Posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in Don't Join Discord Servers!!!:

@faraday Yeah and that's the thing, too. Some of us do have friends who send weird messages, start playing new games, join different guilds etc... and from whom randomness like that wouldn't be completely out of place.

I get that, but that's just indisputably risky behavior in this day and age of phishing scams.

Friends can help each other out by not just sending random "hey check this out" type messages, but instead providing context.

You can help yourself by turning on your "sus" radar even when the random link is from a friend. Examine the link to see where it's actually taking you (wary of typos or google.somewherelse.com type scams), double-check the lock icon in the browser and security certificate, be extra suspicious of anything asking you to provide login creds or click on a "trust me" popup.

There are no guarantees of course, but there are good practices.

ETA: I don't mean to trivialize, because this crap is hard. Scammers are expert at manipulating human behavior. Even security professionals fall victim. All we can do is take steps reduce our risk.

@gremlinsarevil said in Don't Join Discord Servers!!!:

Things can come from a friend that is still out of the blue.

Yeah that's how most phishing attacks get you. It's a weird message from a trusted friend/coworker/contact with just an obscure: "Hey check this out!", usually without any context (or with minimal context like "It's hilarious")

You just gotta be paranoid. It sucks. It's hard. Scammers suck.

@derp said in Don't Join Discord Servers!!!:

There's no whisking off to other sites and such, which would be a fairly obvious red flag

There kind of is, though, it's just subtle enough that it fools people.

Here's a good video explaining what's going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JL8O-9IkcQ

Basically you get invited to a server (normal, no problem), but upon joining a bot asks you to scan a QR code (which is just a link in another form) to verify yourself. The QR code/link then takes you to a confirmation prompt/page that says "do you trust this?" The hack happens when you click "yes I trust this" because it gives the bot access to your login credentials.

So there are actually two red flags here: One is the QR code (again, essentially a link) from an untrusted source, and two is the "do you trust this" warning prompt from discord itself.

Now I realize that often these things come from a hacked friend's account, so you might not see it as an untrusted source. That's the nefarious part of so many phishing schemes. I'm not faulting people for falling victim. I'm just saying, "don't join discord servers" is the wrong message. "Don't use Discord's QR scanning login" might be a better one, or "be wary of scammers trying to phish you by inviting you to servers". But let's be clear about what the actual problem is.

Incidentally this isn't new. The exploit has existed ever since Discord added the 'login with QR code' feature.

Just to clarify - from what I've been told, it's not joining the discord that gets you hacked. It's a suspicious link that you get sent after/during the process that takes you to a fake website where - (this is the part where my reports got a little hazy) - you are asked to enter your discord credentials to "verify yourself".

So the moral of the story isn't 'don't join discord servers' - it's be wary of ANY link at ANY time asking you to enter credentials. Double check the URL, the lock icon, the source of the link, etc. to make sure that it truly is Discord asking for your Discord credentials.

@tooters said in Mourning a character, how do you do it?:

I don't get emotionally attached to the characters I make. Not only that, I don't understand why the vast majority of players do.

People get attached to characters in stories. Just look at any fandom to see people going bananas over their fav chars are treated (good or bad). Making people care about the characters in your story is kind of a fundamental hallmark of storytelling.

I won't pretend to understand the psychology behind why it is this way, but it is undeniably A Thing in human society.

So if you can accept that people get attached to characters in stories, in general, it follows that people would get attached to their own characters in their own stories, to include MUSHing. The degree of IC/OOC bleed that pervades roleplaying only intensifies this effect, and the PVP aspect @Ganymede mentioned can introduce an extra layer of perceived unfairness/anger/etc.

I wouldn't say I "mourn" characters (that word has too much baggage in my mind), but I do get bummed out when their stories get cut short for whatever reason. I don't really do anything specific about it though.

Sadness. I didn't know him well, but he was always a decent guy. I had lots of fun on TGG, and his combat code there was the most impressive MUCode system I've ever seen.

@derp said in Great TV:

I disagree with this premise. If you want to relive the story from the books, then you should read the books. Every video adaptation of a story that doesn't have a LOTR budget has to make allowances and changes to fit the story into the narrative that you have.

I think it's a balance.

Budget constraints are a real limitation, like you said. So are time constraints. If you tried to film every scene in a novel it would be a mini-series, not a movie. And some things that work fine in a novel don't translate well to screen. Adaptations are almost always necessary.

But if you're not going to be faithful to the spirit of the original story, then don't try to pawn your movie off as that story just to ride its coattails. Do your own thing.

@arkandel said in Great TV:

So for instance the new Star Wars series drew the original cast back but... they didn't do jack. In fact they were portrayed, largely, as failures.

