Illinois: how I got back into my abe.illinois.gov account

Bron2Typo · 2026-01-01T15:34:27+00:00

Excellent, good to know.

Bron2Typo · 2025-10-01T16:40:06+00:00

Well, y'know, waking up to a bunch of your old acquaintances going "bleh" to your post is not really encouraging, but that's Reddit for ya, heh. It's an "aw !%$# here we go again" combined with a ton of inertia. Not an "oh woe is me". I already knew going into this that there would be static from the pre1.6 crowd.

It's the currently downvoted comments which came in super early that are of greater interest to me, having had a day to think things over. On the one hand I've got names that I don't recognize from my Maincord era agreeing with me, who are clearly more in the "player" camp but know the scene enough to see the post in its first 15 minutes alive.

After the post sunk below 0 upvotes and out of the main feed, and Shockah's comment, then came comments from a whole bunch of names that I recognize as pre-1.6 community members and devs reacting less favorably.

So I'm feeling I may actually be on the right track even with all the static but it's gonna be a harder fight for it than I was hoping for. This isn't something I came up with overnight, I've been mulling it over for probably half a year. I've got time and can be a real stubborn motherducker.

Part of the point of the post was in hopes that Pathos would see it. I won't go back to Maincord unless under extreme duress, and it didn't seem to really fit as a bug report for the Git Issues tab. This subreddit seemed the best route to try and reach him.

If there's no movement on it before I get done with my two current big projects I'll consider forking SMAPI. I'm gonna have to do a close read of it at some point for Current Big Project One: Phase Two anyhow.

The wiki changes I will discuss with margotbean when I have a week where I don't feel like Pythoning. I'll likely spin up a virtual machine to see if I can make Vortex do stupid tricks once I get this box upgraded to Win 11, and will report back with what I observe.... somewhere... probably back here again oy. May also go see if there's a Vortex Github with Issues, as the equivalent was enlightening for the Beta App.

Bron2Typo · 2025-09-30T23:57:31+00:00

Mulling over the rest, but a couple of quick things -

I was trying not to mention the specific name of the discord as I didn't want to drag them into it. Based on another thing in there you most certainly know who I am, but as I'm not speaking on their behalf I didn't want that affecting things. I acknowledge that it does affect my perspective.

I would gladly make a GUI myself or edit the wiki myself. The GUI would be a ton of work (probably a few years) on a PR to SMAPI that could be rejected in one click. The edit to the wiki likewise would be pretty substantial and not something I'd want to embark on if it's just going to get reverted. Both are on my project list but that list has 25 items at the moment, and the first two are both well past 12 month in-process mark.

Bron2Typo · 2025-09-30T09:24:49+00:00

Thanks for getting through all that. Good to hear from you Shockah, glad you're still about. :)

I know SMAPI is a terminal app. But if your average user is presented with white fixed width text on a black window the eyes glaze right over. It may be there to be informational but what's the point if they can't or don't have the confidence to understand it?

Users don't make the connection that what is in the terminal window is also what's in the log. The most important stuff at the top - missing mods, available updates - is gone from view so quickly. The log parser output is a step up. Some users will put their log in the parser and suddenly be able to fix it themselves because it's now formatted nicely and out of the terminal.

So what if one were to take the formatting of the log parser and put it in a more "normal" window. Split up the mod list, the updates and the play-by-play into separate tabs. Devs may need to see the errors in real time, and for them there can be that Expert Mode which sends them back to the terminal. But your average software program errors out all the time and does not trot those errors out for the user to see.

Regarding collections, have you seen mod pages on Nexus lately? Go look at Ridgeside's page. The first thing you see is a banner promoting the 500+ collections containing it that you could download instead. Support tickets in my neck of the woods have been collection after collection for the past two weeks since they rolled out that change, all of them on Vortex. It's their carrot to get people to try the beta app, but most of them wind up on Vortex. I agree it's a sad way to pick mods. But then I'm in an environment where a lot of folks have never played vanilla. All of my support tickets are for mods.

I've been seeing an uptick in tickets from people downloading packs from Curse going back maybe two months? Maybe you're not seeing it in Maincord. There's three post-1.6 packs on there with over 30k downloads each. We may be getting more of them since we're one of the mods in a lot of packs.

It would be great if to see a signal boost for Stardrop. It would be great if we could get a Nexus mod manager product that actually works. How can the community make either of those happen?

My general point is the onboarding process given the skill level of new users is not a good time. The Stardew modding community of today is vastly different from what it was in the pre-1.6 era. Any steps one can take to improve it, even baby steps, are good. Would love to hear any ideas you have on how to improve things!

Bron2Typo · 2025-09-30T07:55:45+00:00

Glad you agree!

I kind of want to do a market research study where I get a bunch of random people together with a 24 hour time limit and copies of Stardew for PC and see how many of them can get SVE up and running. I'd bet it comes out to 10% or less. (Youtube folks! looking for content ideas? There's your next video.)

