Discussion

@[email protected] (I have, of course, already run Toast of the Town for her)

I'm on the look out for good ttrpg adventures for a single player and GM (my wife and I, specifically). Anyone got good suggestions? Preference for fantasy but doesn't need to be DnD (maybe even prefer it not to be), other genres definitely worth suggesting if the adventure is good. Any suggestions on things designed with this in mind or easy to convert?

@[email protected] @[email protected], you seem to be gentlemen of impeccable taste who might have thoughts?

@[email protected] yeah, input can be a challenge. Even here in Italy teaching primary age kids I've hit a few things I didn't expect ('~' just doesn't exist on the standard Italian key layout, for instance). I don't have direct experience with non Latin alphabet learners but like you I'm guessing it's a painful extra hurdle.

@[email protected] Sort of, although see efforts like hedy.org/ sharing naive language programming.

That said, I've been told it's not quite as bad as it sounds. A lot of code uses abbreviations, terms outside of normal language, or words in unusual ways anyway ('bool', 'for', 'def') so it doesn't help but it isn't any worse than car and cdr.

I can't say that it doesn't feel unfair though.

@[email protected] It appears that the magical girl genre has changed since my childhood. Still seems to be about the fighting evil though, so I'll take it.

"With the power of schadenfreude and the means of production, we will defeat you Skynet knockoff 47!"

@[email protected] More honestly, if I'm writing for public consumption I've always been surprised at how what ever level I write to, somebody finds it useful so I tend to write towards 'knowing slightly less than myself'. If I'm trying to write to persuade or reach a specific audience, that's a much harder challenge and I can only commiserate.

@[email protected] I've found that it's nearly always quite a bit more than when they say "okay, got it" and a reasonable amount less than when they say "please stop, my brains are oozing out of my ears".

I hope this email shit post has found you in need of low impact humour, as opposed to actionable advice...

@[email protected] @[email protected] that second tag should be - not sure what happened there! Wandering shop in general seems to be a mastodon instance with quite a few writers.

@[email protected] there's definitely some authors around; I'm aware of @[email protected] and @[email protected] of the top of my head they both regularly post to writing related hash tags that will help find other authors.

I'm bemused by Google sometimes. Their search console allows you to declare that you're moving a website to a new domain. It then requires you to prove you own both domains, checks the old domain is redirecting to the new one, and then puts up a large banner on the old domain saying that it knows it is being moved.

I check back several weeks later to find nothing on the new domain is being indexed because "Google has chosen the canonical url" from its index that lists the old domain, not the canonical url in the pages on the new domain that points at, well, the new domain.

So... what was the point of telling you the site was moving if you still assume that the indexed values from the old site are the canonical urls even when those urls now permanently redirect to the new site? Was I supposed to leave the canonical urls pointing to addresses that no longer exist except as redirects? That seems... not correct, to be honest.

My blog posting script is nearly there, successfully reading posts from my RSS feed and posting them on this server as a dedicated user so people can subscribe, comment, etc.

All I need to do now is finish token refresh for oauth, track the ids of posted articles, create an embeddable view of replies to show on the web pages, deploy it to a live server, set up some error reporting.

Yeah. Nearly there.

@[email protected] I'm still waiting for mine to start. My wife isn't fond of beards, but that often leads to people mistaking me for her son which is somewhat frustrating for both of us, especially given that the grey in her hair looks awesome (to each their own taste, but I never really understood the whole dying away grey hair thing - to my taste it nearly always looks better than before!)

Meta, apparently. It didn't stop so I've now blocked it...

On the one hand it's doing so at a rate that I can't really be bothered blocking it, but it just seems such a pointless waste.

Some bot appears to be downloading the entire git history of my blog via http requests to every file on every commit on the repository.

Which is obviously a hugely productive use of my and their bandwidth given most of the files are identical on every commit...

@[email protected] @[email protected] "Don't you want to take a break from the meds to relax while you're not at work?" "No. That's not relaxing..."

Nb: hopefully this doesn't need saying but it's not that the song 'cured my depression' or anything stupid like that. But it was certainly a huge turning point in letting me know something was wrong, and to start dealing with it.

As a special bonus for reading this far, on the same album the band hired Brian Blessed for no other reason than to laugh at the beginning and end of a track. Have a look for 'The Joust' by Eden Burning, you won't be disappointed by the laugh.

For some reason, that song, at that moment, was exactly what was needed to break through the depressive shell and remind of a whole bunch of core things that had got buried in the numbness. And it's a good song, you should go l listen to it as well.

The only problem being I'm still driving down the motorway at 70mph and I can't see a thing through the tears. Fortunately, I didn't die. So that's also good.

In the mean time, I've joined RockSoc and started buying CDs, so I haven't listened to a tape for a while. But now I need to drive myself home from uni, and the car only has a tape player. So I drive for a while, but it's a four hour drive and I'm tired so I stop, find the cassette, and drop it in the car stereo. And after a while, it starts playing Hem Me In, and I start crying. I mean, really streams coming down my face crying.