Popular notices, page 5

@paulgatling yes. The initial problem is that OpenBSD does not seem to support Audio over HDMI. So I’m looking for an alternative :)

I would like to take the HDMI out and Headphone (jack) out of my laptop and convert it into an HDMI (audio+video) signal that would be understood by a TV.

Does such an adapter exist?

I seem to only find to do it the other way.

@cstross It was eye-opening for me to try reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces and not just derivatives. It's obsessed with Freud! I had always heard things like "the Father is metaphorical" but the original is very clear that the gender of each character matters immensely, for Freudian reasons. It really undermined my remaining faith in the system.

Then I learned about kishotenketsu and how the Hero's Journey doesn't actually work to describe many stories anyway.

@ploum @Remittancegirl Naah, for Hollywood, Hero's Journey is old; these days it's all Save The Dog (or whatever cult formula came in after that, there's a new one every generation).

@Remittancegirl @cstross : the point is that there’s a huge market for throwaway books that repeat the same familiar, feed-good story.

Some would say that this is the majority of books (and movies).

If you want to sell your story to Hollywood execs, following the Hero’s journey is probably a good idea.

If you want to create something original, it worth studying The Hero’s journey in order to not repeat it unconsciously (as we have been nurtured with books/movies from this cannon)

@Remittancegirl @cstross reflection points: I‘ve found that I struggle to take away agency from protagonists. It makes me at times viscerally uncomfortable. I‘m okay with people struggling with their own internal incongruencies. And I‘ve had the sneaking suspicion that this has to do with my own struggles for agency against external circumstances.

@cstross I do wonder if - and I'm just speaking for myself here - it is a sign of privilege and relative comfort that I enjoy being haunted by non-happy endings.

@cstross I think the biggest problem with the Hero's Journey is that it was study meant to describe a common narrative structure that spanned stories from all over the world. When people began to use it as a guide, it became a problem. Reverse-engineering might be handy, but not sublime.

For many, there's an emotionally satisfying landscape to stories that roughly follow this structure, but if emotional satisfaction is all a writer is after, then just rewrite fairy tales over and over.

#writersCoffeeClub 9/8: The Hero's Journey is garbage. Discuss.

I avoid writing Hero's Journey narratives because they're deterministic. If the reader recognizes it, it drains the novelity out of a story and turns it into a Plot Coupon Quest—in which the protagonist has to ramble all over fantasyland, collecting magic Plot Coupons, until they have enough to send off to the Author for an Ending.

NB: it's OK to run something that initially looks like a Hero's Journey then takes a surprise twist.

@clacke Oh, chemistry pedantry. I was hoping for some ridiculous etiquette pedantry about the proper way to hold a salt shaker.

Häller upp födelsedagsvin och skålar med mig själv medan jag väntar på min födelsedagspizza... myskväll väntar.

*advertiser spends billions a year and spies on me through 30 different apps*

"d-do you want to buy... *looks at my receipt for a GPU purchased yesterday* do you want to buy a GPU?"

@sertaptap A few months after buying my house I got a postcard from a realtor "recently sold in your neighborhood for $XXX".

It was my house.

Our fiscal host, Open Collective Foundation (OCF), have announced plans to dissolve by the end of this year. We're still looking at our options and will communicate more once we've decided what's next for us.

In the meantime, wikis.world will continue operating as usual. We won't be able to accept any more donations after March 15th - however we have enough funds at OCF already to last us until their shutdown so this will not cause any near-term issues.

I've just deployed the RealMe @mediawiki extension which makes it possible to verify links on your user page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Extension:RealMe

(yes I know it's a Friday, but we removed an extension too to make the total difference 0) #wmhack

Subject: New Debian developer Taavi Väänänen

finally an email with some good news :-)

my brain is constantly flipping between "why is my backpack so heavy" and "oh I should also carry $X too with me next time" with various values of $X #gpn22

is sending photos of FLIRTs to someone considered flirting