lucid-moon

[lucid-moon]

Knowing a little bit of programming is neat and all. Until you go "ooh, a small bug in a tool I use, that I'm just knowledgeable enough to kludge together a fix for. I'll make a quick patch and send it off."

And then you spend an entire day bashing your head against trying to get some asshole's[1] incredibly specific environment up and running so you can actually test and iterate on this bugfix - and then continuously get stuck on shitty programmer-brained tools, and give up because fuck it it's not worth the effort.

[1] Not really an asshole. They made a cool tool I really appreciate. I just hate the whole dev setup.

(Goddesses damn I wish you could just be like "Here's the literal two commands you need to do to get an exactly the same environment I use." Nix is... on the path to it, but it's the EVE: Online of programming learning curves.)

please learn how to code

like, if you're bored today, and not doing anything,

learn a little bit of coding please

[lucid-moon]

Working with a python library.

>Function I need to use has to be awaited, because it's a coroutine. >You can't await on the top level because they need to be in an async function. >Put them in an async function just for this. >You can't call the function they're in without awaiting the function. >You can't await on the top level because it needs to be in an async function.

Absolutely fucking deranged series of errors here.

[lucid-moon]

"Something in this vile network of ML libraries has passed PyTorch a folded up note letting it know that I am using AMD gpus"

[lucid-moon]

The encryption format used by OpenSSL is non-standard: it is "what OpenSSL does", and if all versions of OpenSSL tend to agree with each other, there is still no reference document which describes this format except OpenSSL source code.

[lucid-moon]

Imagine there's this chef, right. Cooks a *lot*, makes food that ends up on... pretty much everyone's plates. For years they cook, omelettes, steaks, pancakes, etc. Then it turns out that every last omelette they made was fucking radioactive. Somehow. Now they stopped making omelettes forever. And because those omelettes were so radioactive, no one will ever make more out of caution. And now if you're craving omelettes, you're shit outta luck.

That's how I feel about Adobe and Flash.

[lucid-moon]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[lucid-moon]

Prosperous Universe: Day One Despair

I started playing this game called Prosperous Universe, by Simulogics. Conceptually, I vibe with it really well. The way I described it in shorthoof was "It's basically if EVE Online was an idle game". Looking at the mechanics and skimming over the gameplay, this is so close to a game I'd envisioned ages ago. I really really really want to enjoy this game. It's got a lot of depth for me to really sink my teeth into, and it looks like I'll enjoy it a lot.

..... Once I can get past some fucking terrible design decisions. An optimist might call them something like "Early Access oversights" that might get corrected later. I am not an optimist.

.....

The game heavily relies on abbreviated commands and referencing anything is done through various types of shortcodes.

e.g.:

`MAT THF` is how you get the "Materials" page for "Thermofluid".

`PLI OT-580b` is how you bring up the "Planetary Information" page for "Montem".

..... If you only know the long name of a thing, the way to find its shortcode (so you can use it in other commands) is a convoluted process involving contract templates. Good luck guessing shortcodes.

(For items: An Automated Cooling System is ACS. A Flow Control Device is FC. A Sensor Array is SAR. Why? Fuck you, that's why.)

"Hey we should have an easy way to search any name in the game and get its relevant shortcode" has been brought up several times over the years of this games development but the dev response has been overwhelmingly tepid.

What I'm pattern matching this to is peak Programmer Brain behavior of "I Must Make And Name Things As Confusing As Possible Because I Am A Smart Person And This Is How I Show It." Fuck.

I found someone else in their discord who was having similar problems as me and ranted about things in a similar way as me, back in February. They had their conversation about things being unnecessarily convoluted and the lack of search making things painful about... two or three days after they joined? From what I can tell, they stopped playing after about three weeks of fighting the UI.

This bodes poorly for my continued enjoyment of the game.

