Best posts made by Thenomain

@arkandel

I would take the “think of the children” comment much better if the NRA hasn’t used it excessively itself.

I think we need a ban on that statement. I mean shit, look at the children all marching for a safer world and all, “think about the children.” And Millenials, all complaining that they can’t afford things in the current economy, wanting an education, wanting us to think about them, like they’re the future or some shit.

They’re all, “we want clean air for the children” and “we want a stable climate for the children.” They can pay for it if they’re so keen; I’ll be dead by then so stop whining and trying to make me care.

No, I’m not falling for it, you spoiled brats.

To @Sparks and @Ashen-Shugar ::

I still think that formatting for a web interface is harder than programming for a terminal interface, and not because I've been doing the latter far longer than the former.

Moreover, it's easier to make the terminal interface to look clean and useful than the web interface.

So I disagree on coding for web only vs. web plus terminal cutting the work in half. Removing a fourth or a third of the work, maybe.

This post brought to you by the continued attempt to explain what I meant to Sparks, since I don't think I'd been doing a good job at it.

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What in the world is shift-ins?

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

The smell of rain on freshly mown grass and evaporating off hot blacktop.

Childhood comfort, thy name is petrichor.

@faraday

You know, I've been meaning to talk to you or @Chime for the last hour about what would be involved in doing something like this.

But then I remember that I hate this hobby and want to push it off a cliff.

Then I get distracted in coding something else for this hobby.

Why do we do this to ourselves, Faraday? Why?

@skew

I disagree. The grid may be a framework, but that framework helps support setting and theme.

Nowadays we may have a closer to 50/50 between grid and RP rooms, but I wouldn’t play on a game that’s gridless.

@sunny said in RL Anger:

Read all the words in my email, people. ALL THE DUCKING WORDS. EVERY ONE OF THEM IS IMPORTANT. I could understand if I had written walls of text or something but it was like 3 sentences long. READ IT!

This is the lament of the coder doing requirements discovery.

@faraday said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:

@thenomain said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:

Why do we do this to ourselves, Faraday? Why?

Clinical insanity?

You may be right.

@faraday said in Project X:

@Ganymede said in Project X:

most of my RP happens on the ship.

Of course a lot of RP happens on the ship, but how do people get there? In my experience it's only the first poor soul who has to walk there, and then everyone else just meetme hops over. Did that first person really gain anything by having to walk the grid vs. just picking "Rec Room" from a scene location dropdown menu? Sometimes maybe. But for each of those times, there's also a time where SoAndSo breezes through a room that they aren't really in ICly just to get from point A to point B.

But they have the option to walk, they have the option to engage with the grid, with the setting, at their pace. If you don’t have a grid, you remove that potential engagement for everyone.

@insomnia

From the article:

Not only is that a pretty low price for a lifelike robot, but she also looks a lot more human-like than some other recent models.

And yet, it looks less realistic than most mannequins.

Case in point.

Okay, that one's better.

@auspice said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

(I wonder if I could make puppy eyes at the people I know at Green Ronin to be able to get playtest copies of that...........)

Green Ronin is very anti-piracy, I know that; there was a very long time where they refused to sell anything as a PDF. How do they feel about Mu*s?

@Arkandel

I played on a game where I was happy playing in about 5 locations.

I played on a game with 5 places where I felt entirely too cramped and is one of the main reasons I stopped playing there.

Haunted Memories probably had probably over 50 public grid rooms, if not more. It also had roughly four individual games running on it at the same time.

So, say, 15 + 10 per additional game running on the grid simultaneously.

This is not easy for me to say without my usual extended story-time, so here it is.

Consider my favorite game line: Changeling the Lost. You have normal (unenchanted) rooms, you have more secret and political places, and you have completely enchanted areas. What is average for that kind of grid is going to be different than, for instance, Mage, which has only the first two kinds, and D&D which may have an extensive wilderness or even city depending on the game's focus, and Star Wars which enjoys its one-biome planets, and Star Trek which likes its space grids, and so forth.

@coin

Or in other words: Fuck the “guilty” part; these are just pleasures.

For instance, I actually liked the Super Mario Brothers movie. I know that nobody else on the planet did, and I know that if I saw it again I would cringe so hard that I’d invert myself, but fuck it.

@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

@deadculture I mean I always /try/ to help. Sometimes it's just not possible.

Knowing that limit is one of the few true talents of making this hobby work. Congratulations on somehow being both understanding and reasonable. If you can teach this skill to those willing to learn, you'd probably do quite a bit of good.

@Cobaltasaurus knows what she is doing too. What I’m afraid of is that @mvattr destroys what it replaces, and the old system and newer system are so similar that it is not trivial to make a unique new set of attributes for the new system (for those of you wondering why I didn’t recommend @cpattr). This means that any mistakes made in updating between systems are permanent.

