Best posts made by faraday

@Catsmeow said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@Ganymede

nebulizer? What does this do to your heart rate? My inhaler makes it feel like it is exploding out of my chest, so I don't like it.

The inhaler delivers the dose in two puffs. The nebulizer takes several minutes of inhaling the medication through a mist from a nebulizer machine. The nebulizer tends to allow more of the medication to be absorbed, and also tends to increase the side effects (including the annoying fast heart rate). Various studies (source, source) have shown no clinical benefit to nebulizers over inhalers overall. But some individuals find that nebulizers work better for them, as @Ganymede did.

Disclaimer: I'm a paramedic and asthma sufferer, not a doctor. Your doctor will be able to give you advice on alternate treatment options if your inhaler is not enabling you to run.

@auspice said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I mean more allow/focus on NPCs being the ones to dish out the discrimination (rather than be on the receiving end).

Yeah that's what I tried on Sweetwater. PCs could have whatever views they wanted, and the NPCs would reflect the historical norms.

It really didn't work out too well. Only rarely did people emit NPCs reacting as historical NPCs would. And the prevalence of progressive viewpoints far overshadowed anything the NPCs did occasionally dish out, leading to a sort of weird cognitive dissonance.

Now I'm not saying it can't ever work. That's just my personal experience.

ETA: By the dissonance I mean... it's kind of strange when the theme says "the NPCs discriminate based on historical norms" but you've got your Native American outcast, your African American doctor and your lady gunslinger all openly attending the town-wide barn dance without a single PC saying a word or a single NPC being emitted giving them side-eye. Yet that's what can happen. I'm not saying that's bad either... it's not like, "oh no we need more prejudice in our RP". It's just a little disconcerting sometimes when there's a disconnect between theme and RP.

@Thenomain Fair enough. Setting suspension of disbelief aside though, adding wireless makes the decker/hacker a much more integrated, fun and playable concept. And AR is just neat.

@Monogram said in Mental Health and Grown Up Stuff:

Though a friend mine gave me a 20mg pill of Ativan, told me to break it into four 5gm doses to 'try and help'. Though another friend said this was probably a really bad idea to do...

Yeah, taking other peoples' prescriptions is a Bad Idea (besides being illegal in most if not all states). Apart from the risk of getting the dosage wrong or having unforseen side effects without a physician's monitoring, there's a risk of medication interactions. Some medicines (including some antidepressants) need a 'taper on / taper off' period so stopping/starting suddenly can mess you up. Others can stay in your system and muck up the real drugs that your doctor may later give you.

</end public service announcement>

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Sometimes I think those sections are as, or even more useful than the rest of them put together.

Yeah. One other response to @ThatGuyThere's remark about what purpose they serve... games come and go. I may not be playing with certain people on a game right at this moment, but it's still nice to have a central place to come and chat with them about stuff.

@Thenomain said:

Without adventuring, a mage is still a mage. Without shadows to run, a shadowrunner is ...

I guess that's where we see things differently (which is OK). "Without adventuring, a mage is still a mage" applies equally well to Shadowrun as it does to D&D.

Neither game really explains what you do besides "be an adventurer" or "be a shadowrunner".

Except Shadowrun does. Does the fact that it's in a supplemental sourcebook and not the main book make it any less a part of the game? (Or heck, maybe it's in the main book now; I never bothered to buy 5th ed.)

Faraday, I posit that your group was still adventuring.

Absolutely. My point was just that adventure != shadowrun. And yeah... I have a hard time envisioning how a Shadowrun MUSH would work without the adventuring focus. I mean, I know they're out there, but I tried to play on them a couple of times as was just like... completely at a loss.

@Ganymede I feel your pain. In fact, me and another mom were ranting about this just this weekend when someone was unreasonably late to her son's party and someone else hadn't even bothered to rsvp one way or the other. My daughter once had a party where only one kid showed up, and she was crushed.

That said, I think a lot of families are seriously overscheduled, to the point where even one more thing is stressful. I know one family with a bunch of kids who are all "we just don't do parties" because they get invited to a gazillion of them and it just gets to be a burden. I also know a family who doesn't want to be the one arriving empty-handed or with a cheap gift because of financial burdens.

So I get that there are unique situations that may preclude someone from coming. But I totally agree -- Just freaking let us know one way or the other so we can set the kid's expectations and plan appropriately. Common courtesy isn't so common these days.

@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Faraday appears to be super mega invested in turning this into rainbow unicorn times.

I have said, like, a bazillion times that I am not opposed to negative feedback and criticism. What I am opposed to is hostility and vitriol. And if your argument is that a community is incapable of having a discussion forum without being complete and utter dicks to one another, then that says more about the community than it does about me.

@Thenomain said:

@faraday said:

Most of the early fiction stories weren't about traditional runners at all. That helped to shape what Shadowrun means to me.

This tickled me. What defines a traditional crook in modern society? I don't know! In the third Shadowrun Returns game, you don't start out as a 'runner, but by god you end as one. Maybe it's entirely how people see you.

But the fiction characters I'm speaking of weren't crooks at all. Kyle Teller from Burning Bright was an upscale paranormal investigator specializing in missing persons cases. Dirk Montgomery in 2XS was also a private eye. Technobabel is about a Renraku corporate operative. One was about a guy working undercover for Lone Star.

Were these guys "Shadowunners"? Depends on your definition. "A criminal who does shadowruns as part of a shadowrunner team" is one definition - that's what I meant as the "traditional" one. But many take a looser definition, one that just implies someone who works in the shadows - the underbelly of society.

The Shadowrun RPG gives you rules to make up a character - any character. It gives you rules for conflict and combat resolution to apply in any situation. It gives you a rich game world. It gives you one default campaign model - the traditional shadowrunning team model - that it focuses on. It also - in the main rulebook - offers other alternate campaign models. I see it as being a lot less restrictive than you seem to.

