Best posts made by WTFE

I have always loved fountain pens, from childhood on. They're so much nicer to write with: no pressure, just slide them across the paper and leave a trail of crap writing behind. Ballpoints need pressure which eventually hurts your hand, and leave a trail of crap writing and dented paper behind.

Living in Canada, though, it was almost impossible to get decent fountain pens. At the affordable end were disposable (!) Parkers that were utter shit at every level. At the mid-range were overpriced Parkers and a few other smaller players that were utter shit, but at least weren't disposable. And at the high end you had stupidly expensive, gaudily decorated tubes that ... still wrote like shit. (Montblanc, I'm looking at you here!)

So I stopped using them.

Then I moved to China.

In China (for a variety of reasons, including one that's so funny you'd swear I was making it up if I told you so I won't) fountains are still the dominant writing instrument. Ballpoints are available and used, but most people reach for a fountain when doing anything serious. (Indeed you're NOT ALLOWED to use a ballpoint on some official documents for reasons which escape me!) As a result, I've gotten back into using fountain pens.

There's a problem, though, and that is nibs. A lot of times new pens' nibs are scratchy and hard to work with. They take some of the joy of a good fountain pen away. I had no idea how to deal with this beyond just gritting my teeth and writing with the pen until the nib is worn down to my writing position.

Then I found out I'm an idiot.

Because there's totally a way to get rid of those burrs and mis-matched tines without buying a hundred nibs and finding the ones that are perfect. It's really simple too. You get yourself one of these:

That is an ultra-fine grit Whetstone. The red side is sintered ruby and is 5000 grit. The mottled green side is jade and is 10,000 grit. A couple of minutes' work (and I mean that: about two minutes) and even the worst nib is turned into a smooth masterpiece that's a joy to write with. (It also clears up a few ink flow problems I had with one nib; not sure what the mechanism was there.)

So yes, that's ruby and jade, two gem stones, being used to fix up some cheap (by western standards) pens. 10cm×2.5cm×1cm. Meaning 12.5cm³ of ruby and 12.5cm³ of jade. As a whetstone.

Of course you pay for what you get. This little motherfucker set me back about…

…THREE FUCKING BUCKS U.S.!

What a world!

(The sintered diamond whetstone at 12,000 grit was too expensive for my tastes. At ten bucks.)

Anybody who reads an unmoderated comments section (and about 95% of the moderated ones) gets what they deserve.

Don't read the comments. It's a basic rule of the modern Internet.

@surreality said:

Many years ago, I had to cut a TS scene short because, and I quote, "I need to go for a moment, the hedges are on fire."

In my defense, they actually really were.

I don't care how many times you say this, I don't believe you and I'm still hurt.

@Monogram said in The Apology Thread:

This kinda makes me want to start a thread about bread. Something bland and boring as bread and if it erupts into a debate.

Just to see if it happens.

If you think bread is bland and boring you are a bad person and you need to be ashamed of yourself. Bread is arguably the most important food innovation in all of history, and given its sheer bewildering variety of forms, flavours, textures, and uses calling it "boring" or "bland" indicates a huge degree of total ignorance.

(How did I do?)

When you hit a new word reading, you need to check it in a dictionary before speaking it.

You don't want to know how many years I was saying "epitome" wrong before someone corrected me.

Or "risible" for that matter.

@Ghost said in The 100: The Mush:

I have an opinion. Yay. We'll all live thru this, I promise.

The issue, Sparky, isn't that you have an opinion. It isn't even that anybody necessarily disagrees with your opinion. (I certainly don't because, as stated before, I have no opinion on the people in question.)

The issue is that you express your opinion like a cross between an incontinent baboon and a three year old child throwing a tantrum.

edited to add
Cases in point:

Also, I apologize, I didn't mean to sound patronizing when I talked about people who don't have a lot of out-of-the-home outlets.

…he said while proceeding to be probably the most patronizing shithead this side of @Ganymede and @Thenomain blended together on their worst days over the past decade…

I'd like to say that I always try to keep those people in mind when I'm out there, MU*ing.

I'm sure they're happy to hear that you're thinking of all the little folk.

In the least patronizing way possible, the reality is that I have a wife, a coffee house, guitars, clean bill of health, working legs, live in one of the largest cities in America, have a biweekly tabletop group, a corner bar, a working car, and a couple of downtown areas with regular concerts and events.

I know no one asked for me to speak on their behalf […]

…he said as he proceeded to speak on their behalf…

[…]I really do feel for those people who run into these shit issues and have to keep plucking the chicken.

