Best posts made by surreality

@mietze Exactly. Which is why insisting it's a 'second offense' is putting forth opinion and claiming it as universal truth/fact. I'm just not even a little bit down with that.

@derp I'm trying to keep the faith. I objectively know it is completely stupid of me to do, but I am.

It is not remotely easy.

Here's hoping you're not two years into this bullshit and your version resolves way faster.

@skew Digitalocean has the ufw firewall installed by default on the LAMP droplet one-click-apps; it's newish but I've seen it going back to around the start of the year from what I recall, at least.

Info on it is here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-16-04

That's the 'how to set it up', but the LAMP Ubuntu droplet has it installed and active by default, so if there are other adjustments you want to make, that covers other refinements/etc.

@auspice We could do with more of those. Especially when it's corgis. Because there are never too many corgis. It is non-possible.

"We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are."
-Clive Barker, Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament

"I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one."
-Guillermo del Toro

Extensions I won't do without:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Page_Forms - not preinstalled
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList3 - not preinstalled
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions - preinstalled (enabling string functions is also useful)

Extensions I find useful:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MagicNoCache - not preinstalled
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Variables - not preinstalled
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CollapsibleVector - not preinstalled

Mrph: (none preinstalled)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Arrays - very useful, but not currently maintained, mostly useful to automatically calculate dates/time periods with: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DateDiff
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Header_Tabs - I like this one, y'all may not. Not necessarily easy to work with re: custom styling, as it is fussy.

I pretty much adored my ghoul on Reno1. She was the strangest creature. Down on her luck former socialite/artist, scraping by. But she had manners and knew how to socialize. Her regnant was a suit-averse Bruja.

This combination was hilarious and led to her essentially becoming The Worst Disney Princess Ever.

• She learned about Animalism by yelling at the pigeons roosting in her as-yet-renovated loft to 'fuck off', then ran screaming, recoiling in sheer horror.

• She once mowed down a zombie with a mini-cooper, which is sort of like monster-murder by Hello! Kitty-mobile.

• She felt very, very bad for shooting a bear after forgetting she could just tell the bear to go away. Oops. "Bear? <nudge nudge with point of boot> Bear? Wake up bear... OH GOD I'M A HORRIBLE BEAR MURDERESS!"

• Her actual vice was Bitchy. She lived up to it. She was more fun when she knew she could absolutely not under any circumstances live up to it, slowly letting the cattiness build until she'd politely excuse herself and go punch holes in things... like walls. Because she was eventually more or less murder ghoul.

She was great fun when she succeeded at something, but far, far more entertaining when she failed at things, because wow, did she ever fail in spectacularly amusing ways.

Making sure to fully redo this before having to go to the DMV to replace a lost driver's license:

...go ahead, motherfuckers. Go ahead and just copy and paste 'brown' again.

(Fuck you, WB of the WoDiverse -- that shit took five hours. And, no, there's no retouching or color adjustment; it is that fucking bright.)

As a quick note, the current install on DigitalOcean for mediawiki droplets will bork itself with almost any change to LocalSettings.php without a tweak.

After the database portion of the file, you'll want to add:

$wgCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";

...stick it right under $wgUpgradeKey and things unbreak again. Figured someone else would run into this one until whatever the next version is that goes in, and better if only one of us has to beat our head against the wall searching up error strings for an hour of head-desking.

@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Games set in crappy/oppressive worlds have flourished before, but it seems like there was some seismic shift over the last few years where everyone got worried they'd be labeled some sort of '-ist' and now everything's sanitized and pretty boring. People don't seem to leap to OOC accusations of the player behind a character being a murderer when that character kills a bunch of people, and I'm confused why we seem to have decided that's self-evident but a character being a sexist or a racist is legitimate cause for OOC concern.

I think this is well put.

The unfortunate thing is, it isn't a completely unreasonable fear -- or, rather, it doesn't seem to be an unreasonable fear at all any more.

There's more than a few instances around the board in recent months in which it's been said outright that anyone wanting to play in a setting like this, or play a character with any of these traits, is somehow celebrating these traits, getting off on them, or that it's a reflection their real world views in some fashion.

I never actually thought I'd see that happen, but it seems to be surprisingly widespread. Sometimes these views are expressed very vocally and aggressively, which may make them seem more common than they actually are -- the loudest voices in the room principle at work, more or less -- but it appears to be a prevailing view.

Normally, I'm pretty 'live and let live' about these things. Games can allow this, disallow this, or strike some balance in between, and so far as I'm concerned, that's all well and good; people will naturally migrate to the games and settings that support their preferred play style and comfort zone, and everybody's happy. To me, that's just common sense, live and let live, etc. and it should be the end of it.

It's hard for that to be the end of it, though, when there are endless discussions about whether something is acceptable subject matter period, anywhere, ever, for any reason, even among players interested in exploring those themes peaceably and consentually amongst themselves in a way that's very vocally damning of the actual players/people behind the screen as being necessarily horribly flawed people for considering these themes, settings, or character concepts.

ETA: It comes back to the fundamental assumption that all games should cater to all players, essentially. They shouldn't, in my view. Players should seek out the games that support the fun they want to have, whatever form that fun takes.

@arkandel It was being done by Glitch and company before, also. As this dipshit’s favorite target, let me just note that I don’t exactly appreciate the call to leave all of his bullshit aimed at me standing, which was a pause in the deletion of posts from repeat offenders, not something new y’all just cooked up and had never been considered or implemented before. I’m out of town and not even checking in much, let alone doing anything to this harassing gasbag, but he’s stirring shit again? Really? I don’t know if I should be grateful or pissed to have missed whatever new poison he vomited forth.

