Posts made by Groth

Assuming you are wrong is a good strategy I have seen many people use successfully. In most internet discussions I will be wrong even in areas I have studied, either because I remember something wrong, made a misinterpretation or missed a key piece of context.

In terms of impostor syndrome, I have never felt that kind of self doubt. I have always felt entirely comfortable with knowing what I know and not knowing what I don't know so things like tests and examinations have never been a source of stress for me. In most activities I have ever pursued I consider myself mediocre, I have always considered anything I can do something anyone could do if they ever tried.

@mietze said in Autism and The MU* Community:

If they cannot stop when someone says stop then it is probably better for all concerned if they are removed from a game until they can.

In terms of managing a game, I've long had the opinion that public channels should be aggressively policed and maintained argument free, most people regardless of their diagnosis won't have any issue respecting that. Maintaining a positive game culture is key to a healthy game in my mind and if someone is harmful to the game culture you shouldn't keep them around just because they have a recognized mental issue.

That said, game management is getting off topic.

@ganymede said in Autism and The MU* Community:

These are excellent strategies, but I find them patronizing. I employ them with my daughter, but would not do so with an adult or online. This is because I try not to talk to people as if I consider them a child.

I also do not automatically go to “neuroatypical” when I converse with someone. That feels patronizing to me too. I am fairly sure I am neurotypical, and I recognize others are not, but I am not going to presume someone pressing me is neuroatypical. In my experience, such are actually pushy neurotypical assholes.

I don't think you should assume someone pressuring you in general is neuroatypical nor would I suggest these kind of strategies should be applied broadly. Except in so far it's good practice to assume good faith.

Rather that when you notice a very specific pattern of behavior, it's a sign something autism related is going on and you can cut it off. A year and a half ago we had someone get dogpiled on this forum where it was instantly obvious to me this was what was going on because while anyone can be an asshole the pattern where someone keeps trying to clarify themselves over and over I usually only see from people on the spectrum.

@silverfox said in Autism and The MU* Community:

I have one particular online-have-met-irl friend where our relationship has been really on the rocks lately and I think this is what is happening. They come to me with what I perceive is the same issue, though they feels what is being brought forth is unique and different, and I just want to shout (and have lost my patience) "we have talked about this stop it!"

I know nothing about your discussion but most of the time I see this played out, the driving motivator is when the neuroatypical is ascribed an opinion or motivation they feel is inaccurate.

To that end easiest way to avoid it is to not try to describe what you think their opinion or motivation is if you perceive it to be negative.

Moving the conversation to something else is fine and stepping back is also fine. You can also try to avoid conversations that cause frustration between you by establishing a rule to not talk about those topics.

@arkandel said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

@groth One of the videos I really love to watch is the "how stuff is made" kind.

"How stuff is made" videos are fascinating, it's astonishing how much work goes into the things we can then buy for just a few cents. Often when I see some of those specialized machines I end up thinking 'How did they even think of doing that?'.

On the subject of Dunning-Kruger I think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you understand something if you're not challenged to it. One thing that happened to me recently was that I had watched a video on induced current from a moving magnetic field and I thought I had a grasp on how it worked, however after getting into a discussion with a physicist, I quickly realized that no, I don't actually understand it at all.

@ganymede said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

You'll forgive me if I choke on the irony if this is a genuine statement.

What my opinion is and what people think my opinion is can often be wildly divergent because of my bad habit of focusing on very specific things and the specificity getting lost in translation. I need to learn to stop doing it because I practically never actually encounter anyone who cares about or thinks about it in the way I do.

@ganymede

That said, I concur. I try not to judge how easy or hard something is based on my own ease or difficulty. I've learned to listen to others about their thoughts on a topic. I do not think, for instance, that I will ever fully understand how to code, but I do enjoy reading the topics in this forum about it.

I think the mistake people do with coding specifically is that they think of 'coding' as if it's this one thing, like riding a bicycle or something along those lines.

Coding is more like cooking, baking or chemistry in that what you're trying to do is tell a computer system to do something by giving it instructions, however there's countless ways to give those instructions to achieve countless different things.

