Does anyone besides me have an interest in them?

Because its to the point I've set up to dual box in order to get them on Myself and Bonnie... but it also occured to me to ask if there were others who wanted to tag along.

Since the forum software uses that super annoying "x minutes/hours ago" instead of just giving the time of the last update to a thread until it gets to the next dfay, I'm constantly looking at the "last visit" time to see if I need to reload more than the top level forum page to see if there's new messages to read, so having it stop apparently midmorningish yesterday is a hassle. I've certainly gone longer than the normal 15 minutes to keep "one visit" live, and even rebooted once or twice in the meantime as well, needing to sign in again. I won't say it makes the site unusable, but it certainly compounds the annoyance of the way the last message times are handled by thwarting my work-around.

Bob, I'm not sure if it's a browser issue or what, but when I'm doing serial revisions to a post before actually posting it, it will sometimes wind up with double or triple the line breaks it had before.

Here's an example of what I mean:
http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/s...#pid186136

Old thread broke 300, so here we go

More interesting/odd than funny, but still...

You can read it here. 

As usual, forum readers get a good 24 hours or more lead on the FFML.  (Hell, you guys got a couple years' lead on them with chapter 1, given that I forgot to post it there until I finished chapter 2...)

Anyway, please post comments in this thread.

Thank you!

As expected but sooner than hoped, my HDD has indeed cacked it, so I'm going to be largely offline until the new parts I emergency-ordered with a loan from Bank of Fam arrive, hopefully sometime around the weekend. Do not be alarmed, the situation is otherwise normal as much as that applies to any of us at the moment.

On the plus side, as long as everything works (it's all new parts, even if I'll be building in a Gateway 310X case originally built like a nuclear bunker to contain the world-shattering power of a Pentium 4!) it should be a fairly good machine - Ryzen 5 3600 w/32Gb RAM on an ASRock B450M/ac motherboard with integrated wifi, an 8Gb Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX580 graphics card ("horribly outdated" at two or three years old, but anything better is around $400-500 and far out of my budget, plus I'm upgrading from a Smelleron laptop's Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics, so yeah. At least it supports Vulkan and OpenGL 4.5) plus 256Gb NVMe M.2 and SATA III SSDs so I can have the OS on one and the other for the swap/page file, and a 2Tb HDD for mass storage. (Or possibly partition the SSD into halves and put 'doze on one so I can set the M.2 up as primary boot drive with Linux and not have to futz about mashing ESC or DEL or whichever key to tell it to go to GRUB every time, since 'doze always wants to be the default.)

In the meantime, I'm booting from my Ubuntu 18.04 live USB and have noother storage, which means basically no swap since that drive is only 4Gb to begin with. That in turn means going to, say, YouTube will crash the browser when it runs out of RAM and has no swap file space. For now the HDD still appears as a read-only disk if mounted, but I'm not eager to test it until and unless I at least have a USB hub so I can put an external HDD in as well as the Live USB to try to rescue some of the data.

As for distros... I've been thinking of going with either MX-Linux or Manjaro this time, rather than Xubuntu. Maybe Pop!, but if I'm switching off Ubuntu I figure I might as well really switch from Ubuntu rather than just migrating to a different flavor. Anyone here played with those enough to have a meaningful opinion?

My primary use aside from incidental do-it-on-anything word processing and web browsing is Blender & GIMP and a desire to work with Godot Engine game development, and a little LMMS audio for sound effects and hopefully original music. All of those are common enough that they should also work seamlessly wherever. The only gaming I've done any time recently is failing to play Morrowind for more than a few minutes at a time while giving armor and weapon mods a cursory look, so that's not really a consideration, just the overall user experience WRT stability, ease of use, and shiny coolness. (There was a video on YouTube I watched earlier today that wa the king of shiny coolness... despite being from 2010. I think the title was something like "KDE + Compiz Fusion + Cairo dock" and it was basically just making the UI dance while playing "the egg travels" from some dinosaur movie soundtrack.

"ubuntu 3D Desktop Cube (KDE, Compiz Fusion, CairoDock" by Philip J. Bugsington appears to be the right one, though I can only judge by the cover image on Google since as I said there's no actually visiting YouTube at the moment. It's silly and completely superficial, but still so cool.

https://thehobbledehoy.com/2019/03/08/br...VDE-GGzN6E

I see that Spacebattles has a "threadmarks" feature, where particular posts in a thread can be marked and a toggle can be set to display either all posts or only marked posts in the thread. They use it for marking IC posts in story threads - one has the option of reading only the story, or the story plus comments.

Does MyBB have anything similar? Preferably set up so that only the thread creator can add threadmarks.

This would be very handy in Other People's Fanfiction and its subforums.

I don't know if I'll ever end up writing anything for this, but a tweet put this idea into my head and now it's stuck. Over on twitter someone commented that Comstar was basically the, "Future Of The 80s!" Bell monopoly writ large. Which had me thinking, the breakup of Bell had its seeds all the way back in the 70s and took place in the 80s, so why not a more Bell-like Comstar breakup. Not a clean and simple two way civil war between Word of Blakists and "But we just want to be phone company monopolists." This post isn't yet a plan but rather me thinking in written form.

With no Star League (unless the breakup is pushed late, but not too late into the setting) they're obviously not getting broken up by the Federal Government Of The Future Of The 80s. I'd also like to see something more like the real life Bell + Seven Baby Bells. That said, if Comstar breaks cleanly on the political boundaries of the successor states what's stopping them from just swallowing up the Baby Comstars? I'll have to dig into what history we have for them and look for some late 2800s early 2900s crisis points where a nice firm push could screw things up.

My biggest thoughts so far:

• I want more than two factions
  
• I am terribly amused by the idea of the Federated Suns network and Taurian Concordat network being run largely by the same splinter faction just for the ulcers that will give the Taurians, said faction, and those in the Suns who wonder if things are about to go boom.
  
• A chunk of the courier service and explorer corp go independent doing a combination of continuing exploration, serving as a go-between shipping stuff between other factions, and trying to cozy up with the Sol belters after having broken away from Earth control.
  
• Earth based Comstar has largely turtled up having realized it has little chance of re-controlling the rest any time soon. Ground and orbital defenses are being rebuilt to ward off outside attack -- while the long sidelined non-Comstar powers of Earth are starting to get ideas.
  
• Whatever Comstar faction controls the most 'west' end of the map gets to play the role of US West of the Future Of The 80s.*