@Bobotron Yes! Works the same way.

You can use directly installed webfonts as well, but you do have to be able to directly install them/etc. (Myfonts.com has some good and reasonably priced ones, and a few free ones -- you can build an installer from there that'll spit out the css for you, which just goes at the top of your MediaWiki:Common.css page, anc once you upload your fonts to the server as directed it'll work fine.)

@ganymede Gotcha -- I definitely misread then. Sorry about that! (Show prep = brain scramble, and I try to shut up then normally, but... FAIL!)

I don't actually know how to deal with the 'argue the extremes alone' problem at this juncture, since it is essentially a duel between strawmen that insults the majority of sensible, respectful individuals by its very existence (sometimes, in both directions at once). This isn't the only subject it arises in, but ugh, does it get ugly in this one.

I mean, we already have answers for the actual extremes:

• The people who can simply not accept these things existing in any form in a setting can play on a place that doesn't allow them, or allows only fantastical forms of these issues (fantasy, space aliens, etc.) if they're only comfortable with non-real-world forms.

• The people who are genuinely bad actors (and are never so subtle or hard to spot as they assume they are; I've never seen one of these players not out their bigotry on channels, OOC rooms, or in conversations that get reported to staff) who want to indulge in actual OOC bigotry behind a character-shaped mask of plausible deniability should be shown the door promptly.

It's the rest of us that need answers, and they're hard to come to if 'if you accept this at all, you just want to demean women RL and call people offensive slurs right and left' or 'you just want the world rewritten to bubble wrap your personal sensibilities and everyone is sensitive to something' are the only positions people recognize as participants in the discussion.

@bobotron I really hope someone picks up Lucifer. It was the most unexpectedly endearing show in ages.

@SG Oh crap. OK. Is this on digitalocean? Because their latest install does this. And it is a pain in the ass.

What you are going to need to do:

ssh into your account and edit your local settings file (LocalSettings.php)

You are going to want to do something that you never want to ever, ever, EVER do under any other circumstances.

Add this line:

$wgGroupPermissions['user']['userrights'] = true;

Save your work to LocalSettings.php and go back to your wiki immediately. You will now be able to change your account to the proper administrator/bureaucrat options.

THE MOMENT YOU DO SO, GO BACK TO LOCALSETTINGS.PHP ON YOUR SERVER AND DELETE THAT LINE OF CODE YOU ADDED ABOVE.

Save LocalSettings.php again (without that line in it), and you should be fixed.

Is this a crappy workaround? Ayep. Still have had to do it twice now. Which is a giant pain in the arse, but it works.

I don't know kitty, either, to give you the specifics you need for the editing, but you'd do those edits however you've been editing your LocalSettings.php file any other time.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I honestly don't get why there is such resistance to the idea that it is okay to have your character opt out of dealing with racism/sexism/homophobia, etc that may hit you on a personal level.

My take on this is to require direct consent for it to occur, like many other controversial themes.

I heard this was completely stupid crazy talk and it should be banned outright if people could just 'opt out' and got aggressively browbeaten about it from both sides of the argument -- as in, 'it even existing in the world where it might be read in a log in which consensual participants go there' was unacceptable, and 'allowing people to opt-out breaks immersion and that's important above all!'

I find both attitudes to be complete bullshit nonsense, but I am apparently stupid and crazy. <shrugs>

(This isn't the first time this topic has come up.)

@lisse24 That’s horrifying, no matter how apt the poop emoji may be for so much of it lately.

In fairness, the suggestion I have for someone to be able to common sense fix the problem the current mediawiki install has on digital ocean is not a best practice.

I am reasonably sure there's a more secure way to do it than the one I laid out through some back end, and the one provided does absolutely have risks (and big ones).

For someone without heavy duty SQL/mediawiki/server experience, however, it works and will fix the problem without incident most of the time. That describes me, really. I only know the fix because I ran into the same problem, and after digging around about how to go about it, that was the only answer I found.

At some point, you have to do what works and hope for the best, especially when the argument about how to get something done takes up more time than researching how and getting it done.

@collective Agreed.

I went with 'you have to opt-IN' to those subjects, and direct OOC consent was still required.

It had a setup for 'RP preferences' where people could write their personal comfort zones for various forms of content. All the controversial content was there. As in, you could detail exactly what was, and was not, OK with you, on any given subject, since a lot of this stuff is fairly nuanced. For instance, somebody might be OK with hearing 'bitch' thrown around, but find 'no, I'm not hiring you because you're a woman and thus too emotional!' -- or might be fine with some kind of Gorean whatever, but only with negotiation first, or... the list is endless, and giving people a neutral space to outline their personal OK/NOT OK boundaries strikes me as helpful. (Many people disagree. Still doing it if I do a thing.)

Stuff can exist in the world, but whether someone engages with that stuff or not absolutely should be up to the player, because the player is ultimately more important than anybody's character.

@coin @cupcake They're doing a pretty stellar job on complex characters, which is always great -- and can't really be relied on when the presumptive 'draw' of a show is going to be the wire combat. They're also still doing a really good job of keeping everyone in the land of shades of grey rather than black and white; that some of the characters are actively struggling with this and some aren't at various points is another contrast that I don't see enough of, and is something I missed dearly when Black Sails sailed off into the sunset. (Bajie wins hands-down for me on this front as the character I'd most want to hug and punch often at the same time.)

We're seeing more and more of this, and often from the cable networks and streaming services. It's less melodramatic hand-wringing soap opera and more realistic in terms of the struggles people actually have.

...also, the general visual design for what I mentally dub 'the murder twins' is so damned beyond OOH SHINY to me that my inner costumer squeaks and trills any time they're on screen.