If you ever wrote down a recipe, you know how to 'code' in its most basic sense and if you want you can call yourself a coder just like someone making a muffin can call themselves a baker if they like.

However if you want to make something more complicated, it'll take proportionally more time and effort to figure out what ingredients you need, how to put them together into a coherent whole etc and with an enterprise project you might have 100+ bakers who all might have different ideas about the One True Way of baking.

So ultimately 'understanding code' is more of a spectrum of knowledge where ultimate mastery is impossible and you always have to continually learn new things.

The main thing I get the impression people with no understanding of coding get wrong is that they think of it as some kind of magic where code just makes things happen and they expect unrealistic results. Code is just a long list of instructions executed in order.

I think the perception of what is easy and what is hard and the contrast against what is (subjectively) easy or hard is pretty interesting.

For me I usually think it's strange when people say computers or most tech gadgets are hard because in my mind, they just do what you tell them to and you can usually just google what's up but to many people computers are still spooky magic boxes.

I also personally find arithmetic, algebra and geometry to be easy but once you get to calculus my intuitive understanding just fails me and it can take severe effort to untangle how things work and what an expression means.

One of the things I dabble in is fighting games, just looking at them it can be easy to think they're easy. After all you just move around in a 2D plane and activate one move at a time, combos are only pressing the correct buttons in the correct tempo, no different from playing the piano. If you've ever tried to get decent at one, you'll quickly learn you have to make split second decisions that require high manual dexterity and top players are the ones willing and able to spend hours and hours each and every day to achieve perfection.

If you're looking at a boat or plane captain while they're cruising, you can trick yourself into thinking they have an easy job, all they have to do is let the auto-pilot steer the craft and chill. What you don't see is all the training they have for all the situations where something goes wrong.

Something easy to overlook is also the difference between mastering a specific skill like say being able to dunk a basketball and the kind of mastery you need to get paid dunking basketballs which requires mastering all the skills involved in a basketball game like dribbling, passing, game sense etc.

Being able to do something very specific better then a professional is not necessarily hard, something I keep seeing referenced lately is Gordon Ramseys Grilled Cheese Sandwich. Does being able to make a better sandwich then that make you a Michelin star chef? Obviously not, it just makes you someone able to make a decent sandwich, being a head chef is a complete skillset that does not as a rule involve cooking sandwiches over open flame.

It's easy I think to underestimate what something involves but to me learning the basics of various crafts makes me appreciate their depths. For instance earlier this year I spent something like a week trying to figure out how to move a character model in Blender (animation software) and it made me all the more appreciate the work of animators and modelers.

@mietze said in Autism and The MU* Community:

The ability to have conversation that is clear and is paying attention to what the other person is saying, as well as theability to ask clarifying questions is often very much a learned skill.

It is something that has to be worked at and its never perfected. It isn't easy. Some people have more difficulty in learning than others.

It's something I hope to get better at, though in the meanwhile I need to get better at identifying the right time to drop something.

If you see it happening in the wild, someone looking like they're digging a hole over something entirely unimportant, you would do them a favor by cutting it off.

One of my biggest difficulties is tone, my text is often interpreted as combative or intimidating and I think that's tied up with an expression style I picked up in my teens and I am not sure how to go about changing.

I suppose that makes an advice of mine to anyone with a child on the spectrum to help them develop a style of communication that feels approachable and keep them out of unhelpful habits.

@mietze said in Autism and The MU* Community:

It is often helpful to learn to stop devaluing or dismissing as "easy" skills that others may be better at than you right now.

Few skills are ever easy. It's said that to master something takes 10,000 hours and in my experience that's probably accurate.

It's easy enough to learn the basics of something or another but to become good at it is not something achieved casually. Dabbling vs mastery is an interesting topic but best had elsewhere.

I think the most blatant issue I run into in online communities and is usually the most tell-tale sign for me that I am looking at someone on the spectrum is the frustration with not being understood.

You have this idea you want to communicate but it is misinterpreted and in your effort to clarify, you're viewed as obstinate.

