On Arx, I spent 5 months OOCly doing research and writing songs, involving people in the investigations, RPing with them about what they already knew, and practicing my lyrics on willing victims. I talked with people about what I was doing, got them excited about things, made social connections between other characters, and even got a little NPC action in. I made a lot of friends ICly and introduced them to other friends. Much RP was had.

Then, in November and December, I spent six weeks doing 5 concerts, one a week with a break for Thanksgiving, to present my songs and to answer the general public's questions about them. I highlighted people in my Q/A sessions who might have a better perspective than me, and in general, I spread a lot of "secret" knowledge out into the playerbase. This led to people approaching me afterwards to ask questions about what I'd said so that they could gain "evidence" in the form of @clues. Everyone who attended got a copy of the song for reference, and most of the songs were chock full of useful information. I made a lot of connections and gave people a lot of fodder for subsequent RP scenes.

I recommended people get in touch with the Bards and the Scholars, and I included both the Bards and the Scholars in my formal @action to staff to essentially sum up what I'd done to get the songs out into the world. For some people, this was their first @action, and they were giddy about helping, and I got to walk them through how to do an @action assist. Socialites jumped on it as a way to use their social clout for Team Good. It was a purely social @action, and I had four pages of helpers because people loved the idea so much.

Turns out, staff loved the idea, too. They gave me a new title, and there were some interesting effects of the @action, including the refurbishment of the Hall of Heroes, a new statue for Sorrel's hero Copper (who died between her concert and the final concert), and the fact that the songs actually are spreading across Arvum. Staff was thrilled that a social-only action touched so many people and garnered so much RP and was an entirely player generated piece of work.

It feels good to be appreciated!

@auspice said in A Regency MU (Conceptual):

Personally I prefer when there's just one PC allowed. But my experience has been that people get very antsy and such when they can't have multiple characters. So my thinking is: 1 PC for society stuff (allowing staff to not be overwhelmed with handling stuff for tons of alts there) and commoner alts for people who have a need for alts or just want to mess around with other ideas.

Honestly? Just limit people to 1 PC. Allow them a time period to tweak it (some concepts work out better than others) and then ask them to stick to that single PC.

If people do want to mess around with other ideas, permit a certain amount of emitting of NPCs: no one important. No one who can seriously influence anything or needs stats to do things. But perhaps someone who can sort of interact in ways their PC cannot; i.e., a nobody sailor interacting with naval officers for the player of a female peer. Essentially, backdrop NPCs. If their NPC ends up being more appealing than their PC, let them drop the current PC and make the NPC as a PC.

Sometimes it's okay to just say, "No." Especially for your own sanity.

This is Osmium, a snaggle-toothed ewok. Shih-tzu, I mean. Osmium is a blackish metal, so Ozzy is the most metal of shih-tzu. Also, Osmium has an odor to it and the root word means "smells", and the dog likes smells. It's the densest of metals and the dog is a little dense. (Yes, his name is a chemistry joke.)

He's terrified of @Cobaltasaurus's cats. He understands that they are sharp and not to be trusted.

Okay, so it's not technically art, but I crafted it with math and logic, and it might help other people make art:
https://github.com/OddishDoggish/asciiArt/releases/tag/v0.1.5

This software is still in testing. It will take an image and convert it to text to be inserted into an Evennia game. No image is required, however: one can simply type and color in the upper window and click "encode" to have it converted to marked-up text. There is a button to copy directly into the clipboard. Highlighting a colored character will allow you to check its color. You can change the color of highlighted characters by clicking the color you desire. For accessibility, you may toggle tags on and off: highlight the area that should be contained in the tags and click the button. Highlighting areas that shouldn't be contained in the tags but have been marked ascii can be removed from the selection by just toggling the button.

If you have any questions or find any bugs, please let me (Sorrel@Arx) know.

Splash art is Ida Cat by Crawfish@Arx.

I got frames!

@faraday The Hero and the Crown was the one I ended up reading first, and I loved it madly, and it's probably my favorite book. My mother was an English teacher then, and she ended up teaching that book to her middle schoolers, and I was a snot that she'd ruined my copy. When my ex dumped me right before our wedding, I made an interstate move listening to that book on tape.

I have read a lot of other McKinley books, but that one may forever be my favorite.

I have the Chronicles of Prydain on my Kindle, and when I am bored or maybe sad, I go read those. They never get old.

I've read the Dark is Rising series (Susan Cooper) so many times that I have the poems memorized. You know, just in case.

The Ordinary Princess (M.M. Kaye) was another one of my beloveds, as was Cricket and the Emperor's Son (Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth). My copy of The Owlstone Crown (X. J. Kennedy) is in the hands of some friends' children.

Ooh, and Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series has largely held up. As has L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But man, those are so much weirder than I recalled as a child.

@crawfish I love Sorrel so so much!

https://i.etsystatic.com/icm/9ebfcd/330906947/icm_fullxfull.330906947_scneugzz5dwk0s88o0cg.jpg?version=0

I need to go through the thread and pull down kitties to alter and upload!

The ewok is having a crisis because there's thunder and he's not supposed to be in the bedroom.

(I love his snaggletoof.)

Current:
Dawn, Spirit Lake
Luna, Chontio
Sorrel, Arx
...
It seemed like a personal challenge to list as many of my characters as possible here. I have log files that date back to 1996, and my memory is hazy. Some things are best left forgotten. I have tried to be as compete as possible, nonetheless, although I didn't always log and some of these logs are from the days when you could only name files with 8 characters.

