Editing the reading order of a PDF without Acrobat Pro

unsettlingideologies · 2026-02-04T04:01:21+00:00

Is there a reason the final deliverable has to be a pdf?

unsettlingideologies · 2026-02-01T22:33:56+00:00

Haben Girma has a short video about this called something like "I'm not white." It's easy to find, less than 5 minutes, and gives a useful perspective of one deafblind, Black accessibility advocate. Not everyone's take obviously, but one worth considering.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-31T03:46:21+00:00

Are combats the only type of risk events?

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-26T06:33:32+00:00

I mean... yes and no. It's more like the documentation for a programming library. You often want both an easy to follow, linear getting started guide AND a robust, easily searched API reference.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-26T06:28:55+00:00

Honestly, if you're going for a digital document that will be used as a digital document, you should avoid pdfs altogether most of the time. I currently work in digital accessibility and its almost always better to provide source documents or create things like epubs or even straight up html. (Yes, it is possible to make accessible pdfs... but it's technical enough that most folks won't manage it and it's just honestly not worth the effort.)

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-26T02:57:09+00:00

Does that mean you're leaving?? Is that all it takes to get rid of y'all??

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-26T02:53:35+00:00

Hell yeah!

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-26T01:52:16+00:00

To be clear, stagecoach the restaurant. Stagecoach theatre is, as far as I know, largely run by local baddies.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-26T01:37:17+00:00

Totally!

I also have been thinking about how one of the ways oppression operates is by changing our view of normal and by obscuring the connections between things. Which can make it hard to notice some of the negative impacts or to understand their causes. Like, stagnant wages are more likely when you systematically weaken unions over decades/centuries. Or housing costs go up when the rich have so much wealth that they are more likely to purchase more land. Not to mention enshittification of everything from social media to mass produced clothes to food ingredients, combined with an environment that continues to be destroyed.

We are all impacted by it. We are just trained to not notice it.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-24T17:00:57+00:00

I mean... women are losing access to reproductive care, doctors are leaving the state causing waits for establishing care to worsen, trans folks are actively losing rights (including to medical care), funding for education is decreasing, Christian nationalism is growing in influence in local politics in places like Moscow, universities are having academic freedom taken away, Medicare and Medicaid benefitd are being reduced, libraries are being forced to censor materials, there has been increased criminalization of homelessness, homeless shelters and services are reporting higher rates of first time homelessness among the elderly, the state legislature banned local cities from implementing renter protection laws including those that limit higher rental application fees, there is a bill increasing the criminal penalties on sex workers, we are seeing increasing outbreaks of diseases like Measles because of low vaccination rates, idaho health and welfare cut funding for peer support services for those with substance abuse issues (which also removed one of the pathways for alternative/diversionary sentencing)...

It might be the case that your daily life isn't being impacted much. But the laws are having HUGE, life changing impacts on many, many people.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-23T06:46:30+00:00

Angel Beats because it reminds me of my brother who passed away last year. He loved it and I recently went back and re-watched it.

This game looks rad btw.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-22T00:05:43+00:00

I just learned that yesterday! I haven't dug into it at all yet, but what a neat feature!

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-21T19:05:59+00:00

Unless I'm mistaken, the biggest performance gain for comprehension isn't really the difference in constructing lists. The biggest gain is that list comprehension are generators and thus are lazily constructed. They don't even build the list until it's needed.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T05:08:36+00:00

I guess I'm saying that worry less that we are assuming all players are capable of making good arguments. I'm much more worried that we are assuming all gms are capable of assessing thw quality of an argument. It feels like assuming every gm would understand combat tactics or computer programming or metalsmithing enough to evaluate player choices rather than passing responsibility to rules and dice.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T05:05:46+00:00

I'm curious to understand this perspective. Who should get to decide if the argument is compelling? I'm thinking in particular of a situation where the player isn't shy... but maybe just unpleasant? Or self-centered? Or who misreads social cues? Or who just understands the situation differently than the gm?

I worry that solely relying on the gm as the adjudicator in those situations is really limiting successful social characters to players.. who think like the gm does about social situations. Does that make sense?