@Ghost is the kind of person who spends his life "working for others. You can tell the others by the hunted look."

[…] I've offset my old frustration with some aspects of MUgaming with shrugging and voting with my feet.

Yeah, that's what your incoherent rants look like. Shrugging and voting with your feet. Keep telling yourself that, Sparky, and even you may some day believe it.

@Auspice Isn't that what this whole thread here has turned into?

@Scorn said in Things We Should Have Learned Sooner:

• Resting bitch face can save you from a lot of conversations you want nothing to do with.

I've taken that up a notch. I have resting homicidal axe murderer face.

You think I'm exaggerating.

I'm not exaggerating.

I'm not angry in this photo.

@Ghost said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

I will note that I am a supporter of dice-assisted resolution and have found that super hero MUs with the diceless, cooperative systems work really well so long as everyone involved is role-playing in a relaxed, reasonable state. However, not all players operate the same, and have seen people abuse the diceless system.

TL;DR: diceless works so long as everyone is cooperative and copacetic, but unethical players will use said lack of dice to their powerpose advantage.

Unethical players will use dice to their power pose advantage too. It just shifts the point of their being assholes around.

Dice are not the great equalizer their advocates seem to hold them. Here's a trivial hack off the top of my head: in chargen make your character invincible, for all practical purposes, in one specific area: say ranged combat. Give them loads of numbers on a ranged attack and loads of numbers on damage avoidance/elimination. Then just carefully avoid any scene in which your advantage can't be used. Suddenly you have a character who cannot lose when played, even though the all-holy dice are there to adjudicate things.

There's a million ways for assholes to be assholes. There's only one sure-fire way to stymie an asshole: don't be there. Avoid the fucker and walk away. This could be as blatant as:

<asshole> has arrived.
home

@faraday said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

@Thenomain I'm curious how you define "immediate feedback tools". Is changing code in a text editor in the server shell and typing @reload in the game not immediate?

I grant that neither Evennia nor Ares can compete with the old MU servers in allowing any old player to fiddle with the code. But for actual game devs, I don't quite see the distinction that you seem to be alluding to.

Every step between "typing code" and "seeing the results of the typed code" is a barrier. This is why, for example, I will always prefer programming embedded systems in Forth over C (or, better, Modula-2). Here's my programming work cycle in Forth:

1. Come up with a crazy idea.
2. Type in the code for that crazy idea.
3. Run the code and watch it crash and burn.
4. Repeat until this doesn't crash and burn.

Here's my programming work cycle in C (or Modula-2):

1. Come up with a crazy idea.
2. Type in the code for that crazy idea.
3. Compile that code (and correct the inevitable whining from the compiler over trivial shit).
4. Link that code.
5. Flash that code onto the MCU.
6. Fire up the debugger.
7. Run the code and watch it crash and burn.
8. Repeat until this doesn't crash and burn.

(I'm being a bit facetious with the descriptions, but the general process is sound.)

What this means is that from the point of conception to the point of inception there is a very little gap (typing the code) when I program in Forth whereas when I use a language like C (or Modula-2) there's a quite larger gap. The immediacy of the Forth approach gets me to functioning and tested code far more quickly by keeping my thoughts on the problem domain (instead of the plumbing) for longer.

In the end I may finally implement the program's final version in a compiled language, but nothing beats a hosted interpreted language (or a language whose compile/link/load cycle is so fast it emulates one) for raw exploration of concept space.

This is MUSHcode's single strength.

As I've gone on at length in other places (including several variants of WORA), MUSHcode is a fucking blight of a programming language. It not only fosters bad programming habits, it demands them. It actively resists any attempt to do the right thing.

Yet, I would far rather try setting up a MUSH server--despite hating the technology it's based on!--over setting up a game on Evennia. Why? Because the barrier between conceiving of something and seeing it work is far, far, far smaller.

Firing up a text editor, editing code there, then switching to your game and typing @reload isn't as onerous a task as the horrible, horrible, horrible steps I take to get my C code working on an MCU, but it's a far cry from "the point of entry is the point of output" that fosters the best exploratory work. You're still switching out of your concept space and worrying about the plumbing. When you factor into that the API I linked to earlier with its myriad of StateManagerFactoryManagerStateManager types and other crud from shitty OOP methodology you have something that divorces you so far from the actual game design that it's actually kind of comical to see.

