Posts made by surreality

@saulot You could arguably just not use 'classic werewolf' as written, and just have 'wolf' an allowed CB type, fwiw, no different from any of the other types. (Which is essentially the same as just making all things that shift on the same footing, vs. 'all things OTHER THAN WOLVES are X, but wolves are special!!!' which is more or less how it's done in the canon generally.)

@lithium Yeah, that's the bridge I can't cross. I tried pretty solidly and consistently for about six years, and it just never stuck.

I am very much a direct manipulation person on some weirdly hard-wired level. I tried lampwork glass for instance, and just couldn't, because you can't touch the piece (because fire and molten glass) but I have no issue doing similar things with clay (which I can directly handle, even if it involves tools) very intuitively.

ETA: I also shift my paper around a lot to different angles to get a better 'hold' on things due to body mechanics when drawing in a sketchbook (t-rex arms and boobs in the way again) when I draw, and I can account for that much better with something I'm directly working on, than working through, since it's a huge angle shift issue to compensate and mentally rewire for each time I waggle around to some new position.

@thatguythere I think, oddly enough, this works for and against a place.

One of the benefits of Reno1, back when, in the period between its opening rush (which every game had, after which 1/3-1/2 of the initial appers who just apped every new place at the time fall off in the first or second idle freeze) and WtF2 hitting (when a new wave hit, which was followed by the RfK closing wave), was the size.

It wasn't tiny but it certainly wasn't big. People had to be on better behavior and keep themselves in check and compromise to get anywhere -- all around. And people did, and in a reasonably peaceable manner, too. The environment at the time greatly benefited from this, and it was one of the healthier game communities I've seen during that period.

It's one of the reasons I find that 'active player group of around 10 or so players on most of the time + 20 or so players popping in 2-3 times/week + 20 or so more casual players popping in maybe once a week' to be pretty much the ideal 'sweet spot'; it's enough people around to allow for opportunities, but not so many that things become permanent niches or cliques or circlejerks if people want to actually do stuff.

@lithium I always joke -- and it isn't entirely a joke -- that I just didn't play enough video games as a kid. My hand-eye coordination is insanely precise. My hand-eye-screen coordination is complete garbage, though, which is a huge disconnect. A lot of folks (even in my generation, I'm in my mid-40s) grew up playing video games to develop the hand-eye-screen coordination skills needed, so it's way easier for them to adapt. I still don't play them (and was always super bad at them -- partly for this same reason -- going all the way back so I never developed the interest even if I like watching the graphics and will watch others play) so that's one of my major weakness areas.

I'm one of those doodlers that will curl up around my sketchbook like Golum all 'my precccciousssssssss' with a pencil or rapidograph pinched between my fingers and whatnot being all hyper-specific. (I always had problems 'working big' for this reason in school, too, but being super short and having stupid boobs that always hit the canvas/paper when I'd have to lean/reach super high didn't help either.)

It's like all the physical mechanics just conspire against me. I had a nice intuos for a while and it did help -- but I still had huge problems with it because of the way I had always done stuff for years. Like, it was better than a mouse or a trackball, but not so much better that it made enough difference to get me back into doing what I wanted to be doing with it when I bought it.

Weirdly... my husband happened to read the previous post over my shoulder when I was showing him something else in here, and he was like, "Well... you are getting a new computer... you're not M*ing any more... maybe you should finally get one, because it pisses me off you gave up drawing. It's not like you haven't wanted one and gushed about getting one since the day they first became a thing." The 16 they have out now is a little too small... so apparently we're going to look at the possibility of the 24 whenever they release them (the 32 is gawgeous-omg, but has that 'nope, too big for my body mechanics' problem even if it wasn't destined to be way outside our budget), depending on how sales go this year and what the price point on those is when they're released (barring any major bullshit life changes between now and then or another unexpected hospitalization...).

I'm kinda in 'you could knock me over with a feather' land on that one, since he said he'd try to cover up to half if it wasn't over $2k. o.o He is really, really pissed at me that I stopped drawing... he wanted to be an artist and it didn't work out for him, and it makes him endlessly frustrated with me that I was 'better at it'• and left it behind for digital stuff years ago.

