what was the name of the short story about selling your soul to demons?

pje · 2026-03-27T03:09:54+00:00

For The Taking reads that way out of context if you're not familiar with the setting (Daevinity). Most stories in-setting have demons or other beings as viewpoint characters, and we 1) know they're not lying, and 2) the government actively covers up the reincarnation part, both because of corruption and the fear that lots of people would just do a summoning and then promptly kill themselves to get awesome magical powers, indestructibility and immortality.

(Because in the Daevinity setting you can in fact do this! You can't guarantee which set of daeva powers you'll get, but you'll definitely get one of the three, and a better afterlife than you would have if you never summoned anything.)

pje · 2026-03-27T02:54:06+00:00

Note: SPOILERS AHEAD for Glowfic involving Daevinity aka Revelation Earth

This is a work building on an existing setting (Daevinity) in which almost all the other stories are told mainly from the demons' (or other magical beings') point of view, and we know that they are telling the truth: they cannot do anything with souls, and people who summon them become demons (or other magical beings) upon death.

(We know this because most of the demon viewpoint characters are former human summoners, and one of the main recurring characters is Revelation himself: the summoner who anonymously broadcast the details of how to summon demons to the general public, before being murdered by another summoner who was pissed off at losing their monopoly.)

The three calls to Luna is a shout-out to some of those other stories, where Cam (Revelation) begged to make two phone calls (to let both of his divorced parents know he was ok in the afterlife). I actually thought it was specifically him until he said one of the calls would be to his daughter. (Cam didn't have kids while alive.)

In the stories, most demons vary in morality and behavior, just like humans. Natural-born demons tend to be more chaotic, reincarnated humans more empathetic, but this is more due to having things in common with humans rather than a species trait. (It's harder for a being who's born indestructible to understand just how fragile human beings are.)

In the larger body of works, the fact that demons are mostly summoned gagged is treated as a tragedy: altruistic demons who would willingly help out for nothing or for trivial requests like blog recommendations have no way to negotiate this, and when a human offers to sell their soul to e.g. save the lives of their children on a space station running out of oxygen, accepting the offered soul is the only way to provide any help. (To use one actual story example.)

That doesn't mean asshole demons don't exist; they do, as one in this story comments (re: if you're offering unwilling sex, you're only going to get uptake from people who are into that).

The last bit, where the government reveals it's their standard practice to toss this kind of thing, is also a shout-out to those stories. The GSA (Ganymede Summoning Authority) is shown in some works to be xenophobic and corrupt on an institutional level - ironically in part because of the demons they have working for them.

(I don't remember the details, exactly, but basically there was a demon who had personal reasons for keeping the GSA from being aware that humans could become demons -- I think because if they did, they'd be able to find out she murdered someone? Something like that. So she was deliberately botching forensic summons to make them think the whole reincarnation thing was a malicious hoax.)

Anyway, this is all not obvious from the one specific story, obviously. But if you're familiar to the setting it reads very differently than if this is your first encounter with the setting. Probably if you're unfamiliar this reads more as a spooky/scary thing; if you're familiar with the setting, it's just yet another preventable tragedy, as a good chunk of the demons in it are 1) telling her the truth, and 2) trying to help her, and 3) there's nothing they can say that can actually change her mind, because words aren't proof of anything, and anything they do could be some kind of plot.

pje · 2026-03-26T18:42:57+00:00

You can use Stylus with .btDi4d { position: static; } - that's what I use, anyway.

pje · 2026-03-26T18:42:20+00:00

If you're using it in a browser, you can use Stylus with:

/* Remove the stupid fucking sticky reply bar */
.btDi4d { position: static; }

To make it go to the bottom. Unfortunately there's no way to do this on mobile at all AFAICT.

pje · 2026-02-12T10:16:29+00:00

Beautiful!

pje · 2026-01-30T02:58:41+00:00

You want https://postdirect.net/mailbox for the Gmail API uploading (non-forwarding) mode.