(And that's not even mentioning the horror that is its installation procedure. Or its obnoxious resource requirements. Or ...)

The Evennia project looks like a very well-constructed project that ... solves exactly the wrong problem, IMO. I wish it well, but I don't really expect it to do well in the long term.

As a former migraine sufferer, I am entirely sympathetic to @Sparks' and @Meg's suffering here. And yeah, when I was at the height of my migraines I would have signed ANYTHING and promised to do anything to anyone if it just got rid of the pain.

His kind never stops and I have the inflamed liver to prove it.

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

But you likely do have a point with the resources. I guess this is why Evennia exists now. I'm making my game with Evennia.

I really, really, really had high hopes for Evennia, but I found it had a couple of crippling problems:

1. The process for installing it is idiotic. I eventually got an installation sort of running. I think. (I'm not sure if it was properly and completely installed because by the time I finally reached that stage of being able to log in I'd lost all interest in using it.) Even old-school code bases like PennMUSH or Rhost were easier to install!
2. The documentation reads like the documentation at Oracle's site for Java SE. It's filled to the brim with over-engineering and turgid prose that I keep handy on my bedside table for those sleepless nights.

Now for the scale of that installation and documentation problem: I currently code embedded systems for a living. One of the smaller MCUs that I use has over 1200 pages of documentation that was written by engineers. ITALIAN engineers. Who painfully obviously have a few issues with writing in English. In total the chips I use from this company have documentation that exceeds 3000 pages. And that's just the MCUs. Each peripheral device I use has manuals that range anywhere from 20 pages in length to 900. (Many of the "peripherals" are MCUs in their own right that just have permanently-burned firmware.)

Further, for my home usage (not work), I use F/OSS tools instead of commercial ones. Documentation for F/OSS tooling is notoriously terrible and the tools rarely, if ever, are designed to actually work together coherently. My compiler is GCC and my assembler is GAS. (These two work well together, and they both work fine with GNU's link editor.) My debugger is GDB and I use OpenOCD as a bridge between GDB and my chips' debug modules so I can actually flash and debug my code. As an added "fuck you", GDB is scripted in Python while OpenOCD is scripted in Tcl (and the link editor has its own fucked-up scripting format for moving things around).

Just the infrastructure coding in any given project--the code that exists solely to bind together the various tools I have to use in something resembling coherent whole--is typically several hundred to thousand lines of Rexx scripts I cook up for each project (though, to be fair, most of it is cribbed from other projects and I push a lot of common code into a cookbook library).

It's a total fucking mess. And I find it easier than installing Evennia was.

And this just in!

(Literally. It arrived at the receiving desk 45 minutes ago.)

Now to clarify, these aren't actually for me. (I may get myself another set mind...) These are something I'm going to insert into the oh-so-boring wedding gift my wife is getting for some friends. I even have a lovely blue velvet pouch of the appropriate size to hold all five dice. There will be a metal plate attached into which I will have etched (with a laser etcher I have here) something similarly racy on one side and, in Chinese and English both on the other "For the wedding night!"

I will probably be murdered by my wife.

@Warma-Sheen said in Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?:

I see a lot of people talk about affecting other people's enjoyment. But does anyone ever have those conversations?

Yes. I make sure I get to know people I play with enough to get a decent idea of what they would and wouldn't enjoy beforehand. If something comes up, I can and do pause action to ask things like "this is gonna go dark places; wanna find a way to avoid that?" Because often people have NO CLUE what their actions are going to cause for a wide variety of reasons, including the atonality of text.

Cause I've never seen them before. I've never seen anyone else have them and no one has ever had them with me.

Get a better class of co-player.

Are there a lot of assumptions being made about how other people are going to react to their IC actions?

I assume people are in the game to have fun. I assume that people can be read for what they find fun or not much of the time.

I like to believe that people can still enjoy their characters and their RP, even when bad things happen to their characters - even if my character does something bad to their character. Not everyone believes that.

I believe it and, in fact, find eternal nice-nice and ever-victorious scenes really fucking boring. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't have limits. It's why the key to any game is communication.

(Actually it's the key to all good social interactions.)

And since no one seems to be having those conversations... is it me or does that leave a whole mess of room for miscommunication and decisions based on flawed assumptions?

Like the flawed assumption that no-one is having these conversations?

The day we view mental health the same way we view physical health is the day we'll start seeing proper training for dealing with breakdowns in it.

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

@WTFE I disagree.

You have that right.

I think that what the professor did was the better story option.

