Every community I care about is dead

  • 176 Posts
  • 820 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I haven’t read this series yet but it’s on my TBR. Is there some kind of actual justification for the price of these books? The combined total word count of all the books is ~350k, which is 50k words shorter than a few books I’ve recently read that cost $7-8 each. Meanwhile the entire Murderbot series costs $76 to purchase, most of them being 30k words for $12.

    I’m lethargic on both getting around to reading it and not letting those hefty prices color my opinion if I were to read it, so I’m not sure if I ever will.





  • You can export your Amazon library at the current moment, as long as the books aren’t published (or maybe purchased?) after 2023.

    I did this for a friend recently and my steps were:

    1. Started a Windows VM (if you’re not using Windows)
    2. Install Kindle for PC app, latest version
    3. Log in and download every book (I didn’t know how to do this in bulk so I literally right click -> downloaded every book)
    4. Install Calibre on the same PC (I think this is necessary so it can access the Kindle encryption keys?)
    5. Install a plugin by navigating to Preferences -> Plugins -> Get new plugins: KFX Input plugin
    6. Install a plugin by navigating to Preferences -> Plugins -> Load plugin from file, using DeDRM 10.0.9’s “DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip”
    7. Restart Calibre
    8. At the top of Calibre, right click “Add books” and pick “Add from folder and sub-folders”
    9. Navigate to your documents and pick “My Kindle Content”, then select “Yes” to “All ebook files are multiple formats etc”
    10. Wait for it all to import
    11. Select all books, then right click “Remove books” at the top and pick “Remove files of a specific format from selected books”
    12. Pick “MD” and click “OK”
    13. With all books selected, click “Edit metadata” at the top
    14. Pick “Set metadata (except cover) from the e-book files”, then click OK
    15. Done, sort of. The DRM should all be broken, and you can convert the books to EPUB or whatever format using Calibre from this point forward, even if Amazon breaks this method in the future.















  • Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.




  • I like stories to have stuff to aspire to, rather than characters that share the pains of a hopeless millenial.

    Yeah I feel that. I wouldn’t call it a light read if you’re feeling depressed, and there’s some clear parallels and lessons from the book’s world to be applied to ours. The story likes to punch you in the guts whenever it feels like it, and a hopeless feeling lingers throughout. I should make an amended edition where the characters frequently get the hugs they deserve.

    it’s hard to come by good furry literature

    Surely. Oftentimes it feels like any furry media that exists has to have a compelling reason why the people are animals, with human-based stories being the default if you can’t think of a good one. It’s nice to have a good story regardless, with the animalistic flavor largely just being garnish on top.

    helping attract some more attention to a project

    Hopefully at some point it will stick and be properly recognized. It was released in 2017 and has excellent Goodreads reviews, but the author is young and surely will eventually make waves if they can keep the creative spark going.









  • You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.



  • Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.


  • I really don’t think it’s “love” at this point. I understand that point of view, but I rarely ever see those types of people anymore. They don’t even necessarily need specific religious litigation to back up their views, and they can pretend that their god “would support them” in their endeavors just as easily. These people want punishment for those they deem “other” because the normalization of “other” challenges their privilege and makes them uncomfortable. I think their fear of these outcomes is the most likely “rational” explanation. Semi-related, the world is not in a good place right now with capitalism running rampant. I think these people are even more frightened at their precarious living conditions and their sense of survival is pushing them to hold onto the privilege and lifestyle they have in any way possible.