● 09.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 02/09/2023: Fediverse and Feeds

Posted in News Roundup at 7:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I was asked why I suggest limiting improvisation in the blorb playing style. Great question! Here’s my answer.

• I’ll first clarify one thing and then explain why there’s this limitation.♥

• Ah, for “wallpaper” stuff you can make up stuff as much as you want! They’re like “what color is her towel” and you go “it’s a light yellow”. Maybe your notes say “The desk is full of uninportant papers. Hidden under the rug is a key” and the players start looking at papers and you can start making up geneologies and transaction accounts to your hearts contempt. That stuff happens all the time, room descriptions should be short & sweet knowing that you can make this sort of thing up.

• It’s only for “salient” things—the core main things the players and their characters are interacting with—that there’s a limit. For example, the other day I ran a module that said “the desk is full of important documents. GM’s choice”. That violated this principle. If the documents are so important, they shoulda been specified before the session began. (It’d had been OK if the module had said upfront that “DMs, you need to specify the documents on page 277″ but it did not.)

• The amazing visual style of the first movie is back—and even a little improved. The story hops between “dimensions”, giving the artists a chance to play; and in some segments they are spectacularly successful.

• The one criticism I have in this department is that the device of dropping incidental text into the frame—comic book style—is not used as much as in the first movie. That’s a shame; I like it. It still works well when it is used.

Technology and Free Software

• These two things will cause it to dump… something or another. I kind of expected them to be the IDs of the locally stored DHT keys. but they aren’t. unless they’re encoded in some other way. on my computer they all started with VkxEM

• that VkxEM seems to be the start of a base64′d binary blob that starts out with “VLD0″ I guess the key names are stored pretty packed.

Internet/Gemini

• I have been using different bouncers on different IRC networks since I got more into IRC again (with SDF and Tildechat) in the beginning of this year and switched between a ZNC and a Soju-based bouncer and I am actually using both right now since I don’t want to change the configs that are working, both are working quite well, so I am not sure if I am preferring one over the other.

• When configuring ZNC I had a rather random issue that caused the nickserv or SASL authentication to fail on some irc accounts and I couldn’t really figure out why and when manually authenticating via Nickserv it always worked, also using cert auth usually works. Since most bouncers and irc networks are up for a long time, this is not really an issue and I simply thought, it is an intermittend issue that happens every Blue Moon (which was actually last week).

• I love email.

• Email has a lot of the same problems fedi has. It’s used by some very bad people, there’s not a lot of moderators, there’s spam and bad faith servers that you need to block on the instance level, if you get kicked off a server or a server operator folds you need to migrate your address and that’s a 🐝, the protocol is also really complicated these days with many layers and spec addons, it’s difficult to find a place and crowd that’s good for you etc.

• Fedi also has some of the same advantages as email: no-one owns it, it can be used for all kinds of things, it’s free etc.

• Yeah, the clones do have a lot of the same problems. Mastodon is akin to tinylogs, and Lemmy is like a discussion site or Usenet type thing. (Although with more bugs.) For example, there is a currently defunct app that makes Lemmy look and feel like a phpBB site (except you get access to all of Lemmy).

• I guess my typical approach to this stuff is trying to think back at what worked? Email, discussion sites, mailing lists. If something works like it did in that era it might be fine, if it works differently then there might be some risks.

• I also use Atom for Antenna (because then I can have time stamps, not just dates), and Alex’s guide above is good, go check it out if you do wanna use Atom, but just know you can also just make a gmisub file and only use it for Antenna.

• That is much easier, for people who don’t wanna have to fiddle with the Atom format.

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