Best posts made by WTFE

Late to the party, but in the spirit of the title I'm going to say that nothing needs to structurally change at MSB. What change is needed is cultural: people just have to own up to the fact that MSB is merely WORA under another name. Drop the pretense of higher aspirations. Delusion isn't becoming.

There was maybe once a small window in which a site could have been built that was WORA for adults. That ship has long since sailed, however, and this is really just another in the line of WORAs. With this thread you've not only let the animals escape to run out into the night, you've gone and set the barn on fire and are closing the door on the gutted, skeletal remains of it.

MSB, like the WORAs and SWOFA before it, is a bitch board for the MUSHing community: no more, no less. This is not (necessarily) a bad thing. It merely is. The bad part is pretending that it is otherwise and, now that the venom has flowed through all the veins here, that it could be anything else. The bad part is trying to fit something that is simply not natural to the community as a mold around the same.

Keep MSB as it is. Just start being honest about it.

USB hubs are the worst. Glad to see they're working for you today.

@Thenomain said in Telnet is Poop:

I'm going to invoke @WTFE here, possibly because of the people I think of who are "anything but telnet", he's the most technical and educational of them. But someone please explain this.

The issue isn't of the technology directly, but rather of the barriers between the first exposure to a concept and the ability to play.

To help strip some of the emotive things here, I'm going to step aside to a rant I wrote about programming languages. There's an unusual metric that is astonishingly predictive of when a language will be unpopular. (It doesn't predict popularity with any degree of precision, but it predicts when a language will be avoided like plague quite well.) The metric is "time to 'hello world'". In short, how long will it take to go from hearing about a given programming language to being able to run a program that says "hello world" (HW) in some form or another.

Time to HW (TTHW) can be anywhere from seconds to days (!). Scripting languages (like Python or Ruby) tend to already be installed on Unix-like machines, you see, so it's literally seconds to get to HW. Even on Windows machines that goes to minutes as you download an installer and then seconds later have your HW running. Popular compiled languages have TTHW somewhere in the minutes range. You optionally install a pre-built compiler (or in the case of Unix-like systems either have it already installed or can install it in under a minute), you edit a file, you compile and you're there.

Some languages, though, have very long TTHW. Rexx, for example, although an interpreted language with the advantages of other such scripting languages in actual use, is hard to find a working implementation for. It takes, say, half an hour for TTHW for an average person (going, again, from first exposure). Mercury, a compiled language, is even worse. Going from first exposure to HW takes a minimum of six hours. If you have slower hardware that could be closer to 48 hours. (That's how long it took me the first time!) Strangely, languages like Rexx and Mercury are rarely considered for anything out there, despite both of them having distinct advantages over more popular alternatives.

Similar metrics apply for games. "Time To 'Hello Game World'" let's call it. TTHGW. An average MMORPG is "install this game, run it, and you're in, actively engaged". The support facilities in place after that point are icing on the cake. The key point is that you're in and playing often in minutes. Web games are even faster (presuming a decent network connection). You connect to the web site, you make your account, you're in.

They also tend to look really pretty when you get there.

MU*es are the Mercury of games. You encounter the concept and are faced with two paths:

1. Use your native telnet client to try it out. This is a terrible experience and leads to people mostly going "WTF!?" and wandering off. Native telnet is the worst way to experience MU*es; it throws all the disadvantages into sharp relief while disguising the few advantages.

2. Download a MU* client, install it, figure out how it works, set up your connection info (which is often not very well spelled out because people running and playing MUes forget what the newbie experience is like), to get the … marginally improved experience of using a MU client. It's time and "go/no go" choice points aplenty, and that before you get to the decidedly underwhelming visual appeal of @emit Hello game world!. It's better than choice 1, but not by a whole lot.

A decent web interface eliminates the barriers for getting to the game entirely. It's a click (or from an amalgamated client site a selection from a drop-down list) and you're on the game. You go from concept to connection in a click or two. Sure you then face the other problem with the MU* interface and lose players that way, but the more you get to that point, the more will stick around simply by probabilistic calculus.

