Regular Joe

3 baldies vandalizing their cells!

One greytide in solitary!

Three fully-powered vampires in Amber ERT suits

Five baldies in cells next each other!

Security story time! This took place recently. You'd think Nanotrasen deals with their prisoners ethically? Maybe, maybe not, but I doubt that you've heard the suspected baddies subjected to this type of torment.

On your order, chief. Situations met at nanotrasen service will definitely honk your day in the name of the honkmother!

Don't! Zero! Get to space you nerd

I've had little time to space this autumn so I went through my screenshot folders for remembering fun moments. Found one, of which I believe I haven't posted before, these from this spring-summer:

The collection enlargens! I love your style. On my spaceman I especially like you drew him smiling. I've tried to play Jean a happy fellow no matter if the honk had hit the fan or not. Well captured!

Oh no, just when I crawled off the forest I spent the summer working. All the good for you my man, be back when it feels like such! Thanks for so far. Personally I thought your antag play is one exemplary one, as observed from the receiving end. It's a funny game, as it's quite as much a community as a game and so disappearing feels like something other, than just stopping to play. Hadn't really experienced such before with things in the internet, either. But we will be there and if we don't, BYOND and DM will probably be till the nuclear winter, so at this point only au revoir! And I might get the opportunity to defeat Fred the vamp some other time then, damn I remember clearly that first shot you have here.

Inserting one (1) Lumpy quote here: "Smh my head"

One (1) honk: honk.

Double track post time! These I actually recorded in April-May during the initial quarantine time. Only recently mixed them up, as got started again in a job that is quite social, and mixing things is the perfect afterwork fun for that. Solitary nerdism namely, bit like being a space chemist. I think though that with these little tracks I've finally learned how to fairly record drums and bass. Guitars and vocals are still bit a work in progress. First on, a demo of one my own tune in construction. No proper guitar solo because a bassist can not invent such things. Secondly, more Thin Lizzy! This one from their heavy end, the 1983 album Thunder and Lightning. Beating the drum track on this was a major fun in the posterior, since those triple kicks, with a single pedal, were initially not in my range of skill as a really-not-a-drummer. Worked well as a leg day, and as with the previous case, a number of pizza AND drumsticks were consumed in the process. Also singing English feels like learning it all over again, funnily enough.

nolla (honk)

Deux !

Yeah, I think too that the question was whether you could have, what you see on the sec records console on the fly, at the vehicle. Side note, I’ve long thought of an on-the-go information device for sec (in general), so that you wouldn’t have to back up to the console if you just wanted to read things (not edit, for a balance reason I think of). Those are vehicle or designated (radio)man mounted by nowadays, yet field test examples of actually every-man’s C2I systems exist already, and those kinds are portrayed in scifi too (think about the wrist computer of the Fallout series). But well, that is out of the range of my code skill and time right now... Sorry for an off topic idea, on this one, a console in the pod sounds fair and easy to implement idea, and the support role argument is a good one. Maybe it would help the pilot to actually patrol at space more, as they could do act as support/dispatch when it is, as it often is, not much happening there? I’d think so. HUD can only read/write things you see, so it does not answer this call. PDA sec cartridge is read only, and at the moment, you cannot view the essential thing that are the comments, with that.

Two distant honks heard in the maintenance!

I’ve long thought of that too, mainly due grenades usually work so that there’s a pin and a lever, and when the pin is pulled off, the lever may fall off, if the user does not hold it while holding the thing in hand - and the nade only primes when the lever is fallen, that is, when it’s thrown. So that when you want to throw one, pull the pin off and then, still holding the lever, take your time before throwing it. Now our nades will start the countdown on priming interaction, so that you have to get it out of your hand fast after that. Due to that, it’s kind of good, in my opinion, that there’s this auto throw in the present situation, but how about if they worked as above? Eg. grenade active hand, press z to pull the pin, no automatic throwintent, and the nade only primes when you throw or drop it; and press z again to drop the lever, in case of you wanted to use the tactic of letting the fuse burn a bit before the throw, maybe keep the automatic throwintent with that action so that if you want to throw it NOW doubletap Z and there it goes.

Neat one, hail Nanotrasen! Those are hilariously differing. From formal letter to that poem... Meanwhile in that shift, one quiet one in a security perspective, I went on rampage in the style that is possible to a detective.

Sounds a neat idea to me, good one to make a PR of, and to test it out? Due to the examination text giving out the death, a thing like count pulse is rather useless. And it feels indeed kind of too straightforward to judge between the living and dead just with one glance, without hitech medical gear or some effort to check it out. Irl you would need to check whether they respond to speak, pain, light, do they breathe, have a pulse; inspect them, unless it is really apparent. (Slapping as test whether spaceman lives or not, when?) A space adaptation of that would bear some potential horror indeed, presently what only a changeling could really do. That is terrific and as such fun. Spot a downed one, start counting pulse - oh damn! Concerning antags, they could be in the receiving end of tactics done with this, just as well as crew/sec would be, thinking about fight scenes. And as the examination would still give out physical damage, to avoid getting surprised, you got to stay alert of surroundings, which is a general requirement of staying alive as say, a sec officer: a motionless guy in the dark maintenance, but they appear to be in sound condition externally - better approach this fellow carefully, if I have to. Test shift or two could give out how this would turn out in terms of adding to the game. No examination text giving it out, coupled to a function in style of what Marsmond said.

