Best posts made by faraday

@Ninjakitten said in A Lack of Imagination:

Kinda take a little exception to it being called 'a lack of imagination', though. My imagination is fine, thanks! It just doesn't make actual images.

This is supported by a number of the articles I've been reading. From the researcher who's primarily studied it:

An inability to visualise does not imply an inability to imagine: imagination is a much richer, more complex capacity than the specifically visual ability lost in aphantasia.

Also interesting, since a couple folks have mentioned it on this thread:

a substantial proportion of those contacting us also report problems with face recognition or ‘prosopagnosia’.

I like the idea of those. I'd rather use fictional representations than celebrities. But every one I've seen is either cartoonish or uncanny valley or just ... not great looking. It's jarring. I hope the tech continues to improve though.

@lotherio said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Not to call her out or drag her in, @Faraday has, just prior to AresMUSH go-live, consolidated a lot of standard global features and add-ons that players have come to expect and enjoy all in one location as a Softcode Core.

Heh, that's been around for close to ten years.

Since @Tempest asked in the train wreck thread about a sandbox setup -
here you go - Zero to Faraday Softcode. It has FS3 and other stuff built in but you can get rid of them with the +uninstall command. It doesn't have +traits, but that's easy enough to do. Maybe @tangent or @ixokai has that quick and dirty version I threw together for Marvel63 when it first opened.

@lotherio said in A new platform?:

But it seems we're focused on re-inventing the wheel when web interface already has gadgets/wickets/platforms/extra/etc that could be made to work in a web frame along side a window client for the RP side that is the typical RP oriented things for the mush to work. There are tons of apps/gadgets/gizmos out there that could take a web frame and make it just as clunky as MUDlet, with options of control.

I looked into that very extensively when designing Ares and you're missing a few very critical points here:

1. It's a giant PITA to install and get all the moving parts working together. I mean, have you looked at the "Zero to MUX" thread lately? Just getting TinyMUX and MediaWiki installed is hideous. Throw in a forum and a ticket system and a Discord chat server and a Google calendar and whatnot on top of that? And then when some update happens and one piece stops playing nice with your system? Good luck.

2. People don't want to go to six different places to get the information for the game. They don't want to have to create six different logins. (And you might think single sign on would work but no - not gonna happen.)

3. We don't really need all that complexity. MUSH mail and bb posts are pretty simple. We don't need a whole email system or forum software.

So yes, we're reinventing the wheel to an extent - but only a small, simple wagon wheel and for good reasons.

Is it saving any work, becoming easier? Or is it just adding more options that equate to more work?

It really depends on what you want. Using Ares with FS3 can be installed and configured without touching a single line of Ruby code. Installing community plugins (which will include several other skill systems) may take a few code tweaks, but the instructions tell you exactly which lines of code to change to plug them in. So if that meets your needs, then yes - it absolutely saves work even though there's a GUI involved.

But for new code? Of course it's going to be more work to do ASCII+GUI as opposed to just ASCII or just GUI. But we're kinda stuck with that as long as we're forced to design hybrid systems that support both interfaces.

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

lthough my preference is for something that generally looks like a traditional MUSH client (an input line at the bottom, a main window for poses) with all of the additional UI elements added to it(a Hangouts-like chat list on a retractable sidebar on the right that you can hide, tabs for 'channels', etc) or on demand. Do I want to send you a mail? I right click on your name, pick that from a context menu and do so.

Yeah that all sounds great, but here we run into some practical issues. We want to have a game server that:

• Is easy to install with very little technical experience.
• Is easily extensible for whatever custom systems a game wants to add on.
• Supports a hybrid interface with multiple inputs.
• Has a really kick-butt user interface with all kinds of fancy UI elements.

Many of those goals are mutually-exclusive. The fancier you make something, the more complex it gets. The more moving parts you add, the harder it is to install. And so forth.

I think we have to be a bit realistic with our expectations.

Thinking about this today while on the support chat with Verizon.

Online chat/RP with ADD:

• Read message.
• Start thinking about reply.
• Get distracted.
• Some random amount of time later... "Did I reply to that? Crap."

Re: the original warning... I don't feel anyone did anything wrong, but it didn't feel particularly useful to me. "There's maybe a creeper on some game somewhere who may be OPP!" Like... what am I supposed to do with that? It kind of feels like a "there might have been a stalker somewhere in America last night!"

I generally assume that at any given moment there are probably multiple creepers afoot in the MU community. Does it matter if any of them are OPP specifically? Do we actually have any reason to believe he left in the first place, much less returned? Like I said - I'm not throwing shade at the intent, just kind of agree with @ZombieGenesis that it might have been preferable to wait until more details were available.

Re: playing a mysoginistic character. I think in today's climate this needs to be treated with just as much sensitivity as playing a PC with any other offensive tendencies. "What's the big deal? My character's just a racist. It's all IC" just doesn't cut it any more. A lot of us don't want to deal with that sort of thing, unsolicited, in our fun times. I'm not saying nobody can ever play a bad person, I'm just saying you have to go out of your way to make sure you're not making other players uncomfortable. Express consent, trigger warnings in logs, making it crystal clear that you respect boundaries, etc. It's a fine line to walk, and I think you've gotta ask yourself whether it's really all that important to the character to wade into that minefield in the first place.

@tempest said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I still say that in the grand scheme of things, it can't be that hard to set up. Comic games don't really need much code. Bboard, +finger, and a +sheet/traits thing. Maybe a +roster/+pc's thing. There's no stats/dice/etc like a WoD game.
Somebody do it, make a copy, and give it out to people. Plzkthx.

