User:Hirokache

User:Hirokache/Fumeology

I've stolen this template from Bahiti, thanks!

About Hirokache

My T7 home is in Seven Lakes.. I am currently Level 26, Student of Three (The Human Body, Harmony, and Worship).

Guild Affiliations

Elder in:

• Absurdia
• 'Gyptians With Jobs

Member in:

• Guilds/
• Guilds/

Initiate in:

• Guilds/
• Guilds/

Tests

Discipline of Architecture

• Initation - Principles of Architecture: Completed
• Test of the Obelisk: Principle completed
• Throne of Pharaoh: Not started
• Test of Towers: Not started
• Test of the People's Pyramid: Not started
• Test of the Library of Alexandria: Not started
• Test of the Megalopolis: Not Started
• Test of Funerary Temple: Not Started
• Test of Life: Not Started
• Test of Ka: Not Started
• Test_of_Octec's_Ghost: Not started

Discipline of Art and Music

• Initiation - Principles of Art and Music: Completed
• Test of The Sculptors: Not Started
• Test of Khefre's Children: Not started
• Test of the Raeli Mosaic: Not Started
• Test of Pyrotechnics: Not Started
• Test of the Formal Garden: Not Started
• Test of Flight: Not Started
• Test of the Prismatic Opticon: Not Started
• Test of Dancing Waters: Not Started
• Test_of_the_Windsong: Not started

Discipline of Body

• Initiation - Principles of Body: Completed
• Test of the Acrobat: Principle Completed - I can teach - See Acro Chart
• Test of the Archaeologist: Not started
• Test of the Bedouin: 6 advances (all gained in the first few days of the Telling)
• Test of the Singing Cicada: Passed, 18 advances so far (speed 10)
• Test of the Darkest Night: Started - Mushrooms needed:
• Test of the Safari: Started - Need otters and rats
• Test of the Ritual Tattoo: Started
• Test of the Fisherman: Not Started
• Test of the Banquet: Not Started
• Test of Takeskot: Principle Completed
• Test of the Oyster Catcher: Principle Completed

Discipline of Harmony

• Initiation - Principles of Harmony: Completed
• Test of Chains: Principle Complete
• Test of the Freeman: Started
• Test of Marriage: Principle Complete
• Test of Prophet: Passed
• Test of Souls: Started
• Test of the Critic: Started
• Balance of Goods: Started
• Test of Promotion: Started
• Test of Reason: Started
• Test of the Giving Fisherman: Not Started

Discipline of Leadership

• Initiation - Principles of Leadership: Completed
• Test of the Demipharaoh: Principle Complete
• Test of the Kingmaker: Not Started
• Test of Mentorship: Not Started
• The Test of the Host: Not Started
• Test of the_Plantation: Principle Complete
• Test of the Covered Cartouche: Started
• Test of Patronage: Started
• Test of the Tour Guide: Not Started
• Test of the Retired Pirates: Started
• Test of the Coalition: Not Started
• Test of the Bureaucrat: Started
• Test of the Hegemon: Not Started

Discipline of Thought

• Initiation - Principles of Thought: Not passed
• Test of the Pathmaker: Not Started
• Test of the Venery: Not Started
• Test of the Bijou: Not Started
• Test of the Constellation: Not Started
• Test of the Tomb of the Immortal: Not Started
• Test of Empty Hand: Not Started
• Hexaglyphs: Not Started

Discipline of Worship

• Initiation - Principles of Worship: Completed
• Test of the Vigil: Passed on
• Path of the Pilgrim: Started
• Test of Festivals: Started
• Test of the Messenger: Not Started
• Test of Astrological Alignment: Started
• Test of Beacons: Not Started
• Test_of_Ritual_Mummification: Not STarted
• Test of the Humble Priests: Not Started
• Remembrance Ceremonies: Not Started

Tale 1

I started playing in the third beta before Tale 1. Asherons Call was my game of choice at the time, when someone mentioned this 'crafting game' they were beta testing. I thought "who would ever want to play a crafting game, that sounds incredibly boring". So naturally I logged in to find out. My first character ended up in a very cluttered waste-land. Back then, there was no wiki or newbie Island to help you get going. I don't think there was any sort of tutorial at all. The main source of out-of-game information at the time was IRC and the forums, neither of which I had found yet. I did eventually run into someone who seemingly only spoke German, and since I (still) only speak English communicating was tough. I created a second character to try another area, because it looked like traveling would take way too long. Here I ran into a person going by the name of Sprocket. He agreed to mentor me, and spent a day or two teaching me the early basics, and I was quickly hooked.

