Be funny if Brendan vetoes this.

Although part of me thinks it’s improper to compel someone to be a Soul without them desiring to, I’m also not super thrilled about having to figure out what the legal difference, if any, between the two pokes would be if you came back. So I’m inclined to think desouling should be reserved to bans.

I don’t see the problem; I would expect desoulment to return me to the same state as someone who has just joined and gained the ability to post to the blog but hasn’t had their intent to join processed yet.

Seems plain enough on the surface: you wouldn’t be an admin on your return, and since dynasty names are informal we’d still call your next dynasty your Fifth, if you returned and had one. And the current dynasty’s mechanics can still refer to pokes as “the Emperor” of their past dynasties.

Shame to see this done without any explicit reason, though: if we’re meant to conclude that you’re deeply disappointed at all FOR-voters on the Power proposal, and we should quote this to our grandchildren as a cautionary tale against mucking around or voting inattentively, you should maybe say this. But if it’s what you want, for whatever reason, fair enough.

(You can also idle out and still have this take effect, under “If a Proposal contains a provision that targets a specifically named Idle Soul…”, if you’re not intending to vote on anything while you’re here.)

@Kevan If a new player joined with the name of “pokes” ten minutes after this enacted, would that person then get to be the emperor of the fifth dynasty of pokes after winning? What if an existing player changed their name to pokes by proposal?

I don’t know about this; it seems like a minor act of vandalism to the historical record in service of a very murky rhetorical point.  on the principle that we can’t make people play if they don’t want to but we really shouldn’t make a habit of disensouling ourselves whenever we feel the need to make a dirty protest on the front page of the game.

in the absence of any reason. It’s not clear whether this reflects a desire along the lines of “I just don’t want to be part of BN anymore” or if it’s a prelude to some vague scam, or something else.

For my part I would think that deregistering entirely is a relatively permanent move and not a replacement for idling.

Apologies for not expanding on this yet, I haven’t had access to a computer until now but wanted to put the proposal in sooner rather than later.

I really don’t think it’s historical vandalism to do this, and that the problems brought up are neatly solved by considering that there’s still a person named pokes who happens to not also be a soul. I assumed that this doesn’t affect anything internal to EE, and that there would still be a registered poster named pokes as well, which might preempt someone registering with the duplicate name? And if it doesn’t preempt it, nothing’s stopping someone from registering with my name now anyway. If nothing else, it would still be rude to impersonate someone else, even if they’re not a soul.

The most proximal, urgent reason I want to do this is because I think it’s bad legal judgement to sign any contract that someone can unilaterally change, and here I have done so (on a smaller scale, of course). It’s too late to not sign it, but I can at least request to be let loose from it.

I did object to this state of affairs, but this is really not meant to be a protest. There are minor factors, both personally and specific to BN, that are making me want to take a break—but it doesn’t total up to something worth, say, writing up a manifesto of gripes. Trying to get out of the unilateral contract dovetails with wanting the break, and I guess now’s a good time to start it.

@redtara: I promise there’s no scam here. I also don’t see why this has to be permanent? All I would be is not a soul, and everyone here has already become a soul from being a not-soul before.

Ironically, looking to see why the ruleset doesn’t have the plain old “players may cease to be players” clause any more - which was there since Round 1 as a reassuring statement of the obvious that BlogNomic is just a game that can always be walked away from - pokes repealed it last year.

Hah! Something something about my petard indeed. I might still think it’s a net gain to remove but turns out I was at least wrong about “can of course be done via [...] CfJ”.

I think it’s still a fair assumption to make that BlogNomic remains a game that anyone can walk away from at any time, by announcing this, in the same way that Monopoly is despite not having a line about it in the rules. If Brendan imposes “every idle and non-idle player has to give Brendan $50 of actual cash each week”, the bottom end of that is people choosing to walk away from the game, not Brendan pursuing real-world legal action to get his $50.

There’s something knotty here about the relationship between the person and the player - the ruleset doesn’t really acknowledge them as separable concepts, which makes it difficult to formulate a solution to the question of what happens when a person has a past in blognomic but the player associated with them does not, or vice-versa.

Probably too niche to be really worth defining, although if we had a separate “errata” section for really really long-tail ruleset stuff I might argue to put something in there.

For what it’s worth, pokes, whatever’s propelling you away from the game at the moment, I enjoy playing with you, and I hope it brings you back in this direction sooner or later.

I have no desire to quash this proposal just to be a jerk, but is there any provision in the ruleset that actually says that only Souls can play BlogNomic?

It’s pretty well implied by everything that someone could do being qualified with “A soul may…”

Yes, and Soul is a synonym for player.

CoV

Now that pokes has explained himself, I’m more willing to let him feel he’s not bound to a contract. I definitely don’t consider anyone bound in real life terms, but it’s reasonable if he wants to guarantee it. The ruleset is already messing with idle souls in a couple of ways, so this is really the only way he gets to be called a ‘muggle’.

It’s funny re-reading my last comment, which, when you don’t know the specific way to parse it because you didn’t just write it, reads like total word salad. An accidental garden path sentence.

:(

Hmm, CoV, hang on a second. I want to make sure it’s still legal to perform the Atomic Action of enactment if the person who created it is not a Soul.

“If the Admin enacting a Votable Matter reaches a step which cannot be applied immediately… that step is ignored for the purposes of enactment.” Okay, cool. CoV again.