Best posts made by Sparks

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

@Kanye-Qwest

I am sorry. I don't mean to be fangirling, but literally no one I have ever met has had this issue. Or they don't understand how I forget to eat. Or how I lose all track of time. Or that I have no concept of time. I have never had someone go 'me too' and I'm ... don't laugh.. I mean I suppose you can. But I'm a little like teary eyed because OMG.. finally someone else gets it and it's not just be being a weird time freak.

For what it's worth, an adult ADHD diagnosis has—at least for me—been an adventure in "Wait, that's an ADHD thing and not just a me thing?" for so many things like that, along with finally actually mentioning them and other ADHD folks being like "OH MY GOD I GET THAT." And both are accompanied by a feeling of some relief that it isn't just me.

So I 100% understand what you mean.

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

sensory sensitivity is an ADHD thing, yes. I cut tags out of clothes, and I can't wear any tshirt or anything that puts even the slightest bit of pressure around my neck. Above my collarbone, really. I feel like it's choking me. Also, I chew my lips constantly. Which I never thought of as a symptom, before. OH BOY.

Okay, people need to stop making me have "wait, that's another ADHD thing?" moments, 'cause I gotta get actual work done today.

(I always assumed the 'gah, this collar is above the collarbones so I feel like I'm being strangled' thing was just another Random Rachel Quirk.)

@roz said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

Mira Furlan from Babylon 5

I hope as she goes to the sea and passes beyond the Rim, she has a chance to say hello to Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas.

Sleep in light, Ambassador Delenn.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in RL Anger:

@Rook said in RL Anger:

People who schedule 1.5 hour meetings to get your help on something, and then show up late and unprepared.

Special hell reserved for the people who do this on Fridays. In the morning. GTFO.

Can there be an additional special hell reserved for people who do this on Fridays, in the afternoon, starting at 4:30pm. And don't actually choose to schedule this until 1pm. (This has happened to me more than once in the past three months.)

@arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:

Then once I got a PC, I still remember the original Wing Commander on my VGA which was like... 11 floppies? But I had a hard drive to copy it to, guys! All 40 MB of it ("what are you going to do with all that space man? That's for professional computers" the person at the store had counselled me) and my friends were marvelling at the graphics. One of them went, "holy shit, it looks just like Star Wars!".

I still love the Wing Commander theme. There's so many great iconic video game theme songs and soundtracks from that era.

I still have a Roland MT-32, and man, sometimes booting up old DOSBox games with MT-32 support... I mean, the MT-32 version of the Monkey Island 2 soundtrack still holds up well.

64-bit Atlantis release candidate: http://riverdark.net/atlantis/downloads/Atlantis-0.9.9.6-rc3.zip

Give that a try and let me know if anything's horribly broken.

@thenomain said in Sockmonkey's Playlist:

@sparks said in Sockmonkey's Playlist:

(Yes, I say this despite being someone who willingly plays Traveller...)

But the big question is would you play it on a Mud? Would you play it with a HUD? Would you could you with some code? Would you should you on the road?

I would not, could not, on a MUD, or on the road, or with a HUD. The game's a mess, I must admit, and players would all want to quit.

Steam: Packetdancer
Origin: Packetdancer
PSN: Packetdancer
XBL: Packetdancer
Twitch: Packetdancer
Discord: Packetdancer#4441

I'm consistent.

@Thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

And I know in saying this I'm going to summon Ganymede telling me that I'm wrong, but we haven't taken the time to work out why the other feels so strongly about this. Or rather, why I feel so strongly and understanding how Gany can imagine the opposite.

So... at this point I like DA2 more than Origins, honestly. But I didn't enjoy my first playthrough of 2 very much at all.

That first time I went with what would have been called a Paragon path in a Mass Effect game and the result felt... really bland. I couldn't emotionally engage with the game that much, and without that investment in the story or characters I just found myself focusing on all the cut corners (Every cavern is the same! Enemies just drop inexplicably from the sky!) and places where you could see paint hastily slapped onto things.

Then I played it a second time, this time choosing all the snarky options (I think this was because when I commented I hadn't liked the game much, @Roz lectured me that I had "played it wrong" and insisted I try again without choosing the "boring" dialogue options)... and that time the game felt more alive. Instead of a sort of stiff storyline I wasn't able to engage with, I ended up with basically this ridiculous fantasy version of a buddy tale. You had this snarky loser who gathered all these misfits around her and sort of made a family, and they all just kind of blundered around following her lead and more or less caused trouble around the city. It was not a deep storyline by any real standard—and it certainly didn't try to paint a grand, sweeping tale—but it let the characters shine. Over the course of that playthrough I came to care about pretty much all the companions in a way I hadn't the first time. (Except Anders. You are absolutely 100% correct that he was badly handled in DA2.)

At that point it became clear the game had really been built around the characters rather than a sweeping narrative. It's more like an anthology of various tales about this weird little family Hawke's put together, and how they just sort of blunder through all the notable events of Kirkwall. There's not a lot of games out there which are really character-focused in that manner, where the story is there only to serve the characters rather than the other way around.

My perception of the game was further improved after someone pointed out that technically the entire story is being narrated by Varric, who is relating it to Cassandra. Varric is not a reliable narrator (to put it mildly) so you can approach the game as being not what actually happened so much as how Cassandra is envisioning things based on Varric's (not necessarily wholly accurate) narration.

