Steven @yam655@weirder.earth

I've got to remind myself to start shittier. Making it ugly and gross and just overall shitty is totally fine when you're starting out, provided you actually _start_.

I know this is true. I've found success with this. And yet, there's a lot of projects I've never even started.

"Why did this person block me? I was trying to follow them. My profile and posts don't have anything in them, so clearly nothing could have been offensive."

This isn't Twitter. Few folks are trying to blindly collect followers.

Stand up for your values, so that others can clearly see that you _have_ values.

@DrSagan finished my new avatar image and it is looking sweet!!

If someone advocates for Gab freely interacting with the decent humans of the Fediverse, then they're supporting Gab.

Gab is the platform for Nazis.

To endorse or support Gab in any way, including advocating a position that Gab should be able to interact with decent human beings, is to be a Nazi sympathizer.

They can whine about semantics, but they're Nazi sympathizers. The facts are the facts.

Nazi sympathizers deserve no respect.

Where can you find me:

All the same content.
- Web: https://yam655.com
- Gopher: gopher://yam655.com
- Gemini: gemini://yam655.com

Fediverse:
- @yam655 : general
- @yam655@sonomu.club : music-related stuff

Music:
- https://mrbeany.bandcamp.com
- https://fawm.org/
- https://fiftyninety.fawmers.org/

Writing:
- https://nanowrimo.org/

My preferred afterlife of an other world adventure (as found in Japanese isekai stories) is little different than the Christian afterlife if you accept that Heaven is just another world.

They get summoned to another world after they die. It's the world that their friends and family also got summoned to. They may call it "being called back home" instead of being summoned to another world, but that feels like semantics.

An isekai afterlife is a totally normal thing for people to believe in. It's one of the most common afterlife theories.

One of my kids was not amused when I said that forehead dolls are just pillows, so we have lots of them in the house.

It commented that such a thing would make body pillows extra long foreheads.

My eldest and I have decided that #CrabPinchChallenge would be a safer video challenge than some of the other stuff people do.

The Crab Pinch Challenge involves letting a live crab pinch you. It might hurt, but it can't kill you.

I want a text and/or ASCII based RPG that incorporates features of the full-immersion MMOs in anime.

Full potential for just goofy overpowered stuff.

One thing I love about Japanese entertainment is that while there are a lot of fantasy worlds with common types of monsters, exactly what those monsters are -- and even whether they're dangerous or not -- totally varies.

Western entertainment seems so rigid with how they view things in comparison.

My favorite is when there's a goofy monster that even the characters in the story find totally bonkers.

Western fantasy with their overwrought worlds could never dream of such a thing.

Though maybe it is just that Western fantasy is overrun with dark, depressing dystopias right now and things would be better with more humorous fantasy. (Terry Pratchett was pretty good, but I'll never, ever read any of George R.R. Martin's stuff.)

... If only heavy overwrought dystopian fantasy and light absurdist fantasy were clearly separate literary genres...

In less than a week #FAWM, or February Album Writing Month, will start. https://fawm.org/

It is a lot of fun. There's a lot of great people. And there will be a lot of great music to listen to.

Practicing writing songs faster can result in people getting better at writing songs faster. FAWM really does help people develop the skills to write songs quickly.

Like all of the monthly contests, though, it isn't for everyone.

Personally, I find it both aspirational and inspirational. The speed that some people can crank out great songs is truly amazing.

I have my own special skills that I've carefully crafted through these events. This year, in particular, I plan to make a lot of very niche music.

February Album Writing Month (#FAWM) starts in a couple weeks.

I will be packing and moving during this time.

That said, my specialty is improvised lyrical acapella, where I discover the lyrics and melody at the same time. I can totally crank out songs while I pack or unpack or driving back and forth.

Transcription is going to be a problem, though. I wish I could afford dedicated staff to take care of it for me.

It sounds like a challenge, though. Ignoring transcription, how many hours of songs can I write/sing while exclusively performing moving-related tasks?

My current record for songs written in February is 298 (in 2018). With each song ~3 minutes long (they were timed and that was the goal time), that was ~14.9 hours.

Can I do more than that while only making music during moving-related activities?

Sometimes it seems like a lot of people are concerned about AI and how it will impact the arts.

