so something happened during an update to my server infrastructure for stream.void.garden, the system rebooted while it was doing something, and it left the server in an irreparable state
for the foreseeable future, there will no longer be a stream.void.garden instance, and i can't see myself going to all the trouble of running a mastodon instance again
i don't have the experience, time, energy or resources to adequately maintain such a, well, mastodon of a software system, especially one so fiddly and difficult to set back up after a server crash
all of my other services, games and websites are simple enough to be put back online with just a few commands and some config files, but that's not the case for mastodon

Don't get shamed into disabling your adblocker to "support creators".
Ads pay so little, it really doesn't matter.
If you want to do the financial support, just donate to them. That is the equivalent of multiple thousand ad views.

Anyone got a fun name for this free company / pirate outfit?

Here's the NPC squad my players are going up against for their first mech fight
Heatray Gab was co-designed by my 8 year-old nephew

today was an exhausting day, so i feel i can be self-indulgent and post an oc for a lancer campaign i'm working on:

Sibyl

A representative for Bridgegap Automation.
Wearing a black dress with gold trim, jet black hair seemingly merging into her cloak. A golden NHP casket is strapped to her chest, shimmering as she speaks.
Accompanying her are two subalterns, matching her every move, walking in perfect lockstep with her. They're painted with a dark, slowly shifting paint that makes it difficult to make out their true form.
A knife-drone hovers beside her, buzzing, twitching and turning as it continuously calculates the optimal path to any potential aggressor's throat.
She takes her time when speaking, allowing her NHP to analyse the conversation and guide her words.

I finally wrote up something explaining that Twitter has not allowed people to pick usernames during signup for almost 3 years now, and that a "jsmith12345678" username pretty much just means you're dealing with a not super technically savvy social media literate person.

https://tinysubversions.com/notes/twitter-usernames/

Arkab-Goodrun Station

Initially built from the remains of RSS Arkab and USO Gudrun Hearth, two freighters that became stranded in the Outer Rim. The original owners, weighing the risks of a rescue operation against the value of the cargo, decided to let the crews make their own plan to find their ways home. The crews struck a deal with local residents, mostly miners, salvagers and pirates, living out of ships and repurposed outpost stations: The Arkab and Gudrun Hearth would be turned over, in exchange for safe transport to Rao Co for any crew-members who wished.

The freighters were docked and welded together, creating a central hub for the scattered population in the area. Some of the original crew-members also decided to stay and join this fledgling community.
With the cargo and now un-needed starfaring equipment of the Arkab and Gudrun Hearth, the community had supplies to live off of or sell.
Bootstrapped and named Arkab-Goodrun, the new station attracted people who needed a home, or at least a place to return to from time to time.

It's still possible to make out the shapes of Arkab and Gudrun Hearth, but other ships have been added over the years, along with various bespoke and specialised constructions between the ships and around the entire structure.
Habitation hubs, manufacturing bays, markets, medical facilities and schools have all been set up as the needs of the inhabitants and visitors of Arkab-Goodrun evolved over time.

A semi-formal political structure has developed on Arkab-Goodrun.
Districts are typically self-managed, the users or inhabitants deciding how best to allocate resource use within.
A station-wide council, called the Admiral is composed of delegates from each district. The Admiral meets regularly to coordinate on station-wide needs and events, or to settle disputes between districts.
There is often friction between districts on Arkab-Goodrun, usually because of conflicting needs, or a percieved imbalance of resource use between them. This has very occasionally turned violent, but in the vast majority of cases, the situations are eventually resolved peacefully. Either through conversation and Admiral mediation, or with help from surrounding districts working to find a mutually beneficial agreement.

alternate "dark-mode" look if your os/browser settings are set to prefer dark colour schemes

gave my website a little sci-fi make over

probably a very newbie-ish question for people who run web servers out there: how do you manage port numbers?
in my case, i'm running this activitypub node, along with a few websites for various projects, all on a vps, with nginx doing the routing between domains and the actual services
so far when i add a new service, i pick a "random" port number by just… thinking one up, and hoping it's not already used

there's got to be a better way, right?
just keep a document with used ports and their services?
or is there a tool that real sysadmins use?

some more "stochastic radiant algebra"
now with new scattering model and sunlight illumination mode

This is a new emoji I made for instances running the Hometown fork of Mastodon. If you're using anything other than the web ui to access your instance, afaik you can't access the "local only" posting option.

This emoji fixes that. With the current Hometown release, adding a custom emoji called local_only to your instance and including it in your toot will automatically post the toot as local only.

This allows you to use the local only functionality from a mobile app, for instance, simply by adding this emoji when you're composing a toot.

It is also designed to match the other accessibility emojis I've created, which can be found above in this thread.

Released under WTFPL, go nuts.

#Hometown #Emoji #Emojis #Emojo #Emojos #Accessibility

here's a nice one

STOCHASTIC RADIANT ALGEBRA

i've got a little start to a campaign prepared for my players, i made a bunch of npc characters inspired by the cheesy feel of the "apex predators" in titanfall 2
"beatdown" betty is all about melee combat, a four-armed mech with thrusters and grappling hooks
"skull punt" jerry has a big 203mm cannon that fires custom artillery shells packed with scrap metal
"padlock" rosa is a massive chunk of metal and shields that can face-tank incoming fire

i fully intend to bring back upgraded versions of any of these npcs that survive to give my players some nemeses

i love the hor_os theme for lancer rpg's comp/con app
tbf, i love the whole app and i can't wait to finally get this campaign started

any other lancer players or gms here?

expænsive

evaporating

blobs
reaction-diffusion system
löve2d+glsl

tenpo suni li sin
lipu pu li laso
supa li jelo
poki li jelo li laso
mi moku e telo pi lape ala
mi kama sona e toki pona

tenpo suni ni li pona mute tawa mi

why say "an ethernet cable" and only annoy a very small section of computer nerds when you can say "a wifi lead" and annoy all of them at once

1980s Yugoslavia's socialist opensource DIY home computer that didn't come from a company and became the local dominant computer for a good while.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/make-your-own-self-managed-socialist-microcomputer

#retrocomputing #foss

almost two years ago, a project i was a contractor and sole programmer on broke down, in part because of my adhd and mismanagement thereof

since then i've been hesistant to take on new contracts, deathly afraid i'll drop the ball again, unable to actually perform and deliver

but today i stumbled on this picture in my screenshots folder
on the left is the key art for the game, on the right the state of the game a couple weeks before it was dropped
the customer dropped the project, claiming to have fallen out with the artist (which explains the missing assets like particle effects, and also why i wasn't getting feedback regarding when ui assets would be available)
they also mentioned stuff about how the game didn't look the way they liked, the changelog for the last month of updates is all stuff about changing colours and tweaking camera settings and stuff like that, all these tiny, silly requests they were making

it's quite obvious to me now that they were stalling, because of their falling out with the artist, until finally they killed the project

it's strange to look back on this now, at the screenshots and the changelogs and realise that, yeah, this wasn't my fault

thinking about the image compression i use for images on my website
this page has some really nice comparisons of jpeg quality levels if you want to get a feel for what quality level best suits your purposes