Posts made by Arkandel

@surreality I went there a month ago! Sadly it was closed and it wouldn't open for another couple of hours, which I didn't have.

So I needed a power strip for the living room with more USB ports since by now the number of devices in the household is exceeding my original expectations.

Fine, I ordered one from Amazon. A few minutes later I realized that, hey, since I own a Google Home and the price difference between regular and smart power strips is pretty small I might as well get a new toy! Then I could do stuff like have the lamp turn on/off at certain hours of the day, etc... it could come in handy. So I canceled the order and put in a new one for a spiffy smart bar.

Hooray! There's a box waiting me when I got home from work a couple of days later. I open it, plug it in and start following the instructions I had pulled up online... but the damn thing doesn't want to connect to my wi-fi. "Hold the reset button until the light starts to blink", it says... but there's no reset button, there's just this unmarked little red button, and no matter how much I hold it nothing's blinking!

I must have spent thirty minutes under the coffee table going through various internet invocations to reset it. I'm a goddamn professional, I troubleshoot networking for a living! Why was this damn thing refusing to cooperate with something advertised as simple enough for commoners? Hell, it's supposed to take 30 seconds, why is it not working after I had tried everything?

And then it hit me... Amazon sent me the original order. The one I had cancelled.

I had just spent half an hour of my life trying to get a piece of old fashioned, dumb power strip to connect to the wi-fi.

Not my brightest moment.

@ghost said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

A lot of time is spent on MSB trying to determine whether or not a complaint is valid or if it's just vindictiveness because it happens so much and no one wants it to happen to them.

For me it's not so hard - usually - to catch an issue when someone has done something truly bad. A few logs of someone openly creeping, being at the center of repeated issues etc is enough to flag them as walking problems and they will always carry that flag for me. If they figure their shit out in the future I can consider playing with them but never closely again.

No, what's hard is knowing when someone has had an one-time incident, or felt particularly triggered that one time, and distinguishing between that and a player who'll always have a thin skin who will need too much patience to deal with. That's really tricky.

Look, anyone can feel bad. It doesn't matter if it's for a valid reason because, well, we don't control our emotions. It also doesn't matter whether that reason can easily translate to someone else - it's possible the same Mean Thing can infuriate one person and only make another facepalm. That's not something to be forgiven or forgotten, it's just... human nature.

A history of fuckups. That's the smoking gun I look for.

@bobotron It took a plunge the moment he 'died' at the hands of Ras back in whatever season that was.

I don't know what happened but almost immediately after that it turned from a show I was watching - and it had its weaknesses but I was watching it - into pure shit. I've tried a couple times since to reconnect but no, still shit.

@surreality Should I watch it starting with S3 then?

Because I watched the first 2-3 episodes and gave up on it entirely.

@thenomain said in Good TV:

I think this is awesome, because we have more mainstream outlets for these stories. I imagine it will also create space in the comics industry for more comics. I don't know if the comics are getting more sales because of it, but I hope they are.

I just don't want one to be at the expense of the other. Comics should have fully contained arcs, storylines which continue to their intended end barring purely financial decisions, characters that aren't just trying to get you to think of an actor or actress who can play the role of <X>, etc.

For example when Marvel basically cancelled the Fantastic Four title largely because they didn't have the movie rights to the team, that's the kind of thing I sigh about.

@auspice It is. I don't have enough :('s

@kumakun So much tends to be a tender topic for some that if we cared about it all we'd never talk about anything.

If it's on your mind, discuss it. Take what you can use from the input you get, and dismiss the rest.

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Is there a dedicated place where people talk about MU development these days? A slack channel, a Discord server?

MSB?

But seriously, I don't know if this is the kind of topic that can benefit from real-time conversations. Those don't tend to work very well for groups, since not everyone's available at the same time, and keeping track of tangents becomes problematic when you don't have threaded topics to separate different discussions.

@lemon-fox said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

And as something of an outsider looking in, it's become really apparent that the socially unhinged people who keep sneaking back into the hobby to do the same thing over and over have irrevocably damaged the ability of this community to trust, as a whole.

In my opinion the damage a handful of people have done to the hobby itself is minimal, although to specific individuals it's much more extensive of course. We simply namedrop them into conversations to drive forth a point, quite often as an insult.

The truth is most people don't think about us in negative terms as much as as we sometimes worry that they do, simply because they don't think of us at all. The vast majority of MUSHers don't have to worry about their public image or if they've been forgiven about their behavior that one time since, unless they set themselves on fire, no one is looking out to see who they play these days or keeping track of their digital whereabouts. No one gives a shit.

It's like going to a gym worrying everyone will think you're an out of shape newbie. They won't, simply because they're busy staring at themselves in the mirror. The same applies to gaming - as long as they don't shit the bed completely most people are going to be just fine.

@testament said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

What is it about mushing, or RPing online that makes it so easy for us to screw up? Sometimes badly. And when it does, why does it often seem like those people find themselves blacklisted from the hobby?

A number of things.

• Internet anonymity is a big thing. It affects everyone even outside of the hobby, and things are said most people would never say to each other's face.

• We're not the most socially adept crowd in general. I mean... we're not, on average.

