Best posts made by faraday

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

I don't recall a lot of people, if any people, even the villains, calling Wonder Woman a whore, bitch, slut, etc, in that movie. And yet the period sexism was portrayed quite nicely.

Exactly. Because it was PG-13 rating and a comic book movie theme. If it were an R-rated movie with more of a historical bent, would you have been surprised if that stuff had been turned up?

To use another movie example: Magnificent Seven (PG-13) versus Django Unchained (R). Both have extremely different 'takes' on period -isms.

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

We are an infamously bad polling source; three people out of...how many people on Soapbox?...say that they wouldn't like it.

I'm not talking about three people. I'm referring to the feedback I've gotten from players on several games, the poll I did here, comments on the Ares forum, the prevalent vocal hatred of games with wikis across many threads here, and reactions to Ares' web stuff.

Seriously. I've done my research. It's not just a handful of dinosaurs saying "I don't like this because it's new", it's a prevailing sentiment. It's all well and good to say "If you build it they will come", but the reality is that we're a community where many people boycott games because of the channel commands. Radically changing the way the game is played - without popular support - is courting disaster IMHO.

@RightMeow Having to make those kinds of decisions sucks, and you have my sympathy. I wish that we had more of a nationwide mandate to close things down and a support system for everyone right now. Individuals shouldn't have to decide between public/personal safety and putting food on the table.

But given what you said - FWIW, it sounds like you are in a high-risk category. The risk is not "wait to get said virus and get two weeks off paid" it's more like "wait to get the virus and then hope you don't have to spend the next month on a ventilator in the ICU -- that is providing there are any more ventilators available at the time."

Also, even though you might feel fine now, latest evidence shows that people can be infectious without symptoms for days - possibly up to 2 weeks. That's what makes this virus so insidious. There are tens of thousands of people out there right now spreading it around without even knowing it. That's why social distancing is so important. #Don'tBeASpreader

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

I have to admit, I sure as hell wouldn't want to play on a game where the theme and setting made that kind of behavior appropriate, but I suppose that kind of game has some merit for some folks.

That's fair. And just to be clear - even on Sweetwater (a western) with its TV-MA rating, I personally would not have tolerated people randomly going around spouting slurs at other characters. Because as @Apos said, that crap is just disruptive no matter how thematic it may be. And as @Ganymede pointed out - you can get across prejudice without resorting to vulgarity if it is indeed important to the character or the story.

The problems I had with that setting weren't nitwits running around dropping n-words like f-bombs. That just never happened even on a game where IC discrimination was allowed. The problems were more like what @Apos described, where modern sensibilities butted up against historical laws and expectations.

And yes, of course, you could just say "Yo, there's no law against <xyz> in this game even though there totally was iRL". You could put a tolerant sheriff in place who doesn't give a crap. You can just go full-on alt-history. But it's nonetheless a problem that will crop up and can easily lead to more subtle forms of IC nastiness.

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

But I think that's where some of the resistance to a web-based game comes from (I mean, there are also those people who just love SimpleMU, but I'm not so much dealing with them), and I felt like the argument for the experience a dedicated client provides was getting subsumed in that.

From a user perspective, I totally agree that's ideal.

BUT we're a hobbyist community. This is not a commercial product and we don't have the luxury of having a full dev team focused on supporting dedicated clients for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, etc. with their attendant versions and upgrades.

Also - having to support both telnet and web in the code at once makes the code way more complicated. This makes it harder for people to extend the platform with game-specific custom features.

So there are tradeoffs, and that's what has me pipe-dreaming about a web-only client.

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

Presuming you have no issues personally, despite being diabetic,

Being diabetic is also considered a "high-risk" category for covid in and of itself.

@Collective @Ganymede

Honest question since I think something may be getting lost in translation here.

I haven't seen anybody dispute the idea that raging slur-spouting bigots shouldn't be allowed as PCs because they're disruptive. Just like serial killers or unhinged sociopaths probably shouldn't either.

