Best posts made by Sparks

I saw Detective Pikachu last night.

I liked it more than I liked Endgame, honestly; it had a lot of heart and joy to it, and I do kind of love imagining living in that world. And it did a reasonably good job of capturing the feeling of partnership that I do associate with the best of Pokémon. That same sort of feeling I get when I transfer my old friends from previous games into a new one; I always get a little happy smile when I see Wulf (my Arcanine, who I think is about seven years old at this point) transferred into yet another game and at my side to go exploring together again.

Though, let's be entirely honest here, I'm the sort of person who even has a beloved seven-year-old Arcanine to start with. So it was not exactly unlikely I would enjoy the movie anyway, as long as it was even halfway decent.

What's somewhat more telling is that my best friend—whose only exposure to Pokémon is being a casual Pokémon Go player but who is a Marvel fan—also preferred it to Endgame.

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

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

from a generation or two ago

Speaking of 'useful stuff for photography from a generation or two ago', you know what I miss? Matte screens. Seriously, when doing color work on the laptop, even a tiny angle adjustment can make it look a different color. I never know what color a thing actually is anymore. With the matte screens, I didn't have to worry about that.

I can't even find these as a custom order thing anymore.

RIGHT? I do not understand why Apple discontinued those; the 'you can get a matte screen' option was one of the best features of the MacBook Pro line some years back.

That said, Acer, HP, and Samsung do all have a few matte monitors they still make. They're just harder to track down because they're not often listed explicitly as matte on their order pages anywhere.

Satire article, presented without further comment: https://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/campaign-finishes-three-year-run-without-dm/

@Rinel said in Good TV:

I'll admit my religion has me sort of lukewarm to His Dark Materials. The ending just seems needlessly and hamfistedly antitheistic (which of course is the point), much like Lewis throwing Susan under the bus (or out of the way of the train, I suppose) seemed needlessly preachy.

I think it might actually just be bad writing, though, because even in my atheist years I was pretty unimpressed with the ending. The setting as a whole, though, is great.

Like I said, The Amber Spyglass is... a thing which I have read. I feel like it actually has some potentially very interesting things somewhere at its heart to say about the common interpretation of the Garden of Eden story, but they're buried kind of deeply beneath a veneer that mostly comes across as a (slightly embittered and almost clumsy) attack on faith in general and Christianity in particular. In a manner which seems to be borderline uncomfortable even to atheists.

Plus, I think it gets so wrapped up in trying to drive home that point that it kind of fails as a good conclusion to the trilogy, even just on narrative grounds.

But The Golden Compass itself, the first book of that set? That's a book that will always be near and dear to my heart; the setting and concepts are wonderful, and the cast in that first book is so rich and varied.

1000% behind a Sabriel adaptation, though. Because dang, that would be awesome.

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

I think I'd do better with plain Dex too, I don't need the racing heart/physical symptom boost that the levoamphetamine adds. I'd love to know how it goes.

The plain dex trial went great, for the record. I got my final prescription and everything, and I've been on the real 8-hour delayed release pills for a little while!

@faraday said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I'll start by saying that I don't believe that @Ghost's comment "if you take a female candidate who isn't as skilled..." was intended with any malice.

I don't think in this case it was, no. I suspect it was a thought exercise or playing Devil's Advocate. Doesn't change the fact that it's still something that I'm exhausted by encountering yet again, and for once I wasn't going to hold my tongue on it and play "get along nice". Apparently I had a decade or so of pent-up ire on the topic that needed to be lanced and drained.

@faraday said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

There's plenty of research to support the idea that having a more diverse workforce is valuable, so this should be something we strive to change.

True story of a tangible benefit of diversity: there's a device we worked on at work which is focused on women's health. It was a great project, brought in a lot of revenue, we did superb work on it, the client was thrilled. They gave us permission to publicly talk about the project, and it has helped bring in new clients and revenue.

I have heard through the grapevine that one of our competitors who also bid on the work was apparently very upset they didn't land that project and we did instead.

You know why we did? We have women on our engineering team. Enough of them that we were able to staff nearly the entire project with women of varied backgrounds.

Our competitor did not have the capability to do that and, shockingly, it turns out that having women be the dominant presence in the room working on a device related to women's reproductive health is something the client might actually value.

@auspice said in What series are you reading?:

But y'all, the world of this book is what has drawn me in. I like the characters, too, but it's the world that's got me. I'm gonna keep reading (go on to the next book and then circle back to the other trilogy).

While the first of the Six of Crows books does not require reading the Grisha trilogy, the second one does benefit from it, btw. Not enough so that you won't appreciate the second book without reading the trilogy first, but there's bits you'll appreciate a lot more if you've read the Grisha books.

(As for the review in general, I concur wholeheartedly: I really love Six of Crows.)

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I personally feel that the amount of dinosaurs like that is pretty tiny compared to the people that would get introduced into MUs with a web only format. Downloading a client is a big bar for entry for some people, let alone archaic command line interfaces in telnet.

I just wish built-in web clients supported some sort of logging. I feel like there's a place to be all "bind your Dropbox account to your game account" using Dropbox's API, give it access to just an Apps/<whatever> directory, and let the server write logs there for you when you click the 'log' button. Et voila, they even show up on your computer for easy searching, too.

