Kichae

Is… is there some reason to read “How to do X without Y” as some kind of value judgement against Y? Because, like, some of us just can’t do accents. I can’t even do my own regional accent, and never have been able to. There being a resource for someone like me doesn’t really invite this “fuck you” attitude you’re bringing, dude, and frankly, it feels like you’re saying it to people like me when you’re coming after something that seems targeted at me.

I don’t know, I this phrasing seems quite evocative to me. Tremble means to waver in tone or power, gravel means to hoarse or growling in a low energy fashion, and words colliding means for words to flow into one another in a fluid and informal way. This all makes speech sound less confident, and less educated. Meanwhile, neat speech is formal, and clipped speech has clear start and end points to words, and so clear distinctions between neighbouring words.

Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it’s too small to be a job.

But in the end, I believe people aren’t willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don’t have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn’t really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It’s also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don’t give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who – as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts – are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is – the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.

@[email protected] Sigil was a project to double-down on ecosystem lock-in and introduce microtransactions into the game at a time where online play was/is ballooning. And it probably had a lot of potential to achieve those things, if not for Hasbro’s seemingly constant refocusing and shifting short term goals.

It’s good for the hobby that it’s DOA, but being so dismissive of it because it’s not something you personally see value in just kind of sounds like burying your head in the sand to the very real changes the hobby has been undergoing since lockdowns started five years ago.

Sigil had the potential to not just lock players into the D&D Beyond ecosystem (even more so than Beyond already does), but also to be a poison pill against homebrew in general.

It would have been a Curse of Strahd machine. Something that has full support for official moduals and rulebooks, and functionally no support for anything else. And there was a very, very, very real chance that it would have worked.

My mom makes these bierocks. I make just the filling (they’re good without the cheese, too, if anyone’s got insides that hate milk sugars or proteins).

There are less kiddie bierock recipes out there, too, if ketchup doesn’t appeal.

https://www.food.com/recipe/stuffed-hamburger-cabbage-buns-runzas-or-bierocks-50809