@Gashlycrumb This situation is more clear-cut. If I trap these cats I am actively taking someone else’s pet with all the legal issues that come with it. They (apparently) sleep the night inside, they just spend all day outside. On the plus side, I don’t envision them deliberately getting into my backyard again now that one of them has had first-hand experience meeting the doggo.

Also there are gaps between our side fences that cats can easily use to escape their backyard. The neighbours know about them and don’t care.

Alas, even though it won’t formally become My Fault if god forbid something happens to a cat at the hands of my dog because she’s kept in an enclosed yard on our property, it’s definitely going to be made My Problem.

@Pavel I referenced the Inner West Council site to find my info. Out in the far west where I am there’s jack-all in the way of stuff besides “go look at legislation”. Mind you, the inner west thing basically just transposed the legislation so it still applies.

@Pavel I even looked it up. There’s a few rules you have to adhere to in NSW if you want to let your cats roam without copping fines. Roaming cats MUST:

• Be registered with local council.
• Be microchipped.
• Be desexed by four months of age, or have a permit (renewed annually) allowing it.
• Wear a collar with identification when outside the property.
• Be kept away from wildlife protection areas.

I can’t comment on the first two, because who knows, but they’re probably in breach of the third (who buys these permits?!) and definitely in breach of the last two. More than once I’ve spotted the mum jumping the fence into the wildlife reserve to go chase a kangaroo or something.

@Gashlycrumb It’s put me in a pickle because it’s genuinely Not My Problem and I really shouldn’t be adding additional stress to my life. But, but, my brain won’t stop ticking this over.

I would 100% trap the lot of them except I’ve only seen the mum a few times, Minaturized Backyard Invader the once, and a third hiding in my agapanthus when I took the bins out the other day. Never buy agapanthus, they came with the house and they suck.

The other issue is, if I were to leave out traps to catch them, all the neighbour would have to do is look out the window and see them fully visible in my front yard. Even if they weren’t visible, they’re smart enough to put two-and-two together and know it was me because I got all these details about the cats through some pointed questions during the rescue of Minaturized Backyard Invader.

The best way to go forward is probably “Hey, desex your cats and keep them inside or the rangers will notice on their bi-weekly snooping sessions” next time I chat with them.

So as most people with young dogs do, I have to deal with my pup going absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolting out the back to yip and growl ferociously at a bird sitting at the fence or a particularly aggressive wave of a distant tree branch or some other random nonsense. This is normal, and is usually ignored, because it’s rare enough to not bother the neighbours (most of whom also have yip/growl dogs) and it’s usually something harmless.

Except two-to-three weeks ago it was because a kitten was in the backyard and could not get back out.

My dog, overly energetic pup that she is, would love this little thing to death. Emphasis on “to death”, so I definitely couldn’t ignore what was going on. Not that I would have, that’d be rude. Also dangerous. Somehow got the dog back inside and spent an hour cornering this tiny little adorable thing and getting it into our old cat carrier. I love cats and kittens are objectively the cutest things on the planet so I consider it time well spent.

Whilst nursing my brand new battle scars (I think I look rakish but my wife says I’m whinging over a tiny dot) I heard a yell from over the fence. It’s the neighbour’s cat. Alright, great, not the same cat I know they have but at least now I know where to take this adorable and terrified little bundle of fluff and claws.

So I hoof the cat through the house, ignore the extremely happy and noisy dog, let the kids take a look through the carrier window (not too close, there are rules), and take the cat back next door. This is the part where I become vexed.

The situation with this kitten is as follows:

• Her mother, next-door’s cat we already knew (and always comes over whenever my wife is out the front), is not a desexed male but an un-desexed female. This was a complete mystery to us and the neighbours until it suddenly ejected three kittens in their laundry.
• All four cats are allowed total unrestricted/unobserved free roam. Outside. Where there is bushland across the road. Where there are snakes. And spiders. And kangaroos. I cannot overstate the number of snakes over there.
• The kittens are seven months old.
• The kittens are not desexed.
• The mother cat is still not desexed.
• Existence of kittens = At least one roaming undesexed male.

This is how colonies start. This is how we wind up with feral cat problems and threats to native wildlife. The whole reason there is bushland where I live is because an endangered species of frog lives there. The irresponsibility of it drives me completely up the wall, and the apathy from the neighbours (who are otherwise great!) irks me even more.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, when my pup goes absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolts out the back to yip and growl ferociously, I now have to check every single time to make sure it isn’t a free-roaming kitten.

EDIT: I got to listen to cat-in-heat yowling for a few hours last week, so more kittens on the way soon I suppose.

Here’s the “Fighting against AI in SRE” update for the past week.

• Experienced developer raised a PR for our IaC that was full of AI slop, which he only admitted to when pressed, and expected it waved through.
• Stumbled across Claude (free version) configuration in a very proprietary repo.
• C-level keeps setting up meetings every two weeks asking how we get AI in our product, unsatisfied with “it breaches GDPR so we don’t” as an answer.
• Got sent this painful little article which caused war flashbacks to my desktop support days: https://thenewstack.io/vibe-coding-the-shadow-it-problem-no-one-saw-coming/

@Jennkryst Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if this hobby dies in our lifetime but if/when it does, we hopefully all have some fond memories.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I just want them to consider that what hey have been doing isn’t working and try anything actually different instead of just hanging a new theme or setting on the same frame work full of bad ideas that have failed for decades.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Am I wrong? Is there some thriving hub of young people out there playing some game I’ve never heard of? It looks like this hobby has gone to seed because it’s been made so generic and uninteresting it can’t offer anything worth the effort of the barrier to entry.

