“I think my book would be a good fit for your house–”
“Sorry, we’re not accepting romances.”
“Romance? This…this is a paranormal horror. There’s not even enough humans to have a romance.”
“I don’t know, the bog monster really presents itself as a love interest.”
“The bog monster. Are you serious?”
“It’s got those big arms and a mysterious air to it. Ladies love that.”
“What? Ladies don’t… No, look, that’s not the intention here. It’s an eldritch abomination in the styling of Lovecraft. I think horror fans will really enjoy it.”
“I understand, but I also think romance fans will really enjoy it, making it a romance. We’re not accepting any romances.”
“But that’s–I didn’t write a romance! It’s not a romance!”
“It’s romance-presenting. We’re going to have to pass.”
“Hey, I can’t find my book on your shelf?”
“oh, yeah, it was a romance.”
“…yes? I know, I marketed my book as a romance and made sure it was immediately distinguishable from your other selections like you asked. I even took the time to keep underage readers away from my book. So why is it gone?”
“We don’t want our audience to read romance period.”
“Since when? You’ve never said anything about the other romance books, even the ones that pretended to be Biographies. I’m actually following your rules!”
“People won’t recommend our bookstore if we have even one romance. We’re throwing them all away, marketed correctly or not.”
“But my book is on your shelf! My readers know my book is on your shelf! How are my readers supposed to find my book if you’re banning it?”
“Not my problem. You shouldn’t have written a romance.”
on the subject of bots, runescape had literally the best way of dealing with their botting problem:
if an account was detected using bot software, they would be instantly teleported to a hearing from a witchfinder general style npc, where other players could watch and throw rotten tomatoes at them. then the audience could vote on how the person on trial would be killed as punishment, and THEN the botter was permanently banned afterwards. it was the funniest shit ever
tbt when they had no banning system so the gms just teleported hackers into The Void™ for eternal punishment
That was a whole other problem in itself, due to the whole “disc of returning” debacle.
Basically there was an item (disc of returning) that let regular players visit these “banned” players in the void. You could come and go freely and still talk to any banned people there. The only problem was that this item was totally tradeable/droppable, and people visiting were getting tricked by the banned players into giving the item up to them, or dropping it so it would despawn.
Basically people were pulling some body-snatcher shit, and banned players were taking the place of innocent players through the disc of returning to get back into the game, and leaving behind the innocent ones trapped in their place. Runescape was fucked up lmao
Useless 