• Roleplaying makes it hard sometimes to separate our egos from our characters. On top of that some of us can't deal very well with either being more popular (or being rejected) even in the context of playing a game, dealing with pecking orders, etc.

• The themes we often play are sensual, romantic, military or political - which compounded with the former can lead to or at least encourage some unhealthy attitudes.

But maybe I see a lot of the negatives because of how this site functions. Because while we all know what the Hogpit is for, there are times I take a step back and wonder, "Holy hell, we are a bunch of hateful and spiteful people, aren't we?" I wonder how much of it is truly honest, how much it is chest thumping, and how much is back-patting. This isn't so plea to better to each other, because most of us are at the age where that kind of thing goes without saying.

It is not. But we're far more likely to rant and attack someone who drew our ire that one time than to post something nice about that person we had a pleasant conversation with. That means over time more threads are created charged negatively than positively, at least on that forum.

Then again that provides an outlet, and things are aired instead of brewing privately in pages, making someone the target of discontent they might have no idea about let alone a floor to defend themselves on.

What I'm asking, after that long-winded opening is: have you forgiven someone in this hobby? You don't have to be great friends with them now, but at least to the point where there's no animosity. Indifference, perhaps. You don't even have to list stories or names or anything.

I'd like to say I forgive all the time but the (perhaps sad, I don't know) truth is I forget all the time. There are people I'm aware greatly drew my ire years earlier who, when I re-examined it rationally after a long period of time, I no longer really recalled any of the specifics. I was aware of the general gist but not just what it was - and at that point is it really worth it to hold a grudge?

On the other hand I do keep track, at least that way, of repeat offenders. If you've creeped on me once you won't get another chance; that doesn't mean I'll avoid and discredit you, but we won't ever have close IC relations again. The first time is a freebie, the second one would be on me.

Or have someone did a friend of yours wrong, and mob mentality takes effect?

That can happen. To be honest MSB has hardened me when it comes to bandwagons since I get PMed a fair bit, and I was fairly thick skinned to begin with. It's frustrating to see it when it happens though.

I'm more sensitive (to the extent that I am at all) when it's friends of mine being mistreated though. I don't invest in my own ego as much as I used to, yet it's difficult sometimes to really tell what happened when you only hear one half of the story - that is, from just one perspective.

Or were you the person that did the screwing up and how hard has it been for you recover from that? Did you have to hide who you were? Play a different game with a different user name or email?

I've fucked up, sure. Having said that I don't really hide who I am on most MU* simply because I do have friends I like to play with and it's always nice to run into them on a new MU*. I also really don't think I'm the type to not take 'no' for an answer; if anyone wanted to avoid me I'd pick up the hint pretty quick, especially since I won't try too hard or for too long to play with any one person before moving on.

One thing to consider here is that for MSB oldbies our identities are pretty much public record. Soft resets - rolling new alts - might hide the crazy temporarily but if I'm creeping on people long enough it's only a matter of time before everyone here knows it, and it will follow us basically forever. We got long memories.

@paris He should get used to it. Regular superhero comics are basically becoming promotional material for the movies, or limited runs and reboots trying to create interest in new films.

@faraday It's okay to rant in general. Sure, it's not really constructive to whine about how much my papercut hurts or how annoying traffic jams are but it's not aimed at anyone here.

@roz It's just that some parts of this latest conversation ("do I need to explain why a woman..." "yes, you do", etc) strike me as more political rather than personal.

Folks, the conversation is more political than anything at this point. Can we please take it to the politics forum instead?

Also I advise everyone involved to keep in mind even this thread isn't in the Hog Pit. Please do not make it personal.

@thenomain I see. Sure, we'd probably want to take some lessons from those models - @mentions, and all sorts of other UI elements people these days consider no-brainers.

What I was hoping to find was a base multiroom chat platform, fully featured and modular enough to add the RPG elements on top of it. That'd be really convenient to have.

@thenomain I did look at it a few months ago. Customization was my main roadblock - assuming all the persistent elements can be handled by a bot (sheets and CGen, say), it'd require tools for automation (handing out and spending XP, that sort of thing).

I'd be 100% into that, if such tools I'd consider mandatory can be at least convincingly faked by a Discord bot.

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Edit: And another thing, this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily. Obscuring it is not a bad idea, but throwing out a common protocol just because it’s old is shooting yourself in the foot.

Just to make it clear, the telnet protocol's age isn't why I object to it - hell, most of what's needed to make a perfectly viable web-only game is easily 10-15 years old by now.

It's that it was never made to support what we're asking it to do. When I type "ls" I never want the output to be changed afterwards (I need to know exactly what I typed, even if it was incorrect), but when I pose "Arkandel slowly picks up his bag slowly" and don't see it until after I hit enter... too bad. It'd sure be nice if I could fix it for more than just the wiki.

Even if someone doesn't want a specific feature it'd be nice if it was possible to even consider it.

World of Darkness: The Documentary official trailer.

@three-eyed-crow said in Good TV:

@arkandel
My understanding is that, because Daredevil's face is masked, he's a LOT easier to stunt double for. Between that and the rushed production schedule for Iron Fist, I don't exactly forgive Finn Jones all his performance sins, but I can see how he was put in a situation where he couldn't really do great work.

If only Iron Fist had a mask in the comics, right?