I'm a lot less concerned, but when I think about why I'm less concerned than some people I find myself with one conclusion:

I fundamentally think the creative/art/music/writing industries are broken as they stand write now.

They've been balancing at a precipice ever since the cost of reproduction went to zero.

It isn't a call to a new website to do the same old shit, either. The whole business structure is fundamentally flawed and destabilized.

The old structure relied upon gatekeepers to keep the volume down. This was needed due to the cost of reproduction.

Now there are no gatekeepers. Every member of the population can be creating something.

To me, there is no difference between an ∞ population creating things and an ∞ human population plus ∞ AI algorithms creating things. There's ∞ competition either way.

If the system lets human mouths starve, it it is -- by definition -- broken.

I've really enjoyed what I've seen of "The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady" It looks fun so far!

I'm also looking forward to the next episode of "Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for my Retirement."

"Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skills" had the light novel available as the "catch-up" series a couple months back on J-novel.club, and the manga is available this month, so... I've read all of that. I know what is coming, and it should be fun.

"By the Grace of the Gods" has a new season. I've read the light novels since the previous season aired. It should be good, but IIRC, the first season covered ~3 volumes of the novels, so I'm not sure how many volumes will be covered this season.

I cancelled my Nextcloud service.

I didn't update the application fast enough and it tripped and fell down.

I couldn't upgrade the application and keep my data because the version jump was too big. I couldn't continue running the application to get my data off because it was an unsupported version of PHP.

I didn't lose any data... but that was mostly because I was lucky and not because I was smart.

That happened a couple months back and I just didn't get it set up again.

I may be a former sysadmin, but it looks like I'm serious when I say I really only want to deal with static sites.

Once my new house is settled, I'm looking at trying https://www.jottacloud.com/

For now, I'm settling in to a new local backup process.

I wish there was an alternative to pdmenu in Debian. Honestly, though, the value of pdmenu had dropped since the move away from Debian Menus to that stupid standardized menu structure.

I've sort of wanted to roll my own Linux distribution for a while. The problem is that I also do NOT want to roll my own Linux distribution.

If I were to roll my own, though... I'd probably have to go with my "White Label OS" idea where I make it easy to adopt a custom theme for the entire OS...

Standard packages with generic functional names and generic icons.

At one point in my past, I used "francine" to let me have a login screen that featured an ASCII-art version of my face. I want to make that -- and more -- available to everybody.

You are a brand, so you may as well use a branded OS.

When it comes to reading and #writing, I love to read #fantasy novels, but I hate, hate, hate epic fantasy novels.

The notion that all high fantasy novels are also "epic fantasy" is saying that Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is the same subgenre of fantasy as J.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings or what's-his-name's Game of Thrones. It's absurd and nonsensical.

Epic fantasy is also -- by definition -- richly world-built. The kind of stuff people spend most of their time behind the scenes fiddling with which delays the release of their books.

My current favorites are translations of Japanese light-fiction. "Isekai" just means "other world" so all isekai novels are also high fantasy.

The thing is, though, light fiction is typically released serially and -- more than that -- it frequently feels like the author is playing fast-and-loose with their world-building. It's a style of writing that can only be done when you don't overthink it.

On a fundamental level, it is the opposite of epic fantasy. They're NOT the same.

Something to remember when buying technology: All that 3G-only wireless technology is now permanently offline. Even if you could find a device that could bridge your local network with 3G data, the 3G band partially overlaps the new 5G band so you'd be breaking new devices in your area.

This isn't an issue with corded devices. Is there a weird, ancient cord with an unusual connector? It may take some hard work to replace, sometimes it may take expensive, custom work to replace, but ancient cables stretching across your room won't harm any of your fancy new stuff.

You can always keep using old corded devices.

The Windows 10 update that allowed Windows 10's WSL to integrate with GUI Linux applications is both really nice as well as pretty weird.

Windows 11 had this functionality previously, so I was glad to see it make the way to Windows 10. (This system can't upgrade.)

It really is the best of both worlds now.

Now I've finally had a chance to try out the "cool-retro-term" that I've heard people talk about. It's pretty cute.

It just occurred to me that with a standard song structure you can directly map it to #kishotenketsu by making the bridge the "ten."

It even has the same essential purpose: to hold interest through change, to transform the earlier section with new understanding, to generally throw an amusing wrench in to things, etc.