Best posts made by Sparks

@Lotherio said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The more options you start packing into a single command, the less intuitive it is.

scene/start name/location=description/timeofday=event/posetimes=publicprivate/faction=scene runner/scene secondary ... is totally intuitive to me.

Ah, I see you're familiar with the syntax of our goal/rfr command on Arx.

(It's not quite that bad, but goal/rfr <goal>,<story beat>=<IC explanation of notable progress towards goal represented by story beat>/<OOC commentary for staff to take into account> is not what I would call an ideal syntax. It's just like... roughly the least-horrible syntax you can pack those things onto a single line with.)

The best part of moving towards web interfaces is that you can collect a lot more data at once for a single operation, in a lot more natural manner: web forms are very good at this. Single command lines in the legacy telnet interface are not.

A spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler DIS-COURSE DIS-COURSE (to the tune of the "Badger Badger" song).

***=next verse, same as the first...***

This isn't technically a MU* thing, as it's from an in-person tabletop game, but it is a GM'ing thing so I'm putting it here.

But it is so wonderful when your players do your job for you of complicating their lives and the plotline in interesting ways. We're approaching endgame on a long-running campaign, and the consequences of three mistakes the players made—one way back at the beginning of the campaign, one quite a while ago that had 17 RL months of consequences before they noticed, and one extremely recent one—have dovetailed together to leave them in a truly terrible position.

We're approaching the end of the main campaign's backing metaplot, and they've just realized that not only does the enemy have nearly everything necessary to win, but that they themselves are the ones who handed over said things. And the best part is that they know it. Both ICly and OOCly, they know this is entirely their own fault. This is payoff on 2.5 years of RP. It is not a set of complications I planned, but it is glorious. I wish I could bottle the GM high.

(Of course, they're now in a bad enough situation that it verges on unwinnable unless I make some things happen to give them one more route to victory. Which I will, because I don't actually want them to fail; getting into the final stretch of the marathon and then falling over is anticlimactic.)

Now if I can just manage that on a long-running plot on a MU*, as well!

Good timing on new things.

At the beginning of last week I got a nice OLED TV for my bedroom, just to have the option to watch things in there if the living room TV was in use (like a housemate watching sportsball when I wanted to watch a movie), or if I was home sick or whatever. Set it up, all very nice, yay, hooked up an Apple TV as well so I have my iTunes library and whatnot.

Friday morning I wrecked my right foot. I have thus been confined to my room for the moment with my foot elevated, inasmuch as if I try to limp around the house with a cane going "ow" repeatedly as I attempt to actually do things, it gives my housemate/best friend a Very Large Sadness seasoned with exasperation. (And also may not be great for my foot, either.)

Having this TV set up here has been very helpful for the whole "not going completely stir-crazy after being largely immobilized for four days" thing.

@Pyrephox said in X-Cards:

@Roz True story. He was a work friend invited by another player, and was obnoxious the whole session, culminating in deciding that his PC had decided that nothing that was happening was real (it was a portal fantasy 'normal world characters end up in fantasy world' - I WAS FOURTEEN OKAY?? scenario) so he'd naturally start raping the women he met.

That said: portal fantasy is a wonderful genre and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. My current 5e game is not a portal fantasy, but I have played in and run several of them, and I always think it's fun inasmuch as the characters have every IC excuse for being as unfamiliar with your newly-concocted world as the players themselves are.

On the topic at hand, though? Honestly, there are times where an X-Card would've been nice even in my old tabletop group where everyone involved had known each other for years.

At one point, the person GM'ing concocted a world shift (i.e., we were in this world and it started to change, a'la magic coming back and forgotten legends being rediscovered) around our (player) phobias. Which could have been very interesting, mind you, if it had just danced along the edges, using it to make for a little bit of psychological discomfort!

But it ended up pushing those phobias a little too hard but no one said anything—not wanting to be the one who ruined the game—until one player finally hit a wall and said bluntly either we needed a new campaign or she needed a new tabletop group. Having an X-Card to raise when we started to cross that boundary from 'a thematic element that introduces unease' to 'yeah I am actively no longer enjoying this' might've let the campaign redirect before it veered too far into that territory.