..... A digression on complexity, gameplay depth, and convoluted-ness. These are things that I can really enjoy when done right. My shining example of what to do with these is Factorio: A fairly complex game that can get decently in-depth. I even enjoy mods that make it more convoluted! But the thing that I'm doing in Factorio is closer to "How Do I Optimize From A To B?"(contrast Prosperous Universe "How Do I Even Find The Command To Do A, Let Alone B?") Factorio has three Things: Resources, Machines, Transports. (If you're playing with Biters, that's one more thing but they're basically just a Resource sink.) Factorio does really well at getting out of your way, so that you're fighting your own decisions more than the games. The parts of the UI you need to interact with to advance throughout the game (mainly Inventory, Recipes, and Technology) all recognize the games complexity and depth, and give you a fucking search bar. Granted, I do use an addon (FNEI: Factorio Not Enough Items) to streamline my search process when it bounces along long chains of recipes, but it doesn't make recipe navigation go from impossible to possible, it just makes it a lot nicer to do.

There are right places to add complexity, and wrong places to add complexity. Fighting the UI is almost always the wrong place.

[lucid-moon]

i would love to read a good book on something computers related. but every computer book is either 1. complete bullshit or 2. written by someone who knows a lot about computers but very little about how to write

[lucid-moon]

I think something a lot of other people can relate to is the way that you get so conditioned to discomfort that you stop registering it.

I remember sitting at the table with my family, eating dinner as a child. I’d try to eat, because of course I was hungry. But sometimes the flavor or texture was so repugnant that it moved into a category of Not Food.

“Two more bites before you can leave the table.”

“I can’t,” I’d say, trying to explain the impossibility.

But because I was a child they heard, “I won’t,” and made me sit at the table. I’d sit in dull agonized silence, bored and hungry for hours until bedtime when they’d give up. I’d hate myself for not eating and my parents for forcing me to sit there. The few forcefeeding moments ended in vomit.

They’d say, “If you don’t eat this you can’t eat a snack later,” and I moved past trying to communicate my discomfort into accepting that I’d just be hungry.

That state of affairs didn’t last, because my parents realized nothing could force me to eat so they catered to my palate, worrying they’d starve me. But the message stuck. If you can’t do anything about a situation, just accept the suffering.

A few years later my mother called me off the playground to ask, “Are you limping?”

I shrugged. My feet had hurt for a long time, but that was just the way things were now. My mom pulled my socks and shoes off and gasped. The soles of my feet were covered in huge painful planters warts.

“Why didn’t you say anything?!” She demanded but I could only shrug at her. I’d learned a long time ago that saying things about my discomfort didn’t matter, so now I had no words. Sometimes things hurt and sometimes they don’t. I simply accepted and did my best.

Now as an adult trying to learn to improve my own conditions can be hard. If I make food that I can’t eat I’ll force myself to sit at the counter still, full of guilt and self loathing, trying to will myself to eat it.

At first I needed my betrothed to gently take it away to present me with something I could eat. Now on my own I can usually admit that it’s not happening before too long and get something else, but I still feel guilty.

Laying in bed at night waiting for my betrothed to finish getting ready I let out a huge sigh of relief when they turned the lights off.

“Why didn’t you turn them off if they bothered you?” they asked the first time it happened.

“I didn’t even know it was bothering me until it was gone.”

Assessing my physical state now to see if I can improve it is something I’m still relearning but I’m relieved to finally have the space and support to do it.

[lucid-moon]

people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.

[lucid-moon]

I noticed today that the deadname of a client was clearly visible in their client file because it was their legal name, and flagged it for IT. I specifically flagged it as "Hey, if someone sees this and calls our client the wrong name, we'll lose them as a client." IT emailed me back immediately, and it's now invisible except on their contract with us, which the majority of us don't have direct access to, as opposed to their client file.

The reason I flagged it framing it as a loss is that what matters to most companies is money. If you can flag a bigoted practice as something that will lose customers, clients, or get them a lawsuit, that is significantly more likely to get taken care of quickly than trying to appeal to their better nature. I could have flagged it as "Hey, this is going to make our client really upset if they hear it.", which was my actual motivation for flagging it, but if I had, then it probably would have been taken care of in a few days or even weeks, not hours.

Always hit them with the profit argument for quick and decisive action.