There are several starter MU setups around - mine, Volund's, etc. The trouble is that they still require some measure of server-side savvy to set the thing up, and some measure of code savvy to configure and administer it. That's unfortunately just not going to change any time soon. I would argue it'll never change until MUSHers are willing to move to a web-oriented server, but I'm probably in the minority there (as usual.)

@Meg said in Armageddon MUD:

'it didn't happen on the game' is the worst excuse ever not to do your job as a staffer.

I'm running an online roleplaying game, not playing moral judge and jury for how somebody lives their life outside the game.

For instance, I may strongly disagree with the rules of the hogpit here, but I'm not going to ban somebody just because they engage in behavior I disapprove of that's within the bounds of the forum. The same goes for discord (outside an official game discord I'm running), facebook, real life, etc. That's not in any way, shape or form my job as a MU staffer.

ETA: I think staff certainly has the right to say "I don't want you on my game" for any reason, but that's different than having the responsibility to police off-game behavior.

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

I don't think anything I mentioned is that uncommon - features like a live chat and content tabs are well documented and robust by now, and yet no MU is using them*.

They're not uncommon, but they're also not well-documented and robust. Almost nothing in web development can be considered well-documented and robust actually. It's all a hodgepodge of swiftly-changing technologies. But those kinds of features are not trivial by any stretch.

Shameless plug for my book: Martian Dreams, about a medic who gets caught up in a brewing revolution on Mars. It was a prequel for Martian Dreams MUSH, if anybody remembers that.

I'm also a big fan of the Pike Logan adventure series, about a team of counter-terrorism operatives.

@thenomain said in Potential Game / Temperature Read:

Mostly this is WoD and Pern, but a lot of players have had the "you are encouraged" beaten out of them, and there is a culture that continues this.

I don't think the discouragement is limited to those kinds of games. It's so pervasive that even when your game policies are all: "You can run plots. No really. PLEASE RUN PLOTS." nobody(*) believes you.

And because people are so sensitive about it, even the slightest thematic or continuity correction often gets taken as "ZOMG you said I could run plots WTF" and leads to people being gunshy.

Offer encouragement? Sure, great idea. But how? If the rewards are too good, you get people running plots for the wrong reasons, and it can also lead to a have/have-not atmosphere for those blessed with the schedule, free time and organizational skills. If the rewards aren't good enough, nobody cares.

For me, it feel very much like a no-win situation, so it's something I've just given up stressing over. Either people will run plots or they won't. Either they'll be happy with the number of staff-run plots or they won't. Largely it's out of your control.

Also... this is how threads get de-railed. But I'm too lazy to spawn a new one, so... guilty your honor.

(*) hyperbole alert

@Ghost I think the key is expectations. People have to not take the game (and their characters) so bloody seriously. It's something that HorrorMU and TGG got right. They weren't PVP, but they set the stakes right so that you go into it expecting to die, and when you do it's not a big deal. It's certainly more of a challenge to implement such a thing in a PVP environment with strangers on the internet, but I don't think it's impossible. You just need to set expectations and have a staff willing to enforce them.

@thatguythere said in A new platform?:

My concern is that 90 percent of those graphical shells make the reading and writing of the text more of a pain than a simple command line. I am all for new players but not if the trade off for getting them is making my experience worse.

Wait - are you trying to say that Discord or Slack with its different channels and PMs separated visually is worse of an interface than a MUSH window with everything all smushed together with a single typing window? If so then I must respectfully disagree.

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

I do not buy at all that adderall/ritalin/etc works 'differently' on the ADD brain than on other brains.

I don't think it works differently - the underlying pharmacological mechanism of action is the same in both cases, but the effects are very different. It's like how folks with ADHD are affected differently by caffeine.

@sunny Yeah I was trying to agree with you. UH-dude crossed the line when h/she started calling everyone idiots, and selectively enforcing moderating personal attacks based on whether the victim replies is kind of silly. And I wasn't meaning to imply you didn't know the difference between unconstructive/constructive, I was just outlining my personal line in the sand. It wasn't directed at you.

@Monogram said in The 100: The Mush:

there are a few people that are so antagonistic that there's just no dealing with them unless you yourself are an conflict-based character. I've had a few times where I had to sit back and wonder about that.

As an outsider who doesn't play there, I wonder though... as long as the behavior is IC, and they're willing to accept the consequences of people avoiding them because of it (IC and OOC)... what's the problem?

I think too many games suffer from an appalling lack of IC conflict. Not overt "I want to kill you" PvP aggression, but just the everyday drama of people not getting along.

@thatguythere To each their own, but that logic flies in the face of every principle of modern user interface design. Discord wouldn't get very far if it smushed every chatroom into one screen like:

<Public> Faraday waves, "Hi!"
<Sports> Seraphim says,  "So how about that game last night?"

MUSHers only tolerate it because that's what we're used to.

@Rinel

Getting so hyperfocused that I forget to eat for ages, then (to steal @Auspice's description) "needing food and being too tired to food", then staring at the fridge all, "but I don't want any of THIS food! Bah!" ...

Yeah. That's totally my life.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

how about the fact that the current moderation regime/system/rules/whatever you want to call it seems to be incapable of supporting a thread that exemplifies MSB's purpose. At no point should we feel like our rules exist to protect the dishonest and abusive garbage-people that comprise UH's staff, and yet it seems like the rules have largely served their interests over ours, with a thread about legitimately terrible people being over-moderated, chopped up, etc.

And that comes down to the basic question @Arkandel et. al. need to answer about what is MSB's purpose.

If the purpose is to support civil discourse about MU-related topics, then no - the UH thread did not exemplify that purpose.

If the purpose is to support no-holds-barred discussions to hold people accountable and wield the power of public opinion to bring down games, as the old WORA did... then you're right.

I don't think we can have both, and this thread is illustrating that rather emphatically. Feel free to prove me wrong.