Best posts made by WTFE

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

If y'all seriously think it is "hubris at a level that staggers the imagination" to ask that people label common trigger content when advertising an event or starting a game so that people can effectively "get the fuck out of things that trigger them" and make informed decisions to avoid the content they know will be problematic in order to avoid problems for themselves and others around them, I know for damned sure this is not the hobby for me any longer.

Your reading comprehension is usually better than this:

It's OK to ask that I'm a bit careful around common trigger issues (like rape, say, or excessive gore).

It's like I ... already said this.

The point is that there are literally BILLIONS of triggers out there. Name something. ANYTHING. Oranges. Cuttlefish. Cheap Chinese oscilloscopes. Anything. Someone, somewhere, will be triggered. (Hell, that last one is self-triggering!)

I have a trigger. One that was once verging on the crippling and even now is pretty shattering when it fires. And it's of a dramatic situation that's so common no reasonable person is ever going to guess it in advance. Any attempt to come up with a way to get me to avoid situations that will fire off that trigger is going to be comically unmanageable. The onus is on me, not on everybody else in the fucking universe, to deal with the situation if it arises or, if I can't, to get the fuck out and stop fucking up everybody else's entertainment.

And if that last thing is the solution? Fuck yeah, that's going to suck for me (or whoever is dealing with the trigger). But welcome to life. It largely sucks like a broken Hoover: badly.

Bok choy bottles, as requested.

Set up a complaints system that each time you complain about someone it adds a bit of a delay to everything they do. And to everything you do.

If one person pisses off a lot of people, a lot of people have a short (imperceptible) delay on their command processing, but the person who pissed off so many will have lag that renders their ability to play unusable.

If one person goes around complaining about a dozen different people, a dozen people have an imperceptible delay on their commands but the whiny snowflake is lagged to perdition.

Have the lag rating fall off at a rate of, say, one complaint-equivalent per day.

Watch your game go up in smoke in the most entertaining of ways!

Please, for the love of God, LEARN YOUR TRADE.

• How to be a Troll - A Beginner's Guide
• How to be a Troll
• The Subtle Art of Trolling

Please don't be like a programmer. Stop revelling in ignorance and sloth. Perfect your craft. Make your mama proud!

@mietze said in FS3:

Uhhhh why is a developer who shares their system being criticized for making improvements or changes and making them available to people 3 times in 10 years?

Point me to where I criticized for making improvements or changes please? (Hint: this isn't possible.)

The confusion stems from several things:

1. The name FS3 already looks like it has a version number in it. For example I use the programming language "Logtalk". The current version of it is called "Logtalk3". There is no confusion here because Logtalk3 is just shorthand for Logtalk 3.x.y: it is the third major revision of Logtalk which has itself had several minor revisions and several more bug fix releases. On the other hand I also use the programming language "SNOBOL4". This is confusing because there never was really a publicly released SNOBOL1, SNOBOL2, SNOBOL3, etc. SNOBOL4 is the only version of SNOBOL anybody alive is likely to have ever used. (There's an extreme outside chance someone is alive who once saw SNOBOL3 if they worked with Ralph Griswold back when he was making the language.) The confusion is further magnified by the fact that there were several versions of SNOBOL4 proper. When you have a number in the name of the language the issue of version numbers gets muddled. FS3 is more like SNOBOL4 than Logtalk3 in terms of generating potential confusion. This, however, is a minor source of confusion. The remaining two are the big ones.
2. The fact that there are multiple versions isn't all that clear. Pick a game, any game, that uses some version of FS3. Look for the mentioning of versions in the various +help/+whatever commands. (Hint: This may not actually be possible in a lot of games.) This leads to problems like two people on two different games "using FS3" talking past each other because they don't realize that each game is using a completely different engine underneath. It also leads to disorientation when moving from one "FS3" game to another "FS3" game and having ... an entirely different experience. (This aside from the fact that apparently some games customized FS3 to be unrecognizable on top of this; that's on them, though, not on the system or its developer.)
3. Even if the fact that there are multiple versions is made clear in a game, and the version identified is also made clear, the documentation that can be found is for the latest version. So I may be playing on an FS32 game and when I go to the docs for how the system and its commands are supposed to work I read ... FS33 docs. So I'm told commands exist that don't, or I see sample output that isn't.

So the confusion isn't because "ZOMG THREE VERSIONS IN TEN YEARS!" it's because the versioning isn't communicated well, and the docs aren't kept around for those poor schmucks on games using old versions. (And, as a minor addition, because the name itself looks like it has a version number built in which obfuscates the existence of multiple versions.)

