Posts made by Arkandel

The other issue here is that we're on pretty uncharted territory. Anyone who says they have a good even mid-term plan is wrong or a liar; we simply don't know how things will turn out.

But look, there are football stadiums packed full of people right now. That isn't going to end well. And the virus doesn't give a damn about politics, opinions or rights, it just spreads.

What I find utterly baffling is how easy it is for people to let their own stubbornness blind them to obvious facts.

Soldiers refusing vaccines? For decades vaccinations were mandatory. You got into just about any military force in the world and got in line to get 5-6 different needles in you, no idea what was in each and no questions asked. Now it's a problem?

Or travel. But mah freedoms! Well for decades if you wanted to get to certain places you needed to get vaccinated. Schools? Same thing.

Or masks. Mask aversion? "Face diapers"? Oxygen deprivation? Doctors and nurses have been wearing them for decades and no one batted an eyelash, now it's an issue?

But you know what? If there was some mastermind behind all this profiting somehow from the campaign against vaccines or masks I'd at least... feel relieved. It'd be intentional. However no, that's not the case - we are just that stupid. We're just doing it to ourselves for no damn reason.

@greenflashlight It doesn't help that these guys all seem to have like a bunch of powers and don't seem that distinct. I can tell them apart only because I know what Robb Stark and Angelina Jolie look like. Will there be time to establish each of them?

Now, @Ganymede had a point that Guardians did that very well, and I could tell right away who Rocket or Groot were or what they could do. But this shit isn't easy.

I think - or fear - that living during a pandemic might be something we will just all... need to do.

Even assuming high vaccination rates in the western world - which is by no means a given there are millions of people worldwide who don't have access to that level of care. Until that happens Covid-19 is here to stay. Any traveler can transmit it.

I don't see us getting rid of mask mandates and we'll probably need to be vaccinated more in the future to maintain a strong immune response or even to cover potential new strains. We're at least at a good place given our mRNA tech.

If nothing else the issue will be collective fatigue. Everyone is tired of this shit. We need to keep being responsible but it's hard. And it won't get easier.

@kk said in Pandemic Era Issues:

But there are people going...oh we should not give medical care to anyone who isn't vaccinated.

That's a bit of a dilemma. There are other medical conditions caused by people doing something wrong - do we not treat patients for cancer who refuse to give up smoking, for example?

I'm still of the opinion insurance premiums should be much higher for unvaccinated patients. Perhaps also prioritizing ER beds accordingly if it means people left are left untreated who don't have Covid-19.

Either way the medical sector is struggling badly to keep up with demand these days.

Here's a question.

Is anyone excited about Eternals?

It's not that I just don't know anything about them from the comics (I barely knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were after all before the first movie came out) but dropping a bunch of characters on us in one movie sounds like it won't work. Or at least I haven't seen it work, even with ones I was quite familiar with (think Justice League, Suicide Squad, etc).

I'm even a fan of several cast actors, but I'm kinda ambivalent about it.

I watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings today. It was really good! I wouldn't say the best MCU movie (Civil War and The Winter Soldier are too high up for me) but it's certainly very near the top.

• It went from strength to strength. Unlike most MCU intro movies there was no boring origin part, no dead time... everything was either setting up the story, offering background or an action scene.

• The fight scenes were top notch.

• Really good chemistry between the leads.

• The benchmark of a good MCU movie: A relatable villain whose motive isn't simply being evil.

Some spoilery thing things:

***=NSFW content***

Actually I did have a question from anyone versed in Asian communities. I read a post on Reddit that claimed Shang-Chi wasn't expected to do very well in actually Asian countries because Simu Liu is too muscular/big, and that doesn't conform to the cultural ideal of lean action heroes.

Is there any truth to it?

@ganymede That's high praise!

What makes it special?

@coin It's all about connectivity. Even the fact you can connect through a client is coincidental - your work's sysadmins simply neglected to block that port but drop outbound traffic to other ports for the same IP address.

It's just how your job's firewall policies are set up. If you have clout with them you can have them open the traffic up and you'll log on fine from the web client as well.

@mietze said in What is a MU*?:

I like Faraday's list the best.

But if I really think about it when I think MU for me anyway the root is text based. Not video or picture or visual in the actually seeing it vs mind's eye thing.

Let's work with that.

Consider an Ares game which - if you're logged on from the web - will display a generic picture of the room you're in. So when you visit the Blue Hearts bar you'll see a picture of a specific bar on the upper right corner.

