Posts made by faraday

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

But now I'm more confused, lol. I rarely miss deadlines, but that's because I tend to cram at the very last minute. Maybe I have mild ADHD

That's actually pretty common. ADHD brains work well in crisis situations because they give us the jolt of neurotransmitters we need to focus properly. Also, we work better if we're interested in the task at hand.

And like @Auspice said - there are different variations. Besides just mild to severe, "Executive Functioning" covers a broad swath of skills, and folks with ADHD can have challenges in some but not others. (More details)

For instance - my kids and I are all time-blind, distractible, and prone to hyperfocus. We all interrupt each other and go off on rambly tangents during conversations. Man, watching the three of us trying to talk about something must be comical.

But we also have our own variations. Kid A is externally hyperactive. Kid B will be in tears (as Auspice described) if they need to do a homework assignment but can't force themselves get started on it. B procrastinates, A wants to do things NOW NOW NOW. They both have trouble breaking down a big task into its component steps, but I don't.

As a result, the coping strategies that I've developed (completely unknowingly, since I didn't realize I had it until my kids were diagnosed) don't always work for my kids, because their brand of ADHD is different than mine. And what works for one kid doesn't always work for the other.

TL;DR; ADHD is complicated. If you think you might have it, get a professional assessment and someone who can help you develop strategies for your specific brand of challenges.

P.S. Those are some cool churches.

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

I've always assumed this was just, you know, the way everyone was with videogames. cos they're rigged to get you hooked, right?

Sure, but that's the thing with ADHD -- taken individually, each of the symptoms are things that everyone experiences sometimes.

Anybody can lose themselves in an engrossing activity (particularly one that's designed to be addictive), get distracted, procrastinate, interrupt, lose track of time, forget their keys, etc. etc. What makes ADHD a "disorder" (I dislike that word) is that folks who have it experience a lot of these things constantly and/or severely, causing significant negative impacts on their life.

It's like being sad versus having depression. One is more severe and chronic than the other.

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

Can someone explain hyperfocus to me

My brain at 5pm: "I should really cook dinner."
Also my brain: "OK, just one more minute. I'm almost done with Thing."
75 bajillion minutes later, having never stopped to cook dinner because Thing was so engrossing.
"OMG why am I so hungry!? How is it night already?!"

The best way I've heard it described is that ADHD is a very badly-named condition. It's not a deficit of attention, it's trouble regulating your attention. Commonly the attention dial is either at 0 (OMG...Thing is so boring it literally hurts) or 1000 (I could do Thing all day without even realizing I've missed lunch or dinner...aka hyperfocus) with little middle ground.

Of course there are different subtypes of ADHD and even people with the same subtype can have different symptoms, so NOT experiencing hyperfocus it is not necessarily an indication of anything.

For more educated explanations than mine, I suggest:

How to explain ADHD (from HowToADHD)
What is Hyperfocus (from ADDitude magazine)

@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.

@Wretched Re: ADHD modes of food.

Truth. So much truth.

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

All else is false. And wrong. And false and wrong. And also should be lit on fire. That's my professional opinion. (I state again, in case anyone missed it, this is very specifically in reference to formal/business writing.)

That's cool. But other professional editors can and do have their own professional opinions about the ideal style for their publications. I've been under both CMS and AP styles at various organizations throughout my tech writing career.

Every writing organization is entitled to their own style. That's why the guides are called Elements of Style and the Chicago Manual of Style and AP Style and not The AP Guide to the One True Way of Writing English. For better or worse, we don't have a French Academy dictating how the language should be done "correctly."

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

Correct apostrophe use is critical to understanding homonyms.

Yes but as with many things in writing, there is no one universal "correct" when it comes to punctuation style. Even the two major styles (AP and Chicago) don't always agree. For example:

https://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-forming.html

Not disagreeing with @Sunny's examples in particular, because as editor, their literal job is to be the arbiter of style for their organization. Just a corollary peeve that the grammar "rules" we learn in school often aren't rules at all, but styles.

@Rinel Not every medicine has the same effect on everyone, so medication alone isn't going to prove or disprove anything. But that feeling of "but what if it's not ADHD and it's just me..." is SUPER common among folks going through the diagnostic process as adults. Years of negative feedback takes a toll.

It's also not uncommon for folks to first experience the effects in high school and college. The further you go through education, the less regimented things become and the more you have to manage your own work. That's when the executive functioning challenges of ADHD really kick in. So really, you're not alone.

@RightMeow It's definitely not just you. Google ADHD and Time Blindness and you'll find zillions of articles on the subject. Here's a good one - How it really feels to be time-blind with ADHD:

Our perception of time — or lack thereof — lays the foundation for our biggest struggles. As Dr. Russell Barkley explains it, ADHD “disrupts the fabric of time.” ... Neurotypical people may wonder, what could be so difficult about looking at your watch? How could you not know how long it takes to get ready for work in the morning? How could you not have realized you didn’t have time to mow the lawn before our date?

