I already have an account on lemmy.radio. In fact it was my first foray into the threadiverse in 2023 during the Redit APIpocalypse. I made an account here because I post a lot in !worldbuilding@lemmy.world, and after the UK lost access to imgur I didn’t feel it was polite to clog a tiny instance with my unrelated uploads.

But herein lies my gripe about the fediverse as a whole. Fediverse platforms are by and large clones of larger social media offerings, and thus inherit some of their problems. Lemmy prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content, so if you want to aggregate a discussion under a single topic, as you would on a forum, it inevitably gets pushed off the front page as new posts come in, and nobody will ever see it again, so you have to keep posting new topics, but those end up clogging the feed. If you look at my posts on the worldbuilding community here, I have a bunch of different topics, but on this phpBB forum All my stuff is tucked neatly into a single thread that doesn’t clog the feed because the thread will remain visible as long as I kee posting.

You CAN sort posts by newest comment, which replicates the default forum style of topic bumping, but nobody ever does that, so the culture grows around the default “hot” sorting algorithm.

Not really trying to become a writer, but I have lots of worldbuilding ideas that I wish I could make interesting to others. I wish I could draw, but there’s a hard limit to what I can do visually, so I’ve had to fall back to writing, sort of. I like writing short character interactions or even just descriptions of an environment, the sort of stuff people would draw.

Oh there are vowels, they’re just written differently. These are xenolangs, languages spoken by aliens, specifically These guys:

With a vocal tract like that they’re not going to be speaking the king’s English (or any other human language) any time soon. There are only eight qualitatively different noises they can make, and most languages only make use of six of them. Whines, growls, and grunts are “vowels”, and huffs (a quick exhalation through the nose), chuffs, and yips are “consonants”. They can also hiss, either plain or trilled, but only Hearthsider uses hisses in actual words.

They supplement this very meager set of sounds with contrasting vowel pitches (high, low, rising, and falling), but also volumes (weak, strong, weakening, and strengthening). Vowel length and “timing” are also important. There are long and short vowels, but also early (two-vowel sequences where the second vowel is held longer than the first, making the change “early” in the syllable) and late (holding the first vowel longer than the second, making the change “late” in the syllable)

Here’s a phoneme inventory for Hearthsider.

Vowels:

And here are the consonants (edit: fixed):

Some random fun facts: Commonthroat has no pronouns. You have to either drop the word completely (very common on Earth) or inflect a noun in first, second, or third person (vary rare but not unknown on Earth, see Elamite). Outlander has a politeness distinction, with transactional, amicable, familial, and reverential pronouns in second and third person. Using familial pronouns to refer to coworkers or employees is considered vulgar unless they’re literally family. Last, Hearthsider has (or will have) a bunch of swear words drawn from liturgical vocabulary (cf Canadian French).

All languages use “to smell” where we would say “to feel” as in “feel happy” etc, because emotions are communicated through their musk. There is a rich set of “odor colors” that describe subjective olfactory experiences, rather than the typical (Western) human way of resorting to comparisons with sources of odors. In contrast, their color vocabulary works like English’s odor vocabulary. Other than “light” and “dark” they can only relate color sensations to familiar objects that are so colored, mostly fruits.

My latest constructed language, Hearthsider (just started this week). None of this will make sense but here we go:

Verbs are a closed class. To form complete sentences you use an equivalent of “do”, plus a verbal noun phrase. This noun phrase can have determiners such as articles attached to them, which indicate things like whether the action was performed only once, repeatedly, etc. To say “X verbs Y”, it would translate literally to “X does Y a verb”. Plurality will likely not be indicated on nouns but will be in articles.

rMl   t  qb  b sBsb    zGK
Light do 2sg a  shine  friend

“Light shine upon you, friend!”

This is a fairly common greeting crosslinguically, so I have translations in my other two conlangs:

Outlander:

sg Bqqbsd rkr PLr
sg      Bqqb-sd        PLr
2sg.AMI illuminate-OBJ light

Commonthroat:

L   rLPq-p      BCq-b         sFsF-qn
OPT light-3D    illuminate-NA friend-2

Here are the gloss abbreviations:

2sg = 2nd person singular pronoun
OPT = optative modal
2sg.AMI = 2nd person singular amicable pronoun
-OBJ = Object focus/trigger suffix
-3D = 3rd person distal noun suffix
-NA = Nonauthoritative verbal mood
-2 = 2nd person noun suffix

It’s BS. The Simpsons already made that joke anyway.

