Posts made by surreality

@tinuviel As 'woman breaks rib removing suitcase from car trunk', I feel you.

@aria Not sure if they're still in print, since it's been years, but check here. She's seriously awesome. She had some amazing maps done for her story world, too, that are super neat. I think there are also audiobooks for the stories, and the reader was incredible -- we heard some of the samples one of the weekends we were up there.

Have to agree here. To folks of a certain age who grew up with text 'choose your own adventure' style games and similar, sure, even if it's still probably a bit of a stretch.

For younger folks, who have always had non-text graphics as an available part of the experience? It's going to feel like a bait and switch, most likely. Whatever the technical definition, this is pretty key. What we do is not what the majority is going to be thinking of when they think of video games. Would they consider it one? Maybe. But it's not what they're going to picture, and it's going to be as much of a stretch for them as envisioning something like the Wii as a real, actual thing you'd have in your house was for us in the days we feared the grue.

I expected 'Deadly Class' to be complete bullshit and garbage.

I am pleasantly surprised with the pilot.

It's gonzo. It's somewhat surreal. If you can't deal with 'over the top', skip this one. It doesn't seem to be as impossibly absurd as Wanted, but it seems to lean that way.

It's set in the 80s and not only hits on many modern critiques of the flaws of the 80s, but does it in a way that doesn't flinch away from the characters having some of those biases, too. (It appears to be trending in a direction that suggests these biases will be addressed, rather than glorified.)

I want to see where this one goes.

@mietze ...more:

Failed=No one picked up on all the clues being thrown out for plots even when handed them directly.

Failed=Staff got overwhelmed and couldn't keep up.

Failed=People not recognizing 'there is nothing going on!' is not the same thing as 'I am not personally interested in the things that are going on right now'.

Failed=Someone else was getting attention I wanted.

Failed=Instituted a policy/house rule I dislike.

Failed=Was <larger/smaller> than X players at any given time.

Having gone off on a few manifestos of grar regarding the state of things as I see them, I'm the last person who would tell someone to refrain from doing the same.

Every time I've done it, I've been surprised to see how many people agree with or recognize some of the things I described, at which point something that may have been overlooked before begins to be taken more seriously and at least becomes a topic of discussion, and also how many people can provide reassurance through example of how other things are not as dire/bleak/shitty as they seem to me.

It's not fun shit to read. It's not fun shit to write, either, and the state of mind someone has to be in to get there isn't exactly fabulousness incarnate. Shit may never get back to a fabulousness incarnate headspace, but at least in terms of my personal experience, it's shifted my perspective from believing there's nothing but a hopeless abyss.

@tinuviel So tempting right now.

@arkandel I had great plans for that metaphorical pony, man.

That moment when, after watching a fat guy in a red suit with a big white beard measuring your side yard and holding up blueprints for a stable with a squint, you realize you are still not getting that pony you asked Santa for when you were five.

• I collect random skills and areas of knowledge because I don't think we were ever meant to stop learning things. At least one of these per year will be somehow related to fiber, clothing, or wearables or other adornment of some kind, from making nail polish to wigs to spinning yarn. Almost none of these things are remotely practical or useful and most of them are extraordinarily niche.

• I argue with myself about whether or not this makes my brain degrade faster, or more slowly, on the regular.

• I am a fan of a lot of things whilst cringing at most fandoms on the whole.

• I have night terrors, and have since I was a kid. Also generally have a lot of trouble sleeping. As a kid, my mother would read bedtime stories, as many do. I still wasn't really able to sleep by then. So I'd make up random stories in my head to fill the gap and keep my mind off of monsters in the closet (or, as an adult, all the stresses that make insomnia such a fucking thing) until I'd drift off to sleep. Never really stopped. If I can't do this, it is my official red flag that Shit Is Dire Right Now, and something in life needs serious, immediate attention.

• I give people way too many chances than is remotely healthy for me.

• I love creating things. It's a bigger deal to me than literally anything else in my life, and always has been. This is completely impractical bullshit that has gotten me massively screwed more than once, but it's unlikely to change, even if I know it should/needs to.

• I can't write unless it's collaboratively. I get X far on any given thing solo, and it peters out. I can write with someone for 2 days straight and forget I need things like sleep or food, though, and have more than once.

• I have a love/hate relationship with the claw machine at our local diner, and more stuffed animals I do not need for someone who isn't especially fond of stuffed animals at all.

@pyrephox She did pretty well with it. Not enough to provide a full income on the level that she was living (she was living a fairly wealthy lifestyle in a lot of ways as she had a number of businesses), but the books did well for her and she had a following. If it seems like something you'd enjoy doing, definitely go for it.

