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Post by Dispersive Prism on May 15, 2015 19:56:42 GMT
Inavet (the character) has shown up with T'Mir with her setting intact, but without any ties to the forum. Imagine Inavet without being tossed into space without a suit and instead curled up playing helpful tech fairy to Miles, and you about have an accurate idea of it.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 15, 2015 19:59:16 GMT
Aesthetically, I prefer pasting to Backstage over a quasi-IC "these posts are actually PMs" board.
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 20:38:10 GMT
Ok, in that case it should be trivial (given the Python CSV reader which is in the already-uploaded script) to make a script to export a forum conversation as a post. The entire conversation would go in one post, but it would still have proper forum quotes and avatars. I will have that done within a few hours unless anybody else beats me to it.
I don’t think there can be sub-boards, but a thread backstage for IC PM conversations could be good.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 15, 2015 20:50:51 GMT
Here's an example of the result of my super lazy bbcode-emitting script (attached).
Please help: Potential Threat to Several Worldsdaevineknowledge: [2015-05-09 16:47:53] I am writing to the three of you because I expect you can best help with this. The problem is not likely very urgent, but it could crop up suddenly at any time later than 20 years from now and possibly much earlier.
Before I can explain the details of the threat, I need to give some more background knowledge about demon culture. Most demons who answer summons do so because they find humans entertaining. Many of those don’t care about ethical entertainment, but because they find humans entertaining, they are unlikely to destroy the world even if they could. Demons who don’t accept most summons are on average nicer people (because the meaner ones often accept summons and treat the summoner as a source of unethical entertainment), but at the extreme end of meanness some most certainly would destroy the mortal world if they could get there.
Currently, the only people in my world cluster who know about this forum or anything I learned through it are myself and small handful of daeva I trust almost completely (to the point where I would not actually go into an immediate panic at the idea of them being summoned unbound and would not expect them to do anything bad, even though I wouldn’t want to actually create that situation). However, I can’t be sure that the knowledge won’t ever spread to other summoners or other daeva.
The thing is, the plane shift spell I’m buying is a spell to move a person from one plane to another. It seemed like it would be quite useful, and I still expect it to be. However, any demon with access to or even knowledge of this forum could learn about it (I think “the most recent catalog of this QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS company” is borderline for enough information to let a demon conjure the relevant catalog, but I don’t want to take any chances and I expect a creative demon could get a copy). After that, it would take at most two decades for a malevolent demon to get the relevant maximum mana and either reinvent the spell or get a copy of that spellbook. At that point, since we’re assuming they know about the forum, they can go to any of the worlds mentioned here.
In a PM to me, Leaf asked if we knew about antimatter, and advised me not to mention it to demons if not. The answer is that we do, but that I am not at all worried about demons conjuring antimatter because demons discovered black holes before humans discovered antimatter, and practically every demon has personal experience with them as a means of waste disposal. That would be far more dangerous for any world with conventional gravity, although it might not cause too much of a problem for worlds where gravity works differently.
For the moment, I am simply going to pretend I haven’t seen Leaf’s question in-thread, to avoid drawing any more attention to the plane shift spell. I’ll PM him the response I was writing there instead.
Mother Starlight, do you have any suggestions? You have more experience with inter-world stuff than I do, and you might know of some way that could help or have some method of blocking the information from getting to Hell.
Leaf and Archangel, do you have any way to deal with black holes appearing or with somebody able to create them?
Archangel, do you have some way of preventing demons from causing massive amounts of damage outside of Hell (where the costs of massive amounts of damage are so small some areas engage in all-out war for entertainment)? If not, do you have any means of preventing interworld travel from Hell except via controlled summons or concordances?
Fortunomancer, I don’t really understand your ability to see the future, but can it tell you if what I’m worried about is likely to happen or any sort of time frame? thegivingvein: [2015-05-09 17:00:41] There exists such a thing as gravity manipulation technology, but I don't expect it to be robust against sudden black holes. Good God. admin: [2015-05-09 17:04:48] Suppressing the sharing of information doesn't come naturally to me, and I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of interfering in local politics, however much it seems like a good idea. I hope you find a solution, but I don't have any good ideas. Maybe you can find some sort of defensive thing somewhere. daevineknowledge: [2015-05-09 17:14:30] Leaf, could your gravity manipulation technology help with a non-sudden black hole? thegivingvein: [2015-05-09 17:17:17] Define 'help'. There are easier ways to avoid falling into one when you already know it's there, and I'm not an expert in obscure applications of grav tech, although I could probably find and consult one if you give me some time. daevineknowledge: [2015-05-09 17:36:24] It might be possible for the QDS magic to make suddenly-appearing gravity tech near the suddenly-appearing black hole, or something similar to that. If it could be created already doing whatever-it-needs-to-do, that might be useful. It’s probably not an ideal solution, but it might be a workable solution.
