Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like ownership.worker, slang and copyright. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was observing.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Hey Tilderinos! I tried this on r/guitar and had no dice, so figured I'd give it a shot here. I was playing bass a few weeks ago transcribing a line meant for guitar and suddenly felt like, uh, learning guitar. So I picked up a Squier CV Jazzmaster off FBM and have been plucking away, really enjoying learning it. Thank you to ~UniquelyGeneric for the Justin Guitar rec, his stuff is great.

I'm aware Jazzmasters notorious for requiring a proper setup, and I don't really mind while I'm getting some form stuff down - but I have noticed there's a bit of a
hiss happening when I pluck on the harder side that I didn't notice while I was testing it out. I made a recording on my audio interface here. There's also a bit of a hum which changes with the pickup selection and goes down with the tone knob. Does this sound like a particular issue and does anyone have a good guide to troubleshooting or addressing it? Not the worst thing if I adjust the volume right, but if I can pull it apart and fix it myself then hey. Thanks!

GMs: do you have any gaps in the worldbuilding of your setting that you're looking for help filling? Post them here!

In case it wasn't already clear, I need help as well. My setting is a near-future hybrid of Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, in 5e. There are two major gaps. First, in my setting North America has fractured into a handful of nations - but the middle part split into a radioactive wasteland and a loose coalition of city states. What locations might be concealed in the wasteland? (A fallout vault-like society living in the NORAD mountains of Colorado?) Which city states would have survived and what would their character be?

I also need ideas for more megacorporate factions.

Here is the work in progress for the setting, if you're interested.

Help me and I promise I'll help you!

Second superhero movie Nolan's Batman Begins from 2005.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

How familiar are you Batman - comicbook, animated series, other movies - and how does this compare? Have you seen the other movies in Nolan's Batman trilogy and does this stand up against the rest?

The rest of the schedule for February is:

• 26th: Gangs of New York

"I mean, pain is the ultimate driving force of life itself. Why do we sleep? Because we're tired. Why do we eat? Because we're hungry. Why do we talk to people? Because we fear isolation, etc. Just like in the movie Trainspotting (1996), where heroin users drown out the pain of existence with substances. Does that mean if someone becomes overly focused on anything, they feel a stronger dissatisfaction with life? And could this be used against us? Like this quote from the book Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig:

The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

This is Album of the Week #21 ~ This week's album is Bruno Pernadas - Those Who Throw Objects at the Crocodiles Will Be Asked to Retrieve Them

Year of Release: 2016
Genre(s): Progressive Pop/Art Pop
Country: Portugal
Length: 53 minutes
RYM | Listen!

Excerpt from RYM review by user DoubleMissMatt:

But there's more in this melting pot of sound than jazz and pop, with touches of electronic music and sampledelia in the mix on tracks such as "Anywhere In Space Time". Building a groove off of analogue synths and a fuzzy chopped vocal sample gives this track a kaleidoscopic sound that reminds me a bit of the Avalanches' debut record. And this isn't exclusive just to this track, as there are a number of nostalgic lo-fi vocal samples that seem to be pulled from films/T.V shows from the 60's (forgive me if I'm wrong with that assumption) scattered across this album at the start/end of songs. That, alongside the two "poem" interludes breaking up the track list, give this album a film-like quality that adds to the wonder of the experience.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

I’ve been looking for a good system for my friends and I to share TTRPG character sheets (primarily DnD) with one another.

We’re not interested in a full-digital VTT, but the ecosystem is pretty fragmented for charsheet-only apps (many immature and abandoned projects). Self-hosted webapp makes the most sense for our needs, but I’m open to suggestions for some other sync method that’s not PDF-based.

This seems like a viable candidate:

https://github.com/Orcpub/orcpub

…but I’d love to hear better options if anyone’s found em.

Intro

Whenever smaller keyboards come up online, I often see a lot of the same reactions/dismissals. I've found many of these to be foolish, but also that the community around such devices has its own barriers. It sometimes is represented from its most extreme aspects rather than someone with a more normal approach and use case.

So here is yet another pitch on why you might want to consider trying out some of the smaller keyboards out there, and the various advantages it can bring. This will probably be quite long, but I hope it at least is interesting.

Daily Drivers

Skills Required

I think the only real "skill" you must have to consider downsizing your keyboard is the ability to decently touch type without looking. If you're the sort of person who still hunts and pecks, no judgement, but this is not for you.

If you're someone who has to code, do data/numerical entry, or type a lot for work, then I encourage you to read on. Those are common barriers I hear thrown out, but in my experience are actually easier with a smaller keyboard.

Why?