Is it no longer a MU*?

Let's perhaps look at it from a different perspective.

Take an Ares game.

What is a feature or limitation you add to it (or what do you take away from it) so that it is no longer a MU*?

To avoid (further) derailing the MU client thread let's split the conversation here. I think it can be a fruitful one.

What is a MU*?

Why is Arx a MU* but World of Warcraft is not? Both allow players to pose, feature persistent worlds, character sheets and an evolving storyline. You can roleplay in both.

What makes a MU* a MU* ?

I think a lot of this belongs in a separate conversation. "What is a MU*"?

Is it the ability to pose?

Is it having a persistent grid and a character sheet?

Why is Arx a MU* but World of Warcraft isn't?

I don't know how well known he is outside of Greece. Probably not much.

But Mikis Theodorakis died today.

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

Well, I see it as a limitation. There are definitely things you can do on a web game that you can't do on standard MU* client.

Yes you can do them, but have they actually been done? Because then we could actually debate whether the trade off of no longer being backwards compatible is worth it (or yet).

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

The need to support old-school MU clients is a tremendous limitation on new platforms and individual games.

Got it. I won't argue the point, you obviously have vastly more experience in this probably than anyone else.

I think for me it had mostly been a matter of what I was used to rather than what was being offered. After all using SimpleMU (for example) for 10+ years I had a hell of a time at some point to switch to even another client let alone play exclusively over the web.

But here is the thing. Why is that an issue? As far as I'm concerned the 'need' for the hobby to move to web-based clients is in order to attract new players who might find the dedicated MU* clients intimidating or off-putting.

Are there games out there which need to be played from a browser because of radical new interface elements or features telnet can't handle?

If not we can have the best of both worlds. Traditional clients for the oldbies and flashy, friendly web browsers for the hip newbies.

Do people still say hip? Is that a thing? I am not hip.

A post elsewhere prompted me to ask in a thread dedicated to the topic.

Are online friends real friends? Where do you draw the line, if you do?

Let's define online friends in this context as 'people you haven't and/or don't expect to meet in real life'.

@groth said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

@arkandel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

The reason I dislike it is because it taints future interactions. How is Bob supposed to build up to the next small tidbit of apocrypha he pries out of Joe and feel legitimate excitement about it when Jane has read the fucking handbook IC and knows everything there is to know complete with its canonical terminology?

I think this is an inherent issue with multisphere. You can either try to create a cohesive thematic experience or you can have the entire kitchen sink roam the grid but you can't have both.

While I'm whining about nonsense like an elitist jerk, you know what gets me?

Fine, fiiine, Jane can learn everything there is to know about the Lancea Sanctum in record time. But I wish at least it generated actual RP, instead of all that expertise being assumed between scenes, where an entirety of a sphere's knowledge was transferred in the background.

The part about super-friends I'm not crazy about is when it's trivialized. That's it. The too-cool-for-school mindset that rolls over these things for everyone.

Werewolf Bob: "HOLY SHIT I FOUND OUT VAMPIRES EXIST JOE IS ONE HOLY SHIT"
Werewolf Jane: "Lol. I was at their Elysium last night to watch the new Sanctified Primogen conduct Midnight Mass."
Werewolf Bob: "..."

The reason I dislike it is because it taints future interactions. How is Bob supposed to build up to the next small tidbit of apocrypha he pries out of Joe and feel legitimate excitement about it when Jane has read the fucking handbook IC and knows everything there is to know complete with its canonical terminology?

@greenflashlight said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

@tnp Dammit. I've been dreading this for a lot longer than I probably should have been.

When I heard it it was on the radio, but I didn't catch the beginning. All I heard was someone from the Rolling Stones had died and something about Keith Richards.

I called bullshit on that immediately.

@tinuviel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

I used to really loathe the Super Friends thing. But then I realised that that isn't what I loathe, really. It's when Super Friends is the only thing going, and the internal 'sphere' plot is either non-existent or solely in support of the Super Friends.

For me it's that I'd rather have RP than not have it.

Inter-sphere RP is easy. You have something to talk about right out of the box - the whole learning about each other's ways trope is wide open. And the romance. And, yes, the fangs-on-fur-and-magic-sex trope, too.

There's something to be said about immediately accessible things to talk about. In itself there's nothing wrong with it. After all there's no guarantee that in-sphere RP is going to be creative and innovative either.