This is correct.

Fair enough, but I’m a hair’s breadth away from deleting my account here and never coming back. Apologies if you’ve read my spiel before. I post it a lot only because I think it ends up being relevant a lot. Anyway, Most people, myself included, join the fediverse for ideological reasons. I’d wager most of us are anti-corporate, or at least don’t trust Google or Facebook sorry Meta 🙄, and Reddit, et al.

But just because I’m here for ideological reasons doesn’t mean I want to talk about nothing else. But every community is either soaking in politics, see my pics above, or empty. Even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary every now and then, so I don’t buy the “everything’s on fire so we should work it into every discussion” argument.

Reddit used to have a somewhat similar problem, in that it attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards), and the experience was less fun if you weren’t one, but Lemmy seems so much more obnoxious in this regard, and I can’t fathom how it could get better.

I’ll just copy what I posted here

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.

Gray.

Metroid Dread was my first exposure to “tough but fair” bosses where every defeat felt earned. Every single boss took multiple tries, and every time I went through this cycle of trying a few times, walking away, debating whether I should quit altogether, only to come back a day or so later to repeat the process. I beat the entire game. Ravenbeak was of course the hardest, but man it felt good when I finally beat him.

I had a similar experience playing through various Soulslikes. The only other one I managed to beat was Tunic (I know I talk about that game a lot. It left quite the impression).

Am blind, can solder (badly). Afraid I can’t help but best of luck.

https://lemmy.world/post/45525365

Started on FB when it was limited to .edu email addresses. It seemed different back then. Backed off around 2011 when oversharing was the biggest concern. My last post I can remember was in 2013, other than a goodbye post in 2022 or so when I fully deleted my socials.

Got a Twitter account in 2010. Made one post, a PM to a friend saying I had signed up, then never went back until I deleted the account at the same time as FB.

Yes, I’ve disabled history and use the FF extension Untrap for YouTube to block anything else that might bleed through. Endless Algorithmic feeds are bad for you imo

PS Trump is an orangutan

Y’all always have to be “on” don’t you?

I lurk on some subreddits still. Sometimes I just want to look at pictures of orangutans or neatly organized server racks without anyone bringing up Trump in the comments.

Also if you count YouTube, I still have premium though I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it.

When I was in the Boy Scouts we took a weekend trip to the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi. We slept aboard in the births used by the sailors. I don’t know if I was below the water line but I imagine the sights and smells were similar to a sub. It smelled like fuel oil. The births were very small. Can’t remember how I felt but I don’t think I had a bad night. The most distinct thing I remember is that instead of turning off all the lights they turned some of the overhead lights off but others changed from white to red. For some reason I found that really cool.

When smart LED bulbs started coming out in the mid 2010s I bought a bunch to replicate the experience, in Philips Hue’s own app at first but now with Home Assistant. I have a scene called “submarine mode” that turns all the lights red. I do this an hour or so before bed and sometimes when I wake up but don’t want to get out of bed right away. My bathroom lights are motion activated (also via Home Assistant) and it’s great being able to see where I’m going without it being too bright.

The gif notwithstanding, I’m not enough of a 40K fan to care. Watching the nerd rage from the sidelines is fun though.

I do, however, enjoy lore and worldbuilding in general. It’s my understanding it had previously been established in several places the Astartes were male only. Were I more invested I would certainly find this decision vexing, especially in light of the fact they already have an all-female faction in the Adepta Sororitas and the fact that Astartes are massive spotlight hogs. Shining the spotlight on these other factions would kill two birds with one stone by highlighting female characters in a way that respects the lore and stemming the endless flood of space marines.

But again I’m just casually interested watching from the sidelines. I’ve never bought any models or read any tie-in novels. The only money I’ve invested are a few video games. The entirety of my knowledge comes from lengthy wiki walks and lore videos.

I like to silo my online and meatspace selves. That’s it.

Something so blue it hurts to look at.

I thank dogs when they let me rub their belly.