Posts made by Derp

@carma said in What is a MU*?:

"Hey now pard'ner, we don't have to spend any time letting blind people play our games."

Which is not at all what I said, but alright. I said that there is a difference between a professional coder being held to accessibility standards and an unpaid hobbyist being held to those same standards, as they likely have no education or experience in those matter, if they've ever been taught design in the first place.

I'm not saying that we should keep blind people out. I'm saying that the how dare you sir reaction to not having it built in from the get-go is a bit much given the difference in who is actually creating the game.

@carma said in What is a MU*?:

People who are blind or people with other disabilities must be able to play it just as well as non-disabled people.

I'm not sure that I would agree with this one.

I mean, yes, in an ideal world that would be the case, but expecting gamerunners to know enough of the accessibility standards to be able to create for this, especially when they aren't getting paid to do so, might be a bridge too far.

It's nice if they are, but that certainly shouldn't be a requirement just for the game platform, or to create a game.

If someone out there with that knowledge volunteers it to make it more accessible, fantastic, but I don't think we should be putting the onus on the creator in the standard creation process. They aren't bad people if they don't know enough to make it available to blind people. That's not a skill that almost anyone needs in their daily lives, and it's already a tall order learning just the code, much less accessibility standards. People get whole degrees in that.

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

I think people are overestimating to some degree the gulf of difference between MUDs and MUSHes.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the interface or whatever looks cool on this one. But. I think you may be underestimating that same gulf.

Especially since, as far as I can tell, on this MUD you're just -- playing with yourself, rather than actively collaborating with other people. And I think that's where the real difference lies.

On a MUD your adventures and encounters come from pre-coded situations. On a MUSH, they come directly from the minds of other people in real time, and that's a big world of difference.

Man, I can't even tell you what makes one acronym different from another.

Why is Rhost better or worse than Mux?

What makes Penn special compared to, say, TinyMUSH?

What even is a MOO or a MUCK? Are they closer to a Mush or a Mud?

I think that the only thing that any of these have in common is that they are an online RPG platform which may or may not require actual roleplay and/or have actual systems for resolution of story situations.

So it's like -- a chat room. Potentially with some extra features.

Beyond that it's been taken apart and put back together so many times I'm not sure you can really draw a cohesive circle around it. Usually but not always contains one or more of the following features... isn't exactly the most helpful metric.

I don't think you're ever going to get away from some kind of client model. The CLI style interface is really about the only remotely manageable way to operate a game like this from an administrative level. Otherwise you'd have ten thousand buttons and such complex menu trees that the learning curve on those would almost be worse than a CLI interface.

I mean, yeah, learning Bash can be a bitch but have you seen Photoshop or Gimp? Because that's what you'd be looking at. You'd need a professional-level course on just how to use the damn thing.

@greenflashlight said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I never have any idea what that question means. How about you tell me something about yourself so I have an example to follow?

This is how I feel every time I see 'must be detail-oriented' on a job posting where I have to write an introduction letter explaining shit about me.

Like -- what the fuck does that even mean? Do you want someone who remembers all things at all times and can summon them up like an Alexa? Or do you want someone who makes obsessively sure that all things are on calendars and filed the way they should be just because he can't remember if he did that one yet and even though it's crossed off the post-it I don't trust the post-it?

Because I am the latter, and so far it works out very well.

@ravengirl said in Online friends:

Then you stop playing and after a month or so it can feel like everyone's just forgotten about you because they don't have mechanics or lore questions to ask anymore, or anything outside of the game that they want to talk about with you.

It's not even that.

It's that you're often literally out of sight. Like -- not appearing on channels or Discord servers, probably buried in the list of DMs. There is nothing there to grab the attention of people like me. So it's not that I don't want to talk. It's just that you're not in my line of sight, and my brain is not the type to go hunting people down. I don't even do that with Rl friends. I can go months or years without messaging them, too.

That's just people.

