@Cupcake I'll chime in with the others on this.
Cut. The. Ties.
I say this as someone who walked away from his parents for close to five years before we finally started normalizing our relationship. I'm convinced to this day that had I not done the severing there never would have been a normalization. It took the shock of me walking out to wake them up. (Well, him, since it was in particular my father I had issues with.)
@Thenomain said in RL things I love:
@ThugHeaven said in RL things I love:
We're in the age of "alternative facts" now
We've been in that age for over a decade.
s/decade/century/
s/century/millennium/
@surreality said in RL Anger:
@Shiggy Psssssst. @WTFE has lived in China for years and years and years.
Probably longer than Rick has been alive, I'm guessing. 
Saturday my son makes me proud and on Monday I get the fruits of being a (bush league) patron of the arts.
This is my third crowd-funding backing on Modian (a sort of Chinese Kickstarter but for creative projects only) and my first that's directly related to the arts. So far I've not even been mildly disappointed by the projects I've backed, but this one blew me away with its professional production. (The music is good too but probably not to anybody's tastes here.)
And thing is, once that seed is planted it's very hard to weed.
I've been there before: great job, great boss, but something happens that makes you doubt the place and … well, I was young and stupid at the time (as opposed to old and stupid, but a bit experienced) and I stuck around past my time. I could have left the job on good terms and instead left the job bitter enemies with one of the bosses.
Don't consider. Effect it. At the very least get your ducks in a row, cross your "i"s, dot your "t"s and be ready to evacuate on short notice. Don't just think about it. Get the process started.
If you can weed that sprout of discontent you've got growing there, no harm, no foul. If not, you're ready to walk on your terms instead of theirs.
@ThatGuyThere said in RL Anger:
This should shock no one but my resting facial expression leads people to think I am angry and upset when I am emotionally neutral or bored.
It's true. Here's his resting face:
So, today I exploded on some people I otherwise generally like. At issue: M-103 and C-16.
The first of these is a parliamentary motion. It has ZERO legal teeth. It is a statement of parliamentary opinion and nothing more. Motion M-103 and five bucks will get you a small Starbucks coffee. (Or has that risen to ten bucks these days?) This hasn't stopped people from exploding all over the fucking social media scene with "ZOMG! SHARIA LAW! BLASPHEMY AGAINST ISLAM IS ILLEGAL IN CANADA!" bullshit.
It's not a fucking law. It's a motion. It's political grandstanding and pandering at its worst. It has NO LEGAL WEIGHT (and little moral weight, given, you know, politicians!) of any kind. Anybody who calls it a law is either stupidly ignorant or a dishonest shithead with a political agenda to push.
This is in contrast to the latter, which is definitely a law. Bill C-16 is either sitting in, or has passed, third reading and is about to become law of the land. And people are losing their collective shit over this one like nothing I've seen this side of "ZOMG CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF SANDWICHES!" or "WAR ON CHRISTMAS!" bullshit. If you were to take seriously people like Jordan Peterson (who is in the vanguard of the screeching hysteria over C-16) you'd think that it was the beginnings of the Freedom Holocaust.
But you know, I've read C-16. You can too. I linked to it. It's a remarkably short document. It basically adds four words of significance to the 40 year old Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 and four words of significance to the matching portions of the Criminal Code. These additional words add one more protected group to the eleven pre-existing protected groups: the transgendered.
Now, I'd understand it if the objection was to the entirety of the CHRA. I might even have some sympathy for it. The notion of a hate crime is very ... troubling to me. There are powerful arguments both in support of and in condemnation of setting up classes of people who get special protection under the law. I don't know enough to know which side is right or wrong and I lack the time or wherewithal to go in and make that determination.
What I do know, however, is that C-16 changes nothing of substance. If you were fine with the CHRA (and its paired criminal code clauses) and suddenly oppose C-16, you're doing something that's either very bizarre or you're doing something that clearly brands you an asshole. For 40 years we lived with the CHRA and have not had the Freedom Holocaust happen. For 40 years most of the current screeching gibbons have been dead silent on the CHRA, but suddenly have lost their shit over C-16. And this makes me want to plank them. By which I don't mean that idiotic YouTube thing. I mean I want to hit them in the head with a quickly-moving plank.
It has been [10] hours since @shangexile "quit" MSB.
It has been [1] minutes since @shangexile last posted.
I don't get the idea that we focus on whether someone has said they are quitting or not. I mean, I guess it's part of your drinking game, but I really don't get it. I think there are a shitton of people, myself included, that have said varying degrees of 'peace' and then come back to posting in varying timelines. Makes it a good addition to a drinking game, for sure, but what does it illustrate about the person that I am missing?
@Meg: It's just a particularly comical cliche on WORA/SWOFA/MSB: the "I'm quitting, no really, I'm leaving now, just watch me go, see how I'm leaving?" routine, usually (but admittedly not always) with the slathered-on implication that they are somehow superior people because they're leaving. It's funny when they do it, and it's funnier when they come back. It's funnier still, however, when they come back in less time than a good night's sleep.
