Darling, stop confusing me with your wishful thinking! It’s a li’l trickier than that. This is the difficultest problem humanity has ever faced. All of our processes—markets, policy, elections, legislation, even day-to-day living—are geared toward exacerbating the problem rather than solving it.
We had the toolbox for it back in the seventies: energy rationing. Let’s get that going again.
Of all the stuff that a DM does, the most important one is to be the keeper of the secrets. To know (or have a way to find out) the off-screen canon game state. Like, the characters have a treasure chest that they haven’t opened. It’s your job as DM to know what’s in there.
I’ve worked from the other direction for the most part (or perhaps gone from both directions at once). Like a Lisp program.
I use modules heavily so when I get a new module, I’m like “OK, so these guys are sorta like the al-Badia so I’ll just have them be al-Badia, while these are like The Old Ones so I’ll have them be the Old Ones, and these other guys are blood cultists and maybe they can be part of the same blood cult as the ones from that other module” etc. A suggestion I first picked up from Prescott’s Trilemma. It makes everything super interconnected.
@Sandra And RPGs thrive by leaning into cliché. (I mean, not without limit, but it's enough fun to be part of the story that the quality of the story itself can slump a bit and the game overall is still fun.)
Is there a way to set the default note off timing? (What some other sequencers call Gate Length.) Either as a device-wide setting, or for a project, for a track, for a scene or just for a clip. As it is I can only do it note-by-note.
All notes are half the length I’d want, and I have to go into them manually and crank up each one separately from 50% to 99%. I would love the sequencer if it weren’t for this.
I have a workaround which is to import SMF’s from any other seqencer (such as abc2midi on Linux or Atom 2 on iPad) and that works fine, using the SmplTrek more as an arranger/player than a sequencer, but since the SmplTrek step sequencer is so nice it’d be great to be able to use it directly instead.
(And another workaround is to get good and turn off quantization, that also works.)
Don’t worry, I’m definitively keeping mine (as a drum machine, looper, and global tracks recorder, and as an audio interface) but I’m just a li’l frustrated with this one issue.
I know that I can make notes longer by pressing right arrow or turning the value know; I can make two eight notes followed by a quarter note for example.
But those notes will all be “staccato” since they’ve got a 50% gate length.
That’s not always what I want especially for a midi or organ type track.
Here is an example. One track playing three notes twice, same instrument. Two fourth notes followed by a halfnote (and the halfnote sequenced by using the right arrow while holding the pad).
The first three notes are played staccato (e.g. “Note off timing” 50%, a.k.a. gate length as some other synths call it). The last three notes are played more fully, with note off timing manually set to 99% for each of the three notes.
Many other sequencers, to get that staccato sound you’d set grid length to 1/4 but note length to 1/8. But on SmplTrek, it’s one setting, called note length, and setting that to 1/4 as I did here results in notes with a shortened, only 50% duration.
Messing with the envelope release is no good for MIDI tracks.
So far my best workaround is to import SMF files that I’ve made with some other sequencer app and that’s a shame since I’m so much faster and more creative with the SmplTrek’s sequencer, but I just don’t always want that staccato sound.
I don’t wanna make a Facebook account just to post in the SmplTrek group on there. 😰
One drawback of POSSE is that you’re bolstering the value of the silos. Instagram grows more powerful with your pictures on it and GitHub thrives on your repos.
@Sandra "There are all these tiny sites, how do I find them?" Aggregators, like publishers in pre-web days, in effect saying "this work is worthy of your attention" in a centralised way. Search was better than aggregators, but search is being killed. So yeah, the aggregators get power, and if they don't bother to show your tiny site, their users will never notice.
Sandra, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to catch your review, or rather, observation of POSSE, especially the long term ramifications from the PoV of #DeSoc.
For quite some time now, I've been advocating for something that describes a not so dissimilar modus operandi for extricating subjugated chattel from that of the #Borg_Collective.
