every time, we put a step in at the beginning and at the end - check Redis first. Redis stores everything in memory using key-value pairs. Redis has up to 16 “databases” - let’s say the unread_counts is database 2. So, it tells Redis to check database 2 for a value with key [whatever my user ID is]. If it’s there - it just spits the number out. If not, it’ll run through the process of asking the database, and when it’s done, it gives the number to Redis. There’s a few other places where this is done, and a few places where the cached number is ignored and forces another database check to refresh it, but broadly speaking, Redis cuts the performance cost of the site to about 20% of what it’d otherwise be. And there we go - a summary of what we’re using, both for the new site and the old one, as well as a little overview of what it does. If you’re in the Cherp Discord server (TT make this a link) (EDITOR'S NOTE: Ok, done), feel free to hop into the coding channel and I’ll answer any more in depth questions you have.

Oh same. I mean. God. There are people I've known from the 90s we still only call each other by screen names.