I mean, just for reference, the message is

%% There's no scene running here. Starting a scene will activate repose and make it easy to share the scene with the web portal. Just do scene/start if you want to start one.

Anyway, to answer the original question...

I play on both Spirit Lake, which is very OOCly transparent, and Arx, which is not. I like the way it works for both of those games. With SL, I like knowing OOCly what's going on because I feel like it fosters that collaborative environment.

On Arx, I think there's so much lore and so much of the theme is built around it and the mystery of it, I like not knowing things OOCly unless I know them ICly. I think that works very well for the IC theme.

So really.. my answer is.. it depends on the theme, and what 'feel' you want from the game.

Accidentally stumbling into some lovely RP with some amazing RPers, which takes your character in a direction you were not intending at all. And then you find out all the subtle connections between them and it's like

I actually had a bit of fun a while back trying to see what a 'future' MU could look like - essentially going browser-only. I got fairly far in the interface before the Good Old ADHD kicked in and I got bored with the project. It still lives on my hard drive, in case I ever get bored.

It's a JS frontend with GraphQL backend, the idea being that anyone could write their own clients for it if they wanted but also that the built-in frontend should be customisable and persistent (as I basically wrote a JS window manager). Each window can have a character that's tied to your login associated to it and so on.

Of course one of the big 'failure' points for it for me is that as it's in browser you're restricted on how much flashy desktop notifications you could do which is a big thing for me as a player. While you could potentially run it in desktop mode with a technology like Electron it'd be game-locked most likely and so on.

Have a GIF to see Yet Another Project That I Started And Will Probably Never Finish.

When your RP partner takes a scene off in an unexpected direction, and you both totally roll with it and get some amazing character development out of it. It's just..

I have a theory about how all of this is going to end I but I need to fill in some words here
***=THEORY THEORY THEORY***

This is absolutely something I struggle at from both sides, so, here's my take on it.

First off, I have been incredibly slow at calling out behaviour that makes me uncomfortable in the past. To the point where I've just let it continue and instead of being honest, just ghosted an entire game because of it. So call it out early and often - to the person at first and escalate as needed if they don't listen or they argue.

On the other hand, I constantly worry that I'm the person making someone else feel uncomfortable. My two ways of handling that are either a) check in with the person or b) back off. I tend to do option b without starting with option a, because I worry that that too will make the other person uncomfortable (yay anxiety).

So I as a player am all for being called on it as soon as possible, because I would rather know. And yeah, it's not nice and it can be a bit of a gutpunch for all parties, but a) as others have said, if the person is worth talking to, they'll respect that and b) if the person on the other side is as horrifically anxious as me about it, then they'll appreciate knowing sooner rather than later.

I've looked back over that and I'm not completely sure if I articulated that at all clearly, but it'll have to do.

This entire exchange from Hogfather. I know, it's not a quote, it's dialogue. Don't care.

Susan: “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
*Death: REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
Susan: "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
Death: YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
Susan: "So we can believe the big ones?"
Death: YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
Susan: "They're not the same at all!"
Death: YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET — Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
Susan: "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
Death: MY POINT EXACTLY.

Also

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

@faraday said in The Work Thread:

There are workplaces that do this. Heck, there are entire countries that do this. It's not a revolutionary concept.

Here in the UK for example we don't have the concept of sick leave in the same way. If you're sick, you're sick, take the day off, there's no bucket of days to use up. You can self certify as unwell for an employer defined period, usually a week, anything more than that and you need to get signed off by a doctor. Your employer will pay you while you're off sick, usually full pay for a contractually defined period, most often 13 weeks, and then you are put onto statutory sick pay, a minimum amount that's mandated by the government.

This is specific to salaried workers, I don't know how it works for non-salaried workers without looking it up!

I read a really interesting series of articles recently that posited (with graphs!) that there may be a chemical component to obesity that is down to industrial processing introducing additional chemicals to our foodstuffs (one of the suggestions is lithium from lithium grease for example).

My problem is that I don't know enough about the science to figure out whether or not the argument is actually any good, or if it's one of those 'this all totally seems logical when you read it but if you do any follow up work around it the whole thing will fall apart' things. The series starts here, for anyone who's interested, but YMMV and it may be total garbage: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/

@groth said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

It should probably be possible to convert any given Web infer face into an electron app for the benefit of both though.

While this is true, Electron comes with its own tradeoffs, one of the big ones being bloat. From memory an Electron app is around 120MB in size. You've also got the problem that every game will have its own customisations so you'd probably have to have one app per game rather than a single client that could connect to multiple games.

I guess you could do something with a web view such that a client is just a really thin wrapper around the website itself, but that probably comes with its own tradeoffs.

All of that said I still want to play with the project, certainly some of these would be surmountable issues with the right combination of technology.

I actually had a bit of fun a while back trying to see what a 'future' MU could look like - essentially going browser-only. I got fairly far in the interface before the Good Old ADHD kicked in and I got bored with the project. It still lives on my hard drive, in case I ever get bored.

It's a JS frontend with GraphQL backend, the idea being that anyone could write their own clients for it if they wanted but also that the built-in frontend should be customisable and persistent (as I basically wrote a JS window manager). Each window can have a character that's tied to your login associated to it and so on.

Of course one of the big 'failure' points for it for me is that as it's in browser you're restricted on how much flashy desktop notifications you could do which is a big thing for me as a player. While you could potentially run it in desktop mode with a technology like Electron it'd be game-locked most likely and so on.

Have a GIF to see Yet Another Project That I Started And Will Probably Never Finish.

@arkandel Neil Gaiman has blogged about this recently - he says that he and Terry planned out the entire sequel many years ago, they'd just not had the time to write it.

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2021/06/really-bloody-excellent-omens.html

@quinn Truth. I live in Cardiff and it's like 'oh I recognise that "alien street"'.

@wizz said in Good TV:

Speaking of time travel, Loki is pretty fun so far.

The latest episode gave me real Doctor Who vibes.

***=Spoiler for plot related things***

It feels a little like someone looked at Doctor Who and went 'what if with a budget?'

Olympia Dukakis