ZorbaTHut
1mo ago
Absolutely! I'm hoping to get a somewhat-serious public release in the next few months.
ZorbaTHut
1mo ago
Is he really busy with work? Life in general?
Pretty much, yeah.
(ping @TitaniumButterfly @Southkraut)
So, here, lemme give a sort of tl;dr of The Shape Of Zorba's Life.
I vaguely divide most of my tasks into a few categories. In no particular order, those are:
- Sanity
- Family
- Survival
- Professional hobby
- Unprofessional hobby
The tricky part is that I usually have time for at most four of them. Unsurprisingly, Sanity, Family, and Survival end up in those four. They're kinda important.
In my case, I work in the game industry. So "professional hobby" is making my own game studio. "Unprofessional hobby" is The Motte. I end up having to choose between them, and for a while, I was aiming most of that spare time at The Motte in the hopes I could make it start paying for itself; if The Motte could take over Survival (which more-or-less gets summarized as Money, usually in the form of Day Job) then suddenly "I have time for four of them" starts looking pretty good.
Well, I'm not going to say that outcome is impossible, but at the moment, it seems pretty unlikely. I took a serious shot, it did not immediately work out. This meant I had the long-term choice of sacrificing professional-hobby in favor of unprofessional-hobby, or vice-versa.
That whole "can I make The Motte take over Survival" thing also applies to the game studio, though. And I found myself in a situation where I had some really promising ideas and tools, which made it seem like I had a plausible shot at making Professional Hobby actually become my day job, thus subsuming Survival entirely, if I started working for myself and managed to get something viable before I ran out of savings.
And so that's what I'm fundamentally focusing on. If I can collapse Professional Hobby and Survival into one thing, then I have spare time to keep working on Motte stuff. But I just can't afford to get too distracted from this, because the bank account isn't going to last forever.
So the tl;dr is that I ended up needing to triage and The Motte got the short end of the stick. That doesn't mean it's abandoned - I really do want to work on it - that just means that there's enough stuff I have more immediate needs for that it has to be sidelined for now.
I will say that the mods have done a great job of keeping this place going. Its current survival is entirely thanks to them and I am extremely grateful. Fingers crossed that my current project is successful - in fact I'm looking at a major milestone coming up in a week that'll give me a much better sense of whether this is viable - and if it is, then I'll be able to come back to The Motte and put some serious effort into long-term plans that I simply never managed to work on.
Until then . . . keep it up, y'all.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
How do you in-person voters... remember anything meaningful?
I go over the sample ballot, make my choices, and either mark them down on the sample ballot or print them out.
Then I bring that in as a cheat sheet and just follow it.
I used to write it down on my phone, but the state I'm in disallows phones while voting, so, paper solution.
ZorbaTHut
6mo ago
@OliveTapenade It's treating it like a relative link; without an http:// or https:// in front of it, it's considered relative to this current directory. Note that it's not even The Motte doing this, The Motte is dutifully linking to whatever you ask for, that's web browser behavior.
If you paste it in raw, then The Motte says "oh shucks that's a website link isn't it? I'd better do all the appropriate processing!" and dutifully stuffs a http:// on the front of it.
Fix it by adding an https:// .
(click the "view source" button)
We should probably be autoprefixing it with https:// but I think this is literally the first time this has come up :)
ZorbaTHut
8mo ago
Looks like it blocks the post entirely. I can't find anything obvious that would cause notifications to not be sent - maybe @Folamh3 is looking in a weird place? Maybe there's a setting?
I vaguely recall trying to reproduce this a while back and failing. @Folamh3, if it's worth the time to you, you're welcome to make a few accounts on https://dev.themotte.org and see if you can figure it out. If you can come up with a repro case, that'll make it a whole ton easier to fix :)
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I've actually got a code review pending for it right now, but it's one of those annoyingly fiddly changes :/
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
(whoops sorry this took a while to see)
So, the janitor system is actually working, mostly as hints to existing mods - I've never rigged it up to actually take actions, but it does give ratings on whether a comment is good or bad. It's pretty dang accurate! If it's uncertain, the comment is usually borderline, but there's a lot of comments that have extreme "this is good" or "this is bad" ratings and it's quite rare to disagree with them.
It will surprise nobody to learn that there are random janitor assistants who are actually more consistent than the mods. I did use this as a tiebreaker during the Doge process.
I've wanted to rig this up to be more automatic - and also to do quality contributions - but life is unfortunately pretty packed right now for various reasons and haven't had time :/
I should definitely do that - I actually started a #workshop thread on a Discord for much the same reason, though unfortunately a lot of stuff that I'm doing is backend and hard to share in interesting ways. But I'll see if I can start posting there when I do have things of interest :)
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