The correct thing to do is to just step away but the feeling of being unable to communicate is very unpleasant and giving up feels a bit like accepting this inability as an inescapable fact.

I got asked today why I don't just stop being rude as if it's that easy but it's not. For the most part I am not intentionally rude but I am aware I am often perceived to be, this is a source of frustration.

There are people out there who are amazing at always keeping their arguments respectful and perfectly convey their thoughts and maybe in theory I could learn the skill but it's hard to double check your own thought pattern when at first glance nothing seems wrong from your end.

These days my youtube is mostly sciencetuber content.

Stand-up Maths is great at making weird mathematics interesting.

Veritasium is great at investigating all sorts of concepts.

Corridor Crew analyze and sometimes reproduce CGI and stunts in movies, often with special guests.

Viva La Dirt League just really great gaming themed comedy skits

SmarterEveryDay lots of good educational videos

Stuff Made Here what happens if you leave an engineer alone with an entire workshop

Technology Connections learn more about technology in your house you never thought about

ElectroBoom Everything you shouldn't do with electronics

Steve Mould Assorted science videos, usually with practical demonstrations

@cobalt

The problem is likely just the different paradigm and your brain thinking the MUSH way. Rooms, objects, characters etc are not set up the same way so whenever you try to approach a problem the same way you did MUSH code it doesn't work.

Unfortunately there's probably no easier way then learning the new pattern step by step until you're used to it. With Ares at least Faraday did a great work with the documentation.

@cobalt said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

Maybe I just don't have the brain for modern coding languages then. Because I found it frustrating to the point of despair.

The frustrating part I find with any modern language is learning the quirks of any given library or framework. They all have subtle differences that can trip you up until you get used to them.

I would recommend starting with something small and manageable or modding some pre existing project. Tinkering with an ares game or arx gives plenty of opportunity for small projects.

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

I'm not saying Lisp (or MUSHCode for that matter) is a bad language. They have their niche uses.

It's probably fine to call MUSHCode a bad language for modern use. It made sense for the purpose it was designed, when everyone was using telnet and there was no such thing as IDE's and source control and feeding the game code line by line was just the way you did things.

I don't think it makes any sense in a world where we have so many powerful IDE's and flexible frameworks to work with.

That said, one thing that's easy to do in MUSH and hard to do without MUSHCode is scripting unique objects. I haven't tried it in Ares but I know in Evennia it's non-trivial to make something like a ball you can throw at people or a magic 8 ball or whatever.

@arkandel said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

Names. Very few characters are called Steve or Jen.

It's always Maximillian and Lillian.

I don't think this is necessarily because people hate common names as much as it's a consequence of character names almost never being purged, so very quickly common names will end up taken and people have to come up with more and more quirky names.

@rnmissionrun said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

Slightly off topic but related in a roundabout way.

What I find weird about this whole situation is that we've had MU*s that featured "real" programming languages (which were easily comparable in capabilities to, say, Python or Ruby, but without all of the mainstream support) for as long as we've had MUDs themselves and yet these have largely been ignored in favor of MUSH. What changed to suddenly make ditching MUSH in favor of Ares (or Evennia), a good idea?

It's not about Python or Ruby specifically. The reason that MUSH has been surviving for so long is that it's pretty much feature complete for roleplaying purposes out of the box, most games only need a dice roller and character generation, both of which they usually copy from some previous game in the same genre.

To replace MUSH, you would either need something easier to set up then MUSH or something as easy with better features. What both Ares and Evennia has done is integrate the web into the game, this is something you can do with MUSH (You can connect your web portal to the same database as the MUSH) but it's nightmarish to work with. This effectively brings MU* into the 21st century.

To do this, you would want a solid web framework. Python has Django which is super popular but it could as easily been developed in C# that has .net. Ares meanwhile uses Emberjs. All of this could in theory have been done long ago but the modern frameworks make it much easier, especially for someone just coding in their spare time.

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

@arkandel said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

I found coding for MU* was an invaluable experience. .. I would heartily recommend it to anyone who's looking to get into programming or is curious about a different professional path.

