Posts
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129Followers
702I have strong opinions about #Lisp but love S-expressions. I also have strong opinions about video games, TTRPGs, software, and programming in general and I post about them a lot
I like to use curly braces to {group words together} to make my sentences easier to parse. for example, try reading the garden path sentence "the complex houses married and single soldiers and their families", and now try reading it with curly braces: "{the complex} houses {married and single soldiers and their families}"
I try to thoroughly CW anything that I post or boost which might be triggering, or just cause strong emotions like outrage or fear. sometimes I make mistakes but I want to make my posts as safe to read as possible. I even CW when I'm {complaining about} or {making fun of} something in case you don't want to hear a stranger criticize something you love
replying to messages is very energy-intensive for me, so I may not reply to certain messages at all, or it may take me a long time. DMs are especially hard
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Draculo's Secret Castle
El_Draculo@secret.draculo.net
Draculo is now streaming!! Come and join the fun!!!
Doom: Hideous Destructor Co-op !!
#retro #gaming #foss #linux #games #streaming #videogames #owncast
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kasdeya
kasdeyaShow content
petition to build a time machine so we can send all the MAGA folks to whichever period of American history they think is “greatest” so they can just die of cholera in the past and leave us the fuck alone
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kasdeya
kasdeyaShow content
my perspective on “all stories need conflict” has shifted a bit
I used to think that it just wasn’t true, and it led to people shoehorning conflict (which I defined as basically fighting against others, oppression, abuse, or some situation that causes suffering) into every story
but it seems like when people talk about “conflict” in a storytelling sense they’re defining the term so loosely that it could apply to literally any story. for example in the story “I got out of bed” the conflict is between the main character and the force of gravity, or maybe their own tiredness
so I still think that “all stories need conflict” is harmful but I also don’t think it’s falsifiable. I just think it’s (IMO) a bad way of framing storytelling because it defines all stories in terms of drama and fighting and enmity and other nasty things - which leads writers to shoehorn those things into every corner of every story and really play them up as well
personally I think that a good story is a collection of cool ideas and interesting questions. the characters are a way of showing those things to the audience and ideally also exploring those things in more depth
the characters need to want things, and those things need to cause them to encounter some cool ideas/questions. ideally they should also linger on those things and engage with them in a way that shows the full potential of how cool they can be
now that I write this out, I wonder if a good way to write a story would be:
- make a list of related ideas and questions that the writer is excited about
- use worldbuilding to make a world around those ideas/questions
- come up with some characters (ideally incorporating even more cool ideas/questions) who want something(s) from the world
- make the characters passionate about some of the cool things (that’s an easy way to get them to engage with them)
- make it so that between them and the thing(s) they want, they’re faced with obstacles that require them to engage with even more of those cool things
so yeah I guess the kas version of “storytelling is about conflict” would be “storytelling is about exploring cool things”
and my ideal story structure would probably be something like:
- introduce the characters and what they want. at the same time, introduce the world/setting and establish some of the cool things baked into the world
- have the characters face and eventually overcome an obstacle that causes them to engage with more cool things. make sure it’s clear that the characters have gained more than they lost from the obstacle
- if you want to put more stuff in the story, go back to 2. otherwise go to 4
- the characters accomplish their main goal! explore the implications of that for a while before ending the story on a positive note
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Diotima
tiefling@bardicperspiration.clubI am no longer the girl I was
But someone altogether new
Assembled from the pieces of
Everything I once was
And everything I have come to be
Yet incomplete
Still evolving
Into what, perhaps
I was always meant to be
https://tiefling.bardicperspiration.com/index.php/2026/02/08/evolving/
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mg. kit
kit@m.tripulse.linkgenuine question: what is actually gained from DDR5 memory in a practical sense? theoretically much higher bandwidth, yes, but I don’t know how important that actually is for anything that matters
this will be long winded, sorry
