Re: [s-d] I shouldn't have eaten the 99 cent sushi.

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There were three things that caused it all to fall apart.

First was the fact that the rules allowed the posting player to add 
whitespace to the result. Thus, you could remove all spaces from your 
document, "babelize" it (which would barely change it), and then 
reinsert the spaces to get a message almost identical to what you 
wanted. I think Uin pointed this out first.

Somebody (BvS, I think) followed up on that with a normal post, 
claiming that we couldn't prove that e didn't do something like what 
Uin did. What's more, e argued, it was conceivable that e had actually 
put some text through properly, and it had by complete coincidence 
yielded eir message. Since we couldn't prove that this didn't happen, 
we had to take eir word for it.

Meanwhile, I argued that the whole Sushi thing was moot anyway, on the 
grounds that it said the player could not post unbabelized messages to 
the forum. I claimed that the rules couldn't regulate anything except 
the abstract parts of the game, and so "Players may not make proposals" 
is a restriction that regulates how we do things, but "Players may not 
post to spoon-business" is simply a false statement. Similarly, "The 
player holding the sushi cannot post messages to public fora unless 
said messages have been babelized" is a false statement, because the 
rules have no real power to stop me from posting whatever I want to 
s-b.

I believe the general consensus was that all three points were correct: 
Removing and reinserting spaces was a good way to circumvent the sushi, 
doing nothing and claiming you'd removed and reinserted spaces was an 
even better way, and neither was needed because it didn't actually do 
anything anyway.

The fourth issue with the sushi was simply the irritation of it. A 
player holding the sushi (prior to the CFJs that declared it 
ineffectual) was effectively unable to take any action - e'd try to 
create a proposal, and get random gibberish, or e'd try to vote, and 
end up voting "It is Valid" on proposals with names that didn't exist, 
or e'd try even just to buy a t-shirt or pick up a gnome, and would 
instead make some claim about ankhs and donkey insides. It was very 
funny, briefly, but after a few nweeks it became really, really 
annoying.

Although I'm for bringing it back in some form or other, I won't vote 
for anything that doesn't address all of the above problems, because 
once through all those CFJs was quite enough.

--
Wonko

On May 28, 2005, at 1.30 PM, Rainbow Wolfe wrote:

> I think that's what started the whole CFI thing off! If I recall (and 
> Wonko
> & BvS would know more) a player allegedly ran the whole thing through
> Babelfish without spaces - the argument being something along the 
> lines of
> it was ran through, and this is what came out... other players felt 
> that
> this was cheating the fish.
>
> - RW
>
> On 5/28/05, eugman@xxxxxxxxxxx <eugman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Well what if we made it so you got the 150 genchips but every non 
> > bablized
> > game action you make costs you 30 Genechips. So you could make three 
> > non
> > bables game actions and still be getting money.
> >
> > Also how are we to understand the game actions?I remeber seeing a 
> > thing
> > where people would have it be in english but have no whitespace could
> > someone elaborate on that?
> > _______________________________________________
> > spoon-discuss mailing list
> > spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
> > http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss
> _______________________________________________
> spoon-discuss mailing list
> spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process 
and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
     -E. B. White (1899 - 1985), Some Remarks on Humor, introduction

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss