Depending on how big the island is, and how the gas is stored, I don’t think it would drop like a rock, I think it would slowly drift down as gas escapes. This reminds me of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels. Perhaps residents could weaponize the islands by selectively reducing buoyancy to crush cities below.

I have a setup involving floating cities in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, but instead of using a lifting gas they use Flanar pontoons.

Tattoos aren’t a thing since most of the population is covered nose to tail in fur. Perfumes are the primary means of personal adornment. The only visual decorations are designs painted or scored onto the writing claw (done by both men and women) and tail rings, which are usually cloth sleeves worn around the tail rather than rigid metal loops.

The anti-baldness laws aren’t heavily enforced, and even when they are, it involves preventing the balding drugs from being leaked to the public rather than punishing possession and use. Perfumes are a more salient way to communicate status and rank anyway, and healers supplement their baldness with specific scents.

They also didn’t always have germ theory, so they weren’t always aware they needed to take these precautions.

I’ve backed myself into a corner somewhat regarding commercial cooking. In theory deliberate baldness would also be prevalent among cooks since they also have to meet sanitation requirements, but I’ve made baldness such a distinct indicator of the medical profession that in some jurisdictions it’s illegal to shed one’s fur as it’s considered impersonating a healer ^[1].

For now cooks use bunny suits or glove boxes, though the use of a mobile assistant who carries tools on the back as described above is also common in kitchens. There’s even a Commonthroat word for the job qgkNPqg that carries secondary meanings of someone who is made to do someone else’s dirty work.

Yes, very much so.

I’ve never heard of a sport where you can lose points, but I’m also not a sports guy.

At the time of the OP I was testing federating two nodeBB instances. ActivityPub requires HTTPS AFAIK.

Are the sugar gliders more like familiars/companions for the wizards or do they have their own society and stuff? Is dancing something sugar gliders are known for?

OK. NOW email is working properly. Turns out my own email provider is more permissive about random email servers. Gmail won’t even put it in the spam folder. I had to switch to a 3rd party email provider. Before I was using sendmail built into the server. I can confirm Gmail is receiving the verification emails now.

“succeed” perhaps isn’t the right word. I like the CBB and have no intentions of leaving. My only gripe is that it runs on a rather old platform. The problem I have with social media is that it doesn’t foster long-lasting conversations. Ironically you CAN achieve a traditional forum experience on Lemmy simply by sorting posts in a community by latest comment and choosing the “chat” option within a thread, but even though they’re trivially easy to select, since they’re not the defaults nobody will bother. The default options favor novelty, so older topics get buried quickly.

But there are lots of ideas that social media brings to the table that I think enhance the forum experience without robbing it of its more cozy character.

In the end, though, my motivation is 80% wanting to improve my sysadmin skills and 20% wanting to create a community. Like how do I manage software updates, backups, migration, provisioning more resources, etc. Since I’m so green when it comes to administration, I’d suggest not using an email address or using a throwaway, and of course using proper password hygiene goes without saying.

Regarding tags, my intention was to start out with a single category and let community usage dictate which topics deserve their own categories. When I was on the Minecraft forums back in 2011, I was annoyed by how granular the forum structure was.

I’m curious about the white hole. That was something I played around with, that the central light was spewing out matter and had a negative gravitational field that pushed people toward the surface since you don’t experience the gravity of a sphere if you’re inside it.

I’d also like to know more about the clouds.

I’m always a sucker for giant cosmic space god heads.

I based the idea on Unicron from G1 Transformers. For the longest time I called the structure in my conworld Yinrihcron in want of a better name. Now the name is used in-universe by humans.

Also, if there are gods or super powerful beings, even high level spell casters there needs to be a good solid reason why they aren’t the ones who are saving the world. The Forgotten Realms made me question that too much, as a player I was meeting all these high level beings and they told me to go into the pit of evil bad guys who are going to take over the world.

I generally solve this problem by presenting gods more like they are in IRL religions, inscrutable and unknowable. This also allows for things like crises of faith, which would be hard to pull off when you have tangible evidence of your deity lying around. As for why they’re so aloof, this is my go-to explanation.

