hurricane Helene didn't get me

[bvanevery]

I just have no relationship whatsoever with r/alphacentauri.  A mod there treated me poorly many years ago, like I was chopped liver when I'd done a pretty big job of trying to drive traffic to them.  So I said you know what?  Forget you.  I'll stick to r/4Xgaming which is far larger.  SMAC comes up in discussion frequently enough there, being one of the all time greats.

The only reason I finally found out the forum had been raised from the dead, is today I was looking for a mindworm emoji on the Will To Power Discord server.  I was wondering why they were on the Alpha Centauri Discord server and why so many good emojis on various servers were locked.  I was plunking through that server, which I haven't been on in a long time, and saw that AC2 had revived.  So now I'm here.

I left Asheville 2 days before the storm hit.  I knew there was some kind of storm coming, but it didn't matter to me.  I had a previous commitment to go help my Mom in Winston-Salem with something.  I was gonna come back to deal with my usual bureaucratic rituals, socialize a bit, then leave again before it got really cold.  Like some kind of Mr. Magoo, I just drove right outta there and BLAM!  everything devastated right behind me.  Back then, I couldn't return if I'd wanted to.

It seems that Hickory was far enough away not to get major damage.  I have another car based homeless friend of mine that planted his flag there after the disaster.  Said it was in ok shape.  I have thought about you BU from time to time as I've passed through there.  I'm a patron of the Hickory Art Museum, I make it a point to stop and see whatever the latest show is.  We should finally have a beer one of these days.  I've been meaning to try that big bar on the central square since forever, but I've always found excuses not to drink alone.

I took a drive to my sister's in Ohio.  Some jerk up there totaled my old car, financially speaking.  It still runs fine, but they dented it up just badly enough to be totaled.  2X to repair what the insurance paid me as settlement, and that was a long fight.  I couldn't even deal with it at all for many months, I was pretty distraught.  I kept the car.  Hey I've put a lot of mechanical labor into it, to make it run well.  Gas MPG is still fine and that's the most important thing.  It's now a bit ugly and I still have to decide how much elbow grease I'll put into making it better.  I have sort of this feeling of resignation that I'm now driving a disposable car.

My Dad has suffered a 2 day evacuation of his hi-rise waterfront condo in Charleston, South Carolina.  Nothing related to any storm.  It seems they built the thing wrong in the 1st place, way back in the 1970s.  And for some reason, some engineering firm only figured that out recently.  There had been a lot of repair work and everything was supposed to be getting fixed.  Then very suddenly, it's announced that it isn't.  City of Charleston makes everyone leave in 2 days.  No resident had warning.  It's a very selective kind of disaster, like a tornado came in and wiped out only your building.  And it's so freaky that there's no insurance for the circumstance, at all.

My Dad is actually in decent psychological shape about it.  I'm not.  In 2024, I was only just starting to come out of my anti-social pandemic shell.  Trying to make an effort.  Then Helene completely wiped off the map, parts of Asheville where I had just started trying to plant my flag.  Art studios are gone.  Places I used to take my dog to a dog park, are a mud and debris strewn ruin.  The only saving grace is at least we had long since ceased going there.  My dog has been dead a couple years now, and I'm not really over that either.  It's just been one damn thing after another.

I did do a sort of "talk about your Helene feelings" group the last time I swung through Asheville.  It helped some.  I should do more of those.  I said, I was already messed up before this happened.  This has messed me up worse.  It makes you feel things like, you will never have stability or safety.  Anything you work for, will be destroyed.

Losing the AC2 server probably contributed to this, come to think of it.  I didn't lose my work, course.  That's living elsewhere now.  But I did lose all my development thread history, and all of those After Action Reports I did.  That's an awful lot of personal interaction and content production, over all these years.

Now I see that the Raleigh area has been underwater, and that was only a tropical depression, not the hurricane proper.  I wonder if Winston-Salem and Hickory will be hammered at some point.    Hope not.  At least I don't think we'd have the same focusing effect that the mountains have for flood damage.  So many places devastated.  Swannanoa, I think big parts of it are still pretty wrecked.  Think Black Mountain fared much better.  The downtown looked fine when I was there last.

Whereas, Biltmore Village... dang.  There's still buildings with steel beams hanging out, just gutted.  Things in better shape are all boarded up.  The arch to get into the Biltmore Estate is fine.  I don't know if it's because it evaded damage, or they just had a big budget to put it right.  Haven't chased down that level of sordid detail.

I try to tell myself there will be other art groups, other communities, not everything can ever be wiped out.  But having your life get turned into an Etch-A-Sketch, where you shake it and it all vanishes, that's hard.

[Buster's Uncle]

I have a lot to say to this, but it's late and I'm tired.  Maybe more in the morning when I'm awake, if the tech coordination don't keep me as busy.

