Games, mostly.

Also, I wrote the 2024 NaNoWriMo novel with it (and did the same in 2017). Can easily fit a daily sprint’s worth of text in memory at once, heh.

I use a few modern add-ons: an SD2IEC drive (lets you use floppy images straight off an SD card) and EasyFlash3 (lets you use cartridge images, including the ability to pack random programs into utility carts).

Everyday tools? Scissors and knives I’ve had at least since 2000. (Fiskars stuff is indestructible)

Computer stuff? My Commodore 64. (Don’t use it daily but pretty regularly, sits in a box in my living room for easy access)

I use plenty of Linux on server side, just that I use Windows as my daily desktop OS for some godforsaken reason.

I actually got back to watching Star Trek recently!

Can someone still developing tell me what I should use for the backend today?

I recommend checking out Python (Django) and Ruby (Ruby on Rails) if you want nice and easy modern Web frameworks that also aren’t that weird if you have PHP experience.

Also I can never understand GIT as a single developer. The fuck is that? I’ve tried everything to understand.

Versioning your code with Git makes it much easier to experiment with new ideas. Cocked up a file? Pull it from the previous version. Create new branches for experiments, merge them in if they work, toss them if they don’t, or keep them around just in case, without them ever getting in your way in the “real” version.

And if you keep the code in a server (GitHub etc), that gives you a backup location and makes it easier to work on code on multiple systems.

For the life of me I can’t remember where this happened, but this was in one of the heavily moderated “safe space” subreddits.

I said something sarcastic, which some powermod interpreted as being against the rules. I didn’t think it was, even if it had been taken at face value.

Problem was, I was in middle of dealing with what I now think was a mental health episode of some description so I ended up arguing with the mod in PMs. Wasn’t fruitful, dude was also rude as hell because I asked them to chill.

When things looked up a few days later I was like “yeah, screw them”. Left that community. Left Reddit entirely for a month.

I now realise this is one of those moments that turned me away from socialising in general. There are dipshits out there who just don’t care.

(Not saying heavily moderated safe space communities are bad! Just maybe not have uncaring career dipshits moderating them. Maybe have clear rules and enforce them consistently.)

Reminds me of how in some old Unix system, /bin/true was a shell script.

…well, if it needs to just be a program that returns 0, that’s a reasonable thing to do. An empty shell script returns 0.

Of course, since this was an old proprietary Unix system, the shell script had a giant header comment that said this is proprietary information and if you disclose this the lawyers will come at ya like a ton of bricks. …never mind that this was a program that literally does nothing.

Pinterest is mostly useful for saving images from the web, so you can keep all images from related topics together and have a handy backup too.

I mostly use it for saving all the cute turtle photos I found.

Unemployed people use LinkedIn mostly for the job board. The employed people use LinkedIn for the social media features, and oh boy

I’ve seen Breaking Bad. This is just what the memes look like in Mexico.

“Proceedings from the Dog Turd”, Elsevier, annual subscription cost: several arms and legs

“Cubist”, or as the old-timers call it, “the Management insisted that this thing must work on MSIE 6, and we didn’t have the budget to make it work on anything else”

What do you like most about BookWyrm? Which features do you use most frequently?

Been using BookWyrm for a few months. I add books to my shelves and track reading progress, mostly.

I loved it when I realised that it just lets me add all random books and edit data from the get-go. The service may not have all of the books I have, but I can just add them.

Are there any features or interactions that you find frustrating or unintuitive? What features do you think are missing or could be improved?

BookWyrm absolutely needs far better abilities to split/merge/consolidate author and book information and do more of the Librarian Stuff. The current system of “you can bring in data and stuff just sits there on its own” is nice if you want to manage a personal library and track individual book progress, but a well-maintained book database is an entirely different beast, and pretty much mandatory for enabling more social stuff.

Also, the ability to import book information from sources is nice, but could use some more integration to a whole lot of other places. I really loved LibraryThing’s integration to bazillion different library services.

One minor quibble I have about BookWyrm is that there’s still the notion of “shelves” and that one book can be on one shelf and different editions of one book don’t count. This is good for casual use - “oh yeah I read this one” - but it’s not enough for true book nerdery. I may have a physical, ebook and audiobook edition of one work in multiple languages and the UI doesn’t show me that yes, I own/have borrowed these exact editions and I have reading activity on this and that and that one.

On that note, yeah, should also have some kind of labeling system for individual editions, along the lines of “I own a copy of this and I’ve stored this in the closet” vs “Borrowed this off the library” vs “I had this one, before the drama queen of an author removed it from Kindle”.

How do you feel about the interface (design, readability, navigation)?

It was a little bit confusing at first, but once I got over the initial weirdness I realised it wasn’t that much harder to use than, say, Goodreads. I don’t really have much complaints at this point. It’s good at what it does.

Do you mainly use BookWyrm on a mobile device or on a computer? And why?

Book nerdery is a big girl thing so I use computer for this. The mobile UI is adequate but could use a dedicated app.

Do you also use other platforms (e.g., Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing)? If yes, what makes you prefer one over the other?

I used LibraryThing long ago, and Goodreads more recently, both with librarian privileges (i.e. ability to edit data, which BookWyrm gives you from the get-go). I think Goodreads is pretty good at what it does, but it did have some mild jank, and of course, I always got the impression that I was doing unpaid labour for Bezos. So I think I’ll go with BookWyrm in the long run, thanks.

People also don’t type in proper punctuation because our keyboards are stuck in the olden times and most online forum and social media platforms are same old garbage what comes to typography.

I’m an amateur writer, I love it when word processors replace straight quotes (") with proper double quotes based on the language (“like this”, ”kuten näin”, «comme ça») and instead of minus (-) you get actual real dashes—as one does. But good luck implementing this on social media. Even blogware handles this pretty badly, the only way to get proper punctuation is to write the post in a word processor.

I agree. It’s quite unlikely the setup will finish in 33 minutes. Not really, anyway.

I like to solve everyday problems through programming. My primary way of doing it is just Python on Windows right now, but Linux does make programming languages a bit easier to access. (And most of the stuff I write would easily run on Linux too.)

Every time I go “damn, this is more complicated/boring than it needs to be and the manual handling is so unnecessary, I wish I could automate this”, I start making a script.

For example, I’m an amateur photographer, so I have scripts for dealing with photos. One is a photo importer/backup tool, because I didn’t trust the importers in the apps to do it right (Adobe trauma). I’m writing scripts for report purposes. One script I wrote puts all of the photos I have on the map.

Yeah, Randy, I find a way to make it happen, it’s called Xbox sale. That’s how I bought Borderlands 3. Which I haven’t played yet. And don’t get me wrong, Randy, Borderlands 2 is one of the most fun games I’ve played, I’m definitely a real fan! I’m definitely a video game enthusiast, I have a ginormous backlog on both Xbox and Steam.

Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.

Which is why I’ve mostly been a console peasant. PC games are like “So let’s spend 5 minutes installing extra shit. And maybe 15 minutes screwing with the settings and fixing compatibility. Oh and are you ready for The Modern Scourge, the Hell that is shader precompilation? We’ll be here for a while.”

Modern games are a little bit better, but yeah…

I’ve seen Americans start explaining how the geography in Spaghetti Westerns doesn’t make sense, so we in Europe have to go “oh, but you see, the film doesn’t take place in real America, it takes place in America of myth and legend.”

I once heard sex noises through the wall.

So I cranked up the volume and played the samples from Sinistar.

I HUNGER. RUN COWARD.