paddirn

Whether it's a sense of superiority or just to be funny or asinine or out of a genuine need to spread the truth, people online generally try to be contrarian as often as possible because it gives them some sort of personal gratification or a sense that they're correcting something wrong in the universe.

prompt: "generate an image of Patrick Bateman as Batman"

Copilot: "create a picture of Marvel's Fantastic Four in Leonardo's the Last Supper painting"

alternates:

Streamer Perrikaryal uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) device to play games

I settled on using Zotero (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below that for sub-genre (cyberpunk, supernatural, low fantasy, post-apocalyptic, etc).

Another set of top-level tags will focus on the actual types of books/products one might see for an RPG. These are just all the terms I've come across before, setup in a hierarchy that makes sense to me, though sometimes terms aren't used consistently across different RPG lines. Since some products can straddle multiple genres/categories, I'm hoping tags will help make it easier to sort through everything. Does this set of categories/sub-categories make sense? I'm still at the early stages of just importing everything into a library, so I'm sure there's categories I've not thought of or considered.

• Core Rulebook (books required to play)
  • Player Handbook (this might straddle the line between core and supplement)
• Supplement (books that expand the rules/setting)
  • Sourcebook
  • Bestiary
  • Splatbook
  • Adventure/Scenario/Module
    • Campaign
  • Setting
• Accessory (mostly non-book related items)
  • Cards
  • Maps
  • Fiction
  • Music/Audio
  • Screens
  • Sheets
    • Character sheet
    • Rules/Cheat sheet
    • Misc sheet
• Resource (more for general books on RPGs, system-agnostic)
  • GM aid
  • Player aid
  • Educational
  • Tables

I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far:

• Folder system: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.

• Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).

• Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working.

• Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.

• Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.

• Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it.

• Zotero: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.

That is, have you ever started getting into a game, only to discover that the community is much deeper than you initially ever suspected?

My kids and I started playing PlateUp! for funsies, it's a 4-player co-op kitchen/cooking/restaurant simulator that has you doing fun things like cooking food, taking customers orders, and washing dishes. We kind of play it for laughs and barely make any headway in it, usually as a result of all the chaos that comes from multiple people trying to run a kitchen. I started looking deeper into it because apparently there's ways to automate your whole setup and have the whole kitchen run itself. The amount of diagrams and setups that people have created are just insane, way deeper than I ever even considered with this innocent-looking game and it's made me reconsider what I thought was just a quirky little party game.