The normal keyboard for most machines has a lot of dead/wasted space that could just be used better, and has some keys that are important or have grown more important in really poor positions.

Some main offenders

1. Capslock - How often do you use capslock? How often do you NEED capslock? If I can convince you of one thing to try out right now it's this, remap capslock (check out powertoys on windows) to left control. As it stands capslock is one of the easiest buttons to hit, and yet it if you moved it over next to Scroll lock you'd probably never mind. A large portion of my job is coding SQL and I never use it because that's what modern formatters are for. Please try remapping it(throw capslock on left control or some combo if you want).
2. Spacebar- Hear me out, as this might vary depending on how you type. Do you use one or both thumbs to hit your spacebar? If you're anything like me, you use one, and in my case it's the left thumb. This means that I've got a massive portion of my keyboard dedicated to one button, even though I'll never touch more than half of it (you'd be surprised how small you can make the space key and still hit it reliably). Now you might think that you don't need that space, but I'll dive into that more later.
3. The number row- More on this later, but my brief take on this is that humans are actually pretty bad at knowing exactly where the numbers are when they get away from the home row, and as anyone who's ever had to do lots of number entries know, the 10key/numpad is the way to go.
4. PgUp/PgDwn/Home/End/Delete- These 5 keys (and control and shift) are great for navigating/editing text/code/spreadsheets/webpages quickly, and could not be farther away from where you really need them to actually do that easily.
5. Arrow keys- A lot of people think it's fine that they're waaaaaay out there away from everything. I will be proposing an alternative given these are also critical to quick navigation.

How is smaller better then?

The core idea is simple. You can find the home row easily with the homing keys (j/f generally have a bump or some defining feature). You're probably excellent at hitting the keys in relation to that if they're 1 step away from the home row. The farther you are from that, the more likely you'll need to look, and the longer it'll take you to press the key even if you don't. So where possible, it's ideal to try and use space more efficiently to keep the keys you actually need to use near this position.

But how are you going to fit all those keys anywhere near the home row?

My Keymap

As an example, to help explain moving forward, here is the keymap for my mercutio 40.

You'll want to save that json, and then upload it at qmk configurator, which will make it much easier to explore. If you've never looked at this before it can seem insane, but I promise you it's pretty tame ignoring some edge case stuff.

If you don't feel like going through the hassle here's screenshots from the site with descriptions of each layer.

Mostly the same as below but i did fix some missing info below so sorry about that. I'm also leaving the descriptions of my "gaming" layers 4/5/6 in the imgur only because I think that's out of scope for this).

The magic of programable layers and context.

Space is an interesting key. It's a key only ever really tap, never hold (outside of games, more on that later). So, why not double it up, and make it do something different when you hold it?

Well in this case, tapping any of my 3 space buttons gives you a space like anyone would expect, but if you hold either of the left 2, it "shifts" you to layer 1 (base layer is 0), and holding the right one, shifts you to layer 2.

I put shifts in quotes because it's just like the shift key. If you hit 7 on your keyboard, you get a 7. If you hold shift and hit 7, you get &. This is the same concept, and just keep the layers organized in a way that makes sense, keeps it very easy to know what layer what key you want is on.

The Detailed Layers

The shorter version

If you don't want to read all of that, the basic idea is that your average person can type on the keyboard with minimal explanation. If they forget where a key is, the other 3 layers all follow rules to help guide them. One layer for navigation and keys that don't actually output characters (home/end/delete/esc/et) and one layer for the rest of the keys that output characters, namely the numbers, which are then also your numpad and ALWAYS under your right hand, centered and ready to go. The final layer is, mainly, for the function keys, still following the numpad from the previous so you can again easily figure out where the button you want is.

What does this gain you?

In the end the main benefits i've found are easier navigation, as I essentially now have a navigation layer with every key i could want on it, and much faster access to numbers. I still do data entry and lots of numbers, and having the numpad always one keyhold away is awesome.

On top of that it's just nice to not have to move my hands so much to type, and to get so much of my desk space back.

I type just as fast as I do on a normal keyboard for basic text, as there's almost no difference, and I type faster doing code/editing text because my numbers, brackets, and navigation keys are all closer at hand and in such a way I don't need to look or even move my hand from the home row to hit them.

So is it just all upsides?

On the typing side, honestly yeah. I've seen a lot of excuses like "well i prefer a numpad" or "how do you type numbers" which I've tried to address in this post.

The only issue i've run into is gaming, where I already really solved most of my problems as shown in the extra layers in the imgur gallery, and think it might even be better for gaming vs the normal layouts.