For Tale 1 my primary interest was the economics of the world. I organized a guild for others with similar interests, with the very creative title of The Trade Guild. From that, Egypt's first (and arguably most successful) bank was organzed. Hellinar was the real brains of the operations of the bank itself, and kept it going long after I took my first long break from Egypt, but I like to think I did my part. I was certainly the loudest cheer-leader, did a lot of organizing, and since I performed more traveling and trading than the average of Egyptian of the time, helped get the adoption of the TN script going. The biggest success of the bank was that 'TN' (short for 'Traders Note' I believe) became the default method of valuation in Egypt. The script itself was only moderately successful, largely because it had weight and bulk, and strength and dexterity levels were much lower back then. I believe it was still the only successful 'money' Egypt has ever seen. As a side note, we originally had a different name in mind for the script, but in-between the time the tech opened and we got a press up and running, someone with a bit of a personal grudge against us 'stole' the name in one of the sillier 'griefing' attempts of the Telling. The new name worked out pretty well though.

I was at one point an owner of the E! microphone that was the ancestor of Tale 7's 'Egypt Today'. I believe it was one of the first microphone's given out in T1, through some contest. I vaguely remember when it occurred, as I remember disaproving of the name (I could be 'serious' about all the wrong things back then). Eventually, after a period of stagnancy, the microphone made its way to my guildmate Doku. He used it to arrange what I believe to have been the first 'Acro Line'. He made all of the preparations, including drawing out a space for people to create lines, I think my main contribution was to assist in people-wrangling during the event itself. I have a fuzzy memory of Pharaoh showing up to the event and me giving him an impromptu interview, but I'm not sure that isn't a false memory. Anyway, when Doku left, he passed the microphone on to me. I began using it to travel around Egypt and perform one-on-one interviews with people. Some were scheduled, but many were impromptu. I think it was used for a DP debate or two. Shelomit eventually suggested using the microphone for more of the 'public chat channel' that it is today, and I agreed. I think by then I was playing less, so ended up just handing over the microphone so she could organize that.

I was one of the first (and few I think) members of The Goods in Tale 1. IIRC Baf made me an elder before he left, I vaguely remember making some trades, but not many.

The Leadership discipline was my secondary interest, though I never made much progress in actually passing tests. I did get a rather controversial law passed, which was to ban TCLogick from contact with new players. By that point, a number of friends and acquaintances had gone through very negative experiences with TCLogick. Most of them I have since forgotten. One of those I do remember was in the very early days of the Telling; a guildmate fumed to me about how TCLogick was charging 'newbies' an entry fee for his mentorship and entrance into his guild The fee was their crystal hieroglyphs for the Octet status. These were considered quite valuable at the time, since there were far more players who wanted to pass than crystals available (no one yet knew that DPA on expired players stuff would mostly solve this problem). Crystals were really the first valuable thing a newbie could obtain, my guildmate believed TCLogick was taking advantage of a newbies ignorance of the value of the crystals, and after I witnessed TCLogick bragging about how many crystals he had obtained, I came to agree with that assessment.

TCLogick ended up as a member of The Trade Guild. When we began discussing plans for the bank, he wished to be involved. He disagreed strongly with Hellinar's plan, and became fairly antagonistic on the forums I had setup for us. Sometime later he ended up harassing one of my closer in-game friends (I don't remember over what, though I think nothing connected to the bank or the Trade Guild), culminating in threats of finding the person and committing violence against them. At that I kicked him out of the guild and banned him from the Trade Guild forums. (It was TCLogick who performed the script name 'theft' mentioned above in retaliation for this).