20-30 years ago I would absolutely agree. Now? MUSHcode is so far divorced from modern programming paradigms and languages that any concepts you learn from it don't translate very well.

MUSHcode serves as a fairly good introduction to Lisp. Dialects of Lisp and languages similar to Lisp are still used by systems that need concurrency like telecom and financial backends.

That said, MUSHcode is a very painful way to learn to code. I would suggest starting with almost any other project if you want to enjoy the process of coding. It's a bit like writing a book on stone tablets, you can do it but there's easier ways.

@arkandel said in Talking 'Bout Ares:

@wizz Yeah +help versus help used to be the bane of my life. Especially for 'custom' commands like +aspirations or whatever.

Doesn't help that people also use news for helpfiles.

@rnmissionrun said in Talking 'Bout Ares:

It was enough to make me grit my teeth in frustration and curse whoever it originally was that thought having WHO, who and +who commands on the same game made sense.

To the best of my knowledge it was not that anyone ever thought it was good to have multiple similarly named commands doing similar things but rather a consequence of trying to maintain softcode compatibility between codebases. So if you wanted to change a command while remaining compatible with any code that uses the old one, you needed to make a new command.

Since Evennia and Ares no longer use softcode, there's no reason to keep commands around for compatibility.

@silverfox said in Talking 'Bout Ares:

@rnmissionrun

yes, but on like... all games. I've been Muing for almost twenty years and on my original game I STILL cannot remember when commands start with a + or a @.

That's not really your fault. Commands starting with @ are hardcoded and commands starting with + were coded for that specific game so which commands start with which not only changes game to game but also changes within the same game as the coder gets around to implementing their own preferred version of default commands.

@kestrel said in Good TV:

I haven't played the video games, but I can imagine they probably work for the same reason the show works. You have a Gary-Stu protagonist who, aside from delivering on male fantasy aspects (strong, muscly, doesn't afraid, all women melt for him) has no real personality or motivations aside from sitting on the fence a lot. He travels from place to place killing monsters, which allows for a flexible narrative introducing all kinds of funner characters and scenarios along the way. I don't think he's interesting and I don't think he's meant to be. The pilot snagged me precisely because it presented a compelling choice through his neutrality without needing to alienate anyone who would feel strongly about either possibility.

Yes. That's exactly why the games work, especially in Witcher 3 where they went open world. They made excellent work at making you feel like a professional monster hunter that has no personal investment in most of the things you get pulled into while meeting lots of interesting characters and being a neutralish party in their stories. Geralt himself doesn't really have anything going on aside from his family of sorts.

They leaned into it by rather then just having you go places and kill monsters, you first haggle over how much you're supposed to get paid, then you track the monster, learn about the monster, get an opportunity to prepare poisons and potions for that specific monster etc which makes an interesting contrast against more heroic stories.

@kestrel said in Good TV:

This kind of narrative is by and large sorely lacking in Western culture IMO — it represents a kind of communal heroism rather than that of a lone individual. It celebrates diversity, perhaps not in the modern sense of identity, but of skill and thought. That many people together, albeit each with their many flaws, can accomplish a task no one could accomplish alone, even when their involvement isn't immediately obvious. (Aragorn & Co. serve to distract Sauron in order to give Frodo, Sam and Gollum a better chance to get the ring to Mount Doom. The quest's glory isn't theirs directly, but they're nonetheless integral to its success behind the scenes.)

It's a bit of a shame and almost weird how as copied as all the other aspects of Tolkiens work are, almost all of them abandon the communal heroism in favor of more straight chosen one narratives.

@clarity said in Autism and The MU* Community:

I would happily wear the same thing day after day if I could get away with it.

Who says you can't? I hate finding new clothes to wear so whenever I have to buy new clothes, I just buy lots of them in different colors and just switch color throughout the week.

Like many others in the thread I've found MU* to be a place where I can be a social in a way I have neither the energy nor ability to do elsewhere. Social cue's are more apparent and in a world of text you don't have the same countless distractions everywhere, it allows me to pretend to be socially adept.