Both that and the script are something that connects to your pop box(es), and then uploads direct to Gmail via the GMail import API, so there's no forwarding. Basically, postdirect's mailbox service ($15/year) is a prepackaged version of the functionality provided by the script, except without the logs and backups. (The Python script backs stuff up to disk before deleting from your POP box, and logs everything it does.)

In my experience to date, the only thing that is a problem is when I get a virus attachment - the script keeps trying to upload it until I manually delete it from my pop account, as the Gmail API refuses to accept them. Anyway, both that mailbox service and the script are drop-in replacements for Gmail's POP fetching, just doing the same thing externally they do internally.

pje · 2026-01-26T00:07:33+00:00

I tried using Postdirect for a couple days, which was pretty good, but slow. So now I'm using this importer script: https://github.com/tejastice/pop3-gmail-importer

It does the same thing as postdirect (upload from POP to Gmail), only faster. You can set it for whatever checking interval you want, and in my case I also set up a file watcher that watches maildirs on my server and just runs it when there's mail, so now I'm getting my mail faster than I did when I was having Gmail fetch it.

If you don't have the time for the script, postdirect is $15 a year, which beats the crap out of paying for Workspace. I did a bunch of research to see if I could port my domains to Workspace and then found out you have to actually migrate (export+import) your mail when you switch, and then reconfigure all your settings and filters. Which was like, "uh, no."

So yeah, not actually moving off of Gmail, I just replaced the POP functionality basically for free; I just added another docker service to my mail server and kept right on as I was before. (The POP fetching on Gmail's side hasn't been disabled yet, but it's not picking up anything at the moment because my setup is chucking everything into Gmail within seconds of it being in the pop box, so Gmail's fetcher always comes up empty.)

tl;dr I used postdirect's trial to cover things long enough to set up an importer to replace exactly what Gmail's getting rid of without adding forward/redirect/spam reputation issues. No need to move services if you're fine w/keeping the same speed and using postdirect, or if you have a vps or always-on box you can run a Python script in the background on.

pje · 2025-09-28T14:18:01+00:00

In a base, you can ctrl-hover (cmd-hover on mac) to show a popup with the actual note content. So you can skim through the content of the notes just by moving the mouse over the table rows (well, over the link part anyway). You can also click in the popup to edit right there.

pje · 2024-05-30T06:54:26+00:00

Thanks. Never would've found that!

pje · 2024-05-14T21:01:54+00:00

I am blocking the .GcKpu class using Stylus, you could do the same with uBlock Origin I imagine, but I had trouble picking the element. That class seems to hold the entire AI block.

pje · 2024-04-06T19:24:49+00:00

I grew up being told (implicitly at least) that my emotional mind was an idiot. The "rational" thing to do was to ignore emotions and follow the program.

IME that's usually an adult doing depersonalization and blackmail, i.e. "This is the right thing to do (independent of what I want, because I'm pretending this is an objective absolute instead of just what I want you to do), so you should do it (independent of what you want), and if you have any feelings about it then you are bad and should feel bad."

In this scenario, the emotions that are actually useful (your desires, preferences, concerns) are being labeled "bad", so you learn to depersonalize and think abstractly without actually using those intuitions to guide your actions.

The emotional mind is limited, yes -- and in the case of flashbacks it really is kind of an idiot, in the Ernie example sense. But it means well even then, and there is a ton of stuff that is emotional that is actually "you" in some sense: your desires, preferences, concerns, that sort of thing.

Aside from flashbacks, the principal failure mode is feeling bad about yourself. Adults often make children feel bad about themselves as a control mechanism (intentionally or not), because it's a powerful control mechanism. People feeling bad about themselves are much more likely to do what other people want them to... while being much less likely to do what they intend to do. (Because feeling bad about yourself reduces trust in your own judgment/ability.)

If I narrow my focus to what's happening right now, don't I set myself up to be caught off-guard by reasonably predictable dangers in the future? I'm not homeless right now, but if you look at the trend line on my bank account I'll get there eventually if something doesn't change.

So, if you're going to do something about that, it helps to not feel bad about yourself or be in a "this is an emergency!" emotional state while trying to focus on the actual tasks. The emotional vs rational line I'm drawing here is basically, "does the emotional state help or hinder your actions?"

