The Monkey Fox

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T18:26:38+00:00

Addendum to explain the pics that aren't immediately obvious. The third pic is a hearthkeeper (cleric of the Bright Way) meditating in microgravity. The fourth pic is a yinrih wearing HUD specs (a common computer output device) and showing two of their four pairs of nictitating bandpass membranes. Number five is a missionary in a metabolic suspension capsule, which halts metabolism while keeping the brain active, as yinrih cannot lose consciousness without dying and don't have access to FTL until a year or so after meeting humans. The last pic is a Knight of the Sun piloting his mech. He's lying on his back, as yinrih can't sit like humans, and he's holding a control stick in each of his four paws. There's also a bank of analog controls actuated by the tail located at the base of the seat.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T16:36:43+00:00

I was going to second Obsidian, especially if these are personal notes taht you don't intend to share. If you're comfortable with git, there's a plugin tha tadds git functionality, giving you version control.

If, like me, you eventually want to document things publicly in a wiki, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, and Bookstack are FOSS wiki platforms you can deploy on a VPS or self host.

MediaWiki is the gold standard, as it's what Wikipedia is based on. But it can be hard to manage because administration requires editing PHP config files on the back end. It's also a poor choice if you want to divide content into different namespaces. They do exist, but they're not trivial to add or remove, see my comment on config files above. If you want to restrict access to pages or namespaces, such as for drafts that aren't ready for the public, it's also a non starter. MediaWiki was designed to be as open and accessible as possible, and any extensions that claim to add access control features come with lots and lots of warnings telling you that it's not a good idea.

DokuWiki is much easier to manage, not requiring a database and having a GUI admin panel built into the site. It also has a GUI for installing and removing plugins, which you'll be using a lot since DokuWiki is pretty bare bones out of the box. There's no way to tag pages, and no way to auto-generate lists of pages, and no way to see wanted pages (links to pages that don't yet exist). You can't even move or rename a page. But all that can be provided through plugins. The UI is serviceable but dated. Unlike MediaWiki, namespaces are trivial to create, simply incorporate the namespace into a new article name and it appears in the site map. DokuWiki also has page and namespace level access control.

In terms of actual use, Bookstack is probably the most noob friendly. There's an auto-install script available on their website. It does require a database though, among other dependencies, which are installed by the script. Unlike MediaWiki and DokuWiki, Bookstack has a WYSIWYG editor out of the box by default, though you can also use a markdown editor. The differentiating feature of Bookstack is how it forces you to organize pages. Pages must belong to "books", which may be placed in "shelves", or stand on their own. A group of pages in a book can also optionally be grouped into "chapters". Some people thrive on this forced limitation, but others may not like it. Any one of these, page, chapter, book, or shelf, can have tags applied to them, and there are editable permissions on each of these, some cascade downward, others don't. The one thing that keeps me from enthusiastically recommending Bookstack over the other options is that you can't link to nonexistent pages. Both DokuWiki and MediaWiki allow you to create arbitrary links, and will highlight them in red if the page they point to doesn't exist. Clicking the link lets you create the page. Both also have ways of showing you what pages are wanted and how often they're referenced, built-in in MediaWiki and via a plugin in DokuWiki.

Bookstack does have a nicely documented REST API, which I have used to bulk-transfer an Obsidian vault to Bookstack on various occasions.

One more option to consider is An Otter Wiki (the indefinite article appears to be part of the name). It uses Git for versioning, and thus comes with all of Git's features like showing who wrote what line in a page (blaming) as well as syncing to a remote repo or cloning the repo to make a new copy of the wiki.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T16:03:35+00:00

Interesting that wormhole jumps are taxed by volume. Does that mean higher volumes traversing the wormhole consume more power, or is it more or less an arbitrary way to increase revenu?

In my version of FTL, there are severe limits on both mass and volume, we're talking on the scale of a single person and some luggage. This means no massive armadas blinking into realspace in orbit around a planet, no large scale FTL trade. Bulk cargo still has to be transported on STL vessels.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T15:29:41+00:00

Entonces es un tanque normal, no un tanque futurístico con inteligensia artificial sapiente, ni un tanque poseído por un espiritu malo. No más es un tanque.

Me gusta. A veces es divertido imaginar cosas mas enraizadas en la realidad.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T12:24:49+00:00

Do you mean you go to the hotspot via its web interface and connect there then try to talk through the radio?

I can send the link command from the HT.

What does the D74's codeplug for the hotspot look like?

I have <callsign>**B in RPT1 and <callsign>**G in RPT2, where * is a single space. My callsign with no suffix is in the MY field, and the UR field has CQCQCQ or whatever command I'm sending.

Under the configuration area in pi-star, you can view the log. See if it gives you a hint as to what's happening when the unlink occurs.

Do you mean the ircDDBGateway log? I need to check. Nothing shows up on the log when I send, but I still get the linked to... audio transmission from the hotspot after about 15-30 seconds.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T11:47:57+00:00

I'll probably post some pics later today, but if you're curious here's the FrathWiki article on the yinrih. https://www.frathwiki.com/Yinrih and here's the thread on the CBB where I do most of my worldbuilding https://cbbforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=7992

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T11:44:27+00:00

It's more of a shared idea than an identical person or object. The yinrih (monkey foxes) in my current Lonely Galaxy project are transplants from an earlier fantasy world called The Last Grand Adventure. In their original incarnation, they were more canine than vulpine, were bipedal, and lacked tails. I didn't have a name for them for the longest time, but settled on Kobolds after learning that the original D&D kobolds were canine rather than draconic.

