Best posts made by surreality

@Derp To some extent, some of that was handled right out of the gate. For visuals, you can cover a lot of this with wiki templates and forms, and organizing your headers and so on to be uniform MUX-side. The forms and so on are handy to lock down a consistent presentation, and allow for some fairly fancy and precisely organized presentation without any need to ever so much as look at the page code.

In my case, the game could pull data from a wiki template, thanks to @Thenomain's news/+help code and @Glitch being a saint to fine-grain it to pluck one template variable; this meant things like filling out the infobox on your character page on the wiki (which wasn't the raw code, but just filled out through data entry on a form, so it was easier to not break and keep consistent) could populate +finger and other commands on the game, so some of the basic, uniform data could be stored on the pages, and both the game and the wiki essentially had templates (in the wiki's case, actual templates and lists, on the MUX, code designed to read that data) that kept it tidy and uniform in structure and presentation from item to item of any given type. (Don't get me wrong, this is a process of doom and it was taking forever, but it felt worthwhile.)

The rest really is a matter of identifying which things you want to have open to additions, and write up something fairly straightforward to explain what is and isn't within bounds (within reason; you can't list everything in the world that is or isn't, so there will always be some judgement calls). WoD has a fairly straightforward example of this in their Mystery Cult writeup, and the build guidelines for most games handle this nicely.

People access to the form, if it's form-based content, to fill out (which will automatically populate the data to the game and throughout the wiki) or set up the build/specific object they're looking for MUX-side/etc.

@Rinel I send all the hugs ever in support of hoping there won't be things like this. I really do. It's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and you seem pretty cool.

In all sincerity, I consider it brave as fuck-all to go through hormone treatments of any kind, for any purpose. The ability of those systems to Jekyll and Hyde the hell out of someone are real, terrifying, and emotionally painful unto themselves.

I have one or two friends I trust, really, to talk to much during that four or five days, because they're aware and KNOW not to take me seriously if I explode or start sobbing over nothing (in part because they know I feel horrible about it and will bend over backward to apologize and I do everything I can to make it right, since I'm still responsible for it, whether it's something I can readily control or not).

Fingers crossed nothing similar will ever crop up. Am rooting for you.

And, as usual, the urge to bash people overcomes reading comprehension to the extent it makes a complete fool of people.

I guess some things never change.

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

'Sitting properly in a chair is torture.'
...my 33-year-old ass is sitting cross-legged in my chair right this second.
I do it at work, too, sometimes.
HOW DOES ANYONE SIT NORMALLY

I am laughing, 'cause... YES, THIS. I've never seen it mentioned before that image, too!

The looks I get at office supply places when the first thing I do to see if a chair is comfortable is to sit with one leg tucked under, or both pulled up on the chair, are priceless.

@deadculture said in Fading Suns 2017:

Say what you mean, or don't.

Pretty sure I did precisely that.

That it failed to pass the comprehension check is as entertaining as it was predictable.

@Rinel I seriously love them. Love love love. They have seriously saved my ass on organization. I want a mountain of them for the studio and more for the bathroom when I can afford 'em.

They're also an insanely convenient size for the rubbermaid 'brilliance' containers and their lids we replaced the tupperware with, and both are equally clear, so my 'not everything matches-ish' eyetic doesn't flare up. (Also highly recommend those if you need something with good locking lids. We originally got some as 'display boxes' for the shells we collect since they're cheaper than actual display boxes by far, and became similarly addicted to them.)

Eventually, we will acquire a double boiler that is... less old than two or more of me. Our kitchen is 1940s tiny, and that space under the tupperware? All there is for pots and pans. There's not even wall for a rack. We found a nice, compact, durable, stacking set we're sloooooooooooooooowly getting pieces of when it's on sale that fits our absurdly small space, so we'll eventually pick up the one from that.

@bored Nah, I just saw the comment and decided to take a look, because it seemed destined to be funny, and, you know, more of the same shit I've seen from you before. But that was gold, man. Gold.

You can try to divert from your boneheaded bullshit like this, but it's not going to work; safe for posterity now.

Fun definition of toxic: so dedicated to being a negative fuckwit and maintaining a false sense of superiority that one loses the ability to read what's on the screen right in front of them and resorts to increasingly desperate ploys to divert attention from their own failures by slinging dirt at others.

@AeriaNyx I have more to say about this (in support of what you're describing) when caffeine withdrawl headache fucks off, but... yeah.

