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been recolouring plushies lately

Haha yes it is I, back at it again with n e w s B e h o l d : i’ve been persuaded enough to start them And now my first commission, for @Onyxarias , their Unathi Sko Kiiz

A few end of round shots from a building event some admins were kind enough to put together during an extended round (Shockpoint and Elysian_Prince... I think? Not sure.... sorry if I'm missing anyone).

Vox hardsuit doodle

Hey! Right now, the Psychologist has no purpose, mechanically speaking. If they were removed the game would not be different in the slightest. Compare this to other heavy RP roles like: Librarian: Some people really like reading the books, and I would personally miss the books. They have a unique mechanic, even if it's shallow. Removing them would remove a feature. Chaplain: Can bless people and are actually mechanically useful during some rounds (cultists and vampires). Removing them might actually affect balance in some modes. IAAs: Has a clear purpose on the station. Recently got their own comms channel which I love. When playing a command role, I always stay in touch with IAA to find any SOP breaches or direct them to stuff that needs investigating. If directed, they can be a great asset. If removed, SOP wouldn't be followed and adherence to Space Law might also suffer. Then we have the Psychologist. According to their SOP, there is no one who they can actually treat, without the permission of someone else. This makes sense, since their treatment doesn't actually do anything mechanically. Treating criminals is also, due to the nature of the gamemodes, useless. Traitors are working for the syndicate either willingly or forced and a good therapy session won't change that. The rest of the gamemodes force criminals that are impossible to help (vampires/changelings) for a psychologist. Even if they can be helped, they can't be released due to their status as EoC. The only criminals left are the small scale ones. The greytiders and shitters. I suppose the psychologists job could be to try to deal with those but as a psychologist you're coming at it from the wrong angle. They need information about rules of the server and how to act, not psychological help. Psychologist SOP for reference: In a short summary, they can't do anything assumed by their job without permission from someone else. Which would be fine, if they had some sort of dangerous or great power, but they don't. However, I don't think the psychiatrist should be able to force people into treatment against their will. I do think others should have that power though. So how do we solve this? Personally, I think features that lack purpose should be removed. By that logic, the Psychologist should be removed. On the other hand, I like the idea of the Psychologist so I wanted to bring some suggestions to make them able to do stuff. Here are some suggestions to give them a purpose: Positive Psychology. Some players will become angry playing this game. The Psychologist, could try to change their emotional state by offering encouragement and compliments. Their goal would be to turn those frowns upside down. This is hard in real life and doing it over a game might be harder. But using this type of psychology might actually make people feel a bit better. Treat it like a serious job. While a lot of beginners play IAA agents, people know when an IAA agent aren't living up to their standard. A psychologist should have a similar bar to reach for. They can't act however they want because then they would be worse than their patients. Psychiatric session/evaluation demanded: Any head can demand a psychiatric evaluation or session by any of their subordinates if they seem angry, sad or generally unhappy. If we base the Psychologists treatment on Positive Psychology, this sessions purpose would be to make them happy or calm down. IAA might also be able to demand that non-heads do a session. The Psychologist could also get access to the Procedures channel. The two outcomes I imagine for this would be the person demanded to do the session either flipping out completely and escalating their anger, which I would consider grounds for demotion OR accepting it, realizing they may not feel allright and do the session. If they feel better afterwards would depend on the psychiatrist. Research: The Psychologist can perform actual psychological research, just like in real life! CentComm, since they sometimes do odd stuff, might want to try some strange experiment. I assume this would be heavily based on the admins on at the shift start, but I'm also wondering how hard it would be to have a rotation of 10 different "experiments" similar to station goal that the Psychologist has to perform. Checking for completion would not be necessary, as long as they have a clear task. They could give their findings to the captain who could fax it to CentComm. Examples: Can (antagonist) be cured by 10 minute exposure to the clown? Will the happiness level of the station increase if the tiles are changed to wood? Will violence increase or decrease, based on the amount of flowers placed in the hallways? If a "calm area" is constructed near dorms, will people visit it to find inner peace? If the mime start acting out peaceful and happy scenarios, will the crew calmness increase? These are some thoughts I trew together in like half an hour so I'm sorry they're a bit confused. I'm sure there are plenty of better suggestions out there and I would love to see a job I love IRL get some more purpose in this game! So keep the suggestions coming!

