Bisexual male here.

When I first started MU*ing, I played female characters exclusively. This
was after I discovered (quite by accident, after creating a character with a
gender-neutral name) that female characters get a hell of a lot more
attention than male ones. This was in late 1996/early 1997 and being openly
gay/bi wasn't cool back then, so I became OOCly female as well. This had
the side-effect of allowing me to talk a little bit about RL stuff without
weirding people out. For example, I remember telling the story of how I had
sucked my date's room-mate's dick while I was waiting for him (the date) to
get out of the shower (he was in there for a good 40 minutes), and became an
instant hero to every guy on the game. To an attention starved, lonely,
confused scrawny bi kid stuck in a hellhole college where he didn't know
anyone, this was like mana from heaven, and I had a blast with it.

At least for a while.

Then I got tired of the BS.

You get tired of people assuming that just because you were willing to RP
with someone that you must be willing to fuck them, too.

You get tired of nearly every situation in which you find yourself alone
with a male on a game, turning sexual, no matter how hard you try to steer
it in other directions and no matter how inappropriate/unlikely the
relationship might be from an IC perspective.

You get tired of being stalked, watched and monitored because apparently
women cannot be trusted to not turn into whores the moment their man is not
around to keep an eye on them. It's amazing how quickly you can go from
being the big damn hero, to being a dirty whore. All it takes is RPing with
someone that your partner doesn't like or feels like he is competing with.

You get tired of dealing with supposed adults who don't seem to know
anything about women. I'm talking zip. Squat. Nada. Rien. Nothing.
It's not like I have any special insight into it being a man and all, but
some of the things I have had people tell me during TS made me want to shake my head in bewilderment and shout "WTF, dude, are you even from this
planet!? A woman's body doesn't work like that! I suck dicks and I know
that!!"

These days I find that I prefer to play hetero male characters. I usually
try to avoid relationships, but there have been a few situations in which a
relationship grew organically from RP so in those cases, I discussed it with
my partner so we could mutually decide, in advance, where things were headed and how we were going to handle it.

I have never explored gay male relationships online and I probably never
will, and that's because I am in a RL relationship with a wonderful guy and
I don't feel the need to vicariously explore that side of my personality.

P.S. Sorry if this rambles, but I am a bit drunk.

@iluvgrumpycat said in RL Anger:

I really love how you can go to the marketplace, qualify for a certain amount of help towards a premium. And then STILL be paying over a hundred bucks a month for a single person with a 6000 dollar deductible. Like....isn't it just cheaper to pay out of pocket unless something really, really, really bad happens? 'cause I'll never spend 6k a year for just going to the dr when I get the seasonal crud.

It's cheaper, until something serious does happen, or you require prescription medications that cost hundreds of dollars per month.

Do you mean:

edit(<string>,%b,_)

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@wizz said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I don't find the toxicity WORA was known for "entertaining" and I have a pretty low opinion of people who do, and it frustrates and discourages me that big meltdowns like the UH X-Men drama tend to draw new faces who want to see more of the same.

Yeah. I get that @Arkandel has no intention of doing away with the hog pit. That's the mods' right and it is not my intention to beat a dead horse.

But I will say this: We talk sometimes about the future of MUSHing, about how hard it is to draw in new players, etc. As someone who knows writers who might be interested, who has a daughter who some day might be interested... I can't in good conscience invite them into a gaming community that is so darn toxic. And I'm not just talking about MSB here, because the same attitude that feeds the Hog Pit pervades the games too.

Now it's not all bad. But it is pretty disheartening.

In fairness, it's not a MUSH problem, it's merely a reflection of how entitled and self centered we have become as a society.

Go to any MMORPG, even ones like LoTRO which do not even offer PVP as an excuse to attract asshats, and you'll find the exact same attitudes. Any forum lacking determined moderation will quickly turn into an all-out 'forum PVP' zone. Work with the general public like I do and you'll find the exact same attitudes in many of your customers. It's becoming the norm, both online and off.

Granted, it's much worse in the MU* community given it's smaller size but I think this is due to the fact that we, as a community, are not well people. It speaks volumes about the state of our community when the only forum for open discussion of MUs and MUing focuses so heavily on vengeance, shaming and WrongFun. It's no wonder there are so few new people coming into the hobby. Between the general toxicity of the community and the craziness of so many of the folks running games, it's a wonder there are any active games left at all.

Thanks to this conversation, I was up until 3am working on space code

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

But if that's the case, then let's stop pretending this is a moderated forum. We have admins, not mods. Accept the reality that it's WORA 2.0 - sink-or-swim, (almost) no holds barred - and continue to deal with the consequences. Either someone will eventually create an IGU2.0 that is moderated, or we'll all just accept what we got and not have to have dozens of pages arguing about how different "factions" within the board would like it to be.

Faraday nailed it. Let's stop pretending that this place is in any way a positive influence on MUs and call it what it really is, WORA 2.0. It's obvious by now that no matter how often this topic comes up, nothing is ever going to change here. Those of us looking to discuss MUs in a constructive way will just have to learn to deal, or find another venue.

P.S. I voted Neutral, because I generally approve of Auspice and Ganymede, but not the other two.