POSSE has merit, being a partial design for disrupting the deprecated monolithic silos, but IMO actually falls short by only seeking to coexist with it, instead of completely obviating them.
As a dedicated FOSS and Privacy Advocate, here's my take on how we can follow a best practices modus operandi, achieving what can eventually relegate today's monolithic silos into the marginalized zone, sending them into the abyss of downtrodden insignificance.
The model can work from any Fediverse platform, but platforms that support a rich feature set with longform authoring capabilities work best, having the greatest impact. For those stuck using masto for the time being, their impact will be less dramatic, but nonetheless still valid.
The model I've been advocating goes like this:
) Create original content on Fediverse enabled properties you own, or cite (link to) content NOT residing in the deprecated silo space (Twitter, Medium, TikTok, InstaSPAM, YouTube, Faceplant, Reddit, Linkedin, Etc.). You can do this from pretty much any Fediverse platform - even masto, with its paltry 500 character limit. A paragraph or so as a rule of thumb, just a teaser/headline to create interest for the reader to follow the link.
) Optional: For added impact and if you have any, from your traditional silo account(s), as well as from less capable clones like masto, offer up a teaser, perhaps a paragraph or so, with a link to the URL of this original content.
) If you're merely pointing to an article or resource created by someone else that exists independently, that's it. Well done! If you created your original content in long form on a more capable Fediverse platform than masto - there are many excellent Fediverse platforms for doing this. A few of those are:
) Endeavor to never publish any actual content (articles, news, photos, videos) on platforms in the deprecated monolithic silo space. Instead, it is preferable to publish your photos, videos on demand, and textual content on a Fediverse Platform well suited to this. i.e., PeerTube for VoDs, Pixelfed for images, and one or more of the platforms mentioned above for textual or multimedia based content such as news articles, HowTo's, tutorials, recipes, Etc.
) Occasionally, you may find it necessary to link to content in the deprecated silo space - a video on YouTube, for example. You may be able to clone videos (depending on licensing) to a PeerTube server, but if not, then make sure you sanitize those videos by using tools such as Invidious that shield the viewer from tracking and other privacy disrespecting constructs built into those silo systems.
The philosophy here is to ensure that anything posted into the deprecated monolithic silo space entreats the reader/viewer to leave that space in order to consume the content.
This practice insures that the consumer of that information does so in a protected, privacy respecting place, presumably built on FOSS, and in the Fediverse. It further serves to familiarize the consumer in an easy and unassuming way, with Fediverse platforms that do not track them or mine their privacy.
For the Fedizen however, it provides a one way transit - anyone seeing a teaser/headline/intro on say, Twitter or Faceplant, is immediately catapulted away from those denizens of commodification that packages and inventories the consumer as the product for sale, depriving those platforms of the necessary revenue that sustains them - death by atrophe. No blissful coexistence, every single post inside the deprecated monolithic silo space is in fact an egress point bringing the consumer into a free and privacy respecting environment.
Obviously, an article on the New York Times website isn't ideal, but it isn't strictly one of the monolithic silo systems listed above either. In this case specifically, it's a walled garden however, so you're directing the consumer to a place where they'll be privacy mined anyway, which offers three other possibilities:
You can, and should unless you feel you absolutely must, elect not to send someone to that resource
You can, under certain circumstances, copy that data verbatim elsewhere and provide a link to that place where you copied the data.
You can also probably check with the AP, since we're talking about a newspaper outlet, most of which actually pull their news from the Associated Press and other similar networks that provide free access, which you can link to instead.
There's simply no way to completely ensure being so mindful of your consumers without precluding yourself from linking to some forms of interesting content - but the point here is that almost without exception, you're not sending anyone into the deprecated monolithic silo space - you're sending them into the Fediverse, where they'll begin to become comfortable with, eventually creating their own accounts here.
