Tiny Chat People

this is exactly why a temporary character limit would be helpful. right now the time between every update is a slog of Discourse™ between all the suggesters and it doesn't seem like there's any sign of us letting up by us voluntarily showing restraint. our indecision and infighting in the suggestions bleeds into the mood of the updates, and (probably worst of all) makes the content of the updates center around frog-crimes more than the tcps. we could use a clean break away from that if we want lighthearted good times.


give the tcps things. have them interact. let them make up their minds and form their own thoughts on things. when they ask us things, answer them with what they need to hear without putting our hand on the scale so much.

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Spoilerthe first letters were helpful for transparency and apologizing. but we're still apologizing and it's getting kind of uncomfortable because now it feels like we're trying to manipulate them into a favorable response to our terrible actions without first doing the work of getting our shit together. we absolutely should not be listened to, trusted or forgiven yet. all the words in the world apologizing are worthless if they aren't backed by a change in our actions, behaviors and attitudes - and we haven't managed to do that yet. what would be much more trustworthy for our cats making their minds up about what happened is hearing fern's POV (or grind's if fern makes it to grind and tells them all about it).

A hurdle toward every individual suggester trying to impulsively impose their own vision of how to perfectly placate the tcps all at once might act well for getting us to learn to be cohesive. if it doesn't, well at least we won't be doing as much harm by pulling the cats in dozens of different directions at once.

After all, the breaking point for fern was an impulsive question at a really inappropriate time overwhelming them. I think it would be much easier to decide whether to do or not to do a thing if it's cut and dry.
("revive gnome and drag corpse home" is much easier to argue for or against than "I think we should try to revive the gnome. it might be unpleasant at first, but it could, in the end, ultimately be helpful to fern's state of mind, and for learning about the world we're in, for reasons a, b, and c...." which some people actually start to take reasonably after enough reasonable-seeming justification.)


So I think we should restart at square one of communication and build up to long form communication once we prove we can cooperate enough to use it responsibly. that way we won't keep tripping over all the words we leave out everywhere and crushing the tcps in the process.


and yes i realize the irony of making a long explanation for shortening discourse.

you have a good point and i'm not against a temporary limit, but i'd like to emphasize the word temporary