I get where you're coming from, but I didn't see it that way. To use a RL analogy, the fact that Nazi-ism and fascism wasn't entirely eradicated doesn't make those who fought in WW2 "failures". They succeeded in their immediate goal of ending the war. They brought an era of peace, but peace rarely lasts forever.

It's the same in Star Wars, plus the original 3 stood up again in their later years to guide the next generation to continue the fight. Leia led the whole resistance. Luke's standoff with Kylo inspired the galaxy. Han's arc with Kylo was instrumental in the final outcome.

That's not to say I approved of all their story arcs (Luke's in particular), but failures? Not in my book.

@hobos said in Places Code Pros and Cons:

Pulling out her hair-tie, the shoopy shoop at a table in the corner says, "... stinky... de... Pie hole..."

Those kinds of algorithms have never worked well in my experience. You end up with nonsensical bits highlighted, like:

At the bar, Bob looks at John with narrowed eyes. "You looking at me, punk?" He yelled, "GET OUT! Now, while you have the chance."

comes through as

At the bar, Bob .... with ... He ... at ... while ...

If you wanted any sort of reasonable context, people had to double pose. But they wouldn't, so it was just lost.

At the end of the day, there are a number of potential rationales behind having places code:

• (Organizational) Defining the location to a more granular degree.
• (Organizational) Telling who's where to aid people in breaking up into smaller groups.
• (Focus) Highlighting talk in your place so you can react more easily to stuff that concerns you.
• (Focus) Reducing spam by hiding chatter at other places around the room.
• (Immersion) Obscuring chatter that you probably wouldn't ICly be able to hear.
• (Story) Highlighting where chatter is happening so someone reading the log later can identify the flow of different conversations.

How much you value these aspects will drive what kind of system you prefer. I care nothing about immersion and a lot about story, so that explains my hatred of the automatic "..." systems. Everyone's going to have a different take.

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

I don't know where you live, but this is a "find someone to present this bullshit to a school board" moment.

Yeah, it's on my list. I kinda know the school board president.

Like, I can understand maybe reading Wallace's speech in social studies class as part of a higher-grade study on segregation, but "Read George Wallace's 1963 inaugural speech to identify effective argument techniques" in 8th grade? Even my kid was like: WTF.

Dear my kid's school: I understand that "Comparing Argument Techniques in Two Speeches" is a valid lesson, but surely you could have found a better example than comparing Martin Luther King Jr's "American Dream" speech to George freaking Wallace's "Segregation Forever" address. "How does Wallace's speech effectively use rhetorical techniques?" "Why do you think MLK's speech is considered the winner in the eyes of history?" Seriously?

Some days I just want to homeschool. Sigh.

@derp said in Shows and Movies We're Looking Forward To:

I'll go ahead and start this thread with: Willow

I was totally going to post about this too. So excited. One of my favorite movies. My brother and I would quote it constantly.

@derp said in Places Code Pros and Cons:

I was more thinking like the MUX logger object things that just capture the poses in the room in sequentially numbered attributes and then spits out a formatted log at the end.

Right, that's what I meant by "server-side auto logger." It could be baked into the server hardcode (as in Ares), but it could also be softcode on the other systems. It's just that some (many? most? I don't even know any more) games don't have that, so it's an academic exercise at best.

@derp said in Places Code Pros and Cons:

I bet there's a way to make it happen. Coders are smart.

I mean, we may be smart but we can't do much with data that isn't there. A client log is only as complete as the messages that come to the client. If you're filtering out places talk on the server side and never sending it to the clients, client-side logs can never be complete. You would need some kind of server-side auto-logger. Ares has that, obviously, but many other servers don't as a matter of course.

Even with Ares, so many of the scene commands are tied into the scene and not your version of the scene that it would require a huge rearchitecting to try to do per-player filtering. Especially given the alt/GM factors. I just don't see places code being used enough to make it worth the effort, honestly.

@Misadventure asked over in Too Much:

Do you happen to have or recall a list of the pros and cons for the setups (for places code) you looked at?

There was actually a big discussion about this a few years back in this other thread, but I'll summarize where I ended up.

TL;DR; - no system is perfect. The main variable is what you think is the main purpose for a places system. For me it's organizational - where is everyone? The spam reduction aspects always caused more hassle than help for me. YMMV. If you see "reducing spam" as the main goal, you might go in a completely different direction.

This is mostly a data dump, but everyone feel free to share other thoughts and other places code alternatives you've seen.

Traditional Pros/Cons

In old-school systems, a player joins a place and uses a special command (usually tt) that emits only to people at that place.

