Posts made by Sparks

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

Pineapple on pizza EVER.

(Pineapple, with the right ingredients, is the topping of the gods! Sausage is just not "the right ingredients". Hrmph.)

@Griatch said in Evennia 0.9 released:

The player-options have been partially converted to use a generic format with
validation. This is specifically used for styling information, and allow e.g.
a player to specify how EvTables are displayed to them (like changing the
colors and symbols used). (PR by Volund).

Oh thank the lord; this means in my little custom core I've been writing for future projects, I can kill off my @display command; that was meant to let you set all your UI preferences (header/footer colors for all output, EvTable styling, etc.) One less thing in the core, one more thing in the base and globally used... that's a win. Remind me to thank Volund later.

(Though the idea of converting all of Arx's codebase from Evennia 0.7/Python 2.7 to Evennia 0.9/Python 3.7 gives me a mild feeling of existential terror.)

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

half the pizza had been eaten so someone clearly chose it on purpose

(I can probably keep replying just with blobmoji all day.)

@Auspice

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

sausage and pineapple pizza

@Auspice - Must... resist urge... to restart... Final Fantasy debate.

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

My mom had a knee replacement surgery, and while it fixed the joint issues she says it hurts constantly. Turns out she is allergic to the metal that was used. Fucking yikes, right? She is allergic to an implant stuck inside of her body.

Anyway, does anyone know if allergy tests are supposed to be performed before replacement surgery? It seems logical to me that you'd test that first (because most allergies come in the form of "surprise, you're allergic to shrimp, now!")

Fucking yikes indeed. However, I actually know the answer to this one! (Not from a legal standpoint, per se, but from a "my maternal grandmother went through this, and I just checked, and it does not appear that standard practice has changed".)

Specifically, folks are not required to and will not by default perform an allergy test beforehand unless the patient has a history of metal allergies. (i.e., gets a rash when they wear silver earrings or rings, etc.) Metal allergies are so rare, and the allergies to biocompatible metals even moreso, that it's not generally worth the added cost and delay.

The Arthritis Foundation still has this information on their Metal Joint Implant Allergy page:

Should You Be Tested Before Implant Surgery? If you are going to have joint replacement surgery, ask your doctor if you should have an allergy test. Because metal allergies are relatively rare, testing before joint replacement surgery isn’t recommended for everyone, says Dr. Jacobs. However, if you’ve had a skin reaction to metal jewelry in the past, you probably should be tested.

In my grandmother's case, she did prove to be allergic (joint replacement in her hands for arthritis), so they had to go back in, remove the metal bits, and put plastic ones instead. She had not had a history of metal allergy, so she had not been tested.

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

@Rinel I love the guy's explanation for why there is no male version of his product though. "Uhm, well, there are more pictures of nekkid women on the interwebs!".

Stay classy, guy.

As much as I loathe this entire thing, from a standpoint of pure machine learning that claim is actually not entirely wrong. From the standpoint of training a GAN, you want as many examples as possible of the thing that the Generative part of Generative Adversarial Network is meant to, well, generate, covering as wide a range as possible. And whether or not the images are more numerous, I suspect there is a far wider dataset available for women than men. Which would actually mean this GAN would be more easily trained for women than men.

It's the "We pulled it because we did not realize people might misuse it" that bugs me the most. It's like:

"Heavens," said the man who had written a program to harvest as many images of naked women as possible, in order to teach a GAN to generate images of naked women using a picture of a clothed woman as a starting point, "we had no idea people might use this to make naked images of specific women of whom they had clothed pictures!"

This is the sort of thing where anyone with even a halfway decent grasp of machine learning could basically just download StyleGAN and build this in maybe two weeks; literally, collecting the the dataset to train the two adversaries is going to take more time than writing the code to generate the model will. So now that someone's pointed out, "Hey, this can be done", I fully expect within several months there's going to be at least two new versions of this floating around.

@mietze said in RL things I love:

And we didnt put a dent in the problem I know, but it was nice to see those people breathe just a little easier.

I do a thing which the homeless folks downtown around my office call 'playing sandwich fairy'. When I leave the office for lunch, if I'm going to go grab a sandwich, I'll make a quick circuit around the area, and any of the homeless folks I see, I ask if there's a sandwich I can get them at Subway. If they say yes, I get their order, then I walk over to Subway, get my sandwich and all the others, and then I retrace my steps, handing out the sandwiches before returning to the office to eat my own.

One of my co-workers asked me why the heck I do it, because "You realize you're not actually fixing the problem by getting sandwiches for five or six people, right? No matter what any one person does, it won't make a dent." To which my reply was, "Yeah, but it makes a difference to those five or six people. And if everyone did little acts of kindness like that, then in aggregate, it would make a huge difference."

It's like the quote from The Adventure Zone: "Do good recklessly."

@mietze said in RL things I love:

And I can't believe I have an employer that gave me the day off to help and paid me my usual wage too.

It's so nice when a company is supportive like that.

