This relates to my world that I started describing in another thread. I post it here for visibility and because it's still very unfinished. As soon as it's mostly done, I'll copy the reworked version into a new comment over there. Comments and creative ideas are more than welcome.

Some background

The Immaruk are a river valley civilization similar to real world Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia who believe in two deities:

• Shuramud, the desert sun whose aspects are day, sun, light, heat, passage of time, growth and the inevitable death of all living things.
• Iwaspat, the shapeless darkness who represents night, darkness, soothing coldness, the ground, stability and a resistance to change.

The realm is ruled by diarchs, two equal rulers who each represent one of the deities and also act as their high priests.

Death rites for common people

With Shuramud being the deity of death, they are naturally responsible for guiding the deceased out of the world of the living. Those who feel that they are getting old and weak travel to one of the shrines at the the edge of the northern desert. In the early morning, they pray, say their goodbyes to their friends and relatives and undress to leave all earthly possessions behind and offer every bit of their body to the sun's heat. Eventually at sunrise they walk out into the desert to die.

Once they have succumbed to Shuramud's gaze, their souls leave their body and rise up to the sky. While most souls are invisible, those of people who had been especially dedicated to Shuramud take the form of soul birds, flaming creatures with human bodies but the head and wings of a bird. There are very rare stories of soul birds who didn't directly rise up to be united with Shuramud but instead flew back to the land of the living and stuck around for a few hours or even days, presumably to fulfill one last task in service of their deity.

Not being able to have your soul collected by Shuramud is seen as a great misfortune, so the bodies of those who die before they reach the desert are carried either by their family or by priests and shrine guardians. If there is no body to bring to the desert, for example if someone drowned and got carried away by the great river or got eaten by an animal, a small statuette that resembles the deceased is made and displayed at their home for a few days to catch as much of their essence before it's taken to the desert instead of a body. I'm not quite sure about this last point yet but I think it fits

The Mirror of Shuramud

Centuries ago, the Shuramud cult lined a natural crater with reflective bronze (or gold?) that focuses the sunlight at a single spot, essentially turning the crater into a giant solar oven. Apart from being used as a furnace to create religious items, it's also where the diarchs who represent Shuramud are taken when they die. Being burned by concentrated sunlight is said to give them a higher chance of forming a strong soul bird than merely being out in the desert on their own.

Priests of Iwaspat

While Shuramud and Iwaspat are mostly seen as equal but opposite aspects of the world who keep each other in balance and should both be worshiped, it would still be seen as improper to give the soul of someone in the higher ranks in Iwaspat's cult over to Shuramud. Instead, they are entombed in a system of natural caves at the northern bank of the great river. There, their souls can forever stay in the embrace of the cool ground, never having to fear the change that leaving the mortal world would be.

For the diarchs who represent Iwaspat, this protection from change goes even further. Unless they die prematurely from an accident or violence, they can eventually retire to a chamber deep inside the caves where they can live on forever. Their bodies don't age anymore nor do they need to consume food. They spend most of their time motionless and in silent dialogue with Iwaspat but if needed, they are valuable advisers to their successors.

During the Eternal Night

Recently, the sun has stopped rising (see main thread), Shuramud has seemingly disappeared and walking into the now-cold desert probably won't free your soul from your body anymore. Those who can afford it, use the dwindling supply of firewood to have their bodies cremated but for most, this is becoming a big problem. Many still follow the old rites but their souls are trapped in their rotting bodies until there is a new sunrise. For gameplay, this could give me the chance to have zombie-like undead if I need them.

Once again, this is all work in progress and I would love to see your ideas. How can I flesh this out or can you think of alternatives that would fit the setting even better?

After a short discussion over in RPGMemes, we came to the conclusion that Lemmy is missing a community to discuss your works in progress and get feedback so I opened one and started posting what I'm working on.

Give it a look, leave some feedback on the stuff that's already there and add your own, no matter if it's something you're working on or a question.

![email protected]

I hope this kind of promo is allowed here. If not, just let me know

After a short discussion over in RPGMemes, we came to the conclusion that Lemmy is missing a community to discuss your works in progress and get feedback so I opened one and started posting what I'm working on.

Give it a look, leave some feedback on the stuff that's already there and add your own, no matter if it's something you're working on or a question.

![email protected]

After a short discussion over in RPGMemes, we came to the conclusion that Lemmy is missing a community to discuss your works in progress and get feedback so I opened one and started posting what I'm working on.

Give it a look, leave some feedback on the stuff that's already there and add your own, no matter if it's something you're working on or a question.

![email protected]

My ongoing work on this world is basically the reason I created this community. Feel free to give feedback, both positive and negative. I honestly have no clue if this is interesting to anyone but me.

I plan on creating a conlang for this world, following Jesse Peterson's amazing guide but I'm not done by far, so most names in this post are placeholders in either English or the proto-version of the language.

Premise

The Immaruk are river valley civilization similar to real world ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. According to their legends, they descend from two tribes that were both led by their respective deity to the fertile lands along the great river. Shuramud is the god of the sun, daylight, sky and growth but also desert heat, merciless passage of time and eventual death of all living things. Iwaspat is Shuramud's exact opposite, representing the night, darkness, nothingness (this world has no moon) but also soothing coldness, stability and the ground.

The Immaruk's culture is centered around the duality of these two deities. All things in life are attributed to one of the two but there is an understanding that a balance between them is needed for life to prosper: for example, grain needs both Iwaspat's fertile soil and Shuramud's light to grow. Of course, this balance is not always perfect but over time, it evens out. Every morning Shuramud's sun rises and gives life to the world and every evening Iwaspat banishes it behind the horizon, providing much needed refreshment and calming down the bustle of the day.