I don't drink, but I'm just 15 minutes west of Hickory, and I'd love to meet you in meatspace sometime.  Let's do that when convenient.

I spent the Helene morning from dawn to noon on my carport watching the trees fall - in barefeet, shorts and a t-shirt, so I'd expected you to be weeks shy of winter migration and asleep in your car when Helene hit hours before the weathermen expected, or dawn.  I've been sincerely worried about you for months, especially the last one.

And this place is my whole life - just imagine how depressed I've been.  Actually gave up trying to resurrect my tech d00dz from the dead, eventually - and that there's still been a huge drag on doing my job getting the word spread that we're back and setting that tech-lack right since AC2 mysteriously came back on the 10th.  Sympathy, my man; I really get that.

Bedtime's coming up, but I really want to say more soon...

[Buster's Uncle]

So you've never mentioned mental health issues in all the years I've known you; this intrigues.  Game knows game, and I'd actually wondered -a  little- if you could be like you are w/o knowing.  Comfortable w/ kicking it around a bit?

Hello angry depressive nurd; I'm a nurd prone to depression w/ severe anger issues...  You are heard, and somebody cares...

[bvanevery]

The pandemic was bad.  I was trapped with a family member in a living situation where the house was experiencing an environmental disaster.  Construction dust everywhere.  It was choking my dog.  It came to a head and he was thrown out of the house.  Of course that meant I had to go with him, to protect him.  He was also quite old and I presume had some kind of cancer, not officially diagnosed.  We nevertheless had some decent times in total survival mode on the road, before the end.  He made it to 17.5 years and for a 65 lb. dog, that doesn't just happen.  I did something right.  Just wish I could have done more right, but I had no resources or family support to work with at all.

I've spent the last 2 years of my life trying to recover from this, and not sure I've made much progress.  The pandemic and the dog survival didn't just destroy me, it also destroyed social networks and emotional support I previously had in Asheville.  I lost a few people during the pandemic, nobody actually to COVID.  Some people just got old and up and died.  Some people had medical or mental problems that finally came due.  Some people are just gone, and I don't know if they're alive or dead, but I presume the worst.

I keep wrestling with Asheville, but I also keep bouncing in and out, not really being consistent about it.  I'm more regional now and definitely uprooted.  The region can go as far north as Ohio, where my sister is.  Or as far south as Charleston, where my Dad is.  Sometimes family is the excuse I allow to pull me away from trying to be social in Asheville.  But mostly it's just fear.  Fear of losing everything all over again.

Helene didn't help.  News reports of more storms don't help.  I have not directly experienced any storm damage.  But indirectly, I'm totally receiving the consequences of these disasters.  They rattle me, and fill me with fear.  I don't really know how to cope with the fear, so my primary tactic has been to avoid it, and suppress it.

Current politics about food stamps and medicaid adds fears on top of fear.  But those fears are more manageable, because I only need X amount of food and I don't have serious physical health issues.  That I know of.  Uh, that's another suppressed fear, that there may be more physically wrong with me than I'm acknowledging.  I'm hoping my gut problems are an understandable case of nerves, and can be handled with better dietary management.

Bad coffee is often a big problem, for instance.  I've gone up a coffee brewing snob learning curve and it's disappointing to have to back off from it.  I make weaker stuff because it's more gut friendly.  I'm pretty in tune to what happens to coffee beans and grounds when they're aging and going bad.  You can get some really bad coffee off a store shelf, and pay a lot of money for the privilege.  I primarily suspect that chlorogenic acid is a big problem for me, and that aging increases it.  I know what the bad stuff smells and tastes like.  I've learned to never, ever tough out a bad cup of coffee.  If it's really bad it can burn holes in me.

I'm encouraged by discovering that eating 2 baby organic carrots a day, substantially helps my gut healing.  The fiber should indeed help.  I think the insight is eating the right amount of fiber.  Not zero, not a whole lot.  A right sized dose.

I try to mentally separate physical problems from mental problems.  A long time ago, I realized pain is a big liar.  If you are in pain, your brain will lie to you about how awful the world is, a kind of despairing.  You won't have those thoughts if you feel just fine.  If I'm having trouble making this separation, I do take CBD oil to keep the edge off.  I don't take it regularly, as surprisingly enough, I usually am able to sleep at night just fine.  But I always have it available in case I need it.  That's my only medication per se.

[Buster's Uncle]

What do you do for money?  I was a rennie on the road, living in a tent for six years sporadically, I think I've told you - and I get some sense of how cheaply a fella can live if he really wants to, though nothing but peanut butter sandwiches gets old fast, and is unsustainable for really long...