And that's assuming just a web client interface to the creaking old MU* approach. With a web client that's modernized you have the option of improving the MU* experience tremendously. Like clicking on the name of a person to get their desc in a pop-up box. Or getting lists of exits you can see/use in button arrays. Or getting a map image displayed with a red X showing "you are here now". Or having online help that can be easily browsed to the side of the main game instead of using in-band signalling. Or a million other ways of improving the overall experience. But all of that is secondary to just getting people into your game so you can sell them on its virtues in the first place.

I worked at a 7-11 in my college years, before I realized security graveyard shifts were where it's at for study time. My biggest horror story was the cocaine bust.

There was a private "neighbourhood security" firm that patrolled the neighbourhood next to our store that we liked to refer to as "the demilitarized zone" in Regina, SK. When they weren't patrolling the zone, they were parked in our parking lot. In exchange for a small stream of free coffee we got extra shoplifting control when things got busy. It paid off one day when one of the pair leaned over the counter and murmured to me, "That lady over there just put a tin of stew into her purse." He paired that with a discreet finger pointing at the lady (of the night) in question. So we waited for her to leave, sure enough without coming to the cash, and one of the security dudes stopped her outside and said that we would be detaining her until the cops came.

She blustered, but I was, at the time, built like a brick shithouse and my work partner was a fat old Irish woman who was a spitfire and a half. We were not intimidated and merely prevented her from leaving until the cops arrived. The cops listened to us, to the security dudes, and then asked the lady if she'd mind opening her purse. She practically threw the purse at them. And from the purse came:

• the aforementioned tin of stew
• a bottle of 7-up
• a box of sugar cubes
• approximately $50,000 (1980s money!) of cocaine in brick form

That was exciting enough, but after the cops cleared the place (with two gratis LARGE cups of coffee and two boxes of donuts discreetly placed into their car when they weren't looking) two OTHER regulars came tearing into the place screeching that we had to get the fuck out of Dodge and quick. They were, we suspect, pot dealers. They spent almost every night at the edge of our parking lot coming in every so often to buy our (horrific) sandwiches and assorted munchies like chips or chocolate. And according to their report the "boyfriend" (their words, not ours; I'd have likely called him "pimp"), who'd been patiently sitting on the hood of a car (not his) while this all went down, upon her arrest and being carted out stalked off the parking lot loudly muttering to himself something about "getting a shotgun" and "blowing their fucking heads off".

We called the cops and within a minute the same cops who'd come before arrived back and concealed themselves in the staff room, pistols out of their holster. Then one of them said, "Wait, that guy. We got his statement, right?" "Yeah." "You don't think..." "Nah, nobody could be that stupid." So on the off chance he was that stupid, they called in to dispatch and checked if his statement had an address. It did. They sent a couple of squad cars to said address ... and caught him in the act of exiting his home with an assembled and loaded shotgun.

It turns out uttering death threats and then going home to pick up the tools to carry out said threats is a very serious offence.

Then my crowning glory of achievement as a manly-man. The two of us were on a swing shift, so we ended at 4AM. Our replacement was a (solo) gorgeous chick I'd been eyeing for weeks. She hears about the excitement and practically begs me on her knees not to leave her alone.

Idiot that I was I left anyway. Because I had a D&D session to write up for noon that day.

DAMMIT!

@Catsmeow said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

So here's a stupid question: Why do we care who Custodius plays?

Should this be a concern?

I'm probably the person who played with Custodius the first here on the board since, AFAIK, Castle Marrach was his first online text game. So let me tell you about his tenure on CM. Then let me point out that he has not visibly improved in any aspect beyond manipulation since.

In Castle Marrach, a MUD-like game similar to Arx in feel (although far lamer in theme), the character that Custodius' player is most known for is the character with the rather twee name "Morte". Of course this character was dark and mysterious and wore nothing but black and so on and so forth. (Interesting side note: he snidely kept insisting that "Morte" should be pronounced "Mort-ay" -- "like the French do". Actual francophones told him he was full of shit, but hey, Custodius isn't the kind of guy who lets facts interfere with his rich fantasy world.)