This gives fun flashbacks to what radio usage is, I would predict (lots of) chaos. Social experiment event, possibly, indeed! Commenting here in which form the suggestion would be possible: How telecomms work would most probably hinder this from taking place with the intention "whole shift only general comms." There is the telecomms equipment pre-setted at the telecomms satellite. The departmental channels are hosted there, and could be altered or destroyed for this desired effect. However, few things are on way of permanently disabling the channels: able Engineering and RND could remake telecomms so, that the headsets work again for the departmental channels. the telecomms setup or its failure either enable or disable the headsets - but nevertheless, you could still use station bounced radios and intercoms (in the same z-level, which is practically as with the headsets with the roundstart telecomms setup). Namely SBRs and intercoms get the access (automatically) to the departmental channels in terms of both their frequency and encryption according to the access of the ID user wears. No user config required. Think of SBRs+intercoms and headsets as two different frequency band radio networks chained to each other. If an encryption at the headset ('subspace' or that is the in-which the telecomms machines and headsets operate) network is borked, SBRs will be affected of that too, but only as long as there is telecomms setup active with the screwed encryption, because of SBR-intercom and headset 'subspace' networks are independent but automatically chained together, if a telecomms setup just was active. Disabling the encryption (or an entire channel/s) at the telecomms setup would, then, stop that kind of problem for the SBRs, as the chain would not be active anymore. This makes some sense, though the bad thing is that you can't disable the "SBR-intercom" network by any mean, but locally by EMPing the local machines, and due to their automatical ID granted access to departmental comms - think of they would be field radios, powerful enough to their signal to go back and forth on an entire zlevel with no black areas whatsoever, and automatically configuring themselves to the user - they're kind of too easy to use, for the event to happen in full scale intented. Due to this, in case of all but general comms down, the security for example would (mostly) grab SBRs and keep using their own channel, running around with either their SBR mics on, or the phones in their hand. Poor detective, though, would suffer of this, as their access lacks the access which determines the ability to talk on sec comms via these - but otherwise it would not be a nuisance worse than that. The most of department crew willing to work effectively, I'd guess, would grab the SBRs too, due that the general chat would get really messy if only it was enabled on the headsets So summa, this kind of event would not be a complete only-general-chat, but more of a minor nuisance - a case for Engineering and Sci to setup the comms on their own. Tuning headsets would not work, afaik, as they require encryption/decryption as well as sending/receiving to be hosted by a telecomms machinery setup, which in case of this event, would be executed, are more or less disabled... I guess, should check that out, not really good in those machines. There is this comms blackout random event (ionospheric anomalities), which is similar, but not similar, as all the comms go down for a period, instead of what suggested here.

While that at Changs did lead not any visible damage (no blood, no pain, right?), that latter scene ended up to a culinary expedition into the world of spicy pizza. Bartender that shift was great! Imagine bar almost like a bar, with quiet chatter and without constant fighting.

Hey! It's a kind of nuisance in terms there is not any permanent fix for it, but usually you can deal with that as follows: 1) try click the console/use PDA in hand again, it might load up again. If it gives an error message, tick the "don't let this page to give messages anymore" and move away/throw item out of hand, and then try again. It's usually good idea not to open PDA/a console right after reconnection or login, wait a minute or two to do that. 2) if this happens to happen a lot, clearing Internet explorer's browsing history and BYOND's local cache will usually make it less frequent for a while. Do this every now and then when this problem starts to annoy you. To clean IE browsing history: a) access IE (start menu type iexplore, open) b) wipe (CTRL+SHIFT+DEL hotkey to access the clear browser history thing) To clean BYOND local cache: a) access Byond hub/launcher b) top right, gearbox icon -> preferences -> games -> press clear cache. IE is due to the game uses it to do a variety of stuff. And BYOND happen to get a bit flipped from time to time. These two tricks will usually work to other problems that more or less break something for you. If these do not work, doublecheck that your BYOND is up to date (stable or beta), at the BYOND hub. Also help might appear faster at the Discord help-channel we got, be welcome around there. Or F1->mentorhelp ingame.

Looking back to the screencaps I took of this one shift, it brings the "Harlem shake" to my mind. A fair description - the one spinning person in the first picture started to offer hats of the latest fashion to the crew. The late shift consisted of considerable amount of hats, tricks of trying to remove them and a puzzle of who-ever might had been the one who initiated the hat day. Honk! For reference:

Time is indeed a question, often there is not any. But I agree some extra mechanical tools - that would not instantly give the culprit away, but provide (some more) glimpses of information - would be cool, in case of sneaky antags and time. I could see it to be a benefit, in tension and RP, for both sec and a sneaky antag. More noir! Got to check out Aurora’s tools. Top of my head I’d think of possibility to extract samples from the crime scene that could be analyzed with a static machine later on. If you’re an officer at a murder scene, and the detective is unavailable, you’re quite out of luck analyzing the scene since you don’t have the scanner, as it is walking elsewhere. Then you got to take the victim to cloning, essentially losing the possibility to scan stuff from the scene as the victim starts walking again with their blood covered clothing. Similar case in thefts or other crimes reported in some specific area - if det is not available it’s quite a dead end. This also makes the job of detective, during lots of events happening, a job of running from place A to place B, with little time to ponder the non-obvious cases. If you could take, for example, samples off the scene, you could render them to the detective to be analyzed, or do the noir yourselves if there is time. Balance would have to be thought out, so that anything such would not be so ’instant confirmed name’ as with the fingerprints.