Steven @yam655@weirder.earth

I've got to remind myself to start shittier. Making it ugly and gross and just overall shitty is totally fine when you're starting out, provided you actually _start_.

I know this is true. I've found success with this. And yet, there's a lot of projects I've never even started.

"Why did this person block me? I was trying to follow them. My profile and posts don't have anything in them, so clearly nothing could have been offensive."

This isn't Twitter. Few folks are trying to blindly collect followers.

Stand up for your values, so that others can clearly see that you _have_ values.

@DrSagan finished my new avatar image and it is looking sweet!!

If someone advocates for Gab freely interacting with the decent humans of the Fediverse, then they're supporting Gab.

Gab is the platform for Nazis.

To endorse or support Gab in any way, including advocating a position that Gab should be able to interact with decent human beings, is to be a Nazi sympathizer.

They can whine about semantics, but they're Nazi sympathizers. The facts are the facts.

Nazi sympathizers deserve no respect.

The goddess called "Mega-mega" in the anime is called "Goodly Godly Godness" in the light novel.

That's a pretty major name change. I was shocked.

Name changes for anime are fairly common, but that isn't an adaptation, it is just a totally different name.

The organization behind #NaNoWriMo is officially dead.

As a long-time fan of the event, I couldn't be happier.

Problems came up, and instead of addressing them, there was assorted pointing of fingers and a turning away of all who wanted to help.

The acting executive director burned all remaining good-will to the ground. (She even took a strange pro-GenAI stance for absolutely no reason.) Of course, her last message to the community was barbed and basically blamed the community for shuttering NaNoWriMo.

Over the past year or so there have been a lot of new writer communities pop up. There are plenty of places for writers to network and challenge each other.

Sometimes I see that bell in the lower right of the Windows 11 taskbar and I wonder why they changed it from the RJ45 adapter icon used in Windows 10. It was a pretty cute RJ45 adapter icon, and I never would have thought "network messages" would get an icon like that.

Then I remember: it was never _supposed to be_ an RJ45 adapter icon. It was supposed to be something else, it just looked like an RJ45 adapter icon instead. This is why they changed it.

The one that's really sticking out for me is definitely "I've been killing slimes for 300 years and maxed out my level" Season 2. I'm currently reading volume 8 of the light novel series, so I should be aware what will happen.

The new daughter in the preview is Sandra the Mandragora. She's a magical plant, and technically the oldest in the house, though she looks and acts like the youngest.

The fact that we're going to get the sister wedding means we'll meet Misjantie, the pine spirit.

If it included everything in the novels, we'll also be meeting Pondeli the undead catgirl.

If it is ending at the sister wedding, that means it'll be before we see Goodly Godly Godness. She's the laid-back deity that reincarnated Azusa.

Hmm... #ExplainYourUsername, huh?

In the late 1990s I was living in Redwood City in a house without furniture. (I had a bed and a computer desk, but I was renting a full 2 BR.)

I had grown tired of my previous username pattern. It just wasn't working for me anymore. I would have been ~21. A reasonable time for a change.

I needed a new username. Something good. Not too long. Not too short. Easy to remember.

My given name is anonymous, so any attempt at using something based on my first or last name would require numbers.

But... candied yams always looked delicious, even if I can't recall particularly enjoying them at the time. (In the US sweet potatoes were marketed as "yams." Candied yams are baked sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top.)

That said, just calling myself "yam" or "yams" seemed a little silly so I jammed some numbers on the end of it.

This username is unique enough that if I'm on a website, it is usually me. (Though I do have a different gaming handle.)

That's a true story of how I became yam655.

Last night, I wrote up some simple scripts to help in managing virtual card decks for playing solo RPG games.

https://beta.yam655.com/software/2025-03-13T0745_Solo_RPG_Digital_Decks/

Managing using X deck for Y game but then going days/weeks between sessions led to stress about game management. (Did I misplace the deck? That means I can't play it again until find it, etc.)

This uses virtual decks so you can't draw the same card twice in a row. This makes it much more like a physical deck than a strictly random online approach would be. You can also easily remove cards and do complex deck-related operations.

Again, I wrote it specifically as an aid in solo RPG play. It's dirt simple, but good enough to help focus on the game and not the tools. #SoloRPGBookClub

I watched some D&D YouTube recently. It reminded me of the difference between Japanese fantasy worlds and Western fantasy worlds and why I tend to prefer the Japanese ones.

The biggest problem with D&D is that folks try to use a shared world. This is, of course, a key important feature with any corporation trying to control and make money off of that world, but that is fundamentally where the problem lies.

The Indy TTRPGs are a lot more flexible and loose. "This will fit in to any of the X types of systems pretty easily."

As soon as adventures allow for multiple systems, they allow for flexible ways to approach them. They allow their use _explicitly_ within multiple worlds, including when said worlds are significantly different than their original source.

D&D people: Dwarf women may or may not be bearded, but are definitely stocky AF. People don't play them because they're not cute.

Japanese fantasies: Dwarf women are probably small and cute and this may go as far as making them targets for human pedos.

Is it normal to hate your (day) job? Do you also hate your primary means of income?

