Posts made by Sparks

Well, that was a hell of a thing.

***=Spoiler (mild)***

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

Thinking about this today while on the support chat with Verizon.

Online chat/RP with ADD:

• Read message.
• Start thinking about reply.
• Get distracted.
• Some random amount of time later... "Did I reply to that? Crap."

To quote a common Tumblr response, "I feel called out by this post."

"Well, I'll go flip to this article really quickly and read it while I wait. Oh, there's the timer, I better go change over my laundry. Hrm, while I'm down here, there's that box I meant to sort through, I should take that back upstairs, then maybe I'll go see if that person I wanted a scene with tonight is onl— gah, I was RP'ing! I hope they haven't been waiting too long for a pose!!"

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

So yeah, warning to folks. People are spoiling the movie in random YT comments.

What the flipping heck. That's just... that's actively malicious. I mean, I went last night specifically so I wouldn't have to avoid spoilers all weekend, but I was envisioning the sort of accidental spoiler where people let something slip without thinking about it in the course of a conversation about the MCU or something.

I mean, I've seen people intentionally post 'spoilers' publicly as a joke, but those spoilers are generally wildly and obviously inaccurate ones. ("You won't believe the fight where interdimensional portals open up and Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman lead the Justice League show up to help the Avengers! I had no idea they'd manage to get DC to sign on for this, or that they were able to keep it so secret for so long!")

Deliberately posting accurate spoilers, much less on completely unrelated things, is just a dick move.

@Too-Old-For-This — nah, Ishtar would be the film that finally broke the inhabitants of the Satellite of Love.

@Ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:

@Sockmonkey said in Good or New Movies Review:

I know this is 8 days old but FUCK. Suckerpunch had to be the shittiest shit movie ever. It still makes me mad to think about it.

Have you seen Ishtar?

I still remember the reviews that referred to Waterworld as "Fishtar", to provide a measure of how bad they felt the movie was.

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

There's a test where they attach an eye tracker/head tracker and make you do a tedious attention game and I was looking away and back with a shake of my head every couple of seconds - that's something I do to refocus on what is in front of me.

This is the accursed QbTest I referred to, which my psychiatrist calls "the worst video game ever." (My psychiatrist is also ADHD, so firsthand understands how torturous that test is.)

Since I didn't want to move my head (as I'd been told a goal was to not move your head), my trick was to say under my breath what the shape/color was when it appeared; that made it far easier to focus on whether the next shape/color matched, without me glancing around/refocusing like that. (It was still super difficult not to look away from the screen. My neck and shoulders were so stiff from forcing myself not to move by the time it was done...)

But yes, as KQ said, developing coping/focusing tricks like that is very much an ADHD thing.

ETA: using timers is literally one of the three reasons I have a smartwatch. Being able to tap the button and say "set a timer for thirty minutes" or whatever keeps me functioning. When I don't set a timer, my tea ends up steeping for an hour or something instead of five minutes...

Those parental stories horrify me. All the sympathy.

I am lucky inasmuch as my parents are loving and supportive and have always been so. Unfortunately, I was unlucky inasmuch as I was misdiagnosed as a kid, and was literally only diagnosed as having ADHD in the past seven months.

As a kid, I had a tendency to find something that interested me and just ignore everything else—including, sometimes, sleep—to do that thing. Reading, writing, coding, tinkering with electronics, etc. This would happen instead of my chores, sometimes instead of actually coming to dinner, etc. Meanwhile, things like chores or homework were really hard for me to get started (yay executive dysfunction!) until the eleventh hour, at which point I would work in a panic-induced state of intense focus.

When I started to suffer some fairly severe depression as a teenager, my parents found me a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist went "Well, depression and hyperactivity? The hyperactivity has got to be hypomania, so clearly this is a case of bipolar disorder!" So I got treated for that, medicated for it, but the medication never seemed to work that well; I kept wrestling with depression, and eventually I got taken off the medication because if you stay on depakote long-term it has Bad Effects.

Flash forward to now. Last year I suffered a massive streak of depression and went back to a psychiatrist again. The psychiatrist talked to me about the previous diagnosis and went, "Really? I don't think that sounds quite right for bipolar. That intense focus sounds a lot more like ADHD hyperfocus to me. Have you ever been tested for ADHD?" When I said I had not, he gave me a worksheet to fill out and made me take the excruciating QbTest (which checks concentration, head/eye movement, etc.). When we got my results for the QbTest back, he said the results were borderline ADHD. So he diagnosed me as mild ADHD (and having developed coping mechanisms), along with clinical depression.

