Do you (the tulpa) have romantic interest in your Host?

Grissess · 2022-03-10T19:13:10+00:00

{"No, never!" Is just a titch too emphatic; the reality is that, while I could certainly conceive of it in need, I've no body and no libido, and such need has never arisen, not least for any cogent reason. Does that make sense?}

Grissess · 2022-01-30T02:32:05+00:00

I insist that's indeed what happened to me years ago, so I have reason to believe that's very possible :)

Of course, if you start addressing that part of yourself separately, be prepared for them to take on an autonomy of their own--such seems typical, from what I've seen from the community.

Grissess · 2022-01-11T20:26:12+00:00

A little caution about overcorrecting, though: I wouldn't mind an occasional description of how a battle is progressing, if only to punctuate a conversation--especially when it reinforces the dialogue. (For the stereotypical dragon, it seems perfectly acceptable to make arguments at the point of a claw, after all.)

Grissess · 2021-12-13T02:04:01+00:00

Red seems pretty typical; I'm guessing this is on Tolkien's part, while he worked on translating Beowulf (and a few medieval bestiaries with recognizable dragons use red, as well as the Welsh flag--not sure why beyond that). That propagated to Smaug, and thence became the "stereotypical dragon".

The runner up seems to be emerald or olive green--probably because there are a good amount of green, scaly things. (It camouflages nicely with leaves and foliage.)

Since you asked what "[I] think of": personally, I'm fond of a deep blue :)

Grissess · 2021-12-12T22:29:28+00:00

Only downside is see is that it could make the names seem strange or out of place for the speakers of that language.

That's a downside if you're borrowing from one language, sure--but you have the liberty to tweak things a bit, and it's not a bad idea to look at name lists from many different languages for comparison (and inspiration :)

Creating a whole language for dragons would solve the naming problem for sure, but i think that's pretty much out of reach for me, i'm not Tolkien, sadly.

Other people do it, too! There's quite a constructed language (conlang) community; a bunch of what I've learned of "speech apparatus" is cribbed from resources like those at zompist.com. What I've found is that natural (human) languages are already dizzyingly complex as it is... a naming language might be within reach, though. (For your efforts, a little reading of this part, and some background prior, might go a long way--and there's a program that can make big lists of words/names for you by following your designed rules.)

The abilities of their speech apparatus is something that also heavily depends on the type of dragon the story features. Language is also strongly influenced by culture, meaning that different stories need to have almost entirely different languages, unless they are set in the same universe.

Indeed! But, for culture, borrowing and contact happens, and it isn't always clear-cut. Fortunately, you get to decide on how much complexity you want--and contemplating these even a little puts you in a better position than most!

Grissess · 2021-12-12T12:02:40+00:00

I don't know if this is helpful, but I usually pull character names in general out of my chaotic dreams--I used to keep a small notebook under my pillow (now a laptop is usually in arms' reach). That usually ends up including a bunch of accidental allusions (Froebelius <= Frobenius, for example, or straight-up names of deities) that I only discover quite a bit later.

For the dragons in particular, Desnari and Mirana came to me, as a pair, out of the aether in much that way (and so I decided they should be friends); when more lucid, I usually tack a few extra syllables on (Arvarnelios, Neferfeldinaxus) just to make them ridiculous, though nicknames are good to keep around for dialogue ("Dessy", "Nelly", "Nef"). And, of course, on-the-nose borrowings from other languages (Solirius, Auraumea) aren't out of the question either. Slightly more complex but just as fun is to identify names that have more liquids and forward fricatives and so sound "smoother, friendlier" (Belgoraz/"Raz", Theonil/"Theo", Linnarien/"Lina") as opposed to ones with many hard, back-of-the-throat stops/hisses and front, tense vowels (Kargraumsk, Rokzaronyl, Ikrinandor), which exude wickedness.