Now CM at the time was billed as a game of intrigue. And Morte played that game really well by all visible signs. He had a gang of thugs who'd go around beating (or worse) anybody who crossed him, and they were terribly good at their jobs, seeing as, you know, not a single one of them ever got caught. Ever. Even when the entire castle was up in arms and looking for even a single one of them. Long after I quit the game I found out how Morte managed to pull this off. He introduced "blue-booking" to the game. All those thug attacks? They were just him manipulating drama hounds into saying they'd been attacked by thugs in "blue-booked" scenes. None of it ever actually happened in-game using in-game mechanics. Why were no thugs ever caught? Because they never fucking existed. It was win-win for the pairing of Morte/Custodius and the drama whore of the week. The drama whore got attention for the brutal beating and wounding and worse, and Morte/Custodius got this mysterious air of untouchability.

Now, naturally, given the Big Baddie nature he built up around himself, there was work done IC to take him down. And there was one guy (name long since forgotten, so I'll call him Pulpit) who was almost obsessive about getting Morte. He would loudly denounce Morte for his crimes, would plot and scheme to take Morte down, and would get involved with everybody else who was anti-Morte to help them in their own schemes, reasoning that if everybody worked to take Morte down together, Morte would fall. (Morte would eventually fall. I'll get to how later.)

All these plans came to naught, however. Somehow Morte had informants who would tip him off to any plans against him. (Even the good ones.) He was never where he was supposed to be; never near the pincers. Other people took the fall for him and he just skipped away, untouchable. Of course when you find out later that Pulpit was one of his alts…

Morte/Custodius was made staff (a "StoryPlotter") at Castle Marrach for "driving RP". Then he got really bad. With his staff powers he would just emote escaping through a secret door that wasn't there in the game. He was able to make perfect disguises that couldn't be seen through (the game mechanisms actually permitted disguises and let you see through those if you had the right powers/spells/abilities/items). He could make his mysterious thugs with impunity, then have them mysteriously die whenever they were caught. His antics got things to the point that as soon as any hint of Morte was in a plot, all the experienced players who weren't in the in-crowd of staff and staff-friends just walked away.

Now, keep in mind that Morte was elevated to staff because he "generated RP". Let me, as a sideline, give you a Morte "plot" in a nutshell. For a long time there was nothing happening for most players at CM. The staff was an inbred circle jerk and paying customers were getting fed up with this. Revolution was brewing. So Morte leaped in to throw the paying rabble a bone just to help stop the upcoming mass exodus. (Foreshadowing: it didn't work.) He inhabited the body of the palace chef and came out to the "Outer Bailey" (code for "place where those not in the in-crowd were forced to play with nothing ever really happening") to treat all the peasants to his special stew. It was sickening to watch everybody and their dog log in their characters just so they had a chance to actually interact with someone (an NPC even!) from the "Inner Bailey". And then the "plot" started. A rat stole the chef's prized ladle. (Yes. Ladle. You read that correctly. The plot was about a stolen ladle. Stolen by a rat.) Morte-played-chef goes ballistic and orders all food cut off to the Outer Bailey entirely because of his precious ladle being stolen. Until his ladle was returned to him, nobody would be eating anything. Everybody scatters trying to find the rat and the ladle. Many hours of "RP" ensued that consisted almost entirely of "have you seen a rat?" "no, have you?" "yes, but no ladle" repeated ad nauseum. Finally someone who was a staff-friend well on her way to joining the Inner Bailey crowd mysteriously finds the ladle in a room that had been searched by at least a dozen people before already. Crisis is averted. Ladle is returned. Food supplies are restarted.

Then the biggest "fuck you" of the story: The "grateful" chef "rewards" the person who found the ladle … with his fucking stew. You know, the stew that at the start was going to be for everybody? Yeah, that's now the reward for one person.

Fucking. Stew.

