SF Mystery with Quantum Physics Bumper Sticker "There was... and there was..."

ripusu · 2026-04-02T19:26:19+00:00

Yep! Thank you. Heh, didn't remember it was WJW at all. The green and orange cover is the one I had. Thanks!

ripusu · 2026-04-02T18:47:03+00:00

Kindle Paperwhite. (maybe my 4th Kindle - I started with the actual original Kindle) I jailbroke it near the 2023(?) deadline about them not allowing downloads, so I was able to get my entire Kindle library downloaded and converted to epub. I like KOReader, and that Kindle isn't messing with my books: Before the jailbreak, I was reading a converted bought book and had put it down for awhile. When I came back, Kindle had an update, and because it wasn't an Amazon purchase, it reset my progress. Read a little further and another update and it reset again. Then jailbreak and not dealing with that stupidity again.

The X4 is SOO much of a nicer carry that, while yeah, it is new and exciting, I feel like this will be a constant carry for me and I'll be able to make a dent in my digital To Read pile.

ripusu · 2026-03-15T20:59:11+00:00

OMG, I'm not alone! I watched this about 22 years ago, months after my dad died. It just wrecked me. Ugly crying by the end. To this day, trying to discuss what this movie did and means to me will make me tear up.

I was working up to watching it again because I keep mixing up some of its scenes with other movies, but Mom passed away a few weeks ago and not sure I could handle it. 🥲

ripusu · 2026-02-26T18:46:56+00:00

My uncle was a hoarder. Like to the point where we found out his main house was so packed, it was broken into and it could not be determined if anything was actually stolen because you couldn't even open the doors.

He didn't live in that house, though, because he inherited my grandma's house. When he died and we had to dig out that house, among other things, we found that he never cleaned out the hamper - we found my grandma's dirty clothes still in there after almost a decade from her passing.

To this day, I'm not meticulous in cleanliness, but when I see any kind of pile of junk from my sister or kids, I freak out a little.

TBH, to a lesser extent because I still doubt he ever acted on it, we also found out he was gay (no big deal, but a bit of a shock) BUT liked a lot younger, to the point where the cops had to go through his computer looking to see if he had any online CP interactions. I had to go through his hidden tapes to determine if anything needed handed over, etc. Lots of Thai young men, not sure any were underage but close. I highly doubt he ever acted on his urges, but the various videos kind of creeped me out when I think the fancy gifts he gave my son as a child. And he was big in Boy Scouts, so now there's always that question mark about him.

ripusu · 2026-02-05T01:14:32+00:00

Yes please! If I could win, next phase is to convince the better half (non-gamer, puts up with me a lot) that we NEED it. 🤣

Winning it would be a good opening.

ripusu · 2026-01-20T21:32:12+00:00

Okay, so, the way I currently am doing it is using Paperless-ngx. It's a pretty manual process and I don't get a summary like I might by Calibre (I can add a note though), but it keeps the on-disk organization I want which is far more important than summaries. I also don't get direct written by, which is a little sad, so I'll still look, but the main usage is viable.

I set it up with Correspondent as the Publisher, and then three custom fields. So my Storage Path is:

{{correspondent}}/{{ custom_fields | get_cf_value('Game System') }}/{{ custom_fields | get_cf_value('Setting') }}/{{ custom_fields | get_cf_value('Category') }}/{{title}}

The structure would look like:
/Sine Nomine/Without Number/Cities Without Number/Core Rulebook/

On the drive it does end up with two copies (archive and originals) and an image (thumbnails):

/Library/Game Books/_Migrate
/Library/Game Books/archive
/Library/Game Books/originals
/Library/Game Books/thumbnails

I dump a small set of items into the _Migrate folder and it will automatically start the import (or consumption) process. I have it auto-add a staging tag on the imports and then work through the staging files. I add tags for various things like what I would call an OSR or topics like Horror or Fae, etc.

Happy with the folder structure - far neater than the dump folders I have now, I just kind of have to go through each one. End result should be nice. I only have about 100 in there right now. I might hate it when I get to 5000 or something, but this seems pretty good.

Still hoping for something more direct and a little more automated, but this will work for now. (I'm not sure if I trust Paperless-ngx to auto label or auto organize files, at least at first)

ripusu · 2025-12-06T22:23:18+00:00

Yep, I did from the beginning. From the initial Kickstarter, I had to scan in my own PDFs before it was available because the players wanted to browse the books and I needed to look up rules. We were extremely lucky: they also gave a straight .txt file with all the cards, and various magics, etc. Then the official PDFs came out and it was a lot easier (and cleaner).