But now, after centuries of this constant meandering, the world has gotten out of balance. First, there was a long period of constant daylight and after Iwaspat's priests managed to depose the leader Shuramud's followers, it has in turn been cast into a seemingly eternal night. Nobody knows exactly how long it's gone on as timekeeping mainly relies on the passage of the sun but it feels like months or even years now.

More to come

Translating all my notes from German and turning them into a post that makes sense takes a while so I'll probably add comments for individual topics and link them here.

• Campaign outline
• Death in the world of the Immaruk (separate thread for now, will be copied into here once it's a bit further along)

How is it May already? And why are there so few fox-sized playgrounds around here?

This photo might not look like much but it has a lot of emotional value for us. The foxes and I live in a big city with very little greenery. So every year in April we rent a small cottage out in the woods and enjoy the sounds and smells of nature.

So first of all, this is not a "help me like linux" post but desktop linux specifically and it's not a "linux is shit" post either.

I run a whole bunch of linux servers (including the one that hosts the instance I'm posting from), the first thing I install on a Windows machine is WSL and I've compiled my first kernel about 20 years ago so that's not the problem we're facing here. I understand how linux works and considering the end of support for Windows 10 this is as good an opportunity as ever to fully make the switch.

My problem is more that specifically linux on a desktop still feels more like an unfinished prototype than like something I'd want to use as a daily driver. About once a year I challenge myself to try it for a while and see how it feels. I look around for a distro that seems promising, put it on a spare SSD, put it either into my Framework laptop or my gaming machine and see where the journey takes me, only booting Windows in an emergency.

And each time, I get fed up after a few days:

• Navigating a combination of the distro's native package manager (apt, pacman, rpm, whatever), snap, flatpack and still having to set up the maintainers' custom repositories to get stuff that's even remotely up-to-date somehow feels even messier than the Windows approach of downloading binaries manually.
• The different UI toolkits, desktop environment, window manager and compositor seem to be fighting each other. I feel like even for something simple as changing a theme or the UI scaling, I have to change settings in three different places just to notice that half the applications still ignore them and my login screen renders in the top left corner of the screen but the mouse cursor acts as if the whole screen was used.
• All of that seems to be getting worse when fractional scaling is involved which is a must for the 2256x1504 screen in my Framework 13.
• The general advice seems to be "just wait until you run into a problem, then research how to solve it". For my server stuff, this works really well. But for desktop linux, it feels like for every problem I find five different solutions where each of them assumes an entirely different technology stack and if mine is even slightly different I eventually run into a step where a config file is not where it should be or a package is not available for what I'm using.
• I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing. I could probably replace VS with VScode or Ryder but it's an additional hurdle. For photo editing, I haven't found a single thing that fits my workflow the way Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop do. I've tried Gimp, Krita, Darktable, RawTherapee and probably a couple more and they all felt like they were missing half the features or suffer from the same unintuitive UI/UX that Blender had before they completely overhauled it with 2.8.

Sooo... where do I go from this? I really want this to work out.

I'm working on a replacement for a broken shelf in my fridge door. It's about 37.6 cm (14.8") on the longest axis so I need to print it in two pieces (as shown in the screenshot). Does anyhone have a good idea for a connection between the two that will be sturdy enough? The fridge door will support it from below for about half of its depth, the rest hangs free.

Wall thickness is currently at 3mm but I can increase it a bit if needed.

One of my favorite pictures from my photo calendars (see my other post). Taken at Ferriter's Cove in Ireland in August 2016, became the August picture for the 2017 calendar.

It all started with a trip to Ireland in 2016 where I thought that simple landscape photos would be too boring so I brought some fox plushies. The photos turned out so cute that I turned them into a calendar as a Christmas gift for friends and family.

Now, years later, I have nine of these calendars and I'm working on a tenth. I've posted them on Mastodon for a while but never found the right community on Lemmy so I guess now you'll have to deal with it here.

The photo in this thread is this year's title. I was packing for a photography job at the local disco and the way the fox sat in the backpack seemed like a good representation of what I'm doing.

For tabletop miniatures I prefer to use a flexible resin to avoid small details breaking off when removing supports or when a mini falls off the table. So far I've used Ameralabs TGM-7 but now that my current bottle is almost empty I'm thinking about looking into alternatives. At over 75€ per liter, TGM-7 is really expensive compared to other resins.

Amazon recommended me RESIONE TH72 as an alternative and there are others on the market like Sunlu Standard Plus. So far I couldn't find a good comparison between them. Do any of you have experience with any of those or other recommendations?

Finally found out what kept me from uploading photos directly to lemmy so hopefully it will work this time.

This is part of a series that I shot in 2020 and now I’ll finally have the chance to show them in an exhibition on Berlin later this year.

I made this list based on the instructions PDF that's available from LEGO's website. For most of these, it doesn't really matter if they are black, dark bluish gray or light bluish gray so I picked them based on what will most likely look good with the surrounding colors and what is cheapest on Bricklink.

Two notable parts: Technic, Axle and Pin Connector Perpendicular Double with Axle Connector 2L is only available in white (the same color as in the set) and for the Technic, Axle 1L with Pin without Friction Ridges "old" light gray is significantly cheaper than any of the newer colors except the included tan.

In general, if you want to save a few bucks, you can probably leave all tan and white pieces as they are. For me, the complete replacement (250 pieces) cost about 35€ plus shipping.

Can we please get a post that explains what this community is for? Seems like nobody reads the sidebar (which is hard to access on most mobile clients) so we constantly get flooded with questions that would rather fit in ![email protected] or ![email protected]

I understand that many people are still confused by how lemmy works but we should make clear that this is for general questions and discussions similar to what /r/askreddit was and not a place to ask technical questions about lemmy.