• (I don't think so at all, we just have different styles -- he is one of the old school anime folk who was into it before it became popular and his stint at Kubert tried to beat the style out of him as 'not marketable in the US' in the early 90s when he went, which discouraged him permanently and goddamn that's worthy of irk-posting unto itself.)

I look at my old sketches and just have that dumb look for a while of 'I don't know whether to laugh or cry', 'cause it's been so long. So I feel y'all on this one.

I could never transition to a tablet to save my life, and I do everything digitally these days, and... mouse, trackball, bwahahahahaha hells no. (And let's be real, the odds of me getting my hands on one of the new Cintiqs are equivalent to winning the lottery, 'cause I'd have to.)

It's the mysql.h, probably.

The 'do the secure installation' step that is now recommended does something that changes the standard permissions that tinymux expects when it comes time to configure it.

I know I managed to fix it once. I do not for the life of me remember how, but it wasn't any of the things recommended on the thread to fix the mysql.h issue, because none of those worked for me at all.

It may have been some kind of worst practice hail mary I yanked out of my ass, so I don't recall, unfortunately, what it was. It was a permissions issue, that much I do remember. Whether it involved changing the permissions on the directory where the file was housed or the file itself, and what I ended up changing them to, unfortunately, I do not remember.

I know that isn't much help, but maybe with that information some of the people who actually know what they're doing can help narrow it down.

ETA: For the tech people: If this is a digitalocean install, mysql.h is there, and it is installed. The permissions are just locked down in such a way that tinymux can't access it to use it to do anything -- which may be only after the 'mysql_secure_installation' step, but even if you did this after setting up tinymux you'd run into the same issue later -- so tinymux acts like it isn't there because it can't see or use it.

ETA2: Mediawiki 1.30.0, the current version, is fussy and different in some new and interesting ways. Be advised if you're using code from an earlier iteration or planning to import. Apparently a lot of stuff deprecated between versions 29 and 30 and you will probably need to tweak your stuff. Depending on how much you fuss with things, this may be no big deal.

(I know I found the stuff they're starting to add in so egregiously annoying I gave up on using Vector entirely and started building a new skin during the time I can't really do anything else productive (while this comp is on its last teetering legs and we settle in for the long wait for its replacement).)

@aria No joke. Black Mirror; an excellent show if you really want to give up on living, period.

(No, really, it's very good, but it is good in such a way that I cannot think of anything that could possibly be worse for anyone with depression to watch than this, ever. They should tagline that shit, "Black Mirror: When you're looking for that final push to give in to that suicidal impulse.")

@lithium said in Good TV:

I still dislike the change to klingons, but if you can get past that, Discovery was actually very well done imho. Enjoyed it.

I did -- out of context -- love all the concept design for them. Like, that was a pretty, pretty, beautifully conceived everything.

But it bothered me in the sense that... that was a lot of frou frou, which is often a contradiction for a highly martial society. There are exceptions, but I don't know enough about the original concept/world-building for the Klingons originally (or in their current incarnation) to know if it fits.

As in, it's the kind of stylistic choice that seems to pick them up out of the 'barbarians with an honor code' sort of feel, which is how the old version used to seem to me, to something more akin to samurai composing battle poetry in their heads and so on. Which is neat, sure, but it is a big change and more importantly, it's not necessarily one I'm convinced they intended.

Why: a lot of it is artsy for artsy ornamentation sake (potentially with some symbolic/religious/spiritual overtones). Yeah, it's a big break from the more industrialist approach we've seen before, which is fine, and I wasn't expecting that, but what we're seeing breaks my brain in some respect because it would mean the armies of craftsmen in the Klingon empire would have to outnumber the soldiers by a factor of like, ten to one at least without raising a lot of other questions that get my brain stuck in boggle-loops on the regular.

