Posts made by surreality

@Ganymede said in Shadows over Reno:

I had put together a Nosferatu concept which I wanted to try out. He's an Azerkatil with the Giant Merit and Physical Disciplines out the yin-yang, but he just wants to be a singer. Not that he's any good at it, but he's a regular in the local karaoke scene. He doesn't understand why he never wins any of the competitions, and he's just strong enough not to frenzy on everyone when he places out of the top 3.

Sure, he's good with sneaking up on people, grappling them, burning their vitae out of them, and then pulling their head off. But he really just wants a shot at The Voice.

Did I mention he had a harsh Balkan accent?

Goddammit, that sounds like the best character ever. A 'quirky concepts'/TV reality/blow off steam place is on my list of never-finished-things, but if I ever manage it, please come and play that character on it. Because that is so amazing it just needs to be a thing somewhere, so help me god.

@Thenomain It's true, though!

I'm wary of the black-and-whites, because they seem to get adopted as truisms pretty quick in this community• because ultimately, they're easy answers, even if they're not real or complete answers.

• Pretty much like every other aspect of life where this happens, it's just weirdly quick in these parts and then anybody who suggests there's grey lurking about gets their skull caved in.

@Thenomain I think we're talking about two different things here.

I'm not questioning 'there's more of a chance that you'll have someone approach you as a player for a scene if you have a number of approachable targets'.

I'm talking about that becoming an issue based on people multi-scening. There's reasonable ways for that to be handled, and unreasonable ones.

@Thenomain said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:

@surreality said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:

@Thenomain I getcha. I think that happens on games with multiple alts, too. It is more a factor of the person than the prevalence of games available, though, I think.

But the more characters you're idling on, the more likely you'll hit a scene.

Yes and no? (Stereotypical Libra answer, of course.)

Yes in that it means you have more lines in the water, but if you know you can't reel in more than one rod at the time, sometimes you just gotta let that second or third fish go with a polite, "I'm already in a scene at the moment, but can let you know when I'm available, or would you like to try to arrange a time for later in the week?"

@Thenomain I getcha. I think that happens on games with multiple alts, too. It is more a factor of the person than the prevalence of games available, though, I think.

For instance... I cannot multiscene. I simply can't. I totally lose all sense of the characters I'm playing and they merge into a mess in the portrayal of both until my RP sucks and I almost inevitably end up with a migraine. Since I know that limit, I avoid multi-scening at all costs. Some people are good at it enough that you can't even tell, though -- while others, you can tell a little but they're still OK at it, others... well, they suck hard at it but don't realize how hard they're sucking.

@Thenomain said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:

Behold the return to, you know, where we were ten years ago.

...in some ways, this is not a bad thing? <hopeful smile goes here>

It's either a pile of options, or a kitchen sink. And kitchen sink is it's own unique animal with its own unique catalogue of diseases that a lot of folk would prefer to avoid.

@skew Am hoping Wendigo will some day pop up here -- I think things would be OK if the hog pit is avoided, honestly. She's good people, for one, is generally spoken highly of here, and there is some useful info in the other areas that I know has been really helpful for me at times.

Totally unrelated to the above: goddammit I hate it when people lie to me and blow smoke up my ass. Especially when they're people who were trusted, got caught, got called out, apologized and swore they'd make it right, and then do all that shit again.

I really need to be less forgiving. Way fucking less forgiving.

@Lotherio While not a superhero game person, this reply speaks so well of the game environment I might have to check this out.

@mietze said in RL Anger:

Yeah, yeah. And miscarriage due to overexercising, hot tubs, caffeine usage, eating lunchmeat, ect. should be manslaughter. Dropping a stack of fertilized eggs in petri dishes is as bad as the loss of life in the OKC bombing. Such a goddamn stupid argument. Nobody except for crazies like Eric Rudolf believes that shit.

There are reasons I love my state.

I find this the best of all possible fuck-yous to the personhood idiocy. (Srsly, I fucking love my state.)

Which is, frankly, the beginning and end of all I'm going to say on this one. I was stuck as a mod on an abortion debate forum for many years on livejournal, pit o' drahmah, for too many years to not have liberally applied the shiny new ignore feature to the testicle-bearers trying to stir shit on this particular topic with hyperbole and nonsense, playing childish provocateurs, because spending the time to lay out why it's hyperbole and nonsense, or even why this shit is childish and counterproductive, would be a complete waste of that time, no matter how tempting it is.