What you're describing is a lot like a 'pay to play' scenario. While they aren't looked on grandly in this hobby, at least those are generally transparent and open to anybody.

I know when Spider was here, she sent some of the stuff she found in the room she was staying in to this person. (Not her things, my things.) She was already boxing that shit up before she even thought to ask if this was OK -- then claimed it was a single old stuffed animal, but dang did that box rattle loud and get heavy for a single old stuffed animal.

I dunno if it helps to have someone say they know this shit was definitely, absolutely going on... but this shit was definitely, absolutely going on.

@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:

@deadculture I don't even know what's happening here.

Apparently I'm evil, I guess for pointing that 'the Firan players who ruined SC' were 1) mostly just normal players, the same as you find anywhere (I know for a fact many of them played WoD too) and 2) that the game had strengths aside from its weaknesses?

@surreality You're acting like the people you whine about harassing you everywhere. You really seem like a mental health case, and that this hobby is something you shouldn't be involved in.

(So let's just quote this before it all gets edited yet again.)

You're not evil for that claim. You're an idiot for being so dedicated to bashing @HelloProject that you didn't bother to read what he actually wrote, and it's just a bonus irony that it agreed with that sentiment in full.

I'm a petty, vindictive cunt when people earn it, and that is precisely what's happening right now -- I cheerfully own that shit. Call it my inner Sicilian waking up.

If you consider reading a thread and laughing at your fuckup when it was spotted harassment, what would you call what you did in mine? Oh, yeah... huh. Double standards and behavior blindness are typical of the toxic crap described.

And more of the same: divert from admitting and owning a fuckup or employing even the most marginal measure of self-awareness by increasingly escalating accusations and ad hominem absurdity. You win the internets! (Shame the prize is a dunce cap.)

Edit: P.S. Back to ignore now.

First followup this afternoon on the first round of the dental surgery nightmare.

Since I don't think I actually posted about this when it happened, here goes nothing:

They're doing this in two stages: top first, it heals and is done, then they start on the bottom. Healing == 3-9 months. FML.

Most places offer to knock you out for this shit -- or offer gas or twilight sleep. NOPE. Not on offer. I got to be awake throughout. FML.

Since everything was numb to the point of 'do I have a face? I am not sure if I have a face... ' I didn't feel anything, but that wasn't really the problem. There is the existential horror factor of 'they are ripping out every one of my top teeth', which is bad enough, but it takes a while, the noises are disquieting as fuckall, and in the case of implants, there is another step.

This step hit #2 on my personal body horror checklist, displacing the creepy IV drip that ran from my upper arm to just beside my heart in the hospital (I forget the name of the thing, but needless to say, someone playing mouse maze with an IV tube and my circulatory system gives me the skittering crawlies).

Because there's that moment you're wide awake and you realize that the friendly all-smiles person staring down at you is boring a drill that looks like it could strike oil straight up into your skull through your gums, and you realize: 'I came here on purpose.'

And it takes a fucking while, y'all.

It takes long enough for you to really sit there and ponder the life choices that brought you to that particular place and time and circumstance. While there's not a lot I could ever have done differently to change things -- bad genes, highly acidic body chemistry, years of not being able to keep food down due to stomach issues, braces ripping off enamel, the shitty work done by the clinic that was all we could afford -- I was already well into time travel scenarios involving a now-aged me yelling at my (then me-now-aged) parents in a Timecop jumpsuit about how slightly crooked teeth are not the end of the fucking world before handing little me a selection of winning lottery numbers before stage-whispering, "Get out!" like a ghost in a horror flick before diving back through the time portal by the time he was done drilling six mine shafts into my skull.

(I will reiterate, I was not gassed or otherwise high at the time. I'm more or less always like this.)

I'm sent off home to go rest, with 3 days worth of quite literally the weakest vicodin scrip available (less effective than two excedrin, this is not a joke). It does the job well enough to mostly just knock me the fuck out for the rest of the day.

Positives: despite over 30 injections, no nerve damage. This has happened before, and it fucking blows. (5 years later sensation is mostly back, but not perfect, and that shit sucks -- smiling like you've had a stroke leads to a lot of not smiling.)

The next day, I have to go to the other dentist so they can screw on the fake temporaries.

Shit they don't fucking tell you and you don't necessarily think to ask about:

• The temporaries do not have spaces between the teeth. (Finals won't, either.) I am a floss whore and hypersensitive to the feeling that something is stuck between my teeth. This is driving me super insane. Having only seen models before, and that being the kind of corner people cut in models, I had no clue this was coming and OMG, guys, nnngh.