Also, do you have any recommendations for how to handle the QDS thread? I won’t be able to ignore your question forever. I could lie and say it lets me shift objects “in my inventory” to another plane, but I don’t like lying and this would draw even more attention if somebody calls me out on it or they get the catalog and notice the discrepancy. I’m not sure if you editing your post to not ask the question would be less suspicious or not, given that I can see when a post is edited. fortunomancer: [2015-05-09 17:37:40] Andrew, Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Mysisian magic, as far as I can tell, only works within the world the individual spellcaster occupies at the time the spell is cast. My fortunomantic suprasensitivity is giving me information about the forum itself, but not about the actions of individual forum members.
When I first encountered the forum, I experienced a specific kind of positive premonition which led me to believe that the forum would not cause significant harm in my world. This implies that the events you described are unlikely, but does not rule them out entirely. I don't have time to explain in more detail right now.
I can get someone to do a metamantic analysis of the forum and use that to attempt to develop a spell that allows fortunomancy to work across multiple worlds, but this would take longer than is desirable. If you have a way to get me into your world there are spells I can cast that will give me more details, but I can't guarantee that my magic will work in your world. Any spells I cast will not give me as much detail about threats to other worlds as they do about threats to mine because fortunomantic magic responds to personal priorities and my world is a higher personal priority than yours.
I need you to tell me everything you know about black holes and how they work. thegivingvein: [2015-05-09 17:39:45] You've already managed to miss one of my posts in that thread and need to be reminded that it exists (when I asked how to make zorkmids). I can just not bother reminding you about this one.
If someone else reminds you... I'm not sure.
I'll corner a grav tech expert and ask them prying questions at the next available opportunity. daevineknowledge: [2015-05-09 17:49:19] I only missed that one because you posted it after I loaded the webpage but before my response was complete. I saw it as soon as I submitted my post. I guess I could pretend that I’m just being careless and didn’t notice it, but if somebody knew the true reason I missed it then they could easily tell that didn’t apply. thegivingvein: [2015-05-09 17:52:10] People miss things, or intend to reply to them and forget, all the time. It's one of the simplest and least attention-getting ways to drop it.
You could also choose to explain only some of the spells, and not say why, and I could decline to express interest in the rest. But dropping it seems better on most counts. daevineknowledge: [2015-05-09 19:23:20] Fortunomancer, I will see if I can get a standard summoning to work from your world, but it seems unlikely since I can’t even get it to work from Limbo. Other than that I have no way to get you into my world until I get a lot more mana.
In worlds with similar astrophysics to mine and Leaf’s, gravity works by everything being pulled towards everything else. You only notice it for the planet you’re on because the planet is much heavier, so pulls harder. The more stuff you put closer together, the harder it will pull.
On a separate note, light does not move instantaneously; it just moves really really fast. It is also affected by gravity, but it moves so quickly that you barely notice. It turns out that for reasons I don’t understand, it is impossible for anything to go faster than light does.
A black hole is when you have so much stuff at the same point that it pulls so hard that even light won’t be able to escape if it gets inside (hence why it’s called a “black” hole). Since nothing can go faster than light, if light can’t escape, nothing else can either.
All demons know about black holes because they’re almost-perfect waste disposal. Demons can conjure stuff by magic; they can’t get rid of it by magic. They used to use lakes of fire or lava, but black holes work better for this purpose. fortunomancer: [2015-05-09 19:37:11] Andrew,
That information is...troubling.
I have more time now and can explain my premonitional sense in more detail.
I had two premonitions when I decided to write in to the forum, both positive. One was a sense that the action I was about to take would be pleasant in a recreational sense (the sort of feeling I get when I’m about to open an interesting but not particularly useful spellbook, only stronger). The second was a feeling that the action I was about to take would result in me acquiring useful and important information. The first was stronger than the second, meaning that the first outcome was probable while the second was merely possible. This implies one of three possibilities:
1. It is so improbable that the forum will cause harmful elements to be brought into my world that my magic does not see fit to warn me that it is even a possibility.