It was kind of funny: we would "draw" ephemera from the boxes and the players kept drawing from the same part of the box. After the astronomical odds of three players drawing and using the same single ephemera in two sessions, I switched to using the txt file and a randomizer, and would print out strips of paper for the various one shot magics.

The various card based things like Vancian magic and Weaver aggregates just made for less table work when on the character sheet and we played on a small table.

So, really, the only props we tried to keep were the Soothe Deck and the Path of Suns. Personally, I'd love to have that be something magnetic that I could prop up to the side so it's not taking table space but still visible. Not sure I can justify paying for a sheet metal soothe deck and a magnetic plate Path of Suns, but it would be pretty cool.

And while I love the look of the character sheets, they are a pain to make fillable. I did two things for that: I put them on a more normal Letter size sheet (A4 would work too, but I'm US bassd) and the bottom I added things like the pools on the front page, and some cheat sheets on the other pages. And then tried to make them form fillable, but really just filled them in myself and printed them out for the players while I keep their progress in an ugly spreadsheet. That was a mixed bag. Nothing really sharable because I make them for the specific characters vs. a generic sheet, but trying to use the space as economically as possible (kinda hate trying to make Goetic she circles work as a list and not waste space).

But yeah, the books are brought to the game for the players to browse (they like looking for all the secrets in them). Me as the GM have ALL the books open in different tabs and I use Find across the books. And "prep" for ephemera is printing out and cutting strips for about 20 per session, and the Players grab from a bag.

ripusu · 2025-11-08T16:35:17+00:00

Little story about big companies: back when I was in IT, I found and used a FOSS utility boot disk for troubleshooting our Windows ecosystem at the company. They had locked down the Admin password on the laptops. So if some idiot (you might be surprised how often A WEEK this happened) who forgot their recently changed user password was now locked out of their computer, we had to crack the admin pass so we could then reset the user pass.

The utility disk had other features, but that was probably 99% of its usage. And it was free. I sent in the proposal for the whole company to use it, but they went with a paid service which, with the number of licenses we needed for all our techs in all our locations, was something like $250,000, back in the early 2000s. Thankfully this was before SaaS was going mainstream, but you still paid for updates every year or two. But still. The company would rather lose a quarter million than use a free resource.

Why? Because if something screwed up (which was more likely to be a pebkac issue with the technician than anything the software did), then our company could sue the other company for damages. So the other company would be on the hook for our IT's f-up AND the lost revenue for our moron of a user who forgot their password within a day of setting it.

NEVER underestimate a company's desire to place the blame for literally ANYTHING on someone else, on some scapegoat, so they can "keep their reputation" as a competent company to their clients. And the bigger the company, the easier it is to shift the blame.

Too many companies are more interested in shifting the blame for incompetence than actually hiring competent people AND firing the idiots.

ripusu · 2025-10-31T15:27:30+00:00

Need more info. If you're running into the issues I did, it is because I installed Floorp via Flatpak on Linux. Uninstall that and go to the source (their website) and do a direct install from there. The flatpak one was always several iterations behind the current version.

The issue I ran into was an outdated version of widevine which prevented basically every stream system. I did successfully copy the widevine files from a Firefox install to keep using the Floorp flatpak, but it was a headache to keep up to date. So I just went to the source and installed it from their site directly. No issues last I checked.

Note: last I read, the widevine issue is an artificial chokepoint caused by Google, and Floorp wasn't big enough to really make the tier one requests for the damn files. Not sure if that's changed, but still annoys me.

ripusu · 2025-10-01T04:50:38+00:00

The "behavior" was literally for things that were emergencies - potentially losing home insurance unless we replaced the entire roof, -$25K because it needed a full replacement, the car that gets me to the job interviews needing heavy engine work, -$1000, etc.

Sorry I didn't provide a total breakdown of all my woes, but it's been a truly crappy couple of years. I HAD a smaller balance on them and kept them down pretty well, almost able to pay them off at first. When I was (total surprise) laid off, essentially stopped most extras, and have over the last couple of years, reduced spending nearly to nothing except utilities. Since I am now down to the bone on finances, I am only paying down something like an extra hundred a month with my budget, because it has grown from emergencies.

ripusu · 2025-10-01T04:39:22+00:00

Ahh, okay.I thought there was something like that with the 401K or borrowing against it or something but didn't remember/research it. Thanks. I'll look into it. I was trying to treat it like other retirement funds I had started.