[lucid-moon]

Don't really have playlists for this specific vibe, but a few artists and songs come to mind:

- Invocation Array

This is very abstract, metaphor. Try songs like The Polymorphic Code ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/the-polymorphic-code ) and The Feral Strain ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/the-feral-strain ), or maybe Shift The Fields ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/shift-the-fields ) or Protocol ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/protocol ).

- The Luna Sequence: (No relation)

All instrumental, give This Is Bloodlust ( https://thelunasequence.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-bloodlust ) a try.

If you're chill with MLP inspired music, there's a few options ranging from the aggressive Destabilize sequence ( part one: https://princewhateverer.bandcamp.com/track/destabilize-ft-cgscrambles-brittney-ackerman ) to the contemplative Imperfection ( https://poniesatdawn.bandcamp.com/track/imperfection )

Moving back out of pony music, there's also The Clockwork Dolls - Into Embers ( https://theclockworkdolls.bandcamp.com/album/into-embers ) which is a contemplative sequel to the album Dramatis Personae ( https://theclockworkdolls.bandcamp.com/album/dramatis-personae ). Track two of Into Embers is from the perspective of the clockwork first mate of an airship pirate queen.

Send me your mecha and robot playlists for enrichment thanks <3

[lucid-moon]

Sure. Let's go into a scenario that sucks and is a poor rhetorical tactic(your framing is blatantly emotionally manipulative) to avoid the main context of my post.

(Personal background: I've been mugged several times, only once have I actually lost any significant amount of value in possessions on my person. USA Northeast and Northwest coasts).

Someone is pointing a gun at me and demands my money, what are my options? Broadly: capitulate, attempt violence, attempt flight, attempt dialogue, freeze.

Let's go in reverse order there. What happens if I:

Freeze?

Well, the person with a gun probably has a range of temperaments from insistent to panicked, continued freezing will lead to verbal escalation to violence. Depending on how committed they are, they'll have an unloaded gun (don't ever rely on this, but in one of my cases it was, and I learned this after the fact), a loaded gun and no desire to use it, a twitchy trigger finger with poor trigger discipline and maybe I'm already dead by the time I'm thinking this far through. Not ideal. I don't want these consequences.

Attempt dialogue?

This really really really depends on the personality and demeanor of the person on the other end of the gun. With shotgunning and decent cold reading, there's a possibility to position yourself as someone sympathetic and caring for their situation. Open ears and a fast mouth are valuable here. Be aware of body language and use that to help spoken words craft a narrative with the person pointing a gun. If it's not collaborative there's massive increased risk of pushback from them, and that pushback will probably come in the form of violence. Use soft capitulations to follow through. Offer alternatives. Time, an ear to listen, etc. If they start negotiating or asking questions, they're hooked. If they stay firm to "your wallet or your life", well, now we're back at the start of the decision tree but with "dialogue" scratched out.

Dialogue: difficult, not ideal, probably worth trying?

Attempt fight/flight?

(Bundling these together because they share a lot of informational questions.)

Well, how fast can I go? How far away are they? How far am I to anywhere safe? Where would I run to? What time is it? Do they look focused, calm, and collected, or jittery and anxious? What's their physical condition? Do I have an (improvised?) weapon in reach before starting to move? What's the size difference between us? What do the surrounding environment and sight lines look like? Is there anyone with me who will get left behind if I run? If there's someone with me, are we on the same wavelength about actions? Can I see if my assailant has their finger on the trigger?

(Asking the location-based questions and keeping stock of my own ability to act when out and about is just second nature by now. Good to keep in practice.)

Depending on all of these, running is possibly a survivable option for most people. I, unfortunately, have Undiagnosable Body Hurting Disease, and can't run for more than ~30 feet anymore. That's probably optimistic. If you're really close to someone holding a gun at you and their finger isn't on the trigger there might be a very slim chance of surviving trying to disarm them before they can take the third of a second to react. Don't rely on it. If they're pointing the gun at your face (likely, this is probably most effective intimidation with a gun) they need just the slightest bit of readiness to end your life there.

Fight/Flight: High chance of death. I don't want to pick these.

Capitulate

Will probably Just Survive if do this. Biggest margins of personal safety, but at the cost of some cash and lost credit cards that you can call the bank the next day and be like "hey I got robbed at XX:YY last night and my cards were stolen, please cancel them."