List is alphabetical by character name and incomplete:

Amadea, Valorous Domain
Analee, Cuendillar
Annabelle, Dark Wine and Roses
Baedi, Star Wars: A New Threat
Beaid, Star Wars: Brak Sector
Bianca, Emerald Dreams
Cassandra, LA MUSH
Cate, Dark Destiny: Denver by Night
Melpomene, Dark Metal: New Core City
Eiriel, Akarian Dawn: Shadows of an Empire
Eva, A Memoir of Betrayal
Eviene, Windy City
Fuchsia, Due Rewards
Gwyn, Star Trek: Gamma One
Ilsa, Haunted Memories
Jenni, Masquerade
Judy, San Diego
Kalori, Firan
Keritbes, Tales of Tavaren
Ketria, Firan
Luna, Due Rewards
M42, San Francisco
Maria, Threads of Time
Meg, Memoir of Betrayal
Meg, Exodus
Meneliel, Elendor
Miko, Darkness Falling
Min, Star Wars: Galaxy
Minerva, Out of the Darkness
Miranda, Fallen Leaves
Mirella, Firan
Mirielle, Due Rewards
Mirelle, Time of Shadows
Sparky, Haunted Memories
Sweet, Star Trek: Anomaly
Sydnia, Cuendillar
Tallulah, Metro
Tallulah, The Reach
Teonia, Firan
Zinnia, Gathering Storm
Zita, Ashes to Ashes

I also staffed on Darkwater, Due Rewards, Firan, and Star Wars: Brak Sector with some regularity, but people often gave me a wizbit because... I dunno. I'm likable and trustworthy or something.

@derp Okay, thank you.

If in your deliberations you decide that you do not want that stuff here, I would be happy to take a backup off your hands so as to archive it somewhere. I am assuming that by the time a decision is made, I will be coherent enough to manage such a thing. Database migration is a part of my day job, after all.

I thought the point of moving to this new incarnation of the board was so that we didn't lose all of the old history.

Where is it?

If it will not be coming up at this site once more, is it possible to get a backup of the database or something so that it may be archived elsewhere?

If this is noted elsewhere, please let me know. I've been feverish and semi-conscious for at least three days now and everything here is very confusing and not very straightforward. Especially since there seem to be Hog Pit threads in Mildly Constructive, and that seems broken at best. Or have we decided it's all the Hog Pit? Because that seems a bit ass backwards, considering that was an opt-in space.

From Bennet, the developer, on BeipMU's discord:

Why is the store app stuck on build 312? Well here's why and how to fix it:
https://github.com/BeipDev/BeipMU/blob/master/Documentation/store_update.md
(This link is also on the main web page so more people can find it, spread the word!)

@macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@tributary Hey, School/Office Supplies are also exciting.

Good. I've decided that in honor of the gender binary being bullshit, I am buying myself another set of rainbow colored pens. Or maybe some cute notebooks to sit in my queue of cute notebooks that might someday get used.

@sahin said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

it's super weird, in the shadow of turning a certain age, that I thought I would have my shit totally figured out -- but, nope, at 42 here I am sitting and and going -- that's right, the gender binary is bullshit and you should get a binder because why the fuck not.

At first I was like, "Yes! Any excuse to buy school supplies," and then I was like, "Wait."

But like, I don't think we ever really have our shit figured out, no matter how old we get. Keep trying new things! Which is to say, I hope you enjoy your not-school-supply binder.

@il-volpe Unfortunately for VASpider and their Flying Spider Monkeys, both Cobalt and I had been burned by their bullshit. So their arguments that they were totally just an active, helpful, fun-creating player who had little disagreements with a few mean people didn't work on us. We knew their game. We knew their style. And they did not appreciate being told, "We know what you are."

Because they absolutely thought they'd get away with things, just as you say.

@macha I mean, just the turd, not the neighbor.

@macha Honestly, I'd be tempted to take a picture of the turd and send them that. "Look, my neighbor didn't pick this up. Deal with it, please."

@betternow said in GMs and Players:

@greenflashlight said in GMs and Players:

If a game's policy is that any claim of harassment must be proven with incontrovertible evidence, then that means we are comfortable beginning from the position that people who report abuse cannot be trusted, right? That they are liars or, at least, too mentally incompetent to understand what other players are doing to them. Since such people are so untrustworthy, their reports must be investigated, correct? That's the only reasonable thing to do. No one's saying they're liars, just that they can't be trusted.

That is not what anyone here has been saying. That's twisting words, and pretty much the EXACT kind of gaslighting they're referring to. I am sure I'll be chewed up for this but VASpider, DownwithOPP and yes, even Ruiz, all practiced this exact thing. It's how they get AWAY with abusing people, by turning the accusations onto the VICTIM, and having staffers BELIEVE THEM over the actual people they are hurting. By not asking people for actual proof of the abuse.

I speak from experience, and if Cobalt were still active she could confirm, that this is precisely what VASpider did on Darkwater, the first iteration of the game, where she literally told staff several players were being abusive to her. Those several players weren't even really interacting with her, and certainly not abusively, and had no idea of who she actually was.

This came down to an apology from Cobalt to me years later when Darkwater 2.0 was made, and a personal invitation to come play there.

I hope this helps with the distinction of "letting abusers run free" and "actually making sure the accused is the abuser".

It's true. And as I recall (but I barely recall, as it was long ago), staff looked into things and eventually got to the point where it was obvious that VASpider was the problem. Then we politely told her to leave, because she could not conduct herself in a manner appropriate for fostering the community we desired on Darkwater.

(Cobalt is alive and well, doing things other than mushing. Mostly taking care of a very large puppy.)

$500 sounds super reasonable for a database migration. I'd offer to do it, as migrating databases is part of my day job, but I'm not familiar with the forum board code enough to think I could do it in a timely fashion.

I vote we get in touch with the migration team, see if this price still stands, and then collect donations.