Posts made by Sparks

@Meg sends all the hugs

Whether or not you end up back here, I hope things improve for you soon.

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

Except my father. He refuses. "If I am out, do not bother me. I'm usually out because I don't want to be bothered!" His old coot-ness is coming along swimmingly.

My dad did that too, for years. But then two incidents happened in succession.

First, one year he and I went to a local summer street festival which attracts a downright ludicrous sized crowd... and we got separated in that crowd. Luckily, I circled back to the coffeeshop he knew I loved, and about twenty minutes later he showed up there, having figured that's where I might. But if he'd had a cell phone, that wouldn't even have been a problem.

Second, several months later, he was supposed to come to a semi-fancy dinner with me and some of my friends, and something happened to delay him. I do not remember what; I think it was a flat tire or an overheating radiator or whatever. And he could not call us to tell us he was delayed; he had to walk around until he lucked out and found what I swear must have been the absolute last pay-phone in existence in Seattle and was able to call me.

That's when he said, "Maybe a cell phone wouldn't be a bad idea." Mom and I immediately went to the T-Mobile store the next day and got him a phone.

Now my dad never leaves his phone behind, and is seemingly addicted to Facebook. Not sure that was quite what mom and I intended when we got him the phone years ago, but...

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

@Ghost I couldn't tell you my mobile phone number if there was a gun to my head.

I can tell you two of my mobile phone numbers (I have a lot of test phones; yay wireless development). That's two out of... uhm, more than I want to admit I have in my bag. The only reason I can do this, though, is that one is the number I have literally had for twenty-two years at this point and the other I have used in testing at work so many times that I know it by heart and can dial it in my sleep.

I can also tell you my parents' land-line phone number, as they still have one and the number has not changed since I was 4 years old.

Beyond that? That's what I have a cloud-sync'd address book in my phone for. I have too many contacts I've amassed over the years, and plenty of other things I need to spend my brain-space on.

Impending lack of ADHD meds.

Today is the last day of my dosage trials; after today, I am back to ADHD brain full time until my next meeting with the doctor and (hopefully) a long-term prescription for one of the meds we tried. Thankfully, I have that meeting on Thursday, which—assuming everything goes smoothly—means picking up a prescription on Friday and being able to use the meds again after that.

But having gotten used to this whole "I can focus without using a handful of coping mechanisms at a time" and "gosh, I'm actually able to understand and track the passage of time!" business over the past two weeks, I am not looking forward to those interim days much.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DIS-COURSE DIS-COURSE... (to the tune of the Badger Badger song, as always)

***=SPOILER SPOILER***

@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.

@Cheesegrater said in Fallcoast Domain Expired:

@Sparks said in Fallcoast Domain Expired:

I'm now really curious what used to be at that address back when that strip came out.

It was the IP address of the comics syndicate that handled Foxtrot.

I thought it might be something like that.

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

Coming to the increasingly annoying realization that I have finally reached that point in my life in which I can't get away without getting a decent screen-printer-scanner-etc. calibration dohickey and software. Which aren't necessarily super duper expensive, but sure as shit aren't cheap.

Honestly, I'd recommend just getting a used DataColor Spyder from a generation or two ago. They keep coming out with new ones with Shiny Glitzy Features, but those Shiny Glitzy Features aren't actually really that useful in many cases. I've still got a Spyder 3 Pro (they got up to 5 and then put out the SpyderX) and it works perfectly well to calibrate things for the purposes of my photography work.

I did the Spyder -> Spyder 2 -> Spyder 3 Pro upgrade jumps, and then realized I wasn't actually getting any benefit from the new features; I've felt no burning need to upgrade since, and the 3 Pro still works perfectly well for me. But the people who do keep riding the continual upgrade cycle on those keep selling off the old ones as they jump to the next.

The SpyderX costs $270; a used Spyder 3 Pro can be found for $80-90.

@Thenomain said in Fallcoast Domain Expired:

@Arkandel said in Fallcoast Domain Expired:

I can't look at most of those IP ranges without cringing.

Or Bill is such a nerd that he knew this and didn’t want to spam someone’s site by accident.

And we know how much of a nerd Mr. Amend is.

There's one IP address in that strip that's an actual valid IPv4 address, and since I do actually think Bill Amend knew enough to know all the others weren't valid... I'm now really curious what used to be at that address back when that strip came out. Since whatever is at that IP address now doesn't accept incoming connections (even ICMP requests), and has no reverse-lookup name associated with it.

