Best posts made by Chime

We're back up and it looks stable.

@Thenomain said in MU Things I Love:

@Chime

Thanks, Theno~

@Arkandel said in MU Things I Love:

@Thenomain said in MU Things I Love:

I largely stopped enjoying myself in this hobby about four years ago. That what I do can help other people from hitting this point is pretty much all that keeps me going.

You are a weird, grumpy old man.

This is true of a lot of us-- at least the weird/grumpy part and Theno's reasoning.

Mattar paneer (basically curried peas and cheese over rice)

@2mspris: Yep. Fixed again for the short term. No, I don't sleep; I wait.

That said, kinda frustrated about apache stability in this round of packages.

@Alzie said:

Since it's been brought up several times, Security through Obscurity is a perfectly fine, viable solution as long as it's not your only security layer. Changing the default port of SSH or any other service will never stop a targeted attack, however as an additional layer of security, it will defeat the non-targeted attacks that are employed regularly that look for a specific opened port.

Additionally, Services like fail2ban or sshguard have their own issues, such as someone recognizing that they are being employed and locking you out of your own server. They're not particularly good solutions given that danger unless you have local access to the server.

Please forgive a bit of thread necromancy, but I just saw this.

Security by obscurity is generally pretty stupid. Running ssh on another port doesn't hide it from very many people and is pretty annoying to the rest of us.

Correctly configured fail2ban should be generating ip-localized rules in response to auth failures. If Attacker A on address ip-A hammers ssh trying to get in as root, fail2ban should block ip-A on port 22 (and maybe other ports). Even if they know my username and hammer that, it only blocks it for the IPs they come from.

Now if they can spoof IPs (not all that hard), then things get more complicated, but usually that results in other problems first.

Source: Me! I've run mechanipus in various forms for several years and AccelaNET before it. I'm quite familiar with operating on the internet at large and in distinctly hostile network environments (woo, DEFCON!). All of my machines run fail2ban and have for many years. Additionally I have a variety of adaptive firewall rules constructed using rate-limiting hash buckets, which tend to make portscanners unusable. I can elaborate on how that works if anyone is interested--

-- but that's part of my point exactly: none of my security relies on obscurity. It's strong without it and spreading knowledge about how it works only raises the strength of internet users as a whole. For the safety of everyone, we must all know how these things work.

...Geez I sound like the Free Council now.

@somasatori said:

What about Dwarf Fortress: The MUSH?

At least then it wouldn't be out of the ordinary to become sickened by miasma, slip on your own vomit, lose your will to keep going on, then go into a prolonged depression followed by homicidal rage.

Urist Bowelquencher is a legendary craftsdwarf, having carved the artifact wall engraving, "Tree-fire the smoke of burning burningness." The engraving is made of olivine and inlaid with bands of cat leather. The engraving menaces with spikes of carp teeth. In the engraving is a picture of a tree. It is burning. Near the tree is the dwarf Urist Bowelquencher, engraving. Urist Bowelquencher is engraving the artifact wall engraving, "Tree-fire the smoke of burning burningness." The wall engraving is covered with dwarf blood, dwarf vomit, goblin blood, goblin vomit, goblin entrails, goblin hair, goblin semen, and bears the infernal brimstone reek of the Fire Demon Borghost Pinchweener, who escaped in the year 475.

fuckers who come in before the crack of noon, like savages.

Fixed that for you.

Okay, here's another one that someone might find entertaining. It's not that old, but... definitely shows how things grow.

From log/tr-coventry/2010-06-23.log:

Welcome to the Reach
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  "connect <name> <password>" connects you to an existing character.
  Non-staff logins are currently disabled. We are in development.

  "WHO" tells you who is logged in to the game (case sensitive).
  "QUIT" exits the game and saves your character.

  Once logged on, "help" gives help on specific commands, functions, and
  special topics.  Other 'help' commands include "+help" and "news".
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Either that player does not exist, or has a different password.
**** 1 failed connect since your last successful connect. ****
Most recent attempt was from 66.220.1.33 on Wed Jun 23 15:19:59.004934 2010.

MAIL: You have no mail.