(To his credit, when he then realized players were getting not just that 'edge of unease' he was aiming for but actively squick/yuck/discomfort, the GM promptly went, "Alright, this obviously didn't work as I'd hoped, I'm really sorry, let's flip to one of the other GMs for a bit and I'll come up with a new campaign for my rotation in the meantime." And his eventual replacement one was one of my favorite setups we ever played in that group—maybe of all my tabletop experiences.)

@Lotherio said in Good or New Movies Review:

ETA: If it helps my favorite cross-over is Alfre Woodard, she's one up on Josh, Michael and Chris Evans (1st Storm/Capt America - I guess his ass is hot afterall?), she played two roles in the same movie verse (mother of boy killed in Sokovia and my favorite portrayal as Mariah Dillard on Luke Cage)

I'm still semi-amused by Brandon Routh playing both Clark Kent/Superman (Superman Returns) and Ray Palmer/Atom (Legends of Tomorrow) in adaptations of DC stuff. If only because it set up the throwaway joke of Ray meeting Kara Danvers/Supergirl and remarking that she reminded him of his cousin.

Some games I've been on (usually those run by @Tat) have a really neat concept of a what if/AU week the week of April 1st. During that week you can roleplay all kinds of wacky non-canon stuff, and there's usually one overarching AU premise that lots of people will participate in for their random non-canon accents. For instance, on the Mass Effect game, there was an AU one year of "what about these characters... but adapted for Dragon Age?" So biotics as mages, etc. And then the AU week is done and everyone goes back to normal RP.

I think that can be a lot of fun.

(As for fanfic, I honestly don't think it's that harmful. If the canon content isn't arriving fast enough, I will read it. Sometimes I will write it. And if I ever publish one of my various fictional worlds publicly, I don't care if others come and play in it. Please don't show me your playtime, for a whole slew of reasons—I've had two published friends have really disturbing fanfics of their characters sent directly to them—but definitely go have fun writing it.)

@Auspice — something I have learned roommates are excellent for is periodically asking "have you actually eaten?"

(My answer has historically been "oops" more often than it should be. Hopefully the meds change that!)

So, since UX design seems to be heavily on people's minds at the moment (see the UX Talk thread), I have a more practical question: what about separating the UX from the functionality?

Some folks don't get bboards (which are modeled after old dialup BBSes in some ways, or maybe Usenet) and would prefer a web-based forum. Others want their posts accessible right there on-game. So why shouldn't we abstract the data? Boil it down into boards and posts, add a reply function if you want to reply directly to a post, and expose the boards and 'threads' on a website?

Then you can have your old-school +bbread or @bb/read type functionality on-game, alongside a phpBB-type web forum. They have the same backing store, the same read/unread flags, the same permissions checks. Just a matter of preference as

Couldn't we do this with other things? @mail/+mail and a webmail interface? One practical example is Arx having +finger type information available on the website as well as on-game, or @faraday putting chargen and combat setup onto the web portal of the game rather than just in-game commands. (Chargen and character application seems a major, major win to move to the web, in particular.)

This is a reasonably common model of development as it is; many will recognize the concept of "models" (data) and "views" (UX). It takes some thought ahead-of-time to separate your backing model from the front-end UX view, but when done right, I think there are benefits to doing so.

(This is heavily on my mind because I'm writing the aforementioned bboard module for Evennia right now, as mentioned elsewhere, and about to move on to a chargen toolkit and some other things. Filling out an Evennia toolbox for whatever future projects crop up.)

Does anyone else think this is a useful expenditure of time, designing things on a pattern like model/view? Are there other patterns you think would work better for a modern MU*-ish game?

Oh, it was an excellent scene. But are you sure that's the right logic?

***=The spoilers now sit atop the Iron Throne!***

To add to Roz's advice: Don't be afraid to ask for help; it's an original theme, and almost everyone feels a little lost and confused at first when they're dropped in the deep end. Other players (and the staff) are usually willing to assist.

I mean, now I think I get the theme pretty well, to the point that I get asked for help by other players both ICly and OOCly. (Even if I have basically an Evernote of Crazy, which is the digital equivalent of a Wall of Crazy with string connecting all the maps and pictures and clippings.) But when I started, I spent the first month and change having to flail at Apostate in a panic every so often when people cornered Aislin to ask about thematic things, having to page him going, "Uhm. What the hell is an X, and have I ever heard of it ICly? Help!"