Like @Sparks said - there are so many things that I never realized were An Actual Thing until I started researching ADHD. My family always used to talk about "Faraday Time" like I existed in some alternate dimension where time passed at a different rate for me than for everybody else. Now I know it's just "ADHD Time".

@Cobaltasaurus said in Welcome to the Euphoria!:

Not more disruptive than someone's connected character suddenly getting idlenuked, I think. Or just going "inactive" and no longer being played and leaving the players to decide whether they are still around in the background or what is happening with them.

Well I'd agree that unceremoniously idle nuking people can be disruptive too, but I don't think that letting the players decide what's happening to them is disruptive. Quite the contrary, it allows those affected by the departure to work with staff to sort out a resolution that works best for ongoing storylines. Whether that means turning the person into a background NPC, or recruiting another player to take them over, or killing them off, or whatever. Anything that doesn't leave the other players hanging just because somebody left the game.

Having a built-in thematic reason why folks might go back into cryosleep is a nice potential 'out' for idle folks. You just might want to consider not making it automatic.

@Cobaltasaurus said in Welcome to the Euphoria!:

Well, in this case I've decided that when anyone idles out they go back into cryogenic sleep.

Rosters definitely have their issues, and an enclosed environment does present added challenges. But it seems like that solution could be potentially disruptive for characters with relationships with the character who idled out. Like if their brother/wife/SO/BFF suddenly just went back into cryosleep for no reason.

@TiredEwok said in Netrunner MUDs:

Which came first: Shadowrun or Netrunner?

Shadowrun, by several years. But most of the similarities between the two (and the Cyberpunk RPG) are attributable to the underlying fiction sources.

Looks neat. Always nice to see original sci-fi.

FWIW, FS3 probably wouldn't be a good fit (being high-tech with psionics and aliens doesn't really fit within the parameters of what FS3 works well for), but there are other systems you could use with Ares if you did decide to use it. Evennia's cool too, especially if you want more simulationist code. Good luck!

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

She is brilliant and so, so good at explaining, holy crap.

We love her channel. SO well-presented and relatable.

https://howtoadhd.com/

@Ganymede said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

This is twice I have seen this statement with no reason to believe it.

I have often spoke about the next generation at risk of being alienated if we don't change the user interface, but I haven't personally seen a sharp decline in the number of MUSHes or the activity on them in the last 5-10 years.

That said, I do think that there is more RP going on in other platforms. There are tons of MUDs. Play-by-forum sites with tens of thousands of players. Hundreds of games on Storium, which has gotten national media attention. A vibrant community of folks who RP with emotes on MMOs. Tumbler blogs, Discord RP, Roll20 and other interactive TTRPG forums.

There's lots of RP to be had, and numerically I think MUSHing is a very small part of the bucket. That doesn't make it any less worthwhile.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in The Fate of MUSHdom:

the MudConnector is still pretty widely used as a search engine for players just looking for games. It could be better maintained than it is, but I feel like there are more usability and cultural hurdles for new players than there is a real problem with not having a dedicated MU listing.

Spot on. Especially since Evennia and Ares also now have automatic game directories. I don't think finding a game is the big hurdle here.

The bigger issue is getting a game off the ground. Just within the Ares community, there are 10 never-launched games for every opened one. Some moved on to other platforms, which is totally cool. But a good many of them gave up before ever getting their game off the ground.

There are lots of reasons why:

• Building a game is a lot of work for a hobby activity.
• Staffing is overwhelming and they don't have enough support.
• MUSHing is fraught with interpersonal drama and they get discouraged.
• They have expectations of what code they want that even Ares' complete game-in-a-box design can't satisfy, and no ability to realize their vision.
• They start working on the code but it's just too much work and they eventually burn out.

Making these issues better will result in more games. More games will provide bandwidth to absorb more players. Only then might it make sense to talk about casting a wider net of general recruitment.

I like to see innovative ideas, but I don't think this is a sound proposition.

It's all well and good to say "advertise and get more players", but those players need to have somewhere to play, and those games need to be able to support the influx. MUSHes don't scale well, primarily due to limited staff bandwidth. You can't fix that by dumping a bunch of inexperienced new players into the mix.

Also the idea of onboarding new players is noble, but MUSHes are so very different. I question how effective it can really be at preparing people to play a real game.

@surreality Sounds like you need to find better people to reach out to, because anybody making cracks about that needs to be whacked upside the head. Hoping you find some support in these rough times.

Watching penguins cheers me up. Here's my favorite penguin web cam in case you like it too: Penguins

Tangential to the question at hand, but I just figured I'd toss out there that doing a full-blown chargen system in Ares is a big undertaking, but just adding something to record stats in the web portal is trivial. You could adapt the web goals tutorial pretty easily for that and just make it a staff-only command to edit the list of stats.

To the original point - it depends on the game, and how much friction is caused by having to figure out die pools and such manually. On some games it works fine. On others it would be a dealbreaker.

@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.)