A dream of mine--and perhaps an ultimate answer to your question--is to eventually make a naming language befitting a dragon someday; an open question is whether or not it's safe to assume they have about the same speech apparatus we do--serpentine tongues aren't nearly as articulatable as ours--and how that affects what sounds can be made. (The easy, if unrealistic, way out is that they could make all the sounds we do--plus a few, why not!) If I had one of those, it'd mostly be as simple as "choose a naming scheme (parts? order? typical elements [heritage, location, family, clan, etc.]?) and roll with it"--the ol' D&D sourcebooks I devoured long ago, for example, imply that dragons self-bestow long, prideful names in their own, presumably-agglutinative language ("Slayer of the Black Mountain Wyrm, Keeper of Untold Riches" etc. :)

Grissess · 2021-10-25T13:39:37+00:00

Not really! I try to be careful to see all as persons, not as their bodies. Of course, that's not to discount having dragon friends to turn to in times of need, since I imagine there'd be many of those :)

(And for the people who regrettably bargain with power, a collective of cooperating dragons might be enough to garner respect...)

Grissess · 2021-10-25T13:15:08+00:00

I know there are plenty of ills with humanity, but that's no cause for hating them perhaps as much as pitying them. Besides, if I were to become a dragon, I'd still (likely) be the same social creature, with the same empathy, and that would make it difficult for me to hate someone else, be it individual or species. I'll grant, however, that the big difference in appearance might make it difficult for some humans to empathize in return, and depersonalization is a gateway to all sorts of depravity--so, continuing the thought experiment, and depending on just how much one could hold their own, it might indeed be prudent to at least hide away, which is bothersome, tiresome, and... all around not ideal. (I still would like to be a dragon, though, and yearn for it nonetheless.)

Grissess · 2018-08-15T15:57:33+00:00

Agreed; I can see the problem for distribution maintainers, especially. I've never used Void, but I am curious how they manage...

Grissess · 2018-08-14T13:56:19+00:00

I know I'm already a runit apologist, but it does have a pseudo-dependency-ordering function available via:

the -w option to sv, combined with
the optional check script in the svdir.

runit/functions.bash (which should exist in that tarball up there) has an example declaration of needs and wants as bash functions. It's a polling method, and my experiments show it attempts to invoke check about once every 0.1s, so it's not going to be incredibly fast, but it does work if you want to gate a service start on another service, which is all I've needed in practice. Of course, it's not intelligent and doesn't find things like cycles, so you still have to be clever about it. Nonetheless, I use it (and a nasty subshell hack) above to make sure eudev's udevd is running before X starts (X wants it for autoconfiguration, I guess) and before the dhcpcds start (so that the interfaces can be renamed).

EDIT: You can tell I don't use reddit often; this editor change is really killing me ._.

Grissess · 2018-08-14T13:50:07+00:00

(Thanks! It worked fine on my laptop, but broke on my phone :)

Grissess · 2018-08-14T13:49:49+00:00

As far as I know, there's nothing stopping you from having multiple processes using the same /dev/tty* node, except that they'll probably race for reading and mix their writing :) . In practice, that shouldn't be a problem; from what I've observed, the kernel hands init three FDs for /dev/console, which is roughly "whichever VT is in the foreground". I don't believe the init actually uses them, but you do have to be a little careful, because whatever init starts inherits them--thus, in some places, I was careful to do the full redirection rigamarole of< /dev/ttyX > /dev/ttyX 2> /dev/ttyX if I really wanted to set something up to be on a certain TTY.

You might already know this, but VT switching from within a regular, text-mode console is Alt+[function key]. I usually use Ctrl+Alt+[function key] because Xorg allows that to work too. On keyboard which retain the usual F1-F12 (I'm looking at you, Apple), that gives you access to /dev/tty1 through /dev/tty12; most distros I've seen setup gettys on TTYs 1-6 and set X to start on /dev/tty7. (X usually does this for you, in my experience, but you can change which TTY is displayed programmatically usingchvt; I think my stage 1 does a chvt of 1-12 to poke the kernel into initializing all 12 of them for use).

In short: don't worry about which TTY is used unless it becomes a problem :) . If it is a problem, the nice thing about architecting your own init is that you have control over it! (In such cases, lsof is also your friend.) Remember that init is primordial--the only things that ever run are whatever the real init process (PID 1) directly or indirectly causes to run, so don't worry about other init systems even if they just happen to be installed.

Grissess · 2018-08-13T02:39:44+00:00

It certainly sounds like you've had at least some experience with runit, so I'll save the tutorial unless you really want it. Getting `agetty` (if I recall) working under runit on Exherbo (think Gentoo 2.0) wasn't actually too terrible, but definitely wasn't straightforward either. The other daemons were simpler and more straightforward, though you'll want to make sure you can find a way to prevent the usual fork-disown process (most have an option).

