Posts made by faraday

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."

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

In some ways, I'm grateful for my differently-functioning brain. It took me a very long time to appreciate the simple fact that I would have doubtless been the most bored and miserable, sickly child, otherwise.

I agree. I like this lady's video about that. She say ADHD is related to the "novelty-seeking gene" and actually can be advantageous to society in many ways. Just not, y'know, sitting in a school desk all day. I don't know the science she's citing, if it's bunk or not, but I like the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWxmEv7fOFY

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

As a kid, I had a tendency to find something that interested me and just ignore everything else—including, sometimes, sleep—to do that thing. Reading, writing, coding, tinkering with electronics, etc. This would happen instead of my chores, sometimes instead of actually coming to dinner, etc. Meanwhile, things like chores or homework were really hard for me to get started (yay executive dysfunction!) until the eleventh hour, at which point I would work in a panic-induced state of intense focus.

Oh, yeah, totally relating to the hyperfocus. My family always teased me for being in my own little world with absolutely no sense of time passing. "I'll be there in a minute!" Hah. Yeah, no. And the last-minute thing? Same.

It's funny (ironic-funny not lol funny) now to see it from my kids' perspective. Alexa says the timer's up. "There's no WAY that was 30 minutes, Mom! No fair!" Like somehow I've managed to establish this secret code with Amazon where I say "Alexa set 30 minute timer" but it only sets 10 or something.

Sad for all the struggles folks have gone through.

Like many adults, I didn't realize I had ADHD until my kids were diagnosed, then I realized that they were struggling with the same things I have my whole life. My parents still don't believe that I have it ("But you were such a good student!") but I'm pretty much the poster girl for adult ADD symptoms, and they've been there for as long as I can remember.

Some coping mechanisms:

• Timers. We have an alexa at home and 90% of my use is to set timers. "Remind me in 60 minutes to change the laundry." "Set a 20 minute timer" (for my kids to stop playing video games). etc.
• Fidgets. I spent my life drumming on tables and destroying straw wrappers. One year I was so bored in meetings I started practicing writing the alphabet left-handed. Nowadays though there are some really cool fidget gizmos. I keep this one in my purse.
• Background Noise. I have a hard time maintaining focus in silence. There has to be some kind of background noise for part of my brain to focus on. Music without words works best, or a movie I've seen 78 times before.
• Visual Cues. I assemble things and put them by the door the night before so I remember them. I'm the queen of post-it notes, all over the house.

Getting accommodations for kids in schools is a PITA.

@TiredEwok said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

Was a thing on most comic games I RPed on. Was a thing on Star Wars Mush, albeit not quite as bad. It's just how it is. People want to RP with others whose characters have a common goal, I guess.

Sure, but it comes down to how small your teams are. In a Firefly type setting you're talking crews of 4-6 generally. That's way different from a game where your "teams" are The Rebel Alliance, or Everyone at Xavier's X-Men School, or All BSG Viper Pilots or The Gangrel Clan. The more reasons you give people to interact, the more opportunities for RP there will be. The more siloed you make people, the more impenetrable your cliques become.

@WildBaboons said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

Being split into crews isn't necessarily a bad thing. When I played on Serenity and it was active that's how it was. 3-5 ships with crews of half a dozen ore more that ran PRPs internally, but also interacted with each other frequently.

It depends on your point of view obviously. (And maybe this deserves its own thread, since it's tangential to SerenityMUSH specifically, but I'll leave that up to the thread owner/mods.)

A crew-based game makes it very difficult for new players to get involved. Because you have to find and join a crew to get any RP, and that's not always easy (especially for introverted players). And heaven help you if you fall in with a crew that includes a bad player. It's hard to avoid them when you're on the same ship all the time.

Even once you're established, If your ship is out in the Black or on a different planet and nobody from your crew happens to be online at that time, you're SOL for RP. It's the same problem a lot of Star Wars games have by splitting their players among different planets.

If that's your thing, groovy - I'm not trying to detract from anyone else's fun. Just saying that I love Firefly as a setting/show but I've never had a good experience on any FF game.

@Auspice said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

I've got a lot of ground work around here... somewhere for a FF game that would be station-based and allow a sort of central-hub for RP + for people to have their ship crews.

There was one of the FF games way back that had Persephone as a "RP hub". I sat there a lot. Alone.

@Ghost said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

With a good enough system, a decent staff, and perhaps a reset to wash out some of that Mal and Inara corruption past, I think Firefly could go that route.

I'd love to see another Firefly game take off, but I agree with the others who have said that Serenity has too much baggage. And the wiki seems busted. No logs, no recent updates. Or maybe they're just not using it? Either way, not a good look.

But the issue with past FF games (other than bad staff) is that what made the show magical was the focus on a small crew. You don't get that same vibe on a MUSH without splintering the players into ten zillion tiny groups and stifling RP. I've long mused about doing a planet-based "space western" FF game, but I really don't think that's what people come to a Firefly game for. I think the draw is hopping from planet to planet in a ShipOfOurOwn, having epic adventures like TV-Mal and company. That's great for the FF tabletop RPG (which is loads of fun) but doesn't work so great on a MUSH with dozens of people.

@Ghost It's been a few years since I've run a Penn game, but last I knew there was no ability to save pages to the DB or snoop live as Seamus describes. You could turn on command logging for everyone or set people SUSPECT, but that stuff all went to a text log file on disk.