@ganymede said in Online friends:

Mind, I buy people shit all the day, so —

Why don't you buy me stuff?

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

If folks are having issues please reach out via PM or on the Ares forum or discord with more details so I can look into the problem.

I have this issue but my problems are:

1. My home web was until recently kind of crap, and;
2. There's somethign with the work network that absolutely will not let the website keep a live connection, it'll drop it after like two minutes so the game informs me that it's no longer receiving live updates.

Client-client works fine though! Not sure that there's anything to be done about those for people like me.

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

The thing I've noticed playing AresMUSH games is that a lot of people still choose to use their old-school MU* client even when the option to play exclusively using the website exists. I wonder what possible reasons there are for this.

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

There's a few commands that only work on client, and...well. The much bigger flashy thing helps me know when it's time to check the web portal.

This. The web is nice and can look very pretty but there are some things that it is just flat-out easier to do in the client, if not impossible to do from the web. It's the same reason that people still use CLI stuff when OS's have been GUI for decades.

@misadventure said in RL Sads:

I read something saying that some folks don't have the same sense of decay of the value or intensity of a friendship over time. That's how I feel, whether it's mixed, negative or positive.

I am definitely one of those people.

High school friend that I haven't talked to in twenty years? Doesn't matter. We're still buds and I will act as such.

@wizz said in Online friends:

This the more interesting question to me. I've definitely gone too far in online friendships, and I strongly suspect most of us could say they relate.

@wretched

@arkandel

I mean -- yes? The two I referenced earlier I have, in fact, met in RL, so I don't know if they would count for this. But I have not met @Devrex, for instance, and I consider him an excellent friend, just like the friends in RL.

AND, just like RL people, there are levels, or I guess -- rings? Like, certain circles wherein certain members get additional trust/attention/obligation over others. Some are acquaintances that you know from work and are friendly with but you aren't gonna offer to help them move furniture or whatever. Others are people that you would totally let crash on your couch if they needed it. Whatever.

@testament said in RL Sads:

I can no longer tell if I'm being distant from my online friends or if my online friends are being distant from me.

I think this is really relative. For me, online friends remain online friends, but if we aren't actively playing together or on a discord server somewhere, or here, then it might be a year or more between chats because I will just get tunnel vision and flat-out forget to check in.

It's not that I don't care about them. I very much do, and would still consider them friends. But there aren't any flashy things or warning bells or whatever telling me to make sure to stay up on my contacts, and most of my social stuff is done through just random interactions on channels or whatever, rather than me trying to reach out to them specifically.

I have two friends in Michigan, one I talk to regularly, and one where we don't talk as much now that we aren't actively playing together anywhere. But I'd still go to bat for both of them in a second and I've got the gas to drive to their respective houses should something go terribly, horribly wrong and they need a friend for something. Because they've absolutely been there when I needed one. The one I don't talk with as regularly isn't less close than the one I do talk with. I just consider us less chatty than we used to be because we aren't in a space where that chatter comes organically to me.

@mietze said in RL Sads:

And it feels real good to be the success story about how you refused the mark of the beast, went through your tribulation, and survived.

Then they failed to read the manual. You aren't supposed to survive refusing the Mark. That's the whole point.

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

we don't try to do that anymore for good reason

I wish this were the case, but alas, tis not.

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

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

@arkandel

We're all Hipsters at our core. "I was into X before it was cool." "I knew about Vampires before anyone else did."

I realised we were all hipsters before you realised we were all hipsters.

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

My little cat got out last night and has not returned.

I’m not sure how or why. I have scoured the house. Whenever she has been trapped before, she meows her way out. This morning, it is eerily quiet.

I don’t know what to do.

Check the shelters to see if someone has picked her up / alert them to contact you. If you know your neighbors well, maybe also give them a heads up. Other than that, just call for her and wait for her to find her way back.

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

the main form of plot development seems to be constant charity drives