Posts made by Ninjakitten

Okay -- some of these, I remember being discussed before (quite a while ago, actually) and still like, but one thing that definitely needs considering is how to make the playlists just one's own info, keeping in mind that virtually nothing gets erased from a wiki. If Bob decides to add 'Idiot at Somewhere' to Fred's list, it'll be in the history forever even if Fred removes it.

It might be worth considering using a CMS (like joomla) instead -- something with finer permissions control, that could theoretically lock a certain page to be editable only by its author (and site admins).

...so what exactly is this meant to be a wiki OF, anyway? What do we intend to contain in it? I'm half-considering volunteering, but is this just the 'we need a replacement for the open games thread' thing, or is it meant to be more? What kind of content will need to be organized? What do we want users to get out of it?

I should probably go sleep instead of making posts. But it really is kind of hard to know from this whether it's something I'd want to offer to do or not.

Ugh, please stick with mediawiki, not wikidot. Wikidot is set up really weirdly and not very flexible; its template handling is awful. Last I saw you have to do a work-around even to have conditional items in your template -- unless it's changed recently, it won't innately let you have a default for if a variable isn't filled in, or let you not show things if they aren't there.

Wikia (or I guess it's Fandom now...) isn't ideal either, but it's a better free wiki in my experience. It at least has most of what you'd want to use implemented....

I would use it before I used something like Discord. I've sometimes used Gateway this way for test-play for characters and such in the past. I probably wouldn't log in a lot, though, so it would probably need a good link somewhere so I didn't forget it existed.

I expect people can more or less behave, but it'd probably be best to make it easy for people to block others out from their existence. Being able to very easily lock rooms and ignore a given player would help when/if you got the 'less' version.

I like TinyMUX and TinyMUSH, personally.

@aria Surely this should have been the Harry Pottery Barn collection.

@paris said in Seeking Accessibility Feedback:

Just making sure the colors you use make a huge difference, though, on games with ANSI and similar systems. I can't count how many games love to use dark blue on black. -.-

My personal hobbyhorse here is "never use colour as the sole indicator of anything".So many games change something from, say, red to green but leave the actual text untouched and expect that to be all that's needed. I'm sure it's been a problem for people using screenreaders, and I know it is for people who by preference or health needs (migraine triggers, eyestrain, etc.) don't use colour in their client in the way the coder expects.

It's probably not an issue with Ares, given you've already been thinking about things. But man it drives me up a wall.

Man, depending which philosopher or ludologist you ask, MU*s aren't even games, or at least the story-constructing, collaborative, don't-play-to-'win' version most of us here play aren't.

By my lights, they're games, but no, they're not video games. Computer games, I'd say yes -- like the old Infocom-style text adventures, which are also computer games but not video games IMO, but which also fit into more of the definitions of 'game' than a MU* does. Online games, certainly -- you could still argue 'game', but 'online' is pretty definite.

If you play sudoku on your tablet instead of the newspaper, has sudoku now become a video game? Is it even a game, or is it a puzzle? How about solitaire on your laptop instead of with a deck of cards? Poker or mahjong against the computer? If two of us decided to write a story by turns in a shared google doc, which we could even have open at the same time, would that be a game, let alone a video game? If not, and if a MU* is, what makes the difference?

There's not going to be unanimity on much of this, because even the academic definitions are several and varied. Why would conversational ones be clearer?

@faraday This is usually true, but somehow a couple of my characters back in the day actually had regular readers who didn't play on the games, or in a couple cases didn't even MU* at all. I don't think many people would get invested through the initial portion of things without some kind of connection, though.

@kumakun I go through phases of log posting. In ye olden days, I just stripped any OOC that wasn't either important to what was going on or really funny (to me), made sure there were blank lines between the poses, made sure it was dated/located, whacked it into a public directory, and that's about it.

These days I still have blank lines between each pose, but use indentation so that when there are multiple paragraphs (that never happened in ye olden days) there aren't confusing blank lines but it's clear where the paragraphs change. (To be fair, that's also how I RP now, so I'm basically setting things how I like them.) I try to have the descs of the location and the characters available in there, also. The exact format depends on if it's a wiki or my own site, but I've always intended them to be read online, so I can do things that wouldn't work right on paper or a standard ebook.

I rarely correct other players' spelling or grammar or anything, though sometimes I'll fix my own typos. And once in a while I've run into someone who didn't want their rp posted, or at least not anything one-on-one where they might have spilled secrets. It's rare, but a few people do object. It's safer on games where posting logs is known to be the culture.

At one point I wanted to make a website that was specifically for people to post and share RP logs, but I never really got around to it. I have one of my own, but I'm really slack about getting my (thousands of) logs into it, and the formatting can be a little finicky sometimes. But, one nice thing about intending it for online is that you can make followable references to other logs if you want, do next/previous, have things searchable, divide by tags, find a list of all logs with a particular character in them...

I have no idea if that answers anything you were asking, because I'm tired and sick and rambly today. But hey, have a ramble.

I learned about talkers in a 'how to use/things to do on the internet' book, and hung out on one of those for about a year before my high school got internet access and I noticed an interesting-looking connection someone had when I did a w. So I telnetted to that address and discovered MU*.

Initially I tried it out because it reminded me of what I already liked, but it was Star Trek based rather than being just sort of a random hang-out, and the differences between it and what I was used to were interesting. And in all honesty, two of the things that drew me in were the same things that had with the talkers: 1) despite a fair bit of social anxiety, I like being around people, and these let me do it under my own terms -- whenever I wanted, easy to leave, not necessarily with physical proximity, and 2) people liked me. I'd never been a particularly popular kid, and in middle school I was practically a pariah, so it was kind of mind-blowing to suddenly be someone people thought was cool and funny and appealing to hang out with.