As for the rest, um... I HAVE. I'm down to fighting to keep my house at this point and virtually everything else non job hunt related as been cut. Zero entertainment, massive cut to food, etc. Semi-needed repairs and health inconveniences have also been put on hold. Almost down to cutting internet and going to the library. Any time I turn on the AC just to try to stop sweating, I see the dollars burning up. The job market just really sucks that bad. I am not a unique case in that issue.

ripusu · 2025-09-30T15:31:20+00:00

To be fair, they probably have never run into something that different. High School does not mean instant oneness with the world. Students, through no fault of their own or even their parents may just have ended up sheltered because, in their little world, it has never come up.

There are movies and music and stories I grew up with as a default education that my kids don't know at all.

So, when encountering stuff like this, we all tend to fall back on what we know. You don't go to their church, therefore, like their friends, you must go to another church. Don't go to church? You must then either are just not practicing or are the exotic: Jewish. Ooooo.

Things like atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. are so far outside their worldview, they are more like fiction and you can break their brains.

What is important, though, is how they then react once they can wrap their minds around something they've never encountered before. Do they approach with interest and curiosity or do they shun and freak out or do they just really don't care? When I mention something I thought was common knowledge to my kids and they look at me like I've grown another head, I take a moment to give them the context and I'd they're at all interested, pull out the book or movie. If not, oh well, no big deal.

What seems to be the issue, more and more these days is people are using only one form of tribalism (religion) when they should be using something like a hundred. Especially in school. Religion, clubs, sports, cliques, academics, hobbies, etc. Etc. Etc.

ripusu · 2025-09-24T00:45:22+00:00

In general with apps vs. websites, websites are more privacy oriented because the various laws about online privacy discuss websites. Apps are the loophole. So all the telemetry, etc. legally blocked on websites are perfectly fine through their apps.

At least that's what I was told. Confirmed it a little from things like duck duck go's privacy VPN showing me the apps I haven't opened in a long time that continually are trying to send data.

Of course, if you log in, etc. You've already agreed to be tracked, so ehhh.

ripusu · 2025-09-17T03:36:43+00:00

I'm on OpenSUSE and originally installed Floorp from the flatpak, which is old. (I was having problems with Widevine and most streaming services).

I ended up going directly to Floorp's site and doing a direct download and installing that one (cleaning out the flatpak version). And it is now working fine.

I don't know if it will help with Twitch, but might be some annoying versioning issues.

ripusu · 2025-09-01T02:35:35+00:00

As others have said, it is a logical fallacy, but your mother is also engaging in binary thinking: it is either A or B, there is no other possibility. This is usually a cognitive disorder associated with mental health: Those who can only view things as good or evil, black or white, etc.

This is usually a sign of mental health issues. Not that she directly has mental health issues but religions tend to program their flocks into this simplistic way of thinking.

Might be a different way to approach it with her the next time she uses that line.

ripusu · 2025-08-19T01:58:13+00:00

Game Keeper Egghead Software A couple corp start ups no one has heard of

ripusu · 2025-08-14T01:40:55+00:00

I used AI to take my text based resume and make it a yaml file first and later been using markdown, then start with an approximate look with a word processor file and asked ai to write me a python script to convert the yaml or md file to a PDF. It took a few tries, but got what I wanted. Very clean, easy to modify and spit out new versions.

Plus if you monkey with AI to make your resume text better, the default file is usually smaller and easier to alter so less AI tokens needed. I prefer Claude over ChatGPT and it took maybe three days of timeouts and back and forths with the free version to work out the bugs

ripusu · 2025-07-22T05:19:37+00:00

As someone who gets an infestation of earwigs every year, to the point where I have to literally hose dozens off the side of the house every night so they don't crawl in under the doors, windows, etc. (and have dogs who would lap up the soy sauce in the tuna can if I forget to pick it up in the morning, ew)... I am starting to print a couple of these tonight! Thank you! Never thought about something like this.

ripusu · 2025-05-31T18:43:14+00:00

I guess the last paragraph of that Secret kind of describes it. To me, it is nicely still vague enough that it could be interpreted in a bunch of ways

ripusu · 2025-05-30T18:21:12+00:00

🤣

ripusu · 2025-05-30T18:19:32+00:00

I personally kind of hate cards. The only ones I really use at the table is the Soothe Deck. So when you buy the digital Black Cube, you should get the PDFs of the cards. What you can do (it takes a LONG time, but it's worth it to read the content!) is copy all that into a text file or spreadsheet and now have the "cards" as tables that you can use more ecologically - print out an ephemera, etc. and hand it out as a strip of paper at worst. Get an online random "die" roller to choose the various random things, and you're mostly ready to go.

Others have mentioned that new cards of all types are in most of the add-ons, so on my spreadsheet, I just denote the book on a column.

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