• Keeps chatter to the place, reducing spam for people at other places.
• Requires you to double-pose if you are doing something at the place that would logically also be noticed to the rest of the room. People often forget to do this, reducing opportunities for engagement across places.
• Requires special commands to pose at the place, leading to a lot of messed up poses.
• Getting a cohesive log requires splicing together logs from all the different places.
• GMs can't see what's going down in other places, making it difficult to utilize places in a GMed scene.

Ares Pros/Cons

In Ares, you pose as normal and everyone can see your pose. There's just an informational tag around it, like:

[+ At Table in the Corner +] Faraday falls off her chair.

• Posing is normal; the place name is just extra information.
• In MU clients, it highlights chatter at your place to get your attention. (in web portal you would have to set up a browser highlight manually)
• Everyone can see everything. This is good for logging and GM-ing, but obviously does nothing to reduce spam.
• You can use places more dynamically, such as organizing military teams who are in slightly different areas but can still see/hear each other.

Hybrid Pros/Cons

I also considered a hybrid system where it would use normal pose commands, but still only emit to people at the place.

• It's easy to pose at your place, but posing to the general room then requires special commands. I found this really counter-intuitive.
• Otherwise it's basically the same pros/cons as traditional.

Miscellaneous Considerations

As someone mentioned in the other thread, in traditional/hybrid, you could conceivably allow GMs to join multiple places to monitor things. That just causes some added complexity and potentially confusion (where is their PC really?)

In Ares' web portal, the scene pose output isn't customized per character, and you could conceivably have multiple characters in the same scene browser. This makes filtering output very challenging.

@ganymede said in Too Much:

The only suggestion I could give for "places" is something similar. If you are at a place, then rather than using a code like 'tt', your default pose, emit, or ooc command would only be seen by folks in the same place;
I don't know if any of this is feasible.

It’s not that it’s infeasible per se, but when I explored it the cons outweighed the pros. For instance GMs wouldn’t be able to utilize places in their scenes because they couldn’t see what was going on. Historically people are bad at posing out to the world when they’re in a place, giving players no chance to notice the rising tempers at the back table until suddenly the table gets tossed. And it all wrecks havoc on scene logs because everything’s invisible.

So the Ares places system is just informational. You pose as normal, no special commands. All it does is flag your poses as being in a certain place.

Not saying that’s the only way to do it of course. That’s just the way I thought was the simplest and covered the most cases.

@lotherio said in Too Much:

As you suggest, its part of the culture and learning that one doesn't need to respond to all prior 10 people that poses is essential to getting into the flow of 3pr and such.

I agree with you, but I think it goes beyond everyone thinking they need to respond to all 10 people, and more into everyone just paying attention to what's already going on and responding accordingly. Conversations are woven together in a really bizarre fashion, and that's definitely a cultural thing.

@lotherio said in Too Much:

Is there a better design to help filter the groups conversing/interacting between their friends to do so in a less distracting manner?

This was something I spent a lot of time on when designing Ares, seeing if it was possible to design a better 'places' system. To be honest, I came up empty. When you consider that the scene needs to feed into a single text log at the end, and that people might flit between places and be at least peripherally aware of what's going on at the others (i.e., those guys are laughing in the corner, that table is having some raised voices, etc.)... it becomes difficult to truly isolate things.

@ghost said in RL-Friendly Game Design:

within those technologies is the answer to taking THIS hobby and moving it into the 21st century.

It depends on what you're looking for really. I'm not interested in "online tabletop" or heavily-tooled games that have integrated battle maps, graphics, etc.

I'm a writer. I want a collaborative writing system with some rules attached.

I know you've said you've been out of MUSHes for awhile so I dunno how much you've seen about the Ares web portal, but it already does things like "chat interfaces that recognize the difference between OOC chatter and IC action". I could add real-time "Faraday is typing..." indicators if I chose to (I just chose not to).

The limiting factor to the next step, in my mind, is the native clients. There's nothing stopping the hobby as a whole from moving toward a Discord/Slack-like client that is a lot more usable than raw text in, raw text out. But that would require a collaboration between the client developers and the server developers that does not yet exist.

@misadventure said in Too Much:

Is anyone interested in this topic as its own thread?

It's not really possible with current MU clients and servers - would require code changes on both sides to add support. But certainly happy to discuss further in a separate thread if desired.

So for all that I've worked to make Ares async-friendly, I don't actually enjoy async RP that much personally. I have had a few good google doc scenes with friends that otherwise wouldn't have happened, but for the most part one of these things happens:

• the scene stretches on so long that it begins to muck with my sense of internal continuity
• I forget the scene exists and never get back to posing
• I'm so worried I'll forget the scene exists that I check it obsessively for new activity
• My partner forgets the scene exists and the scene just sorta...dies

So my version of RL-friendly is planned and short. If it's planned, people can adjust their schedules around it. If it's (reasonably) short, they know they're not going to be at it all night.