D- for effort. F for effect. Try harder.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

While there are absolutely players willing to run their own stuff (and I love them), they are the minority. There are also a lot of players who are gunshy about participating in PrPs.

Because we have made this not fun.

How could a process of taking a whimsical, extemporaneous idea of doing something fun and then grinding it down with weeks-long process of negotiating with staff over what's allowed, what the reward will be, which people will or will not be permitted to participate, passing muster over tests of "inclusiveness", etc. not be fun, @Thenomain?! You're talking crazy talk!

Just add in-character written reports and you have the epitome of fun!

Quelling the willingness of people to do things on their own didn't happen overnight, either. You can't expect people to trust you personally when the experience has been quite different elsewhere.

"But I'm different from the literally dozens of other people that have smashed you in the face with a shovel! I won't smash you in the face! Why won't you hold still when I pick up a shovel?"

So PrPs:

1. Tacitly turned RP into a monetized activity

The irony being that there's plenty of evidence that monetization demotivates people.

2. Turned the reward system of doing things into a bureaucracy

I still cannot fathom the people who bureaucratized RP. I simply cannot grok the personality types involved. Do these people work in HR or something?

3. Removed staff from a key position of running of their own game

Abdication of authority is motivating! No, really!

F for effort. F for effect. Repeating the same thing endlessly does not improve reactions. Try varying your approach a little.

@Rook said in Identifying Major Issues:

@WTFE said:

Players are enjoined to run plots, but only if the plots don't in any way, shape or form touch the grid in the slightest. So your PrPs are fine so long as they have zero noticeable impact on the setting!

So I read this and think to myself, when I was building and advertising Umbral Shards as a game entirely designed to be modified, changed and built out by the players... no one was willing to either believe it or touch it with a ten foot pole... where is the draw?

I didn't try out Umbral Shards because WoD gives me hives. It has zero attraction to me as a setting and the few times I tried it out because I wanted to see if maybe there was actually something to it were sufficiently disastrous that it's not a brick wall I'll be smashing my face into any time soon ever again.

Granted, I suspect that most everyone that checked the project out was a MSB reader, so the sort of group-think that has lead WTFE to that conclusion above might be statistically prevalent amongst those that showed up. Thus, there was a lot of uncomfortable feelings when reading the intent and mission statement of the game. See, US was supposed to be entirely PRP-driven, with the locks taken off and the players trusted to not only do dangerous things, but game-changing things. That was the entire dream!

And then there's this: "PrP-only" reads to me as "staff doesn't give a shit". At this stage, I may as well play over IRC for all the difference a game server makes.

The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel

@Meg said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

@WTFE

Sometimes when you post, I really want to send you chocolate. (You're always so grumpy! Do you want some chocolate, WTFE?)

Chocolate. And booze. Either works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_which_do_not_contain_themselves

In general when I start a new project I divide the issues up into several boxes: PD, DS, SI, HI, and NY.

PD: Problem Domain
This is the code for the actual functionality. If you're calculating artillery trajectories, this is where you put your kinematics code. If you're writing a chess engine, this is where you put your move tree pruning. If you're writing control firmware for ABS systems, this is where you link your sensors to your actuators via your PID controller. (This happens to also be the code that is most likely going to require few to no changes even if changing platforms.)

DS: Data Storage
This is where you map the data needed by the PD code into how you plan to persist it. This is where you have your flat file reader, your database integration layer, your file system handling, etc. It may be mildly system-specific: you may need minor changes in file systems when moving from Windows to Linux, say, or from SQL Server to MySQL, but the code here will be generally stable as long as you don't profoundly change your persistence model.

SI: System Integration
This is where you toss the stuff that's not related to data storage but is variable across systems. Your concurrency mechanism maps from your model to the native model here. Your network interaction layers are in here. Even your I/O primitives could be found here depending on the precise nature of your PD.

HI: Human Interaction
Whether command line or GUI or VR or whatever else is dreamed up, you put this into a separate box. If your PD code has any code related to human interaction in it, you've done fucked up and you've locked yourself into a single mode of interaction for no good reason. (Most software, sadly, has done fucked up in this regard.)

NY: Not Yet
This is the box where features that would be cool but that you're not going to put into this release go. Why don't you just toss them out and deal with them later? Because knowing that you're going to put a feature in will have you thinking of how you'll put it in and leave you room in your design for that later feature expansion. If you just toss out the NY features without thinking about how they'd fit in in the future you're opening a can of whoop-ass on your own code base.

