Best posts made by Chime

Oh. Uh. A URL. You kids and your web thing.

https://www.patreon.com/lashtear

I'm driving to LA and back today (probably about 7 hours total with traffic) and ostensibly seeing relatives, so I suspect that today is out. But soon....

@Auspice said in Dystopia MUX:

Sooooo... game down? WHAT HAPPEN

Kuramori (one of the larger Mechanipus hosting servers) is undergoing kernel update and a brief several migrations to updated the virtualization setup. Things will start back up when that completes, which I was hoping would be about 90 minutes ago, but will probably be more like another 30-40 minutes.

In more technical detail for the morbidly curious:

• Updating the kernel to address privilege escalation vulnerabilities
• Migrated off Linode's legacy Xen environment into their KVM environment
• Migrated again to take advantage of some of their additional service upgrades (trading cpu count for MOAR RAM, etc)
• Resizing of disks

Some of those operations are unfortunately rather slow. Kuu went through most of these updates shortly after decomissioning of The Reach.

Sorry for the inconvenience; please remember that planned maintenance is better than unplanned maintenance, and Dystopia will be back up and perky very soon.

@Thenomain said:

Yeah, @JinShei, but you're using Fate Core, a fairly simple system that has some internal checks that prevents people from, e.g., putting everything at 5/Excellent. To be good at something, you have to give up something.

So hopefully we'll start to see more people using Fate instead?

Heyyy. This thing is still alive, and has a variety of fixes.

Additionally, I've not got a basic set of unit tests (with ever expanding coverage) and per-commit checking via travis-ci. In particular, I can now show things like:

Other long-standing mux issues fixed in current mechanipus branch:

• The inline-sql handler (sql()) will conveniently auto-reconnect whenever needed, completely transparently.

@Chime said:

Things NOT present but definitely on the must-do list before a release:

• Complete replacement of the svdhash database implementation. This is a huge amount of work but necessary for where I want to go with it.
• SQLite support for games running without mysqld handy.

Still on the agenda, and in progress! Add to this:

• Will do a complete rewrite of the SSL layer to clean up some odd cases and allow carrying SSL contexts across @restart.

Known issues:

• stubslave launch may be broken

Fixed!

• dbconvert symlink origin on non-symlink platforms (windows?) with out-of-target DESTDIR may break

Should be fixed, difficult for me to test. (And probably no one cares)

• MinGW cross-compliation goes down in flames because of the lingering VisualCisms.

Likely dropping windows or at least MSVC support entirely.

• I need to write a bunch of manpages.

Yep. And to continue extending the doxygen docs-- but I'm holding off on that as a LOT of the complexity disappears when rewriting certain parts.

I think race is kinda silly from the biodiversity perspective; the dna differences are negligible. Now... socio-cultural differences and the effect of historical circumstances, prevalent languages used, etc, can be a big deal.

Hell if I know though. I'm a compsci person, not a psychosocial engineer.

Based on genealogical research my mother did, about 5/8ths of the family came from England, with a few small branches from Ireland. The rest is mostly Germanic, with the current surname dating to Prussia in the 1880s.

As far as skin color, well... yeah. I'm well into the looks-like-a-vampire territory. I put on SPF 9000 or it burns and peels off in long, bleeding strips. Mostly it's pale-to-translucent, but often looks fairly red because I blush anytime I'm thinking something naughty.

And yes, I'm always thinking something naughty.

But culturally? Well. That's much more complicated but likely best left in a different topic.

Enough games are run on their own VMs now that iptables is a pretty legit way to go, if you can manage it.

I've used RCS, CVS, TLA (arch), Darcs (and used to be a supplier of magically statically linked solaris sparc binaries because of the trouble others have with Haskell), hg, bzr, svn... I think that's about it.

I really did like Darcs, but the way they don't-handle branches by making you just use additional repos for branching is awkward to me. Git feels like the best of all worlds.

"Back in my day, we had to commit our changes five miles through the snow..."

Seeking something outside your perceived demographic helps promote continued biodiversity. That said, humans are so much alike it doesn't matter much.

But daaaang I admit that mixed-anything looks very very nice.

Though I will always have a very soft spot for tall, blonde, athletic women. Take me, my sweet Valkyrie~ * swoon * ...applies somewhat to tall, blonde men too, but not as much. Usually.

