No shaving off leading zeroes, no assuming I want a formula unless I explicitly prepend the cell with an = (or whatever the syntax is). If I want a string that starts with a hyphen, it's just a string that starts with a hyphen. If I open a CSV or TSV file and save a copy without doing anything to it, it should be identical to the original down to hashing the same.

But I'd also like the nice auto-filtering capabilities that excel has, where there's a dropdown on each column for sorting and searching.

Does such a program exist?

I sometimes feel embarrassed by this hobby. I'm a grown man playing make believe, and I don't have the excuse of saying it's for a book or game. But occasionally I gain useful skills through the course of my conworlding.

Over the weekend I ported all my Obsidian notes for the Lonely Galaxy to DokuWiki. Part of that process involved extracting the hashtags from each markdown file and transforming them into a format that the DokuWiki tag plugin could parse. This involved some Python regex nonsense.

Now I'm at work, and lo and behold, I'm encountering a nearly identical problem, porting an Obsidian vault to another format, with tag extraction being one of the steps. So I revisited the script I wrote for the LG wiki to see how I did it. It's one function with a single return statement.

def get_tags(some_string):
	return re.findall(r"#\w+",some_string)

So as shy as I am about this project, it is proving useful.

Some branches of Agentivist Neoshamanism believe that every species of living thing has a pool of mana distributed across the entire population of that species. Consuming members of that species grants you its portion of mana. The fewer specimens, the greater each individual's portion of the overall mana pool, and thus the more mana granted to the consumer.

Childlore is folklore passed directly between children, without the input of adults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore

Stuff I can think of off the top of my head are paper fortune tellers, summoning Bloody Mary/the candyman, the cool S, parody songs like "Jingle bells Batman Smells" and "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead" etc.

This stuff has intrigued me since, well since I was a kid. I always wondered where they came from. I never saw adults doing that stuff, so I figured another kid had to have come up with it.

YIP (Yinrih Internetworking protocol) is used to address nodes on the realspace internetwork. intra-planetary links are made with optical fiber, and inter-planetary and interstellar links are made using FTL Underlay tunnels.

The Allied Worlds, having a much denser population compared to Partisan Territory and the Spacer Confederacy, can afford a network of realspace repeater satellites that have much slower ping times but far higher bandwidth.

YIP addresses consist of 81 trits (27 BB27 digits). This gives YIP an address space of 3^81 or roughly 4.43*10^38. Since it's balanced ternary, half the space is negative and half is positive. This distinction is likely significant but I'm not yet sure how. Perhaps negative addresses cannot cross the borders between autonomous systems, making them similar to IPv6 unique local addresses or RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses.

A YIP address may be written in nine groups of three BB27 digits like this

bcd-fgh-jkl-mnp-qBC-DFG-HJK-LMN-PQb

The address may be further divided into a network prefix, subnet ID, and interface suffix.

I know the demographics around here, so I know everyone's just going to put "nothing lol", but please understand what I'm asking first.

I'm physically incapable of driving a car. I stand to gain immeasurably from a world that didn't assume everyone owned one. Having loved-ones with respiratory issues aggravated by car exhaust has made me very aware of the health issues surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, and having to navigate sidewalkless suburban stroads on a regular basis and juggle poorly funded public transit has made it very clear to me that pedestrians are second class citizens. I could go on and on about the mess cars have made of urban planning, and the number of jobs I couldn't take because they required driving, but I digress.

In short, I hate cars just as much as the rest of you. But I'm also conscious that a lot of other people feel differently. What does widespread car ownership enable that would be difficult or impossible otherwise?

As an American I'm familiar with the cultural aura that surrounds the automobile. One of the early episodes of Mythbusters explained this pretty well while digging into the folklore surrounding a particular car-related urban legend. Cars represent freedom and self determination, two qualities highly prized in American society. You can go where you want when you want, without relying on schedules and routes mandated by public transit[^1].

