💾 Archived View for ecs.d2evs.net › posts › 2022-11-11-pgte.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:08:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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"a practical guide to evil" was a good web serial

the wordpress site of the serial in question, may be down by the time you're reading this

a friend of mine introduced me to APGtE in early 2021, around a year before it was finished. it took me a while to catch up to what had been written as of then, but once i did it became a fixture of my monday and thursday nights. i missed ErraticErrata's writing over the last half a year, and i'm happy that pale lights started up recently.

as of now, the practical guide is still publically available for free on the wordpress site linked above, but ErraticErrata announced a publishing deal with a sketchy-ass mobile app called yonder, where it will be sold on a per-chapter basis as a sequence of microtransactions. the serial would very much benefit from an editor, and i would love it if it were eventually published as either a normal ebook or a traditional paper book, but i really don't like this move as a whole.

this is excabarated by the fact that it seems that the wordpress site will be shut off on 2022-12-31, likely well before the series is done releasing on yonder. i also don't believe that there are any official plans to archive the comments from wordpress, which only makes things worse.

i wrote a small script a while back that scrapes the practical guide and builds pdfs of it for my personal use, but up until this point i've respected ErraticErrata's wishes and haven't distributed them publically. however, with the move to yonder, i don't think it's fair to let these books disappear from the public internet. as such:

a gzipped tarball containing pdfs of the practical guide, both with and without comments

the shell script i used to generate said pdfs

be aware that the script in question is an awful pile of hacks, ymmv. it depends on hq, weasyprint, and curl

hq, which is like jq for html

as of now, there don't seem to be any plans to do something similar for pale lights, and i haven't bothered to make a pdf for it since i'm reading it as it comes out, but i'll update this post if the situation there changes

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