Also, remote printing and monitoring are nice features, which would be a pity to lose.

I don’t see an easy way to accomplish this independent of Bambu’s servers, especially if you use the handy app on your phone.

Slightly harder: add exceptions for bambus servers in your routers firewall so that requests to that domain are blocked

I assigned a static IP address to my A1 mini in my router, and made a firewall rule preventing all traffic originating from that IP from going to the internet. The printer is also in LAN only mode, but I periodically have to reconnect it to Bambu studio which is annoying.

Prey doesn’t mean defenseless. Lots of prey animals have gnarly defenses.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard it claimed that a large herbivore is more dangerous than a predator. No idea if that’s true, and I’m too lazy to verify it, but intuitively I’d think predators won’t spend more energy acquiring a meal than that meal provides, so if they’re full or don’t think you’re worth it they won’t go after you. But prey animals attack out of fear and are thus less predictable.

Reminds me of Jingle Cats

Thanks! I wrote this over a year ago. I’ve got a bunch of other stories, but I’m not sure of the quality of my writing. I’m a worldbuilder first, and the plot and characters serve the world, not the other way around, which is generally considered bad when writing fiction.

I personally enjoy reading amateur sci-fi. It’s fun seeing someone’s raw unfiltered imagination, even if the prose isn’t up to par.

The CBB is mostly for conlanging but has a sizeable worldbuilding/conworlding subforum. You don’t have to be a conlanger to enjoy it. I would definitely recommend especially if you’re nostalgic for the traditional forum experience. It’s absolutely a better format for long-lasting topics compared to Lemmy/Reddit, where threads get buried very quickly regardless of how active they are.

A lot of my worldbuilding is based on stupid memes from around 2009-2012.

I also just grab concepts I think are cool and try to make them unique.

I had to look up what a cat organ was.

I thought they were sold in the US now with some slight modifications to comply with the law? I know I’ve seen Kinder eggs in my local grocery store.

But yes, the ban is due to a perfectly sensible law having a bizarre edge case.

It’s also why king cakes don’t have the little baby figurines in them I believe.

On Lemmy you can see (and search) a list of all the activity from every instance federated to your home instance. Looking at Ibis, which a few posters have mentioned on this thread, it has a discover page with a list of federated instances and articles on those instances. The current format is hardly scalable, but it’s a start.

But, as I said before, the issue is less about discoverability and more about editing. Just like I can post in this thread even though I’m on a different instance, you can edit an article on one instance even though you’re on another. The alternative as used by Wikipedia, is to allow anyone, account or not, to edit. Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.

In addition to discoverability, I’d say it provides a happy medium between letting every rando with an IP address edit a page and requiring account creation. Part of the point of the fediverse is to have (almost) everything in one place under a single account while still keeping things decentralized.

I wouldn’t doubt it, though MW seems hard to manage.

This looks interesting.

Seems like it’s still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?

I’m not thinking of a single distributed wiki, but something more like Fandom where you can edit pages on other wikis that are federated to yours.

Easy hosting isn’t quite the issue. Dokuwiki is trivial to self host. What I’d like something that’s a happy medium between requiring account creation to edit pages and letting literally every rando with an IP address go to town.

I’d like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it’s open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.

I’m getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say “urbanized”) nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who’s hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by “last comment” which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it’s not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won’t bother.

I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.

The smell of decades of second-hand smoke emanates from the threadbare carpet and faded walls, mixed with the faint smell of chlorine from the indoor pool down the hall. Stale donuts and cold coffee sit at the continental breakfast bar. There are a few small tables and chairs. A coffee table is surrounded by a few overstuffed armchairs and a sofa. A check-in desk stands across the entrance hall from the breakfast area, but the night auditor is nowhere to be found. At the end entrance hall, door-lined corridors stretch into the distance to the left and right. The parking lot can be seen outside the windows, lit by the monochromatic light of sodium vapor lamps, but the darkness and driving rain obscure everything beyond. If there even is a beyond…

A low thump can be heard from behind one of the nearby doors, followed by the quiet clicking of tiny paws on the tile floor. The door creaks open, and a wet nose framed by whiskers pokes out, twitching a few times as its owner scents the air.

“Yay!” yips the little stranger “We’re on Earth. Finally I can meet a human!” Overcome with excitement, the creature trots into the hallway, nose to the ground drinking in the mélange of aromas. It’s covered in earthy brown fur. Its only clothing is a backpack stuffed to bursting. Its head is vulpine, but its body appears more like a new world monkey, with a broad back and thicker limbs. Its sinewy tail, long enough to touch its nose, is held aloft with the end curled up. It walks on all fours, but all four six-toed paws look like grasping primate hands, save for the extra thumbs.

It prances over to the glass door to the pool and rears up on its hind feet. It presses its forepaws against the glass. The tips of its digits are hairless, with grayish-black skin like an orangutan. Each digit is tipped by a sharp iron-enriched claw. The underside of each digit possesses a carnivoran paw pad, and there’s another arrangement of pads on its palms. The three palmar pads indicate the creature is a male. “Ooh, mama Redclaw, can I go swimming? Please?” He suddenly realizes there’s no one else around.

“Mama redclaw? Papa Sunfire? Mama Moonshine? Papa Hearthfire?” He runs back to the room he came out of. Finding nobody, he tries knocking on a few of the doors with his tail. Eventually he walks into the check-in area and puts his paws up on the counter, his pointed ears and wet nose barely visible from behind. “Anyone?” He begins crying, rills of crimson lacrimal fluid dribble from the corners of his black lips, matting the brown fluff of his chest. “Anyone?” He lets out some ugly gurgling sobs, which echo unheard down the halls.

I’m not familiar with the setting, but I’m getting cosmic horror vibes.

The first part of this story reminds me of a recurring nightmare I have involving going under anesthesia. I have mild asthenophobia (fear of losing consciousness) which can blow up into hypnophobia (fear of falling asleep) in my darker moments, so I found the scenario suitably creepy.

It sounds like you’re aiming for cosmic horror here. Interesting stuff. My one actionable criticism would be to split the text into paragraphs.

Maybe I could post some of my stories here…