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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • There’s a case to be made, realistically speaking, that using a well-known framework or even a CMS like Wordpress means less complexity specific to your website to understand for the next person. FTP cough SFTP or Markdown/HTML is definitely not beyond non-technical people to understand and use, but sadly there could be some resistance nowadays I imagine.

    I would look into static website generators. Sadly I’m not sure what is most reliable nowadays, but I would prioritize easy of use and installation, as speed is probably meaningless on your scale. Here’s a random article.



  • YouTube recommendations are often 30-60% decent and you can always fall back to that. Anything that has tags and similar artist functionality: Last.fm (still technically exists), everynoise.com, more specialized sites like Encyclopedia Metallum. I like to get some recommendations out of band even if I use streaming, otherwise it’s too easy to phase out and make your memory dependent on their algo.

    Some (even) more niche and involved methods:

    • I am experimenting with using search.marginalia.nu for searching for opinions on forums and personal websites, starting with my “initial” artist, genre or the vibe I’m looking for.
    • if you look for an album on ebay or wherever and find a have a small seller with their personal collection, I like to take a listen to some other items from the same person that look promising.
    • at least for jazz and probably mainstream pop/rock (? however to call it) there are physical books dedicated to briefly reviewing a ton of albums. I prefer this to typical written reviews because all I need is an album name and some gist of what to expect. If the writer has a long analysis etc. I tend not to agree after listening, I may like some things that they hate and the words have nothing to do with music. Probably the “1000 albums you have to listen to” lists on the internet can serve similar purpose.


  • I don’t know if you’re talking in the long campaign, same players context, but I often find that for one shots around half of players, at best, skim the rulebook of the particular system. Myself sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t find time. Some people, like it or not, come to a session mainly to chill and even let the others do most of the adventuring. Others engage with the adventure but don’t feel like engaging with the rules beyond what the GM requires.

    I’m also assuming the GM will explain the rules, and I think they are the ultimate authority. So stuff from the rulebook may not even be relevant (thrown out, replaced), and GM is the interface for the rules. I would call it OSR mentality, though some may call it glorified player laziness. But as a GM it may give you more room for your ideas actually.

    I think the situation is a problem if players don’t know the rules and get mad when their plans are impossible. I suppose this can happen more often with rules-heavy systems.

    Anyway, I think keeping the rulebooks close to the players (either as putting them on the table or sharing PDFs) is good advice.



  • I was looking into Arch-based environment and wondered if there is an option for a scenario where you don’t have to update for a few weeks for example, because you don’t use that computer or whatever. But you still want to try the Arch configurability and wiki docs for it.

    From what you’re saying, it’s still actually all rolling release. From my (flawed? correct me) understanding it is different from Ubuntu or Fedora, where you can update an outdated OS state and it isn’t supposed to break. Possibly barring changing OS versions.



  • To add even more, to get the real error log you often have to go to console (GNOME terminal) and run the program from here (command name + enter). It will crash and leave the message you can copy. Not that different from Powershell in windows.

    How to know the command name? In KDE you right click the program in the app menu (it’s called Activities in GNOME as far as I remember) and go to “Edit program”, where it is in the text field. For example to run Firefox, you run “firefox” from the console. People can correct me about how it works in GNOME and if there are easier ways. I’ve often tried to guess it, lol. Not only experts use Linux.


  • Yeah, I’m not disagreeing there is a convenience and ease angle, but I think there’s a middle ground where we have 2-3 communities for major interests with somewhat different vibes or approaches, so there is a topic reason for them coexisting. This already happens in the old school forums ecosystem. Fediverse’s advantage here is that you hopefully don’t need separate accounts.

    Re: loss of knowledge, if some instance/community does a purge, I’m assuming the old posts are still there, at the very least on the instances that used to be federated with them. I suppose it would be a nice to have a feature for admins for “freezing” their public backups of mirrored communities when they get defederated. It’s not that different of a scenario from standard Internet drama, we just have to handle this nicely.

    I agree with other people that the right to defederate is to be respected. If we rely on one hub community somewhere to congregate, this is only kinda decentralization. At the very least the central hubs shouldn’t be on instances that are too defederation-happy.

    On the other hand, I see the argument that many users means more difficult moderation, where defederation might be a band-aid as they say on beehaw. The question is if they have too ambitious moderation goals to handle being a central hub, and maybe indeed it would be better for their communities to be sort of internal to them.


  • May be worth keeping some local communities in that case, which can also serve as sort of backup for wider community from other small servers. For example, if there is “Knitting” on a big instance, you can consider creating something more specific like “Knitting full RGB sweaters” on your smaller instance. Then there is a basis for sustained discussion there, and more people can come if something breaks. I have some ideas for comms like this that I’ll maybe come around to creating.

    I don’t think we need to keep full centralization be-where-everyone-is mentality here. Or maybe be where everyone is, but don’t make it the only place where you talk with people.