Seeing someone else's day just being made by some unexpected joy; that joy can be almost contagious.

This past Sunday, we held a party for a friend—the cousin of my best friend—who just graduated medical school. (She's now a neurosurgeon! With a breathtakingly large student debt!) So everyone wanted to hold her a congratulations/farewell party before she heads off to residency in another state.

Anyway, she is also a gamer, and her favorite videogame series is, by far, the Legend of Zelda games.

So her parents managed to go and get her an amazing custom made sculpture cake, which was an artistic pile of rocks a'la Breath of the Wild, with Link perched atop it, the Master Sword and Master Shield in hand as he stood ready, and a banner below reading "Congratulations on leveling up" and her name (with Dr. finally prepended).

It was an absolutely stunning cake—the most spectacular sculpture-cake I've ever seen in person—and seeing her expression as she realized what they'd gotten her was wonderful.

(Bonus: it was also delicious.)

@skew said in skew's Playlist:

Saw a buncha other people updating. Realized it's been a long time, so updating my own.

Just on two games at present, Arx (Mae and Jack) and Fate's Harvest (Green). Busy working on not-MU stuff... and some other stuff...

Mae counts for a dozen characters because she rocks. So sayeth Hana.

@Cupcake said in RL Anger:

It's so stupid but I am near to tears; as it is I have trouble communicating and when I ask for clarification someone implying that I'm stupid or being sarcastic about it isn't helpful and makes me feel like shit.

No, being mocked for any miscommunication—misunderstanding, mishearing, misreading, misspeaking, etc.—never does. Sympathies.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Fandom and entitlement:

@Sparks Ugh, and in Endgame, you never even see Carol ASK about Marie, or mention her, or see her face as one of the missing. I get it, she had a fun weekend kicking around with her pal Fury, but I don't really think that he's the reason she rushed back to Earth after the snap.

To be fair, Endgame was written and filmed before Captain Marvel, which is why Carol's out-of-uniform look is so different in Endgame; they hadn't even settled on her aesthetic yet. When Endgame was written, they may not have yet known how that relationship would shake out and so didn't want to risk contradicting something.

I'll let them slide on that one just for reasons of production practicality.

@Auspice said in Fandom and entitlement:

@Sparks Have you seen The Mummy Honest Trailer yet??

I object strenuously to the claim that Rick addresses all problems "by shooting at them". That is a gross mischaracterization and does not do justice to the true breadth of Rick O'Connell's potential solutions to the problems he comes across; yes, he does shoot quite a lot of them, but he's also seen to wave a sword at problems, and frequently screams at them as a fallback option.

Sometimes he even does more than one of those things at the same time!

I just got back from my writing mentor's memorial. And while it was good to see people I haven't seen in so long, I'm feeling her loss far more keenly today; I realized that I knew so many people there, and she was the one who had introduced me to all of them.

She was like a katamari, but she rolled through life collecting people instead of things. You'd enter her orbit and be carried along. She didn't see any difference between her famous friends and the ones whose name no one would know; everyone was just friends, and she always wanted her friends to meet each other. (Not always with warning, though; I was not the only one there with a tale of "so I met her for brunch/lunch/dinner and then found out that Ursula K. LeGuin/George R.R. Martin/Octavia Butler/Harlan Ellison/whoever was there too, and nearly had a heart attack.")

She was someone unique, there will never be another Vonda, and this evening I'm acutely aware of the hole she's left in so many lives. Like running your tongue over the hole left when a tooth is lost or extracted.

I suppose my peeve is just that this evening, I keep running my tongue over that hole.

@Caryatid said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

A better way to show instead of tell (thereby risking her reading into a well-intentioned question that still gives weird vibes) is to, before or after the interview, tour the interviewee through the workspace.

This. When we interview people, they will have three interviews: a phone screen, a technical interview, and a social interview. The phone screen is obvious enough. When they come in for the technical interview, they'll be scheduled for a social interview too. In the social interview, you get 3 or 4 randomly-picked folks at the company who'll sit down and just get to know you. What's your sense of humor, etc. Basically, are you a cultural fit? And in return, the interviewee gets to ask any questions they might have about the company culture. (We also give them an office tour, separately from the social interview.)