A few people who have spoken to me a couple of months ago might know that I was talking about taking a break from the game. SS13 and paradise in particular has always been very special to me. I had never taken part in a community like this one, and i must say I loved it. If you pair the million things you can do in this game with a community of nice people who are always willing to help and talk you have something good. I got to admit that I didn't come to this community as someone i can look back at with pride. I had a pretty bad start, did some things I'm not proud of. Ultimately, I do feel like I have changed. This community is very much what i have to thank for that. I have made so many friends here, and have loved chatting, playing and talking with all of them. However, there was always some issues that had grown with me over time. The first obvious one being burnout. After playing enough, the game got a little less interesting from a game standpoint. Being someone who had all antags set to yes(clings were on and off) I really started noticing this when I was no longer happy to roll most antags. I found myself mostly standing over bridge and talking throughout most of the rounds. not really doing much. Now this still kept me in for quite a while, as seeing people, talking with them and having fun interactions was still very fun. However i could no longer play the game as much anymore, as the long shifts could really get slow. I found some stuff to do, like killing megafaunas on lavaland, which i did for a while. At the end after killing bubblegum i was back to that same place though. standing over bridge and just chatting a little. The interest in the game itself kinda faded, which is probably something to expect when you play a game a lot. I still loved hanging around on the discord and sometimes the forums still though. Even started coding and contributing at one point. I once again was so surprised that some people went to great lengths to help me learn how to code and make PRs. At one point the coding really re-ignited my initial flame for the game again. I still didn't play it as much, but browsing the github, discussing the code and making some small code changes was really fun. This leads into some other issues i had too though. I really don't want to go into too much detail here, but i found myself really disagreeing with some things on the development side. Some of it at times was even frustrating when my own PRs didn't always feel considered or cared about much at all. I quite recently lost interest in contributing code here as well. After a while of not playing though i must admit it felt kinda good at times too. Having only been here for about a year, I had a decent amount of time on the server, and found myself playing it a lot, maybe even sometimes too much. Some time after I removed the new round alert role on discord I started playing other games more again, getting back and playing with some friends i hadn't really talked much too in a while. Now this doesn't mean I had a bad time with this game, quite the opposite actually. I cannot stress enough how much i have enjoyed my time on this server. And as mentioned at the start i had talked about a break, and i think it's time I really take a break from all of it. Having been working on some other ss13 projects in addition as well. I still might come back to it sometimes in the future, and i really wish to do that. Despite some of the Issues I have had, i still love and respect the server and the community. Thanks everyone for letting me be part of this, and i really wish you good luck moving forward! I still have a discord, and I'm not disappearing from the face of earth. Do contact me if you ever want to talk or something:P some pictures I snipped throughout my time here: Careful with the vampires, they bite. Just some spessmen standing up against bullying. No one should have this much power... Probably my proudest moment on the server of all times, picture taken right after I killed bubblegum. There is a blob by the way... This got me burnt out from engineering/atmos for a while man... Can't forget the time Kanye West came over for a visit...(He had literally copy pasted the entire wiki page in his flavor text too by the by) Last but not at all least, some proof that can ruin careers! I found some more pictures i wanted to share, so here you go. A nice and calm shift, planing the creating of an abomination with Grunt while drinking tea(Sulfuric acid for him). We did make this abomination later, put his brain in it but failed to ever revive him after that. I think it was spark who did this. Pretty damn terrifying if you ask me. Oh and the dogs talk to you through your mind. If you're gonna die, at least die with some friends right? Some people actually fell for this, including the captain. Quick easy station funds scam. Three is a reason i don't trust those people up at CC... Admins these days man. Me and two other vampires discussing with command why vampires deserve better rights. Captain actually contacted CC and stuff. Ended with me dying to a heart attack either way so that's that. Alright that should be it.