This is now the second time I am telling you that people aren’t MUSHing because there are more convenient, better known alternatives.

Here’s some examples:
https://www.facebook.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/
https://disboard.org/

@RedRocket

No.

What is irritating me here, now, and far more than it should be, is the endless repetition of the burden of work upon other people. You are seeing something you do not like, and you are insisting that others must try it your way.

Do not do this.

Your preferences are unique just like everyone else. It is not your place to say that they are wrong (unless it’s illegal or really gross, we have other threads for that). If others like PvE games, they do not deserve to be lumped into a category of play-it-safe whingers. They are doing what they like, same as you.

If you are seeing the same mistakes made time and time again, the onus is on you to fix them to your satisfaction if it is within your power. Correcting the catastrophic freefall of the world’s economy is a bit out of our reach but learning how to code Penn or spinning up an Ares game is very much not insurmountable. So stop listening to us, and yourself, getting upset on the internet. Be bold, try new things. Innovate!

If you don’t see it, make it. That is the essence of creativity.

Finally, half of those analogies fell flat on me because I’m not American. I know nothing about yank politics or weird handegg besides that they exist and people are very noisy about them. I will not see things your way, and that is not something you can always change.

@RedRocket why is it on others to make the game you want? There’s enough tools and know-how around for you to develop one to your requirements.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I’m saying that they are dying because they are being run the way a small hand full of whiny forever-victims who instigate the problems they then complain about want.

The more generic and baby proofed the games became the more the player base dwindled away. What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Maybe, just maybe, you might want to think about why it worked back then instead of just dismissing the only time the medium was actually successful at retaining a large player base because it hurt the feelings of a few bad actors who just want to stir up shit and make drama.

Text-based games are dying because gaming mediums are changing. People who want their dopamine fix have tens of thousands of choices, very few of which need telnet to access. This is no longer the Wild Wild Web 1.0 of unbridled creativity spawned by techological limitations.

Young people getting started go to Discord because that’s where all the RP is now. Thousands upon thousands of servers joinable at a click. Infinite accessibility. MUSHing is kept alive because of a dedicated and committed group and the average age of people in that group is rapidly ticking upwards.

It’s pretty clear now you’re arguing in bad faith. Everyone has their personal preferences, but I don’t see anyone else in this thread so virulently lambasting others for having preferences different from their own.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

the reality of housing shortages

I’ll have to make a note to include that when I launch my Vampire the Masquerade: Sydney by Night game.

Oi just be daring and set it in somewhere like Campbelltown. People can still afford to buy there.

Not that they want to.

Not that they should.

Would love to sit here and have a whinge about this very topic but that’s a whole other… topic lol.

@Testament said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Coming back to post that Ozzy died today.

https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1947720771889205473

>plays the biggest farewell gig of all time
>dies

What a way to go.

Kenneth Colley aka Admiral Piett.

Harris Yulin, Gul Darhe’el himself.

“Duet” isn’t just one of my favourite DS9 episodes, it’s one of my favourite Trek episodes period, and Yulin is a big reason for that.

I’m less concerned about grid-level mood than with having the freedom and flexibility to run a scene that might fit whatever sort of tone I want to hit today. For example, on one grid on one character, I GMed:

• A tomb of zombies horror
• Mad Max desert rig chase
• High class well dressed casino heist
• Hacking a secure server (THAT was interesting to GM because you can’t write “and he typed on the keyboard” and be evocative)
• Run
• And a badly dubbed chop socky kung fu comedy

tl;dr I tend to chafe if the tone is too rigid, flexibility lets me be creative. If a grid is a canvas I prefer it unpainted.

I still think using “Sandy Petersen” and “cool shit” in the same sentence is a hilarious oxymoron.

MAP13: Downtown was so messy and the progression was so hard to follow he had to paint a giant arrow on the floor saying where to go next. Doom 1 Episode 3 was a mess. His stuff has always been amateur hour at best so I’m unsure why he’s held up as a shining example of quality here.

I guess my point is, a work isn’t automatically good if the creator matches your ideology.

Sandy Petersen brought us Slough of Despair, so.

@Faraday Trust issues lol. I tend to err on the side of caution and go for absolute clarity because I assume no one looks beyond the text and sees what’s actually happening.

@Faraday Does it? I thought the name was autogenerating as Guest-AdjNoun and up to the player to change later.

@Faraday said in Ares Tour Feature Feebdack:

these characters will be functionally equivalent to any other new character.

You’re on to something here. If someone uses tour to create Guest-AvariciousBinchicken (highly recommend a prefix for Guest instead of a suffix for clarity purposes), then there’s a command like convert that… well, converts the Guest bit into a full playerbit, you’re minimising clicks between the initial inspection and working on their real character.

This hits @Tez’s point about taking pressure off people. It makes it super easy to check the place out and then super easy to stick around. And if they don’t stick around, the Guest bit goes poof into the ether, its job done.

People love convenience.

Spoiler

@Pavel