I think that is a huge deal. One of our most recent hires (she's a freaking rockstar programmer and we were so lucky to land her) was considering which of two jobs to take, and the social interview at our company is why she went with us. She found out there was a D&D campaign run at the company, that there's a book club for SF/fantasy books, etc., and went "My people! I shall join them."

@Auspice said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

@Auspice said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

My father is a developer. Apparently he used to, if he saw a job he was interested in but didn't know the language, put it on his resume, apply, then go out and buy a couple books to teach it to himself leading up to any potential interview.

So, so many guys do this. So many.

I mean, he managed to pull it off but it baffles me to this day. I can't learn shit like that. I'm over here trying to switch gears from learning python to ruby and I wanna cry sometimes. XD

whispers into your soul Python is better. Stay with the Python...

In fairness, Ruby's actually a perfectly fine language and well worth learning. I'm personally just used to using Python on a daily basis to create CI build scripts at work, for machine learning stuff (which is primarily in Python these days, it feels like), and so on. After so much Python, doing Ruby always feels like I'm driving someone else's car for a bit; I know how to do everything, but the windshield wiper toggle is in the wrong place, the parking brake is a pedal versus a stick, etc. So I just have to force my mind into Ruby mode instead of thinking Pythonically, and that annoys me enough that I default to Python for things.

(That said, I wish that they'd gotten the Ruby-style safe navigation operators into Python prior to the not-yet-released 3.8 version; i.e., Python's upcoming ?. equivalent to Ruby's &. operator. C'mon, guys. This thing is sanity-preserving, and should've been in Python 3 from the start.)

@mietze said in RL Anger:

My son is trans and turns 18 in less than six months. He is out, and I have made comments when they've posted less extreme stuff about "hey, you are talking about my family here" to which they always act shocked and how could I think they hated my kid/my family.

I am so sorry you and your family are going through this. It's even more aggravating since this mindset—"how could you think I meant that person?"—is so, so prevalent.

They've actually done studies; people who have gone through life in a privileged/'societal default' (straight, white, cis, etc.) position often see themselves get exceptions in various situations. Someone cuts them slack on a speeding ticket because it's clear they're remorseful, etc.

These people genuinely get the impression that things work on a case-by-case basis and that laws are wielded only against people who deserve it. And so when someone talks in absolutes about any given group of people—LGBT folks, immigrants, people receiving government aid—they assume they mean all those other ones. You know, the people who are actually being bad by doing that. And because they expect things to happen on a case-by-case basis, they genuinely believe that these broad, sweeping absolute laws they are supporting will be used as a tool, something only taken out when it needs to be used against the nebulous "other/bad" folks in that category.

"Oh, I don't mean my undocumented immigrant neighbor; he's a responsible father, I love the restaurant he runs, he's a great guy! I mean all those other ones, who are here for criminal reasons!"

"Oh, I don't mean that person I know who needs financial aid to be able to feed her kids; no, her situation's understandable. We just need to be able to do things about all the people who are cheating the system."

"Oh, I don't mean that LGBT person who I know. Of course not! They're fine! I mean the other ones out there, the perverts and pedophiles people talk about!"

This is how you keep getting stories about how Trump supporters are shocked and outraged that their immigrant neighbor who everyone liked got rounded up by ICE. How they're shocked and outraged when their own sister-in-law (or wife!) gets deported. How they're shocked and outraged when someone turns one of those anti-LGBT laws or mindsets against the LGBT person in their family who they of course didn't mean should be included, because they're one of the good ones.

They're always so surprised when it happens, and upset that this is clearly not what was supposed to happen. Hence the joke around the Internet: "I never thought leopards would eat my face," sobs woman who voted for Leopards-Eating-People's-Faces-Party.

It's infuriating, because you can't point to the examples they actually know of people in the affected classes; they'll only be offended that you think they mean to include those people. And they'll continue insisting that no one would do it to that person, right up until something terrible actually happens to the person in question.

It's bad enough when it happens with acquaintances, co-workers, or friends; I'm so sorry you've having to deal with it with family.