I absolutely do think more people need to use Lua, especially for config. The language does have some rough edges (what language doesn't) but I always suggest Lua tables whenever a thread about JSON and its discontents comes around. It's minimalistic, it allows for comments, you don't have to quote strings. You do have to avoid the temptation to add logic. But at this point most of 'yall are using some bespoke language to generate YAML to probably generate more YAML so the horses of complexity creep have already fled the barn.
That said I'm probably too old school but I really still prefer the "old" method of templating. It's a lot easier for me to reason about the structure of the HTML site-wide when I can actually see the HTML. Of course a lot of modern programmers can't read HTML and it would just seem like noise to them, which is fine. I think a lot of the rationale behind something like this is readability and that's often a matter of what you're comfortable with. I personally worry that this would become difficult to follow once you're dealing with a large and complex site with nested and fragmentary templates.
Then again, this is basically how most modern websites work using front end templates with javascript - all of the HTML is generated, so I'm probably just being an old man yelling at clouds here.
The point about the old design parsing HTML is fair, but if you want a templating language at some point something has to do that and you don't want it to be the browser. You don't want to do what most untemplated PHP does and just toss interpolated strings into the response and just make it the end user's problem. The Lua version here inevitably winds up doing a lot of the same work. Treating a templating language like an actual language and having an actual parser may seem like overkill but it also makes features like context-aware escaping, caching and plugins easier.
I don't think that attribute order is a problem in HTML - the spec doesn't care, the browser doesn't care, you shouldn't care. But if you do care, I don't think arranging attributes in alphabetical order is the best solution. There is apparently an informal HTML attribute ordering standard for this: (https://dev.to/bawa_geek/a-standardised-approach-to-html-att...). Which again, doesn't really matter with HTML but does match what developers would expect to see.
If I had to suggest improvements in terms of architecture it would be to either use something like Teal (a compile-to-lua language that lets you add types,) and LuaJIT, which has plugins that improve the performance of strings and tables, and serializing data. And rather than dynamically generating everything, statically cache as much of the HTML as possible.
Just remember that if you publish them to the web, you give up "first publication rights" that might prevent you from being able to publish them elsewhere later. The web does count as "publishing" regardless of whether you get paid.
If you don't care about that, just make a website and put them all on it. Maybe avoid a third party platform since you won't have complete ownership of your content. Any static site generator will work. I personally suggest Nikola but it doesn't matter. Anything that can generate a simple blog format should work.
You might also consider setting up a Mastodon account and pushing links to your stories there. I don't know how big the writing community is there but it's probably not nothing.
I wouldn't bother with a literary agent unless you're a professional looking to be signed by a major publisher and self-publishing platforms tend to be scams.
Problem is everything else is getting eaten by AI so I wouldn't even know how to market in this scenario.
The go-to site for finding markets for speculative fiction used to be ralan.com but it looks like it closed in 2023[0].
This is true. Personally I always try to get my work published with a third-party first, and then I talk with the editors to clarify policies. Most smaller magazines and publishers are pretty flexible, they’ll often have some provisions in place to allow you to re-publish original works on your own website after a certain period of time, if that’s the route you want to take.
It’s the approach I’ve used in the past with places like Paged Out and 2600 Hacker Quarterly.
I know the author of the Martian published that story first on his website, but I don’t really know the layout / or what “first publication rights” be or entail. I have to do my research - and yes, I never have used AI writing any of them so I’m kinda scrambling now to find a way to do this before it can. thank you
This entire thread has swiftly descended upon by bots, shills and sockpuppets. It'll be flagged before any hope of finding good faith conversation in the morass.
It's just weird to see it here, honestly. I wouldn't have expected the ROI on this board to be worth it. It just feels, whatever the admins think, more like reddit with this crap.
The problem with green alt accounts trolling threads like this has been getting worse for a while. I don't know what can be done about it other than to just flag them, but that doesn't stop them.
It's only allowed in one direction, but it's effective in many.
Violence is the reason slavery ended in the US. Violence brought us civil rights laws. Gay rights. Women's rights. Labor laws. Environmental protection laws.
Every right granted by default to white Christian gentlemen at the founding of this great nation had to be taken in blood by everyone else. That's just how America is. It cannot be trusted to live up to its own standards except at gunpoint.
When, where and how violence is justifiable is a different question, of course. But the premise that "Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic" is simply false. If violence were politically ineffective, authoritarian states wouldn't use so much of it.
Half of those things were not brought about by violence. Labor laws? Absolutely. Gay rights, maybe? Gay marriage was famously won non-violently by showing the wider public that gay is normal.
What violence brought about women's rights or environmental protection laws? I suppose protestors destroyed the fur market.
UBI will never happen in the US so it's a pointless argument. Americans will have plenty of pawn shops and short-term loan services to help them, though.
One can go to /r/UFOs and see plenty of "interesting thought experiments" happening in that area, and while that might be entertaining, it isn't compelling.
I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.
Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.
>It is hard to understand why the U.S. cares about a random Middle Eastern country called Israel this much.
Study the links between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity, in particularly the latter's view of Israel's role in end-times prophecy, and you'll get your answer.
You are getting downvoted, but you are correct. USA is failing in separation of church and the state and now it is going to have a war because ancient book said so.
Yeah. I think the instinct is "But that's batshit!" and like, yeah, that's exactly the problem.
To be fair to the ancient book, at that time it would have been understood by intellectuals that it's not a prediction of future events, it's a message to them about their past and present, not a message to us about our future. So us blaming the book, not the crazy people is the same mistake as if we were screaming at the author of "Don't Create the Torment Nexus". The author was writing fiction, the critics knew it was fiction, most of the readers knew it was fiction, the problem is that billionaire tech bro who thought it was a message from God telling them they need to spend $100Bn to create a Torment Nexus.
The Secretary of War, a Christian nationalist and white supremacist, has framed the war in Iran as a holy war to bring about the End Times. Many people in the government have said they consider America's military support of Israel to be an absolute Christian obligation. JD Vance and the President want to create a new Catholicism with blackjack and hookers and holy Zionist warfare because the Pope disagrees with them.
>White replacement theory and expressing support for an alt-right ideologue who manipulated people with bad faith, dishonest and downright monstrous arguments is not "standard right-wing".
It is now. That's what the shifting of the Overton Window and normalization of right-wing ideology does. These aren't fringe beliefs anymore, they're commonly held, mainstream right-wing views. They're policy within the US government. Charlie Kirk was treated as a martyr and a hero by the administration. He was treated with more dignity and respect than war veterans. The DHS posts memes about mass deportation.
The "far right" and "alt-right" no longer exist. Those labels are no longer useful and no longer describe reality.
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