How 'bout that! :D

If the SSD itself is OK, then it was probably trying to boot the SSD still. The blank screen issue might have to do with the graphics drivers then? I remember having a similar blank screen problem with Ubuntu a long time ago where I had to put in "nomodeset" as a parameter in GRUB when booting until I got the right drivers set up.

the tablet supports pxe boot. Do you think I could get mileage off of that if I set up a server on my other laptop and connected them via ethernet?

Maybe. If it's not too much trouble to set up and you can't get the USB to work again, might as well try it before throwing in the towel.

I'm rather confused by the fact that the USB drive worked for you before but doesn't any more and yet seems to be OK on other systems. Is there anything like "fast boot" enabled in the BIOS maybe? (Try turning that off if so.)

Also, when you're trying to boot from the SSD, can you get anything out of GRUB by tapping shift or escape (or maybe other keys) while it's trying to boot?

Do you think that removing the ssd will help?

It's a sanity check to help you rule out things like unintentionally booting from the wrong device. Can't boot from hardware that's not there! If the USB does work with it removed, then something you believe about how the device boots is false and you can then try to figure out what. A lot of BIOSes will "helpfully" try the next device in the sequence if it can't successfully boot from the first one -- which can be really confusing when debugging.

Some other thoughts for things to check: does the device confirm that it can actually see the USB drive in some way? Does a USB keyboard work in the port you're using? If there's more than one USB port, have you tried a different port? Do your USB drives work in another computer?

You might find writing guides relevant to your interests. For example, "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card contains some details about how the author came to write Hart's Hope and other novels. "Scene & Structure" by Jack Bickham might also be interesting -- I don't remember discussion of specific books in it, but it might scratch a similar itch for how-it's-made style content.

Some books also contain introductions/forewords/afterwords with details about how the book was written. A bunch of OSC's novels (like some editions of Ender's Game) come to mind specifically -- I read those back when I was curious about maybe trying to become a writer, so that's the most prominent example in my mind, but I'm sure there are others. I've also seen translations of a number of works where the translators include really long introductions explaining some of their choices -- and sometimes criticize earlier translations.

[...] male-gazey content. I am 2) a woman extremely disinterested in that.

I feel some men might also not want to see content focused on games where a big goal is to romance a man as a woman, presented in a femgazey way or a way tailored to our desires even if not sexualized.

Fair enough. There are a lot of eroge where you play as a women that are absolutely, clearly intended to be played by men though; that part alone isn't likely to be off-putting, but I can see specific presentation and femgaze heavy works being just as off putting to some guys as malegaze heavy works are to some women. If the audience is mostly straight guys, posting fan art of something like an explicit BL work probably isn't going to get much positive response, I suppose. :-)

There's so little content posted regularly in the visualnovels community though that I feel like anyone actively trying to start discussions there on the subject of VNs would likely be welcomed, but I might be wrong about that. The most successful posts I've seen are generally notices about sales and some business news with people occasionally posting memes and such as well.

If that doesn't feel right to you though, I get it, and hopefully reviving the other community works out.

Is the issue that the posts will be frequently inaccessible?

I don't think your posts are federating out at all when kbin.social is down -- basically only people on your own instance can see it, if I understand how federation works correctly. If you check the view of the community from lemmy.world the last post visible is from a month ago, for example -- https://lemmy.world/c/Otomegames@kbin.social?dataType=Post&sort=New -- even though I can see on your instance that you've started several threads since then. I can't even load the community from reddthat since it was probably never requested and kbin.social is down currently; it just errors out.

Does Lemmy have a way to get inactive mods removed and replaced?

I don't know. Tagging @Blaze@reddthat.com for suggestions since they've been trying to grow the Fediverse for a while and may know how to go about it, if it's possible.

Or is there a website where you can download OpenStreetMap as a PDF.

Have you taken a look at this wiki page yet?

Depending on what you need one of the suggestions there may be helpful.

There is also documentation about PBF files as used by OSM if you want to do something more unusual that needs custom coding.

Now imagine if to buy a car you had to tolerate cameras and other forms of tracking your telemetry just to get to work and feed yourself.

Sorry to be the bearer of depressing news, but that's basically already happening in new cars.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/car-spying-insurance-surveillance-data/

I wonder what cuil things it will say if you start asking questions about hamburgers instead...

Maybe you'd be interested in "kinetic novels"? They're basically VNs without choices.

Just the other day, I got a reply to a thread from ~6 months ago on kbin!

It was spam. :/

I was following it casually last year, but haven't really kept up. These are some of the communities I made a note of:

• !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• !share_anime_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• !imageai@sh.itjust.works
• !ai_art@lemmy.world
• !stable_diffusion_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• !localllama@sh.itjust.works

I don't know about KDE in particular, but I've had problems with USB mice waking various Ubuntu systems when they're not directly connected (i.e. there's a hub or KVM in between it and the computer). The workaround I used for that was to remove the mouse input (e.g. by carefully pressing a physical button on the KVM) -- which was good enough for me -- but I think there is a programmatic way to block particular classes of input from waking the system if some device is waking your system inappropriately.

Doing a quick search turned up this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/252743/how-do-i-prevent-mouse-movement-from-waking-up-a-suspended-computer -- I can't vouch for any of the specific techniques there though.

Worth noting that while I had a problem with the mouse specifically, other hardware could be causing your system to wake up.