on the average desktop/laptop, I’m not even sure DDR4 was a notable gain. the theoretical bandwidth was straight up identical in the early days, there wasn’t really a significant bump there until DDR4-3200 became commonplace, and even then, it’s not the kind of difference that will be noticed by anyone other than the 1% of people who know what that means, how to spot the difference, and actually do things that benefit from the difference. prefetch is the same, latency isn’t meaningfully different either. the biggest improvement that I can see is that the voltage was significantly lowered, which is cool I guess. I’m quite sure that most people could use a computer with DDR3 memory today and be completely fine, as long as the processor holds up, which is the real bottleneck here anyway
but DDR5? I just plain don’t know what it’s for. from the regular desktop perspective, it’s just annoying more than anything, and it created a brand new issue for novice pc builders to be terrified by, being extremely long memory training times where the computer is on but with a black screen for anywhere from a minute to many minutes. I’ve seen a lot of people rave about the “on-die ECC” that DDR5 has, but that is very much not what people think it is, regular DDR5 memory is no more stable than anything that came before it, that “ECC” is only there as a band-aid fix for the instability inherent to the incredibly high clock rates. the performance difference between DDR4 and DDR5 on the same processor (thanks intel for making alder lake compatible with both) looks to be between negligible and unnoticeable in all cases that a regular person would encounter, and while I’m sure there are some server workloads that would like higher memory bandwidth, I also happen to know that you can run basically any web software you want with a $20 single board computer, so I don’t care about that. and of course I am Very Aware of The Datacenters and what they do with the stuff these days
but in the end, the only thing I know is that I don’t know. there must be some real, actual, good reason for this, other than just making numbers go up. is there some kind of real, actual science being done that eats up memory bandwidth that DDR5 was a revelation for? anything other than machine learning, neural networks, or computer vision
the more I look at modern computing, the more I begin to feel that computing died a decade ago. performance keeps increasing on paper, but in the real world, it matters less and less, without considering the added problem of software being made worse as the concept of optimization dies at the hands of productivity
if there really is an honest to goodness practical use for DDR5 that truly justifies its existence in a way that I can see and can be explained to the average non-techy person as well, then maybe I’ll become a little less pessimistic
but on the other hand, I kind of feel like a much cooler path forward for computing at this point would be for older architectures to be revived and reworked with a laser focus on power efficiency. that would be great for everyone. and if super high powered and high bandwidth stuff really is still needed for some things, it can stay in the datacenter as its own separate thing
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blackle mori
suricrasia@lethargic.talkative.fish
here is some haphazard advice to getting back into reading:
- try to find a specific place where you can read without distractions. for me this was having long baths with my phone in a ziplock, reading epubs
- if a book sucks, hit the bricks. don't feel bad about dropping a book halfway through. once you have a reading habit in place, then you can try to trudge through books that are outside your comfort zone. but for now, just read what you like
- take people's recommendations. regardless of if you finish, you get to talk to them about it
- do research to find your next read. read reviews of books to see if they sound compelling to you
- don't let yourself spend a whole day/evening/night reading the same book. you'll eventually get burnt out on it, even though you nominally want to know what happens next. pace yourself
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kasdeya
kasdeyaI love watching Let’s Plays of story-based games because the commentary helps remind me that it isn’t real and I can always fast-forward past the painful parts
I think it also helps a lot if it’s an older game because those tend to have much more simplistic plot structures, so I can predict roughly what’s going to happen in advance and I can identify which part of the story I’m at, and when I need to skip past a part
it also helps a lot that the overall storytelling isn’t as effective as newer games - from technical limitations, voice acting, and just the fact that folks didn’t take video games as seriously as a storytelling medium back then
anyway I’ve been watching Jesse Cox play Ace Combat 5 and I’ve been really enjoying it, for all of the reasons I mentioned above
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Joshua Small
jsmall@infosec.exchangeIt's been years since I actually liked an Internet ad but this Indian restaurant keeps making King of the Hill memes and I don't hate it.
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Deep Space 90210
DS90210@mastodon.socialKira: I’m sick of being tolerated.
Kira: Either adore me or despise me you cowards.
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Owlor 🦋
Owlor@meow.socialone type of autism assessment question that keep tripping up the demographic it's intended to diagnose is any variation of "do you have a problem with..." some ways it might fail to yield accurate results:
* "No I don't have a problem with [thing], I just avoid it"
* "No, I don't have a problem with [thing], I have a system for dealing with it"
* "No, I don't have a problem with [thing], it just doesn't come up often enough to be a problem."