@Lotherio said in Wiki and You:

Its so easy to make tools for others to add pages, to add theme, plot pages, etc. It is easier to learn than mu-code for most and further still, its much easier to make it functional for others to use. It not hard to set up templates to add new elements.

^ Exactly this. It's a great way to allow people to contribute to the game and affect the game world directly by contribution, rather than destruction. A lot of players feel that blowing things up is the only way they're going to make an impact on the world, which is as sad as it is potentially problematic. Allowing people the ability to make constructive changes rather than destructive ones opens up an enormous wealth of possibility, and allows people to be able to say: That, I did that, I made a mark and people are having fun with it! That is something that should never, I think, be underestimated.

@Lotherio There is one time I will do this: when it is painfully apparent the person hasn't read a damned thing and just wants to be hand-held 100% of the way. It's absolutely easy for someone to miss a thing or two, but if they're asking to be told every step of a process that is clearly laid out somewhere instead of reading something that is literally right in front of them, 'read the directions' is eventually going to come up.

@ThatGuyThere said in Wiki and You:

Honestly, I would not even make a character page if the 20 minutes f slapping one together wasn't less annoying the regular comments of how I need to make one.

I hear this a lot. It's actually kinda why I set things up like described above. Instead of having to enter a pile of data a bunch of places, it means just entering it all once... and two clicks shuffles it all over to a charpage right then and there that the player never needs to hassle with again if they don't want to, but they have it, and nobody can yelp about it. (Also means it can have them linked in proper places and whatnot for the 'cross-reference to find people to RP with' stuff @Cupcake mentions without them having to ever do anything extra.)

I'm a huge fan of only having to do something once, since it both saves time and helps ensure consistency.

@Lotherio said in Wiki and You:

I think, for me at least, wikis are a tool that can help others find RP, or share stories and help the creative process of the shared environment.

This is my take on it also. I wouldn't call folks who are wiki-averse also change-averse, though, but there's a reason for that.

Like any other 'new thing being tried', some people hate the very idea of people trying it. Sometimes it's because something similar has been done badly. Sometimes it's because they like the old way a lot. Sometimes it's a misconception about how things work, or an assumption that things will be a certain way -- they can't see a positive way it could work, or one that would be seamless from their end re: what they're used to.

I saw enough of this in the other thread that I just didn't really bother responding beyond where I left it; I can either fumble around trying to explain shit that's above my paygrade to explain but can be done, or I can get on with doing it. (I'm better at showing than telling is the best way to sum this up.)

A lot of explaining was required to even get there, because what I've managed to get done was not done without help.

Explaining why doesn't always come across. I probably couldn't explain why now to most people who would have the capability to help me get there, because those people have vastly different skillsets, and a fairly large chunk of the principle behind it is 'make it easier on people who don't have those skillsets'. 'Develop that skillset' is not the best answer; for instance: what we have now is an advanced skillset (MUX/MUSH/MUD/etc. code), it takes a great deal of time to learn, documentation is often not written in plain or easily digestible language for a novice or requires understanding of concepts that the documentation assumes the reader already knows (when often they do not and it's not always explained elsewhere), and even as someone with reasonable intelligence who has poked at things a little from time to time, I have difficulty making sense of it at times, so I can't imagine how hard someone who is relatively new to this on the whole.

If there are alternative approaches that can reduce this specific barrier to entry in game play, and especially in game creation, I think it is wise to explore them.

The tl;dr of this: pretty much anybody can fill out a web form without needing any prior education in MU code -- using or writing it.

While explaining 'if we had this one thing... ' took a while before someone was willing to bite, a few discussions of what that one thing could do have (I think? I hope?) made some of its potential clear, at least to the folks who helped make it happen. (And that's just what I could envision doing with it in a short span of time, not 'the whole community throws in ideas'.)

