Apparently there’s another influx of new folks here, so I guess I should give my best tidbit of advice:

You have to really actively seek out people to follow here, much more than you’re used to — and until you do, this place will feel •dead•. Cool stuff isn’t just going to show up. You won’t get many helpful suggestions. No tech giant marketing dept is spending millions to draw you in. It’s going to be •work•. It’s kind of a drag, tbh.

But: your people are out there!! You just have work to seek them out, one account at a time.

it seems like #GAGSProject isn’t getting used very often at all, so I’ve been thinking about cancelling the VPS to save myself some money every month. I don’t really have that much income so it would be helpful to spend a little less

I would still keep the source code available on GitLab, and I might even share my server configs if anyone is interested in hosting their own version. but cancelling the VPS would mean that you can’t use GAGS anymore without hosting it yourself

I just wanted to mention this in case someone wants to talk me out of it or has a good alternative for me

okay so thinking about this more: Alkahistorian (stage three) rewards the player by giving them upgrades that automate certain aspects of the map. so the reward is a decrease in cognitive load, letting them abstract away those complexities as “this just makes more of the element that I need over time”

but what if that didn’t happen? what if the player had to be the one to automate those parts? so later on as you unlock new, more efficient recipes for crafting certain elements, those recipes would actually be more difficult to automate. encourging the player to rewrite their existing automation code to incorporate the new recipes

does this post make sense to anybody except me? I’m ngl I’m actually really really tempted to make a prototype of this idea, though I don’t know anything about game dev and wouldn’t have any idea how lol. but this sounds like the kind of mod that I would fucking love to have exist in the world

to me the fun of a game that lets me do programming inside of it is that the game will extrinsically reward me for my automation, but I feel like Minecraft programming mods don’t really offer any extrinsic reward for doing the actual programming, except for very very simple cases that boil down to something like “take items from spot A and put them in spot B”

maybe I should learn how to make Minecraft mods just so that I can add more complex stuff to automate, like a nuclear reactor that needs to be constantly monitored by a computer

ooh, actually, maybe I could make the Minecraft equivalent of the Alkahistorian games, where the pipes between elements (and therefore the reaction rates) could be controlled via redstone

every time I see a new Minecraft programming mod (ComputerCraft, OpenComputers, Integrated Dynamics, Hex Casting, etc.) my thought process is always:

• oohh imagine all the cool things I could do with this!
• wait… what would I do with this?
• Minecraft isn’t really complex enough for me to need this level of automation, and I don’t think there are any mods that add enough complexity to warrant this

like every time I install ComputerCraft or Project Red I’m always like “ooh I can’t wait to use this to automate something” but then I never need to automate anything that’s more complex than like, one boolean logic operation

I think it would be amazing if certain mods added stuff to the game that was deliberately designed to need automating. for example a reactor that needs a control loop system to keep it from melting down or wasting reactant. or maybe computer-controlled omnidirectional conveyor belts as the only way to transport items between machines

but as it is I feel like ComputerCraft, OpenComputers, etc. are power tools without anything to use them on and that’s such a shame

@smolcasm omgg thank you! I thought I was going crazy lol or maybe I was stuck on some weird experimental version of AO3. now I see what you’re talking about, and this is way better for searching for things

the ultimate test of a magic system is whether someone is intrigued by it enough to make a Minecraft mod out of it

starting to think that AO3 writers are competing to create the most intricate and demented media crossover stories possible

@smolcasm woahh huh! using CSS to hide them is really smart

do you know of a guide on how to use AO3 that goes over stuff like how to filter out tags? because I can’t find that anywhere in the UI and this site is so complicated lol

there’s a way to filter out tags on AO3? I’ve been trying to figure that out but so far I’ve only found a reddit post from 7 years ago saying that you can do a workaround involving creating an RSS feed

I have no idea how to find stories on AO3 that I like but I am discovering many exciting ways to find stories that make me uncomfortable

I literally only got one email from Vote.org for the entire year and it was telling me to fill out an absentee ballot form in fucking October and that can’t be right. what is going on?

I just want to vote in every election every time an election happens why is this so hard T_T

does anyone know of a mailing list that I can subscribe to, or something like that, that will remind me to do specific American-voting-related things (like mail an absentee ballot form) and also tell me what the deadline is to do that?

I keep missing election dates and I have no idea how anybody keeps track of them or even hears about them. apparently there was one in April?

I just got an email from Vote.org today telling me that it was getting close to the deadline to request to vote by mail, but the paperwork says that I’m requesting to vote by mail for this year only, and I think all of the elections for this year have already happened?

idk I’m really confused. and government websites just make it more confusing because they’re worded in legalese like “deadline to post notice of candidate filing deadline” like what the fuck is “candidate filing”?

@konstruct aw no problem! I actually do think that I’m okay with alt text that’s written like “their very pretty [body part]” or “their cute [whatever]” though! because to me that comes off as the writer of the alt text sharing their opinion instead of telling me what mine is, if that makes sense

@konstruct I’m really glad to hear that it was helpful!