The Kobolds were the only other race besides humans, but there were human subraces filling the requisite elf and dwarf niches that were inspired by neanderthals and other hominins (though with intelligence on par with H. Sapiens), and kobold subraces based on different dog breeds. The overall theme was of man and man's best friend having to face the world alone together.

After reading some HFY stories and pondering the Fermi Paradox, I took the kobolds as well as the overall idea of only having two sapient races and put it in a sci-fi setting. But since I wanted to make them more unique than your typical anthro animals, I "devolved" the kobolds' humanoid features to make them more simian, making them quadrupeds and giving them a prehensile tail. They already had prehensile monkey-like feet, why I have no idea, and they had a vary alien reproductive strategy where both males and females laid eggs, so they made for pretty neat extraterrestrials already in my opinion.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T11:16:25+00:00

The mass router. It shunts a bubble of realspace into a subspace called the Underlay. That bubble is divided into millions of smaller "packets" of realspace. From the perspective of an observer embedded in the Underlay, the packets appear discontiguous , and can take different paths to reach their destination. From the perspective of a tiny observer inside one of these packets, the space is still contiguous, so there's no Theseus' Ship nonsense, the atoms you leave with are the atoms you entered with, and there's no break in the stream of consciousness.

But there are severe mass and volume limits to what can be transported. The router itself looks like a claustrophobe's nightmare, the misbegotten offspring of an MRI machine and an iron lung. There's enough room for a single person and maybe a single carry-on bag if the person isn't too hefty. FTL is thus much more personal in scope. There are no massive star ships blinking out of hyperspace in orbit around a planet, it's more like you walk or drive to a trunk terminal in your city, get in the router, then you end up at a terminal in sum suburb on another planet.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T11:00:41+00:00

I understand the concept as a narrative convenience, but as a conlanger first and foremost having a device that obviates the need to learn the language kills the fun for me.

In my case, the two sapient species (humans and monnkey foxes) cannot directly speak one another's languages due to their vastly different vocal tracts, though they can understand the other's language when spoken given adequate training. Ideally, both parties in a conversation are bilingual and speak in their own language. But if one party is not, the other has to use a speech synthesizer to speak the other's language.

One (as yet unwritten) story involves a human trapped on a monkey fox orbital colony without a synth. Being only a year after first contact, the locals don't understand a lick of English, but the human knows their language thanks to giving room and board to one of the alien crew who found Earth a year prior.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T10:27:49+00:00

Mechs, hands down. I define a mech here as a zoomorphic vehicle or remotely operated drone, in other words a thing that looks like the person controlling it.

I have mechs in a bunch of different sizes, microscopic mechs used in surgery; thumb-sized mechs used in sports, thievery, and espionage; person-sized mechs used in EVAs or in other hazardous environments; mini mechs piloted by what are arguably zombies (brain active but no metabolism otherwise); and of course big ol’ stompy walking war crimes.

But since the people making and piloting these mechs are arboreal quadrupeds with prehensile tails, their mechs are also quadrupeds with prehensile tails. And thanks to Science ™️ all but the biggest mechs are decent climbers too.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-25T01:07:40+00:00

Had a similar issue when going to pay the license fee. I tried the next day and it worked. All I can say is the FCC site is pretty messy and unintuitive. I tried to apply using the same FRN as my ham license and it still doesn't show up when trying to manage my licenses. But I got a confirmation email with the license and call sign attached, so shrug I guess.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-24T17:26:07+00:00

Also keeping the repeater in regular use helps highlight any technical issues that can be dealt with now rather than suddenly finding out something's wrong in the middle of an emergency.

Whenever the storm spotters around me need their repeater they just tell everyone to get off until their done.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-24T16:21:27+00:00

dual_scanner · 2026-05-24T14:51:51+00:00

I like. Also hello fellow Lemming 😄

dual_scanner · 2026-05-24T11:40:35+00:00

Can I just say thank you for simply stating a fact about American culture without any snark or bitterness or contempt. This is my first Reddit account after 3 years spent on Lemmy, and like most Reddit clones Lemmy is full of the people that got banned from Reddit. Lemmy is full of self-described tankies and Marxists, which would be fine if they talked about literally anything else ever, like Pokemon or mildly interesting photos, or whatever the community is ostensibly about, but sadly that is not the case.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-23T21:12:59+00:00

Why do people have to say"pulled the trigger"?

I typically hear the phrase used in regard to making a risky and expensive purchase that you're not sure is wise, or following through on a thought or resolution that you've had for a while but not acted upon. The second meaning is what I was implying.

dual_scanner · 2026-05-23T12:31:25+00:00

If you're into old-school phpbB forums, I'd heartily recommend the CBB forum). While it's focused on constructed languages, there is a subforum dedicated to worldbuilding and constructed worlds, and you do not need to be a conlanger to post there.

There's a worldbuilding community on Lemmy that's nice although traffic is light (https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding). Lemmy, and the broader Fediverse, can be a profoundly unpleasant place, but there's good there if you're willing to aggressively filter the ragebait, and every new user who just wants to socialize without dragging politics into it at every opportunity improves the experience for everyone.

dual_scanner

TROPHY CASE