Every fucking Morte-run plot was like that: something offered to many, then taken away, then offered to a staff-friend who "solved" the problem. (Most CM plots sucked if you weren't in the in-crowd, but Morte's were the lamest and most aggravating by far.)

So I said that Morte finally fell. Here's how. He seduced the wife of one of the game's owners/principals into meeting him in a motel room and fucking. They got caught. He was banned from the servers and a lame duel was fought that killed his character bit. That was it. (How do I know? Interesting story: when I was trying to figure out why a bunch of characters had vanished without a trace, I said, in a private OOC conversation with another character, "WTF HAPPENED!? DID HE FUCK THE BOSS' WIFE OR SOMETHING!?" Within 30 seconds I was yanked into the staff room of discipline and grilled for who told me about this because apparently there was a huge wall of secrecy complete with signed legal documents around it. My frustrated, off-the-cuff ludicrously over-the-top comment turned out to be true. They got really upset when, upon being asked who told me, I said, "You did. Just now." Then they tried to claim that I had a legal obligation to not spread the story. Which I just laughed at because at that point I hated the fuckers more than they hated me.)

So, that's your "Custodius". You tell me: is this a source of concern? I've been watching his performance on many places since his CM days. I've even interacted with him via IM services and on some social MU*es since then. He's claimed many times that "I was only 17" and "I've improved" and so on … and then stories come out of the MU*es he plays on that shows he's the same old Morte I knew and despised back in the CM days. He is truly the metaphorical leopard whose spots never change.

If Custodius is on your game, get him the fuck off your game. If you're in a game with Custodius on it, get off the game. People here have a hate hard-on for VASpider. I think Custodius is at least at the same level as her for sheer toxicity. If you don't listen to my advice in this paragraph, let me know so I can get the popcorn started.

The 2016 Song.

@Pandora said in RL Anger:

At least I own being mean and hateful when I am in fact being mean and hateful, which is honestly not that often.

Never understood why this was considered a virtue instead of an exacerbating condition.

If someone doesn't realize they're being an asshole, it's not really quite their fault (except insofar as not knowing you're being an asshole is often fucking stupid).

If, however, someone knows full well that they're being an asshole and then flat-out says they know it this actually, to my mind, is worse. It means they recognize assholeish behaviour and then explicitly decided to continue doing it.

Asperger's is one HELL of a drug.

Thanks guys. I was really missing the traditional WORA bloodbath. You came through for me. I love you all!

Let's be blunt: the guy is so obviously painting Daken@UnitedHeroes that the initial claim of not wanting to name and shame is risible (and thoroughly disingenuous). The added "I've heard that people are saying" thing is just diarrhoetic frosting on the bullshit cake.

So here's my advice to OP: if Daken's antics are bugging you you have these viable options:

1. Avoid.
2. Talk to HIM privately with your concerns, and without the bullshit "I'm concerned on your behalf" nonsense.
3. Nothing else.

Note what is missing from this list: trying to stir up a good old-fashioned MSB/WORA/SWOFA/whatever curb stomp. Because the stomp could very well be yours if you keep this nonsense up.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

@Ex-FaviIIa-Surgo said in RL Anger:

untermenschen

Oh, sorry. I didn't realise you were actually braindead.

Also, it's always capitalised: Untermenschen. If you're going to insult me, do it properly.

Further, you cannot be "an Untermenschen". You, in the plural case, can be "Untermenschen". In the singular case, however, as was used here, you can be "an Untermensch". (This presumes, naturally, you want to be one of those tiresome turds who mix languages to disguise their lack of thinking by "SEE A FOREIGN WORD I'M NOT AN IDIOT WITH NO OPINION WORTH EXPRESSING!")

TL;DR summary: go back to 4chan. Feel free to return when you accomplish adulthood in more than just time spent on the planet.

I'm just flabbergasted at someone posting a trash bin fire as an enticing plot lead-in to sell the game. Really? Was the paint drying plot considered too risqué?

