Posts made by Ninjakitten

@Admiral Annoyingly, I'm no longer sure where, but I have read that dreams are apparently separate and imagery for them happens in a different place in the brain. I have definite memory of vivid dreams, including dreaming in text (I very rarely remember dreams at all anymore, but that's a different thing).

...though part of my brain likes to point out that when awake I can only remember them in the same way I remember things I saw IRL, so how do I actually know I ever saw them the way I think I did and that they didn't actually start as the same kind of 'image file code' that real things are stored as in there?

Idle curiosity. Any pathetically 'skeery' PMs here to any staff he clocks as male, or is this just a special service for ~the ladies~?

@Auspice I need downvotes back.

Actually on topic: puns. Wordplay is pretty much the best thing, even if I'm too tired to actually put some in here. Like the proverbial bicycle.

@Auspice ...okay but @Tashly said a good pun.

@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:

Now I'm curious. I realize there are confounding factors here, but do any of you who don't do the picture thing enjoy the building aspects of games like Minecraft?

Absolutely. The main things I did in Minecraft were the puzzle-y bits (basically figuring out how to automate All The Things and what should go where to be efficient and the like) and all the building. ALL the building. The people I played with would go off and explore and kill things and collect stuff and, well, mine, and I would mine some as well, but mostly I designed and built our places. (And did a lot of sorting and managing our resources because come ON people, if you just throw everything into any chest we will never find it again, and then we might as well not even have it.)

@Kanye-Qwest said in A Lack of Imagination:

Sometimes I get held up because I'm like wait but they were right HERE and now they are posing being THERE and arms don't work like that!!!1 And I realize it's my deal and I don't push it on other people but it slows my poses down as I adjust and try to figure out how to describe plausible animation I see happening.

I have this issue too, but again, no visual component to it. I just know X can't be here AND there at once, and I could swear A was between B and C so how is she now leaning on D, who I'm pretty sure was seated on the other side of the table? Sometimes I annoy people by trying to get OOC clarification of just who is sitting where and the like, but I need to know or I don't know where my character is and thus what movements or direct interactions are logical.

I could draw the relevant bits out for you as long as people haven't made them all non-Euclidian, I could gesture around myself to where other people are if I'm where my character is, but if I close my eyes and try to see it, all I get is black. And maybe afterimages of whatever light was in the RL room.

@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:

I can usually recall exactly where in a paragraph or on a page something I read was

I've always been pretty decent at that. In junior high if you handed me a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or another book I'd read a few times) and specified a scene I would often have been able to open the book to within a few pages of it. But it wasn't ever visual, it's a sense-of-space/size thing. I didn't see it in my head, I just knew where on the page it was, or how thick the layer of pages should be.

@faraday said in A Lack of Imagination:

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’.

This is also interesting to me because I feel like I'm very bad at recognizing faces -- I don't always realise X is the actor who played Y as well, for example, and 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'm actually not terrible at remembering hair colours of characters, heights, things like that, but it's a sort of fact file rather than an image. If a mind laid things out like your sort of standard wiki char page, my brain skips the picture and just goes with the table with the 'hair', 'eyes', etc. in it.

I think that, as well as with the continuum people seem to have from 'nothing, just blackness' to 'vivid, detailed, photorealistic' for mental images, there's also differences in the ways people toward the 'blackness' end up processing/storing/accessing data that we'd think of as visual. It's hard to talk about to figure out details, though, because there's a point where I always end up coming back to: I don't see anything, but for a number of things, I just know.

I have aphantasia. Until a couple years ago I genuinely thought 'mental images' and 'seeing things in your mind' and the like were just metaphors.

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. I kind of think of it as being like a computer without a monitor. The images are still there, and I can glean information from their code or filenames or whatever, I just can't actually see them. So when I design logos and websites and sometimes draw pictures, I don't actually see a visual representation until I've done it and I'm looking at it outside my head. I can tell you whether it came out 'how I imagined' or not, but I have to make it and see it with my eyes to be sure whether it works the way I expect it to. Usually it's pretty close. But I never see any image inside my head, I just kind of... know.

For RP blocking and such, I keep track of things like a file of facts, and I rely a lot on other senses in my mind. Sound is middling there, scent and taste are pretty faint, but feeling and especially proprioception are pretty clear. If you ask me to imagine my kitchen, I don't get an image, but I do get a sense of where everything is and how it would feel to reach for this or for that. If I tried to describe it to you, I could tell you the facts like the cupboards are white, with round wooden handles, but I don't see that in my head. I do have a sense of them being about this high and about this wide and I would probably be gesturing to tell you the stove is there and the microwave is over there. This is one reason it helps me a lot when there are maps of game areas, and even better the rare case where someone lays out a combat scene or similar in a document!

Anyway. Finding out about it explained why 'guided imagery' in elementary school was never anything but boring. But having been in a number of discussions of it at this point, I think people who do 'see' things in their head often overrate the necessity of it in things like enjoying fiction. It would be neat to have the images (though from where I sit it seems like it would also be distracting), but I can get into a book just fine without needing it to mentally be a movie too.

4.00.294 is upon us!

• Added 'Clear' Edit menu item for edit windows.

• Added Tab Colors for Puppets.

• Added 'Delay between lines (seconds)' for Smart Paste sends. (This can be useful for people pasting in files of commands,such as installations or building, to improve the ability to see which line any errors that might happen actually belong to.)

• Changed Log file picker to remember the file extension after closing it.

• Changed puppets to not see the Connected/Disconnected messages as it'd cause activity in their windows that wasn't useful.

• Switched to PCRE 10.34 (from PCRE 8.x; exe grew by about 100k so hopefully regexes works a lot better!).

