Community Center

CB sign-on at the front desk

The street’s community center, at about ten in the morning. The sun comes in through the blinds, the chairs are stacked against the wall, and there is a radio on the front desk. The radio is the CB, a chat channel patterned after citizens band radio, and this is the only place it is switched on. Sign on with a handle and this week’s password and it rides along in the corner of your screen, on every page of the street, until the password changes or you sign off.

The front desk

A handle is whatever you type, up to 24 characters. The password is shared with the Stimpunks community and changes from time to time, so ask for it there; if you are not in the community yet, joining is on stimpunks.org.

Signing on keeps your handle, a pass and where you put the radio in your own browser. What the channel keeps, for how long, and what it never keeps are all on the privacy page.

How the radio works

Open is on and closed is off. While the radio is open and the tab is in front of you, it listens to the channel every few seconds. Fold it away, or look at another tab, and it stops listening altogether.
No alerts. No sounds, no notifications, no badges and no unread count, and nothing is saved up for when you come back. If you were not there when something was said, you missed it, and that is how it is meant to work.
Ten messages, then midnight. The latest ten are all there is on the channel; an eleventh pushes the oldest off, and everything is deleted at midnight, Colorado time.
It sits in the bottom right corner. Drag it by its bar to put it somewhere else, or press Move and use the arrow keys; Home puts it back in the corner. It remembers where you left it.
It reads aloud if you want it to. With the radio open, a screen reader hears new messages as they come in. The switch on the radio turns that off.
There is one room it stays out of. The Healing Checkpoint, room 429, promises that it writes nothing down about you, and a radio that listens to a server and remembers where you put it would make that untrue. So the radio waits outside that door and is there again when you come out.

House norms

Our covenant is the floor. Everything in the Stimpunks Covenant applies on the channel, as it does in every Stimpunks space.
A handle is not proof of anybody. Nothing checks them, so do not borrow somebody else’s, and do not take anybody’s as proof of who they are. The one mark that is checked is BASE: only our moderators can send it.
It is a room, not a private line. Everybody with this week’s password can read the channel. Say what you would say in a room with people in it.
What is said here stays here. The channel forgets at midnight; do not carry it off in a screenshot or a repost unless everybody in it has said you can. That is the covenant’s own privacy norm, on the one channel of ours built to forget.
Nobody has to answer. There are no alerts because nobody is waiting on you. A message into a quiet channel is fine, a quiet channel is fine, and you can leave without saying goodbye.
Plain words are fine. Say ten-four and breaker-breaker if you like them. Nobody needs to know the codes.
Keep the password inside the community. It changes from time to time, and everybody is signed off when it does.
If something is wrong, tell the base. Say so on the channel, or reach us privately. The base station can take a message off the air. If it keeps happening, the password changes, which signs everybody off at once, and that is the only other lever there is.

The covenant

The Stimpunks Covenant is where our community norms live, and it is longer and better than anything this room could say about them. It starts from the Contributor Covenant, version 2.1, which every Stimpunk agrees to abide by, and adds what we have learned since: no proselytising, prosocial ways of settling conflict, and how to repair harm when it happens. Read it on stimpunks.org, where it is kept up to date, rather than here, where it would not be.

Whose this is

The CB was Ryan’s idea: a simple chat patterned after citizens band radio, a shared password that rotates, no alerts, a short history cleared daily, and a radio that floats on the screen once you are on. It is the one thing on this street that talks to a server, and the only thing that sends anything anywhere, and the privacy page says in plain words what that server keeps.

The type is Varela Round, by Joe Prince, for the letterboard, and Radio Canada, by Charles Daoud, Coppers and Brasses, Alexandre Saumier Demers and Jacques Le Bailly, for everything that is read, both under the SIL Open Font License and read off their own records rather than typed. The radio on the desk is ours. Everything is credited in the liner notes.

Job marker — a push-in letter, fallen off the letterboard

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: The door the radio waits outside

Before the code: Which room does the CB's radio stay out of?

Hint 1

It is the last thing in the list headed How the radio works.

Hint 2

It is a guest room with a bed nobody is charging you for.

Last hint

Its room number is 429.

Give me the answer

The answer is The Healing Checkpoint. Room 429 promises that it writes nothing down about you and has no fetch in it. The radio listens to a server and remembers where you put it, so it would make that promise untrue, and it waits outside the door instead.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: TENFOUR

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.