@silentsophia said:

I dunno. There's no real fucking reason to bully someone. But I guess 'don't be an asshole' is too tough for some folks …

Well, there's also the issue that "being an asshole" varies wildly from person to person. A friend of mine that I've known for decades asked me for some recommendations on computer hardware. I know what he uses his computer for, etc. and said, "well, based on your use profile, there's no reason for you to waste money on a top-of-the-line rig that you won't even use 10% of". Another friend of his who was present thought that had me being an asshole (while the guy I said it to nodded in agreement and went on to buy a computer he used for four years before he finally outgrew it).

Some things are pretty obviously "asshole behaviour", but the dividing line between "asshole" and "not-asshole" are not as clear as some would like to pretend they are.

Getting back to my professional roots. I gave up on embedded systems and moved into mainstream software decades ago. I burned out so badly from this that I gave up ALL software 15 years ago. Now I'm back making embedded software and … WTF did I leave this for? This is incredibly fun!

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

@WTFE The only people who can stop her are the staff who allow or disallow her to play on their games. I think we're all aware of that.

It's the staff I'm viewing as the village bumpkins. Their whole "we've got this, trust us" thing has me giggling. It's almost as if nobody has ever in the past thought of watching her closely with an eye toward stepping in if she starts being a problem...

One thing I love about life? This man lives on the same planet I do:

When I first read that Oberlin fiasco months ago I started laughing like mad at the Chinese person who was complaining about the culturally appropriated General Tso's Chicken complaining how it was boiled, not fried like at home.

He's a fucking poser. A liar. A total and absolute fraud. He's either never actually set foot in China or he's lying about the food he ate while in China.

How do I know this? Because General Tso's Chicken is not a fucking thing here! It doesn't exist except as an American import. (And to be fair it's a pretty popular import--once adjusted to local tastes. Don't ask about the adjustments…) It is a dish born in the USA and bred in the USA. The real-life General Tso (properly Zuo Zongtang--more evidence of the dumb shit being a poser), contrary to the idiot stories surrounding this dish, never ate it. (It would be difficult for him to do so seeing as he died about 90 years before the dish was first created.)

The Japs whining about the purity of sushi are full of shit too. I've been in Japan (albeit ever so briefly) and you can get sushi that's easily as bad as what Oberlin was serving. I mean for fuck's sake there's sushi in vending machines! So much for the "intense respect" the dish is given in "authentic Japanese culture". (Someone apparently forgot to circulate the memo among the authentic Japanese…)

And bánh mì? Really? "Vietnamese" people are talking about bánh mì as if it were a dish? It. Fucking. Isn't. Bánh mì means "bread" for fuck's sake! It applies to any bread made with wheat. Any one. And it's the bread. Not the sandwiches (note the plural!) made with it (although through synecdoche the sandwiches are often called just bánh mì…in ENGLISH).

Which bánh mì did the "Vietnamese" chick mean when thinking about "comfort food from home"? Bánh mì kẹp kem? (That's an ice cream sandwich.) Bánh mì chay? (Vegetable sandwich.) Bánh mì thịt, maybe? (Meat sandwich.) Or any number of a thousand other variants? There simply is no single dish called bánh mì. What she described as an "insulting" version of bánh mì would probably be wolfed down in actual Vietnam without comment … unless the food was shit, of course. (And given that this is university cafeteria food that likely cost them about two bucks, it probably was shit. But not because it was "appropriated".)

The Oberlin students undermined any hope of ever being taken seriously on any subject with this little idiot stunt of theirs. The modern left is going to have to learn that not everything is political, not everything is problematic on oppression grounds (I'd be FAR more concerned about listeria outbreaks in cafeteria food than the hysteria that broke out there!), and that sometimes you can complain about things in and of themselves (this food is shit!) rather than making up lies so you can use the nuclear option.

What, another one? Didn't all y'all just have three?

@Tyche There is only "Americanized" General Tso's chicken. It's an American-Chinese dish. It has never been seen in China until there was a vain attempt to introduce it here in Hunan.

@Faceless said in Sleepy boredom...:

MU*ing never changes.

No matter how much it needs to.