Welcome, to the first guide to falling asleep published by Rileydoe, or das bread. There's a preamble to be spoken here, speaking to those of us with insomnia. Trouble with sleeping, known as a habit of sleeplessness, or insomnia: Insomnia is pervasive throughout the vibrant backgrounds of this community. From programmers, artists, wage workers, or salaried, we all can fall victim to it. There are many ways to break a habit, but this post exists as a place to share your guide to falling asleep, or follow and comment on the guide posted below. Enjoy a sleepful life, and don't beat yourself up over falling into a very well established habit. Insomnia, the habit of sleeplessness, or inability to sleep. What causes insomnia? There are a number of factors to consider when we approach our own sleeplessness. Stress begins as the place to put blame to, accumulation of stress can trigger insomnia. Our response to normal life events that bring stress is often sleeplessness. An elevated response to stress, as well as possessing other conditions co-morbid with insomnia are key factors to understanding why we can't sleep. As well, predisposition to insomnia can come from other sleep related disturbances. Tendency to have a racing mind, lead to a racing heart, preventing the mind from considering the individual is asleep. There are dissonant feelings associated with sleeplessness, the mind telling the individual they are awake, despite being asleep. This leads to a further habit to form, and leads into chronic insomnia. Considering mental illness. Conditions of the mind, and habits are often symptoms of our mental illness. Those who experience depression or anxiety, have comorbidity with each other. That too, insomnia shares. Depression symptoms are linked to insomnia, as well as anxiety. Treating the insomnia has been clinically shown to improve depression symptoms, with a lesser case being true of anxiety. If you are experiencing depression or anxiety, consider behavioral therapy, as it can improve all of the worsening symptoms. Access to mental health care is varied, so also consider a self-help approach, treating the easiest symptoms first. Where to begin? Treatment. Depression, and anxiety have an elevated response in patients to seek self-help, as well as professional help. However, insomnia patients do not seek the same treatments, and have a less recognized appreciation for the programs. That said, taking any step to help improve your own insomnia condition is something to be recognized as critical. Medications, are well known to have a lesser impact than behavioral change. Those who seek out medication are often chasing higher doses as tolerance develops. It is much more effective to examine your behavior, and start a self help treatment. There is hope in changing your own habits, and it starts with acknowledging your issue. Ask a professional about CBT-I, and if anyone they know offers such a therapy. CBT-I, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy of Insomnia. Some psychologists specialize in a type of therapy to make patients change and affect the way they feel about sleep. Self help, and the many ways to focus on sleep. There are a few ways you can start the journey into breaking this awful habit. Focus on sleep comes from a variety of things, as someone who has struggled with chronic insomnia, I've approached it in a few ways. I always found it silly that I could fall asleep on the couch, snuggled up to my partner watching a movie, but not in bed. The moment I lay down, thoughts sprung up and my restlessness began. Picking that apart, focus can help us sleep. Occupying the mind is important, if you have anxiety and insomnia like I do. What I started with was watching TV while sleeping, but it held my interest too deeply. I put on the same shows for a while, but eventually that faded out as I'd seen the whole show. Enter podcasts, and audiobooks. Audiobooks and podcasts, explore the inner attention. It may seem counter-intuitive, when your mind is full of racing thoughts to add to them. Experiencing something new, and listening to a voice guide you through it can be different. Many podcasts are free, as well as there are a plethora of free audiobooks as well. Giving yourself something to pay attention to will aid you in a sleepful night. I have a tendency to pick someone with a smooth, or breathy voice. A few times listening may come off as too much, but turning the volume down can help you with that pickup. Asking a partner to record a few chapters of your favorite book can do wonders on helping you connect about your issue to a loved one. It may only take them a few minutes, but it has such an impact on both your lives. Parents and family can aid here too, recording their favorite books for you to help guide you into a more happy rest filled life. Exercise, and eliminating screentime. Often we find that a day spend doing too little is a day without sleep at night. Given a day filled with labor intensive, or mentally vigorous activity and we happen to pass right out. This acts as our natural way of finding sleep, taking the mind and body and working them out so they require rest. Take up walking, if you haven't tried any physical exercise before. There are many sanctuaries across all of nations where you can walk and find a nice intro to exercise. Puzzles, like picross or sudoku are great for working the mind out. They find all sorts of free platforms too! There's plenty of online puzzles you can print, or fill out electronically. That said, too much screentime and light keeps our brain in a pattern of staying awake. Try to turn off all screens and devices an hour, or 30 minutes before bed. Setting up a time where you can turn off your devices will help to eliminate this pattern of sleeplessness. If you are required to look at screens for your job, invest in a $30 bluelight filter device. There's plenty available, some software, some built into the screens, or just glasses. I recommend the glasses as you never know if you can get IT to install a bluelight program. I believe f.lux is a free program available to reduce eye strain. Diet and coffee. Routines of eating. Ditching coffee is not easy, but caffeine has a serious impact on your sleeping habits. Morning coffee is a-okay. But after noon, it's best to avoid the stuff. Some tricks to start cutting back coffee consumption are to replace it with morning exercise, during the lunch hour try to do a little bit of cardio. You'd be surprised how much a 10 minute jumprope will do for you. It's very important to reduce caffeine especially in the later afternoon, it stays in the body actively for many hours. Another good way to start is cutting back hour-by-hour with the cups of coffee or tea. Reducing it slowly to only morning consumption. Diet can also impact sleep greatly, eating before bed is a surefire way to keep yourself awake. Set a consistent dinner time 3 hours before you intend to go to bed. Those of us with crazy hours, try eating right as you get off work or from school. It will help reduce that nighttime restlessness. Chronic Insomnia and resets A strong pattern of insomnia is known as chronic insomnia. The inability to sleep, becomes routine and sets it way into our lives. It's important to know how to break this habit and change the routine. Resets, are change of environment to repair our sleep onset. Sleep onset requires us to feel sleepy, to feel like we want to rest. Otherwise it fills the time with racing thoughts and an uncomfortable feelings. Doing something boring in very dim light will help with this new onset of sleep. Take 20-30 minutes to get out of the bedroom, sit in somewhere dim and try something boring. Cleaning some dishes, or doing housework is very effective for myself. Some say folding and putting away laundry is great for this, as well as reading something thick like a detailed novel. When you start to feel sleepy, head back to bed. Sometimes it can take me two or three resets on a really bad night, so don't feel bad if it doesn't work right away. Things to avoid, bad sleep quality habits. Another important thing for changing our rest, is understanding destructive and bad rest. Sleep quality is just as important as the sleep itself. For this reason, alcohol is really awful to our sleep. While it does help people to sleep (a night-cap) it is damaging to our rest. It worsens sleep quality, and comes with an association of guilt sometimes. Aside from that, alcohol is shown to worsen insomnia in the future and require larger doses to be effective. Many recommend melatonin for sleep aid, however it should almost never be used in cases of insomnia. While it is a sleep aide, it only helps when taken in large doses. It is used to help a persons natural sleep clock like in a delayed sleep phase syndrome. This is where someones natural sleep clock is a few hours ahead of society's expectations. Say they naturally sleep 2am-10am, but have a job that requires them to wake up at 6am. You can use melatonin in these cases, as you may think you have insomnia, but you get a full 8 hours on the weekends when you aren't working. Melatonin is ineffective for insomnia, as insomnia is patterns of sleeplessness, not delayed sleep phase. Taking Melatonin at the wrong time can worsen insomnia and have other negative effects on mood. That about sums up my own journey with sleeplessness, and I hope you can find some of this information useful. Below is cited some sources on insomnia and it's clinical understanding. Drake, Christopher L., Timothy Roehrs, and Thomas Roth. "Insomnia causes, consequences, and therapeutics: an overview." Depression and anxiety 18.4 (2003): 163-176. Arroll, Bruce, et al. "Prevalence of causes of insomnia in primary care: a cross-sectional study." British Journal of General Practice 62.595 (2012): e99-e103. Krakow, Barry, et al. "Prospective assessment of nocturnal awakenings in a case series of treatment-seeking chronic insomnia patients: a pilot study of subjective and objective causes." Sleep 35.12 (2012): 1685-1692.

