Best posts made by Arkandel

This is an e-mail I just sent to Uber Eats. The meal was from a new 'recommended' restaurant, badly packaged and rather bad, but the complaint I sent was about the actual hair found in it as well.

Hello folks,

I don't care about adjustments to that one meal at this point, but could you please explain what I was expected to do here?

There was a hair in my food. I tried to take a picture of it - but it's a hair - so I did the best I could yesterday, when I had it.

This morning you are asking me to send a better picture, I suppose, clearly showing that hair. How would I do that? How do you even suggest I keep the hair overnight, so that I take a better shot of it today? How would you know it's the same hair as yesterday?

Regards,
<Me>

My best guess is they try hard to make people drop their complaints.

A long time ago I was noticing our (limited) free space on the MU* account was going down faster than expected and du -a showed a weird log file I hadn't seen before.

On a quick investigation that text file included... everything, every single command made by every single player, timestamped over a period of a few weeks. I boggled and went to the game's owner, who after thinking hard said he did execute a command he found on staff help files - there was nothing on that help file, just the existence of the command itself. It didn't seem to 'do' anything so he forgot about it.

I believed him (the guy had shell access but hardly ever used it), but that command had been there for years. It was probably made for debugging purposes... maybe? But the damn thing was the ultimate spying tool, and on the complete spaghetti code written by 15-20 coders over a very long period no one knew who put it there in the first place (and of course there was no git blame back then).

We disabled it but... well, in a game with more than one or two coders and no code reviews, spying is effortless.

@surreality Alas, my tablet's android. I guess bluetooth would still work anyway but eww, Apple stuff in my house?

@Thenomain I don't know what the implementation of snoop is on MU* but on CircleMUD it actually gave you access to everything someone saw on their end, including pages, channels etc. Talk about massive violations of privacy.

I just think LeBron lost a great deal of respect in many people's eyes, my own included - and I've been a great fan of his work outside of a basketball court for years now - after all this.

For starters he is sending an inconsistent message as well as a wrong one. For example in the interviews he gave lately he suggested people can't be educated and shouldn't criticize situations about far-away places they've not experienced themselves; what about Akron, Ohio? I'm not a black kid being abused by the police there, should I not care? And if I do why wouldn't I care about Chinese kids in Hong Kong openly threatened by a superpower's Head of State with 'shattered bones'?

For another he spoke about the way this affected him and others as if that will draw any sympathy at all. The base salary in the NBA is $898,310 - and rest assured, the vast majority of athletes who might be impacted by any of this are superstars with their own branded shoes being sold in China, and thus have made much more than that.

So what is the worse case scenario here? LeBron got slower than normal room service while he was there? He's in the final few years of his career and has a guaranteed $1B contract with Nike alone - are we supposed to feel bad because he might make less money going forward?

Who's sympathizing with whom here, and why?

@ThugHeaven I wouldn't consider being dark in a public room to be a security violation if you actually intend to throw plot at them. If it's in public it's more or less fair game (although staff should still be mindful of disrupting a scene people are already engaged in and seem to enjoy).

@Warma-Sheen said in The Basketball Thread:

He's not just talking about himself. There are others on both the Nets and the Lakers that don't have his pull or his money. And what about the equipment manager? What about the assistant equipment manager. There are a lot of people in the NBA team wagon who don't have LeBron's money or pull who are also there with him when this goes down who are also targets. And they aren't in Hong Kong where support for the fight for democracy is high. They are in Shenzhen and Shanghai, where the opposite is true.

Everything else aside, don't you think that all these people feeling a sovereign government might lash out at them over a completely different person in sort-of kind-of the same line of work as themselves said something on twitter is a pretty damning thought in and of itself? Fearing for their safety - and despite protections, both diplomatic and physical? Over what someone else said somewhere?

LeBron gave those interviews after he was back in the US. Did you see any comments made about protecting or standing up for all those people who enjoyed none of those protections and didn't get to simply fly away from the problem altogether?

No, of course he's not the only one being hypocritical here. Of course there are vast industries enjoying profitable relationships with China even though the regime is violently suppressing its own people. Of course there are millions of buyers purchasing products made there instead of punishing that regime with their wallets.

But just that's not what this conversation is - not every conversation is about everything. LeBron specifically and publicly wanted to play the role of a man who won't shut up and dribble, and he's failed to live up to that when real money was on the line.

Funnily enough the MU* I feel 'safe' doing anything I like in scenes is Shang. Who's gonna spy on me and to see what? The TS? There's TS everywhere, you can walk in public and see people (and animals, and things...) going at it. Spectating it is such a common commodity its value is reduced to just about nothing at all.

So if you need to get some private RP done - and I don't necessarily mean RP of a sexual variety - you can just log on there since making alts only takes about a minute and you don't have to wait for approval, grab a room... done.

@Warma-Sheen said in The Basketball Thread:

But before labeling Morey this lonely soul, remember that the man caused a shitstorm and kept his job. You don't keep your job in that situation against the political and economic pressure of the entire nation of China without having more than a few powerful, decision-swaying people on your side.

I think what made the difference there was the publicity and huge spotlight this entire affair received almost immediately - which is, admittedly, a kind of power and economic pressure altogether. Once that happened and political figures from both side of the fence jumped on it the NBA was put in quite a tough position; if they fired Morey they could stand to lose even more money from endorsements, boycotts, etc... not to mention a potentially dangerous precedent.

Now, granted, if this was some nobody working for the NBA who had tweeted that (the equivalent of that hotel employee you mentioned) I'm really not sure at all he'd not have been fired immediately and without much noise.