@pyrephox said in Who are you?:

• I have sordid addictions to paranormal romance novels and cooking shows. If you managed to write a romance series about competing chefs in a fantasy world who fall in love, I would buy every copy.

My former mentor wrote a series fantasy novels about knitting witches. Alongside each novel, she'd write a book of patterns. She did well enough with it to produce companion audiobooks of them. If someone actually did what you're describing, and released a side-by-side recipe book people could opt to buy as a 'set', they would likely do pretty fucking well.

I'm another 'no'.

There are some very old text-based video games that some MUs may have similarities to, and there's little argument the roots of MUDs with a high level of automation likely flow from there.

The kind of games predominantly discussed here branched off from there, and took a decidedly different direction over time, with a few exceptions. We don't really get into the RPI and MUD style games here (in discussion; I'm sure plenty of people posting here play on them also), however, so the MUX/MUSH style games are fairly distinct at this point.

Some are closer to simulated tabletop RPGs, but those aren't video games. There are formats now to play tabletop games more directly online, but those are relatively newer than MUX/MUSH for the most part. Other MUs are completely freeform, and could arguably be played on IRC or anything else that allows people to throw text at a shared document or website, like a forum or email chain. And while these two far-end-of-the-scale approaches are possible in and by other means, the experience of them tends to be different in ways that people have discussed at some length. Most MUs are a hybrid of these things, anyway.

Are there more 'interactive fiction' style video games now? Sure. They're more along the lines of a 'choose your own adventure' format, for the most part, though, which is more or less like going back to the old old old text games of this kind and adding visuals to them.

So... pretty much no. In the same way that someone can RP on WoW or similar, it's not the point for which the game was primarily designed. Ultimately, that's where we are with MU.

...when folks are too busy having fun doing things various places (RL or IC) to have to gripe, and this board gets relatively quiet for a good reason.

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.

1. Part of me will always be a big kid that loves playing 'make believe'.

2. Free helps. A lot.

3. Creative people are awesome, and this hobby has an abundance of very smart creative people in it. Many with kickass interesting ideas.

4. An interactive story to think about is my brain's equivalent of a fidget spinner or other tinker object for my hands when I'm not playing.

5. Brainstorming is fun. It doesn't even need to necessarily go anywhere; just the process of brainstorming or 'what if'-ing things that either never come to pass or are just background is fun to me.

@sincerely Those are incredible. I have nothing but awe and admiration for anyone who can do metalsmithing. I have never been that brave and OMFG that silver piece is especially stunning.

The blue aura quartz is natural quartz (usually), that goes through a process that fumes it with titanium to give it an 'aura' of iridescence. It's pretty neat. There's 'gold fuming' process with glass, too, that a lot of lampwork folk do that tends to get an iridescent peachy-pink, from what I recall. It basically uses heat to adhere a thin layer of titanium to the surface.

This is similar (but not the same) as some of the beads you'll see around -- they coat them in titanium, first, then heat anodize them. It creates a stronger iridescence in a variety of colors depending on the temperature, but it's not as stable (as the titanium layer is more likely to scratch away), while the fuming process (supposedly) creates a more intense chemical bond. It's pretty neat, actually. I have a single crystal like this I've been hoarding for years I picked up an age ago -- I asked them what it was and how they do it, so that's how I found out.

Mudrammer isn't a zillion bells and whistles, but I've been able to use it without much fuss; it definitely gets the basic job done without a hassle and I appreciate the hell out of it for existing. I haven't managed to get the logs to work, but I don't use the mail app, so that's a big part of why.

Seconding this; the western has been the land of all the crying, because the story is incredibly wow. Also, all the everyone crying and cracking jokes together OOC and laughing at the same time, because the people are just as wow and epic.

So much with the crying, though, oh my lawd. The good sort of 'if this was a movie everyone would have gasped right there at once out loud in the theater' moments are very much a thing. The group cheers, yep, those, too.

Cannot praise the game enough. Really just can't.

@faraday Yes and no. You can save snapshots of a droplet that you can create a new droplet from at any time, and they're pennies a month to store.

You'd want to take a couple of snapshots at a time between rounds of spinning it up if you want to hand them out, though, since you can hand off a snapshot that someone else can then spin up as a droplet -- but once you hand it off, you no longer have that copy yourself to work with. It doesn't clone it to them, it transfers full ownership of that particular snapshot to the other party.

I pull stuff up and down a lot in the short term to grab this or that off of an old experiment (of which there are many), so can confirm it's really not that bad.