So if that's the consensus, and modern/sci-fi themes don't generally have the historical baggage of dumb laws that have since been overturned (women can't own property, interracial marriages are illegal, etc.) ... what exactly are the problems you're seeing in WoD/modern settings?

And in historic settings, what do you suggest? Just handwaving completely and having nobody be allowed to bat an eye at a female gunslinger or an African American sheriff, even in eras where, say, iRL women weren't allowed to wear pants and slavery was still a thing?

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Or...dude, I don't even know what this was for.

I don't like seeing it classified as MUD-like. I think that's misleading and potentially damaging to someone who doesn't know anything about it and sees that description and might go "Eew, not for me". To someone who's not coding (i.e. 99% of the players), virtually all of the everyday commands from Penn/Tiny will work for them.

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

I understand the desire to have more/better testing, but..... unreliable tests only hurt us.

I think it's important to keep in mind the intended purpose of the antibody tests. They are relevant on a population level, not an individual level. They give you a yardstick for how much the disease has spread asymptomatically throughout a city. It doesn't take a perfect test to do that. They were never intended to give a specific count of cases, and certainly not to be a green light for "you've had it so you're safe."

No antibody test can give you a green light at this stage, even the FDA-approved ones, because nobody knows if antibodies prevent reinfection at all, or at what thresholds they might do so.

So at this point, there's no reason to get an antibody test unless you're part of a more widespread organized study (like this one.)

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

Okay, so why is bigotry different in that a player should have to put up with it on a non-consensual basis? If your character can't get sick without consent, or can't have their IC house burn down without consent, what makes it okay for the players of those characters to have to sit through abusive language and situations based on race, orientation, etc?

I didn't say anything about consensual. I was talking expressly on "Random Crap Heaped Upon You From On High By Staff" when you were implying that people should just randomly get typhoid.

Once you get other players into the mix, it comes down to the game's consent policy. Some games are more consent-y than others.

@saosmash I don't see how organic RP and multiple scenes are inherently in conflict. Someone can 'open' a scene in the mess hall and leave it there, hoping others join in for "random RP" while still doing a back/forwardscene in another tab with someone else. You just have to sort out your character's internal continuity and work out where any given RP fits in. That doesn't mean other scenes have to be fluff, just that there are some constraints to what you can and can't do without causing massive retcons.

@apos You're never going to stop people from doing multiple scenes on their character, backscenes, etc. People do that already; the only difference is that they're using crappy workarounds (like OOC alts or spoofing one char with another) or going off-game to G-doc or whatever.

That said, if a given platform doesn't let you execute your vision, no biggie. That's why it's good there are multiple platforms to choose from.

@Wretched I was helping my daughter with a foreign language assignment that used the Brady Bunch to illustrate family words. I had the theme song stuck in my head for the whole rest of the night, despite the fact that I never really watched the show and haven't seen even a blip of it in decades.

And then I make seventeen trips to the kitchen to keep going back for the one thing I went in there for in the first place.

@tat fyi stress and subdue were in 2nd ed too.

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

In this thread's context though all I'm saying is that the key isn't so far to do away with some features we are familiar with or to do them differently, it should be to provide the technical capability to do so.

I disagree. A platform that tries to be everything to everybody is by its nature going to be either

• incomplete - requiring you to fill in the blanks yourself (e.g. current MUSH servers) or
• insanely complicated. I mean, it's nice to talk about magically-functional Wordpress plugins, but have you ever tried to write a Wordpress plugin? There's a reason why almost all of the decent ones are behind a pay-wall.

So it comes down to what your goals are. With Ares, my goals are 1) Make it easier to play, 2) Make it easier to create a game, and 3) Make it easier to code.

All three of those core goals get screwed if I try to keep every existing feature, plus every conceivable feature you could build with current softcode, plus a web UI on top of that.