New custom ID for Pepper.IO, @TheManBenji, but hope they like it anyways!

*scream

It would make sense, but capturing and containing a vampire is already hard enough for sec.

I LOVE!!!!!

The following changes have been made as a result of head discussion of items brought up in the 2nd community survey: The "Repeat Offender" space law modifier is now +10 minutes, instead of the old +5 minutes. Combat implants (anti-drop, CNS rebooter) are now considered "restricted weapons" under space law, which means that scientists giving themselves or other people such implants without authorization is grounds for the person who gets the implant to be charged with major crime 304 possession of a restricted weapon (10-15 minutes). The person who did the surgery may also be charged as an accomplice. Admin policy is generally that if you are an antag, you can ahelp and ask for easier objectives, and admins will generally grant this. However, exactly which objectives you get is entirely up to the admin. Notably, if you want harder or more objectives, you generally have to emag a fax machine, fax the syndicate, and ask. Mentors and admins are now allowed to use the new #Help voice chat channel to teach newer players the basics of the game. This includes answering "how do I X?" or "what does Y mean?" questions over voicechat. We trust mentors/admins not to use this to metagame. Newer players are allowed to join this voicechat and ask questions if any mentor or admin is present. Please don't use this channel for general chit-chat, keep it reserved for its intended use. The ability to get game help over voicechat has been proven helpful for many games, so we're adding it here for a trial period to see if its helpful for Paradise.