The Reach - OOC Nexus

    The Reach is a New World of Darkness (nWoD) game set in the fictional
county of Dunlin's Reach. It takes place between two towns that are
separated by a swath of ocean; the mainland town, Aleswich, is the
economical and industry-driven capital of Dunlin's Reach, with the town of
Dunlin's Port being a rich, indulgent tourist town with a dark past.
    We offer PCs in Vampire: the Requiem, Changeling: the Lost, Werewolf:
the Forsaken, Hunter: The Vigil, Mage: the Awakening, Geist: the
Sin-Eaters and a variety of Mortal+ 'Sighted' characters from Second
Sight, World of Darkness: Immortals, World of Darkness: Inferno and the
Book of Spirits to just name a few. This is the OOC room where players can
kick back, relax and rest up to talk about dodging those crazy Great Old
Ones.
    Because if there's anything we hate about Dunlin's Reach, it's all the
goddamn Elder Gods.

Contents:
Gomorrah
Obvious exits:
IC <IC>  Building Nexus <BN>  Staff Nexus <SN>

Yes indeed, The Reach. Check out how clean (okay, unused) the job board was:

=====================================================| Anomaly Jobs v6.0 |=====================================================
*  Job# Type  Title                                                                          Due On   Assigned To      Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*    48 EVENT Test                                                                           -------- Roanoke            NEW
*    49 EVENT Second Test                                                                    -------- -                  NEW
*    50 EVENT Test2                                                                          -------- Roanoke            NEW
==================================================| * Denotes New Activity |===================================================

And how completely different the set of staffers were

Password changed.
<StaffOOC> Coventry has joined this channel.
Channel StaffOOC added with alias so.
<StaffOOC> Sverdlovsk says, "Welcome Coventry"
Santiago pages: There you go. ;)
<StaffOOC> Gomorrah says, "We need some damn help files. HEY Coventry!"
<StaffOOC> Coventry says, "Hiii!"
<StaffOOC> Gomorrah says, "FIX EVERYTHING"
<StaffOOC> Coventry sets up a veterinary office.
-- Players --
Coventry(#974PXckg)
Sverdlovsk
Gomorrah
Santiago
Chernobyl
-- Objects --
-- StaffOOC --

And here we are, the WHO and +who.

Player Name        On For Idle  Doing
Coventry             0:03   0s
Sverdlovsk           0:52   1m
Gomorrah             1:04  15s
Santiago             1:08   1m
Chernobyl       32d 02:16  45m
5 Players logged in, 15 record, no maximum.
-----------------------------------| +who |------------------------------------
* #-1 NOT FOUND  #-1 NO Neuter  0s  0s * Unfindable *
* #-1 NOT FOUND  #-1 NO Neuter  0s  0s * Unfindable *
* #-1 NOT FOUND  #-1 NO Neuter  0s  0s * Unfindable *
---------------------------------------------------------------------| 3 / 15 |
Alias           Channel            Status   Title
pub             Public             on  con
so              StaffOOC           on  con
-- End of comlist --
=====================================================| Anomaly Jobs v6.0 |=====================================================
*  Job# Title                                                                                Due On   Assigned To      Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
==================================================| * Denotes New Activity |===================================================
==============================================================================
   Group Name                    Last Post      # of messages
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1  -  Job Tracker                   Mon May 10            5 U
 3     Changeling                    Mon Feb 22            0
 4     Hunter                        Mon Feb 22            0
 5     Geist                         Mon Feb 22            0
 6     Mage                          Mon Feb 22            0
 7     Were                          Mon Feb 22            0
 8     Sighted                       Mon Feb 22            0
 9     Mortal                        Mon Feb 22            0
10     Vampire                       Mon Feb 22            0
11     OOC: Discussion               Sat May 22            1 U
12     ElseMU* Advertisements        Mon Feb 22            0
13     Wanted Concepts               Mon Feb 22            0
14     Announcements                 Mon Feb 22            0
15     PrP Requests                  Mon Feb 22            1 U
16     Events                        Sat Apr 10            0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'*' = restricted     '-' = read only     '(-)' = read only, but you can write
==============================================================================
Set.
That name is already in use.
Alias set.
<StaffOOC> Gomorrah says, "The #s on the map (job 55) are the room's dbf#"

...I really do miss Gomorrah. I think she tried to poke me about a game on WORA before it flopped, but I couldn't get in to reply and... yeah. I don't do that anymore anyway. But where-ever you are, hope things are well.