The psychiatrist told me I should probably try a couple informational organizational systems to manage things, but he didn't think it was severe enough to need medication. (He did medicate the depression, which was desperately needed.)

About three or four months later we were talking about something else, and he went, "You know, let's talk about that ADHD diagnosis again. Because having worked with you for a while now and given this executive dysfunction situation we're talking about, I'm beginning to think I may have misdiagnosed the severity in that first session. You mentioned you used a few coping tricks to focus during the QbTest; can you tell me exactly what you did?"

I noted that I'd been jostling my foot to keep myself from fidgeting, that I'd dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand (because when I do that, I find it makes it harder to have my thoughts wander; I do this during meetings), and I had tensed my shoulders to keep myself from looking around and letting my mind wander, and after about a minute I had devised a mental trick to let me remember the color/shape combinations so as to not miss many.

Psychiatrist goes, "Yeah... in light of that, I think I'm changing my diagnosis: you are just flat-out ADHD and have developed a number of coping mechanisms. Let's start discussing medication."

So... now I'm doing medication trials to figure out what medication works best for me! Whee?

@Auspice @Rinel

For the record, my issue with the trope is not quite the same one you're describing.

***=SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SO MANY SPOILERS***

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

Yelp, I do not know how you got my personal phone number and I do not like it, do not call me, I hate you.

I'll see you Yelp and counter with the automated robocaller that has a computerized voice speaking Chinese.

@Jaded I do use a HOTAS setup for Elite, and I feel like once you've done that there's no going back. It is a little harder if you're using a VR headset as well, because it can take time to be able to find specific switches without looking if you have a setup with many switches/buttons separate from the throttle or stick, but the flight feels so much more natural.

@faraday — Moreover, trying to use encryption here only provides an illusion of security, which is actually worse than no security at all in my opinion. If you're aware there's no security in a system you can set your expectations accordingly. But if you think there is security, then you feel even more upset and betrayed if that so-called security is proven to consist of little more than a polite request of "plz no snoop".

@Arkandel said in Saving Pages to the Database:

@faraday Encrypt pages with public keys possessed by all parties who want this feature enabled.

Then if any one of them wants to release their contents they can, if not staff can't look at them anyway.

Either you have to store the pages unencrypted in the database for page/recall or the web integration to work (in which case there's no place for encryption in the flow, because the pages are stored decrypted, the thing you wanted to avoid), or you need the user to provide their private key every time they receive a page or use page/recall (impractical and annoying), or you need to have them upload the private key to the game to be used on their behalf to decrypt pages without providing it every time (in which case the key is in the database and the entire thing is pointless because if your worry is "staff might read my stuff", they can still do so as they have your private key on file).

Sure, there are some hacky ways you could try to make it work (writing a custom client for those who want to use telnet, or having the decryption done in JavaScript using a key stored in local storage, and saying pages can only be used from the web portal), but none seem appreciably better.

Unless I misunderstand the Ares design—which is possible, I've only poked at it in small bits thus far—and the database does not play any role in passing information between the telnet side and the Rails web side, this just doesn't seem a practical place to use public key encryption.

@Aria said in Good TV:

And JFC, I am having a major feel. Yes, it was beautifully done. And yes, the character in question asking what they did at the end totally makes sense for them and their mental process. But I am legitimately really upset about it in a "representation matters" kind of way, and not just because of the specific trope @Sparks is referring to.

Yeah. There's the one trope I'm a bit upset about, and then a second representational issue which doesn't match a named trope that I know of but which I'm also a bit upset about. I suspect what you're referencing is the second of my blargh factors.

But god, I have to give them credit for execution. Despite my issues with it, it was beautiful in the most awfully painful way. I'm gonna freaking cry every time I hear that song now, I just know it.

@Aria said in Good TV:

I want to have a conversation about this but don't want to post spoilers to the board.

I think I also need a hug.

I have had a couple of private-message conversations about that finale on here because I have many feels, both narratively and otherwise.

@reimesu said in Good or New Movies Review:

@Aria I was not bored. I came out thoroughly entertained. But lord, it wasn't good, to quote Bloom County.

So, basically the BPRD/Hellboy equivalent of Netflix's The Order, which is a series that is so terribad it results in an underflow on the 'quality' field and wraps around into being somewhat enjoyable again?

Double-post, whee!

@reimesu said in Game of Thrones:

Ok, here's one for you: I first started reading A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran 33 years ago, via WaRP Graphics. It's been restarted under various presses repeatedly. Someday, I will find out how it ends. (It may actually be finished, but it's out of print and I can't afford the copies on Amazon.)