Now, not all software has all five boxes filled. An embedded sensor monitor, for example, may not have an HI component at all: its controller will have that. And your HI and PD might be the same thing if your software is, say, a GUI framework library. But in general an overwhelming majority of software would be well-served by using this simple model.

And here's the thing.

Even beginners and hobbyists would be well-served by doing this boxing. Because separation of concerns makes for simpler code bases, not more complicated ones. But it does mean you have to think before you type. Which is the major distinction between "programming" and "coding".

This, @Ashen-Shugar, is incidentally why I don't think there's actually a clash between supporting the CONFIG.SYS-lovers and the WIMP-lovers in properly-constructed software. The issue isn't that it's impossible to support CLI and GUI and whatever in the same program or program suite. It's that most software is written by people who can't imagine that it's even possible.

I have been living here so long that it often fails to occur to me just what a weird place it is. Sometimes, though, I get a wakeup in the form of "What the fucking fuck did I just experience?!"

This is one of those wakeup calls. I introduce to you "马奶酒" (horse milk spirits):

If you think the bottle is weird, wait until you hear what's inside it! The name is not symbolic or poetic in any way. It's a direct description of what this liquid is.

This is a (mostly) Mongolian thing: double-distilled fermented mare's milk. It turns out that mare's milk is one of the very few milks that has enough sugar in it to properly ferment by itself. So of course those crazy Mongols figured out a way to make an alcoholic beverage from it: Kumis. Then the crazy Han said "we can distill this!" The result is quite possibly the weirdest hard liquor I've ever let pass my lips.

@TNP said:

I've heard of that and always wondered what it tasted like. So what does it taste like?

I … lack the vocabulary to describe the taste. It's like 白酒 (baijiu, or "white spirits" -- typically sorghum-based hoch) that's gone off, but in a way that isn't as off-putting as that sounds. I'm not sure this is something I'd regularly drink, but it wasn't an experience I regret.

@Luna Not a slide rule. Two. They're both museum pieces (iff a museum out there had the grit to prise them from my cold, dead fingers, that is).

Interstellar

OK, that's not fair. The movie was fine for what it was: a stately-paced space opera with a few mild pretenses toward "realism". It was above average fare for SF movies; it was well below average fare for SF in general. So I guess my real peeve is…

Christopher Nolan

OK, again not fair. He made a few films I like, despite each one of them having a fairly deep structural flaw at some point or another. He's ambitious and he's trying new(-ish) things and I've got to respect him for that. He's not the super-film-genius-of-this-or-any-other-century he's made out to be, but he's a pretty good film craftsman. But that "he's made out to be" allows me to finally identify the real peeve…

Christopher Nolan Fanbois

Holy shit what an obnoxious bunch of turds! It's not possible, in the mind of a CNF, to dislike a Christopher Nolan film because, you know, you dislike some aspects of his work. No, the only reason that you could possibly not like a Christopher Nolan film is that you're stupid. I made the mistake of checking a few reviews of Interstellar after I watched it to see if I was maybe over-reacting to some of the things I found hinky in it. Wow, did I not expect the festering pool of fanboi pus that I found! In massive screeds (longer than a @HelloRaptor post!) with many correctly-spelled words I learned that I found Interstellar a bit lacklustre because I don't know the laws of … and I quote! … "phsychics [sic] and black holes" and thus didn't understand the movie.

The problem, of course, is that I understand the laws of "phsychics" just fine. And indeed this is part of why I think the "realism" of the film is overhyped. There's loads of physics that got done wrong. (Indeed you can easily point out which parts of the films got vetted by their pet physicist and which parts they didn't bother double-checking on.) And, also, apparently, "love transcends time and dimension" is a law of "phsychics" to this crowd of manboi [sic] macaques.

Seriously, what is it about Christopher Nolan in particular that makes his fanbois so utterly fucking repugnant as human beings?

@HelloRaptor said:

Maybe the fanfiction community should stop being so utterly filled with some of the most ridiculously crazy fucking people ever? Fanficcers make MU* drama queens seem utterly tame by comparison.

@Roz: You're making me agree with @HelloRaptor. Please stop!

I've seen some seriously scary shit in MU* circles, and heard of even scarier. And none of it holds a candle to even the surface stuff when I poke my nose into a fanfic community.

Thanks for the citation. It seemed too witty and literate to be 4/8chan material.

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