@packrat said in Phoenix, Arizona:

So I am going to be in Phoenix Arizona for most of a week in late February thanks to my new job. I will be busy with work and being jetlagged but will probably have some time to explore, can anyone recommend anything particularly interesting, things to see or do?

Yes, see Las Vegas!

@auspice said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

Who wants to learn Python with me and build an awesome space system in Evennia? I've had Ideas for a couple years now.

Way ahead of ya there, been working on my Expanse game for a while now Will be happy to help out any way I can. Just ask.

I have absolutely no idea!

Ruby is so similar (IMO) to Python that I was able to start programming for Ares (simple stuff, obviously) without knowing the first thing about Ruby. I just followed the examples in the code and looked up things online when I needed to. I've since taken the time to learn it properly and I like it so much that it has become my go-to scripting language. In fact, I am using it for my current Rhost based project, which makes extensive use of Rhost's RESTful API and execscript functionality.

Oh, and if you want to see what picky looks like, try running your Ruby code through Rubocop

There's actually an Evennia based project in the works based on the Fallout franchise. I'm not 100% certain how far along it is since I only just got involved with it a week ago and all I've really done is work on their D20/OGL chargen, but what I've seen so far looks rather nice.

I'll leave it to the game owner to advertise the address and such.

Edit: I've been told that it's not Fallout per se, it's based on the Exodus RPG, which started out as an official Fallout game but after legal disputes with Bethesda and Interplay, was ultimately released with a generic post-Apocalyptic setting instead. The game owner described it as "Fallout with the serial numbers filed off."

Slightly off topic but related in a roundabout way.

What I find weird about this whole situation is that we've had MU*s that featured "real" programming languages (which were easily comparable in capabilities to, say, Python or Ruby, but without all of the mainstream support) for as long as we've had MUDs themselves and yet these have largely been ignored in favor of MUSH. What changed to suddenly make ditching MUSH in favor of Ares (or Evennia), a good idea?

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

20-30 years ago I would absolutely agree. Now? MUSHcode is so far divorced from modern programming paradigms and languages that any concepts you learn from it don't translate very well.

I ran into this from the opposite direction. I came into MUSHing with some QuickBASIC and Turbo Pascal experience, neither of which helped me learn MUSHcode. In fact, the experience led me to learn C so I could hard code the things I wanted and avoid MUSHcode almost entirely.

That was back in 1998. Since then, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with MUSHcode and can do pretty much anything I need to do in it provided I am sufficiently motivated to do so. I still much prefer a 'real' programming language though.

@roz said in Talking 'Bout Ares:

Newer codebases removing command prefixes is literally the best thing to happen to this hobby in like 20 years.

I will admit that I was dead set against the removal of command prefixes at first, but then I took a very long break from MUSH to work with Evennia, and when I returned, I found them to be terribly frustrating to use, mainly because I kept forgetting to type them. It was enough to make me grit my teeth in frustration and curse whoever it originally was that thought having WHO, who and +who commands on the same game made sense.

I have noticed that one of the most common complaints that I hear about MUSH on the Evennia Dev site, is the "weird and confusing" command syntax. This includes command prefixes, switches and use of the "=" sign to separate args.

Same basic function. The only difference in the complexity is the Evennia version supports the use of player-defined UI colors. One is clearly simpler than the other.

Ares/Ruby:

def header(str = '', width = 78)
  return line if str.empty? || str.nil?
  
  "%xn%x27-- %x33<< %x15#{str} %x33>> %x27%xH#{'-' * width - (str.size + 10)}%xn"
end



Evennia/Python:

def header(text: str, player: Character, width: int = settings.CLIENT_DEFAULT_WIDTH) -> str:
    if o := player.options == None:
        return ''
    
    if not text:
        out: str = f"|{o.border_color}{o.header_fill * width}|n\n"
    else:
        flen: int = width - len(strip_ansi(text)) - 10
        out: str = f"|{o.border_color}{o.header_fill * 2} |{o.header_star_color}<< |{o.header_text_color}{text} |{o.header_star_color}>> |{o.border_color}{'-' * flen}|n\n"

    return out

The only thing I do not like about Ruby is how it handles truthiness. Coming from C and Python, it knocked me for a loop when I discovered that only 'nil' and 'false' are false. Everything else, including empty strings and the number 0, for example, is true. Which just feels so... wrong!

It's easy enough to get used to though.

I have absolutely no idea!

Ruby is so similar (IMO) to Python that I was able to start programming for Ares (simple stuff, obviously) without knowing the first thing about Ruby. I just followed the examples in the code and looked up things online when I needed to. I've since taken the time to learn it properly and I like it so much that it has become my go-to scripting language. In fact, I am using it for my current Rhost based project, which makes extensive use of Rhost's RESTful API and execscript functionality.

Oh, and if you want to see what picky looks like, try running your Ruby code through Rubocop

It may please some of you to know that there is a TTRPG version of FunCom's Secret World in the works. Check here for more info.

Can't recommend BeipMU enough to folks on Windows (and even Linux or BSD with WINE!).

@zombiegenesis said in Game System Tutoring?:

I've actually been working on a Savage Worlds plugin for Ares. Been tempted to try it out using Deadlands or an OC superhero setting.

Hey, me too, but I ended up switching over to Evennia for... reasons.