The humour reaches sublime heights when they spend most of their returned time defending the fact that they've returned instead of shutting the fuck up and pretending that their original flouncing-off didn't happen.
@surreality said in Forum Factions:
Also: The Drinking Game Players
...I suggest me, Gany, and WTFE, at least.
I would have used a gif from Princess Bride for this one. You know the scene...
Is there a "Actively Seeking Liver Donations" faction? If not, can we make one and put me as the patron saint of it?
<irony>
I really can't picture what mental, social, and/or pecuniary state you'd have to be in to just rip up all your roots and travel an insane distance to a completely new venue to start it all over again.
</irony>
Good luck with your endeavours, Auspice. If you ever feel like roaming even further afield, I can probably give you some pointers... 
@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:
Sensible Command Names - Why is the OOC profile command named +finger? Or the build command 'dig'? Or the private chat command 'page'?
Consistency - The mixed up mash of coded systems on most MUs often leads to bizarre inconsistencies - like one command uses
subject=messageand another usessubject/message.Redundancy - +help versus help or +desc versus @desc anyone? MU systems overlay on the base hardcode implementation, so you end up with multiple ways to do similar things. Which is sort of related to...
Command Prefixes - Why is it @desc versus +where versus quit?
These. All of these right fucking here. And it goes far, far, far deeper than even that.
Another (non-MUSH) example of shitty UX despite having decent functionality: Git. For many of the same reasons here.
Now I personally know that a lot of this stuff has historical roots. +finger from the unix command, @/+ prefixes for softcode vs hardcode. But when you look at it as an outsider it's un-intuitive, needlessly complex, and just plain goofy.
The @ vs. + vs. . vs bare thing never had an excuse except POSSIBLY the hardcode vs. softcode divide if there's no way to override hardcode commands in softcode. But ... a few questions even if that hardcode/softcode divide needs to be kept:
+finger instead of finger? What does the "+" add there at all?set <property> <target> <foo>. And to read it get <source> <property> and to read it in code get(<source>, <property>) and so on.@Derp is right in that there is a certain level of complexity you cannot reduce below. But that's the essential complexity of a problem domain. What's at issue in shitty UXes (like that of MUSHing) is the unnecessary incidental complexity typified by unexpected naming, unnecessary duplication, bizarre naming schemes, etc.
Nobody (sane and/or knowledgeable) is clamouring for a reduction of essential complexity (because this is impossible). But there's a whole lot of work that could be done to eliminate the incidental complexity of MU*ing, even sticking with the servers as-is.
But I do agree with @HelloProject that you can make at least the basic versions simple.
And that's the other issue in UX design. Identifying the most common use cases and streamlining it for those to be efficient and simple. If 99.44% of the time an attack is roll d20 add attack subtract defense, that should be what happens when you type the attack command by itself. If you have to add modifiers for uncommon situations, a raw attack should still work exactly as the most common circumstance holds.
The same is true for all parts of the MU: chat systems, bulletin boards, jobs systems, scene management, etc.: the common should be the default.
@EmmahSue said in But Wait, There's More!:
Your questions may begin.... now.
OK, if you insist. My question is…
WTF is this and why do I have a picture of it?:
I thought GoB was awesome … except for that pesky time zone issue that kills my ability to play pretty much any fringe MU*.
My recent trend of collecting whimsical Chinese erotica has hit paydirt.
The cover looks so innocent...
...but the contents are OH SO NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
Seriously. Don't follow the second link if you're at work (unless you work at a porn studio or something, in which case maybe you can take notes?).
@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:
I fail to see how extending the 'mail' command to do something more (what I'm suggesting) is any more confusing than disabling it and forcing players to use a +mail system instead (which is what people do today). The player doesn't care whether it's softcoded or hardcoded; they just want to send mail.
This. This right here. This is the fucking essence of UX 101.
Don't make the user care about irrelevant bullshit.
There's plenty of historical reasons (good or otherwise) for MUSHes to have a terrible UX. I get it. There's a lot of baggage here.
But…
This doesn't stop it from being a terrible UX! That's the part people have to get through their skulls. There's plenty of reasons why DOS was the way it was too, historically. It doesn't change the fact that DOS was a piece of shit that everybody was glad to see the back of … except for the DOS grognards who spouted a lot of the same shit that's being spouted here about how MUSHes do it right.
@Collective said in But Wait, There's More!:
@WTFE It's a sphere gap voltmeter. And zappy plasma magic happens between the big metal doorknobs. Who wouldn't want a picture of that?!
Close. The gap voltmeter we make looks very similar. (Indeed I think externally they're the same housing.) But this specific one isn't for measuring voltages. It's for actually discharging. It's for testing insulation and grounded casings and the like.