2. My magic could not predict this particular situation because my magic doesn’t work on events in other worlds. (This is unlikely because the situation was caused by the forum, which does exist in my world).
3. My world is uniquely equipped to deal with this particular threat. I'm certain that we don't have a way to adequately fight black holes, but there's a (slight) possibility that we are better able to stop demons from creating black holes in the first place.
In summary: I am almost positive that I would know if posting on this forum would cause something very bad to happen to my world, but given that my magic interacts oddly with other worlds, I can't give you a definite guarantee. I'll let you know if the metamantic analysis yields anything useful. archangel: [2015-05-09 19:52:58] I don't know of any means to block interdimedensional travel. That doesn't mean the Foundation doesn't have any, just that it's never been closely related enough to anything I've been working on that I needed to know. I've notified some people and should receive an answer soon, but I'd be surprised if it worked on a worldwide scale.
If there were a suddenly appearing black hole, the Foundation would expect to be forewarned through means that aren't available in other worlds. Slightly more helpfully, we do have a lead on containing them. I've just been informed that the Foundation is in possession of a singularity with an estimated tenth of a solar mass. The containment mechanism is something we do not understand, but experimenting with it is dangerous for obvious reasons. If you can get a friendly demon to create the containment device without the singularity, preferably in some isolated corner of Hell, it might turn out to be a scalable solution. Even in the best case, though, a demon surely doesn't need a black hole to destroy the world.
The most urgent step is to shut down that thread. If the information that there exists a plane shift spell gets out, that's all it takes. If nothing else, at least remove all references to the catalogue and let readers think the stated list is a complete one. I can provide a visual amnestic to assist with dropping the subject. thegivingvein: [2015-05-09 20:10:46] Is your visual amnestic going to get past the censor?
I might support editing the thread if editing was invisible, but itt. unless Mother Starlight has that power, I guess.
Trying to aggressively suppress information that has already been partly released is a losing game, at least in my world. If Mother Starlight is reluctant to assist us, we can't expect to shut down every curious onlooker who wonders why so many posts in the thread were edited at once and where the references to the catalogue went. Right now, nobody but us knows there's anything dangerous about that thread. Let's keep it that way, all right? admin: [2015-05-09 20:26:59] I could invisibly filter the phrase plane shift to some plausible alternative throughout the forum, either for all users or some well-defined subset, such as only those from Daevinity. This would not affect the memories of anyone who read the phrase before I install the filter, nor would it affect demon-conjured copies of the catalog. Would this be helpful or harmful? daevineknowledge: [2015-05-09 23:20:30] Archangel, I think I need to know a bit more about the containment device before I can conjure one. For example, what’s it called? The requirement is not strictly that it’s a unique specification, but that it’s a specification that lets the demon “find” what they’re looking for.
Mother Starlight, I think that would be quite helpful, especially if it was only for users from Daevinity. It wouldn’t completely solve the problem, but it would mean that any daeva who wanted to use it for destructive purposes would need to be not only malicious but also more curious than average.
If you could change the phrase plane shift to dig (which I could plausibly and truthfully claim would be quite helpful if I became a demon) for readers in Daevinity, and simultaneously change the number 1037 to 838 for such readers when it refers to the price I paid, I think that could go a long way to preventing the information from getting into the wrong hands. admin: [2015-05-09 23:31:52] All right, I'll do that. thegivingvein: [2015-05-10 00:08:21] I suppose that if a user from Daevinity were to type the phrase themselves that would already be a bit of a problem, but they would certainly notice something was up with the phrase if they did, and it wouldn't be hard to figure out the context from there. admin: [2015-05-10 00:13:22] I don't think it's possible for me to filter with perfect consistency and undetectability. thegivingvein: [2015-05-10 00:14:45] Unfortunately. archangel: [2015-05-10 00:16:40] We know it only as the containment mechanism from SCP-123. If it has a real name, that's not it. It's made of a dull gray metal arranged in sixty triangles forming a geodesic sphere; any solid or liquid that enters the sphere is drawn into the singularity. Nearby objects on the outside are also drawn toward it, but weakly. The strongest the pull gets on the outside is at the boundary of the sphere, where it is approximately one Earth gravity. This suggests that containment is imperfect
I've attached an image of SCP-123, but there is little else I can tell you. (Note that this image as depicted does contain the black hole, relevant if you try duplicating it exactly.)
admin: [2015-05-10 00:28:04] This PM thread format seems messy and suboptimal, so I've created a board here that's only visible to people I authorize. Currently that's me, esthfora, Andrew, Fortunomancer, Leaf, and Archangel. Attachments:convertation.py (910 B)
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 21:12:06 GMT
I was planning to go with the actual bbcode (quote timestamp="unixtime" author="@username") tag, because it can take parameters for author and timestamp and give nicely-formatted quotes with avatars and the timestamps according to the reader’s settings. Other than that, I think your output looks good.