Looking at more tangible things, I suppose hauling a bunch of stuff from point A to point B would be hard without a car.

But what else am I missing?

[^1]: Ignoring the fact you can only go where there are roads, and someone has to build and maintain those roads.

For me, Tunic. Well, it's a bit more complicated. I was burnt out on soulslikes and wanted a break. Saw what I thought was a nice little Zelda clone, as in I was scrolling the Steam store home page and did a double take when I saw the one and only piece of promotional art for the game. That character design looked like it was one floppy green hat away from a lawsuit from Nintendo. Instantly downloaded it upon learning that the instruction manual played a big part in the gameplay.

I have fond memories of game manuals when I was a kid, coming home from not-yet-gamestop with a new game looking at all the concept art, or having my parents read to me from the super mario 3 manual when I was little. Anyway, long story short the game was another soulslike. Set in the ruins of a fallen civilization? Check. Spend currency to level up? Check. Opening up shortcuts to previously visited areas as you progress? Check. Difficult bosses? Check.

Oh, but what's this? The whole game is in this indecipherable script that you have to decode? Oh baby! I spent way, way way too much time trying to decipher it. I got so obsessed that it was effecting my sleep and I had to uninstall the game for a few weeks. Never ended up solving it.

Anyway, overall the experience was a roller coaster of mild interest to acute dislike shifting to all consuming curiosity and finally to exasperation. I don't think a game has evoked that many varied reactions from me. The music is also amazing.

In Super Mario Bros, I called fire bars (those rotating fire thingies in castles) "fire spankers". A friend called Goombas "chicken nugget heads".

Update:

I've settled on Dokuwiki for my personal project... at least for now.

I know wikis have been discussed here before, but I wanted to add my two cents after shopping around for a wiki at work and for personal use.

Obsidian

Pros

• plain text storage format
• great at gathering disorganized thoughts without imposing a rigid structure

Cons

• closed source
• many features that arguably define a wiki are either absent or paywalled, like easy sharing, collaboration, and versioning

Mediawiki

Pros

• it's the wiki. Everyone's used and possibly edited a Wikipedia page.
• version history
• close to Obsidian in terms of "write now, organize later"
• Probably the nicest-looking FOSS wiki platform out of the box
• a lot of the features that Obsidian paywalls are built in, like multi user support and version history

Cons

• Articles not stored in plain text
• Has its own markup. Granted Mediawiki predates Markdown but the table syntax is horrendous. The Mediawiki help page on the matter actually tries to dissuade you from using tables and notes that the markup is ugly.
• Extensions are annoying to install
• Absolutely zero access control. You can even edit other people's user pages. There's no way to hide sections of a wiki from the public or from particular groups of users.
• It tries to be all things to everyone. While this makes it versatile, it also means doing a particular thing probably requires knowledge of CSS or Mediawiki's own templeting syntax. Sometimes I just want to have an info box that doesn't clutter the source code of a page.

Dokuwiki

Pros

• Access control finally!
• Plain text files
• Easy to create namespaces, which Mediawiki also has but doesn't want you to go crazy making your own.
• While it's not Markdown, the markup is nicer than Mediawiki IMO. The table syntax at least is miles better

Cons

• Uglier than sin. Yes even many of the templates (themes) on offer aren't much better. The Bootstrap 3 template seems particularly popular, and while it's a marked improvement in most areas, like a lot of frontends that use those bootswatch pallets there are dusty corners that don't work, like black text on a black background.
• Some stuff like tags and moving pages have to be achieved via plugins. Seriously you can't even rename a page?
• Mutilates article titles. Makes everything lowercase and replaces non alphanumeric chars with underscores (or something else configurable).

