Posts made by faraday

Of note, since not everyone reads the Ares forums...

The player in question has been banned from AresCentral.

Being banned from a particular game generally does not affect your AresCentral status. However:

1. If you’ve been banned from a game, you may not come here and pester the game-runner(s) who banned you. Take the hint and leave them alone.
2. I reserve the right to make exceptions in extreme circumstances, like someone who’s been serially harassing people and maliciously attempting to bypass bans across multiple games.

They responded (due to a glitch with the forum ban... my error) protesting that they had been so very polite while doing #1, while apparently completely missing the fact that it was inappropriate to do so in the first place. (And also letting #2 sail right over their heads.)

@Cobaltasaurus said in A Lack of Imagination:

Do you know how hard it is to go back to sleep when you have "Oh, she's cute but she's psycho, yeah a little bit psycho." stuck in your head?

No, but I can imagine. One time I crashed at a friend's house and they had the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack playing while I fell asleep, and OMG I had that 'coconut' song stuck in my head for ages. I still can't hear it without thinking of that.

@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.

@krmbm said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

BUT LYNN YOU ARE NO ASHEN

I can definitely confirm, I am not Ashen (No doubt Ashen is greatly relieved by this as well.)

There's a patch out for Ares now that fixes the bugs in the ban feature.

And contrary to what Troll may insist, they were, in fact, bugs. Silly oversights like "doh! the ban list is checked alongside the password but guests don't use a password", for instance.

Ares and Rhost both have an optional proxy blocking feature that will block players from known proxy sites (using a list graciously managed by @Ashen-Shugar). This doesn't stop all VPNs, but it can make it a little more difficult for a troll to play whack-a-mole with you. (At the cost of inconveniencing legit new players who may want to use proxies from work or whatever.)

That said, MUSHes are not exactly bastions of security. A savvy ten-year-old can bring down a MUSH--it hardly takes a Machiavellian tech genius. This is nothing more than someone wrecking the sandbox to keep the other kids from having fun. Sad, really.

@Auspice said in A Lack of Imagination:

I've been having this weird experience with watching that Lego Masters which I swear must be how some people are with sports (I mean I enjoy watching sports but I don't get shouty at them). Like the camera interviews they'll be like 'gosh we don't know what to do for this' and I'm like HOLY SHIT YOU FUCK NUGGET IT'S OBVIOUS JUST......

Lol whereas I watch Lego Masters (the kids are really into it) and I'm like.... OMFG HOW CAN THEY EVEN DO THAT? I'm in awe

@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:

but do any of you who don't do the picture thing enjoy the building aspects of games like Minecraft?

Not at all. Or building things like legos. My kids can envision and then build these elaborate structures, but I can't manage anything better than a blocky box.

@Ninjakitten said in A Lack of Imagination:

I'm always worried I won't recognize a friend or relative I haven't seen in a while when I go to see them again. But the thing with the latter is I virtually always do. I took an online test recently (part of a study, rather than a 'for fun' type) and my result came back as solidly average. So I think I'm actually not notably bad at facial recognition, but because I store them somewhere I can't 'see', I feel a lot worse at it than I really am. I don't have the precision of description for faces to feel confident in connecting what I have with what's really there when I see it.

I had a similar experience with an online test with celebrity images. And yet when I go to a family reunion I sit in front of people I've known all my life and have to second-guess myself like... "Is that so and so?" I'll go to a parent-teacher conference worrying about whether I'm going to recognize my kid's new teacher. There's definitely a challenge there, whatever that particular test may say.

I wonder if the celebrity test was more of a false-positive, because it falls more into pattern recognition. Like I know that's Chris Pratt more because I'm pattern-matching it against a specific image from a movie I saw, rather than something from my own memory.

@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’.

@Goblin said in A Lack of Imagination:

Found a test online! https://aphantasia.com/vviq/

It's one of those annoying ones where you get all the way to the end and then they demand your personal info/email before they'll send you the results.

But judging by how all of my answers were "dim and vague" at best, I don't think I really need them to send me a score

@Apos I also can 'hear' music in my head far more clearly than I can 'see' images. And yeah there are definitely degrees. I know my cabinets are a sort of orangish brownish color, but I couldn't describe the countertops if my life depended on it.

I have trouble recognizing faces too, especially if they're out of their usual context.

This is super interesting. I never really knew aphantasia was a thing.

I have a friend who has these interesting sci-fi story-ish dreams, and he'll describe them to me in ridiculous detail. Like down to the color of the curtains in the room or the way the sunlight glints off of the steel doorknobs or whatever.

Meanwhile if you asked me to describe my kitchen, like @Ninjakitten says, I could do so in fact-based terms... the cabinets are brown, the sink is right by the back door, the stove is gas with five burners... but I don't really see a vivid image in my mind. It's more like fuzzy still pictures at best.

I think this is partly why I find MU descs so useless and love PBs. You can give me this elaborate evocative desc of a room or person, and all I'm gonna get out if it is, like... "ok there's a table in the corner and that guy is tall with brown hair". I can't picture it without an existing reference.

I believe the option you want is under Preferences->Windowing->Display worlds and spawns like Apple Mail or iTunes. The "old traffic light style" also has a sidebar.