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 21:58:09 GMT
I have updated the script as I specified, attached. Here’s a diff from Mother Starlight’s version: --- convertation.py 2015-05-15 15:12:13.254780005 -0600 +++ convertation-bbcodequote.py 2015-05-15 15:50:35.357497326 -0600 @@ -1,14 +1,19 @@ +#!/bin/python2 import sys import csv +from calendar import timegm +from time import strptime + if len(sys.argv)!=2: - print 'Usage: python convertation.py conversations_data.csv > conversations_pretty.bbcode' + print 'Usage: python', sys.argv[0], 'conversations_data.csv > conversations_pretty.bbcode' sys.exit(1) with open(sys.argv[1], 'r') as csvfile: data = csv.reader(csvfile) conv_id = -1 for row in data: + # Row has format [tid, subject, sender, time, message] try: thisrow = int(row[0]) if thisrow != conv_id: @@ -20,6 +25,7 @@ #message = message.replace('href="/', 'href="http://manyworlds.boards.net/') #message = message.replace('url=', 'a href=').replace('</url>', '</a>') #message = message.replace('\n', '<br>\n') - print row[2]+': ['+row[3]+']'+'[blockquote]'+row[4]+'[/blockquote]' + timestamp = str(timegm(strptime(row[3], "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))) + print '[quote author="@' + row[2] + '" timestamp="' + timestamp + '"]' + row[4] + '[/quote]' except ValueError: pass
Here’s my run of the same conversation, in a spoilerbox to prevent page stretching. Please help: Potential Threat to Several WorldsI am writing to the three of you because I expect you can best help with this. The problem is not likely very urgent, but it could crop up suddenly at any time later than 20 years from now and possibly much earlier. Before I can explain the details of the threat, I need to give some more background knowledge about demon culture. Most demons who answer summons do so because they find humans entertaining. Many of those don’t care about ethical entertainment, but because they find humans entertaining, they are unlikely to destroy the world even if they could. Demons who don’t accept most summons are on average nicer people (because the meaner ones often accept summons and treat the summoner as a source of unethical entertainment), but at the extreme end of meanness some most certainly would destroy the mortal world if they could get there. Currently, the only people in my world cluster who know about this forum or anything I learned through it are myself and small handful of daeva I trust almost completely (to the point where I would not actually go into an immediate panic at the idea of them being summoned unbound and would not expect them to do anything bad, even though I wouldn’t want to actually create that situation). However, I can’t be sure that the knowledge won’t ever spread to other summoners or other daeva. The thing is, the plane shift spell I’m buying is a spell to move a person from one plane to another. It seemed like it would be quite useful, and I still expect it to be. However, any demon with access to or even knowledge of this forum could learn about it (I think “the most recent catalog of this QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS company” is borderline for enough information to let a demon conjure the relevant catalog, but I don’t want to take any chances and I expect a creative demon could get a copy). After that, it would take at most two decades for a malevolent demon to get the relevant maximum mana and either reinvent the spell or get a copy of that spellbook. At that point, since we’re assuming they know about the forum, they can go to any of the worlds mentioned here. In a PM to me, Leaf asked if we knew about antimatter, and advised me not to mention it to demons if not. The answer is that we do, but that I am not at all worried about demons conjuring antimatter because demons discovered black holes before humans discovered antimatter, and practically every demon has personal experience with them as a means of waste disposal. That would be far more dangerous for any world with conventional gravity, although it might not cause too much of a problem for worlds where gravity works differently. For the moment, I am simply going to pretend I haven’t seen Leaf’s question in-thread, to avoid drawing any more attention to the plane shift spell. I’ll PM him the response I was writing there instead. Mother Starlight, do you have any suggestions? You have more experience with inter-world stuff than I do, and you might know of some way that could help or have some method of blocking the information from getting to Hell. Leaf and Archangel, do you have any way to deal with black holes appearing or with somebody able to create them? Archangel, do you have some way of preventing demons from causing massive amounts of damage outside of Hell (where the costs of massive amounts of damage are so small some areas engage in all-out war for entertainment)? If not, do you have any means of preventing interworld travel from Hell except via controlled summons or concordances? Fortunomancer, I don’t really understand your ability to see the future, but can it tell you if what I’m worried about is likely to happen or any sort of time frame? There exists such a thing as gravity manipulation technology, but I don't expect it to be robust against sudden black holes. Good God. Suppressing the sharing of information doesn't come naturally to me, and I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of interfering in local politics, however much it seems like a good idea. I hope you find a