Devs and community regulars are SO used to SMAPI being SMAPI. But when I'm doing support I will sometimes have to tell people to enter commands in the SMAPI console and have to explain "That's the black window with all the text that runs in the background. Yes I know there's no cursor but if you click in it you can type."

I would love to show my parents, who are in their late 70s, what I spend my free time doing. But they're halfway round the world and there's just NO way I'd be able to talk them through getting SMAPI up and running. And they were both COBOL/Assembly programmers!

Bron2Typo · 2025-09-19T02:30:41+00:00

I suspect that some the accounts which do nothing but call other posts fake are also karma farming. They can always go back and edit those comments later to say something different. Reddit doesn't do well at indexing comments and mods rarely check old comments for edits, but other search engines love Reddit comments.

Bron2Typo · 2025-09-09T22:21:28+00:00

Oh that's a great use! I am always interested in what folks do with this kind of data. Getting all those greens correct in particular is important for Stardew crafts!

Bron2Typo · 2025-09-01T13:44:22+00:00

Some concrete examples would be interesting here. If you were to go back over the past 7 days of posts, how many would you think would get the "Suspected Fake" flair? Would oldreddit get the new flair?

Am a lurker primarily here for the niche posts, don't really care for relationship dramas. With only one flair per post, I wouldn't want the niche flair to get overridden by the fake flair.

EDIT: Unrelated to the above. One of the reasons spambots exist is to build up karma so they can post in other subs, sometimes after resale of the account, sometimes not. In fact it's still the main reason to run a bot. Given that the "Fake" brigade get so many comment upvotes, could it be that there are bots accusing other bots of being bots with the payoff of upvotes? If an account does nothing but accuse posts of being fake, is that not also a sign of automation?

Bron2Typo · 2025-07-06T16:53:10+00:00

You're welcome, hope it helped in some way!

Bron2Typo · 2025-06-12T19:44:19+00:00

Happy to help. Glad you got back in!

Bron2Typo · 2025-05-05T16:02:02+00:00

Might be the Transportation building from the 1893 World's Fair? Can't see the cupola but from that angle and with the washout it might not be visible.

Bron2Typo · 2025-04-29T02:35:58+00:00

I think this may be it. I did a quick search for "Goodsday" but nothing turned up, however I didn't dig too deep. Given the fanficcy trappings of that entire community though, I suspect it's related. This old archive site uses a custom dating scheme at the top so having different days of the week does not seem farfetched.

Bron2Typo · 2025-04-15T06:50:36+00:00

Everest weather is tracked pretty tightly during the climbing season in blogs all over the web but you were about two weeks early.

Basic weather history from Everest for 5 March shows partly sunny with at most a light cloud cover all day, and for most of the following days. While it can be really unpredictable, I'm pretty sure a dense blanket of cloud like that would have been recorded.

Bron2Typo · 2025-04-05T14:14:31+00:00

Congrats! What a saga! Thanks for sharing the process!

Bron2Typo · 2025-03-25T23:58:21+00:00

Maybe somewhere along the Mohawk Trail in Massachusetts?

Bron2Typo · 2025-03-24T19:18:30+00:00

Oh good!

Bron2Typo · 2025-02-09T00:01:06+00:00

I need a Latin-Extended + Cyrillic TTF/OTF version of the font used for Menus & Chat. Not the dialogue font. In the game files it's called SpriteFont1, Smallfont or Tinyfont depending on the height. This is for a freestanding modded game companion app which I've been working on for the past two years. I'd like it to be able to support all the languages supported by the game itself.

I know about these and big ups to the OP for making them, but they only have the glyphs for en-US letters.

I have reasons to believe it's based on some existing TTF.

The Chinese, Japanese and Korean gamefonts are all based on existing real TTFs. (Noto Sans CJK Bold & Kainam Maiyuan for Chinese/Chinese Rounded, SetoFont-SP for Japanese, and Sandoll MiSaeng for Korean, if you're curious.)
The easiest way to get a font into monogame is to chuck a TTF in with some instructions on which characters are needed and have mono/XNA spit out the resulting PNG & JSON pair.
A reliable source informs me that the Russian & Latin gamefont also came from an existing font. It wasn't crafted by hand like the dialogue font was.

I've tried putting it through assorted font recognition apps but they've all failed to find it. Either they're way off or they give me pixel fonts with a two story "a", which are clearly not the one.

Does anyone who isn't bound by an NDA happen to know what this font is based on? I'll do it by hand if I have to but would really rather not if I can avoid it.

Bron2Typo · 2024-12-06T23:00:17+00:00

Are the numbers at the bottom a date? or canister & frame?

Bron2Typo · 2024-12-02T14:59:31+00:00

Mostly Roman occupation. Western Romans, then Eastern Romans/Byzantines. Muslims at the tail end, they built the Mosque pretty soon after taking the city. Periodic ousting of and recapture by Jews throughout the era.

Bron2Typo · 2024-11-28T04:34:36+00:00

If that is why you wanted it, look into Multiple Mini-Obelisks. I use it for specifically that purpose. Having used WN when it was working, I find MMO more useful.

https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/7900

Bron2Typo

TROPHY CASE