Are the sugar gliders more like familiars/companions for the wizards or do they have their own society and stuff? Is dancing something sugar gliders are known for?

OK. NOW email is working properly. Turns out my own email provider is more permissive about random email servers. Gmail won’t even put it in the spam folder. I had to switch to a 3rd party email provider. Before I was using sendmail built into the server. I can confirm Gmail is receiving the verification emails now.

“succeed” perhaps isn’t the right word. I like the CBB and have no intentions of leaving. My only gripe is that it runs on a rather old platform. The problem I have with social media is that it doesn’t foster long-lasting conversations. Ironically you CAN achieve a traditional forum experience on Lemmy simply by sorting posts in a community by latest comment and choosing the “chat” option within a thread, but even though they’re trivially easy to select, since they’re not the defaults nobody will bother. The default options favor novelty, so older topics get buried quickly.

But there are lots of ideas that social media brings to the table that I think enhance the forum experience without robbing it of its more cozy character.

In the end, though, my motivation is 80% wanting to improve my sysadmin skills and 20% wanting to create a community. Like how do I manage software updates, backups, migration, provisioning more resources, etc. Since I’m so green when it comes to administration, I’d suggest not using an email address or using a throwaway, and of course using proper password hygiene goes without saying.

Regarding tags, my intention was to start out with a single category and let community usage dictate which topics deserve their own categories. When I was on the Minecraft forums back in 2011, I was annoyed by how granular the forum structure was.

Upvote for the Dark Crystal reference.

Tiny furry human! The adults are quite striking as well.

I searched for “monkeys” and this is the first post across all the instances I have access to that’s just a nice picture of a monkey and not a rant about NFTs or similar.

I’m curious about the white hole. That was something I played around with, that the central light was spewing out matter and had a negative gravitational field that pushed people toward the surface since you don’t experience the gravity of a sphere if you’re inside it.

I’d also like to know more about the clouds.

I’m always a sucker for giant cosmic space god heads.

I based the idea on Unicron from G1 Transformers. For the longest time I called the structure in my conworld Yinrihcron in want of a better name. Now the name is used in-universe by humans.

Also, if there are gods or super powerful beings, even high level spell casters there needs to be a good solid reason why they aren’t the ones who are saving the world. The Forgotten Realms made me question that too much, as a player I was meeting all these high level beings and they told me to go into the pit of evil bad guys who are going to take over the world.

I generally solve this problem by presenting gods more like they are in IRL religions, inscrutable and unknowable. This also allows for things like crises of faith, which would be hard to pull off when you have tangible evidence of your deity lying around. As for why they’re so aloof, this is my go-to explanation.

an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.

First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn’t send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to…

Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn’t as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it’s no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.

This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn’t work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it’ll be fine.

Seeing as how this has persisted through both my longest-lasting conworld and my most detailed conworld, I’d say a race of sapient doglike creatures. While part of the appeal of of dog ownership is that, compared to humans, dogs are emotionally simple critters with uncomplicated needs, A big part of me wishes I could explain things to my dogs in a way they could understand, and that they had the capacity to unambiguously tell me how they’re doing. I also wish I didn’t have to keep burying them every 10-15 years. Ergo, sapient cynoids that live over 7 centuries it is.

Unrelated, but I would draw maps when I was a kid, just an island with blobby regions representing biomes or polities or whatever. There would ALWAYS be a lake of lava somewhere on the map.

Oh, and mechs. Big ol’ stompy walking war crimes. Combine this with the sapient dogs and you get space doggos piloting mecha-Clifford into battle, good times.

Interesting.

In my case, the light was the physical manifestation of a god of order. Opposing the light was a god of chaos and entropy that appeared as a writhing mass of viscera that completely surrounded the sphere, underground from the perspective of the inhabitants living on the inner surface. The world existed near the birth of the universe or near its end; it’s not clear to the inhabitants which is true. The light is either banishing the chaos and establishing physical laws, or fighting a losing battle against the incarnation of heat death. Magic is possible either because the laws of physics are still sorting themselves out or because they’re breaking down.

A day-night cycle was made possible thanks to a hemispherical shield that orbited the light, occulting it for half a day

I went all in with AREDN but couldn’t get people interested.

Interesting. My AC fan has a noise pattern that revs up as the AC or heater starts. I can hear it on the radio before I hear the fan itself.

I find it interesting that there’s a mix of commenters complaining that Reddit is at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

I assumed they were aware of each other and simply differed in moderation style or the type of user they wanted to attract.

I have, however, been toying with establishing a presence in the fediverse for conlangers/conworlders to congregate; likely not Lemmy, but NodeBB, as I like the more permanent nature of forums compared to more modern social media. As for non-federated conlanging communities, there’s the CBB where I hang out most, the unrelated ZBB, both running phpBB. But the granddaddy of conlangery on the internet is probably the conlang mailing list.

I can only vouch for the CBB, as I’ve merely lurked briefly on the ZBB and have never checked out the mailing list, though it’s on my todo list.

I was on Reddit from mid 2012 to mid 2023, across a few accounts and with a hiatus of a few months here and there. I had been passively looking at less centralized forms of personal interaction on the web, trying to find traditional forums to replace the subs I frequented. Like a lot of people here, the API issues and the news of Reddit courting investors left a bad taste in my mouth.

I deleted my account, but I still lurk on a few subs, and my IT job means I have to dig through reddit posts on a regular basis for troubleshooting purposes.

I’m attempting to run a NodeBB forum. I’m only assuming that web sockets was the issue because the first search result I came up with that matched my symptoms mentioned it.

Cool. Follow up question: Do I generate the cert once and distribute the same private key to all the servers I’m running? I’m guessing not, but does that mean I run the certbot command on every server?

I love mechs!

Across yinrih culture there is a concept similar to European knighthood, but replace horses with mechs. The commonthroat word for mech pilot rGHqg also means knight. There is an order of warrior monks called the knights of the sun who make heavy use of mechs and bulky powered armor (think WH40K space marines). The word for “squire” (Lmqmg) also means “mechanic”. Mechs are operated by both a knight and a squire. The knight pilots the mech and handles primary weapons, while the squire acts as an engineer managing the mech’s systems and occasionally manning secondary weapons.

The twist, of course, is that since I tend to think of a mech as a vehicle that resembles its pilot, yinrih mechs have four prehensile paws and a prehensile tail. Their quadrupedal body plan makes limbed vehicles slightly more believable, and I go out of my way to mention that they use force projectors^[1] on the palms of the mechs’ paws to keep them from damaging terrain underfoot.

Mechs used by knights of the sun lean a bit more into zoomorphism than is strictly practical, with heat sinks shaped to look like ears, and antenna arrays positioned like whiskers.

As for how mechs came to be in this setting, they kept making powered armor bigger and bigger until it was a vehicle being piloted rather than a suit being worn.