solution, but I don't have any good ideas. Maybe you can find some sort of defensive thing somewhere. Leaf, could your gravity manipulation technology help with a non-sudden black hole? Define 'help'. There are easier ways to avoid falling into one when you already know it's there, and I'm not an expert in obscure applications of grav tech, although I could probably find and consult one if you give me some time. It might be possible for the QDS magic to make suddenly-appearing gravity tech near the suddenly-appearing black hole, or something similar to that. If it could be created already doing whatever-it-needs-to-do, that might be useful. It’s probably not an ideal solution, but it might be a workable solution. Also, do you have any recommendations for how to handle the QDS thread? I won’t be able to ignore your question forever. I could lie and say it lets me shift objects “in my inventory” to another plane, but I don’t like lying and this would draw even more attention if somebody calls me out on it or they get the catalog and notice the discrepancy. I’m not sure if you editing your post to not ask the question would be less suspicious or not, given that I can see when a post is edited. Andrew, Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Mysisian magic, as far as I can tell, only works within the world the individual spellcaster occupies at the time the spell is cast. My fortunomantic suprasensitivity is giving me information about the forum itself, but not about the actions of individual forum members. When I first encountered the forum, I experienced a specific kind of positive premonition which led me to believe that the forum would not cause significant harm in my world. This implies that the events you described are unlikely, but does not rule them out entirely. I don't have time to explain in more detail right now. I can get someone to do a metamantic analysis of the forum and use that to attempt to develop a spell that allows fortunomancy to work across multiple worlds, but this would take longer than is desirable. If you have a way to get me into your world there are spells I can cast that will give me more details, but I can't guarantee that my magic will work in your world. Any spells I cast will not give me as much detail about threats to other worlds as they do about threats to mine because fortunomantic magic responds to personal priorities and my world is a higher personal priority than yours. I need you to tell me everything you know about black holes and how they work. You've already managed to miss one of my posts in that thread and need to be reminded that it exists (when I asked how to make zorkmids). I can just not bother reminding you about this one. If someone else reminds you... I'm not sure. I'll corner a grav tech expert and ask them prying questions at the next available opportunity. I only missed that one because you posted it after I loaded the webpage but before my response was complete. I saw it as soon as I submitted my post. I guess I could pretend that I’m just being careless and didn’t notice it, but if somebody knew the true reason I missed it then they could easily tell that didn’t apply. People miss things, or intend to reply to them and forget, all the time. It's one of the simplest and least attention-getting ways to drop it. You could also choose to explain only some of the spells, and not say why, and I could decline to express interest in the rest. But dropping it seems better on most counts. Fortunomancer, I will see if I can get a standard summoning to work from your world, but it seems unlikely since I can’t even get it to work from Limbo. Other than that I have no way to get you into my world until I get a lot more mana. In worlds with similar astrophysics to mine and Leaf’s, gravity works by everything being pulled towards everything else. You only notice it for the planet you’re on because the planet is much heavier, so pulls harder. The more stuff you put closer together, the harder it will pull. On a separate note, light does not move instantaneously; it just moves really really fast. It is also affected by gravity, but it moves so quickly that you barely notice. It turns out that for reasons I don’t understand, it is impossible for anything to go faster than light does. A black hole is when you have so much stuff at the same point that it pulls so hard that even light won’t be able to escape if it gets inside (hence why it’s called a “black” hole). Since nothing can go faster than light, if light can’t escape, nothing else can either. All demons know about black holes because they’re almost-perfect waste disposal. Demons can conjure stuff by magic; they can’t get rid of it by magic. They used to use lakes of fire or lava, but black holes work better for this purpose. Andrew, That information is...troubling. I have more time now and can explain my premonitional sense in more detail. I had two premonitions when I decided to write in to the forum, both positive. One was a sense that the action I was about to take would be pleasant in a recreational sense (the sort of feeling I get when I’m about to open an interesting but not particularly useful spellbook, only stronger). The second was a feeling that the action I was about to take would result in me acquiring useful and important information. The first was stronger than the second, meaning that the first outcome was probable while the second was merely possible. This implies one of three possibilities: 1. It is so improbable that the forum will cause harmful elements to be brought into my world that my magic does not see fit to warn me that it is even a possibility. 