• Fixed Logging->'Starting from Top of Window' to be more reliable, as it was previously using the 'mouse cursor over' code to work.

• Fixed a glitch where right clicking in the input window/char notes/editor pane causes the window to scroll and selection to change.

• Fixed a glitch when docking windows larger than the available space. Now they shrink down to fit.

• Fixed hang/crash bug with the find dialog that happens if you have a 'New Content' marker visible, the output window is at maximum, and new text comes in.

• Fixed a hang when || is in a regex (probably mid edit due to preview). 'a||b' is seen as 'a or nothing or b' and the nothing results in an infinite loop of nothing matches..

As always, it's appreciated if you use the store version so that the developer gets a little usage data and at least knows the existence of hangs or crashes. (If you actually encounter one, please do send in the data dump it will ask you to allow! It should give him enough information to help find the bug and squash it.) And, of course, if you can't/won't do store for one reason or another, you can grab it from github here.

Mapping is still in development, and if it's a thing you're looking forward to, why not drop in to the Discord, help test the current builds, and get your preferences and use cases heard?

@Ghost I mean really, no one's stopping you doing that for free.

Something currently in the works...

@Arkandel Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked if he's always pretty skittish. I've got one similar -- former stray, semi-feral, we figure about a year old or a little less when she showed up, been with us 11 years now(!). She loves me, but she definitely loves me best if I'm in an immobile position such as you mention. She's more chill about unexpected movements (as long as they aren't fast, especially in her direction) and about being generally walked toward now, but still watchful and still prone to fleeing and hiding whenever she suddenly fears I might be heading toward her because this time I finally intend to eat her delicious soul.

@Jennkryst said:

AS FOR PBS AFFECTING MY RP... also yes. If there are two players/characters using the same person, I will go out of my way to mistake one for the other, as punishment for them not combing the wiki to make sure their CHOSEN PB was not already in circulation (something else I'll do, like a creeper).

...well as a punishment, that's kind of hard on the one who took the PB first. I'd guess there's a reasonable chance they're already mildly annoyed about someone else taking 'their' face, to start with.

I've had some fun mistaken-identity/wow-you-look-just-like RP with people who weren't bothered by it, though, and back in the days when PBs weren't really a thing (and wikis weren't at all), I nonetheless chose someone as a visual inspiration that someone else had also picked (with some tweaks), and their resemblance ended up being a big story point, which was kind of awesome.

@JinShei I'm really sorry to hear this. I kept looking at it, but not having the time/energy/ability-to-settle-on-an-idea to actually make a character yet and hoping I would soon. I'm sorry I never managed to, but I'm glad it was there while it was.

FWIW, the writing on some of the roster descriptions/backgrounds was great.

Augury was great, and the Masq-revival was one of my favourite and most important games. My character there still holds the record as the one I've played longest overall and for the most scenes, as well. We were lucky to have her.

Smol update! 4.00.293, spotting and squashing bugs:

• Added '/ansireset' command to reset the current ansi state. (this one's actually a way to handle an occasional server-side bug rather than a Beip issue.)

• Fixed a docking layout restore bug, where horizontal windows could shift slightly.

• Fixed a crash when using Find in the main output window.

As always, you can grab it from the store or from github! Updating right away is recommended if you ever use the 'Find' feature, this time.

Happy New Year and happy 4.00.292!

Lots of small improvements and at least one bigger common request...

• Found a way to disable the OS default beep sound when going out of bounds in the input window (either delete or with the cursor) (so those of you who were bothered by it, here you go!)

• Switched to the modern OS visual themes; dialogs shouldn't look like they're from Windows 95 anymore!

• Added '/newedit' to create a dedicated editing window (with a few options for it, like having spellcheck enabled) (This has been a frequent request, so if it was one of yours, please try it out and see how you like it!)
  

• Added character notes window (Options->Show Character Notes Window) to easily edit existing character info field
  

• Added crash detector that gives the option to generate a mini dump to send in (to make it much easier to share crashes) (Please do send them to the dev if you hit any!)

• Added spawn trigger option 'Copy line instead of move' so that a copy can be left in the main output instead of only moving

• Added 'Set Background Color' option to stat windows

• Added Logging->'Starting From Top of Window...' menu item to start a log from anywhere in the output history

• Changed tab colors to be saved per character, not per tab visible at shutdown (behavior with puppets might be weird, let me know what it should do)

• Fixed spawn tab triggers to now honor the "Don't show as activity" setting

• Fixed a bug in smart paste where it was adding an extra line feed per line, resulting in LF CR LF sequences instead of the correct CR LF.

• Fixed the tiny drag image in the Worlds dialog, same issue that the trigger/macros/aliases had when dragging an image, forgot to fix this one too

• Fixed a hang when sending enormous blocks of text (>64K) and using restore logs (if what is sent is larger than the restore log size it would get stuck trying to make room forever)

As usual, using the store version is favourite -- if you're currently using it, you can hurry up the update by opening the store app, going to 'Downloads and Updates' in the upper right three-dot menu, and then clicking 'Get Updates' -- but you can also grab it from the github here. Why not drop by the Discord and say thank you or ask about the enhancement you're dreaming of?

@Ganymede
...okay? I don't really think this affects my point that most people have families even if they don't consist of the worker's spouse and children, a whole lot of those people actually would also like to be with them on a holiday, and it's kind of messed up to have that routinely dismissed. I'm really tired right now, and may well be missing your point.

(Sorry about the upcoming trial thing, though.)

Plus oddly enough single people with no kids tend to still have parents, siblings, close friends...

@hedgehog
Meatloaf - Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)