...Because I only just read the first chapter, and I know it's gonna throw me for a loop, but come on. This whole sequence of events feels like a parody of Westerns– Specifically the "everyone in a bar gets into a fight" trope. I feel like it's playing out like a Three Stooges sketch.

Dude with a penchant for random acts of violence fights sailors because IDK he's a cowboy I guess. A freaky-looking judge lies about a priest and you get that moment where the music stops and everyone goes "git 'em!" before they all laugh about how they semi-accidentally murdered an innocent man, because violence funny, Mr. Judge just gave them a pretense and they're greatful.

A guy named Toadvine insists the kid's in his way. When the kid refuses to move his immediate reaction is an earnest attempt at murder. They flop around in the mud. When the kid wakes up Toadvine is concerned about the possibility that he broke the kid's neck because, well, that's not what he was tryin' to do. Just kill him. No bad blood between them, they trudge through the mud to hand each other their weapons and the kid wordlessly follows Toadvine (I guess they're friends now), who immediately goes to attack someone else because... who knows why. Pries their eye out.

It really is as if Blood Meridian is depicting the west as one giant stupid bar fight. I wonder if the punchline that it becomes escalatingly awful over time and how dare you glorify stupid random violence like this? or something?

I don't know, I'm just ranting. This is strange.

OK, so, this is only tangential to the purpose of this community, but still. The concept of a PKMS has tossed me into a wider interest in storing the content of a document entirely in plaintext with nothing but a markup language, and then formatting that content from there (often with PanDoc). Nothing frustrates me more lately than the idea of stuff that could be in text files yet isn't, because text files are rad as hell and computers actually understand them.

Confession: It's a TTRPG rulebook because of course it's a TTRPG rulebook. Of course the traditional method of making something that that is, y'know, Adobe Acrobat, but starting with something like that means that converting to any other format is just harder than it needs to be.

Obviously a PKMS like Obsidian isn't really suited for longform, heavily hierarchical content like this. You used to be able to use nested YAML to hack a chapter / subchapter system together but no longer, and it was never a very good idea- if anything Obsidian intentionally resists attempts at hierarchy. LaTeX is awesome but none of the people who use LaTeX know how to document / tutorialize it in a sane way and it's community consists entirely of mathematicians and technical writers. Seems like an astoundingly useful tool that goes woefully under-utilized.

My idea right now is to try using the DocUtils. It's markup language ReStructure is explicitly hierarchical and, bonus points, ReStructure is used by Project Gutenberg for it's epub tools.

Any other ideas? Am I being a bit of an idiot?

Edit:

I got what I was looking for. It's AsciiDoc. Kind of a holy grail tech thing for me.

I just got a pretty good deal on an old ThinkPad (think 10 years old now) to use as a beater for screwing with ArchLinux and hopefully to find a real use for. It's in great shape like it was never really used, but big shock, the battery is at 50% effective capacity and what's there disappears in less than an hour.

Would you bother buying a battery replacement for it? On one hand I want it to actually be usable on the go because that was sort of the point. On the other, while replacement batteries exist, I'm worried that they're already very old themselves and already "expired". Would you take the chance? I don't want to let this thing go to waste when it's still perfectly usable, in fact it's pretty fast.

I've been using Obsidian for a while, but recently, I've started considering that either of these grant me Obsidian's main advantage- your knowledge base being portable- while also being FOSS software. (In particular org-mode also gives me access to some things VimWiki would lack like support for things like images.) ...Oh, and apparently org-mode can be exported to loads of other things through the glorious program that is Pandoc. Loads of Android apps that work with org-mode as well, so you can, in fact, sync everything between pretty much everything!

On one hand (heh) there's apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren't typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.

On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as... intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it's all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.

It actually makes the techbro in me think there's something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.

I suppose that's actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.

...Meanwhile I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That's sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I'm finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don't get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I'd get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.

TL;DR someone who's bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal

I love being outside. I hate the sun. I also hate sunscreen.