@Lotherio Martin has said in interviews many times that the Song of Ice and Fire books began as a fantasy retelling of the War of the Roses. So you're absolutely right about it being England, though not Arthurian.

ETA: Apparently Rinel also commented on this while I had the editor window open. Oops!

@Arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

@Sparks Is it watchable/enjoyable by someone like me who never watched or played Pokemon growing up?

I've never really watched the anime myself. Though I will admit I've picked up some knowledge of it via osmosis when at trading/battle meetups at cons like PAX West and ECCC, enough so that I recognized one of the easter eggs in the film that referenced the anime rather than the games.

My best friend has never watched the anime or played any of the games except casually playing PoGo, which is not—shall we say—exactly heavy with meaningful lore. So basically, her knowledge of Pokémon going in was enough that she could've pointed at a given Pokémon and say "Oh, hey, I caught that thing in PoGo!"

As I said, we both enjoyed it more than Endgame.

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.

@Kumakun said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

I just did a quick search on Alex and WebSockets, and looks like they're actively supported by Alexa/AWS services now. I'll have to look into the limits on data chunk size limits, but I doubt a text pose is going to be greater than what it can handle. Alexa Skills Kit has come a long way in the past few years!

AWS has supported WebSockets in the AWS API Gateway service and similar stuff since... I wanna say December of last year? But I didn't remember anything about Alexa in that particular announcement. If Alexa skills have now got a way to use persistent WebSockets to maintain a connection from request to request, that definitely makes it somewhat easier; it used to be you had to use a proxy server for Alexa to do anything with websockets.

(Though every MU* that supports websockets uses a different protocol over that socket; the skills would have to be specific to the server family—like one for PennMUSH, etc.—or else you'd end up using a proxy backend to connect to games anyway. Even if that proxy server used websockets rather than being polled, which makes it marginally less horrible, albeit still a privacy concern for some players since that proxy server could log everything going through it: passwords in the connect command, pages to people, the @mail you read, etc.)

And yeah, I assumed the UX would be utterance based; you would definitely not want to leave the context of the MU* client skill while using it. But even maintaining context, you have that request/response UX cycle to deal with, which is the bigger issue.

And transcription seems the worst bit of all. Leaving aside the 10-second limit on audio transcription, there's the matter of syntax on the average MUSH. Pose and page and look and movement are probably easy enough, but many standard MUSH commands could be absolutely wretched for an interface like this. Imagine trying to tell it how to transcribe +bboard commands to write a post, or to dictate the sort of commands that many WoD games use in their chargen systems.

And I don't even want to think about stuff like Arx's plots or goals system, where the syntax can get particularly convoluted: something like goals/rfp <goal>,<story-beat>=<IC description of goal achivement>/<OOC note to staff about goal achievement> (...which I may even have gotten wrong, because I'm not on the game to check the helpfile right now!) is not the most friendly single-line command syntax to remember even when typing. Trying to dictate that to Alexa could end up being an infuriating experience.

That said, despite all these hassles, it's an interesting project to tackle! If you choose to go forward with it, I wish you luck; it'd be an interesting result to see, and might well be useful to folks out there!

@faraday said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

And I share your concern about the skill UX too. Having to say "get me new activity from <game>" over and over is not great UX.

Yeah. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure skills are simpler, because each 'page' of the choose-your-own adventure is a predefined block of text, and each page has a finite number of pre-defined options. So you have a much easier flow.

Request: "play CYOA"
Response: first page of CYOA is read, possible choices are listed, and Alexa now waits for input
Request: makes a choice from the list
Response: next page of CYOA is read, choices are listed, and Alexa now waits for input

And so on. There's a clear and defined request/response cycle; each response is known in full, and there's a clear place to stop and wait for input.

With a MU* client, you don't have any convenient predefined place to transition from 'response' back to waiting for request, nor do you have any way to move on from waiting-for-a-request to the response phase—and thus continue speaking the text from the server—unless the user issues a request, necessitating that the skill has a "no pose yet" or "continue" type request, in addition to a 'send <whatever should be transcribed and sent>' type command.

And this is without getting into transcription issues. "page Faraday Hello" is easy to transcribe from dictation, because Faraday is a known word. But "page Pax Hello." might well transcribe as "page Packs Hello." instead, given that "packs" (as in, "Jim packs the boxes.") is a far more common word than "pax" is. And if you have people with completely unique names that aren't likely to be in a transcription database it's likely to be even more difficult.