2. My magic could not predict this particular situation because my magic doesn’t work on events in other worlds. (This is unlikely because the situation was caused by the forum, which does exist in my world). 3. My world is uniquely equipped to deal with this particular threat. I'm certain that we don't have a way to adequately fight black holes, but there's a (slight) possibility that we are better able to stop demons from creating black holes in the first place. In summary: I am almost positive that I would know if posting on this forum would cause something very bad to happen to my world, but given that my magic interacts oddly with other worlds, I can't give you a definite guarantee. I'll let you know if the metamantic analysis yields anything useful. I don't know of any means to block interdimedensional travel. That doesn't mean the Foundation doesn't have any, just that it's never been closely related enough to anything I've been working on that I needed to know. I've notified some people and should receive an answer soon, but I'd be surprised if it worked on a worldwide scale. If there were a suddenly appearing black hole, the Foundation would expect to be forewarned through means that aren't available in other worlds. Slightly more helpfully, we do have a lead on containing them. I've just been informed that the Foundation is in possession of a singularity with an estimated tenth of a solar mass. The containment mechanism is something we do not understand, but experimenting with it is dangerous for obvious reasons. If you can get a friendly demon to create the containment device without the singularity, preferably in some isolated corner of Hell, it might turn out to be a scalable solution. Even in the best case, though, a demon surely doesn't need a black hole to destroy the world. The most urgent step is to shut down that thread. If the information that there exists a plane shift spell gets out, that's all it takes. If nothing else, at least remove all references to the catalogue and let readers think the stated list is a complete one. I can provide a visual amnestic to assist with dropping the subject. Is your visual amnestic going to get past the censor? I might support editing the thread if editing was invisible, but itt. unless Mother Starlight has that power, I guess. Trying to aggressively suppress information that has already been partly released is a losing game, at least in my world. If Mother Starlight is reluctant to assist us, we can't expect to shut down every curious onlooker who wonders why so many posts in the thread were edited at once and where the references to the catalogue went. Right now, nobody but us knows there's anything dangerous about that thread. Let's keep it that way, all right? I could invisibly filter the phrase plane shift to some plausible alternative throughout the forum, either for all users or some well-defined subset, such as only those from Daevinity. This would not affect the memories of anyone who read the phrase before I install the filter, nor would it affect demon-conjured copies of the catalog. Would this be helpful or harmful? Archangel, I think I need to know a bit more about the containment device before I can conjure one. For example, what’s it called? The requirement is not strictly that it’s a unique specification, but that it’s a specification that lets the demon “find” what they’re looking for. Mother Starlight, I think that would be quite helpful, especially if it was only for users from Daevinity. It wouldn’t completely solve the problem, but it would mean that any daeva who wanted to use it for destructive purposes would need to be not only malicious but also more curious than average. If you could change the phrase plane shift to dig (which I could plausibly and truthfully claim would be quite helpful if I became a demon) for readers in Daevinity, and simultaneously change the number 1037 to 838 for such readers when it refers to the price I paid, I think that could go a long way to preventing the information from getting into the wrong hands. I suppose that if a user from Daevinity were to type the phrase themselves that would already be a bit of a problem, but they would certainly notice something was up with the phrase if they did, and it wouldn't be hard to figure out the context from there. I don't think it's possible for me to filter with perfect consistency and undetectability. We know it only as the containment mechanism from SCP-123. If it has a real name, that's not it. It's made of a dull gray metal arranged in sixty triangles forming a geodesic sphere; any solid or liquid that enters the sphere is drawn into the singularity. Nearby objects on the outside are also drawn toward it, but weakly. The strongest the pull gets on the outside is at the boundary of the sphere, where it is approximately one Earth gravity. This suggests that containment is imperfect I've attached an image of SCP-123, but there is little else I can tell you. (Note that this image as depicted does contain the black hole, relevant if you try duplicating it exactly.) This PM thread format seems messy and suboptimal, so I've created a board here that's only visible to people I authorize. Currently that's me, esthfora, Andrew, Fortunomancer, Leaf, and Archangel.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 15, 2015 22:06:21 GMT
Ooh, shiny. I like it.