This post and many other reasons is why I dislike slings not being able to thrall security. All it does is lead to massive amounts of murderboning, which is something we're very much trying to discourage on the server as it is. Not enable people that like it to do it more and look for more ways to be able to do it.

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:

mime office and clown office being the same office? they will never leave their office because they will be too busy beating the shit out of eachother, I see it as a win.

From an admin pov, my main concern with psych is the fact that a good chunk of the time, it is played by players who are absolutely bald, and decide to kidnap someone, straightjacket them, and force-feed them drugs. Because that's what they think is appropriate for a psych. I've had to ban more people from psych/medical for this than I care to remember. As such, any mechanic which psychs can abuse to detain people for long periods of time, or really at all, is probably not a good mechanic. If we're going to give psych a mechanic, something they can use to make the job more interesting/relevant, then I would suggest: something detection-based, like the ability to use an item to scan for abnormal brainwaves, which could reveal things like vampire thralling, mindslave implants, etc. This would require a unique neural scanner, them to hold still for 30-60 seconds, or something like that. Enough constraints that the psych can't mass-test everyone. something to do with curing psych abnormalities, like for example reversing abductor programming, or effectively giving someone a mindslave implant that makes them loyal to NT (OOCly, this is a reward for traitors, who get to be released 'on parole' rather than sitting out the rest of the round, as such this implant would be extremely limited supply, only one is available and only the psych can use it). have a system where people can opt to give their character mental disabilities, not just physical ones, during char creation (e.g. syndicate-induced PTSD) and have the psych able to dispense unique drugs to help with these... and have a unique HUD that lets them identify people whose medical records show they have these conditions (basically make it easier for them to find rp partners) Really, we should consider just removing the straightjacket from the psych, and giving it to sec's medical wing. Psych is meant to be treating patients on a voluntary basis. Patients sent to the psych against their will should come exclusively from security - not something the psych should be able to engineer themselves.

Some vox I wanted to get around to drawing! I'll branch out to drawing other species eventually

Now I can finally post this! Tetra "I use duct tape as anesthetic" Vega

So, you may notice that with the many suggestions here, few are implemented. This is intended to be a guide to how to make them well and increase the chance of them being implemented, as well as to explain why many aren't. First of all - Coding Difficulty: For anything to be implemented, it has to be coded. If possible, I'd love if some of the coders could chip in with what makes things easier/harder to implement. A few tips here: * Porting something from another codebase is generally the easiest. * Small changes, such as the text and description of an item are more easily done. * Graphical changes are generally fairly easy, it's just replacing a file. * The bigger the change, the harder it is. * Anything to do with atmos is trickier than it sounds. * It is easier to tweak something that already exists than it is to bring something entirely new in. Scope: It's generally best to try to keep things as limited as possible. Suggestions to overhaul or introduce huge things are likely to be put into the "too hard" basket. The bigger something is, the more work needs to be done - and not just once. As other things are changed, we have to maintain the rest of the code. Balance: Balance is very tricky to maintain. For a start, not everything is -meant- to be balanced. The clown isn't meant to be balanced compared to the Captain. Deathsquad are meant to be OP as hell. Ian is God, etc. If what you suggest would become the go-to weapon/item/etc of choice, there's a fair chance it's unbalanced. Suggestions of nerfing also need to be considered carefully. Unless you know the code very well, and all the numbers etc within it, then try to avoid giving specifics. Nerfing can come in many forms, from reducing availability, reducing the sheer numbers involved, or adding/buffing counters to them. If something is seriously OP, then there's a fair chance we're already looking into it. Finally, make sure your post doesn't read basically like this: Rock is OP, plz nerf. Paper is fine. Remove X: If something is problematic, we're much much much more likely to try to fix it rather than just straight out remove it. Posting "Remove X it sux" is unlikely to be listened to at all. Finally, don't take this as me telling you not to post suggestions - but the bigger the change you suggest, the less likely it is to happen, so don't get your hopes up. This has been made because I've seen some fairly well thought out (and some not-so-well) posts, quite long and detailed that most likely won't happen for some of the reasons above.