Interests: programming, video games, anime, music composition

I used to be on kbin as e0qdk@kbin.social before it broke down.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • If you want to improve significantly, go read someone else’s code and modify it. Try to fix a bug in a program you use, add a feature you want that doesn’t exist already, or even just do something simple for the sake of proving to yourself that you can do it – like compiling it from source and figuring out how to change some small snippet of text in a message box. Even if you don’t succeed, if you put in a serious effort attempting it, you will almost certainly learn a lot from trying.

    Edit: changed wording to try to be clearer





  • Oh, I remember playing Iji! I think that was the first game I played that noticed and reacted if you tried to play as a pacifist. There was at least one unavoidable boss fight when I played it though, as I recall.

    Digging back through my old disks, it looks like I actually still have my copy from 2008 (version 1.2, according to the manual.txt file) as well as a saved game from much later when I replayed it in February 2013. That was a while ago!





  • I’m not sure if I’ve ever fallen in love with a completely imaginary dream person, but I did dream about my ex once years and years after we broke up. I don’t remember what I dreamed about exactly, but I do remember waking from it. The happiness fading as the realization set in that it was all a dream – I was by myself in bed and none of it had been real. I’m usually pretty good at dealing with solitude, but that moment… that was the most intense loneliness I think I’ve ever felt.


  • I wrote something like this before for academic researchers to load data sets on display walls by using their cellphones. I approached it by building a simple website. When the user logs in, they’d see a table of entries (from a directory listing on a shared file server that they could drop their data sets onto) and could click a button that made a form post to the server which caused it to run whichever programs were needed to load the data set they wanted (or run a couple of other handy commands – like turning the monitors on/off, etc).

    You can do something like that too in Python if you want:

    1. Learn how to start and stop programs from Python scripts. This can be done with the built-in subprocess library. If you know how to launch the programs you want from the command line, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out how to do it from Python by reading the documentation. It will take some more effort to figure out how to interact with it (e.g. to stop it from user input) without blocking your script, but this can be done.
    2. Learn how to write a simple program that can respond to HTTP requests in Python. There are a number of libraries like tornado, flask, cherrypy, etc. that can do this. Pick one, read the documentation, and write a tiny page that allows you to submit a form and then trigger an action on the server in response to an HTTP POST. You should be able to interact with it by pointing the browser on your computer to localhost (possibly plus a port) or from on your LAN by putting the IP of your computer into the address bar.
    3. Figure out how you’re going to organize the entries you want to be able to load. You could just do something trivial like putting the files in known folders and running os.listdir, or something more involved like tracking the entries with a spreadsheet or database or JSON file that lets you associate custom metadata with each entry (like a custom name to show or an icon to display or when it was last launched, etc.)
    4. Generate a web page based on that data collection. I recommend using templating – e.g. with mustache, or jinja, etc. Basically you write some HTML-like text that lets you indicate places to fill in data from your program and it will do the conversion of symbols like < into &lt; that are needed for HTML output and also repeat patterns using entries from lists you provide to build the rows of tables and such for you.
    5. Set up some security (e.g. a simple log in system) and polish it up as much as you care to do.

    Good luck and have fun!


  • You might find writing guides relevant to your interests. For example, “How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy” by Orson Scott Card contains some details about how the author came to write Hart’s Hope and other novels. “Scene & Structure” by Jack Bickham might also be interesting – I don’t remember discussion of specific books in it, but it might scratch a similar itch for how-it’s-made style content.

    Some books also contain introductions/forewords/afterwords with details about how the book was written. A bunch of OSC’s novels (like some editions of Ender’s Game) come to mind specifically – I read those back when I was curious about maybe trying to become a writer, so that’s the most prominent example in my mind, but I’m sure there are others. I’ve also seen translations of a number of works where the translators include really long introductions explaining some of their choices – and sometimes criticize earlier translations.



  • Everything I’ve set in Settings is forgotten: Default Listing reverts to All, Default Post Sort reverts to Hot, and so on.

    mlmym (the “old” interface) stores its front-end specific settings in your browser via cookies and local storage. The way it’s implemented works for the most part and probably makes the front-end simpler, but has some downsides like not retaining your choices between logins. There’s an issue open for this in the bug tracker: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/104

    I’m not sure why it forces a logout periodically even when you’re using it regularly though. (I mean, the cookies are probably not being updated and just expire eventually – but I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice or not.) It might be a good idea to open an issue for this?


  • e0qdk@reddthat.comtoNew Communities@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    […] male-gazey content. I am 2) a woman extremely disinterested in that.

    I feel some men might also not want to see content focused on games where a big goal is to romance a man as a woman, presented in a femgazey way or a way tailored to our desires even if not sexualized.

    Fair enough. There are a lot of eroge where you play as a women that are absolutely, clearly intended to be played by men though; that part alone isn’t likely to be off-putting, but I can see specific presentation and femgaze heavy works being just as off putting to some guys as malegaze heavy works are to some women. If the audience is mostly straight guys, posting fan art of something like an explicit BL work probably isn’t going to get much positive response, I suppose. :-)

    There’s so little content posted regularly in the visualnovels community though that I feel like anyone actively trying to start discussions there on the subject of VNs would likely be welcomed, but I might be wrong about that. The most successful posts I’ve seen are generally notices about sales and some business news with people occasionally posting memes and such as well.

    If that doesn’t feel right to you though, I get it, and hopefully reviving the other community works out.

    Is the issue that the posts will be frequently inaccessible?

    I don’t think your posts are federating out at all when kbin.social is down – basically only people on your own instance can see it, if I understand how federation works correctly. If you check the view of the community from lemmy.world the last post visible is from a month ago, for example – https://lemmy.world/c/Otomegames@kbin.social?dataType=Post&sort=New – even though I can see on your instance that you’ve started several threads since then. I can’t even load the community from reddthat since it was probably never requested and kbin.social is down currently; it just errors out.

    Does Lemmy have a way to get inactive mods removed and replaced?

    I don’t know. Tagging @Blaze@reddthat.com for suggestions since they’ve been trying to grow the Fediverse for a while and may know how to go about it, if it’s possible.


  • kbin.social’s been down for a while, and having serious problems for months.

    There is a general visual novel community at !visualnovels@lemmy.comfysnug.space which might be a better place to post to. It’s not very active, but I know there are at least a few people around paying attention to it. I might chime in on some threads occasionally if you post there. My tastes are more in line with VNs aimed at the straight-male demographic, but I’m willing to try other VNs beyond that if there is a really good story or novel mechanics or some other non-sexual factor that makes it interesting.

    If that community doesn’t fit your needs, I think there is also !otome_games@lemmy.world – but it seemed completely dead the last time I looked. You might be able to revive it though if you want to try.