[bvanevery]

That's actually not something I'm going to discuss publicly on the internet, because who knows, government snoops could try to use it against me somehow.  But the summary version is I rely on Christmas and birthday gifts and am extremely tight fisted and frugal all year with it.  My cash footprint is terribly, terribly small.

[Buster's Uncle]

Taking this convo up here, where it's not entirely off-topic.

The following post is offered in the spirit of I'm trying to be your friend and help you.  Please forgive the bits you don't love - I have to talk a little about the elephants in the room to be helpful.

I have contemplated whole cloth forum server design.  To the point of exercising some due diligence on available piles of open source code out there.  Including checking out the Fediverse and their evolving technical infrastructure.

There is a fundamental big problem though.  Coming up with the tech is hard work and not enough by itself.  You must also have a substantial community that uses the tech.  We both know how much work that is, even if you don't have to manage technical anything at all.

The only way I can see personally justifying the effort, is if I finally make and ship a SMAC-like game.  It makes me money, and then I'm doing the website forum in order to run the gaming business.  Which still has perils because as a one man band, I have to also keep my game alive and kicking.  It's a lot of ambition to take on.

It can't, In My Informed Opinion, be done by one person.

I astonished myself and everyone else by turning out to have good instincts for gentle people management, but I had years with a partner who knew the community a lot better -and listening to his advice/insights- as on-the-job-training before I was on my own.  He did all the under-the-hood tech stuff that doesn't show -spending time he didn't really have because RL- we both promoted like madmen, and we were filling a niche that there was a demand out there for - no vital AC community anywhere else online, and many people out there freshly hungry for just that. 

-And doing what we did here would have been impossible w/o what we spent several years doing at WPC's AC building the SMACX community, both for our own learning, the people contacts, growing/maintaining the online people pool available, and whatever positive reputation we managed to build with those people.

I respect your ambition(s), I do, especially your grasp of the basic principal of promotion - get the word out, get the word out, get the word out, and get the word out some more.  Yes; exactly.

-But you, at minimum, need a partner.  Just what you've been doing since I've known you is too much job for one person.  One energetic fella can do a lot -staying with the forum example- to create activity, but he needs a reliable co-conspirator or two to have conversations and not look like a spammer.


Some ideas about addressing that:
Think about what I said above about the virtue of brevity, when it can be managed.  Breaking complex long-running thesises into much shorter paragraphs helps when a wall-o-text can't be avoided.  Focus; figure out the shortest expression of what you mean to say, and ruthlessly trim out the details your audience needn't know.

Think about how your goals and your personal issues inform what you post.  My frustrations have no place showing in my promotional activity - and my frustrations are profound, always, just, I don't talk about them when I'm spamming Facebook for AC2, y'know?  We've clashed bitterly over exactly this point - the AARs, which I will refuse to re-litigate if you try.

Think about your deep need to be likable and liked - not as a personal issue -though I bet that applies, too, you lonely geek- but a component of promotion and your need for trustworthy collaborators.  All of mine have inevitably been friends, or didn't last long.  Work on that likeability thing. 

It was hard for me when I turned my head around in the mid-nineties -yes; I used to be a lot worse- to accept that people are all out for Number One and don't really care about my problems, and accept that the Power Of Positive Thinking stuff really works, and I needed to engage -HARD- in Trying To Be Easier To Take.  Again, I used to be a lot worse; I'm still working on it 30 years later.  It's a full-time project for the rest of my life.

You are wildly stubborn, which is a problem and also indispensable to all you've achieved as a promoter here since 2017 - maybe put some deep thought into that, and breaking your goals into achievable sub-goals.  The Ultimate Goal's really just money and independence, yes?  What will it take to get that?  You figured out for yourself a lot of that a long time ago, but maybe take out your Grand Strategy and give it another look?

Frankly, you're probably wasting your time here, alas, outside whatever enjoyment you derive from participating...


I am at your disposal to kick this around, if we can keep it not un-pleasant...

[bvanevery]

Well, there is another route.  Yes the Python Software Foundation doesn't use Python for its forum.  But I didn't check whether there are any other major Python forums, and whether any of them use a Python-based solution.  Maybe there are none, or maybe none do.  But I didn't do any due diligence on that.

The point would be to look for some forum somewhere that already has critical mass, both technically and people wise.  Then implement the various UI features I want on top of that.

The sticky wicket is whether that's a community I actually want to participate in.  Last time I made a sweep of things, I didn't see one.

Especially, that Fediverse stuff.  Ran into a bunch of kinda weird bona fide Marxists coding in Rust.  Real risk of not fitting their politics and that getting in the way.  Not itching to do things in Rust either, although I don't completely dismiss it for web work.  It's one of the purposes it was made for.  I've monitored one of the things it wasn't made for, 3D game development, and haven't been impressed with what people came up with.  The punchline is that Marxist group closed their server participation, due to lack of resources to deal with surging popularity from the Reddit debacle.  So the point was moot.