.....

Wow! It sure seems like Capitulation is the only thing to do! I'm so glad I accepted the consequences and it is now my personal responsibility for getting robb- no. Shut the fuck up.

That was a forced encounter. "Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose." Life sucks like that. Take it up with a god, if you believe in one. If you see one tell him he's a fucking shitbag.

The encounter has ended, and I'm assuming I'm still alive. There are a few possible outcomes: I can have all of my shit stolen, I can spend an hour and a small chunk of cash to listen to the person who was going to mug me, I can be in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, I can be scared shitless that I managed to survive running away from this, etc.

Now I have choices. Do I?

Use my knowledge of what this person looked like to dox them, catch them alone and return violence?

Get back to my car and try to find and chase them down and run them over?

Call the cops and file a police report?

Go on with my life?

Buy a weapon?

Improvise a weapon?

Get their contact details so we can have lunch and commiserate about The Horrors?

Well the first two have significant challenges with them, but assuming they go as written there, now I'm potentially dealing with criminal consequences or a suspect or something. Not ideal. Maybe a subtle violence?

Call the cops? That's extremely cursed. Either they'll be useless and probably mock me(very likely) for daring to think a mugging is worth their time or they'll go out and kill someone as a result of this.

Weapons are great! If you're getting the drop on someone else. But also: The winner of a knife fight dies on the way to the hospital. More than half of all gun deaths are suicides. Don't rely on a weapon unless you train religiously with it and have it accessible within less than a second at all times. But back to the gun suicide statistics: If I brought one into my house there's much too high of a risk that one of my partners would die either by suicide or accidentally discharge. I'm not accepting those consequences so I'm taking that risk.

Get their contact details and buddy up? Hmm, how well did the dialogue go?

Of course, you could just go about your life and pretend like nothing happened. Did you try to talk your way out? Maybe they now consider you their last lifeline, consciously or not. But if you disappear, they're back in the same spot they were... just now.. why would they trust someone who tried to talk to them?

-----

(If the "threaten to shoot me if I don't give my wallet was a metaphor (e.g. for domestic abuse), then these responses convert well to that. I endorse people killing their abusers. I recommend methods that don't blatantly trace back to the abusee.)

-----

People are going to do things. Good things. Bad things. Weird things. Regardless of if you act(and remember that inaction is action), people bounce around like ping-ponging dominoes. When an action is taken, it affects others. Others might not necessarily change, but this new input does affect them. How do you want others to move? What would cause them to move that way? What else would happen as a result of that? And the knock-on effects?

Anyway, I've been spinning around this as I've been writing and I do want to reiterate: There is a keen difference between being stuck in a no-win situation through no fault of your own, and engineering your own future by specifically aiming for the set of outcomes you want. Outcomes, consequences. This was probably much too long of a post for something that feels like an emotional flinch/disgust response at the negative valence in a specific word. Eh. Oh well.

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

[lucid-moon]

That second-last post had me doing a wistful sigh.

Going back to the start, I'm reminded of a similar lesson I had as a child: "You can do anything you want to do. As long as you accept the consequences of that."

"Wow I can [action]?" "Yes, but [consequences]." "Oh. (thinks for a bit) What if I [other action]?" "Yeah, then you'll get [other consequences]." "But what if I want to [action] without [consequences]?" "Well you could try combining with [other action], but the reason those [consequences] will happen is because {something about society having rules against similar things and trying to build habits in me as growing up so I don't get the really negative societally-enforced consequences}." "Huh."

And this is like. "Consequences" has a negative valence, but it's just "things that happened because actions I took".

I think this was an effective way to get young-me thinking about goals and planning around getting other people to do things - once I got to metadiscussion on sets of actions and consequences to narrow down paths it was fairly illuminating.

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

[lucid-moon]

half of the mystique around "tech stuff" that most people experience is mostly just because they don't know the difference between a "tech enthusiast" as constructed by Apple et al's marketing team and "people who know computers work" and how there's very little actual overlap between these two categories. the only actually good programmers are the ones who want to fuck the computers or perchance have undergone some other technopsychosocial adaptation, which does not correlate with knowing how many dozen cameras the latest iphone has or being able to get along well with the business major interviewer at a startup called Zyergote who drives a tesla

[lucid-moon]

https://erikmcclure.com/blog/we-could-fix-everything-we-just-dont/

Depressing post, thanks.

