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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • i use it to run my forums and it’s significantly better than any experience i’ve had with phpbb. i don’t know how much an activitypub plugin would be actually useful for it, given that that’s basically a niche for a niche, but if all you want is a community forum that gets delineated into different categories and has a fairly robust user-driven tagging system, you could do worse for replacing Lemmy imo

    the biggest downside is that it’s not very friendly for low-engineering experience admins, especially if you want it to scale outside of a single computer it’s running on (separating the db from the web traffic, for instance)



  • i will never not simp for shiv silent. easily my favorite way to play. wonderful game.

    i like to play what I call A20EZ cuz I’m not the best at the game: play A20 on custom, with sealed draft, vintage and the ending modifiers. it’s very fun to just start with a strong deck and get tons of relics!

    it also feels like it teaches me what is actually strong in terms of raw card synergy, which has been very nice for learning how to get better at the game without suffering through being bad at the game as much.



  • Yeah, here to say, as bad as my childhood bullying was, the adults are worse.

    They’re the ones who, in the background, were creating the circumstances for this by talking shit about you or instilling within their kids a bloodthirsty competitiveness that only lets them see others as targets.

    And in the foreground, letting the kids who instigate the bullying, especially when it gets physical, get away as the victims - by equally enforcing punishment & loudly saying that you’re both at fault, or just punishing the kid being bullied only for fighting back.


  • In K-12 in the US? Yeah. I’ve been bullied past that too, but K-12 was the worst of it.

    • I had to leave my kindergarten class due to someone who was acting out. We became good friends in school bc we ended up being into the same nerdy things, but he had bullied me a ton until about 6th grade when it became just joking instead of bullying. He credibly threatened to kill his wife a few couple years ago, whom we both grew up with. I’m still processing this in therapy.
    • I remember once one of the people who hated my guts growing up, I accidentally walked into him because our class was crowding and I mistook how much space I had. He pushed me to the ground and said, “stay away from me, faggot”. I’ve brought this up in therapy more than once.
    • Everyone in my class picked up I was gay before I did. I had to fight it a lot, because when I wasn’t fighting against the bullying from it, it was worse. I even went as far as starting a rumor that the guy I was sleeping with was sexually assaulting me, because he was a giant piece of shit to me & bullied me a lot too and it was socially convenient. He wasn’t really affected because he’s mostly straight and was just using me to get his dick sucked, while I thought I had romantic feelings for him (and didn’t realize they were that). I’m still processing this in therapy.
    • At some point someone started a rumor that I was a pedophile in 10th grade. Being a minor myself, I didn’t understand this, but I think it was a rumor from my work with middle schoolers cub scout group. I haven’t discussed this in therapy.
    • In college, I had my ability to trust people on the basis of religion shattered in a Bible study. I got brought into a group that I thought was good, but as I started developing relationships, we had a session where the leader of the group singled me out during a “share your favorite passages” section and just completely railed into me, saying things that invalidated my choice and trying to put me in my place by arguing against my interpretation of its meaning. I’m agnostic now, even though I have a great relationship with my childhood church. I’m still processing this in therapy, it comes up quite often.

    This is all just top of my mind, and there’s a lot more, but hopefully it gets across - being bullied is something that can affect you for your whole life. I’m in my mid 30s now. I’ve been treated for depression, and gone in and out of therapy since I was 20. It’s pretty easy to say being bullied fucked me up a lot.

    At least I’m better than I was before starting therapy. That’s all I can really say.










  • Use an allow list and make federated moderation a required agreement.

    Short term: If you take down a post from the origin, set it up so that it submits an email or whatever. Follow back with federated servers within a week.

    Long term: Advocate for this in the project. Gather support and consider forking a long term solution, unless a better platform presents itself.

    This is a hard as hell problem but to be honest automated federation is not good in my book. I had so many problems with it in early mastodon to the point of building the first allow-list server, i’m not surprised to hear similar issues here.



  • I got sick of the constant quick travel back to merchants in BG3 and decided to just install the mod that multiplies my encumbrance by 9000x. the item management in that game is a giant pain and the gold economy plus encumbrance is an artificial barrier to getting them from merchants that simply adds playtime for no actual benefit.

    Realistically speaking, if you want a useful encumbrance system, you should be thinking: what is the goal of an encumbrance system in the context of this game?

    In BG3, it serves a few purposes:

    1. physical consequences. reduced movement speed, damage from jumping, etc are all part of D&D rules, which is useful when you’re in a kind of situation where, say, you need to get a giant boulder across a huge gap and put it on top of a button that opens the gate while in combat. but outside the context of combat, doing this is meaningless, as the player can simply overcome this problem with time, which is annoying more than fun.
    2. limit access to the number of options a character has when confronting an encounter. it’s not feasible to carry 99 potions of greater healing on you, and encumbrance is a general strategy that prevents this from being as effective. at the end of the day it does not solve this problem
    3. express limitations on what a character can do with their environment. encumbrance affects how much else you can carry, such as throwing a big rock at an enemy to do a lot of damage. this is irrelevant in the context of inventory vs. how much you can affect your environment; it can easily exist independently of an encumbrance system.

    I don’t like encumbrance in games in general. It makes games more fiddly, and forces the player to engage the system with no real addition to the fun of it. Limited inventory slots are similarly frustrating in games to the scale of Baldur’s Gate. BG2 solved both of these problems by giving the player a billion bags of holding, which also had the added benefit of making inventory organization easier in a system that was largely left the same from its predecessor since it probably was built on the same codebase. BG3 had no such codebase restriction, and its type sort system sucks (the search bar is a lifesaver). Encumbrance very much feels like a “This is how it works RAW in 5e, so we’re going to do it this way” decision, which is funny because in plenty of other situations the devs decided to stray away from RAW to make the game a lot more approachable.

    I don’t know if the goal of encumbrance is to prevent players from taking everything as much as possible or not - but if it is, it utterly fails at that goal