Our biases can be seen as very ugly things, or we can try and recognize that they are biases-- and enjoy them where and whenever we can that won't hurt others. The world would be a miserably boring place if everyone had the same desires.

Yep. And you haven't seen nothing until you encounter the typical wereleopard character. I had nooo idea what I was getting into, even having read the books.

Still. I love the setting....

@Sammi --

It was more than that, but the drop database bit looked cooler. No one really wants to see all of the

cd /var/www/thereach/docroot/w/maintenance
php dumpsomethingorotherIforgettherestbutyermumetcetc |xz -9 >~/reach.xml.xz
cd ..
rm -rf images/
tar xJvf ~/images.tar.xz images
cd
rm -rf /var/www/thereach
cp /home/mush/thereach/game/backups/somethingorother ~
cp -r /home/mush/thereach/git ~/reachgit
rm -rf /home/mush/thereach
groupdel thereach
userdel -r thereach
a2dissite thereach
a2dissite thereach-ssl
service apache2 restart
rm /var/spool/cron/crontabs/thereach

and so on, and on. The guts are always ugly. Not sure appropriate alcohol/music to give it a sendoff. Leaning toward the Sound of Silence and a double of scotch.

@DamnitJim said:

In general, there should be a lot more Coalitions for Promoting More Hookups. That's my main message

Ho yez.

@HelloProject said:

So, I wanted to have a bit of a constructive discussion about things that are commonly held as difficult or impossible to explore in a MUing environment. Obviously anyone can say "This is why you can't do that", but I would like people to think of things that people believe cannot be done, and then think of ways that they possibly could be.

Like McMannis said in The Usual Suspects, "There's nothing that cannot be done."

A notable example of something considered difficult or impossible to do non-destructively in a MU is time travel. Sure, there are examples of staff controlled time travel (String Theory, which is a Heroes MU, Mega Man MUSH, where we went back in time and met Street Fighter people in the 90s). However, time travel is still highly regulated. Mega Man MUSH handles time travel by simply saying that it creates an alternate universe rather than altering the present, but again, it's staff controlled.

Time travel complicates or eliminates causality. As causality is often the only tangible evidence that your characters mattered, this very quickly becomes pretty ugly.

They can dick around in history, they just can't change it, thanks to causal loops.
I know that the grandfather paradox is a thing, but I would ultimately override it with causal loops. "You killed Hitler! Holy shit!"
"Hey why did Nazis still happen?"
"Oh, I guess Hitler was never actually the original Hitler, but a double", and so on.

This very quickly becomes silly an degenerates to a case of whack-a-mole that can never actually hit the right mole. Not fun.

That said, I think time-travel issues could be very well handled if certain limited short-range forms were a standard part of the setting.

Kim Harrison (of The Hollows fame) has a new series out involving "drafters" -- people that can draft new timelines. Essentially, they can rewind time in a localized region of space by some number of seconds or minutes. For example; I've been shot! -- rewind time 30 seconds and kick the gun out of his hand before he can do that! ... It's very difficult and has terrible costs and psychological results, especially to memory. Indeed, she apparently wrote it to explore some of the social implications of Alzheimer's and related memory issues; the drafters need an Anchor that can help them stabilize on a coherent memory of the winning timeline.

This could make for a very interesting setting. I highly recommend reading at least the short story she put out in advance, "Sideswiped." Unfortunately, it being science fiction instead of urban fantasy with hawt vampires, elves, werewolves, and demons, the sales have been catastrophically bad. It really is fantastic writing though...

@Thenomain said in Fallout/Wasteland existing code/snippets.:

TinyMUX doesn't have a 'nospoof' @pemit, so @nspemit --> @pemit will have to do.

And yet I had a variety of code on The Reach @pemiting without nospoof tags, e.g. the posebreak stuff.

Hint: just run the pemit as the target (see objeval) and no tags are printed.

@Cirno:

Sweetie, you really need to get laid.

@Ataru said in Dune Coda Stuff:

Hi friends,

Ominous already.

So I've been away from MU*ing for over a year now ... returning to find WORA gone, Reach and much change. I've been lurking a bit and seeing what is happening in the community. It is good to see many names I recognize and look forward to RPing with again.