ETA - Oh, I guess it's also a bug, per Roz's post. But that menu item also shows and hides the sidebar.

@Auspice said in Good TV:

But I gotta say, I feel like some of these teams were chosen less for ability and more for, uhh.... quirkiness? factor?

Well, I mean - it's reality TV. They're going to choose contestants that they think are going to get people to watch. But judging from the final builds in the first episode, they all are at least "good" builders, some moreso than others.

@Derp said in Getting into Writing:

I mean, given that there are no small number of criticisms about our distinct lack of ability to do this, I sometimes wonder. You'd think that it would be a way to learn, but many of us seem to be lacking in some essential element.

RP, like many writing exercises, is a way to practice. Practice is geared towards refining skills you already know. It's generally not the best way to learn new skills or advance to the next level.

It's like playing softball in a bar league. Sure you'll probably get slightly better over time just by showing up and having a few at-bats every week, but it's a far cry from actually training seriously in a sport.

Writing is a craft, and doing it well is going to require some kind of learning. Different people learn in different ways, though, so I wouldn't place value on one style over another.

You also want to train for the sport you want to play. As others have mentioned, RP and prose are different. They're both forms of creative writing with certain skills in common, but like baseball and softball they have different styles and different rules. You can become good at both, but you want to make sure you're conscious of the differences as you practice and 'play'.

I don't know why we're talking about this in this thread, but since we are...

@insomniac7809 said in Tyche Banned:

It's not mean. It's not shit-flinging. It's not anything that needs to be in the HogPit. But that's where the Arx megathread is so that's where I went.

Yeah, totally.

You also have the Facebook Problem. In any social endeavor, people gravitate to where the people are. Even if somebody opened another no-holds-barred MU discussion forum, it would have a hard time competing with the established community here. It's no wonder that the constructive-only alternatives, which inherently have a narrower audience, had trouble competing.

It's true that drama and dumpster fires will always have an audience. I mean, how many reality shows are based around that concept? And I agree with those who find it necessary to have a 'the truth hurts' section for outing bad behavior. It's still disappointing to know that any given discussion thread is prone to being pulled down into the mud at any moment just because people can't be bothered to be civil even in the Mildly Constructive section. It's also no wonder that most folks would rather tolerate the mudslinging than be cut out of half of the discussions.

@krmbm said in Tyche Banned:

It has happened. Several times. They don't last, 'cause people get bored.
There's a reason the Hog Pit accounts for ~45% of the posts on MSB: it's more fun in there.

And yet the non-hogpit section is still relatively active given the comparably small size of our community. There are clearly folks willing to engage in mildly constructive discourse.

I think the larger problem is that MUSHing is a (relatively) tiny and stagnant community. There just isn't that much to talk about that's actually relevant to the hobby and constructive. Most of the activity here has nothing to do with MUSHes at all, in or out of the hogpit.

Y'all are sweet. Thanks.

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

I don't understand when I played on an AresMUSH it prompted me if I wanted to connect a character to an AresCentral handle. If you don't do that than isn't there no privacy concern? Isn't the point of the AresCentral feature to share characters across games and allow msging and stuff?

Right, handles are completely optional. You can even have more than one if privacy is your concern. There are technical and usability reasons why handles are public, which I alluded to in the conversation I shared. Maybe I'll elaborate on that at some point for those who actually care, but right now I'm kinda exhausted.

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

When I first started tinkering with Ares, some of my friends warned me that Faraday was not at all receptive to people modifying the server in ways she did not personally approve of and that she and I would most likely end up butting heads.

Yeah, y'know, given that I've spent an astonishing amount of time writing pages and pages of tutorials explaining how to write custom code and how the underlying engine works, that's not only patently untrue but kind of insulting.

There is an immeasurable difference between saying "no" to implementing something in my own spare time and objecting to someone else spending their time implementing the thing.

Ares is open source. Do whatever you want with it.

But there is a limit to how much of my free time I'm willing to expend hand-holding someone through hammering down the walls of the thing I've built to build something I don't approve of. I won't apologize for that, nor should I have to.

@Seamus said in Image Attribution & Creative Commons:

However, it sounds like someone is going through the trouble to make it known.

Indeed. I have been CCed on several emails to talent agencies, such as the following:

To whom it may concern,

There is an use of the image of one of your talent pool on the website (https://savageskies.aresmush.com/char/<CHAR> ) which may paint them in a less than favorable manner. As per the the digital media rights, may be seen as a violation of their copyright, as outlined in (http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-another)

There are may be other of your talents located on this website or on other similar sites which you can find a reference for here. (https://arescentral.aresmush.com/games) If you have any questions, please direct them to the people whom created the game this is ran on as well as the people who are listed as Members of the staff.

It all seems rather petty to me to single out one specific game, since this is fairly common practice across RP/blog/fanfic/tumblr sites across the internet, but that's their prerogative.

I just wish they'd stop CCing me on it, since I have nothing to do with the content of individual games. (Any more than Wordpress has control of self-hosted blogs using their software.)

To @Auspice's point about attribution - that's up to the page using the image. Ares' file upload system is basically the same as wordpress or any wiki software.