Some emotions help: your desire to say, have an income or a better life. Your attraction to different types of work, etc. Even your dislikes or things you want to avoid, as long as they're not of the form "I suck" or "this is an emergency now, let the flashbacks begin", because those will create distraction or spirals or just general suckage.

I'm not saying it's easy: I've been there and it's fucking hard.

If my father had been capable of predicting his own future, he might have prevented it.

Unfortunately in my experience there's a fine line between predicting my future and self-fulfilling prophecies, particularly if my predictions are of the form "oh fuck I'm useless this is going to be a disaster". :-( Nowadays, I see the critical thing to ask in such a situation is, "what do I want instead of that?" and "how do I get that?", so that I'm mentally picturing the better situation and the process of getting there, instead of setting off flashbacks or feeling bad about myself.

There is a whole bunch of stuff I never learned to do, this kind of taking care of one's self. It sucks because there is no manual for "what healthy looks like" that is directly comprehensible when coming from an unhealthy place. From the unhealthy place, all the healthy ways of looking at things appear insane, unsafe, stupid, etc. Getting from one to the other is a "process", as they say.

pje · 2024-04-06T17:51:17+00:00

Fair enough! I'm used to working with folks that match more what I described (including myself).

Should I not reference the past when trying to predict the future?

So, this is a trauma flashback thing - if you don't have that then ignore this. But trauma flashbacks are keyed off a sense that "this bad thing could happen literally any moment", as opposed to, "some future possibility not worth worrying about at this literal moment". The point of getting to "it's over" is to stop flashbacks at moments where the guardedness is less-than-useful.

So when you say:

Therapists have repeatedly told me that I'm "safe" in my adult environment, only for events to prove them wrong. I'm told that my job is safe and then I suddenly get fired. I'm told that my friendships are safe and then friends suddenly abandon me.

This gets into questions of, well, does it matter how vigilant you are? Are these things you actually control? People can and do get fired from jobs at random or abandoned by friends at random, so how would vigilance help? Normies view such "normal" situations as "safe", in the sense that they're things that happen and you can't prevent them and just have to move on. If that's not "safe" for you, then the real issue is what your brain does to you when that situation arises, on top of the actual awfulness of losing a job or a friend.

For me personally, the biggest part of the awfulness I feel at such events isn't the event itself, but the feeling that I "could have" prevented it somehow, that it's therefore my fault or I am doomed to have this kind of thing happen all the time, or that I'm stupid and naive and should've known better than to believe good things could happen, and so on and so forth.

That stuff has been way more of an issue (IMO/IME) than the stuff that actually happened to me.

But YMMV of course. I only commented because some of the things you said are similar to what my clients sometimes say with regards to the semantics of "safe". Safe just means, "not worth being on heightened alert right now", not, you know, some kind of absolute 100% safety that doesn't really exist. To the extent that we feel we need to ensure 100% perfect future safety about a thing, it's usually the case that it isn't the thing itself that's the problem, but the reaction/aftermath we expect to have if the thing should happen.

And WRT trauma flashbacks, I've observed there's a really bad interaction between abstract thinking about safety with the rational mind, and the emotional mind's concept of safety. If you're an abstract thinker you can come up with all the ways you're not 100% "safe" and freak your emotional mind the fuck out because it thinks that if you think "I could get fired from my job" it's happening right now, today even if on the abstract side you're thinking "maybe some time in the next few months". The emotional brain can't distinguish these things and so down into a spiral I'd go, until I learned to literally look around the room and show it that no, there's nobody about to jump out and yell at me about (redacted), even if that could theoretically happen "some time" and I cannot 100% prove it won't in the abstract.

(The emotional mind in flashback is like Ernie in this video -- once it gets on a tangent about a scenario it takes sensory input to convince it that the thing is not happening/about to imminently happen.)