Seeing as how this has persisted through both my longest-lasting conworld and my most detailed conworld, I’d say a race of sapient doglike creatures. While part of the appeal of of dog ownership is that, compared to humans, dogs are emotionally simple critters with uncomplicated needs, A big part of me wishes I could explain things to my dogs in a way they could understand, and that they had the capacity to unambiguously tell me how they’re doing. I also wish I didn’t have to keep burying them every 10-15 years. Ergo, sapient cynoids that live over 7 centuries it is.

Unrelated, but I would draw maps when I was a kid, just an island with blobby regions representing biomes or polities or whatever. There would ALWAYS be a lake of lava somewhere on the map.

Oh, and mechs. Big ol’ stompy walking war crimes. Combine this with the sapient dogs and you get space doggos piloting mecha-Clifford into battle, good times.

Interesting.

In my case, the light was the physical manifestation of a god of order. Opposing the light was a god of chaos and entropy that appeared as a writhing mass of viscera that completely surrounded the sphere, underground from the perspective of the inhabitants living on the inner surface. The world existed near the birth of the universe or near its end; it’s not clear to the inhabitants which is true. The light is either banishing the chaos and establishing physical laws, or fighting a losing battle against the incarnation of heat death. Magic is possible either because the laws of physics are still sorting themselves out or because they’re breaking down.

A day-night cycle was made possible thanks to a hemispherical shield that orbited the light, occulting it for half a day

I assumed they were aware of each other and simply differed in moderation style or the type of user they wanted to attract.

I have, however, been toying with establishing a presence in the fediverse for conlangers/conworlders to congregate; likely not Lemmy, but NodeBB, as I like the more permanent nature of forums compared to more modern social media. As for non-federated conlanging communities, there’s the CBB where I hang out most, the unrelated ZBB, both running phpBB. But the granddaddy of conlangery on the internet is probably the conlang mailing list.

I can only vouch for the CBB, as I’ve merely lurked briefly on the ZBB and have never checked out the mailing list, though it’s on my todo list.

I’m attempting to run a NodeBB forum. I’m only assuming that web sockets was the issue because the first search result I came up with that matched my symptoms mentioned it.

Cool. Follow up question: Do I generate the cert once and distribute the same private key to all the servers I’m running? I’m guessing not, but does that mean I run the certbot command on every server?

I love mechs!

Across yinrih culture there is a concept similar to European knighthood, but replace horses with mechs. The commonthroat word for mech pilot rGHqg also means knight. There is an order of warrior monks called the knights of the sun who make heavy use of mechs and bulky powered armor (think WH40K space marines). The word for “squire” (Lmqmg) also means “mechanic”. Mechs are operated by both a knight and a squire. The knight pilots the mech and handles primary weapons, while the squire acts as an engineer managing the mech’s systems and occasionally manning secondary weapons.

The twist, of course, is that since I tend to think of a mech as a vehicle that resembles its pilot, yinrih mechs have four prehensile paws and a prehensile tail. Their quadrupedal body plan makes limbed vehicles slightly more believable, and I go out of my way to mention that they use force projectors^[1] on the palms of the mechs’ paws to keep them from damaging terrain underfoot.

Mechs used by knights of the sun lean a bit more into zoomorphism than is strictly practical, with heat sinks shaped to look like ears, and antenna arrays positioned like whiskers.

As for how mechs came to be in this setting, they kept making powered armor bigger and bigger until it was a vehicle being piloted rather than a suit being worn.

I looked up Cloudflare tunnels and tried setting one up. Some things future readers may want to know:

1. You have to set Cloudflare as your domain’s authoritative nameservers.
2. You need to set up an account (not a problem) but also have to register a payment method, even for the free tier (no me gusta).
3. Regarding NodeBB specifically, if you set up a tunnel, you can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but it fails when you try to log in. A few minutes of searching leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets, and the solution requires you to partially expose your IP address, defeating the principle purpose for me to use cloudflare in the first place.

How does this subspecies handle the situation?