I would need a community that isn't too formative and developer oriented.  If' you've got 5 guys already working on UI neato features, they're just gonna clash and veto my input.  They'll all be seeking their own purposes and glory.  They'll have their own visions and too many cooks spoils the broth.  This is a basic problem of partnerships.  It's important to pick ones that are complementary and not destined to blow up in your face.

So yeah, "Can I sell what i want to implement?  Will it be accepted if I build it?" is a real issue.  Sure, in open source you can walk away and have this big pile of code yourself.  But if you lose the community that was doing the work, and that gives people a reason to congregate, you've lost a lot.  Most of those bodies of code, aren't written with only 1 maintainer and developer in mind.

[Buster's Uncle]

There's a real cost to having to walk away, too.  I've done it a few times, and people not playing close attention to why find it Instantly Old by the second time - makes taking co-conspirators with you a lot harder.

I think you're on a good track. thinking about what you can do/sell, alternately...

[Buster's Uncle]

I hereby note that the Modding thread I split off from your off-topic posts in Council Room -I'm no topic nazi, but what the topic is matters in that folder- would serve your purposes better for discussion of your professional aspirations, while any talk of personal issues informing your style is absolutely better off compartmentalized in here.

[bvanevery]

For me the context here is merely catching up.  Accounting for where my head is at now.  My SMACX AI Growth mod is the open source project I succeeded at finishing, solo.  After having been burned by previous open source partnerships.  And that's 7+ years ago now, that I started that journey.  You saw it.  Until the Great Forum Outage and you didn't, of course.

There's a reason I don't just dive into open source partnerships.  I know the endgames.  I think my last bona fide attempt was during the pandemic, a 3D game engine project.  I'm done with amateur hour project formation.  I could only work on something that's at "big mature scale" now, and only if it's the right project for my specific incremental goals.  That's why I went looking at what the Python Software Foundation does.  It's clearly not amateur hour as far as Python is concerned.

I've monitored a few things, like the Godot game engine.  Every 6 to 12 months I dust off that exercise again.  And I'm reminded why I didn't bite on it.  Doesn't meet my goals.  If you want it done right...

[Buster's Uncle]

-And this may well be the only place you find where you fit at all, for all I know.  I'm flattered and proud you've thought so; building this community w/ it's general chill tone out of generally touchy people is something of which I'm sinfully proud.  Maybe it's not all been futile, if you can course-correct.

-But the personal style issues, pardon, MUST be addressed, for all the improvement I see in your tone since our time off...

[Buster's Uncle]

As to partnership?  I can't speak usefully to that as a component of designing and implementing a game - just the promotional aspect of Building Bvanevery Inc. From The Ground.  Dunno just how that would work to get someone on the bus w/ you, but you'd be well-served by having someone to converse with, instead of doing monologues - someone you could leave the talking to while you just code and all that, even better.  Let him look for his own junior partner, ideally.  -Basically, delegate the PR to an -amateur at first- PR department.  That could have some future to it if you figured out a way around I'm basically telling you Step Three: Profit!

You'd almost certainly have to find a sunny-natured guy or two and teach him/them promotion...

[bvanevery]

There are a number of managerial theories out there about different leadership styles.  My personal experience is that trying to incorporate someone into one's own agenda, is work.  There has to be value add to that work, as compared to just DIY.

I've been through many open source projects where in hindsight, the people were not worth trying to work with.  They may not even have been bad people in any particular way.  Just they have their level of experience, their goals, their perspectives, their life needs, and there isn't enough overlap with what you yourself are trying to get done.

In the indie game world it's pretty well known that people aren't going to write your games for you.  Nobody gets to be "the ideas man" with a lot of others eager to implement it.  The implementors generally have their own ideas and spend their time going at it, not looking for someone else to lead them around.  There are some exceptions to this, you might find a rather personally undirected laborer here and there.  But in terms of dominant supply and demand, it's absolutely true.  You want something specific done, you'd better be prepared to do it yourself.

It might be a bit different in the networked forum software world.  When personal artistry is not at stake, there is more opportunity for multiple parties to benefit.  However, there are also platform wars.  And temptations to sell out, to seek to be the next Facebook or Reddit or whatever.

Networking and web stuff was never my forte.  I was an under the hood 3D graphics, assembly code, and to some extent programming language design guy.  I studiously avoided the web for decades, because it was too computationally slow to be interesting to me.  But in more recent years, I've realized the political implications of internet platform control.  So I'm more interested in it now, without a big technical background in it.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well sure.  It's just --- I can't see DIY/one-man-band building to BrandonGames^tm and money in yo' pocket.  Problem you have to solve, there.  -It's not a matter of not believing you're good enough, just doubt that going it alone can be made to achieve your goals.