lown @lown@weirder.earth
poet, programmer, writer, witch, professional utopian, anti-capitalist. doing tiny goods.
trans and non-white stories are fundamentally important.
Joined Apr 2022
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I've made a service called Pointers which lets you share links to your online presence privately with friends and mutuals! Like Linktree but open source, private, and low-tech. https://pointers.website
New blog post: I did some Weird Hacks and got an RP2040 board working with the FastLED library on ESPHome! Fairy lights! 💡 https://raphael.computer/blog/plasma-stick-2040-w-esphome/
⚔️ ➡️ 🎲 After @Sandra and @BPeylet gave me excellent pointers on making quick D&D 5e monsters, I built a little command line utility to convert a flat number into a best fit number of dice. Download here: https://raphael.computer/blog/damage-to-dice-calculator/
What I would love is a system which reworks all 5e monsters to: (1) fit in a one-line stat block with extra information for special actions; (2) have the same save for everything, and for that save to be based on HD/CR; (3) have their CR based on their HD or vice versa; (4) have a tag-based system where adding the 'fast' or 'spined' tag adds +5 to attack or +2 to damage or whatever; (5) have simplified damage maybe? 5e is such a punchy game that you end up throwing huge quantities of dice for attacks, so that may be unfeasible.
Last night I spent two hours working through the DMG and Monster Manual to build a monster, just because I felt the need for it to be 'balanced' in terms of CR. My players are comfortable playing 5e, which is fine, but I am amazed that I couldn't find a system out there for simplified 5e monsters. I can throw together an OSE monster in ten minutes and _roughly_ know how it'll fare against my players, but in 5e, the fact that Hit Dice are completely divorced from CR and that there are two separate CRs which are averaged makes it so difficult for me to stat a monster quickly. Surely there's some sort of quick 5e monster generation technique out there? I can't believe the only two options are (1) reskin an existing monster or (2) do backwards math to work out how many dice make up a damage-per-round of 39. Show me your secrets! #DungeonsAndDragons #DnD #D&D
lown
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We noticed you haven't taken the worm oath.
Our website depends upon worms from our visitors to make money, so that makes us sad.
Would you like to take the worm oath now?
[YES, Let Me Take the Worm Oath] [Manually Adjust Oath Settings]
lown
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I'm confident that cishet white techbro transhumanists who are fans of cyberpunk won't be able to write a good cyberpunk novel at all
wanna know why?
because all they talk about is "OMG TECH COOL" without considering how it might impact the society especially in ways that might threaten marginalized people/people that don't benefit from capitalism
because to them it's "SJW agenda" (1/2)
my privacy-first link-in-bio service pointers now has encryption! share links to your private online presence only with trusted friends for a limited period of time!
all data is encrypted serverside, which protects against my biggest concern with this sort of service: the database being accessed by an attacker.
i'm so _bored_ of being sold things on Instagram. it's the last data-for-profit social network I use (otherwise I just use Cohost and Mastodon) and the constant advertising is gross. As ever, what's keeping me there is being able to stay in touch with my less techy friends...
lown
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Ok, one more (embarrassing, over-the-top) update tonight:
I bought another domain. It was just sitting there (in the icebox, which @molly0xfff was probably saving for breakfast):
lown
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I re-read A Psalm for the Wild-Built recently and i gotta say i am re-experiencing the desire to run away and be a tea monk. Sure, you might say Judaism doesn't have that tradition...i say they don't have that tradition *yet*.
lown
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I hear new people noting how chill, tolerant, and pleasant Mastodon is.
Mastodon isn’t chill or tolerant or pleasant. It’s a tool… a foundation on which to create and maintain a culture.
It’s those who’ve been on Mastodon, run servers, and served as admins who did the hard work and created the culture you now enjoy.
Now, it’s your turn. The only way it stays tolerant and chill is by us doing the work to keep it that way.
A good example of, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
I've made a service called Pointers which lets you share links to your online presence privately with friends and mutuals! Like Linktree but open source, private, and low-tech. https://pointers.website
i've come up with an idea for a little service a bit like those 'link in bio' pages, but for your private links which you'd only rather share with friends and mutuals. it's a response to the idea of people losing contact with online friends when places like twitter go down.
how it'll work:
create an account, add the names you want to be able to be found by, and add your links.
people can search for your names, but they won't be able to see your links.
they can send you a request, at which point the service pings you an email.
if you accept their request, they get access to your links for a short period of time - maybe 7 days or 24 hours.
it's up to them to then follow those links. they can always send you another request if their access lapses.
is there any interest in this sort of thing? any feature requests or concerns? i'm building it to be relatively low-tech and resilient, with a simple backend and no client-side javascript. it'll be open source of course!
lown
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There is no 'both sides' to Trans Rights. Any article from any source that attempts to do so is contributing to Trans Genocide.
Anyone that doesn't address that shit immediately is part of the problem.
lown
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One thing that I've seen mentioned less than other #fediTips these days is that in the fediverse culture the number of followers isn't considered important, having *mutuals* is.
Some instances even hide the number of followers and people followed, and users can do so for their own account.
Even when it's visible, having a huge number of followers and following very few people is looked at as a oddity, and a sign of somebody who's probably not interested in interacting with people, and thus is not really part of the fediverse culture.
The converse is also true: users with almost no followers who follow a lot of people (unless they are really new) give a bad “bot” vibe, and people in the fediverse tend to be wary of them.
Having a reasonable number of both followers and people followed is seen as ideal.
This doesn't mean that you have to follow everybody who follows you! curating the list of people you follow is an important part of the fediverse experience, and you should only follow people whose posts are of interest to you and will make your life better. However I'd recommend giving at least a chance to everybody who follows you, looking at their profile and posts and consider whether you want to follow them.
And then, remember that unfollowing people is perfectly acceptable and requires no explanation: following somebody is not a long term commitment and consent can be given and taken away at any time.
Some instances even hide the number of followers and people followed, and users can do so for their own account.
Even when it's visible, having a huge number of followers and following very few people is looked at as a oddity, and a sign of somebody who's probably not interested in interacting with people, and thus is not really part of the fediverse culture.
The converse is also true: users with almost no followers who follow a lot of people (unless they are really new) give a bad “bot” vibe, and people in the fediverse tend to be wary of them.
Having a reasonable number of both followers and people followed is seen as ideal.
This doesn't mean that you have to follow everybody who follows you! curating the list of people you follow is an important part of the fediverse experience, and you should only follow people whose posts are of interest to you and will make your life better. However I'd recommend giving at least a chance to everybody who follows you, looking at their profile and posts and consider whether you want to follow them.
And then, remember that unfollowing people is perfectly acceptable and requires no explanation: following somebody is not a long term commitment and consent can be given and taken away at any time.
game development
hard problems in software development:
- cache invalidation
- naming things
- getting the screen position of a unity ui toolkit element
🙃
lown
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PSA re: Mastodon 4.0 Interface, boosts appreciated
The new web interface includes a footer link to "Get the app", which leads to a page that heavily emphasizes the first-party Mastodon apps.
As a reminder, the first-party apps are intentionally missing core functionality (Local/Federated timelines, "unlisted" post privacy), and are a very poor user experience compared to third-party offerings.
If you're an admin, please consider editing your local instance's code to replace or remove this link.
today is exclusively a day for listening to the mountain goats because tonight we are SEEING THE MOUNTAIN GOATS LIVE
aaaaaaaa 🐐
poet, programmer, writer, witch, professional utopian, anti-capitalist. doing tiny goods.
trans and non-white stories are fundamentally important.
Joined Apr 2022
