Since I'm about to post a little and try something in the MU* world again, I figure I should create this list so people know who the hell I am/was.

Current

None

• Life changed. I'm a Mercy main in Overwatch, though! NanbanJim#1178

Past

The Greatest Generation

• Bastian Hertz (WWII, Poland, Belgium, France, Greece), Fallschirmjäger NCO and my main.
• Jukka (Winter War, D), my first TGG character.
• Seppo (Winter War, D), crotchety old Jäger in the Winter War.
• Sixten (Winter War), Einar (Winter War, D)
• Vilhelm (Wehrmacht), Kunstler (SS)
• Dowd (ANZAC/Newfie WWI, D), the little Newfie who fell in love with a machinegun (according to the trench rumours, anyway)
• Thompson (ANZAC WWI, D), Lee (ANZAC WWI)
• and maybe a few others

Ravenswood Academy

• Lucian, Luck-based student, joined at the hip with Aya
• Twelve-Gauge (staff)

Shang

• Irja, with the trolly kinks list. I was there to connect with OOC friends.

Naruto Rivalry MUSH

• Irii, the samurai-musume.

Battlestar Kharon (I think)

• Panda (short for Pandorian), the dumb Marine.

The Reach

• Tolik, aka Bob, is make think he is being the really cool guy. (Russian Mage)
• Thomas, handyman and Malleus Hunter.

Serenity MUSH (I think)

• Jander, a former Black Company mercenary.

BSSM MUX

• Valk, staffbit who helped run the game into the ground.

... and a few dozen other characters lost to time.

Oh, I'm also Nanban Jim pretty much everywhere.

@HelloProject said in What does advancement in a MU* mean to you?:

And while I don't claim that my solution will work or even necessarily be considered all that great, I do think that there is value in trying and discussing.

This. This this this this this. This motherfucker, do you speak it.

There is so much social pressure on not being wrong, especially in geek circles, that what passes for "discussion" all to often more closely resembles monkeys throwing poo.

If you want to talk about why something can't work, FFS do yourself a favour and first come up with the same depth of reason as to how it could work.

OK, I'll get off my MU Soapbox now.

This is how I started writing my how-to on AWS:

So you want to run a MU*, for free, for a year?
OK, first things first:
KNOW UP FRONT THAT YOU WILL PAY OUT YOUR BUTTHOLE IF YOU GO OVER, AND NOBODY CARES THAT YOU DID NOT INTEND TO!!!!!
You are entering your credit card info in this process, so if you have any doubt whatsoever in the slightest that you might not remember to cancel services in the 11th month, or that if something about that goes wrong that you can't afford the hosting, don't do this. And for God's sake, do NOT do this for someone else.
I feel like I need to say this again in another way: DO NOT go over your 750 hours!! AWS pricing is stupid expensive (because it's not intended for things that 1.) take up as few resources as a MU*, and 2.) don't make you money).
So you've read all that and you think you're responsible/financially masochistic enough to ride this dragon.

And that's where I stopped. I started thinking of all the people I know from MUdom. I started thinking about me in my twenties. I started thinking about how I'd feel finding out someone had followed my AWS How-To with the very best of intentions, for some reason overran the 750 free-tier hours and were financially ruined by it (and let's be honest, a lot of us got into MUs because free was all we could afford, balancing on a razor's edge financially).

I can't mentally or emotionally handle that. Thinking about it makes me physically ill.
Even moreso, one of the very few demands my God puts on me is to love others. It's not my problem if you get yourself into trouble... but it's not very loving if I give you instructions I know have a real chance of causing you ruin.

Yeah, I recall @Cheesegrater mentioned it's not that expensive... That's awesome, but with the byzantine options provided at this point to me I can't see how he gets the price he pays, and so I can't in good conscience at all help people get embroiled into something I can't get them out of and can't be sure they won't get themselves into trouble with.

So my how-to is simple: If you want to use AWS for hosting a MU*, it's possible. The licensing is byzantine, but the Free Tier stuff is marked pretty well. You want a Red Hat LINUX distro, you'll need to set up a certificate in PuTTY (they have instructions), SSH in and sudo-yum a developer package, and you're on your way.

If you have the wherewithal to figure it out from there, you'll have the wherewithal to figure out how not to get yourself in trouble.

Sorry guys, I know I essentially promised a few of you a guide. It just gives me the willies thinking about how badly this could turn out, and I figured I could at least give that explanation.

In summary, AWS is a valid option for running a MU in test/dev/pilot-program... if you can figure it out yourself. IMO you're better off running TinyMUX on Windows, or signing up for some of the low cost options like Linode or DigitalOcean.

So it's 2019.
I figured out this past year what needed to be done:
Either stand up the rotting DB next to a clean one and do a manual copy-paste job, or do the same with the flatfile.

The first option is simpler. @decompile and then swap some #DBREFs before pasting into the new game.
However, the rotting DB is, well, rotting. There's no guarantee that what I get on an @dec is going to be accurate, especially as uptime increases. Any scheme to reboot it more rapidly is bound to cause even more delay.

The second option is more confusing, but the DB can't rot if I'm opening the flatfile in a text editor.
The formatting of attributes and DBREFs isn't too bad, though. This is pretty doable. Even for unmotivated me!

I think I've found my future for it, too. Twilight: 2000 has been a beloved game of mine since my teenage years. I've had some repeated online interest in it from friends and fellow T2k junkies over the year. I periodically ask these fans to pick a "sine qua non" for playing T2k. So far it's Humvees, distilling fuel, going home/rescuing home, lots of guns, and radiation danger.

Distilling fuel and rads are the only ones of that which would need some coding... and I can see some places in existing code that I might start from for these systems.

