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software tinkerer and aspiring rationalist. transhumanist and alterhuman

I try to be very careful about CWing things. sometimes I make mistakes but I want to make my posts as safe to read as possible

I sometimes post NSFW/kinky/lewd things behind CWs

I have very limited energy and am very shy so it might take me a long time to reply to messages sometimes, or I might not be able to reply at all. this is kind of an "output only" account for the most part, but I'm hopeful that I can change that over time

I sometimes use curly braces to {clearly show where a grammatical phrase begins and ends}, like that. you can think of them like parenthesis in code or math, except they operate on grammar instead

if you see me mention #GAGSProject that's this: https://cryptid.cafe/notice/AxJRZIJ0k4hAXnDCsq
lewd
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quagsire is objectively the most fuckable pokemon apparently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFbdqzRs2So

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Logging on to mastodon like

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Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ablobfoxbongohyper

waaf wrrff waf!! neofox_floof fluffytail

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dollboard
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My favorite neighborhood celebrity is Marie Laveau, the black cat that just chills outside the occult bookshop

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Does anyone have book (or site) recommendations regarding consensus and coordination/collaboration principles and best practices?

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the funniest part about new world mac os: there’s a sega vs accolade style check done by the new world mac os bootloader.

open firmware property copyright in the root device must start with "Copyright " and have " Apple Computer, Inc." at offset 19, otherwise the bootloader will show a fatal error.

the intent was: pass this check only on official apple systems that set "Copyright 1983-year Apple Computer, Inc." in the open firmware bootrom

the reality: "Copyright IS NOT BY Apple Computer, Inc." passes the check.

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@ninafelwitch to be honest I never understood what it was about Pokemon games that was supposed to be fun. a lot of the Pokemon designs are cute or cool-looking but the gameplay hasn’t changed in 2 decades (except for this most recent entry! but in some ways it seems like it’s actually worse than gen 1) and it really seems to boil down to a very tedious version of rock-paper-scissors

but yeah this game also does look pretty bland, and it’s not exactly graphically impressive either. I feel like a small AA team could probably make a much better Pokemon game than any official mainline Pokemon game

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@ryker_rf5 thank you for all of this info - this is all great to know 💙

do you know if people on these sites tend to get upset or manipulative/creepy about people looking for friends on them? I’m kinda worried about that because they are all dating sites and I’m definitely not looking for more partners right now. I had some bad experiences on Fetlife with people pretending that they were just being friendly but secretly they only wanted lewd things from me

also if it’s not too much trouble I would love to read your advice on how to meet up safely. that’s something that I’m relatively new at tbh

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Edited 3 days ago

"I'm a programmer with a Fediverse account. I spend *most* of my programming hours on this OS:"

Please consider boosting for a more statistically significant result.

14% Microsoft Windows
31% MacOS
53% Linux or Unix
0% Other (Please comment.)
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dunkey’s video on Pokemon Legends Z-A perfectly summarizes how I feel about JRPGs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqJQhezFZ-M

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Edited 2 days ago

I know she will never see this, but I would like to wish one of my personal heroes a very happy birthday today!

Dr Mae Jemison is not only an accomplished doctor and author, she was the first Black woman in space AND the first real life astronaut to appear in Star Trek!

She went to space, and she served on the Enterprise; two of the most amazing things any one person can achieve in life, and she did them both!

Live long and prosper, Dr Jemison 🖖

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Edited yesterday
storytelling ventpost; emotional manipulation; torture and abuse mentioned (in the abstract)
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remember that the purpose of storytelling is to emotionally manipulate your audience into feeling as much pain as possible

there are two schools of thought for how to do this, but they both rely on this core insight: your audience will feel the most pain if you trick them into caring about something before you take it away

for example, you could show a complete stranger being horrifically tortured. but they don’t care about that character, so the torture is only painful because of basic empathy - not because of any personal attachment. your audience might even be able to numb themselves to the pain by dissociating

but what if you tricked your audience into loving that character first? then they won’t be able to escape the pain no matter what they do. it will linger in their minds for months or even years

remember that any time you’re able to make the audience care about something or someone - this could be a person, a place, an ideal, a culture, or anything else - this is an opportunity to deeply hurt them later, proportionally to how much you tricked them into caring. remember that the only purpose for having an idyllic society, a cute and innocent character, or anything else that is positive or upbeat, is so that you can rip it away to inflict pain