Transcription of small notes into Evernote or similar is a much easier task, since if you dictated, "Remember to talk to Pax about Atlantis support for AresMUSH by Tuesday." and it transcribed the note as "Remember to talk to packs about Atlantis support for aeries mush by Tuesday.", you can easily edit that note in Evernote after the fact to correct the mis-transcription.

But transcribing a page or pose for this scenario is one-and-done, you don't have any way to edit it if the transcription turns out wrong—or even to reliably see whether or not it did. Even if you say "page Pax Hello." and it transcribes it as "page packs Hello.", then somewhere in that blob of text the game returns you'll hear "No such player 'packs' found." Which, sadly, still sounds when spoken aloud as "No such player 'Pax' found." (Oh, dear, I vanished from the game!)

This isn't to say it's not an interesting set of problems to potentially solve, just that I think the "how do you design the UX for this in the most usable fashion" question is a much harder one than "how do you implement the backend".

@faraday said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

@Sparks Can Alexa hold onto a connection like a MUSH client or a web browser websocket does? I didn't really think it worked that way and would need a completely asynchronous API. But I confess I haven't really looked into it much so I could be completely wrong.

The Alexa skills themselves cannot, no—or at least could not do so two years ago, which was the last time I mucked about with Alexa skills. You would indeed need an asynchronous API.

But it's trivial for a skill to make a remote web connection, so what you'd really have to do would be to implement a backend server which handled the connection to the game on the skill's behalf; when you connected it would send a 'connect to this IP and port' and return a unique session token for you to use, and then all your further operations—'get status and/or pending lines', 'send line to game', 'disconnect', etc.—would just be calls to that web service, which would connect to the game on your behalf. Bundle up the responses into a JSON or XML format and the skill can easily parse them. (Obviously you would want some sort of additional security key, so that merely stealing someone else's session token isn't enough to take over their session.)

It's a bit convoluted, yes, but that part would be doable. It's the actual skill UX that gives me more technical concerns.

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!

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

I wonder if it's a triggerable thing. I grew up in a messy house. I was the only person who ever cleaned, growing up. Which was depressing and exhausting.

Honestly, I suspect it is. My grandmother, who I loved dearly and who is in large part responsible for who I am today, was nonetheless a hoarder. (Which wasn't uncommon among people who grew up in the Depression.) By the time she passed away, the basement of the house was so full of stuff you couldn't properly open the door to get down the stairs, and the entire third floor was also filled with things.

Mind you, it wasn't like keeping just old newspapers or whatever; a lot of it was amazing stuff! Boxes upon boxes of family photos for instance, going all the way back to 19th century daguerreotypes. A Civil War military pass belonging to an ancestor who was a medic, granting authority to pass through both Union and Confederate lines to tend to the wounded of either side. A first edition of the boxed set of the Lord of the Rings. A set of 20-ish years of every issue of Astounding, Amazing Stories, and Asimov's. Just... wandering through that house was fascinating, even if you often had to edge around boxes of things to do so.

But there were also literally things like an entire cabinet full of ceramic marmalade jars, another full of washed-out glass peanut butter jars, etc., because "you never know when you might need one". Too many teapots to count, just in case one broke, so she didn't have to go buy another. And that sort of hoarding had certainly been the case during my mom's childhood, too.

In contrast, my mother is one of those people who is absolutely incapable of leaving something out for very long. She won't leave papers out on her desk, the only thing allowed on the coffee table when people are not actively using it are books (or a laptop), etc. She cleans almost reflexively, and is vicious about getting rid of things she decides she no longer needs. (Except handmade bowls to mix tea in for chado. She has an alarming number of those.)

And it would not surprise me in the least if it's because of the house she grew up in.

@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!)

@PuppyBreath said in RL Anger:

I caved and put my dream horse, my most valuable asset both monetarily and emotionally, my main motivation for even continuing to exist most days, up for sale. The only person seriously interested in him doesn't want to pay for him.

Augh.

I know a lot of people out there might look at this and be like "pfft, a horse is such a luxury", but as a fellow horse person I feel you on this; the partnership you share with a beloved horse is sometimes one of the best balms for depression and despair. When everything else is dark or seems hopeless, even just being there in the pasture or stall—much less actually tacking up and going for a ride—can be the light you need to keep going.

If I had to sell Debutante, it would break my heart.

You have my sympathies on this one.

@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.