It's an old piece, but still relevant.

Ahoy new mateys!

Just thought I'd repost a couple of little bash scripts I use to download and watch series.

notflix

This one searches for torrents, then live mounts the first result, e.g. :

./notflix.sh nina paley sita

That command should play Sita Sings the Blues, by Nina Paley.

Requirements: vlc or mpv, and either btfs or peerflix.

torrench

This one searches for a torrent, gives you the top few results, and starts torrenting what you select using transmission-cli.

Requirements: transmission-cli

Also, if you're on Debian et al. you'll have to change where the script says systemctl start transmission to systemctl start transmission-daemon.

This looks like rather good advice, and I like the comparison to brutalist architecture. It feels like it fits, because so many seem to think brutalist architecture is ugly.

Personally, I like how functional it is; and similarly, functional (if plain) adventures make for good sessions.

It's been some months, and kdenlive is still listed as orphaned. Anyone know how packages become un-orphaned?

Also, if anyone else is having the same problems, this fork worked for me (the missing dependency is glaxnimate.

https://github.com/classabbyamp/void-packages.git new/glaxnimate

Story Points

Story Points let a PC start without any backstory - instead you get 5 Story Points, and spend them to:

• know an obscure fact
• know a language/ culture
• introduce an ally to help with the current mission
• et c.

By the time players spend them all, they should have a chonky backstory which was always relevant to the current mission, so no info-dumping required.

• If all your points were spent introducing cousins and siblings, we have established the character has a big family.
• If all your points were spent knowing languages, and knowing highly obscure knowledge, we have established the character as a very clever, and well-travelled person.

Good features

• Speeds up game (no lore dump!).
• Players are less pissed about their characters dying early on session 2 they haven't invested the work of writing an essay on their origin story.
• It's probably the most popular part of the game whenever I receive feedback from someone reading (not playing) the game.

Bad features

Nobody spends Story Points

It doesn't replenish, so players hoard the points, refusing to spend them.

So far, I've tried:

• granting 1 new Story Point over a long Downtime period.
• granting XP in return for spending Story Points
• adding a one-page rules summary to the table, including notes on what you can spend Story Points on.
• demanding all new characters come from the pool of allies created through Story Points, meaning that:
  • it's better to have more allies, so new people have a wider pool of characters to select from, and
  • new PCs are never entirely new - they're known to the party.

...nothing works. Everyone likes it in theory, nobody uses it in practice.

The only idea so far is massively raising XP rewards for spending Story Points.

Is there another rule, or a better way to present this system, which would encourage actual use?

Well, it's not new - I've just ported it from Gemini, so it's new to the web.

Hugo compiles the website from Markdown documents. It runs on a raspberry pi, which spends most of its day telling robots that admin.php is not available.

Download the spreadsheet, type in your name, and you'll find a randomly generated spreadsheet.

• Your name becomes a seed for a hash.
• The hash creates a random numbers through modulos.
• The modulos become D6 rolls.

It's taken a few days to make, and the results are interesting - having to put every rule in the game gives a new perspective on the rules.

I'm not a big fan of spreadsheets - TTRPGs feel like a little haven away from the screen. But sometimes in-person play isn't on the cards.

I think a heavily-automated spreadsheet makes a good introduction to a game's rules. You just click on all the yellow-coloured squares, and fill in what you can until you don't have any XP left.

I like how the midnight pub allows people to leave comments at the bottom of articles.

Are there any other gem servers which allow replies don't depend upon coding knowledge? I just do basic hosting on Arch.

I'm hopingt to allow general replies, like geddit.

Looks snazzy AF, but no Linux version yet.

Possibly stupid question, but why not stop e-mail spam in the same way we do IMs?

I don't see how I could ever get spam-messages from, e.g. an xmpp account. Worst-case scenario is that I get a bunch of 'subscription' requests, and I can only add friends when I trawl through the requests, or if I know they're adding a request at the time, then look out for that request.

Emails seem to let everything in, with a reliance on the admin to sort this out. Why not do the same thing?

Specifically, I'm thinking of writing a script:

1. If this person's in my contact-list, they're cool.
2. If they're on the shit-list, they're deleted.
3. If not, they get into the 'waiting room'.

... then set up a shortcut to put someone on the shit-list. So there's no more 'you've got mail' notifications from random spammers, and I can review it once a week or so to pull the good-guys out.

Seems like a good idea, but then I wondered, why hasn't this been done before? If the script works, it seems like someone could do the same thing with a GUI.