@HorrorHound said in WTF And?:

...You are all Heretics, and meddle with The Warp! BURN!

Hail Tzeentch!

The first three books are very reasonable, non-overly-eroticised old urban fantasy. Old here meaning: more like the hardboiled detective genre, police procedural details, etc; and ... * drumroll * Payphones. Yes, it's that old.

The next books after that deal with the whole Richard (werewolf guy) situation with respect to pack politics and how that affects pack, other shifter communities (like the "pard" of leopards) and how it fits in with Jean Claude and the vampires of the city. Lots of foolish angst and denial.

Bearing with that, out through Obsidian Butterfly are a fairly reasonably well-done urban fantasy series. OB in particular does a very nice job of showing (with respect to the chain of books from the beginning of the series) a long, smooth transition in Anita as she looses her humanity and becomes something much darker. It's a bit grim, but I respect what she did to the character and how she got there. Fair warning: it is quite a bit more brutally violent than prior things, especially focusing on Anita as a person willing to torture and coldly murder in order to get her way.

After that comes Narcissus in Chains, which is rather awful and contains the "deus sex machina" (heh) that others have alluded to. This and the next batch of books are more reminiscent of her Merry Gentry books, which were more straightforwardly billed as erotica rather than urban fantasy. It's a striking contrast from the earlier books in the series, and rather disappointing.

The last few books have been a bit better, though a significant number of chapters are spent on the stupid sex-drama of a number of characters that should have been forgotten ages ago. (Richard, Asher, etc). As of the last full-length novels, she seems to be trying to drag the story back to the police-procedural type stuff she started with, and has been emphasizing the aspect of Anita-as-a-federal-marshall.

The short novella released a month or two ago... well. The author is trying to broaden Anita's horizons by playing for both teams. I'm still not quire sure what to think, but have to agree with Anita's assessment that a lot of the people around her are whiny bitches. If that continues into the next book with actually telling some of these clowns to fuck-off-or-die (or just killing them), then the series might improve.

It is one of the more classic examples of a 'broken masquerade' setting, but is a rather grim and ugly thing, and does not give a very good representation of the BDSM community either. Think: supernaturals are as horny as d'Angelines of Carey's Kushiel books, but the writing lacks all of the delicate class that Carey used.

c.f. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/06/02

@iceshinagami said:

Hey, you get to work at 6, go to bed by 11pm you have a very nice day!

Biologically, some of us are not set up that way. Coming in later is not (generally) a sign of laziness. Sadly, there is a common misconception there that earlier means more-dedicated, somehow.

Haha!

No, I won't be burning the house down, with lemons or otherwise.

I will be setting up a Patreon in the near future as it sounds like a much much better way of doing things.

Again, if I ever do need to shut it all down, I'll give people plenty of warning and help moving off. I just... kinda couldn't take that guy anymore

I'll definitely ask @loki for help when needed. Much appreciated!

Y'all need some more vitamins T, H, and C. Alternate/newer technology types in the MU* space still catering to potentially RP-involved games are relevant to my interests.

If updates come periodically... great! It's content and something to read that might inspire people to go do something. If you don't like it, don't read it. That said, each post of that sort should be framed in the form of "here's what we've done since last time:" and be a coherent forward progression. Blind repetition does no one any good, but I don't think that's the case here, is it?

@Thenomain said:

(hint: drink fresh-ground, home-brewed coffee; it's very inexpensive)

Ground fresh every morning for that pot of coffee with a standalone conical burr grinder using beans roasted in the past week taken exclusively from the Mordecofe plantation in Ethiopia. You probably haven't heard of it. * adjusts her hipster glasses and flaunts that westcoast cargopants-and-flannel chic *

Seriously though, it's really good coffee.