Keeping to those goals requires compromises. There are many compromises I've made with Ares. Some of those will turn off some people. I don't really care as long as it doesn't turn off everybody. (Which is why it's not web-only even though I'd like it to be, because that would turn off almost everyone.)

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I think there's a confusion here that if we allow backwards compatibility with telnet it's an all or nothing agreement. This isn't true. You could allow a telnet client to connect and make the same commands people have always been used to, but also provide a web client that runs off a restful API. These things are not mutually exclusive.

They're not - Ares has done it. But as @Roz said, that choice has added a lot of complexity to the code that I wish wasn't there.

Just a trivial example, let's say you want to have "Race" as a new chargen field for your space-game-with-aliens. With either telnet-only or web-only you'd only need to touch two things: the command/screen to set it, and the one to display it. But when you try to support both, you now need to have the telnet command to set it, the telnet command to display it, the web screen to set it, the web screen to display it AND the Rest API to allow it to be set via web. And help files for all of that. And oh-by-the-way they're in different languages, because web uses Javascript/HTML and the backend uses Ruby.

And that's just for one extremely trivial command race <race>. Now multiply that by a thousand or so different commands/features.

Now imagine explaining all that to a novice coder trying to learn a new platform and you hopefully see the problem.

@RightMeow Here's a great video explaining it better than I could: Why Stimulant Medication Helps ADHD -- and How Stigma Can Hurt.

@insomniac7809 said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

ADHD meds are speed.

Not really. They are amphetamines, but calling ADHD meds "speed" is like calling coedine "heroin". Equating the two perpetuates an unfair and inaccurate stigma.

There are also various non-stimulant medicines now that work for some folks.

@arkandel said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

What I'm asking is... are all these cases individual, whether explicitly written rules exist for them or not?

I think they are, truly. Even something as simple as an login-based idle policy invariably leads to exceptions, let alone something as complicated as "are you active enough".

You ask - is it fair for someone to file for divorce because you've been gone for two weeks? I ask: Why not? Is there ever a circumstance where someone should be chained to an IC relationship they OOCly don't want to be in any more?

You ask - is it fair to take away a mastermind position from someone who's not mastermind-y enough? I ask: Why would you? Do you expect everyone to be able to RP their character convincingly? Would you take away a doctor PC if their player couldn't play a doctor to someone's satisfaction? Whose?

We could go through scenarios all day long, and you'll get a variety of answers and justifications from different people on each one.

Playground rules say that its up to those involved to sort it out, and to staff to intervene when they can't. In the end, you just make the best call you can and leave it to other players to decide if you're fair or a tyrant. Ultimately people vote with their feet.

@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:

it's not our intention to make misleading comparisons so if the example comes across as disingenuous we can remove it.

I think that a MUSHcode vs new code example is helpful. If the existing one isn't good, maybe @Thenomain could point do / provide a good tutorial-worthy example in MUSHcode and then someone can make an Evennia version.

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

I went back between wanting to cry, feeling called out, and being like OMG.. it's.. normal?!

I know right? It's like... OMG, so many things in my life suddenly make sense. I'm glad it helped. I love her channel. I've also found these sites to be super helpful: ADDitude and Totally ADD.

Related but possibly tangential ... Has anybody ever seen IC PC leadership work out well in general? Sure there are those rare non-staff players who can handle both the OOC and IC demands without flaking out or abusing their authority, but does it happen often enough for people to really continue beating their heads against the wall? I gave up long ago. It seems that a lot of these problems go away if you just don't go there.

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

It would be like trying to write a "Operating a dump truck guide" for bicyclists.

I don't think it's that different. All programming languages share many core similarities.

The way you input the code is very different, and that's a big learning curve. No argument. But switch vs if? Dolist versus each? Emit versus ... msg (I think that's the Evennia equivalent)? These are not universes apart. Comparison tutorials exist for many other languages (C#->Python for instance) and there's no reason why one couldn't be made for MuCode->Evennia. I'm working on one for Ares, in fact.