I heard of a few other conflicts, most of which I don't remember and none of which involved me directly. (The only detail I remember was a case where TCLogick had built one or more Christian Crosses on land that an acquaintance considered to be his own; I think he was able to organize a campaign to downvote them enough to be able to tear them down). Time passed on and I mostly forgot about TCLogick, until one day Shelomit asked me about him. A friend of hers had had a bit of a run-in with him. I seem to think it had something to do with flowers, but could be way off on that. I do remember that he was very abusive towards Shelomit's friend, to the point where the person quit the game over it. Shelomit mentioned having heard of other issues with him, and wondered if maybe something could be done to prevent further problems. I don't remember if Shelomit ever explicitly mentioned trying to ban him, but I do remember I believed that was what she wanted. It was also agreed that Shelomit should not be connected to whatever was done in any fashion, since it might seem weird that the wife of the owner of the game was trying to get a player banned. Until today, I think I've only ever mentioned her involvement to one other person.

I didn't think a ban would be effective, as he could just come back and would probably be angry and more prone to abusing others. After a good bit of contemplation, it occurred to me that 'established' players would be more likely to know how to handle TCLogick if he began attacking them, and that it was newer players who might need more help. Preventing him from contact with newer players seemed like a pretty good plan. The law would spread the world of TCLogick's ... difficult nature, it would prevent potentially scaring away new players, but it would not prevent him from continuing to enjoy most of the content of the game (he had already pass the Test of Mentorship by then). I began a pretty aggressive campaign for signatures of my petition and votes for when it came up. Even with my campaigning, I think it would have been a very close vote and quite possibly have been voted down, but someone else who had been treated poorly by TCLogick 'infiltrated' his guild and captured screenshots of TCLogick encouraging some newer members of his guild to engage in griefing of some other Egyptians. I was able to link to these screenshots in the final petition and I think they were key to getting the law passed. At some point during this process, TCLogick began harassing me with tells (I assumed at the time that he used /tells instead of chats because once you closed the client they were no longer visible and therefore more difficult to prove). Some of them were threatening violence, the one that stood out to me was when he threatened to track me down in real life and make me 'regret the day my mother met my father'. He was the only person I ever ended up setting to /ignore. Later, after I was no longer really playing, MissBarbara took up TCLogick's cause, and successfully got a law passed restoring his ability to contact new players. I logged in for an interview on the topic; I don't remember what I said, though I think I try to stay neutral on the topic. I wasn't really active anymore, and for all I knew he had actually reformed.

Tale 2

House of BES saw its last hurray in Tale 2, and I was pretty excited to start the telling as a member, though after the very early days I don't seem to remember any interesting guild achievements.

TpcT and/or Teao had talked with me during the end of Tale 1 about recreating The Goods for Tale 2. Baf wouldn't be around, but he would provide us with the source code for the site. I was a few years out of my third and last attempt at an undergraduate degree, having gone for a CS degree that time. I had fairly recently started a job as a jr. unix system administrator at a data center provider. I had a server I could host the site on, and while I didn't really know PHP, I figured I could learn enough to get by. At some point concerns arose over a perceived lack of transparency into how exactly The Goods worked, so I created a [on sourceforge] for the code. Someone mentioned that having the data was more important. My backup at the time was a nightly dump of the database that was emailed to me. I created a mailing list to send the backup to instead, and began adding anyone who asked.

One day, Tchrin (who then ran the main fan-site and official forums), sent me a slightly angry message wondering why I was logging in as a bunch of different users on the forums. I was a bit confused by this, as I wasn't logging in as anyone else ... but Tchrin said the same IP had first logged in as me and then as a number of other users. It turned out that The Goods stored usernames in plain-text. A lot of people, including myself, used the same password for the forums as they did for The Goods, and one of the recipients of the database backup had realized this and began testing things out. He contacted me not long after, and I was able to fix things up fairly quickly (for some degree of fixed ... I think I just md5 hashed the password field, told everyone they should change their passwords, and stopped sending out database backups ... an embarrassingly unthorough response, but it was the best I knew to do at the time, and it did prevent any more issues).

...

Tale 3

I believe it was in the early days of Tale 3 that I created the first 'Vast Conspiracy of Legacy Players' guild, as a tongue-in-cheek response to the complaints about the advantages or perceived advantages of 'Legacy Players' (especially by one rather infamous player who's name I've forgotten). It was in a rather remote location but did bring in a number of players. I believe a version existed for the next few tellings as well, though I never made it into those.

Tale 6

(G) 2500, -3000, Seven Lakes 2500, -3000 |contentonly=no|{{{2}}}}}