People that like white backgrounds on webpages. I want to stab you in your eyeballs.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

AND WE SHALL IT... THIS LAND.

You accidentally the verb.

@surreality

Damn. I swear I just wasted like a whole hour drooling over espresso machines again.

I would probably go with more of the semi-auto style if I went that way, along the lines of Breville's BES920XL. But. Those brass Pavoni machines are so pretty~

(There's a reason I've been way less pleasant than usual this month, and I blame the perpetual withdrawl migraine. )

I tried doing that-- Once. I was working in an office back then; regular university IT department stuff. After about two weeks of trying to do without any caffeine at all, a group of my co-workers cornered me before I could slip back into the safety of my undersea-crevice cubicle. They didn't say anything, but stood there, silently judging me. After an evil cackle, one of them cracked open a can of redbull or something. Not the best soft drink, and certainly no comparison to coffee-- but that smell... If I hadn't smelled it, I'd not have been seriously tempted. Once it was thrown open before me, I was lost. With great gleeful gulps I drank the thing down, then scuttled back to my cube-- screeching with furious delight at the raw power of the stuff.

It is truly the modern vitae.

Then of course there is the trip I took with some friends a few years back; we were huddled near the meager shade of a tarp to escape the harsh Mojave sun, squinting through the glare at endless miles of dusty earth and purportedly still-alive creosote bushes. As the silence stretched, my friend put his hand on my back and grinned slyly. His tongue darted out for a moment, moistening his lips as he surveyed the camp. His eyes swiveled back to me, and his grin showed far too many teeth.

"I've got something you'll like," he said. There was no doubt in his voice; he knew me far too well. He nodded, likely knowing anything I might have thought or said was superfluous. I did scowl; his self-assured dominance was wearing thin in the heat and I remain ever the skeptic. Rolling a small container into his hand, he showed me the label, then leered-- daring me to action.

"PURE ANHYDROUS CAFFEINE," it read. Well, and so. "Wow. Um. Like how do we even--" I recall not being terribly articulate, but then again I hadn't had any yet. He pulled out some ridiculously flavored bag of doritos and proceeded to coat one with the powder until it looked like a powdered donut.

"Try this." he said, leaning in closer. Him being him and me being me, I did-- but that caffeine certainly didn't hurt. My heart may have disagreed, however; I could feel it accelerating within the confines of my body, trying to escape. Soon after, my face contorted in dismay. "Auwwgh."

Miracle tho caffeine might be, it doesn't taste very good in pure form.

@skew said in Quiet Quiet Rooms?:

Thank you, @Chime!

Anytime!

Hate to do this, but can anyone break down how to apply this patch in very, very simple terms? I can get into the console as necessary, I know what git is, I just have no idea how to apply a patch to a game. Or, well, most anything else linux-related.

Sorry for being a bit terse. I spend most of my waking hours at some sort of unix prompt (Linux or otherwise). First, you'll need several tools. If you don't have administrator (root) access, then hopefully your host has already got these installed. On deb-derived systems (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc etc) you'll want something like

$ sudo apt-get update
... some lines downloading package lists ...

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential g++ make patch tar bzip2 wget git
... some lines describing additional packages it wants to install ...
... question about if that's okay (say yes, generally) ...
... many lines about downloading and installing each package ...

If the tools are already there, then you won't need to do that.

$ cd
$ mkdir mux-src
$ cd mux-src
$ wget ftp://ftp.tinymux.org/tinymux-2.12/alpha/3/mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2
--2017-05-09 23:35:06--  ftp://ftp.tinymux.org/tinymux-2.12/alpha/3/mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2
           => ‘mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2’
Resolving ftp.tinymux.org (ftp.tinymux.org)... 52.34.23.255, 2600:1f14:2a0:2201:ab7d:7d:8dd3:57fc
Connecting to ftp.tinymux.org (ftp.tinymux.org)|52.34.23.255|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done.    ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done.  ==> CWD (1) /tinymux-2.12/alpha/3 ... done.
==> SIZE mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2 ... 1080619
==> PASV ... done.    ==> RETR mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2 ... done.
Length: 1080619 (1.0M) (unauthoritative)


mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2               100%[===============================================================================>]   1.03M  --.-KB/s    in 0.09s   

2017-05-09 23:35:06 (11.6 MB/s) - ‘mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2’ saved [1080619]

$ tar xjvf mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2
mux2.12/
mux2.12/INSTALL
mux2.12/SGP
mux2.12/CHANGES
mux2.12/LOCAL
mux2.12/REALITY.SETUP
mux2.12/NOTES
mux2.12/src/
mux2.12/src/move.cpp
mux2.12/src/Doxyfile
mux2.12/src/autoconf.h.in
mux2.12/src/muxcli.h
... many more files unpacking ...

