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3 yr. ago

Just a guy, bout to get my PhD in experimental particle physics. I like hockey, basketball, DND, science, and audio equipment.

Go Nuggets! Go Avs!

Until current site stability, federation sync issues, and front-page spam in kbin are resolved, I have migrated to fedia.io:fedia.io Account Page

  • An old granny bard, based in no small part on my own grandma. She doesn't channel her magic through song or dance, but through her sassy remarks, telling stories about her childhood, and making baked goods, sweets, and presents for her adopted grandkids (the adventuring party).

    Bardic Inspiration? Reminding you how much she loves you and is proud of you. Alternatively, giving you some candy for later or promising that if you do well, she will bake you a pie or take you out for icecream for being so brave.

    Healing spells? Blown kisses, band-aids, and warm cookies.

    Hypnotic Pattern/Hold Person/etc? Telling a rambling story (that she forgot what the point/moral was before she even started) but the enemies are too polite to interrupt her.

    Dissonant Whispers/Visious Mockery/etc? Asking when you are going to get a boyfriend/girlfriend, graduate, get married, or get a real job. Telling bad (and slightly innapropriate) jokes, for her own amusement, often messing up the punchline. Asking if you have talked your mother recently ("You know, she won't be around forever, and I am sure she wishes you'd write more.") Simply saying "Bless your heart."

    Party Buffs? Giving you knickknacks, homemade gifts, or old hand-me-downs she really thinks you'll like. Passing down age-earned wisdom and giving encouragement to just try your best. Making breakfast for the party, using far too much butter, cream, and other artery clogging goodness.

  • I didn't know the European Space Agency organized E3. Learn something new every day.

  • Not just guitar audio! I own a tube amp for my guitar and 2 tube amps for driving my higher-end headphones! They are neat little pieces of electronics history, not just in how they run, but also because most of the best tubes are old military surplus. My oldest pair are from 1945 and were made for early army/navy radar systems.

    1945 JAN-6AK5 tubes

  • There have been hiccups, and we aren't always at 100% attendance, but I am really proud of my group for making the time to play (almost) every other sunday at a set time. On the weeks we miss, they are also good about adjusting their schedules so that we do a back-to-back weekend instead to make up for lost time.

  • Overleaf is free (the paid tier is mainly for work stuff, collaborative document editing and the like) or you can install a LaTeX interpreter and run the files locally on your computer. Then you can print it off at home, at a print shop, etc.

  • Not dumb at all. If you aren't familiar with latex, the easiest way to use it would be to make an overleaf account, open the template, and follow along through the comments in the document. Most everything is formatted for plug-and-play entry, so you just fill in the required fields. It is a bit technical, but should be mostly readable even without markup experience. You can also copy the text from the .tex files (itemcard.tex, ItemCommands.tex, and tcolorboxSettings.tex) into chatGPT along with your item description and it will convert it for you.

  • All shall tremble before the superior typesetting experience.

  • Thank you!

  • Thanks! If you end up using it, let me know!

  • Hey, the printable card setting has been implemented (just waiting for Overleaf to publish it), but I thought I'd show off the result here first:

    Printable Card Example

    It fixes the card size to a 5:7 ratio, the same as any playing card (usually 2.5×3.5in), so it will fit any sleeve for game cards when printed.

  • Hey, the printable card setting has been implemented (just waiting for Overleaf to publish it), but I thought I'd show off the result here first:

    Printable Card Example

    It fixes the card size to a 5:7 ratio, the same as any playing card (usually 2.5×3.5in), so it will fit any sleeve for game cards when printed.

  • It was funky and felt distinctly un-LaTeX with the pdf cropping and graphic declarations, but was super fun. Way different from academic writing or even hobby typesetting with normal, pre-made classes (the DnD 5e LaTeX Template by rpgtex is a gamechanger for homebrewed dnd content and was the catalyst for this). The standalone document class is really weird to work with, and using tcolorboxes as the main document content feels like I am fitting a square peg into a non-euclidean hole, but it is still working!

    I am just glad I decided to use LaTeX and not python for this.

  • Joke answer: I am a young burnt out academic who is putting off writing his PhD thesis, so I fit right in the sweet spot for this sorta thing.

    Real answer: I learned to do this as I was doing this. I had a solid idea of what I wanted and just started going through the LaTeX documentation to find the things I would need. Really it is just three new tricks I had to learn:

    • The standalone document class, which crops the pdf to the content inside
    • tcolorbox, which usually adds a blurb in a colored box for text inserts
    • Logic gates for LaTeX

    Everything else was just formatting. I was inspired by this template that showed that LaTeX would be good for dnd stuff.

  • They are, and will always be, iconic. I only used one other source when making this, mainly for the font pack and the potential to add a texture map to the text block in lieu of solid gray.

  • Thanks! I couldn't sleep one night last week so I threw the basics together. Then I went on a mission to understand how to implement logic gates into LaTeX, get everything turned into commands, automating the sizing, etc. By Friday it was easy enough to use and made a good enough looking card that I figured I would share it with the world!

  • LaTeX is a typeset that is written in plain text with Markup language. Word, docs, acrobat are all WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, so you type the words and use toolbars to edit formatting. In markup, what you write is what you get: you type everything, including the commands for alignment, spacing, etc. It makes control and customization of your document easier. If you ever have tried to use MS Word to make a good looking equation and wanted to die when it messed up your images and spacing 10 pages back, markup typesetting is the solution.

    My tip would be to find a few templates on overleaf that you might find useful and just mess around and try to come up with what you want to see. Could be for work documents, could be for a hobby, whatever. Overleaf, the website I shared this project on, is great because it handles the backend stuff like compiling, software installs, etc. and allows you to easily copy templates over from premade projects in the gallery.

    I learned to use it for writing scientific publications, but eventually I used it for all my homework, making 'official' looking DnD content, keeping a log of my work; basically most documents that are longer than 1 page. It is particularly good for science and math writing, but is almost as versatile as HTML for whatever you want to make.

  • Yeah, I feel kinda silly for not thinking about it in v1. I play in person, but distribute items via discord, so it never even crossed my mind.

  • 196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

    I'll tell you hwat, that rule just ain't right.

  • Dungeons and Dragons @lemmy.world

    New Pointyhat Video: D&D Monks are GOOD, Actually