@Serafine said in Wyrdhold Discusion:
Best of luck on your new place, it looks very interesting and if I had free time, I would app in a heartbeat.
Except let us be fair here, you already did as Valentin and got banned. As we saw over on the Neitherlands thread, you played Laurent (based on the screenshots you shared as Laurent)
Shall we compare descs?
My cat passed suddenly last night with no warning. She was fine, and then she wasn’t, and even though we got her into the car as quickly as we could she didn’t make it to the vet.
We’ve had her for 13 years, and I really wasn’t ready to lose her. I thought we had a good few years left with her. My only consolation is that had it been 10 minutes later we’d have been out at the shops and she’d have been alone, but as it was we were able to tell her everything was gonna be okay.
I’m in fucking pieces. I keep listening for her and being careful where I put my feet and every time it catches me out just how much it hurts. I know that this too shall pass but right now it doesn’t feel like it.
I admit I was trolling just a little bit with the title and then I got distracted by dinner. But I do have some thoughts about it.
I get this feeling that there’s the part of the MU world that looks down on friendship - like if you’re RPing with people you’re not allowed to also like them because… reasons?
And of course, one of the things about friends is they tend to have similar-ish opinions, and so if you don’t agree with someone on a subject you may well not agree with their friends. And suddenly, cliques are born, where clique == group of people that you aren’t in.
Staff, of course, are not allowed friends because they staff out of the goodness of their hearts, but they must not enjoy it because if you enjoy something then you might be tempted to do more things for the people that you enjoy doing things for and then that’s favouritism.
I dunno, I thought I had a point, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an online community be so split about the idea of being friends with people you spend time with.
I’m on the side of friendship good, in case that wasn’t clear. A friend is someone I want to spend time with and share experiences with. Sometimes I feel we’ve got so lost in the weeds of “everyone must be equal in their fun having” that we forget that we’re adults with lives and jobs and we do this in our spare time. I want to spend my spare time with my friends, not with people I keep at arm’s length.
The most specific thing I’ve researched for RP was “the application process for a library card in the Grand County Library District in Colorado and the necessary forms of identification.”
My GP has completely screwed me on medication and I’m absolutely furious.
Backstory, about 2 years ago I went private for mental health care because the UK’s mental health care is pretty terrible. In doing so I was diagnosed with ADHD and started on medication. Once I was stable, the psychiatrist entered into a shared care agreement with my GP at the time - this means the GP prescribes on the psych’s advice, so I don’t have to pay private prescription rates.
At the beginning of this year I moved and so moved GPs. As part of that a new shared care agreement needed to be entered into, which the psych duely sent off to the new GP. For the first month the GP happily prescribed me the medication. This month they managed to only prescribe half of it and then contacted me to tell me they couldn’t prescribe it at all (and acted very surprised when they found out they’d already prescribed me some).
So when I actually spoke to the GP they were like ‘oh, we can’t prescribe outside of a shared care agreement and we don’t have one from your psych’, and when I poitned out they’d had a letter a month ago suddenly ‘oh yes, here it is, but we don’t normally enter into private shared care agreements, so you’ll have to be referred to the NHS mental health team which can take upwards of two months’.
So when I asked what I was supposed to do without half my medication her response was ‘oh you’ve started taking it already?’. I’ve been stable on it for over a year with no changes to the medication, which a simple glance at my file would have told her. So not only are they saying they won’t enter into a private shared care agreement, they didn’t actually check my notes before making that decision, never responded to the shared care agreement request, and never told me that this was the case before it came time to request my medication, so rather than giving me time to arrange a private prescription they’re leaving me half a dose down for at least a week, because it’s a bank holiday on Thursday and Friday so even if I can get the prescription request in by tomorrow I won’t get it until at least late next week.
I guess I’m lucky that ADHD medication isn’t one of those drugs you have to keep up a dose in your system at all times, but jesus fucking christ, the next two weeks are going to be rough.
I’m waiting on a call back today to see if they’ll ‘make an exception because I’m stable on the medication’ which they could have done a month ago, but either way I’m putting a complaint in.
takes one sip from the drink he ordered three hundred poses ago and now it ceases to exist
@Tori said in An Arx Peeve Thread:
‘where has this person been’ makes me feel really crappy and a bit irritated.