* "No, I don't have a problem with [thing], actually I seek it out cus it helps drown out some other sensation I do have a problem with".
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Void Chicken
Taweret@timeloop.cafethe fediverse is just a bunch of neurodivergents building their own internet so they don't have to talk to the other internet
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kasdeya
kasdeyaI strongly prefer scifi to fantasy but I’ve got to admit, it’s really easy to quickly explain a fantasy concept to someone
like my “a witch hands you a TF potion” poll. the scifi equivalent would take a lot of explaining because every scifi universe is different, but everybody knows what a witch is and can imagine what a transformation potion is, so I can explain everything you need to know in literally just seven words
maybe this is part of why D&D got so popular: it’s just really easy to quickly get someone up to speed, like: “you’re adventurers and you’re going into a cave full of goblins”
anyway I’ve been thinking about making more cute little choose-your-own-adventure style polls and I guess if I do I’ll probably stick with fantasy instead of scifi. as much as I wish I could do scifi it would just take way too much explaining lol
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Michael Stapelberg 🐧🐹😺
zekjur@mas.toPSA: Did you know that it’s **unsafe** to put code diffs into your commit messages?
Like https://github.com/i3/i3/pull/6564 for example
Such diffs will be applied by patch(1) (also git-am(1)) as part of the code change!
This is how a sleep(1) made it into i3 4.25-2 in Debian unstable.
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kasdeya
kasdeyaa witch appears and offers you a TF potion! she explains that the transformation will take 1 hour and you can mold your body during that time to choose your exact shape, coloration, sex characteristics, etc.
which do you take?
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Smolcasm
smolcasm@rrr.shheight exchange poll but this time i'm too lazy to do actual measurements. wyd?
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molegato
molegato@mastodon.gamedev.placeBav is Twinkle's best friend and roadie, as well as a cute little cotton ball! Let's have a look at her model's wireframe ⭐
#lowpoly #gamedev #indiedev
Wishlist Twinkle's Galactic Tour on steam! Bav's there, I promise!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3938440/Twinkles_Galactic_Tour/
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Octavia Con Amore 
Succubard's Library
OctaviaConAmore@cutie.city
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I've seen people here and there talk about receiving massive amounts of harassment on Fedi for being some marginalised group, whether that's queerness, gender, race, or something else, often leading to them leaving. The most recent one was from a woman with multiple times my followers, but I've also seen the sentiment from people with a fraction of mine 
While I don't go into their replies saying this because it'd be rude as hell, I just don't seem to get harassed. Replies I get to my posts seem genuine, ernest, understanding, and thoughtful, and I can count the nasty DMs I've gotten over my 3+ years on fedi on one hand (with fingers left over for a mug of cocoa). Nastiness that finds me tends to be individuals I'm asking to not whitewash poc or to use CWs to not retraumatise marginalised folks, but that's at most once every month or two. I'm part of 5ish marginalised identities yet seem to get less harassment than a bunch of people with only 1, and it's got me thinking a bit 
Cutie.city is a fairly lax instance when it comes to blocks, so either our mayor does some seriously pinpoint precision work combined with future sight or that's probably not the main cause of not getting harassment. It could be that those people with 1 marginalised identity are more marginalised than my 5 combined, but irl, at least, one of mine can't even use bathrooms in government buildings, and I share some identities with people I've seen speak about being harassed so that's probably no it either 
I've had multiple posts hit 3 digit boosts, and it's not like I make don't make tons of posts that have room for reply guys 
Thinking about it, the conclusion I come to is that all of you who follow me are to thank for my experience on Fedi. Not only do you yourselves engage with me in ways that make my time enjoyable, the circle of connections you have also seem to be relatively safe for my posts to be boosted into 
Thank you all for that because it's made me fall in love and stay in love with Fedi for over 3 years now, through multiple instance migrations and through various difficulties (both on and offline), and made me feel like this is home for me in a chaotic world where home is hard to find 
Please continue being kind to me and to each other~ 
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Natasha 
🇪🇺
Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt
I don't want to laugh at someone's real distress but this IS very funny ...
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