I was playing on TGG. It was the Battle of Britain campaign. I remember I was playing a Polish flier. Now, something you have to know is that TGG's aerial combat was a bit like running someone's EVE Online backhaul spreadsheet in your head, in real time. Except it was actually fun flying by text readouts. Fun, but challenging.
I thought I'd learned the flight system.
I thought I was able to fly my plane at 10 feet above the ground after a battle.
In fact, I thought I could fly it at 6 feet. It looked really cool, people were cheering.
And then something happened and I crashed and had to use one of my 3 +revives.

My narrative explanation was that it wasn't a crash... my pilot just landed on a street and hopped into a pub for a pint, and the revive represented military discipline coming down. XD

Looking for players/staff from TGG (The Greatest/Lost Generation).
I've fired up the database again, 5+ years after my last attempt.
Not sure I'll do a public game with it, but I figure some people wouldn't mind logging in to the old girl again.

This just blew my mind. Especially with the comment I saw it tweeted under:
"Using salt circle runes to trap an A.I. car is possibly the most cyberpunk thing ever."
https://twitter.com/Gossenphilosoph/status/884769533810143237

Distracted by D&D campaign.

@Thenomain Wow... then you're one of the people who helped me RP with friends and family when I moved away for college. And for getting me into this hobby, which helped teach me that I hate programming, kind-of like scripting, and really like networks.

Thanks!!

OK, I was going through my downloaded pictures folder and found this screencap of one of the most badass moments of TGG. This was from the Pacific campaign, wherein some Japanese planes--a Zero (piloted by the NPC Yoshi) escorting a Betty bomber (piloted by Ichiro NPC) were attacking the PCs ship, the USS McCalla.

This is an example of the code in the MUSH, and how the game so beautifully added amazing code to RP.

So it's 2019.
I figured out this past year what needed to be done:
Either stand up the rotting DB next to a clean one and do a manual copy-paste job, or do the same with the flatfile.

The first option is simpler. @decompile and then swap some #DBREFs before pasting into the new game.
However, the rotting DB is, well, rotting. There's no guarantee that what I get on an @dec is going to be accurate, especially as uptime increases. Any scheme to reboot it more rapidly is bound to cause even more delay.

The second option is more confusing, but the DB can't rot if I'm opening the flatfile in a text editor.
The formatting of attributes and DBREFs isn't too bad, though. This is pretty doable. Even for unmotivated me!

I think I've found my future for it, too. Twilight: 2000 has been a beloved game of mine since my teenage years. I've had some repeated online interest in it from friends and fellow T2k junkies over the year. I periodically ask these fans to pick a "sine qua non" for playing T2k. So far it's Humvees, distilling fuel, going home/rescuing home, lots of guns, and radiation danger.

Distilling fuel and rads are the only ones of that which would need some coding... and I can see some places in existing code that I might start from for these systems.

Distracted by D&D campaign.

Well I got the Linode set up, with a $20 credit (there was a code, PodcastInIT2018) and giving @ixokai a $20 credit for his referral code too. Quite nice!

It's currently just a blank Fedora 27 box.

I'm enjoying it already, pretty easy to set up. Makes AWS look like the Byzantine empire.

@apu I think he's right, I think it was Baggy

@cupcake I think it's going to take a pain in the ass rebuild, but yeah... once I'm done I'll want to show it off.

If @EUBanana gets it up and running stable (me I think there's unrecoverable database corruption, but I'm sooooo not on his level haha), well that'll be his call for his.

I'll say this right here, I'm certainly sending him the flatfile of whatever rebuild I complete.

6 months to the day just about, and I've set up Linode.com account (thanks @ixokai !) to get the old girl back up and rebuilt from careful copypasta.

At my pace, this is going to take a while. Like, it might be Christmastime before it's done. But figured I should say something on it.

Yeah, he's not just some right-brained fop though. The guy's working on his own self-driving car, and has done other technically tricky things. What I read wasn't clear but it does seem like he turns on the AI for his unit inside the circle during the video.

I suppose in my excitement I didn't lay down a 30,000 word litany of disclaimers and of-courses.
Or linked the article I found for myself on Vice I found via an easy TinEye search.

Or left the fun verbiage and said "Hey fellow RPG fans on an RPG forum about playing RPGs in old text-based servers, does this not look like the kind of thing that would work in a cyberpunk dystopia like many of the RPGs we enjoy, and does that not have cool parallels to the fantasy RPGs we also enjoy? What ho!"

Nah I'll just leave it as "HEAD ASSPLODEY WOW" and add this quote from the tech-savvy artist: "I've got totally carried away in the research, and ended up writing a bunch of my own software, rigging up cameras and building neural networks to reproduce some of the more interesting currents in the field. Like the trap, I wouldn't entirely trust what I've built, but the principles are sound."

And I've shut this down for the time being. I want to thank everyone for showing interest, old and new. Most importantly, thanks to @EUBanana for advice and providing latest DB. And, you know, coding the bloody thing!

What's next for me is to eventually get some alternate hosting, probably Linode. Fire up the provided DB, decompile the Master Room objects, and recompile on a brand new TinyMUSH server. Probably I'll have to recreate some objects too, I think basically for a while I'll have to side-by-side run new and old DBs, with the old version in a "Groundhog's Day" scenario with no dump interval (so it doesn't save the DB) and a daily kill/restart job.

So yeah. Sometime 2018.

This was a really cool experience. It was fun seeing the old girl up!
Seeya not-so-soon!

This just blew my mind. Especially with the comment I saw it tweeted under:
"Using salt circle runes to trap an A.I. car is possibly the most cyberpunk thing ever."
https://twitter.com/Gossenphilosoph/status/884769533810143237

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.