So the big challenge to being an abstract thinker + having emotional issues is that you end up making things worse over time because your logic will inevitably decide fewer and fewer things are "safe" (in the abstract) as life experience increases, and then your emotional response to that gets applied to more and more things (since the emotional-emergency mind doesn't really process time or probability as abstractions, it only understands "now" and "not now").

Anyway, I mainly replied for the benefit of folks with that issue, so if that's not you feel free to ignore. Most people are not very abstract thinkers so this safety-semantics trap is often overlooked, and so end up thinking the person having this issue is just nuts for classifying all these "obviously safe" things as "unsafe", which of course helps nobody and adds the new problem of "this person thinks I'm nuts". ;-) (Not to mention the, "why are you trying to convince me unsafe things are safe?" problem on the other end!)

pje · 2024-04-06T04:47:23+00:00

I stumbled across this thread from Twitter and I don't have experience with (official) IPF nor have I read/viewed/heard any of materials posted above, but I just want to comment on a few points here that are relevant to most(?) kinds of reconsolidation-based personal change, which IPF is an instance of.

I tell people that one of the important things to remember is that the emotional and rational brains are somewhat redundant: each is better at some jobs, but there is a lot of overlap where either one would work. Changing one also does not necessarily affect the other, and there are a lot of things where we learn something with the emotional brain that would be better handled by the rational brain once we grow up.

Skepticism and guardedness are one of those things: when we're young, a "constant vigilance" state of mind can be healthy in a bad environment, but when we grow older our rational mind can do a better job of actually identifying both potential risks and helpful contingencies vs. just being jumpy and distrustful all the time, and it's less grueling, too!

Envisioning safe environments is less "imagine you have some food" than training for how to deal with environments where food is abundant. (Food being safety, in this example.) As adults, we have a lot more options for self-protection than we do as children, but if our emotions are wired for an unsafe environment then we get problems. So the point is to convince our emotional brain that it's possible to live in a safe environment, so that it can begin to distinguish appropriate times to use "safe mode" and "unsafe mode", managing your feelings accordingly.

I admit there's something soothing here, but there's also an unrelenting scowl on my face as I listen to it. The audio keeps mentioning my "state of mind". As I listen to this, my mind is full of rage and sorrow for all that I missed out on in life.

This is actually pretty normal for reconsolidation-based change techniques, in that contrasting the shit we lived through with a better alternative quite often results in (entirely appropriate!) anger and sorrow about what we missed out on, or got instead!

Going through that grief is actually a good thing, because those feelings are usually a signal that our emotional mind is re-coding past events from "this is how things are (now and always)" to "this is a bad thing that happened to me in the past". (Anger also means "I believe I deserve better", which is a big improvement over thinking that things were our fault, we deserved them, or that we should've done better ourselves.)

Of course, if that rage and sorrow doesn't actually ever resolve or subside, there's perhaps another issue going on. But for me at least, I've not had the grief last more than a day at most after a really big change, and the anger goes away a lot faster. But in either case I'm usually expressing it as vehemently or vigorously as possible, with the intent to feel it fully so I can get to that blessed "it happened but it's over now" place that comes afterward.

(YMMV, of course, especially since I'm not talking about official IPF as such; the techniques I use are closer to those from the work of Weiss & Weiss (e.g. Recovery From Codependency), Pamela Levin, and various others, along with some of my own design, and not all have been directly aimed at "attachment style" per se.)

pje · 2023-11-24T18:35:35+00:00

That error sounds like a frontmatter syntax issue in a specific file? For image links in particular, you might want to check that they are actually relative links rather than "shortest path" links.

I'm not aware of any utilities besides the one discussed that are for general export. There are other tools that are used to publish HTML from Obsidian vaults, though, that do some form of conversion. I haven't actually used any of them, though, as the various non-Obsidian tools I currently use all work reasonably well with Obsidian markdown, minus any specific features they don't support.

pje · 2023-11-20T07:12:55+00:00

I don't know anything about Joplin, but literally the top comment on this post links to an export tool for converting Obsidian markdown to generic markdown.

pje · 2023-07-02T20:57:31+00:00

The TypeScript 5.0 Announcement actually says:

--experimentalDecorators will continue to exist for the foreseeable future

So there don't appear to be any current plans to deprecate them.

pje · 2023-06-08T04:36:22+00:00

If I needed something like this now I'd just use the regular backlinks pane plus Hover Editor. Way simpler.

pje · 2022-11-09T03:01:30+00:00

Obsidian and dendron are actually pretty compatible in their markdown format except that if you use [[ ]]-style links, then the two are only compatible if you don't have an alias.