as mentioned before, there are two schools of thought for how to manipulate people into caring about aspects of your story, but both involve making your audience feel hope

the first is the Harry Potter method: show a character who is a helpless victim of abuse (make sure to cover a broad spectrum of abuse in order to trigger as many people as possible), then give that character hope of a better life. the audience will want the abuse to stop, and the hope will make them think that they can safely care about this character

the second school of thought is the Lord of the Rings method. this is for audiences who have caught on to the Harry Potter method and try to avoid stories with horrific abuse. in the Lord of the Rings method, you start by setting the tone light and wholesome, and trying to endear the audience to as many people and things as possible. then ease them in to a slightly darker tone, but not so much that they can’t handle it. over time, make the tone worse and worse. gradually tarnish things that the audience loves, and make this process more overt and painful over time. as things continue to get worse, the audience will unconsciously hope that this is a temporary dip in tone and that things will become light and wholesome again soon

as mentioned earlier, an important aspect of both styles of storytelling is hope. if your audience doesn’t have hope that things will get better, they’ll stop reading. so make sure to stoke the embers of their hope for as long as possible to maximize the pain that you can inflict

hope is the reason for the happy ending technique: if your audience knows that there is going to be what people describe as a “happy ending” eventually (no matter how rushed or bittersweet it is) they’re more likely to keep reading. remember that a few short paragraphs or even a whole chapter of happy ending will never be enough to heal the pain that you’ve inflicted over the course of an entire novel, so a happy ending is a small price to pay for unrestricted access to your victim’s mind

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git signing with SSH keys should really be default, ngl
GPG is such a pain in the ass in comparison, this way people would actually do it more

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I give negative shits about GTA 6 but I am looking forward to seeing videos like this breaking down its world

I Drained The Ocean Uncover Every Underwater Secret in GTA 5

CW: among the things found are the bodies of murder victims

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@smolcasm that’s amazing. I really want to do that eventually. I have A Lot of Issues that are stopping me for now but I would love to start writing again

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Edited 2 days ago

I tend to bristle against any kind of storytelling advice because it often boils down to one (or both) of these:

  • make sure to always avoid [thing that I love] because it’s really boring and nobody likes it
  • make sure to always do [thing that I don’t like and that very often hurts me] because your story will be boring and/or pointless if you don’t

and first of all that’s invalidating. but second of all I also want to tell stories, but I definitely don’t want to follow mainstream advice because then I’d probably just end up creating more art that hurts me

for example, the advice that I’ve heard about exposition is “only tell the audience things that are 100% necessary to the story. ideally tell it to them in an indirect way. also, spent as little time as possible telling them things because the focus of the story should be about characters and emotions and drama”

but, some of my favorite parts of books like The Martian or The Fellowship of the Ring are long infodumps that serve little or no plot purpose at all. if Tolkien had followed this advice then I wouldn’t have gotten to enjoy reading about Bilbo’s birthday party or the origins of pipeweed or a whole bunch of cool worldbuilding about hobbits

also I don’t really like stories that focus on characters and emotions and drama. that’s a danger zone for me. it isn’t inherently hurtful, but it makes me feel like I could be hurt at any moment, and more often than not I am eventually hurt. I’m much more comfortable with stories that are about things or ideas or worldbuilding. that’s where I feel safe

anyway what I’m trying to say is that if/when I end up writing stories again, I’m going to have to figure out how to write a good story from scratch, because mainstream advice doesn’t apply to me. and that sucks. and I’m very upset about that and several related things

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Hey there! I'm one of the blind folks who read alt text on here. I'd like to say thank you for adding that so that I can also enjoy images of cartoon animals. A little effort from you means a world of difference for people like me

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@lizzy @pharmafemboy I’ve lived in a moldy hoarder house for my entire life and I’m actually doing fine. or, my lungs are fine. mentally I am Not doing fine

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re: today in minecraft: block automation
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@transoptimal oohh okay I think this makes sense! so it sounds like Trickster is kind of like Lisp? in that everything is either a function or an argument for a function, and it’s all one big tree structure

also omg I thought that that picture was just like a cool magic-y design that they made! that’s wild that that’s actually code

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