Ares presently has no SUSPECT flag, but it logs all commands (from everyone) except for pages/channels/poses (and a few other private things like passwords) to the text debug log on disk. Channels are saved to the DB for channel/recall and web portal chat. Poses are saved to the DB if you have scene logging enabled. Individual players can currently log pages they receive in a very limited fashion for abuse reporting.

Can't speak to the other codebases.

@Seamus said in Saving Pages to the Database:

Just throwing this out there, but RHOST already has something akin to this, sort-of, the @snoop feature which allows staff to view all activity of any player registered to them, including inputs and pages. That being said, people still play on RHOST servers. It really has to do with trust vs capability. If they trust the staff, it doesn't matter really what the staff can or cannot do.

Penn has the same thing with the SUSPECT flag, but both of those must be enabled on an individual player-by-player basis. In the past, the idea that some games might turn it on wholesale for everyone has gotten some serious ethical side-eye -- even if nobody was actually looking at the logs except in cases of reported harassment.

@Tinuviel said in Saving Pages to the Database:

I would argue that any coded 'enhancements' to a codebase itself should be to remove trusting staff, and reliance on staff, from the equation as much as possible.

Sure, but removing them completely is impossible. If staff controls the server, they have access to every byte of data sent to and from it. Full stop.

That said, the proposed features are about letting players access their own pages in new ways. That doesn't include staff having a command to randomly snoop on pages. Code staff with database access could poke around and find things. There's no practical way around that, as @Sparks and I pointed out earlier. But "someone with high enough permissions can dig it out of the database" doesn't mean easy access for everyone.

@Sparks said in Saving Pages to the Database:

this just doesn't seem a practical place to use public key encryption

That's exactly right. Even if you have to pass the key to decrypt your pages, you're still passing it to the game, and thus effectively giving nefarious staff access to your key - and your pages - anyway.

Not to mention the fact that a nefarious staff could still intercept the page and log it before it was encrypted and saved to the database in the first place.

Encryption might make people feel a little better, but it's not really a viable protection in this case.

@Arkandel said in Saving Pages to the Database:

rather than how to best safeguard it since otherwise staff will always have access to full records of pages.

Staff can already have full records of pages if they want to, on every MU server ever built. Whether that's enabling full command logging, or setting people SUSPECT, or whatever.

There is no real privacy on a MUSH, from a technological perspective. It is entirely reliant on the ethics of the staff involved to not go digging into things they have no business digging into.

So I'm not really interested in adding a complex encryption scheme to perpetuate the illusion of privacy (because even with encrypted storage, the game itself needs to be able to decrypt the pages somehow to display them, and that means the capability exists for code-staff to decrypt them too).

What I'm really asking is whether the illusion of private pages is important enough to players that they would not want to play on a game that was explicit about the fact that they're saved to the database.

@Arkandel Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not going to do that. That's not how PMs work in any other system (Discord, Slack, even this forum right here). If MUers value their privacy that much, they can do without the feature. These are chat messages, not state secrets.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Saving Pages to the Database:

Pages/PMs feel like the one thing I need to log on to do, everything else is more or less possible through the webportal atm.

This is actually why I'm not inclined to make it game-configurable unless the community is overwhelmingly in favor of it. I mean obviously a game can do whatever they want with the code, but I don't need to make an easy 'off' switch if most players view it as core game functionality

There's been an interesting discussion among the AresMUSH community about whether to store pages to the database, in the same way as mail messages and channel chat (if channel recall is enabled).

This is not a unique idea. It's the basis for how private messages work on virtually every forum and chat system out there. Historically, though, a lot of MU folks have had a knee-jerk reaction about this feature. I'm wondering if that's still true.

The main thing driving this on Ares is folks wanting to be able to page via the web portal, but there are other non-web advantages: a page/recall feature, being able to report harassing pages, and so on.

The main argument I've heard against it is privacy, and I would hate for this to be some deal-breaker that makes people shy away from Ares games. (Initial push-back is why I haven't already implemented it.) But let's be honest - no text you send to someone else's server is ever truly private. If a nefarious staff member with wizard privileges wants your pages, they can already get them (on any MU server).

Feel free to chime in with your opinions here (please remember this is the constructive area), and take my survey if you like.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/75NNHKT

Even if you don't already play on Ares games, you might find one someday and your opinion still counts.

@Roz said in What's your nerd origin story?:

I WAS JUST BORN TO IT.

Mutants represent. For me it was my dad. He's a retired soldier/physicist and was a wargamer before I was even born. I painted my first mini when I was about 2, and he took me to see Star Wars several times in the theater. SW, Trek, Dr. Who - I was hooked.

I got into gaming by playing wargames with him and his friends. Dad eventually picked up on my penchant for assigning names and backstories to my figures and tracking their exploits, and bought my first RPG (Traveller 2300) for Christmas one year. He'd GM adventures for me, my brother, and my BFF.

Now my daughter is making her own video game in Scratch and my son is going through the campaign in Starcraft2.

So yeah... the geek is strong in our family.

@A-Meowley said in Bloopers:

The wiki is atrocious; barely usable on mobile

Y'know what does work great on mobile? The Ares web portal.

Just saying.

@krmbm said in Bloopers:

That place is so many kinds of nuts.

They put a giant stop sign on the web portal? I... have no words.

I wonder if they realize they can just.. turn it off? (Not that I advise it, but if they hate it that much...)