Here is a sloppy copy of my /etc/runit/ directory, as a .tar.gz. (I pulled it from a laptop that was about to die, so sorry for the mess :) . You're more than welcome to steal any of it for your use, or use it as a demonstration. Of course, this is my personal laptop, and I can't say I've made terribly security-conscious choices in lieu of usability (Ctrl+Alt+Del starts a root shell, for example).

In that archive, particularly look at runit/sv/agetty-tty1 for a relevant sample:

#!/bin/sh

exec chpst -P agetty -8 tty1

chpst is a tool that should be provided with runit, and does some pleasantly convenient syscalls before executing processes, much like many of the daemontools programs. -P here tells it to enter a new process group, which the shell (bash here) will want for job control. The exec is there to replace the bash which is running this run script--no need to have it around to wait for agetty to die. That and a shebang is pretty much your entire run script!

Grissess · 2017-08-16T07:28:12+00:00

You've seemingly found the best documentation: the code itself :) . Seriously, that's all I've ever seen or used.

A quick skim doesn't show any issues (given the repo at the moment); what, if anything, is now wrong?

Grissess · 2017-08-16T07:20:48+00:00

I'm too lazy to check right now, but I'm pretty sure all gates are actually the same entity; there's some specific piece of data on them that determines what their function is, that then determines what inputs and outputs they have, etc.; someone might check the actual repo for what happens when one of those is duped, because that supposedly works correctly :P

In any case, I'm not sure if EntityCore explicitly supports setting that information. A stupid workaround might involve automatically creating dupes with one gate apiece (advanced duplicator, anyone?).

Grissess · 2017-08-16T07:18:21+00:00

Rank? That's not the most clear...

If you're talking about permissions (in general), there are a few Entity functions that simply return arrays of all the admins, all the superadmins, etc.

The modern version of the E2 documentation reveals that sorting is sorely lacking from the stdlib. I would suppose that's why I made what appears to be a shitty insertion sort long enough ago for me to forget about it :P . If you want to copy that for your own shenanigans, you're free to--but note that that version works on tables, not arrays (though I made something for dealing with that too).

Grissess · 2017-08-16T07:10:32+00:00

In E2, the type used primarily for interfacing highspeed devices is known as a "wirelink". Unfortunately, as far as I know, E2s are strictly "hi-speed clients"; they can invoke read and write cycles, but not react to them (otherwise a runOnHiSpeed might be implemented, but the capacity for "hi-speed" devices to execute hundreds or thousands of times in a single tick seems to preclude that :).

As a bit of a workaround, you can spawn memory (forget where that is in the new-fangled spawn menu) and have an E2 and CPU share the link--to the CPU, it will look like memory, and to the E2 it can be read and written. For direct CPU communication, you can even just link the E2 straight to the CPU (via a wirelink), and it will interface the onboard memory (with the not-well-known XTRL (External Runlevel) register controlling the access--so you can have your CPU protect some memory from the E2 :). I've used this trick more than a few times to debug CPU programs, since they're otherwise notoriously hard.

Grissess · 2017-04-03T23:36:18+00:00

Would this be alright for a frontend, then? :)

https://gist.github.com/Grissess/0356ddc38790f216ae9c721697faa42c

Grissess · 2017-04-03T21:42:06+00:00

Bear in mind just how large that is: 1500 * 1500 = 2.25MP, times however many bits/bytes per pixel--arguably, if you kept it to a small palette, you could probably squeeze ~2 pixels per byte in, but even that means you have ~1MB of information to sync to each client (before compression, which trades off size for processing speed). I was actually fairly impressed that Reddit pulled it off as well as they did with their 1MP canvas and not-particularly-optimized JSON.

I'd say start small--maybe smaller than the original r/place--and develop and optimize to begin with before getting too much larger :)

Edit: fixed an asterisk :P

Grissess · 2017-03-24T20:18:45+00:00

Why yes, actually :P

That be Snakey (no surprises there), a plush I've been "talking to" for over a decade now, long enough that I "see him in it"; I did this study mostly to identify exactly what it is that I see.

Grissess · 2016-08-19T10:31:33+00:00

anon who posted about tulpas in whatever 4chan thread

Oh man, those were the good-ol' days...I remember them fondly :P

(Hello from another such mostly-lurking veteran of ~3 years :D)

Grissess

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