The only remaining hassle is roguelike games such as stone soup or caves of qud, which LOVE to assign every fucking key a use so there's no easy way to remap things and I have to actually add another layer JUST so i can hit the numpad numbers because I need them to navigate....

BUT unfortunately, you might actually want to acquire one of these keyboards, and that's where stuff gets a little tricky.

Programmability

All the upsides I just mentioned assume you can actually program the keyboard. Thankfully this has gotten much much easier with both Via and ZMK making the process very simple. QMK is doable, but difficulty wise it shared a lot of similarities with trying to get the perfect modded run of Fallout New Vegas going with about 20-40 mods. If you are not more comfortable in the tech world, I recommend ONLY boards that support via software. I believe these days anything that supports QMK supports VIA, but it's worth checking on the via website to make sure the board you're about to get works.

Some assembly required

The mercutio and the discipline I built myself after ordering the parts. They're through hole soldering and were some of the first soldering I'd ever done on my own outside of a quick kit I bought off amazon to practice. It is actually not that hard BUT you need the equipment. It's not horribly expensive to get but it's not cheap either. I do really enjoy just throwing on music and putting these together, but I totally understand that you might just want to, you know, buy the fucking thing already built.

Thankfully many sites offer build services (or you can find them on etsey) which charge a fee to assemble it for you. This is what i've done with every corne i've ordered because it is NOT through hole soldering and I don't have the guts for it, and even still they've all had some eventual issues (although again, i carry mine with me in a very unprotected state because i'm insane so some of that is on me).

Made of money

Especially if you're paying for the aforementioned build services, these things can get into the 200-400 range FAST, which is a lot for a keyboard. There are some cheaper options out there, and the Mercutio was only $70ish before switches(not bad) and keycaps (range from dirt cheap to ungodly expensive).

Still I would not recommend ANY of these for a first time buyer. My first smaller board was a 60% mechanical and those range from $70-100 these days from what i'm seeing.

Take my money....please?

Sometimes you just won't be able to find or buy the board you want in the way you want. There are lots of interesting boards i've seen over the years, but they're either very expensive or only open for a limited time. I had a working cornish zen that died on me. I'd love to replace it. I cannot as they currently don't sell them. Will they make more? Dunno. I hope they do.

Recommendations

I DO NOT recommend diving in head first and suggest starting with something simple like a 60 or 65, probably keychron, as they're a decent budget brand. You might want to go even cheaper with just a 60% off of amazon that isn't even programmable just to see if you outright hate it, but I do think that getting something you can start to tweak as you begin to understand what you want helps adoption.

Final Thoughts

I hope this gave some of you the push to look into all this. I'm glad I dipped my toe in it, less glad about the absurd amount of money i've spent on it (dear god keycaps), and really glad about the moment where I thought "huh i really just don't need all these keys" and pulled some out. I hope I can convince a few others give it a shot and hopefully see the same results. No dvorak or home row modifiers and weird triple tap macros. Just some layers and common sense.

I do still, if nothing else, highly recommend switching left control to caps lock.

Backstory: Seemingly randomly, I was contacted by a company that saw a comment I made online about a previous area of expertise that they want to venture into and have asked if I'd like to be a consultant to them.

I've never been a consultant, dealt with them directly, or have any idea what would be expected of me as one. Looking up consultants and consultancies and what they do has provided zero insight as they seem to be purposefully vague or overly broad.

Starter questions (I realize they're vague and I'll have follow up questions as I get a handle on this):

1. If you are or have been a consultant, were you independent or part of a firm?
2. What do you actually do?
3. What did/do you charge for your consultancy services?

While there were conversations about this in the past, those were much more generalized.

Now, I personally don't have issues creating world maps, regional maps, or 'battle' maps, as it were, but when it comes to city maps... I'm consistently at a loss. That said, I don't want this to just be me begging and whining into the void about how I can't find something that I prefer to make city maps in, so here's what I've used and would recommend over the past 15 years or so:

• World Maps: Wonderdraft, Photoshop, Campaign Cartographer (probably about ten years ago, and I never finished a map with it)

Of these, I definitely recommend Wonderdraft the most. I think if you put in enough time and effort, Photoshop can turn out better (and most detailed), but if you're interested in a style that Wonderdraft has support (and assets) for, it's pretty much perfect. It's a one-time cost, has been getting consistent updates and support since it was in beta years ago, and the community assets are pretty much unending. The one caveat to Wonderdraft is that if you want to make an absolute behemoth of a map (like I'm apt to do), it will eat some serious resources and can begin to lag, due to how it handles each individual tree/mountain/path as a singular, editable asset.

