Best posts made by surreality

@Thenomain I have this now.

It's so good it's worth sharing just to spread the word, no joke.

@Pondscum I hope they throw the book at them. No, fuck a book. I hope they throw every volume of the encyclopedia at them.

Are you looking for boilerplate policies pre-written for a game, or for a wiki template?

I can't help on the former but could probably paste you code for the latter if you want.

Mediate.

@tempest said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

I mean, until we have code where +roll strength checks your name, then checks the wiki, and pulls info from some staff-maintained database on the wiki or some shit....

That was totally possible. The +roll code just wasn't done yet. Sheet data was, however, public. But I'm big on the open sheet thing. If it can be pulled for +finger, it can be pulled for +roll.

@WTFE If you can get past the 'omg that is so 90s trenchcoat and a katana' brain that generated the gun fu, it's a pretty powerful flick. The scene with the room full of 'artifacts', as it is discovered, is strikingly well done.

Similarly, there was a piece of crap horror flick that was part found footage part 'documentary' about kids who got abducted by aliens and disappeared (the faux documentary part is the families investigating the disappearance, the found footage part the last evidence they find) had one of the most impressive visuals I've seen in a long time: after years when these kids had been gone, they showed a picture of a blank wall in the house of one of the families, which had the vague outlines on it that indicated that there were once a number of small pictures there, that had now been taken down, as the families spoke about trying to find resolution in the narration. They later pan down to a box with the framed family photos in it, but the simple image of that wall was surprisingly profound (and it's sad that the 'explainer' pan down is necessary, but lowest common denominator, I guess). Most of the movie was garbage, but that was a very finely crafted sequence.

@Arkandel I always like to think of it this way:

The people I want to hire as staff generally do not need to be told any of <things in policy>, because they know what's OK and what is not OK because they're ethical people and think before they act.

I'm not hand-selecting and hiring and screening the players. Players can come from anywhere, be known or unknown, be oldbies or brand new to the hobby, and will have different expectations based on their experiences, lack of experiences, and so on.

The latter are going to need guidelines to make sure they are all on the same page and understand the expectations. While this is helpful for staff as well, it's not as necessary, because players aren't selected and screened in the same way.

Pontificate?

@thenomain Remind me later and I will poke some things? I was revamping +finger as +profile and had a sampling of data that did exactly what you're describing in the test bit.

@Lain Confirmation, the ritual, is a statement of full belief in the dogma and a life-long promise to follow the tenets of the faith.

Content of said rite of passage is relevant. If that rite of passage essentially means 'I agree to be a lying pretender for the rest of my life' if you go through with it, well, no. Not doing that.

@Bobotron said in [Request] Policy Template:

I think there's a point where there's a bit of 'blinders' on the policy stuff, particularly in certain communities throughout MU*land.

I'm a detail person also, but for a somewhat different reason.

Namely, this is a hobby with a lot of 'understood' and 'unspoken' rules about manners, conduct, etc. Depending on what part of the hobby one is in, this also varies somewhat widely, which complicates everything further.

That is an enormous hurdle for new players to learn, and it is very easy for people to become alienated by innocent missteps before they hit their stride or adapt.

As @Sunny mentions, expectations must be clear -- also as a matter of simple fairness.

What makes me sad is that I would swear I had that exact jacket in the 80s.

@faraday I get where you're coming from on the desc samples, save for one bit. Namely, the second of each pair actually contains more information. If written in the first format, the amount of information conveyed would be much, much longer -- so it's actually a shortening method rather than 'here's why I want to write a ninety-miles-long desc'.

'she has a stubborn chin' is simple, and a lot shorter and cleaner than 'she has a defined jawline, and her default resting expression gives the impression of stubbornness', which is what the first actually conveys. (The previous example, just 'she has a defined jawline', doesn't have this much info available.)

With the jewelry example, both convey that the character is wearing a lot of jewelry. The second gives a lot more subtle detail -- it's 'dumped' on, it's maybe all she's got, it probably isn't well-coordinated and doesn't match or necessarily make sense together, may appear cluttered and overdone, etc. Again, adding all of those elements to 'wearing a lot of jewelry' would expand the one quick line into multiple charmless sentences when one simple phrase with easy inferences will typically accomplish the same thing.