• There is a brand new ridge behind the back of my teeth, where tooth met gumline. 'Broadcast English Theater Me' now has the craziest fucking lisp and this is not even the tiniest bit OK. There are some other issues here but they're more technical or gross so just augh. My tongue is grumpy with me like it's the last remaining old guard codger hanging on 'til retirement at a small town business that just got inundated by hipster millennials.

• "Don't eat anything you can't cut with a spoon until the permanent teeth are in place." Yep, that's 3-9 months from now. For maybe like, two weeks, before it starts all over again for the bottom ones. Time to become besties with the slow cooker and finally get around to ordering that foodi cooker thing, which has moved from 'would be nice to have' to 'a person cannot actually live on pudding, even if you can get little mini-flans now', and I don't always have 12 hours to wait for meat to fall apart in the old slow cooker.

I get bounced back and forth between the surgeon and the doc to get these things screwed on. The swelling is so bad the surgeon has to do it. The words 'lasering off excess gum tissue' are used in my presence -- which seriously would also hit the top 5 personal body horror list in a nanosecond -- but they thankfully do not have to do that. <wood knock goes here>

"Don't worry, the second and third day are the worst, then it gets much easier."

OK. I'll trust you, smiling man with the skull drill.

And maybe that would have been the case, but...

...one of the clinic's badly capped teeth cracked and fused with my jawbone. Unbeknownst to me, it ripped out a 1/4 square, jagged-as-fuck chunk of jawbone when it came out. That very unhappy part of my face has been spitting out bone fragments -- wait, that is not the way to put that.

That does not convey what's happening here.

Tiny, multi-pronged, spiky bone caltrops are tearing their way out of that space on a daily basis as part of the healing process.

This is actually predictable and not very unusual; I had a minor version of it years ago. While it sucked, it was two tiny slivers, not a tribble farm of calcium devil-nettles. It also hurts badly enough that I literally cannot think or sleep through it, and tears just randomly appear from out of nowhere at intervals. If I took enough Tylenol to even dim that shit, it would actually kill me.

Weird side note: I have the teeth. I figured this would be a strange request, but the doctor insisted that most people want to keep them and I am thinking, 'good gods, why?!' (In my case, I had veneers done on the top front six many moons ago, and they fanged the shit out of my canines for me, as this happened back in my LARP days. Yes, I am that tragic geek loser that wanted to save my fangs. If my sad pretend vampire ass had to have my fangs pulled, by gods, I was keeping 'em.) There cannot be that many vampire LARPers out there, people that still believe in the tooth fairy, or are afraid the biomedical waste trash witch will put a curse on them.

Looking at the horror show that was the remains of them is how I figured out why this was happening, because... holy shit.

Hopefully, he can do something to fix it today or schedule a short-wait time to do so. Ideally it won't be a huge extra cost, but it may mean some kind of bone graft. (Nnngh.)

Hopefully, something more useful for the pain factor won't be a nightmare to insist on, because it's necessary, and while I'm sure I will die in some spectacularly stupid way, I don't want it to be 'my oral surgeon is so scared about the opioid epidemic that I die from a Tylenol overdose'.

I even considered just making sure I sleep through much of any recovery period, but I grind my teeth in my sleep when something hurts, and that will fuck things up faster that a wrecking ball to the chin and ensure nothing ever heals properly. I also apparently have crazy bite pressure, who knew? We will not discuss the number of sleep mouth guards I've completely torn apart or how quickly.

It's been an adventure thus far, y'all. Folks were supportive and understanding about this here in a huge way, so I figured the update was worth doing. It's not as bad as it could be, but dang.

@ThatGuyThere I have generally planned to require email if I ever open something -- as in, email to request a first login.

But really, that's required anyway for how I'm doing stuff; wiki use is also necessary, and wiki, while it can be set up to not require an email to be handed off to someone directly for account creation with some hacks or a complete lack of security, needs it.

Really, we hand out our emails on most games that create wiki logins this way, and generally to more than the 1-2 people who may have access to a game's gmail account to +jobs, which are often set up in such a way that any staffer might be able to read the email that's been shared in the +request.

Instead of thinking of things from the perspective of 'how games that require you to email for game access', which are few (and have the glaring problem of Elsa attached to them), think of it from the perspective of how many times people already do share this information in a much more broad way in +request on a game without anything remotely resembling an incident arising from it.

