Posts made by Arkandel

Locked since the MUX is down. Please use other threads to discuss this game.

@lithium said in Stranger Than Fiction MUX:

@roz said in Stranger Than Fiction MUX:

@theonceler said in Stranger Than Fiction MUX:

Okay, I promised I'd make a longer post.

I've already shared plenty in this thread and the advertisement thread, but I've got a couple of things that really bug me so I'll cover them.

Just a note that this is actually the advertisement thread. Looks like the Hog Pit thread is here if people want to go at it!

Is it really an advertisement thread anymore if a game is dead?

How do you advertise for something that doesn't exist?

Is the game actually down or just declared dead?

We don't have a policy about this, but I'd have no issue locking an ad thread for a dead port. However since there's a Hog Pit thread, y'all can just fire your phasers there.

... Second post! Already!

So when I uninstalled sendmail since we no longer needed it, it didn't clean up after itself... but left a little present behind in /etc/network/interfaces.d/ , which was causing ifup -v eth0 to fail. In a layman's terms, the machine hosting MSB was up after that but it had no functional network until I fired up a console (thanks Linode for that) and figured out wtf had just happened.

Sorry about the disruption.

We might as well have a sticky here for site-wide stuff that probably don't interest most people.

The first item: Users reported they weren't receiving e-mails. This was verified, and as of now we upgraded to postfix over sendmail. I tested just now and it works, but if it doesn't please let me know.

@packrat They aren't idiots, they're just playing the numbers. For every hundred people who ask back reasonable questions to stay safe they just need one who is an actual idiot (or just old enough...) and they're in business.

Reddit came through today with these gems. I... I lack words.

https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html

@lotherio said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I'm finding I don't like comment 'X seemed upstanding to me, I would never have expected (really bad behavior) from X' more and more these days.

Feels like it implies that we should expect the behavior of some people or something. It just feel its redundant, we shouldn't expect anyone to be a mass murderer, rapist, serial killer, clown, pedophile, whatever.

I don't know that I agree. I know people iRL who're too emotional, or whom I've seen kick a wall in frustration, make crude jokes, etc.

Would I expect any of them to escalate it to the point of being killers or whatever? Of course not, that's a hell of an escalation! But if I saw their mugshots somewhere after something bad I'd be able to say something to the effect of "well, that doesn't really surprise me I guess."

What it comes down to is... it's just something people can say because what else can they?

@packrat Yeah, usually in games staff have a different view of their own MU* than players get to see.

To a bird's eye view "this guy can punch hard" is at most as useful as if not quite inferior to "can generate cash and bribe people with it".
Yet in practice cash is rendered mostly useless, bribery involves jumping through time consuming bureaucratic loops at best and the effect isn't worth the hassle.

But a punch is one dice roll long, immediately rewarding and never goes out of style.

It's good you're taking this into consideration on the early stages!

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@arkandel

It could also be that you're a lazy, slow soccer player too.

I mean, just saying, bruh.

I'd say I ran at least as much as my fellow players, with a couple of outliers outrunning me.

Which is to say we are all slow, old fucks.

@packrat said in Fading Suns 2017:

On which note, what kind of things should one be able to spend really big chunks of social capital on?

Focus first on what the in-game effects of such spends can be, and then you can figure out their type or what they're worth.

It'll do little good to have carrots no one wants to chase.

I was in a conversation yesterday after a post-work soccer game with collegues about how it was going to help a friend lose fat.

I showed him this later on from my Fitbit, regarding that same game's impact:

493 calories isn't worth jack shit. It's maybe half a burger - or a slice and a half of pizza. Maybe.

Losing fat takes place in the kitchen, not the treadmill.

@thenomain Also PayPal is supposedly terrible sometimes if you depend on it to get your money. They can discontinue or suspend your account (and have), at which point your options are damn limited.

I use it all the time but only to pay, not to receive funds.

@krmbm We don't grow out of anything around here, sir/madam.

(More seriously though, I'm not sure - maybe there are web browser extensions that disable animated GIFs per domain)

@krmbm said in New forum toy!:

Is there a setting somewhere to disable gifs?

This shit is annoying as fuck.

https://www.pcmag.com/article/345706/how-to-stop-animated-gifs-from-auto-playing-in-your-browser

@faraday Hell, we saw a recent example right here on MSB. Without any changes to the configuration or upgrades, and in fact because there were no such changes, the templates all over MSB broke and the site became basically unusable.

The fix was trivial but it could have gone wrong, and it could have taken me considerably more than my lunch hour if the upgrade script somehow blew things up. That's a pretty typical case - not all code that breaks is your own.

If you do such work for hire and you're called in by a panicking employer months after the fact when you're already busy doing completely different things, you have to know how to respond. Not having worked that out ahead of time is the worst possible outcome for both parties. Just because it's not your fault it doesn't mean it won't fall on you to do something about it.

@ganymede It's a legitimate way to do it. In programming terms if the contractor is asked to provide a fixed estimate then they should fudge the number to comfortably err on the side of caution, and if an itemized list is involved then that can complicates things - such lists are often nitpicked to death.

But yeah, an hourly wage works best if feature creep is a reasonable expectation, which for MU* projects it definitely would be. Maybe have a pre-agreed threshold amount (in $$ or hours, whichever) past which the coder reaches out since few people will want to shell out unexpectedly big amounts for a free game.

As a side note, it'd be interested to see if such an idea would catch on, and how it'd affect other technical 'jobs' required to run a MUSH. If the coder is paid $200 to set it up for their 10 hours of work how does the wiki designer feel about putting their own 10 hours in for free?

@seraphim73 said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:

Turns out, on a pirate(ish) game, most people want to be pirates

Yes, and those should swing from a high place at the end of a sturdy rope.

What @faraday says it's true. I'm in the field and I have friends who've freelanced on projects before, and figuring out the difficulty and timeline of non-trivial projects is an incredibly complicated task on its own.

Trivial doesn't need to mean 'simple' although it usually does, it can be something we've done before in a very similar fashion. For example setting up an existing CMS platform with a custom template and some configuration tweaks is trivial enough that someone who's done it before can do so again and fall within the ballpark of an initial estimate.

The fun part? Even then it's tricky. The customer might come back days or even weeks later with additions or things they just noticed weren't working right, a necessary security update could break critical parts of a site, etc. Non-technical employers (the vast majority of them especially for 'trivial' things since if they were technically inclined they'd have probably done them themselves) don't understand the issue but they do understand they paid for something that, in their eyes, isn't working right.

Work for hire has its rewards, and sometimes they make it all worth it, but care needs to be taken. As for the legal repercussions, add to them the nature of the job - you work for people in various geographical areas where different laws can be applied, and it doesn't get any simpler.

@surreality said in Creative Outlets:

With the way they made the mechanics, though? I played a con artist who never once got a single success on a roll to lie with a 4 subterfuge and 4 manipulation. (And I rolled it a few dozen times over the course of playing the character, so it's just just a case of 'never rolled it'.)

According to http://nwod.org/wiki/index.php/Probability_Math the chance of rolling at least one success with 8 dice is 94.23%.

It is obviously possible to roll no successes, even on multiple attempts, but that's not a failure with the mechanics since the math checks out.