You are, however, 100% wrong in doing so in this case.

A story consists of one or more plots. A plot is the resolution (one way or another ) of one or more conflicts (or as Polti would put it, "dramatic situations").

There was a plot in play. It resolved around several dramatic situations. (Aside from the obvious military angle there were plots buzzing around politics, public relations, and a shady bit of clandestine research that could have gone really badly pear-shaped had everybody involved in investigating/propagating it been suddenly terminated out of the blue.) ZERO of those dramatic situations got resolved with the sudden TPK. Thankfully before this cycle we'd done a full plot with a suitable ending so the sour taste from this fiasco wasn't as bad as it could have been, but only an idiot would think that a TPK mid-story is good narrative technique.

You are free to disagree, but ... here's a thought: find me three books (that aren't academic wankery that five English majors in the world have read, I mean -- something that was actually read by actual people) that "resolve" a plot by killing all the protagonists suddenly out of the blue while (important bit here!) none of the current conflicts have even begun to get resolved.

Some stories don't have happy or even meaningful endings, which makes them even more poignant.

This "story" didn't have an ending of any kind. It had the kind of "ending" you'd get from a novel that was 3/4 complete when the author suddenly died of a heart attack. It didn't end so much as get truncated. I mean he TRIED to continue it, but without the IC history, connections, motivations, etc. there was no reason for the new characters to keep going into the proven-deadly killing field. If even ONE of the original characters had survived there might have been a way (although more than one would have been much nicer), but we didn't have that. What we had instead would be like if, say, Colin & Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Philip Selway, and Thom Yorke all simultaneously got killed in an air crash but Nigel Godrich decided to just take five other people, call them Radiohead, and kept them making albums.

One of the inspiring texts for D&D (It was in Appendix N) was Seven Geases where spoilers the main character survives a whole host of adventures only to die by slipping and falling from a cliff at the end. end spoilers

And the whole host of adventures were a set of plots with beginnings and ends, right? He wasn't on his way to the site of the first of those adventures and fell off the cliff before he even got to it?

Then again, I am a strong gamist rather than a narrativist, unless I am playing something like Mystic Empyrean or Microscope.

And from the gamist perspective he was right. It's just that as a narrative it fucking sucked. So right here you're contradicting what you opened with. You're saying "from a gamist perspective it was a good narrative". There's a reason why "gamist" and "narrativist" are on opposing ends of a spectrum: they're not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.

You can read all about the founding ideas behind old-school D&D in this series where a blogger played with Mike Mornard, one of the early players in Gygax's group: http://blogofholding.com/?series=mornard I think everyone should read the whole series, as D&D set the stage for our entire hobby. It's sort of a Federalist Papers of RPGs.

I really don't give a shit. All the "Federalist Papers of RPGs" in the world doesn't change what literally thousands of years of literature has deemed to be a narrative. There is merit as a game to the "let the dice lie where they may" stance. But that merit is not a merit for narrative. Good narratives can emerge from that only by accident in the same way that getting a coherent and decent character out of a character generation system that will kill characters off part-way through can: blind luck.

And note, again, I'm not saying you're wrong for liking the "gamist" approach (as much as I fucking hate that clunky neologism). I'm saying you're wrong for thinking that the "gamist" approach made for a good narrative here. You're not doing wrongfun. You're just factually incorrect about the narrative structure.

@SG said in RL things I love:

@WTFE what kind of adventures are you going to go on with those hats? You need machetes, knee socks and khaki short shorts to go with them!

What makes you think I don't have the rest of that?

I just find the concept of tying "elitism" to "pretendy fun time games" utterly hilarious.

Nobody (self included) can ever just say "I don't like <X>." They always have to make it some moral or mental failing in The Other for liking something different.

Yesterday someone mentioned something about a "Harvey" and Houston. I had no fucking idea what they were referring to, so I asked. Apparently not knowing about a hurricane half a world away and subsequent flooding in a city that's also half a world away makes me "ignorant" and "insensitive".

So I asked the stupid cunt what her opinion was of the flooding in Assam and Bihar. (You know, places that are by comparison in my back yard.)

Today I find that being aware of massive events that are impacting millions upon millions in a country that's the next door neighbour of the one I'm in, without being aware of an event that's half a world away, apparently makes me an "asshole" on top of everything else.

Strangely, though, her ignorance of massive disruptions (far larger than the Houston thing!) half a world away doesn't make her an ignorant, insensitive asshole.

Gotta love the way people think sometimes, eh?