Hopefully that makes sense. It isn't any issue of length preference so much as trying to pack personality and characterization into the words you're using, no matter how few or many of them there are. The more wisely you use them, the fewer you tend to need.

@Derp Holy hell, man. Good luck. A friend of mine was in a similar position last year; it is... I can't even imagine when it's a family member. Ears are open if they are needed.

@faraday To be fair, we have not seen it here yet, but we used to see it all the time on WORA.

@HelloProject You don't even know the half of it. It's why other than lingering around here a little for another week or so to make sure I catch up with some folks and clean up some loose ends, I'm pretty much done.

I am more or less the hobby's canary in the coal mine, I think. Maybe it was foreshadowing that I turned bright yellow and then almost died earlier this year? ...weird how I totally missed that symbolism entirely until just now! Signs, man.

@sunny Definitely. He and I have kept in touch some, since I had sent him a silly rant about TS descs that went up on the pre-forum website, and we always got along OK. (It was more silly than mean, things like 'if two dudes with descs describing their dicks as 'the biggest you have ever seen' were to stand in the same room naked, would their wangs magically just keep growing to out-do the other until they blotted out the sun? Don't do this!' and such.)

Beachcombing. Seriously instant zen. Especially when neat things are found.

Funny when the husband wants to leave because he’s afraid it will start to rain again until I found an old C3PO happy meal toy in a tangle of seaweed, at which point he decided to give it another go.

So I guess I also my husband’s weakness for his longest held geekery. It is kinda adorkable.

There is something I would really very much like to see happen, and I cannot code for beans. I know even less about SQL and the wiki-to-MUX or MUX-to-wiki integration.

It would, ideally, be one function. (It may need other functions it might be dependent upon; I do not know enough about MUX code to know if it will or will not.)

I do not think it would likely be an easy thing. I just know that for the kind of wiki-fu I screw around with, it would be amazingly useful.

What I'm picturing: name of the function could be anything that doesn't conflict with something else, I'm just going to call it 'wikiyank' here.

[wikiyank(namespace,pagename,template variable)] -- something roughly like that.

Namespace and pagename should be fairly self-explanatory; by template variable, I mean something like this:

{{Template
|variable01=something
|variable02=something else
|variable03=something else entirely
|variable04=and another thing
}}

so it'd look something like: [wikiyank(namespace,pagename,variable03)]
in the code, and that would spit out: something else entirely
as raw text.

(Some of the things I want to use this for could arguably just be a page of raw text brought over through existing methods. Others, no, as this would mean scads of specifically named pages consisting of something like the number 3 and nothing else. <eyetic> Not doing that.)

This may be even more complicated than it sounds because the delimiter you'd expect you'd want to look for -- the pipe symbol -- is used throughout a whole lot of other wiki code. If necessary, I may be able to work around that, but I can't guarantee it.

Also, super curious if anyone has managed to find a way of sending the output of +events or similar code from the MUX to the wiki -- or can think of a way the wiki could populate something along those lines to send to the MUX. I can set it up to force a raw text output for that, but I suspect it's not that simple.

I have no idea what I could potentially bribe anyone with to try to accomplish this, or what would need to be set up server side to allow for it. I just know that at this point, it would be incredibly useful, and have the potential to make my life about 10x easier. It would be sincerely appreciated.

(I make beaded jewelry -- yes, some of it can be worn easily by dudes and/or I can make pieces that are -- and dye yarn and wool roving, so if by some strange miracle there's someone into either of those things, has a significant other into those things in need of shiny stuff, or similar, I would happily send some of either or both as a thank you. You can probably guess how likely money is in this scenario because I make beaded jewelry and dye yarn for a living. These are... not exactly cash cows on the best day, unfortunately. )

Do you know what con it was? Even if someone doesn't necessarily know the player by this description, some con networks are pretty tight; you may catch the attention of another poster here who may know someone they could ask if the circumstances sound familiar.

I don't do cons these days, but the husband does a few, and I'd be happy to ask him if this sounds like anyone he knows if the con is one he does. (I think he was doing Anime Next most recently.)