I’m willing to make the copy and come up with a way to refresh it in the inevitable disasters that will happen while working out the translation scripts. It’d be fun to work with Cobalt again, and with Skew prodding at things too this shouldn’t take more than three, four weeks. Ish. Vaguely.

My 100-Percent favorite thing to know about the pets of humans:

The Dog: "Hey animal that is hanging around us while we're hunting, you are also very good at hunting, you like packs, we like packs, you are now part of our pack. As we grow together we will make you one of us, and like us we will make you the tool we need at the time, across the ages, as one with us, forever." / "Okay!"

The Cat: "Hey animal that is hanging around us while we're chasing rats off barges, you are very good at hunting rats, you like hunting rats, we like it when you hunt rats, how would you like to also be fed by us when you're not also eating rats and in exchange we won't treat you like vermin because you don't eat our grain. As we grow we promise not to make you do anything else, forever." / "Okay!"

(I tried to narrow down the parrot, et al., but the conversation in my head was more that of someone tricked into paying a roommate's rent for free. Birds are crafty buggers.)

@lithium said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

@thenomain No they really do not.

Tell that to the Harry Potter game I'm tweaking CoD code for. In order to treat the setting with respect, something needs to change.

You have your own opinion, but it's...well, tangenting this thread. I don't mind this, but you seem to want this discussion to split. I tried to bring it back home, and you're getting kind of snippy about it. So if you want to discuss this, fine. If you want it in a different thread, now is the perfect time to reply to a post as a quote in an entirely different thread. (I've done that my fair share of times.) If not, don't worry about it.

--

edit: I just remembered the historical books that White Wolf/Onyx Path came out with. I cannot imagine almost any of them being possible without system tweaks. Vampire 1980s and Mage 1920s maybe being the exceptions. I don't think Mage Noir had anything but a few optional add-ons. The Vampire Chrome tweaks were brilliantly funny.

There is a reason why the phone code I banged out for The Reach (and many WoD games since) is called "Dumb Phone Code".

1. It's simple. Actually one of the kind of cool things about doing this is that I've created a say() function that gets used in 'places' code, et al., which will convert 'say( <enactor>, :grouses, )' into the correct output style for say and pose. This came about because of the phone code.
2. It's silly. Seriously, what's wrong with you people! Next you'll be wanting automated apartment rental code, detailed language code, actual car objects, random emit code, and...oh my god! You've actually asked for this stuff, haven't you!

I'm kidding (half). We coded all of this about ten years ago, and then got tired of it because it didn't add anything to our experience. I mean it; you haven't experienced the dark side of immersion until you've been forced to carry around a phone object and remember the half a dozen commands--yes, really--to do things like hide your voice, block caller ID, mutter in the room that you're in and yet be clearly heard to those on the other end. I couldn't even remember how to answer the phone half the time. And back then, there was a difference between a mobile phone and a land-line phone. And the phone book. We really did this.

It died out because so many of us started using 'page' for phone conversations. Mutter code died because people stopped using it. Language code died because people stopped using it.

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There is nothing wrong with wanting toys and immersion cues. Part of why I'm here is to tell people about their history, and that history is that immersion code breaks immersion. It can remind you that you're in a game, especially when people criticize it (on games where people are allowed to criticize the game, unsubtle Arx jab), and double especially when it creates a division of people who will use the code and people who won't. The number of people who take their immersion seriously can easily push the cliquish.

Trust me; I'm an Immersion Scientist. Here's my badge:

--

That said, do things that are fun because they're fun. If people use the code, awesome. If not, who cares. The only math to this is how much time you want to put into the project, and if it's your project, it's your time. Use it fun-ly.

@insomnia said in Good or New Movies Review:

Didn't know where to put this, but Ready Player One released digitally today, and it was a good movie?

Was it? I listened to Wil Wheaton reading the first chapter and it was so cringe worthy that I wanted to stab scissors into my ears. I gave it to the end of the chapter but I was turned off pretty much immediately.

Oh, and also I don’t find Wil’s voice very easy to listen to. He’s okay I guess, but it wasn’t comfortable.

If the movie is very much different than the book then I’ll give it a shot for images of Our Cyberpunk Future.

@miss-demeanor said in Silly things you'd been tempted to do on/for a MU*:

@ganymede said in Silly things you'd been tempted to do on/for a MU*:

@thenomain said in Silly things you'd been tempted to do on/for a MU*:

I once quit MUSHing.

Then came back.

We thought you were a goner, but --

The Theno came back. He just couldn't stay away.
Away, away, yea yea yea

He wouldn’t leave home, no, he wouldn’t stay away.