I love the ever living hell out of the visual design. Love love love. OMFG love love love. Could not love more. Love like I loved the design for the original Stargate when it first hit theaters back in the 90s kinds of love.

Just, from what I've seen of it all so far? What I know of the 'old version' (and my interpretations of it), the design (no matter how gorgeous I think it is), and the few eps I've seen so far... it doesn't all fit together in my head in a cohesive way, even with the 'maybe they're going for a more... ' approach thing in mind.

Maybe that just a 'yet' and I need to watch more of it? But while I don't hate it, it is a bit of a ????? that I've been having trouble getting my brain around properly and it's getting in the way of enjoying it (while being a reason to enjoy it because omfg shiny as fuck -- gahhhhhhh all the mindscramble!).

(Yes I would be completely content if the red pandas just kept going for the rest of the page, because... red pandas. It's like corgis, there can never be too many.)

@ghost said in Bad Actors, and Bad Behavior (extended):

We can all agree that a doxxer, stalker, or sexual harasser is bad, and no one likes to be made fun of, but if we're going to discuss negative behavior and the poor ways that people treat each other on games, we should probably ask ourselves if by dragging people's characters, wikis, and descriptions through the mud, are the people doing this not being bad themselves?

This is what the last question is about in a nutshell, yep.

It isn't as much about the forums, though, as it is about behavior on games. Plenty of people engage in the forums but aren't on any games at any given time, and plenty of people -- great and terrible -- are on games and not the forums.

The forums vs. games convo really isn't really the intended focus here, though as much as how to handle things on games is, and the forums are no different than any other game-external communication mediums (skype, discord, facebook, voice calls, etc.) in that regard. 'Using out-of-game communication broadly' is a factor, yes, but this isn't a thread intended to be in any way about forum policing, and I'd like to gently steer away from that one. (There are plenty of existing arguments about that elsewhere on the boards, and I don't see this coming back from that frequent tangent if it gets too deep.)

One of the things I've watched shift drastically over the years -- it's one of those pendulum issues in the hobby that seems to swing from one extreme to the other -- is how people handle bad actors on games.

We know, collectively, that there are some toxic folks in the hobby, or folks who commonly demonstrate some exceptionally toxic behavior for whatever reason. (Some of these reasons may be more understandable or sympathetic than others, but that's a separate issue, and this one has plenty already. The reasons why may be good fodder for another thread, but aren't meant to be the focus here.)

How would you define or identify bad behavior?

How much bad behavior would it take for you to identify someone as a bad actor (rather than 'the average person who screws up sometimes and generally will feel bad about it when they realize that they have done so, and try to make it right')? Does it have to be a specific sort of behavior to cross this line?

How do you feel it best to handle known bad actors (by your own definition as above, there's no need for broad consensus that someone is problematic, ex: Spider/Rex/Elsa/Custodius/etc.) being allowed access to a game at the outset? Pre-bans? Pre-bans for some, new chance for others? New chance for everyone?

If -- either because they were allowed on under a new chance principle, or snuck on, or never realized they weren't welcome in the first place and just showed up -- a bad actor appears on the game, how do you handle this? This is from the player, staff, and general perspective (if they're the same for both). This can be anything from 'ignore it' to 'ban instantly' to 'keep an extra eye on them' to 'avoid them' to anything else you can think of.

As staff, how do you want players to handle this? As a player, how would you want staff to handle this? (Not actually the same question as above.)

Do you have concerns that the presence of a bad actor on a game will inspire bad behavior in others? (This can be through following that person's behavior model, or starting a gossip circle, or spawning arguments somewhere that spill all over the game, etc.) If so, at what point does this become an issue in its own right, and what do you do about it?

This is in constructive for a reason; please keep this in mind! While examples of bad behavior are very likely going to come up, this is not a place for specific call-outs re: game behavior; please try to provide examples without naming names if you can. (Doubly helpful, because not all of us have direct experience with any of the various problem children in the hobby, so knowing the bad actions really is more important than knowing who the bad actor is.)

@tempest It's fairly new. It is also glorious as hell.