Yay. I think.

Anywho, while lurking, I've noticed in a few threads that there was interest in a Dune game.

Hm. peeks at her forum signature. Yeees, there might be.

Well, my Dune server is still up and running (I need to talk to @Chime about keeping it going and what I owe her and all, if she could ping me that would be great) and the wiki and I still have all my notes for news files, the grid and well everything.

You're fine for now. Still trying to sort out my long-term plans for Mechanipus. Worst case, in a few months time I'll be looking to shut down the web side of things; looking into offsite wikis/forums/etc might be very helpful. Direct MUSH hosting I can maintain more or less indefinitely.

I'll post a link to the wiki below as well as to the address of the game. I will hang out there if anyone wants to login as a guest (I think I need to turn CREATE on in the shell, I'll look into it, it might work already) and chat about it. If there is interest, I would be happy to complete its development and manage the thing. Its still the one setting I would be most keen to play as much as I miss WoD (or CoD now I guess).

So if there is interest, let me know here or ping me on the game. I won't do it if its not really something people are after ... I'm happy to use the server space for something else which might be of more interest to people. Anywho, good to be returning to the MU* community!

Interested. Not sure I have time, but interested.

@Seamus said in Chime's MOO thread:

Once upon a time there was a moo coder out there that iirc went on to run a Chicago based wod mush. He was pretty fancy with his moo code.

That sounded like the start of a limerick for a bit there....

To be clear: I would love to see a renaissance of urban fantasy mu*s facilitated by a better server environment. I think the game I want to make is more sci-fi type stuff-- but I will be trying very hard to make a modern, mush-user-friendly moocore that will make sheets, chargen, etc. a snap to deploy for most would-be game owners.

But we aren't there yet.

I like to think I'm fairly safety-conscious and a courteous driver, so I try to keep it under 90 mph.

Usually.

@deadculture said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

I do think a coder like you could do something really great to update the MOO codebase for Cybersphere/Ghostwheel/etc. Would certainly make launching a new game based on MOO more viable, and perhaps without the cultural pitfalls that the medium seems to have.

@surreality said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

@Chime We were probably there around the same time.

...and if you ever do something with MOO to make it, well, workable? (As in, there's some hint of a clue how to even get it running... ) Oh, gods, please let me know.

Hm. Hmm!

I had a project I was working on that I tabled because some friends asked me to take a peek at a new game they were helping with that had trouble with codestaff disappearing and needed aid. (That game was later fairly popular, though few probably remember it now. It was called The Reach... cackle, cackle) MY project from before then was SurfaceTension, designed to be a an RP MOO using the Blue Planet rules and setting.

Like many MOOs, it used a from-scratch core and quite a few hardcode changes to make it more mush-like. Spent a lot of time making player:tell() smart enough to render mush-style color codes intelligently on different output platforms (Telnet, xterm256, html, etc) and implement things like NOSPOOF handling (far better than MUSH does). On the hardcode side, I re-did the prefix chars so semi did ;emotes and comma did ,evals. I was just at the point of adding more detailed dict-type support and numerous new moo-language features for things like lambda expressions and the like. ...so yes, I have some vague familiarity with the moo hardcode now.

Was running into moo bytecode speed execution limitations and pondering ways to re-architect that. Also, much like other codebases it was rather strictly singlethreaded-- this was great in the old days but I'd really rather have true multithreading with easy to use composable-STL transactions for clean handling of shared state. These aren't must-haves, but it sure would be nice.

What sorts of MUSH-style features would either of you guys need for actually making a working game with a MOO? IIRC my list that I was targeting was:

Mandatory:

• mush-style say/pose/@emit/ooc for IC and OOC rooms (done)
• mush-style page (done)
• the existence of rooms, as moo doesn't have those in hardcode (done)
• the existence of exits, as moo doesn't have those in hardcode

Recommended:

• mush-style channels
• mush-style @mail
• SSL/TLS support
• Various things commonly present in SGP, etc

Optional:

• mush-style colors (done)
• SQL bridge
• ticketing system analogous to AJ

Thoughts? Is this the sort of thing anyone actually wants? I mean when I was talking about it before most people were like 'ewww, moo?'