Campaign Cartographer is an oldie that I tried about ten years ago, had some success with (mostly in how it designed continent outlines and things), but just didn't feel like it had enough malleability to create things the way I saw fit.

• Region/Continent Maps: Wonderdraft, Photoshop, Inkarnate

I think everything I said about world maps applies here, as well. I haven't used Inkarnate in the better part of a decade, but I know the free version was very limiting and there were some concerns about the company 'owning' anything you created in the program. That said, a brief look at it now makes it look like a more closed-off version of Wonderdraft, but with a subscription instead of a one-time purchase.

• Battle Maps: Dungeondraft, Photoshop, a plethora of generators that I can't even begin to remember dating back 10+ years

Before Dungeondraft, I pretty much hated making maps for combat. Early in my GMing 'career', I would just have a blank canvas on Roll20 and draw on details as it was needed, and eventually I just pivoted completely to theater of the mind for all of my combat. And then Dungeondraft rolled around, and it was pretty quick to export from there, incredibly quick to import to Foundry (with a module), and Just WorkedTM. Before that, I did occasionally try and make things in Photoshop, and would follow tutorials from time to time, but it was all just so time-consuming, and with a lot of asset hunting if you wanted consistent art style and detail to what you were doing. It was just so much.

Which, of course, brings me to...

• City Maps: Wonderdraft, Dungeondraft, City Designer 3, Photoshop, Watabou's Medieval City/District/Village generators, AI...?

Ah, the problems. So, I tried to make city maps in Wonderdraft, but it's very obvious that it was built for a larger scale, and there are a lot of 'hacks' (or workarounds, I guess?) you need to do to make it work, and it can be frustrating and very time-consuming, as there's nothing there to really automate the process at all. For example, Wonderdraft has this beautiful 'paint brush' for assets such as trees or mountains that will 'spatter' them across a set radius, with a set density, etc. This is very helpful for something random like forests, but essentially useless for placing buildings. Dungeondraft is a little better in this regard, but has the opposite issue: Everything is too 'small' and focuses on more grid-based, rigid design, given that it's built for, well, dungeons. And battle maps in general.

I purchased City Designer 3 (along with a big pack of Campaign Cartographer add-ons) as part of a Humble Bundle a while ago, and I kind of enjoyed it, but it really felt like the amount of effort required wasn't worth the end result, which - at best - would be using art assets designed to give the feel of the maps from D&D 5E. And even then, that limited the asset options because it didn't seem like there was a lot of additional third party support for the program (which is definitely showing age). That said, it's the only one I've used that seemed able to handle good building placement along roads, able to do it automatically. That said, Photoshop?

Probably the best time I had making city maps. I had to stylize them, but with enough ingenuity, good knowledge of automation (through recording Actions), and following some art style tutorials, you can make a "cheap" city map that's able to have a lot of variation. If you're interested in map design in Photoshop, I highly recommend the tutorials of Jonathan Roberts, who is very much my 'gold standard' for map creation. Unfortunately, he doesn't really update his site any more, and some of the tutorials show their age, but all of the content there is still great.

Then, we have generators. The ones linked above are the best ones I've found, though the city ones leave a lot to be desired as far as graphics and specific details go. But the village generator for small towns and the like? Beautiful. It's genuinely just a perfect little generator if you don't care all that much about the specifics of the map. So, for most towns and villages, it's fine. But what if it's a town built up against a mountain, that sprouted up around a mine? Well... that's not gonna work. What if it's a town that's split on two sides of a river, protecting passage? No such luck. A swamp town, or one in tree-tops? No, not really gonna work all that well.

And just last year, I was turned towards AI generation here on tildes, thanks to @atomicshoreline and his fairly extended description of how to set things up. But, I eventually gave up bothering him after my old video card kept having VRAM issues with only 8GB.

I have seen some very good city maps made in Inkarnate, but I don't know that I'm interested in something that has a yearly subscription, and I can imagine it being very frustrating long-term to invest in something that I've seen issues with in the past.

So, all of this is to say that I really enjoy making detailed content for my world, but I've always had issues with cities. There's just so much content that needs to be hand-placed in almost every program, and even an un-finished city has taken me well over a hundred hours in Dungeondraft, and that was with me still actively hating looking at it..

So, if anyone has other suggestions, I am quite literally always searching for new ways to make city maps, and I've tried just about every suggestion given to me at least once, often to the detriment of my bank account.

Oh, if someone can think of a better title to this post and wants to change it, please be my guest. I just wanted to contribute my knowledge and recommendations, rather than just throw a "give suggestions" post out into the ether, and wasn't sure how to phrase that.

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.