But I switched over because I liked RP, which was new to me then (beyond playing make-believe as a younger kid, which I had loved). I liked the idea that you could come up with your own character to do things in this fictional world, and also still talk to and hang out with people as yourself. I was a theatre kid, and I liked the sort of on-stage/off-stage effect.

Having a place where people liked me when I was being myself is probably what kept me in at the beginning, because the RP itself wasn't really that good for a while. But I liked writing, and I always particularly liked dialogue and characterization, and once I got to a place where things, as @Arkandel said, click, that was probably it. My own character surprising me with a reaction is definitely one of those feelings, and relatedly, when I can't figure out why s/he did it until days or weeks later when suddenly it's entirely clear and makes complete sense. Actually, all three of his examples, definitely.

I like the persistence in changes in characters and world, and I like the ongoing nature. I like the lack of graphics -- I've tried RPing on MMOs and SL, but if you pose throwing Bob down the bar and I can see both of you just standing there, I have no immersion. In text, that's not an issue. And I love words. Oh, and speaking of immersion, I like being able to feel for my characters, and other characters, and I've never really found that anywhere else.

Also, the real-time, online, collaborative creativity aspect is fascinating enough I made it my focus in grad school, so there's that.

...these days I'm also appreciating the fact that it doesn't have to be as ephemeral as something like TT or LARP. I have logs that are old enough to vote, now, that I can still go back and read and really get into the stories again. That's kind of awesome. I wish I'd logged everything from the start.

When I end up reading some quite old logs and see that not only did that story really work, but I'm still pretty happy with my writing and characterization in it, overall.

@groth said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

Yet at the same time even very mundane things like giving someone a hug requires some degree of power posing

Asking is a totally reasonable way to do it, and I do that kind of 'if X tried to lift Y up, would Y go for it?' a fair bit, but often if I don't want to take the question OOC, I'll construct the pose so that nothing in it depends on how the thing's reacted to -- which often means it's the last thing in the pose, but not always -- and phrase it as an attempt, rather than a result. It's not perfect, since having a hug dodged (for example) is kind of awkward ICly, but then again, if my character would have gone in for the hug and Fred would have refused or casually ducked it, then it's an awkward the characters earned.

Obviously that doesn't help if someone's objection to the attempted action is OOC, but for the more minor things I've found it works pretty well.

@aerianyx I don't have a lot to contribute that hasn't been said, but just figured I'd +1 to the set of people with the same sort of anxiety/issues. I've been actively working on it for at least a couple years now, and still kind of suck at it, but some improvement beats no improvement, right? It's slightly less terrifying than before... Good luck!

@surreality Does the colour translate in photographs? I'd love to see that!

@jonah42175 Ah, the Large Newbie-Eating Plant. I loved that thing. I made a Large Newbie-Eating Mokole in its honour on another game a good few years later. At this point most of my memories of the place are vague too, and I didn't log back then, but hey, I can still be nostalgic!

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

Worrying yourself into inaction.

/signed

OMG TNG TrekMUSE! My first MU*. I don't think we knew each other (I was Random) but I'm just jazzed to see someone else who was there.

@runescryer I think Calaveras has that kind of code too. (Well -- coded phones, not the tap-to-talk thing.)

@surreality I want to read this eventual butt-dialing. Well, no. I want to read the character reactions. It sounds fun.

Actual topic participation: a couple decades ago, on a Star Wars game, I mavved TS to Public. And promptly logged off and didn't return for at least three days, when the blush had finally started to subside. I seem to recall people were pretty kindly silent about it, but wow.

There've been some pretty great typos, too, but I can't think of any of them off the top of my head....

@ThatGuyThere
I do agree that just "no" would be an inappropriate answer to the question "what is your email?" However, the implied rest of that question is "so that we can put you on our list," so "I'd rather not sign up for emails, thanks," would be perfectly appropriate, as well as accurate. But I also agree that the cashiers probably rarely care that you lie about it.

I'm pretty sure I've only ever been asked "would you like to sign up for our email list?" though, and "no, thank you," does work just fine for that.

(To be more or less on topic: I suspect I might not be comfortable with how much info Pokemon Go wants either, but since I don't have anything that could play it anyway, I'll just sit back and watch the rest of you catching 'em all.)

@Thenomain said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

@Hushicho said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

there's a reason why versatile bisexual women are often called "unicorns"

I'll bite.

Why?

Perhaps there are different vocabularies going in here, because by my understanding, a 'unicorn' is a bi woman who wants to be the third for another couple (comprised of another bi woman and a [generally] straight man) and be involved with both of them. Because there are, it would seem, a whole lot of straight guys who want that to be a thing, and it is, apparently, so rare in reality as to be nearly mythical.

Bisexual women who don't fit said fantasy are, however, not nearly so unusual (nor nearly so popular). I'm not sure where 'versatile' comes into it here, as neither meaning I have for it makes much sense here.

However, if the point is that plenty of games have welcomed the particular configurations of female queerness that fulfill stereotypical-straight-guy fantasies, well, hey, I don't doubt that. But that doesn't in any way suggest they're safe spaces for anything that doesn't. This place has no obligation to be either, mind. It's just not much of an argument for not being.

Edit: Way too slow, as usual. Oh well!