This isn’t part of the fediverse, it’s an old-school phpBB forum, but you may also like The CBB. That’s where I do the lion’s share of my conworlding/conlanging. There’s also FrathWiki, and The Zompist bulletin Board, which overlaps considerably with the CBB but is IMO more unpleasant due to allowing IRL politics.
I post on there often.
That’s more or less how I go about it. I’m both the author and the only audience member worth pleasing. They’re reflections of my interests, hopes, anger, and fear, so I don’t expect what I do share to be interesting to anyone but me.
The best way to find something you’ve lost is to buy another one, then you’ll find the original.
Antivaxxers are chaos cultists who want to share Grandfather Nurgle’s gifts with humanity.
Sometimes my dead dogs visit me in my dreams. I know they’re supposed to be dead in the dream and I give them lots of pets and belly rubs. Then I wake up feeling great. Yes I’m 99% sure it’s a product of my unconscious mind but sometimes…
All animals have limited intelligence. Humans are animals, therefore humans have limited intelligence. Take a chimp or a dolphin and try to teach them calculus. Now imagine what realities lie beyond human understanding. There’s a whole epistemological realm of the unknowable out there.
It’s weirdly beautiful in a melancholy way. I imagine most intelligent species are at least somewhat social, and they have an intrinsic desire to seek fellowship with others. I also imagine most would possess curiosity in order to seek out something other than themselves. So there’s this chorus of unheard voices calling up into the void “is anyone there? We’re over here. Hello? Anyone?”
And sometimes I look up into the sky and wonder if I’m looking at some distant soul who’s also looking back at me, wondering the same thing
go fight them and ruin their world (cause that’s what we do and love).
We are space orcs
I don’t believe aliens have been to earth so there’s nothing to cover up. I’m personally pessimistic that we’ll ever encounter alien life, intelligent or not. The universe is so vast and the time scale so deep that there’s certainly something else out there but the odds of us running into one another are next to impossible.
But I like to think that somewhere out there there’s another species just as alone as we are, howling into the void. And I wonder what would happen if we did finally meet, if they found us after groping around in the darkness for who knows how long and rather than attacking us or lecturing us they just rejoiced that they weren’t alone anymore.And we’d ask them about the vast galaxy-spanning metacivilization of countless other sophonts that most sci-fi seems to take for granted and they’d shrug and say “Nope it’s just you and us, lonely together.”
Several years ago there was a strike somewhere in our neighborhood, close enough to damage several electronics in my house, mostly via the network. I lost my router, and the built-in ethernet port on my PC.
When I was in high school a friend and I were waiting outside the school when it started raining. Lightning struck the field across the street. I wanted to look around the area to see if I could find some fulgurite (sand that gets fused into glass by lightning) but never got a chance to.
I have several antennas in my backyard (amateur radio) and have to disconnect my radios whenever lightning gets close. I can tell when a storm is in the area through the radio even when the weather around me is clear. I really should get a lightning detector.
On a related note, some government entity in the US (I believe it’s either NOAA or the NWS) keeps a public database of lighting deaths.
Warhammer 401(k), as in you have to cash in your retirement fund to pay for the hobby.
I’m the kind of guy who devours lore through YT videos and fan wikis without ever touching the actual franchise, and I’ve been doing that with 40K for years before I thought about buying a model. When I looked at the prices I decided I’d rather eat food.
“I’m a person and I have personal space!” --me if this ever happens.
There is no remuneration amongst the stars.
What do you mean “playlist”? I’ll listen to a single song over and over again all day if it checks the right boxes.
Some examples from the past few months. It’s mostly video game music, and I may or may not have heard of or even be interested in the game it’s from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzwV5085Vvo
I think there’s a bit in some Mark Twain novel (can’t remember which one) about how people will gladly pay to ride in a carriage but wouldn’t want to be a carriage driver since pay comes with expectations.
As someone who only knows anything about cave diving from having binged mrballin videos in the summer of 2022, I salute your bravery.
The ability to write clear documentation is an invaluable skill. So many open source projects have terrible docs. The docs are probably written by the devs themselves, who perhaps don’t realize that end users won’t have the intimate knowledge of the thing they’re documenting as they do, so they leave a lot unsaid that should really be explicit.
In IT, at least in networking, systems quickly become black boxes even to the person that designed it, and good docs are just as useful to the person writing them.
Constructed Languages. Not for nothing did JRR Tolkien call it a secret vice. It’s such a lonely hobby. You can enjoy the work of a chef or an artist or a musician even if you yourself aren’t a chef or an artist or a musician, but nobody’s going to complement the elegance of your conlang’s noun inflection system.
It’s bitterly ironic that the whole point of a language is to communicate, but the vast majority of conlangs will never be uttered by anyone other than their creators, and rather badly even then.
I don’t want to get paid for my hobbies because they wouldn’t be hobbies anymore, but it would be nice to get more than just a smile and nod from people outside the hobby now and then.
Since it seems people are sharing the fruits of their labor as well, here’s my most complete conlang: https://www.frathwiki.com/Commonthroat
My personal opinion: FB is bad not just because of who owns it or how it’s operated. The very concept is harmful. I grew up in the 90s before the web existed. All the stupid stuff I did and said stays where it belongs, haunting my memories when I lie a wake at 3 AM. Now along comes social media. You over share your life, and it’s all associated with your real name and real face and real phone number. It’s all out there, forever, for everyone to see. No thanks.
I’m out of mana!
Our only galactic neighbor, Vulpithecus fidelis