I know it’s almost certainly not the spirit that it was meant in, but I would absolutely take spitful glee in reading it as ‘where has this person been all my life oh my god they are amazing’ and be like ‘yes I am amazing’.
So one of the things I know I’ve talked about before is what the future of MU* looks like. What systems we might be using in a year, five years, etc.
I think it’s fair to say with the rise of Ares lots of people are excited by the move to web and away from telnet for many things - caveat: I know this isn’t everyone and some people just don’t get on with Ares, but I don’t want to rehash that discussion in this topic.
It gets me thinking, how much are we held back by telnet? If we could drop it entirely and do everything in a browser, what would we gain? And what would we lose?
What would we lose?
Dedicated clients would probably go - one of the advantages of telnet is that the protocol is fairly simple, and everything else is window dressing in a client - you send text, you get text. The client is completely unaware of the meaning of the commands. Even if every game started from the same system that had the same API, whenever you add something it’s going to add another call or object to the API, and a single client wouldn’t be able to understand all the variations.
If you lose dedicated clients, you lose a lot of notification functionality. Sure, browsers have some notification ability, but now your game is just in another tab somewhere and it’s easy enough to close by accident and then where did my game go? Also, mobile browsers are an entirely different issue.
(Side note, you can do things here with service workers in the browser, but it’s still not the same)
You might be able to do something clever with an Electron app that just behaves as a window into the game’s site, but I wouldn’t want to assume its workability without some serious testing.
There’s also accessibility concerns. Telnet is easier to make friendly for screenreaders than a single page app website. It’s not impossible, but it’s already an afterthought in many areas, and it could get lost at the wayside, closing off games to an already under-served population.
What would we gain?
Killing off telnet does come with its advantages, of course. Development can be focused in one area, whenever you add a new system, you add it in one place, rather than having to add the telnet-side code as well as the web-side code. You can get rid of long and arcane commands that need to take in multiple inputs and make it a single dialog box. Information can be displayed in ways other than just ASCII.
You could add rich information to your interface - when you enter a room you could get a picture of the room. For your grid you could display an actual grid of information that shows you where the various rooms are, the exits you know about and so on.
It could improve accessibility. Not everyone wants to play with telnet clients to play a game and creating it all in browser could bring more people on board. And if done properly it could make games more accessible to screenreaders, but again that’s a big if.
And of course, just because I’m a big showoff, here’s a gif of the thing I’ve been working on on and off (mostly off). I wanted to build something customisable where you can set our your layout however you want, with potentially multiple character windows worth of stuff at once (maybe you want to RP as your PC but chat as your staff-bit). All in browser of course, the gif showing two browser windows at once.
So far the backend is written in Python, exposing a GraphQL API, and the frontend is written in JS using the Vue 3 framework.
But other than just being a vehicle for being a showoff, this topic is also for other people’s thoughts, so tell me, do you want to see the end of telnet? Or is it so core to MUing we can’t get rid of it?
@Pavel And/or my favourite, putting in their +finger that they’re definitely 100% OOCly okay with IC drama and it’s all IC.
And then it’s followed by a post saying they need to take a break because they’re really stressed out OOCly about all the IC drama.
@helvetica But this is kind of my point. I’m not sure I agree that ‘being banned from a MUSH’ is actual harm.
The rest of this post is not necessarily a direct response, just thoughts that have been brewing this evening.
I don’t think any of this happens in a vacuum. Let’s say that reputational loss is a form of harm. If someone comes to me on a game I’m running and says ‘Hey, X is a sex pest’, the first thing I’ll do is talk to X.
Their response is usually pretty indicative of whether or not there’s substance to the accusations. If it’s “Oh god, I didn’t realise I was coming across like that, I’ll go apologise immediately”, that’s a very different response to “Well I said some things that toed the line but wow they’re so sensitive.” In the former case I’d probably give them the benefit of the doubt, in the latter I’d probably kick them out immediately. I still might keep an eye on them in the former case, and if more people come to me and say “Hey I don’t like X’s vibe, and they did these things too” I may reconsider my original decision.