Arx's logging of scheduled events is awesome, but only works if there's already an event scheduled. Ares' scene system is great, but I think all scenes are all public, and on some games—anything involving secrets, PvP, etc.—you don't want every scene publicly readable.

@lithium fwiw, a client that supports silent keepalives being sent will work with Evennia and Ares both to stay alive on Comcast links out of box. Basically, the client will send the same invisible keepalive to the game every 60 seconds that the keepalive flag makes the game send to the client.

(I don't know if Potato does it. Atlantis should, and I think Cmud does.)

@kanye-qwest said in RL Anger:

At my last worksite I walked into the bathroom and there was a girl in there EATING a CUPCAKE.

...what. No. What? WHY?!

@aria said in YA Fantasy Recommendations:

Ironically, I was just looking at the Throne of Glass series because it's apparently won the Goodreads choice awards for YA Fantasy for four years running. Is it really that bad?

Honestly, I enjoyed the Throne of Glass books enough to read the whole set, though I preferred the earliest ones; they're hardly in my top favorite series, but neither do I regret reading them. Still, there's definitely some truth that the power levels some of the characters—in particular the main one—are throwing around by the last books are a bit ridiculous; the cast at the start of the books are basically level 3 D&D characters, and a not-insignificant amount of the cast around at the end of the books are pretty much level 20 D&D characters (with all that implies).

The Raven Cycle is superb, though. And if you want some YA science fiction I did enjoy Brandon Sanderson's latest, Skyward.

@Aria said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

....I would play the fuck out of a game based on Melanie Rawn's two "Dragon Prince" trilogies.

This would be great.

Speaking of things with "dragon" in the title, I would also play the heck out of a game based on the Temeraire novels (His Majesty's Dragon, et al). Horatio Hornblower with dragons? Yes, please.

@Chime aside from being closed for a few years and so probably no longer a consideration, Firan also never used reality levels; all of Firan's stuff was bundled under the --enable_firanmux switch (except for the Penn-compatible inline SQL stuff which was pulled out into its own define).

I dunno which game was the breakage case.

Edit: Firan did have a lot of movement specific logic needed for the follow command and the IC footprint tracking, which might've been a consideration in modifying move.cpp. But none of that was in the reality level defines.

@auspice My father is a lawyer, and this explains a surprising amount about him.

Heya, Nightgold cousin! (And also fellow former Firanite.)

@Aria said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Sparks said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Aria said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

....I would play the fuck out of a game based on Melanie Rawn's two "Dragon Prince" trilogies.

This would be great.

Speaking of things with "dragon" in the title, I would also play the heck out of a game based on the Temeraire novels (His Majesty's Dragon, et al). Horatio Hornblower with dragons? Yes, please.

Unfamiliar! What is this? (Yes, I know I have the internet that I'm on right now but I care more about opinions from actual humans than random shit from Google.)

The Temeraire series is by Naomi Novik (who actually apparently used to be one of the wizzes on Transformers 2k5), and takes place in an alternate history version of the Napoleonic Wars where dragons exist. They thus get trained for aerial warfare, but it's more like a version of naval warfare—crew tied on with ropes, firing artillery at other dragons.

When I said "Horatio Hornblower with dragons", I very much meant Horatio Hornblower but with dragons. If you like Horatio Hornblower, and enjoy the idea of dragonback aerial naval warfare, you will probably enjoy the series. (The series is also concluded, so no worries about waiting for new books; you can start reading and if you enjoy it, you can read the whole dang thing.)

My only thought is that the last time I toyed with Alexa skills—which, to be fair, was about two years ago—the speech recognition could only do 10 second chunks of audio. Plus, the skills system had a request/response mechanic that meant when Alexa was waiting for your next request, you couldn't have the Echo then interrupt them to start saying something else. (I.e. the text from the MU* server would have to be processed in chunks, and once Alexa was waiting for your input any further text from the server would have to be stored to speak after the user input was done.)

So unless the skills system has changed—which is possible!—I don't really see an efficient way to actually enter longer poses/pages/etc., plus you would have to have a command like "continue" to start speaking the next lines of input once Alexa paused to wait for your own input, if you didn't want to enter a pose or page or whatever. And you'd need to come up with some logic as to when Alexa stopped talking and waited for that input. If there's 14 new lines of input that have come in, do you say all of them? Stop and wait for input after a maximum of 10 lines, then speak the remainder after the user has spoken their input? Stuff like that.

But if there is now a good way around those limitations, it could be really neat for some folks!

This thread is full of books I love.

I would also note I'm very fond of the (very strange) Machineries of Empire books; right now that's Ninefox Gambit and Raven Strategem, both by Yoon Ha Lee. The third and final book is due out in June.

Hiii! It's nice to see you are still playing.

@Thenomain said in MU Flowchart:

@Ashen-Shugar said in MU Flowchart:

The key, of course, is to design a mush based on a theme that appeals enough to existing coders to draw them in so they can help you

The Strange.

...oh my god someone please do this so I don't have to.