Most movies are inherently cash grabs...that’s kind of the business I think the live action versions are as much about expanding to a new audience of tweens than nostalgia though. My kids and their friends are starting to outgrow cartoons and they love the live action ones.

I am honestly baffled by this. What is it about Chris Hemsworth or Cate Blanchett's face that has anything to do with whether they can play a period role?

Cate Blanchett - The Missing

Chris Hemsworth - In the Heart of the Sea

Double post for a more on-topic question for @Finn -- how does the MUSH handle these 'alternate' style chars? I mean, let's say I made up a street doc, or a private eye, or a journalist, or a ganger... is there actually stuff for them to do other than bar RP? Or are all the plots geared towards 'runners?

@Arkandel It seems that a plugin for that does not already exist, although there is a feature request for something similar that folks could comment on/upvote if they like.

@Ghost There's an option under the privacy settings to "Only allow chat messages from users I follow". So you can kinda use that as a whitelist.

@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I don't believe in protagonists or antagonists as viable concepts on a MU*, period, regardless of any -ism either may or may not possess. They don't work outside of short-term NPCs, because a game is necessarily an ensemble cast.
A game isn't 'Iron Man 2', it's 'The Avengers'.

I think we're just using different terms for the same thing. Yes, a MU is an ensemble cast with many protagonists, plural. By this I'm using the definition "main character" - in contrast to "supporting character". Most MUSHers want to be one of the heroes, not one of the extras.

My point was that in mainstream fiction/TV/movies/etc. the "main characters" aren't usually the ones spouting racial slurs, unless they're the bad guy or in the midst of a rehabilitation arc. They're also not the ones locked into oppression, unless they're in the middle of a 'bust free from the oppression' arc.

Given that as the cultural norm, it surprises me that people expect MU characters to really be any different. There are just more of them in any particular story than even in the biggest ensemble cast.

@ixokai Ditto. Though it does sound more MUD-like than MUSH-like (not saying it's a MUD, exactly, but I felt the same about Firan and this sounds like it's in a similar code-heavy vein), so maybe the reference is apt? Dunno.

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

In fairness, Ruby's actually a perfectly fine language and well worth learning. I'm personally just used to using Python on a daily basis to create CI build scripts at work, for machine learning stuff (which is primarily in Python these days, it feels like), and so on. After so much Python, doing Ruby always feels like I'm driving someone else's car for a bit; I know how to do everything, but the windshield wiper toggle is in the wrong place, the parking brake is a pedal versus a stick, etc. So I just have to force my mind into Ruby mode instead of thinking Pythonically, and that annoys me enough that I default to Python for things.

Side tangent. I think that's just a matter of being used to one vs the other. I think that Python is a perfectly fine language as well, but as someone who learned Ruby first, there's just a cognitive dissonance because things are similar enough to feel like: "Oh! I know this!" But different enough to be like: "Crap, that totally doesn't work."

Ares started out in Python, but there were roadblocks that proved easier to overcome in Ruby.

@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@Collective and I are surely not saying it now, but it's sure being addressed like we are.

I seriously don't know what you're talking about. Who do you think is misrepresenting what?

I see:

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And yes, I know my characters are not me. But I also don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask why the 'right' to be vile and hurtful to other people is so much more important than anyone else feeling welcome in a given environment. Because those words hit the players with the same force they hit the characters sometimes.

That certainly comes across to me as saying that it's bad for people to argue for the "right" to have IC -ism in their games. And there have been other comments in this thread to that same effect. If that's not what was intended, then it's just a miscommunication.

Now bear in mind I said earlier that I prefer to avoid RL -isms too in RP. They make me uncomfortable. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that viewpoint. But I'm just genuinely puzzled by the assertion that "nobody's saying it shouldn't be allowed" when I think some are.

I think the hobby could benefit by a terminology shift. "Featured Character" and "Original Character" are not antonyms. You have Original chars and Canon chars and either type can be featured or not. Contrast a sheriff in a Wild West game with "Squirrel Girl" or some other low-powered 2-bit comic character.

I just helped them set up the code, so I have no insight into staff policy, but I saw nothing on Marvel 1963 that would preclude you from making up a powerful original character.

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

Seriously, it is actually considered very bad practice at my workplace. Leaving commits in smaller chunks makes it /way/ easier to figure out which change exactly broke a build or introduced some kind of instability, and to roll just that change back. It's really important on firmware projects.

Totally derailing the subject, but we use squashed commits for PRs because when you've got dozens of devs all contributing to the same codebase, you don't need to be spammed with everyone's: "Doing X" "More X" "Fixing X" "Unit tests for X" "Typo in fix for X" iterations along the way. A single squashed PR commit for "X" is the way to go. This assumes that your PRs are reasonable and you aren't tackling 17 features or changing the world in a single PR.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Let me start this by saying that I don't think 'Theme' trumps human beings. I just don't. If a hypothetical game runner does, they should post a notice saying so in policy or character gen, so I can move along and find another game.

Let me be clear - I fully respect and support your right to have games free of whatever RL discrimination makes you uncomfortable. (In fact - come play on my BSG game, which is exactly such a place). I fully support games' rights to say "it's alt-history Wild West, where slavery never existed".

But if a game is going for 'costume drama realism', and discrimination is a part of the theme, then I don't think it's fair for one player to force other players to alter their characters to ignore that aspect of the theme. Fade to black? Sure. Handwave abuse instead of using the words on screen? Sure. Try to avoid each other as much as possible? Sure. But if you're a preacher and my cowgirl gunslinger walks into your church, I think you have a right to react to that ICly.