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Having a fursona is a means of buffing God's greasy fingerprints off of you and instead creating yourself in your own image

It's time for every LaTeX user's favorite game...

"Where the Hell is That Extra Space Coming From?"

It seems I control neither the horizontal nor the vertical...

How UX apathy leads to corporate capture 

"No, $software is fine, users just need to learn how to use it"

"That's a stupid feature, nobody should ever need that"

If you've spent any amount of time in FOSS circles, you've probably seen sentiments like that all over the place. Unfortunately, they're a big part of why dubious corporations (eg. Microsoft, Google, etc.) have been able to co-opt the FOSS community.

Why? Because regardless of what you, as a technical FOSS person, believe is "necessary"... users are not going to care about that. They have certain expectations from their software in terms of feature set and ease-of-use.

Either you meet those expectations, or users go elsewhere.

Now, "it's FOSS, it gives you freedom" can sway that decision *somewhat*, but it only gets you so far. Most people care more about getting their stuff done, than they care about (to them) abstract ideals of "freedom".

And because of that, you're setting yourself up to be vulnerable to corporate capture - because corporations can superficially *claim* to do FOSS, but provide an actually accessible user experience, and suddenly everybody flocks to the corporate thing.

And sure, corporate FOSS has real problems compared to community-run FOSS. But understanding that requires a degree of nuance that most people won't see, and that you frankly cannot expect from people for whom FOSS isn't their whole existence. It's specialized knowledge.

Which boils down to a very simple reality: either *you* provide the UX that users want, or a corporation will do it for you, and with none of the community governance and long-term sustainability. Those are the options.

A great example of this is systemd; yes, it has plenty of problems. But because of the widespread insistence in FOSS circles that "nobody needs more than SysVinit", everybody flocked to an actually usable alternative the moment it appeared, monolithic design and corporate governance be damned.

Don't be that person. Listen to users about their needs. Take complaints about UX and accessibility seriously. If you don't, then you're not helping FOSS; you're harming it.

saw someone posting pictures of cool building with graffiti on it --> cool! click expand on the cw to read the post --> "it would be prettier without the graffiti"
yep that's a block from me, dog

It always pains me to see romhacks and homebrew console projects with embarrassingly bad programmer-art fonts, or fonts (sometimes ugly ones) taken from other games.

If you're making a romhack or other project that needs (or even just kinda wants) a new bitmap font, don't let your confidence in your code, music, or even pixel art convince you that you can throw something together solo and have it look decent. Please talk to someone experienced. It doesn't even have to be me. (But it could be!)

@Doephin My guess is that the "save your cursor position" code is part of the "track changes" code because it's all in the bucket of "keep user-specific stuff in the file" code. It feels ridiculous, yet almost sensible.

@trysdyn I gotta know, what sort of responses? (My head's already full of guesses.)

No Nut November, the first of the food allergy themed months followed by Milk Substitute December and Gluten Free January.

Images, fantasy creatures, nudity 

Anyway the entire world is going to crap and I’m having an off day so have a couple of Baphomets I drew, which is what did work out okay.

Now that it's officially out, we should plug it in #ttrpg - we made a tabletop roleplaying game for a podcast jam! packbat.itch.io/ltmawp

The series premise is that we're doing an actual-play where, every episode, we create and play a new mini roleplaying game to act as the next chapter of the story. In this pilot episode, us and our cohost Em make a game for the prologue/pre-credits scene of a YA creature horror story, and the result is fascinatingly creepy - I hope y'all enjoy it!

- 🎒 ✨

LaTeX woes – resolved for now! 

I got it working! At least, it's working for my initial test case. We'll see how it holds up, but... I got it working!

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LaTeX woes. 

I got the thing to not gobble up spaces... so now it pretends the non-breaking space token (the tilde) is a regular space.

Can I confidently typeset a book without non-breaking spaces? Guess we'll find out.

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Filk, Marvel characters, all caps, very bad ideas 

BIG AND GREEN AND STRONG AND HORNY
THE HULK FROM IPANEMA GOES WALKING
AND WHEN HE WALKS NEAR PUNY HUMANS
HULK SMASH

LaTeX woes. 

So l3regex doesn't work like I'd expect, and it looks like fixing the whole "all spaces disappear" thing will take some programming chops because the one example I've found of how to fix it doesn't seem to work and I can't figure out why.

This is going to be a theme for LaTeX and I kinda hate it. I want reliable regex-based formatting without having to hire a programmer.

But I fucking well will hire a programmer if that's what it takes. I need this.

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Ah-ha! Got the `l3regex` stuff working!

Now to figure out why it's stripping all the plain spaces out of the search text.

@Doephin I wouldn't know – I never look into them 'cause I've been turned off of the software that was giving me such trouble. *grin*

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