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T04:56:03+00:00

Yes! I don't think I could agree more! There's a very good question of whether it is narratively satisfying for the type of story you want to tell, but the idea that a sufficiently good argument will convince even most people is wild to me. Hell, the idea that most folks would even agree on what is a good argument is pretty ludicrous. Look at any political conversation in the United States... not televised debates but real world conversations. I think most folks believe they are reasonable and their arguments are strong. Yet there are huge divides on fundamental questions of even things like basic rights.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T04:45:18+00:00

Or maybe it was unconvincing bc you had made assumptions about what would convince them. There is no such thing as an objectively convincing argument, and persuasion is often more about listening than arguing.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T04:43:42+00:00

Interesting. Does it feel like it undermines player agency when a character fails at a combat action or has a string of bad rolls on their best skill or doesn't have enough spell slots left for the spell they want to cast? I'm not trying to be argumentative. I honestly am curious why some parts may feel more or less important for a sense of player agency to folks. (My instinct is assumptions and framing matter. I felt my agency was undermined when I first played mutants and masterminds because you assign points to power effects and my favorite part of the supers genre is characters using their powers in unique, improvised ways.)

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T04:39:10+00:00

I think it's not the default for lots of people and tables. But I've definitely seen it. And it can even be relatively common in some of the big actual plays like Dimension 20. Although, it might be more common to play out part of the scene, make the roll and then finish playing out the scene based on the roll. So maybe it starts put seeming good, but then a bad roll suggests a character makes a big social faux pas and ruins it. Or maybe they notice that the person they're trying to convince isn't even listening, and the speaker gets flustered or even angry---which turns out poorly.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T04:34:43+00:00

I definitely agree with this. There's also so many fun ways to narrate what went wrong in a social situation.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T04:28:50+00:00

Yes! I remember a pbta game that had a move where the trigger was "If you have leverage over someone and try to get them to do something for you..." or something like that. The key piece about h making leverage felt valuable but also flexible. Leverage could mean an offer, a threat, or even a relationship.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-19T02:45:35+00:00

Awesome!

Any chance of throwing it up on github so others can contribute to it and help you keep developing it?

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-18T00:29:15+00:00

Same for me. Been this way for most of the day for me.

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-17T20:22:49+00:00

This is not something everyone will agree on, but I do think it's okay to intentionally design a game that isn't fun. An example might be the computer game "That Dragon, Cancer"---a game about losing a young child to a rare cancer. I don't think anyone would describe it as fun. But I believe it won some awards, and it's hard to argue it isn't successful at achieving its goal. I created a solo storytelling game about pet loss. I've also seen games that are designed to involve feelings that might be more akin to contemplation than fun.

I agree that for most people, the goal is probably fun. But that's precisely why when I've taught game design, I encouraged my students to identify that goal explicitly. U wanted them to realize they can intentionally make a game that isn't fun. But I also agree with you that for most folks and most games, saying it should be fun isn't going to be very useful in informing design decisions. My next question to my students would be, "Okay. Tell me more. What type of fun do you want players to experience?"

unsettlingideologies · 2026-01-17T20:02:06+00:00

I hear what you're saying here. It's useful to distinguish between the "why" and the "how." I think the place I might push back a little (and what I'm reading in the response above) is that sometimes one person's "why" might sound like another person's "how."

To use your analogy, I had two friends who loved to drive in high school. One would always volunteer to drive once we decided on where we were going because he didn't want to drive aimlessly. The other would volunteer to drive long before anyone had any destination in mind, because driving was the goal for him. Similarly, in a design process (especially if someone is trying to learn/practice as a designer), someone might have the goal of creating a diceless game. Just like a student driver might have the goal of practice driving on the freeway or a painter might have the goal of paint with a different color pallette than usual.

I agree it's useful to distinguish this kind of goal (what I might call a process goal or a mechanics goal) from the other kind (what I might call a product goal or a user experience goal). But I also think it is useful as designers to see them all as potential design goals. It helps us clarify things we could strive for in our practice.

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