My personal opinion is this was a test of sorts by China to see how much their leverage can take them. They played hardball right away and although Adam Silver seemed willing to release a couple of quick statements right away to appease them (in fact two of them, with the US one staying fairly neutral while the Chinese one hilariously condemning Morey, so they conflicted with each other) they kept pushing, and at that point the NBA had to cut their losses and push back.

I'm really interested in seeing where this ends up. The NBA is at such a place these last few years even its off seasons don't really constitute downtime, as there are so many genuine storylines playing themselves out every summer; it's just that it's not often geopolitics end up being one of them.

@Ganymede said:

As staff, I should be able to ask a player what their PC is doing during the period on which another is spying on them, and expect to be given a truthful answer. As another player, if I choose to spy on someone, I would like to think they would do the same. Maybe we go through some rolls to see if I'm successful or not, or not if we can agree on it.

One of the issues there is timing. When we're on the grid (theoretically) we're doing Important Things. It's when we play having those hush-hush plots to overthrow the Prince, make under the table political deals or whatever the hell. So if you're Obfuscated, following me around while I'm involved in such shennanigans that's what you'll get to spy upon.

If staff-you asks me "what were you doing between 1 am and 2 am yesterday?" I'm not ... honestly sure what I could say. Was my character plotting? Or was he in a taxi going downtown to catch a movie? Or just sitting in a room reading Twilight?

It's not necessarily cut and dried about being truthful. Now if we wanted to discuss players actually trusting their own staff to make their IC lives more interesting by actually giving them the tools to do so then I'd quite agree with you.

You kids might be focused on those fancy new hip shows and the latest cool series but may I interest you in season 2 of The Kominsky Method?

Yeah, that's right, the character-actor equivalent of The Expendables with a star studded cast that'd have rocked the box office in say, the early 80s; Michael Douglas, Alan Arkin, Jane Seymour, Kathleen Turner... it's all here!

I love it. The whole thing is based on the friendship between two old guys in what's basically a pretty basic excuse for plot (a guy's wife dies, an aging actor's career is going nowhere) that's there to justify witty dialogue, great delivery and just amazing acting.

@Coin said:

@Arkandel said:

@Cirno said:

There are a decent amount of black mushers on this very same forum. Some of us have even made, or will make, games.

Wait, you're black?

I'm not sure if you're trolling the notorious troll or just kind of don't pay att--wait, no, you just don't pay attention. >.>

... In retrospect I'm not sure which of the two would appear more likely to any casual observer who knows me. So, I guess, fair enough!

But give Cirno some credit here.

I don't know why, among daily reports of people dying in assorted horrible ways, I'd still be this mad about the same happening to animals (especially how many of them die every day pretty badly as well).

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/woman-finds-her-pet-dog-135747023.html

But I am. Grrr.

@Ghost said:

@Arkandel That's a shame. I bet your roommate ended up with someone who didn't have the same interests. I didn't hide my interests in horror, gaming, and metal music. It helped me find a girl who liked similar things. Now we game together, watch horror movies, go to metal concerts, and have the sex.

That's the silly part, he's been married twice and converted both his ladies to play games. No table-top stuff but they play board games, watch fantasy, etc. <shrugs> It's not like this stuff carries the stigma it once did (?) anyway.

For me in this context my nerdy interests fall in the same category as liking animals. If a chick didn't like my dog I wouldn't be interested in her (and it certainly wouldn't be a hard choice between the two) so the same applies to stuff I like doing, reading, watching, etc. I mean what I like is part of me, it's not like those things are disposable.

If you thought I'd hesitate making you FEEL THINGS you'd be wrong.

https://cheezburger.com/9581829/artist-creates-heartfelt-story-titled-good-boy

@Ghost That's not possible. On a MU* you are a sex deity bumpin' uglies with other sex deities after saving the city from demons. In real life you get to use tissues and run to the bathroom to avoid wet spots on the bed while dinner's getting ready.

... Unless that's your thing in which case congratulations! The sex is gonna be great.

@SG TSCC was one series I was so sure I'd hate when it first came out and I ended up loving it. It was #1 on my list of shows to watch the entire run, and it pissed me off to no end when it got cancelled.

@Warma-Sheen said:

Universally. I've never had a night where I said to myself 'man, I really wish I would have told that extremely attractive woman that I like to play D&D'. Never. Not a single time in over a decade.

And that's why she can't find a D&D group! You're a monster.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

@Auspice You get into the space as quickly as you can, and when the queue is gone you fix yourself up. Duh.

North American drivers can't park worth a damn.

Fite me.

@Coin I still play with you, don't I? I'm in no way stating length equals quality, that'd be dumb. But there's a correlation there.

Let's put it this way - if someone writes a paragraph (or more) they've spent some time and paid some attention to it. It might not be great as that depends on the player's writing skills more than anything but at least I can reasonably say it wasn't put together in five seconds when they remembered that window.

Now, I realize some folks will be rubbed the wrong way by this - it's fine. I don't mean to be offensive by making gross generalizations like this, only to claim I value my free time quite a bit; when I MU* it's almost always in the evenings after I've taken care of everything else in the house that can't wait but before bedtime. So if I only have 2-3 hours to do fun things... well, it's not fun to wait twenty minutes for a crappy pose. It's not rewarding to read a hastily generic response after I do wait for that long.

Nor is this unique in gaming. If I'm on a WoW 5-man group and one of the characters is always staying behind, going AFK, etc they're not being good players. Obviously there are differences there (posing is turn-based and the pace is a lot slower) but paying attention to people you're playing with seems like a universally good rule of thumb.