What I know is this: with what's essentially one tweak to an existing tool, as a hopeless novice MU coder, I'm now able to take a piece of data from the wiki and format it for the MUX. +finger? Populate it from the same data that's on the wiki, and both remain consistent. Chargen? Fill out a form. Click a link. It takes the information you entered and creates the basics of your character page -- which you never need to touch or fiddle with again after that if you don't want to; a second link of the same kind for staff sets up your sheet on the wiki, which is in a staff-only editable namespace, preventing tampering and automatically providing a log of all changes to that page viewable to everyone for full transparency. And so on.

Wiki cross-references better than a MUX in a variety of ways. With one single change to a drop-down menu, faction maintenance, wanted concept listings, sphere/group membership, 'who lives in this region', etc. can all be maintained at once without further changes. If that information is also being piped to the game, again, you have one change that requires no formal code primer or cheat sheet for even the newest staffer on the team to keep things current without running through half a dozen MUX commands to accomplish the same thing. Again, these changes are visible on the wiki and the game after the few seconds it takes SQL to update. In regard to the amount of time this saves in terms of game maintenance (and everything staying properly updated across the board instead of something getting missed), it would be hard for someone to convince me this is in any way a bad thing, or is not useful, and that's without even considering how much faster and easier it is.

For instance, we're looking at something like this: Need a statted NPC or creature? Like creating a +temproom, make a +tempnpc. Just set the name of its wiki page when you create it, and it automatically populates its sheet, stats, and powers, for immediate reference without requiring notes, making it easier to run things on the fly. (This is 100% doable, it's just a matter of the doing.) Want to set up a Creature, Generic Thug, or other NPC like that that doesn't exist? Create it from drop down menus and save the page in minutes, tops -- and then it's a resource that the whole game can potentially use when/if needed just as easily as indicated above going forward; you've just added a valuable resource for the game and lowered the barrier to entry for scene runners by providing them with a helpful quickstart for a pickup scene to run on the fly or an NPC they can use when creating their plots.

@Insomnia said in Good TV:

@Cupcake It's airing in Canada. We got the first two episodes on Space.

There was a half-naked male butt though, so probably why it's not on SyFy yet. I remembered they had to edit all the butts out of Bitten.

Oh, sweet jeebus, really? That is just... I don't even need to say that this is dumb. It is so beyond obvious that this is dumb. And haven't they had shows that show butts (or other bits) anyway? Other cable (and even network) shows seem to have managed to get away with some random backsides here and there.

Just... really? This is why we have the 'month or so after Canada' delay on most things?

@ixokai If you're really not comfortable flattening the creeper for the observed behavior, since he hasn't been told to stop by the person he's creeping on:

p creeper=We've received reports of unwanted sexual advances from you to another player. She was not comfortable addressing this directly with you, but we have received and reviewed her complaint. This behavior stops now. If it persists, you will be shown the door without ceremony.

It is far from a perfect answer, but it is better than being able to do nothing at all, if you're not comfortable just canning the jerk.

@Misadventure Huh! That's... odd. The space barrier seems more sensible, but I can see how that'd work. Not as well, I don't think, but I at least see what they were going for.

Is there a note of the invisible thing elsewhere? The article just mentions that when the 'personal bubble' is activated, other players must stay one foot or more away.

@WTFE I forget. Is it the Shinto ceremony that, in Japan, uses the white kimono and the red kimono? Or is that a secular cultural element? Because I have always loved that, and am absolutely stealing that general idea.

While I don't recall the order at present, the general idea goes like this: the ceremony has two of those enormous, heavily embroidered, OMFG STUNNING, bridal kimono. One is usually white, the other usually red, but they sometimes appear in other colors. The bride enters the ceremony in one, and after vows are exchanged, she changes to the other, as a sign that she is now part of her own, new family, with her husband.

(Imagine the madness the US bridal industry would do with this notion, folks. Seriously.)

I have a 'transformable dress' notion rather than 'two dresses' but that's because 1. I'm a costumer and 2. I'm permabroke.

(Ironically, I already have two bridal kimono. One is red! It's... just that the other one is magenta, and... no. ALL THE NOPE.)

@mietze said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

They are not what makes a tool say "tits or gtfo".

Hell, we had Rick Sanchez and his crew of dipshits doing this on this board with some regularity, and that isn't even remotely like any modeled behavior here. Some people are just... well, useless. Until their bodies can be donated to medical science.