Aura V. @auravulpes@computerfairi.es

And now, a short tangent on Goldendict:
It's a nice piece of software, but I wish I could expand the languages it knows of. It doesn't like when I try to use VSK as an XDXF "from" language, and barely tries to do anything. I wish I could tell it "Oh, VSK is Valirisikakol" without having to compile from source. I also wish it had runic support, given my failure at making a runic dictionary that'd work with it

XDXF:
Oh, gods, this nightmare. Upside: It's powerful *as fuck* and Goldendict supports it fully. Downside: it's all fucking XML. If you're comfortable writing XML or HTML files, it's, as I said, really fucking powerful. If you're not, stay as far away as possible. Don't even think of touching it.

ABBYY Lingvo .dsl files:
So, I played with the next while on Linux. I wanted something Linux-native, and I started playing with what Goldendict supported. .dsl files aren't too difficult, which is nice, but Goldendict's support for formatting codes can be iffy at best. Not everything works. You'll still have the formatting, but it won't render it. But, not *terrible*. Basically, it's a fancy txt file.

SIL Lexique Pro:
I actually started with Lexique. Yes, no faffing about with spreadsheets and txt files for me. Straight to linguistic tools. And, I kinda like Lexique. It's simple enough to use and gives you a really good catalogue. The only problem is that the format isn't exactly easy to move to other software. But, the .db file is written as plain text, so it wouldn't be too difficult for someone to write a converter. It's just no one has yet

So, I like building conlangs. I like it quite a bit, actually. But, having just written lists of words can be...inconvenient, shall we say? Hard to find if a new word is similar to an old one, or to find a given word or anything like that. So, I like to use digital catalogues. What follows in this thread are some of my thoughts on systems I've used.

"🎵 Here comes the sun, doo doo doodoo, here comes the sun, and I say [incomprehensible, but sounds kinda like the opening to The Lion King] 🎵"

"I close my eyes and all there is is Bejeweled. There is no god."

But, yeah. In conclusion, people should have easy-to-use means to express themselves; death to cringe culture, people shouldn't be shamed for expressing themselves (unless, ofc, they're Nazis or whatever, but hopefully that's implied pretty well by, like, my general history of hating bigots and reactionaries and the like); and teens should have more tools to explore their own sexuality

In the latter role, it seems to function sorta like games like WWE SvR 2011 did for me, a way to actually see my own fantasies play out. Or as traditional writing did for me, like with that (kinda awful, in hindsight) story about me getting raped by a Zoroark. Granted, I never shared, but it seems to be used as a means of actually seeing various fantasies play out and how they feel about them, or just to please themself

I mean, just to relate my own experiences with sexuality and sex and all that as someone growing up in rural Texas, it seems to, in the former role, function much as gay furry porn did for me. Something that let me mentally experiment with various ideas without actually having to deal with the human body, a thing we kinda just learn to not talk about.

So, TIL that Gacha Life porn exists. And, honestly, *good*.

I almost wish I had the time, energy, and knowledge to do an entire analysis on this stuff, but, long story short, this comes off to me as a safe means of exploring sexuality and sex w/o having to confront the human body for young teens in sexually repressed areas and as a means to express and share these desires for those creating them. It's honestly kinda beautiful and I love it.

Fun: I'm taking a nuclear physics lab this semester! I'm gonna get to play with radioactive stuff!

Not-so-fun (but understandable): I have to take additional safety training on top of the lab safety training I've already done.

Oh, gods no: The trainings (yes, there's multiple) are videos of powerpoints with no way to skip though or download the powerpoint or anything, so I have to sit through long videos. This would be not-so-fun, but ADHD! This is excruciating!

Just so we're clear, don't @ me on this. I'm not interested in having 59 million techbros showing up in my mentions to all give me the same two reasons why they think I'm wrong. I'm even less interested in techbros who'd be calling me by my deadname if they knew it showing up in my mentions to tell me why I should call something the way they think it should be called. You can all piss right off.

Calling it "GNU/Linux" makes me infinitely less likely to listen to you when you tell me I should use it.

Oh boy. My partial differential equations professor has emailed us and told us to review (ordinary) differential equations. I don't have a huge amount of study in ODEs (my diff. eq. class was a combined course with linear algebra) and was kinda hoping for a couple days of review. This class might just end up killing me. Send help.

Seriously, if you know of any good sources for reviewing ordinary differential equations, I could *really* use them right now

Okay, so it's a cheap magnifying glass I bought a target that makes it easier for me to read the markings on various PCB components, but come on! Play along, would ya?!