I'm not a big fan off some of the Void Distro-reviews which just show the installer, so I've made a review of how it looks after a few years of daily use.

I've missed out a load of nice features, because it's already a fairly waffly review.

Given the price of art, I've been playing a whole heck of a lot with Machine Learning (ML) images (along with ever other indie RPG designer out there), and the results are bad. This one is Midjourney, which seems to be one of the better generators.

If the problem is just my lack of skill, that still sounds like a problem. If I have to hire a professional, I'd rather just hire an artist.

I'm writing a campaign about Vampires in Belgrade (Hungary) in the year 1230.

Starting with something without too many parts, a young Tzimisce vampire in the story (well, he was embraced young), has a ghouled raven he speaks with.

dark ages boy speaks to raven in the moonlit rain

Oh dear... it doesn't know that human boys are bigger than ravens. So it's beatuful, and enchanting, but doesn't convey information, and the kid looks like 'the little prince', not like a sinister flesh-crafting vampire.

Making some variations, I finally got here:

It's better, but the raven also looks like a humming-bird, and the moon looks like someone spilled it. It really conveys nothing more than 'boy and raven', so it's not about to enhance the passages - and RPGs really do need good images, because every one conveys a boat-load of strange ideas.

Next up, what about a that scene where a vampire-hunter finally tracks down the coterie's lair? He finds them by sunset and has to flee before they wake up, but he'll be back tomorrow to kill the lot. He rides a horse, and has an ovcharka (bear-hunting Russian dog) by his side. The coterie will find signs of his passing, such as footprints.

After some bad images, I finally left the dog out - most of them blended the dog and horse into a single image, if the dog appeared as anything more than a shadow.

Slavic, of-the-night, noble hunter reading tracks, horse, footprints, village, 1300s

So we have a ruddy-great horse dwarfing the world in one, and lots of horse-butts which look out of place.

Time to make lots of variations again.

Slavic, of-the-night, noble hunter reading tracks, horse, footprints, village, 1300s

... so now we have more of a centaur-creature as the horse blends with the man.

Overall

RPG images should explain things, and the explanations should involve the interactions of multiple elements, such as one person shooting an arrow at another, or threats, or setting a building on fire. AI seems to mix styles well - want a vampire drawn by Picasso? I'm sure the results would be stunning. But if interactions are missing, I don't see how anyone can use these results.

Machine Learning In General

I suspect machine learning will simply not work in our lifetimes. Consider the story of machine learning when translating:

1. You make a basic dictionary, so you can type 'cat', and it gives you 'le chat'.
2. You give it rules about nouns and adjectives - now you type 'the black cat', and it returns 'le chat noire'.

It gets 5% of language, then 10%, then 20%, and it's tempting to imagine that 99%-accurate translations are coming soon, but they're not, because if we go to translate 'James is right, Alice is left', the machine will return 'James is correct', because translating this statement does not rely on rules, but on understanding intention and meaning. Those hold-out sentences may require that we start by programming real AI, with real consciousness, and only then teaching it multiple languages.

The artist Vladar's putting together (mostly) generic fantasy map-pieces.

It's CC-BY, so it's open for commercial use. I've commissioned it for my own RPG, but all the pieces should work for anything faintly related to Gygax.

There are more pieces to come, and of course it's open, so if anyone out there can do drawing, feel free to add a wall/ mace/ dead goblin in a new file.

If anyone's into the Classic World of Darkness, I'm translating the Dark Ages core rules into LaTeX so anyone can hack about with them.

Plans (in various stages of completion):

• Include a 'Dark Ages' option, which makes things look like the Dark Ages books, and changes rules, like replacing 'driving' with 'riding', and switching examples.
• Include a 'Vampire' toggle, so that Vampire-specific rules, like Disciplines, or lists of clans, get included just when that toggle's on.
• Add Contest rules instead of Combat rules (mostly done) because I don't like how WoD does combat.