[lucid-moon]

Guide on how to use Fletcher for Proxying messages.

Fletcher is a Discord bot with a lot of miscellaneous utilities. If all you want is proxying features, I recommend you instead go with Pluralkit or Tupperbox, as they're primarily built for this use case. If you already have Fletcher around and want proxying, read on.

Sometimes Fletcher doesn't proxy messages for no apparent reason? Dropped events or something. IDK, that's beyond me to debug. Just know that it's not nearly as reliable as Pluralkit or Tupperbox.

The condensed Fletcher Proxying docs, where I got most of the initial info for this post, are found here.

I wrote this to explain how to proxy messages to someone on Discord, but it wouldn't fit in a single message there, so I moved it here and started expanding a bit.

(Tumblr doesn't really have inline code formatting as far as I can tell so for bits that are supposed to represent that I made them small and green.)

Prefix

First you start with a prefix you want to use for a proxy[0]:

!preference tupper [Prefix]

For example, my prefix is L:, so for me to set this up I would use:

!preference tupper L:

A prefix can… probably(?) be any non-space set of characters[1]. You could do something like:

!preference tupper abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

And then later after all the configuration was done[2] you can go:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz this is a message being sent

…And Fletcher will delete and re-send under that proxy. (Of course, you would probably want to choose something easier to type out in regular usage. The Prefix can be anything, as long as you keep it consistent between the commands.)

Nickname

Next you choose a nickname for the proxy you want to send:

!preference tupper-nick-[Prefix] [Nickname]

For example, my nickname with Fletcher is Lucid | Lunae, so for me to set this up I would use:

!preference tupper-nick-L: Lucid | Lunae

Say I wanted to use that full-alphabet I mentioned in the #Prefix section above, and call that proxy Alphabet. I would do this:

!preference tupper-nick-abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Alphabet

Avatar

Next find a link to an image you want to use as your avatar.[1][3][4] The command to set a specific image to your proxy's avatar is this:

!preference tupper-avatar-[Prefix] [https://linktoimage/]

For Alphabet I might want to use this image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/IPA_Unicode_0x0061.svg/240px-IPA_Unicode_0x0061.svg.png

So I would enter this command:

!preference tupper-avatar-abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/IPA_Unicode_0x0061.svg/240px-IPA_Unicode_0x0061.svg.png

Deletion

To delete a[5] specific !preference, run the command but with the optional parameter to instead be null. (This applies to almost all Fletcher preferences, not just proxy-related ones.)

For example:

Nickname !preference tupper-nick-[Prefix] null e.g. !preference tupper-nick-abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz null

Avatar !preference tupper-avatar-[Prefix] null e.g. !preference tupper-avatar-abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz null

Usage

To actually use a proxy once you've got a Prefix, Avatar, and Nickname set up, first you wait.[1][2] After the requisite period of Waiting, proxy usage is [Prefix][Text] in any message. If there is text before your Prefix, Fletcher won't proxy it. Using my Prefix L: as an example:

L:This is a test. This will be proxied, with the output: This is a test.

LL:Test. This won't be proxied: There is an extra L before the prefix.

L:L:Test. This will be proxied, with the output: L:Test.

:Test. This won't be proxied: The full prefix isn't included.

[0] Fletcher refers to proxies as "tuppers" for historical(?) reasons. [1] This isn't well-specified. [2] Definitely don't forget the waiting step. You have to wait some un-specified amount of time for these changes to actually work. [3] I'm pretty sure it has to be something hosted accessibly to Fletcher always? I think if the image at the link changes, your avatar will also change. [4] I don't think you can directly upload an image for Fletcher to use. You can upload an image to discord then use that discord image link, but I recommend against this as discord is taking steps to combat this in the near future. [5] It looks like you can't delete a Prefix. If you ever make a prefix you don't want, that sucks.