I recently had some discussions with a few folks who completely turned their back on things like Twitter, which is good because it is one of those social networking systems that engages in tracking and privacy mining. Those individuals have made it easy for themselves by simply putting the existence of those privacy disrespecting resources completely outside the real of consideration - it's not like anyone is going to suffer because they didn't visit Faceplant. They may suffer a bit of withdrawals, but bear the following in mind:
There are liquor stores on virtually every corner in the real world. They sell booze at liquor stores. An alcoholic must come to terms with this and learn to live with this fact, making a conscious choice to buy, or not to buy booze in those stores, or even go outside where the temptation is even greater.
That's not the greatest metaphor I know, or maybe I just didn't deliver it well. Either way, I hope that in understanding this death by atrittion model, that people can make better informed decisions about privacy for themselves and others.
I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the matter, and any tools that help assist folks in addressing privacy concerns. Please feel free to share this by boosting to raise awareness within the Fediverse (and beyond) of all the excellent platforms available to everyone in the Fediverse. I realize I left out large sectors of the Fediverse that can be factored into this formula - the link aggregators and forums like #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Kbin, #Mbin, #Discourse, and more. I didn't even directly address the purpose built single user instance platforms. Maybe we can give them some coverage in a later edition :)
If XHTML is all good and Textile/RST/Pandoc is all bad, then YAML is half bad. Like Textile and its ilk, I can’t easily write YAML without tools. But the good thing is that if I am looking at a YAML document, I can more or less understand the gist of what’s there.
I’m still not at a level where I feel comfortable with the YAML I make without linters or parse dry runs or Emacs modes although I’m getting more and more comfy with it.
But if all strings had to be quoted, it’d lose its human readable appeal. Might as well use JSON at that point (and many do, since JSON is more used than YAML or at least that’d be my guess).
@Sandra I just find JSON ugly. But tbh I'll probably use that (in its expanded form so that it's on multiple lines) before I go to the trouble of building a new data structuring language.
There is this whole “deep work” productivity culture obsession with hating on notifications, and when I do hyperfocus I often turn notifications off. That needs to be easy to do, and I do that all the time.
But there is a level of focus just before that depth, and it’s just as valuable, maybe even more valuable since it’s not as obsessive and not as neglectful of my well-being as a whole, and I can’t get there if I’m in check-check-checking hell.
Not happy with issue trackers that has a ton of required boilerplate just to suggest an issue. Users (“lusers”) who are reporting bugs are helping the project and if it’s easy for them to contribute, more bugs will be found.
Non-mandatory boilerplate prompts (“here’s where you can find the version number”, “here’s where you can find logs”) are great but it should be possible to bypass since it’s stuff that’s not always relevant, like a user finding a bug can’t submit the admin’s logs for example.
I’ve said it before but probably the biggest culture shock when working in the corporate world was that they pay for testers and UI designers while when users give such suggestions for free in the FOSS world, they get kicked in the head.
The flipside to that is when the users are coming across as entitled, that’s not right either. Users, you’re not a paying customer or employee.
I can't recall, but it was just yesterday, there was some sort of issue I needed to report with something, and I'm used to those annoying boilerplates - it's like calling your ISP and getting tier one tech support with a notebook... "Can you turn it of and turn it on again?" Gimme a fricken' break, man!
Anyway, I teetered for a minute. Not sure if I wanted to fill that stuff out for something so trivial, but....
Then I noticed - there was a button to bypass all that! I was astonished
I don't want mandatory darkmode because I just can't see it very well especially when I'm tired. I can but only if I squint and like super focus, or zoom in. Here is a comparison image (above and below) but to me they're the same picture.
This is for LCD screens. On CRT it's the other way around and there I did use darkmode all the time. I dunno why.
@Sandra Thank you for sharing this. I don't think most people who set dark mode as default realise how difficult it can be do read (and the ones who do but still do it without an option to change can go... (I was about to write something very rude)).
For me, the dark mode doesn't look as bad, but instead what happens is that everything around me starts flashing (similar to what would happen if you look into the sun).