Tried to implement it, ran into timezone issues. Working draft:
import sys import csv import time import datetime
if len(sys.argv)!=2: print 'Usage: python convertation.py conversations_data.csv > conversations_pretty.bbcode' sys.exit(1)
with open(sys.argv[1], 'r') as csvfile: data = csv.reader(csvfile) conv_id = -1 for row in data: try: thisrow = int(row[0]) if thisrow != conv_id: if conv_id != -1: print '[hr]' print '[b]'+row[1]+'[/b]' conv_id = thisrow print '[quote timestamp="'+str(int(time.mktime(datetime.datetime.strptime(row[3], '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S').timetuple())))+'" author="@'+row[2]+'"]'+row[4]+'[/quote]' except ValueError: # This try/except is so it doesn't choke on the first line of the CSV, # which lists column header/titles. pass
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 22:17:20 GMT
I’m pretty sure the export is in UTC, isn’t it? I forgot to test whether Python assumed UTC or not. EDIT: Both empirically and looking at the source code, the calendar.timegm functions of Python 2.7 and 3.4 both assume UTC. Looking at the docs, this is also said there, but not directly (gmtime says UTC, and timegm says it and gmtime are inverses).
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 15, 2015 22:19:17 GMT
I dunno, maybe? My script was outputting times that were later than they should be, and I'm west of UTC.
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 22:29:19 GMT
Your script was using mktime, which assumes local time. The table at the top of the documentation of the time module, which I really would have liked to have handy before I found that information the hard way, says that this is localtime and you should use the calendar.gmtime function I did. I’m glad one of us got lucky with finding the right function. I thought of the timezone issues before I finished my modification, but forgot to test them when I was done writing.
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 22:34:27 GMT
Oh, that’s annoying. Even though I didn’t include the source link in those quotes, the Andrew account still got notified about them. That exposes backstage information to non-backstage accounts. I think anthusiasm and I are the only ones who keep our backstage and character accounts separate, and the minor inconvenience of getting an OOC notification on a character account probably can’t be avoided anyway even if it doesn’t happen in this circumstance.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 15, 2015 22:38:21 GMT
OK then!
Combining the other minor changes I made along the way with your actually-works-right code, I get the following:
#!/bin/python
import sys import csv from time import strptime from calendar import timegm
if len(sys.argv)!=2: print 'Usage:', sys.argv[0], 'conversations_data.csv > conversations_pretty.bbcode' sys.exit(1)
with open(sys.argv[1], 'r') as csvfile: data = csv.reader(csvfile) conv_id = -1 for row in data: # Row has format [tid, subject, sender, time, message] try: thisrow = int(row[0]) if thisrow != conv_id: if conv_id != -1: print '[hr]' print '[b]'+row[1]+'[/b]' conv_id = thisrow timestamp = str(timegm(strptime(row[3], "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))) print '[quote author="@' +row[2]+ '" timestamp="' +timestamp+ '"]' +row[4]+ '[/quote]' except ValueError: # This try/except is so it doesn't choke on the first line of the CSV, # which lists column header/titles. pass
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 15, 2015 22:41:21 GMT
When editing your profile, under Notifications, you can disable notifications that you've been quoted.
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Post by Leaf on May 15, 2015 23:06:45 GMT
What do I need in order to run these? I mean, presumably Python, but I don't know anything about Python.
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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 23:13:50 GMT
I used python2 in the shebang line because it wouldn’t run on three, and I regularly use Arch where the default python is python3; if some people don’t have python2 installed with that name then no matter what’s done some people will have problems. If everybody does have python2 installed with that name, which I think is the case, then it should be fine. I also typod in that I should have used /usr/bin/python2; python is theoretically guaranteed to be there if it’s on the system. In practice, I think there are some systems where it isn’t, so the most cross-platform way would have been to use the env trick and make that line “#!/usr/bin/env python2”. Also, for anybody wanting to use this who doesn’t have a Linux or Unix machine (Mac OS X is Unix), you will need to install Python. In any case, you need to run the script from the command line. This is relatively straightforward if you know how, but is not easy to figure out if you aren’t a computer person. I can techsupport, or you can include me in the conversation and I can export it for you.e).
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