There's a shelter for homeless youth about 10 minutes walk from my office. My company has, for years now, staffed the shelter during lunches; a bunch of folks will walk over and spend an hour helping make lunch, and then another batch will show up and spend an hour serving food (while the first group heads back to the office). It's not just allowed but encouraged to pitch in.

Nine months.

Nine months I've been on aimovig. In that time, I have had very few migraines, and without exception they all responded immediately to the abortive. (I've had one cluster headache, which is freaking terrible; cluster headaches are like migraines on the "Nightmare" difficulty setting, where the pain has a high enough chance of causing suicidal thoughts that they're actually also known as "suicide headaches". But I generally only get 1-2 clusters a year, and the aimovig was never going to help with those, so that's no surprise.)

Today, I woke up with a migraine. Oh well, this has happened once or twice before. "Shoot," says I, "I guess I better take my migraine abortive before I attend my teleconference with the UK office! It only takes an hour at most to kick in, so I'll be more than ready to go into the office today once the two hours of teleconferencing meetings are done."

That was three and a half hours ago.

It has not kicked in. The migraine is, in fact, actively getting worse. I will be working from a dark, quiet room at home today, and may take a half day.

I shouldn't despair. This is just one headache; it's not even the worst migraine I've had by a long shot. But it's the first one in nine months that hasn't responded to the abortive. And now that aimovig has been out long enough, they're seeing that some percentage of folks stop seeing as much effect—sometimes any effect—from it around 8-10 months into treatment. I've been waiting nervously to see if I skated through that window, because the neurologist says that so far she hasn't heard of anyone who makes it through that spot having the aimovig lose effectiveness.

And so all I can think is "Please let this be a fluke. Please don't let this be the first step of a return to the old state." Because that possibility makes me want to cry.

Nine months of understanding what it is to not have a constant low-grade migraine. To not have 2-3 spikes of severe migraine a week. Of actually being able to go out on a sunny day and not worry about whether the sun would turn into a death laser aimed through my eyes at my brain. To not worry about "should I go see that movie with friends, because theater sound systems are awfully loud?"

Please, whatever entity controls medical reactions, let this one be a fluke...

@Lemon-Fox - I mean, I don't know if MCG does have a policy like that; I just thought Coin's post was saying they did by saying that using the Strange for something online would be as bad as trying to use a Steve Jackson Games line. Your reading might also be correct!

@Lemon-Fox said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@Coin said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

It really is very sad because The Strange is one of the most enticing game settings, really.

Isn't that owned by Monte Cook Games?

I mean, given it's literally a game by Monte Cook and all...

But I just thought Coin was saying that MCG had the same sort of policy about online games SJG does, not that SJG literally had The Strange.

@Ghost — There used to be what felt like 200 different anime games out there back in the 1990's, and every time you blinked another one popped up. AnimeMUCK, AnimeMUSH, RanmaMUCK, ElseMUCK, ShoujoMUCK, FictionMUCK, there was a MUCK solely based on Utena which I do not honestly remember the name of, BSSMM (Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon MUX)...

@wahoo - my current MacBook Pro is having the display issues there's a recall for, but it isn't bad yet so I haven't taken it in. Maybe I should just get a newer one and then turn in the older one for repairs once I wouldn't be without machine, then once the repairs are done, turn the older one into a beta OS box like the old Mac Pro used to be. Because it is really useful to have a spare device to run the OS betas on.

@wahoo - ugh. Well, I'll install Catalina on something later and see what might be happening; that build works fine on Mojave, so it's got to be some Catalina specific changes. I'll just have to figure out what to put the beta on; I don't really want to install Catalina on my personal laptop, and right now I know some of the tools I need for work won't work on Cat, so I can't upgrade that one. And my aging cheesegrater (I.e. original style Mac Pro) is old enough it won't run this one.

Right now we're underwater on GM stuff on Arx, but I'll figure out a solution to debug Atlantis on Catalina once we're above water again a bit more. If it's super completely broken, though, I am gonna cry.

@Auspice - Conga rats!

@Auspice - the issues that were reported were all in the experimental 64-bit build. If you're on the 64-bit build you should be okay on Catalina; if you are not, you're fine until you get Catalina, at which point it will cease to work. I need to get the 64-bit build in better shape and put it out.

I might honestly just flip the Atlantis GitHub public and let other people start coding it, too.

@wahoo said in Atlantis Client:

@Sparks I'm on the beta program so I think I might be d-e-d on Arx for a while.

Oh, yeah. Unless you download the beta build of the 64-bit version earlier in the thread, you're fucked.

ETA: http://riverdark.net/atlantis/downloads/Atlantis-0.9.9.6-rc4.zip - I haven't had a chance to get rc5 finished.

Yeah, I need to push the 64 bit version publicly live soon, before Catalina drops in September. Otherwise the 32 bit older version dies.

@SinCerely said in MU Things I Love:

@Sparks You hit the sweet spot. Good god damn, woman.

I'm glad; I felt that one was really important to get right and give a lot of meaning.