The problem with the idea that “if you accuse someone they’ll immediately be ostracised from all their communities” is it’s not actually true? Like if someone came forwards and said “Hey Rath is a sex pest and he’s been pressuring me for TS,” I’d expect that my friends and the games I play on would go “hey what’s up with this?” and not knee-jerk kick me out of everything, but if I gave them shitty answers then they’d show me the door. I certainly wouldn’t kick out a long-standing friend over a single accusation on a MU board without talking to them first.
If you’re kicked out of a community from a single accusation on an internet forum? Well, chances are that there were many more accusations you didn’t see, and/or the community already had a vibe about you. Or, maybe the community was just not worth being part of in the first place, because yes, sometimes communities do just suck.
One thing that anyone doing logging should consider is how it interacts with their obligations under the GDPR and associated data protection legislation.
No, you are not exempt from the GDPR if you are in the USA, If you have a server that European players use, you are required to meet its obligations.
Any collection of personal data (yes, including IP addresses, which are considered personal data) requires consideration of why you need to collect and store that data. You’re now a data collector. Proper operation of the service counts, so it is entirely correct and fine for Ares to store pages in the database, for example, as it’s part of the operation of being able to serve your pages via the web portal.
Auditing also can be a valid reason to store data, server access logs for example can come under this. So lets say you want to store all the logs so that you can audit people’s use of the service so that you can ban them if they turn out to be a creeper.
Ah, but you want to read the logs? Now you’re a data processor, that has obligations too.
What happens when someone pages a friend about an operation they’ve just had on their spleen? Now you’re storing medical data, with all the obligations that come with that. If you made your users consent to having all their messages stored, that’s fine, but that doesn’t lift your legal obligations to handle that data appropriately.
What happens when someone leaves the game? Do you keep all of those logs? Unfortunately under the right to erasure, once your need to store their personal data goes away - they’ve left the game, your stated purpose for keeping their data was to ban them if they turned out to be a creeper, it’s no longer valid - you no longer have the right to keep any of it and you must get rid of it without delay.
Now I think it’s incredibly unlikely that the ICO (or other authority) would go after a MU - unless a particularly egregious complaint was made - and with the right considerations, risk assessments, advice, and yes even technology, you can probably make things fit within the correct legal frameworks.
But it’s a consideration that I don’t think many people think about, so it’s probably worth spending some time looking over the relevant legislation.
When I manage to persuade a Fae hunter to give me their dog by invoking the law of Finders Keepers.
@Herja said in MU Peeves Thread:
This is the one I play chicken with. I will use cock right out the gate.
So will I.
And I don’t mean in RP.
@dvoraen No it was their FRIEND. You know, the friend that wanted to play Vincenzo. The friend that specifically picked Vincenzo. Vincenzo’s friend.
I’m old and tired.
Also I want to write my own MU system and I’m never going to finish it, so.
Double post to add that I was aware at this point that @Tat is a librarian and I was worried I’d get it wrong and look like a fool in front of her.
There is a reason a lot of my poses at that time were rolls Library Science, “Jonathan does library stuff.”
So I wanted to see how possible it was to build an Electron app that used a BrowserView to just load the site, giving the impression of a native client without actually needing any specific code on the client. Turns out it’s super easy!
I added a quick notification to test it and see what happens. So this first one is a standard browser notification from Chrome - I sent a new chat message from the native client, and as Chrome was in the background, it fired off a notification. Same sort of behaviour as Ares. No control over Chrome beyond triggering a notification, fair enough, can’t flash Chrome in the taskbar, or highlight the tab.
And then I thought - can I override the Notification behaviour when the JS frontend is loaded through the Electron BrowserView?
Yes.
Yes I can.
Rather than just a pop up notification I can make the taskbar flash as well (which is not standard behaviour). And of course, if I can override notifications when they’re being called through electron, I can do the same for anything else.
The upshot of that is, if I wanted to make a native client for this thing, it could be a single client that would work for every game that ran the system.
(Technical detail of the solution: when the JS frontend code is loaded through the Electron app, it replaces window.Notification with a function that sends an IPC message, so rather than sending an HTML5 Notification it fires off an event. The IPC message is then picked up by the main process of the Electron app and from there we can trigger anything we want, which in this case is just a native notification and the taskbar flash)