FWIW, A Distant Soil is not done yet, but I think the final 8 issues of the comic are supposedly coming out from Image sometime this year? And last I checked the whole thing so far was also available in digital comics form, for whatever that's worth.

And speaking of old comics that readers have been waiting to finish for years, I'm so glad that Mark Oakley is slowly getting back to Thieves & Kings again. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Stardrop and Jenny Mysterious too, but T&K will always be far nearer and dearer to my heart than his other comics, and we were left on a cliffhanger for like... 14-ish years of the 25 years the comic has existed, I think? Regardless, also still a longer wait than with GRRM and the latest ASoIaF book so far.

@SG said in Game of Thrones:

On top of that, rumour has it, he writes on an air gaped 1990s era computer, and plans to retire if it ever fails.

The first part isn't rumor; he's outright said in interviews that he still writes on that old computer specifically because it can run WordStar. I don't know about the retirement part, though I could believe "if I can no longer find a computer that runs WordStar" would be a hard and fast condition to him for immediate retirement.

Still, I can actually understand that one.

Lots of writers have specific tools that work well for them and which they've developed their creative flow around. I know people who just write everything directly in Microsoft Word as one giant file. People who write individual chapters in Word as separate files (like my late writing mentor). People who swear by Scrivener and find it hard to really work in other text editors for writing fiction (hi, it me). Even people—very, very strange people—who write everything in raw LaTeX, and probably should look into some sort of therapy.

I personally write most stuff in Scrivener, because it fits my flow; I can keep all my notes and worldbuilding in the same file, I can tie it into Aeon Timeline to keep time straight in things, etc. And sometimes I get stuck; when that happens, I find I can get myself moving again if I go write longhand with a fountain pen for a while; it gets me out of my own head and into a different mental space than typing on a computer does.

When someone's writing routine is disrupted, it can really make it hard for them, though. There was a point where I tried writing a story in Word instead of Scrivener because it was all I had installed on that particular computer, and I just floundered. I know perfectly well how to use Word, but while it was open my brain was stuck in 'documents for work' mode rather than 'I am writing a story' mode and I just could not make the words come to me.

GRRM has been using WordStar since like the late 1980's, I think. So I can understand that with that much muscle memory for keystrokes and all, trying to move his writing process to a different program might very well feel almost impossible.

@Ghost said in Game of Thrones:

there isn't a pizza that he doesn't like.

Having helped take GRRM out for Thai food after a book signing 14 years and two books ago, I can confirm firsthand that the same is true for crab rangoon. He was a really great guy to talk to, but from a "I hope to see you live a long and healthy life" standpoint I was a little concerned to witness that he ate like my great-uncle Tommy (who had experienced about three heart attacks by that point).

Though at that dinner, GRRM mentioned that HBO had just optioned the books but that he doubted they'd ever actually put a series into production because of how many seasons it would take and how much it would cost to do right.

Looking back at that conversation now, I laugh.

@Aria said in Game of Thrones:

Ohh, god, do not get me started on Melanie Rawn. I've been waiting for that book since I was 13. I'm going to be 35 in, like, two weeks.

I know about five years ago she posted online that she'd write The Captal's Tower after she finished the fifth Glass Thorns book. Which she did in 2017. So I'm crossing my fingers that we might get a conclusion to Exiles in the next couple of years...

But yes. I am in the same boat as you. As I said, 22 years. So far, the biggest gap in the ASoIaF books has been 8 years (between the last book and now). When people complain about how long they've been waiting for GRRM to finish The Winds of Winter I want to go, "Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know of waiting? Waiting is for the Exiles fans, who watch the author craft three series before finishing the trilogy. Waiting is for the long gap, when readers are born and live and die all before the third book is released..."

@Aria said in Game of Thrones:

I love her work. Love. I would, as I have posted in other threads, play the shit out of a Sunrunner's MU*.

I would also play the shit out of a Sunrunners game. I was, at one point, tempted to build a Sunrunners MU*, until I realized there were probably about five people in the entire MU*ing community who would actually play there.

@Snackness said in Game of Thrones:

@Sparks The Captal's Tower?

Got it in one guess.

@silverfox — best of all, the meme that got the song stuck in your head is itself the best response to complaining about getting the song stuck in your head.

I am quite certain GRRM has either written himself into a corner somehow and is trying to figure out how to extricate himself, or that his enthusiasm for the series has waned due to how prominent it has become (and how often people joke/complain about his writing speed).

That said, I've been waiting for the third book in one fantasy trilogy for 22 years; supposedly the author is still going to finish it someday, though I'm not sure I'm holding my breath. GRRM still looks fairly fast in comparison.