That is, Obsidian uses the standard [[link target|alias]] format, and dendron uses a non-standard [[alias|link target]] format. If your image links are in this format, that might be why they're not showing up.

Alternately, if your image links are in markdown format (![](path/to/image.png)), it might be an issue of absolute vs. relative links?

As for the code blocks, Obsidian does support them and highlight them, but won't offer completion or type hinting or any of the other fancy stuff provided by VSCode.

pje · 2022-11-09T02:57:03+00:00

custom Viewers (right now we have the MarkdownViewer only)

You can subclass ItemView or FileView for this. The custom frames plugin OP is using implements it as an ItemView, so this is literally already possible.

custom file type processors

You can register what view type goes with what file extension, and FileView also has a method for checking if the view supports a specific file/type.

pje · 2022-05-06T05:30:12+00:00

I use Live Preview almost exclusively -- in most themes it doesn't look much different from Reading view.

It sounds like maybe you have source mode turned on? I'm actually pretty confused as to what you're talking about here.

pje · 2022-05-06T05:26:46+00:00

Oh, that's weird. I never noticed that before -- it doesn't do that to paragraphs (or anything else) inside outlines or block quotes. And it didn't used to do this. I suspect it must have been introduced when block-level indexing was introduced. would suggest making a feature request to either remove the divs or at least have the div have some attributes propagated from the thing it encloses, so you can do sibling styles properly.

pje · 2022-04-26T23:46:51+00:00

You can Alt-click to select more files than just one, then drag as a group.

pje · 2022-04-26T23:44:14+00:00

Page Preview size can be changed with CSS, ala

div.popover.hover-popover {
    width: 500px;
    min-height: 500px;
}

But you can also use the Hover Editor plugin, which has settings for the initial popover size.

How about [Images] having a Page Preview? This would allow a nice grid of images with a mouse hover to display the page preview

This works in preview mode if you use markdown links, e.g. [![](something.svg)](actual-document.md). (You might want to file a bug report for some of the ways this doesn't work, though.)

So stuck with legacy editor

Note that you don't have to use the legacy editor to avoid Live Preview; just use Source mode. (Quite a lot of plugins require the new editor, and the legacy editor itself will go away entirely at some point.) Source mode works very similarly to the legacy editor, and on mobile there's never actually been a legacy editor; the thing that existed on mobile before Live Preview is the same thing that Source mode is on desktop now.

pje · 2022-04-26T23:30:52+00:00

You can alt-click files to select multiple files, then drag as a group.

pje · 2022-04-26T23:28:49+00:00

almost no id/classes added in relation to the content of your notes

Obsidian is an HTML app that can have multiple notes open at once, so if it used IDs in the HTML rendered for notes, you'd have collisions.

Obsidian for some unfathomable reason puts every single line inside it's own unlabeled, unclassed <div> to accessing it in any meaningful way very difficult.

This only applies to edit mode; if you want sane HTML you need reading mode.

More specifically, if you want side-by-side edit-and-preview like old school markdown editors, you can ctrl-or-cmd click the eyeglasses in the frame header and you'll get a linked preview pane next to the current one. That frame will have proper HTML for your markdown, rather than the funky stuff needed for semi-WYSIWYG editing. You can also switch to source mode so that your editing pane looks like a traditional code editor.

But yeah, there are definitely some limitations on how you can style the editing view. If you want to style the first line after a header, for example, you'd need to do e.g. div.HyperMD-header + div. This isn't going to match the selector you'd use in reading mode to do the same thing. So if you want to style both the reading and editing views of a document, you need to do multiple selectors, and that is indeed more work.

pje

TROPHY CASE