So... I was reading some old limericks and it appeared to me that many times these seem to follow in to a structure similar to kishotenketsu. Limericks are A-A-B-B-A, and they seem to usually be Introduction-Development-Twist-Twist-Conclusion

The conclusion regularly calls back to the introduction, pulling in changes brought up in the twist.

Example:

There was an Old Lady of Chertsey,
Who made a remarkable curtsy;
She twirled round and round,
Till she sunk underground,
Which distressed all the people of Chertsey.

I'm not saying this is always the case. I'm just saying it appears to be a natural outcome of using the structure.

The two (usually) shorter B lines are the perfect place to throw in something novel and strange, and the last A line is ideal to callback to the top.

I compiled a few forum posts I made about #GenAI and how it can be stopped today without a technical solution.

TLDR: Gatekeepers that require a third-party (such as an agent) to sign a notarized document stating on penalty of perjury they've seen earlier drafts of the work and it is made by a human.

https://beta.yam655.com/log/2025-01-31T0752_GenAI_will_revive_Gatekeeping.txt

It's a solution that doesn't require us to trust folks using GenAI to be anything other than lying thieves.

It isn't even dependent upon trusting some other group of techbros to keep the first group in check. It's a techbro-free solution to the issue.

#amWriting #amReading
#WritingCommunity

I love #FAWM's "Titular" tool.

I've also engaged in "50in50" where you improvise 50 songs in 50 minutes, and the slightly longer "50in60".

I don't like to make more work for myself, though, so I wrote scripts to help me.

I have a new script to help me organize my prompts for a more lyrics-based approach. I'll be using the new one this year.

https://beta.yam655.com/software/2025-01-28T1852_prompts_for_songs/

The use of such tools is not at all normal for FAWM. But this is how I managed more than 400 songs last February so it has clearly worked for me.

I kind of low-key want to write more songs than hours in February. It is a totally nonsense goal, but I have business cards calling me a "mad artist" so I have an image to maintain.

It looks like the #FAWM site will be opening soon.

It was opened for a few minutes. I guess it wasn't quite totally ready, though.

My potato-iest potato of a computer seems to run #FreeBSD fine.

This computer has had issues playing DRMed video from streaming sites even at the lowest streaming resolution. It's a real potato. When I bought it I thought the only thing to look out for was too little RAM, and so a RAM upgrade would solve most issues. I was wrong. It is still a potato even with a reasonable amount of RAM. (Specifically: It still had problems playing video from streaming sites.)

It's a CPU+Monitor thingy, and I think the monitor Dell used on this has a resolution the video chipset can barely handle. Higher resolutions are all well-and-good, but performance issues tend to require lower resolutions.

I had Linux on it, but a kernel upgrade was incompatible. I could always select the previously-working kernel, but it is nicer to not need to go through the effort. (Yes, yes. If I wanted to track down the difference between the two kernels I could have built it myself. Does it look like I had any interest in doing that? Because I did not.)

I've become quite partial to my orange console colors, so one of the first configuration changes I looked for with my #FreeBSD setup was how to change the console colors.

It doesn't get much easier than (from https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vt&sektion=4&format=html )

In loader.conf(5):
kern.vt.color.<colornum>.rgb="<colorspec>"

This should be super easy to configure.

I am trying a #FreeBSD install. Technically I think I've tried installing FreeBSD before, but it would have been ~30 years ago.

The contracting company I work for with my day-job was purchased by a different contracting company. Ostensibly my daily work should stay the same.

But they feel low-key sketchy to me. It is arranged to maximize profit for the company and to make the employees glad for it, while also reducing the employees' ability to work elsewhere.

But more importantly, their healthcare plan is much, much worse. Their mental health solution is "cost-saving" but directly anti-science, focusing on transactional relationships and drugs instead of relationships of trust.

I want a different job, but ... I hate my whole industry. This is made worse by needing work-from-home with the market trying to push for return-to-office.

How many hours would it take? If I'm seriously committed to looking for other work I'm basically looking at spending _all_ my free time on the task and...

I am important. My "me time" is important. Just surviving is more difficult if I fail to prioritize myself.

I don't have time for this.

Recently I've been sleeping 11+ hours a day. I don't particularly _want_ to sleep that much. I'm not particularly depressed. I am, however, exhausted.

"This is stupid early. Surely it'll end up being a nap, or I'll wake up stupid early tomorrow and have time for stuff." ... and then I wake the next day with my alarm.

It is annoying. It is problematic.

I've also got a 9 hour job (that pretends it is 8 hours, but expects people from 8 to 5).

12 hours for sleep + 9 hours for work == 3 hours for everything else.

If I don't get enough sleep, my central apnea can get worse and I can give myself heart problems from forgetting to breath. (Reproducible. Not theoretical.)

I tend to wake up an hour before work to, you know, prepare for work. That means 5 days a week, I only have 2 hours for everything else.

Twice a week I drop off or pick up my kids. It's ~30 minutes each way. Another hour+ gone.

I'm _really_ feeling like I don't have the time for anything that's not important. (Also: I am important.)