@desea no, because golems are not animated with negative energy - they’re animated with arcane energy which is a primal force of order. necromancy uses negative energy which is a primal force of anti-life (death is the absence of life. negative energy is the inversion of life)

you can make a golem out of clay or rock or bones or anything else. but necromancy can only animate things that once held life energy (dead things), by filling them with unlife

(also this was a really interesting question!)

@tempest ohh - huh! so I don’t actually need to have plasma-meta marked as manually installed, in that case? this is really good to know

tbh I’m having such a hard time navigating the package lists. if I run something as simple as pacman -Ss firefox I get literally dozens of packages, most of which are only tangentially related to Firefox at best

so often I’ll just do pacman -Si <whatever I need> and if it looks about right then I’ll install it and hope there wasn’t a better alternative package somewhere :/

edit: so it looks like plasma-meta optionally includes plasma-x11-session! I wonder if pacman asked me if I wanted to install this at one point and I just skipped past it. it was asking me a lot of questions that I didn’t understand lol

yess KDE is working! the problem was that KDE doesn’t work if you only install plasma-meta and plasma-desktop - you have to also install at least one of the packages in plasma-x11-session (I think the specific package needed might be kwin-x11)

I added a note about that in the Arch Wiki discussion page and hopefully someone will make the edit so no one else has to go through troubleshooting this lol

trying to keep track of all kinds of messy config files, packages, systemd services, etc. while working on getting Arch working has me really appreciating the philosophy of Nix

in my Arch VM I have a ~/NOTES file where I keep track of any changes that I make to the system so that I can fix them if they stop working or bork something. but the problem is that I have to make so many changes as I troubleshoot things that it would be exhausting to keep track of all of them. and yet it always seems like I’m recording the wrong things, as I have to look up {the location for the config file for that one Python script that auto-generates a pacman mirrorlist} on the Arch wiki for the fourth time (it’s in a directory called xdg for some reason?)

so I’m left with {the information that I need in order to fix my system} scattered across multiple Arch wiki pages (assuming I can remember what to search for) as well as my own notes, which is pretty stressful. plus I don’t have any way to ask the question “what’s the state of the system right now?” like there isn’t exactly a git history for my entire virtual machine

I would really love to be able to organize my configs in a way that makes sense to me, rather than the system, and add lots of comments and documentation for my future self. and also keep all of that under version control

of course, I do not want to make learning Linux any more complex than it has to be so I’m probably not going to actually use Nix anytime soon lol

once I can get sshd working on this VM, though, I’ll probably write a Python script that compares the list of manually-installed packages with a list of packages that I hardcode in the script (with comments for what each package does and why it’s needed, and where to go to configure it, and etc.). that should help make things a little less hectic

Aeromachina looks like it’s going to be a pretty solid 3D metroidvania. I found the platforming a little frustrating and the combat simplistic but it’s got a cute vibe and I’m just happy to see a metroidvania that isn’t doing the Hollow Knight thing again

another game I’m looking forward to is Pragma Twice in which you have to write JavaScript to control your character and solve puzzles in the world

Dead as Disco looks incredible. I’m so excited for its release

imagine if Arkham-style melee combat was a rhythm game with actual music

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3404260/Dead_as_Disco/

@Shivaekul fucking Microsoft. I’m sorry you have to deal with that

@ilobmirt aw - thank you! I appreciate the offer and I might take you up on it once I have the energy and patience to work on this some more

this is a ridiculously good animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhqB9-GWbCg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBjJXtaIzs

this is a pretty interesting (and short) history of proto-TTRPGs (historical wargames)

alright that’s enough Linuxing for today lol; I don’t even know where to start on troubleshooting this stuff

aaand now networking is borked too somehow, even though it was working perfectly before

wait nvm it’s still borked; it’s just borked in a slightly different way. it took a while to get there but this right here is the true Linux experience