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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 23rd, 2023

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  • When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king’s ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).

    The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.


  • The article doesn’t really do Tim justice. He’s a bodger who is basically a genius for what I can only describe as Goblin technology. His projects are as much about fun and experimenting as having a result. In the first windmill video he acknowledged that he could just buy a small electric windmill, but that’s not the point.

    I mean, this is the dude who made a narrow gauge railroad and a compressed air locomotive to transport wood to his terrifying biochar chopper and crucible.






  • Can I pester you with a question? Feel free to tell me to get bent because I know your time is worth money and this is just the internet. We have a new Trane system that was flawless when it was first put in, but over the past five months the blower has started making louder and louder vibration noises. Almost like it’s slightly off balance. If it was an older system I wouldn’t think twice, but it was dead quiet at first, just the sound of moving air pretty much.

    Part of me wants to open up the cabinet and just see if there’s some sort of vibration pad that’s gotten loose, but I also don’t want to to void a warranty, or something. It seems so trivial a thing. We live in the boonies and a service call is pretty onerous for a tech. I thought maybe there could be balancing weights, like a car wheel or a lawnmower blade, but your comment about motors being sealed is making me think twice.





  • In cyan’s defense, every other point and click mystery/adventure game at the time was so much worse about this shit. Spacequest had stuff like if you forgot to do something in the first room you fail in the last room and can’t fix it. Even Nancy Drew, which was made for kids, had some bullshit (but at least a built-in hint system). Game design had come a long way. The new monkey island games are great.


  • Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!


  • Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she’s had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won’t run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

    A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven’t seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.





  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mltoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksHomer
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    3 months ago

    The show was also conceived with Bart as the main character, with the world being from Bart’s perspective. As a kid Bart’s age of course your dad is dumb. Homer is the irl name of Matt Groenig’s dad.

    As the show progressed the writers ended up latching onto Homer more and he gradually became the core of the show. Also the characters “Flanderized” (literally!) more and more as time went on and he became more ridiculous. The Frank Grimes episode is pretty genius for capturing all this in a funny way.


  • Speaking as someone who’s worked inside a couple “AAA” studios, sympathy to a union has definitely increased in the past decade. It’s no coincidence that bonuses and profit sharing (a major part of compensation) have plummeted over that same time. As much as fans hate unambitious and venal design choices in recent games I assure them that devs hate them just as much or even more, since they ruin years of work. We have steadily decreasing feedback into these choices and are expected more and more to stick to our corner pushing pixels and writing code. Morale is probably the lowest I’ve ever experienced and mandatory RTO adds insult to injury.

    The various QA Union success stories have lots of support on the dev side. However many people believe it’s impossible somehow, or that they personally would get laid off or have their job outsourced if there is even a hint of organizing. Especially the past 12 months, the bloodbath has workers terrified. Everyone is trying to keep their heads down as much as possible. I unfortunately don’t see this ending well unless funding loosens up and people can start small studios again. There was a wave of this during Covid but those studios are all dying now. It’s seriously depressing. I’m a refugee from the VFX world and I feel like I’m watching the sequel.


  • I made a 3d model in Blender and showed it to an architect, with the huge caveat that I only work in vfx and games and have absolutely no idea how to build real things, so please just consider it a “napkin sketch”. This model was just flat colors, I didn’t bother with texture maps.

    I also used QGIS to show him a map of the site, along with some LIDAR elevation data I downloaded from a government website. He just took elevation/plan images and did a great job translating it into a real set of drawings with some major improvements.

    After that I took his drawings and did a 3d model in FreeCAD, to help determine where our existing furniture will fit before I broke my back moving it around.