I've always found it weird that WoD repeated the rules for each game. This way, there's no repetition in the writing (just the output).

No idea if I'll have time to finish the project, but if anyone else lives in the small Venn intersection of LaTeX and old WW books, PRs are very welcome.

I'm making a dungeon generator, partly for fun, and partly to learn python.

I want the output to be plausible, so it'll lay down in three stages:

1. Make random mine/ natural caves/ fortress
2. Add a civilization like dwarves/ elves/ gnomes to add rooms, traps at the entrance, maybe a library, and art (i.e. treasure).
3. Make an invader, e.g. necromancer, goblins, or mad wizard.

At each stage rooms change, so the necromancer will turn dwarves into undead dwarves, and goblins will turn nice spaces into nasty spaces, and maybe set more traps.

Atm it's in early stages, and uses graph-easy to output a conceptual map.

PRs and coding suggestions very welcome.

Dice rolling programs take too long.

Some demand syntax like /roll 2d6+2, and I think 'you should know that 2d6 is a roll without my typing /roll, and also everything I roll has been d6's, so obviously if I type just 3, I mean '3d6'.

So I wrote one with defaults. This is my second python project, so the code isn't pretty, but it does the job.

You write:

""

 2d6
Result: 5

d8

2d8
Result: 12

3+1

3d8+1
Result: 8

If you give it a target number (TN), all rolls will tell you whether or not you've reached that TN.

If you give it a difficulty, it'll tell you how many dice have landed on that number or above.

You can input these things in any reasonable format:

tn=18

TN 12

difficulty = 4

dif 9

I set up a new machine with Void, and it took an embarrassing amount of time. I wanted a script to install Void with 1 line of bash from a live iso, so I could look cool next time. Here it is:

xbps-install -S curl

curl https://malinfreeborn.com/autovoid.sh | sh

The idea is to place the script on a public site, execute it, then get the following:

• a full WM
• all dotfiles set up
• all home files

...basically, a full setup.

Results

It's 2 lines of bash, rather than 1, which is less cool.

I remove the need for a password by making the system auto-login to a user in the wheel group. I've tried adding the option to set a variable, password="mypassword123, which would then automatically add that variable as the main user's password, but something's gone wrong there.

The user gets ssh keys pulled from gitlab as a kind of backup.

To Do

• Atm I can use unison to pull in ~ files from my server, but it'd be nicer to have this done automatically, before the reboot. I guess that'd require another line for authentication.
• See if something can pull the script without curl, so the script can be a single line of bash
• I might see about puting in arbitrary usernames/ hostnames later.
• Any other suggestions?

And if I sign them after, with git commit --amend -S, will that cause problems for later pulls or pushes with subtree?

I have files marked with a line like this:

date: 2021-01-01

I've been usinng Solderpunk's RSS feed generator so far.

=> https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/gemfeed.git Link

But it only does date by file creation date, which doesn't work for me.

Any gemini RSS feed generators where the date can be drawn from a variable?

Just wanted to share my workflow.

I got a Markdown to Gemini translator at idiomdrottning. A script then uses git subtree to pull those commits in from repos which just have writing.

The main bonus is that the Markdown can have a paragraph split into different lines, which works easier with git.

The end result is I can write in plain markdow, and it'll automatically be presented both in the Gemini capsule, and then on the website, which uses Hugo to render markdown into html.

Since Hugo already uses tags for topics, I got Gemini to recognize those tags. It's made the capsule a little cleaner, since the posts are no longer jumping between Ayer's Logical Positivism and Terminal APIs.

I've ended up adding writing pieces Gemini that I wouldn't put on the web. I'm not entirely sure why - I guess it just feels like it's public, but not too public.

=> Bash script

=> Site

Port 1965 is only going to one place, so how can I make sure it's going to the right place?

I currently have agate running on a raspberry pi with Arch Linux Arm running agate for the first site.