Trader Joe's (I swear I feel like an evangelist for that place sometimes) had something with a small amount of real juice in basic seltzer. I'm one of those people that for whatever reason cannot do artificial sweeteners. It's either the full sugary/syrupy version of a soda, or 0 cal seltzer without the sweetener (plain or with a flavor, the basic lemon-lime or mandarin orange has always been fine), so I gave it a shot. It wasn't bad! It's more bitter than seltzer, though I drink black coffee more than any of the above combined, so, uh, needless to say, that's not a huge issue for me!

I can deal with LaCroix but never got into getting it regularly. It's a good switchup to one of their more exotic flavors once in a blue moon, but I stick to the non-sweetened types.

That 'thirstier than when I started' is dialed up to 11 with me for all the artificial sweeteners, even in colas/etc. I'm that person that would rather have a can of 'real sugar' pepsi once a week than the artificially sweetened anything all the time. (This is kinda what we do.) It's more like 111 with the 'zero calorie sweet seltzers'. My mother was super into them for a long time (and my husband still is), so there was a period of years in which they'd have me try 'the best thing ever totally can't tell it's artificial!' yet again and I'd have a sip then immediately fill a cup with ice and need to wash the taste out of my mouth with three ice cold glasses of basic filtered tap water.

I may be misremembering this, but I think there have been studies on some of the sweeteners and the 'thirstier than when you started drinking' factor.

@Derp @HelloProject That.

Plus, having it means you can do some cool things -- like allow people to OPT-IN to get a notification if one of their characters is going to freeze soon, or to send a new password over to the player at the end of a temp-ban, send a new password if they forgot theirs and need to verify they are who they say they are somehow, etc. (@newpassword is the easiest way to do this when it becomes necessary, and it requires somewhere to send that.)

I didn't plan to have guest logins enabled at all times. Mostly, they wouldn't have been, but there would have been a posted schedule for 'open house' periods for guest availability on the wiki. So email becomes a little more necessary. (I hadn't decided if it'd be something like a certain week per month, weekends only, one month per season, or what. But it was a thing.)

Have long been a fan of this.

@Ghost Hyperbole and a real contortionist stretch of logic aren't fact.

And it changes absolutely nothing about the fact that the mechanic is in no way singled out or defined as being indicative of a measure of superhuman or non-mundane ability.

That they wrote it all into a power designed to indicate precisely (edit: those things professionally trained mundane skill), without a supernatural predicate, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that your preferred interpretation is absolutely nothing more than that and has nothing to do with the intent of the game designers.

You can argue for your perspective, but stop pretending it's some purist approach that's 'the true source of the mechanic', because on its face, that's utter nonsense.

@Seamus Caffeine withdrawl is about equivalent to a migraine from hell for most folks. You have my sincerest sympathy.

(If ever you don't have to cut out caffeine... omg, don't.)

@Ghost I'm not calling you any names or slinging insults at you; I am discussing your argument exclusively. Knock off the accusations, please.

There's also a bit of licensing and business transition history involved, not just 'cleaning up mistakes'.

Considering that they heavily revised, and re-released (and re-re-released in every edition for mortal and supernaturals, an expansion from the original Hunter-only approach that TR and FC spread more broadly) PT, I can't say I agree, but that's neither here nor there.

WW/OP doesn't focus on game balance, or trouble themselves much about 'the balance between mortals and supernaturals'. What you're describing increases the imbalance between the two and in a way not indicated in the game's current design by attempting to define the intent behind the mechanic as something other than what it is, which has been reinforced in subsequent editions of the various game lines.

If that's what you think is desirable, this does that. If not, you're not increasing balance, you're highlighting imbalance. Either way, cool, but the difference is relevant.

...but it should honestly be in comic sans for maximum impact.

@Thenomain See, I love me some target numbers -- but not necessarily in the structure for WoD.

For MUX, I think target numbers can simplify things somewhat; modifiers handle this now, but that's a lot of +/- to keep in mind at all times and their application is dodgy at best in terms of uniformity from scene to scene, ST to ST, etc.

I wouldn't suggest re-introducing them to WoD, but as it stands, that it's as difficult to perform a casual task as it is a very hard one with the same pool is the kind of simplification that breaks reasonableness more than it can be said to enhance it in any way. It's simpler, yes, but that isn't always a selling point.

@Rinel I have an unfortunate fondness for their chicken nuggets that I am free of until I can eat solid food again. (...in about a year. ) But it is a guilt-free year on that front and something about that is genuinely lovely. I discount no upsides!