$ git clone https://github.com/lashtear/tinymux.git
Cloning into 'tinymux'...
remote: Counting objects: 59424, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 59424 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 59422
Receiving objects: 100% (59424/59424), 18.34 MiB | 17.20 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (46787/46787), done.

Now, you should be in a folder called 'mux-src' right underneath your homedir, with the tar.bz2 archive of upstream tinymux from Brazil and a git checkout of my quirky version.

$ ls -laF
total 1080
drwxr-xr-x   4 lucca lucca    4096 May 10 00:01 ./
drwxr-xr-x 104 lucca lucca   12288 May  9 23:56 ../
drwxr-x---   5 lucca lucca    4096 Feb 13  2016 mux2.12/
-rw-r--r--   1 lucca lucca 1080619 May  9 23:35 mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2
drwxr-xr-x  11 lucca lucca    4096 May  9 23:58 tinymux/

$ cd tinymux
$ git show 5fd6080286dc36fe7ba6673a208dbfb445a6d056 > ../blind-room.patch
$ cd ..
$ ls -laF
total 1088
drwxr-xr-x   4 lucca lucca    4096 May 10 00:03 ./
drwxr-xr-x 104 lucca lucca   12288 May  9 23:56 ../
-rw-r--r--   1 lucca lucca    4606 May 10 00:03 blind-room.patch
drwxr-x---   5 lucca lucca    4096 Feb 13  2016 mux2.12/
-rw-r--r--   1 lucca lucca 1080619 May  9 23:35 mux-2.12.0.3.unix.tar.bz2
drwxr-xr-x  16 lucca lucca    4096 May 10 00:03 tinymux/

Now we have that same bit plus that blind-room.patch file. Now before you start suggesting that it'd be really handy if we kept all those patches somewhere easy to access-- that's exactly what any revision control software (like git) does. Anyway, time to apply.

$ cd mux2.12
$ patch -p2 <../blind-room.patch 
patching file game/text/help.txt
patching file src/move.cpp
patching file src/netcommon.cpp

Congrats. You now have a tinymux tree from Brazil but with just that one patch of mine added. If you were instead building from his git repo, you could do this all much easier with the git cherry-pick command, but you probably aren't. If building against an archive export of his git tree, change the parameter to -p1 because of the slightly different directory structure.

This should work for most any 2.12 or 2.10 version, though if you use 2.10 the file offsets are slightly different, so you would see instead:

$ cd mux2.10
$ patch -p2 <../blind-room.patch 
patching file game/text/help.txt
Hunk #1 succeeded at 5009 (offset -12 lines).
patching file src/move.cpp
patching file src/netcommon.cpp

Yes; git, patch, diff, etc are all rather clever and indispensable tools that I can't imagine getting through my day without. Game should build as normal with these changes.

can we all please just get along ._.

The Difference Engine was magnificent-- but then I'm a computer dork and the idea of viable mainframes made with gears and steampower and punch cards is AWESOME. It really could work, and thinking about how to do these things and how history might have been different is something I find fascinating.

Now, "steampunk" as a modern style can be an absolutely horrible thing. Tacky use of corsets that aren't worn right, stupid plastic gears spraypainted and glued to all surfaces? Ugh. It is bad and if you like this you should feel bad.

Reasonable approximations of Victorian-era clothing at each of the various social classes can be very nice. The whole ethic of Reason-- that we can observe natural phenomena and draw conclusions about the working of the universe and better ourselves by doing so and that any gods that might exist are irrelevant-- I love that.