I feel like there's a weird split between the reality of having this gross white goop on you all the time (most people don't wear sunscreen all the time, right? Right??) and the reality of the sun basically wanting us all dead.

This sunburn calculator made by a dermatologist will show you how quickly you can actually get burned. Personally, today, I literally can't stay outside for longer than 14-ish minutes (probably even shorter in my case) without any sunscreen before I've had too much sun.

Even on a somewhat cloudy day, I can't stay out there for more than half an hour. I notice that I'm getting too much sun, too. I feel like my eyes are sunburned practically. I struggle to comprehend how skin like this even evolved. People practically shame me for "not going out enough" when they straight-up just have darker skin than me.

...And yet the idea of always putting sunscreen on is like, some kind of social faux pas on top of me really not wanting to. It smells, people notice that it smells, it feels gross, people notice that I'm even pastier than usual. It's like wow, you care about skin care enough to deal with that and spend gobs of money sticking a shot glass of sunscreen on yourself every two hours? God forbid if I actually had lip balm of all things as a man, and wearing clothing that would actually keep the sun at bay a little bit, ahhhahahaha. No. /rant

TL;DR what do y'all do about the sun existing?

Edit: I got over myself and started buying decent sunscreen. And decent SPF lip balm because Jesus Christ my lips are somethin' else. If people think it's weird to not get skin cancer that's their problem.

BallisticNG is pretty much what introduced me to WipeOut rather than the other way around, ironically. It can only be described as a passion project. By default, it plays like the classic PS1 games, but there are options which make it handle like the more "modern" WipeOut titles. Steam Workshop support + purpose-built track and ship editors mean it's a very community driven game, too, so people have recreated a huge chunk of Wipeout's track library alongside a lot of totally new tracks. I really wish it was better-known because I think it's the perfect hub for the few WipeOut players left standing.

I hope this isn't seen as an advertisement, because I think it's just legitimately of interest to anyone who likes RPGs a lot (and I certainly don't work for Bundle of Holding). It's like Humble Bundle if it focused entirely on RPG content and there's a lot of genuinely good deals tossed around that would never show up on Humble.

You read it right. Infodump time. Whatever hyper-specific thing you've been itching to really rant about. Rant about it.

Of course, it's up to everyone making Lemmy instances to decide how this'll work, and no one is able to make those decisions for them, which is how it should be.

But if you were to make your own Lemmy instance, how would you handle it?

Personally, while I think Beehaw is a great "staging ground" of sorts, I think it's important to remember that Lemmy instances all communicate. Just hit the "all" tab and you'll see posts from all sorts of instances- although mostly Beehaw, since 99% of us are here.

So if I were to make a Lemmy instance- which I want to, at some point- I would make it much more focused. Almost like a subreddit with sub-sub-reddits. It'd probably be TTRPG-focused and I'd make communities for specific games and families of games that get a lot of discussion (and a catchall for everything else.) Because, once again, people from basically every Lemmy instance could subscribe to those communities so long as the instance I ran wasn't blacklisted for one reason or another.

There's another reason I think I'd prefer things that way- It'd make the federated nature of Lemmy stronger. With very general instances like Beehive everyone naturally congregates in one place and it's kinda a microcosm of how Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the internet places and I think that misses the advantages that a federated platform brings to the table.

What do you think? More focused instances or a whole bunch of general-purpose instances that just happen to be ran by different people / have different moderation policies?

Edit: ...Well it turns out someone has set up a TTRPG community (Put this in the search bar to get to it while logged in: !rpg@lemmy.ml)

Edit #2: ...Admittedly I'm getting a better grasp of how this all works now, and it's more than a little frustrating that actually interacting with other servers is limited to subscribing to feeds. I guess I get it, technology-wise, sort of, is saving data across servers just not something ActivityPub can do, really? I feel like it defeats the point a bit if the majority of Lemmy instances are on a server ran by the Lemmy devs because being anywhere else is limiting.