"We were outnumbered; there were five of them who tried to attack us!"
enemies fall from sky
"Only five? Surely the companions of the Hero of Kirkwall could easily deal with such a paltry threat."
"Ah... did I say five? I meant twelve!"
additional enemies fall from sky

And the caverns are because Varric can't be arsed to actually describe individual caverns after the first one, so Cassandra just keeps envisioning them the same way each time. Things like that.

That said, I still liked Inquisition better than DA2 (sorry, Roz) because I cared about the companions plus I also had a storyline with more moments of 'payoff', and a game which was—despite Frostbite—clearly more finished in a lot of ways. I felt like I was getting my cake and my ice cream, rather than just one or the other.

Sure, my love for the Inquisition companions wasn't as absolute as with that second playthrough of DA2; I wasn't as attached to them, and there were some I could honestly have just ignored entirely if I wasn't being completionist. (I admit I was not that invested in Cole's story, for instance, despite having read the tie-in novel specifically about him.)

I will also confess that my fondness for Inquisition is almost certainly influenced by the fact that it was really the first game where I got serious about my screenshot shenanigans.

At any rate, based on my own wildly differing experiences on two different DA2 playthroughs—and the change in my own opinion of the game after the second one—I can completely understand why people have such polarized opinions of it.

Aaaand a fix for a bug in the hotkey library I use, and to fix the dock badging logic: http://riverdark.net/atlantis/downloads/Atlantis-0.9.9.6-rc4.zip

@thenomain I would not play with FS3; the system's wrong for this, you see. There's no place without gaming fools, and people like to argue rules. A Traveller MUSH would be a mess, so much it leaves me quite depressed.

(And I'm out; fun as it is, I refuse to play an extended version of this game on someone else's playlist thread.)

@Auspice Most appropriate use of a GIF on this board.

Straight to VHS.
Donjon.
EXUVIAE.
Better Angels.

Sadly, I've never had a chance to run any of them.

@Arkandel said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

I guess I was never into sci-fi for roleplaying purposes although I read a lot of it and I certainly enjoy science fiction movies and shows.

The sole exception to that is playing Force users because lightsabers.

pops up like prairie dog

Did someone say lightsabers???

Man, a Pokemon-esque game that was basically a MU* version of the standard RPGs, with capture/training/gyms, and where the metaplot 'seasons' were some group (Team Whatever) doing something semi-nefarious and trainers needing to stop them... I would play that far more than I should probably admit.

It would actually be fairly possible to make the training/battle/evolution system in Python with Evennia.

I am a dinky little 1.252336448598131, alas.

@Atomic - oh, I love Atomic Robo. Both the RPG and the comic on which it's based. The best part was that the one time I played the RPG so far, I got to play a version of myself that's actually canon!

(I am actually, very briefly, a character in the comic in the FCBD 2016 issue as a Tesladyne action scientist who gets eaten by vampires on the same page she first appears on! And then as a name on the memorial Robo puts up outside Tesladyne for those who fell stopping the invasion. All the folks in the cafeteria, the response team, and the memorial are various fans they wrote in.)

@auspice While a lot of those I'm pulling into Atlantis 2.0, 1.0 allows you to open as many log files as you want on a world at once, and close them individually. You should be able to have an always-running log and pop one immediately to catch a specific thing.

Welp.

Now I'm trying WoD.

I blame @scar, @Caryatid, and @Meg.

So, the first ADHD medication trial I did (mentioned about two weeks ago in this thread) didn't do much for me; the ritalin was a really mixed bag. I was able to focus slightly better, but it gave me a raging headache, so we stopped fairly quickly. I was sort of disappointed and went, "Well, maybe medication won't do much for me after all."

But now I'm trying first adderall—tomorrow's the last day of that test—and then dextroamphetamine. And oh my god this is amazing stuff.

The first day I was taking the adderall, even on a minimal dose, I was able to sit in a 1.5 hour long meeting and actually focus for most of it; yeah, my brain still drifted off on some side track prompted by a random comment twice, but that's way better than the like... 12 times it would've normally been unless I was digging my fingernails into the palm of my hand under the table or one of my other coping mechanisms. Instead, I just sat there and listened and my brain stayed on track. And then I was able to go and start a task that I'd been putting off for like 3 weeks.

(And again, that was on one-third of a full dose. Full dose, I think my brain probably wouldn't even have wandered those two times!)

The downside is that the 5-hour adderall pills only work for me for 3 hours at a time. And the difference between those first three and the last two is stark. Plus, I get a kind of unpleasant headache for the last three hours.

Luckily, there's a very likely explanation for this: adderall is a mixture of dextroamphetamine (which hits quickly) and levoamphetamine (which takes longer to release). So the first three hours is usually the dextroamphetamine, the last 2-3 hours is usually the levoamphetamine. The fact that only the first three hours are effective (and that I have a headache for the last three hours) is a pretty common sign that dextroamphetamine works well for my ADHD, while levoamphetamine is a thing that is Not For Me. So starting on Wednesday, I'm dose-testing just plain dex, and we'll see how that goes.

At any rate, the reason I post this is that if you are ADHD—even if you think you have 'sufficient' coping mechanisms to function in daily life—if you are offered to do medication dosage trials, I really suggest that you do it. Because, yes, I had sufficient coping mechanisms to function as an adult (and a senior engineer), so I could've just kept going. But now I've seen how brains are actually supposed to work, where I can just... pick a thing and start it, much less do so without ending up thinking about three other things along the way, and it's amazing.

(Though I'm told the euphoric feeling of "holy shit I can actually do things what is even happening" superpowers does eventually fade, even as the productivity and focus remains.)