Bookstack

Pros

• It looks good I guess. ~~Haven't spent much time with it.~~ (now I have, see cons below)
• Yay markdown!
• Also has access control
• WYSIWYG editor (not my style but if you want non techies to use it it's a must)

Cons

• Also not plain text
• remember earlier when I talked about "write now, organize later"? Bookstack holds a gun to your head and forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. I know some people thrive under this limitation, but I don't.
• No backlinks -No linking to nonexistent pages

Those last two are IMO what define a wiki. I want to see what pages are wanted but missing and see how ideas relate to each other. Without these two features I'd say BS is more of a documentation platform.

Other wikis I've tried but not to the same extent

Wiki.js

~~IDK, I don't know much about this one, but don't like the workflow of making new pages.~~

Hard pass. It seems like it's been in development hell for a few years now, and I really don't like how you make new pages. Yes you can link to nonexistent pages, but you have to specify both a file name and a page title, where every other wiki I'm aware of assumes the link text you followed is the page name and uses the page name (or a sluggified equivalent) as the article title.

Gollum

Really simple, which is both good and bad. Too simple for me.

An Otter Wiki (the article seems to be part of the name)

A lot like Gollum. Doesn't indicate when you link to a nonexistent page. No support for article tags, and no visible indicator that a link leads to a nonexistent page. As I said above, it's important to me to see what info is missing but wanAted.

Pepperminty wiki

Looks cool but it's abandoned

Tiddlywiki

Steep learning curve but pretty versatile. It's a single HTML file so you can host it on something like Neocities. Really rudimentary search functions, absolutely not meant for multiple users.

Balanced bace-27 (BB27) is used in vulpithecine computing in a similar manner to hexadecimal. Yinrih computers are based on balanced ternary instead of binary, where each digit can represent -1 (written T), 0, or 1. Balanced base-27 uses 27 digits which can represent the decimal range -13 to +13. The Yinrih Internetworking Protocol (YIP) uses BB27 to represent YIP addresses.

The table below is a human-friendly version of what yinrih actually use. Yinrih numerals are written with the highest-order digit to the right, since yinrih write right to left.

For everyday use, yinrih use either base-12 or base-24.

The Lonely Galaxy is not a speculative biology project. I come up with flora and fauna as I need them, nevertheless I feel a bit sloppy about it. Yih's biosphere isn't terribly different from Earth's. Some of this is deliberate. I want yinrih culture to be more relatable while still being different, so their environment has to follow suit. Some of it is laziness. "Eh just stick an extra body segment on a bug and call it a day".

Anyway, here's a very basic insectoid body plan. It has organs analogous to antennae, but they're positioned on either side of the mouth. They're also much stronger, designed not just for sensing but also for grasping. It has two thoracic segments rather than one. Each thorax has a pair of legs and a pair of wings, for a total of four legs and four wings. There is an abdomen that does not differ substantially from that of a typical Terran insect.

As with IRL bugs, there's a lot of variation in this form, including possessing more or fewer thoracic segments, with wings and legs along with them.

Here's a few bugs I've come up with in the lore:

Fireflies: despite the name they're more like bees, living in colonies, feeding on nectar, and producing honey. Their name comes from their bioluminescence, which they use to communicate. They occupy a cultural niche similar to butterflies or ladybugs, being seen as beautiful and pleasant critters. Their association with light once made Firefly a popular given name, but its use has dropped off a cliff thanks to Lichlord Firefly, the leader of Partisan Territory.

Fur lice: ectoparasites that infest yinrih fur. They thrive in crowded environments like the floating cities of Welkinstead and on orbital colonies. There are two species, a basal form that lives on the surface of planets, and a more derived form that has adapted to microgravity, losing its wings. They may be eusocial, forming colonies on their host.

Armorbacks: marine animals in a related clade. They look very crab-like. Legends circulate among the salty-pelted sailors on the surface of Sweetwater of a gargantuan armorback capable of devouring the crew of a mini sub, and the sub along with them. It is said to be completely invulnerable except for a weak point on its ventral side. To kill it you have to flip it over on its back.