I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.

I think about that a lot.

I agree with this. It’s the artists, not necessarily the “style” itself. Basically the fundamentals of visual language are what’s hard to master, just like writing beautiful poetry requires mastery of a written/spoken language. Artists that have spent the time and put enough thought and practice into creating their own unique voice will be difficult to replicate.

Some modern artists I can think off of the top of my head:

• Piotr Jabłoński’s art for the Dishonored series
• Laurel Austin and Wei Wang’s art that created the modern Blizzard look.
• Disney Studios’ Nine Old Men.
• Craig Mullins the “grandfather” of digital painting.
• Traditional painters like Arthur Gain, Richard Schmid, Ruo Li, Mark Boedges, and on and on.

When I was in elementary school I entered the bathroom and some other boy was standing with his back against the wall, facing the urinals, with his pants down and his dick out. When he saw me he said, “No wait! I can make it!”

He then started to piss. He apparently was pissing as forcefully as he could, trying to “make it”. As his stream started it went all over the floor in front of him, then crept up the wall, splashing all over the pipes and the bottom of the urinal. Finally he got, at best, one drop of piss into the urinal at which point his stream retreated and he re-sprayed everything a second time.

“YEAH!” he said. “YEAH!”, in victory. Then he left.

It’s been like forty years and I still remember this. I have five memories from elementary school and this is one of them.

Not a huge fan of snakes. It’s not to phobia levels, but I get a huge adrenaline rush when I see one, even if a fraction of a second later my forebrain identifies it as harmless. I love being in nature, so it’s just something I have to deal with.

I’ve had several rattlesnake encounters and it’s at least one guaranteed nightmare every time. The dream is always the same: I’m standing somewhere at dusk, often barefoot. Under a nearby, low object I see a rattlesnake. Then I see another to the side. Then another behind me. Then I realize they are everywhere.

I really hate ticks, so I appreciate their rodent killing service. But if we never ran into each other again that would suit me fine.

Agreed, and there’s a good chance that log is full of one thing spamming over and over, and the devs would love to know what it is.

Thank you for the encouragement. I’ve been thinking about it.

At AAA studios you can pour your heart and craft into creating something beautiful along with hundreds of other wonderful colleagues, for years, only to have it ruined by management who literally doesn’t give af. Not only do they not play games, or even like games, they are proud of this fact in a sort of, “sell me this pen” type of way. These people always existed but the “financialization” of the industry means they are everywhere now. Even one of these people in the wrong place can be poison, and they are everywhere. This mutated organelle has made the entire studio system too neoplastic to perform its primary function.

It’s like training for years as a chef, slaving away in a hot kitchen for the big opening, then having the owner (who hasn’t cooked in decades) insist you serve your food in the toilet because “hey it’s porcelain, it’s the same as fine china”. Then when the restaurant bombs you get fired and he gets a huge bonus because he’s a genius cost cutter and you couldn’t sell his vision. Nobody cares that you made the best bisque of your life when its served in a toilet. How many times can that happen before you say, “fuck it”?

Well for me it was ten years. Not laid off, but just couldn’t take it anymore. I could probably get another job with my resume, but I just can’t bring myself to apply again. Through a little planning and extremely good luck I’m not really under any pressure. Makes me feel like a fool because a lot of people work worse jobs, but then I remember how sad and angry I was all the time. When I look at job postings those feelings return. The problem is I still like it and want to do it. I feel forced out because I care about making good stuff instead of just “line go up”. I would take a huge pay cut to work on a team that had the “magic” again.

Yeah this is an extremely thin wrapper on GPT4All, literally just feeding in the above prompt. I’m not knocking the author for trying/sharing this but you’d probably be better off just installing GPT4All. That said, do you think this would have kept Ted out of prison?

You: The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Model: Honestly, I think the whole Industrial Revolution thing has just been a total mess for humanity as a whole. Like, what was supposed to be some kind of progress or advancement ended up causing way more problems than it solved. And don’t even get me started on all the environmental and social issues that came with it… ugh, it’s like we took two steps forward but then tripped over our own feet and fell back a few paces.

The low men.

It’s annoying when the vacuum system has a small leak so, over that long road trip, the car is always slooooowly losing speed. It’s such a nightmare to diagnose, at least as a DIYer.

I would add Grist to that list for climate focused reporting.

Yes, there are propane powered mosquito traps that emit heat and CO2. Supposedly they are effective but costly.

Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.

In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier’d back because the director couldn’t be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.

Same. I just watch StarCraft now. I was never that good to begin with, but playing now is likely to make my withered heart explode.

Hmm, interesting question. I would say social media but it’s toxic for so many other reasons. Perhaps an online virtual assistant? Or maybe charge yourself a monthly or weekly fee into some account until you complete the task? Since it’s purely for yourself, whatever act “costs” you should be enough. A friend of mine was a huge proponent of making physical lists at the beginning of each day. He would then move any uncompleted tasks to the next day’s list, and the act of physically writing it was enough for him. He insisted it be on actual paper. This guy was super accomplished so it must have done something for him.

I also work well under deadlines but perform horribly without them. Upon reflection I realized a lot of my motivation is related to not disappointing others and/or embarrassing myself. Neglecting personal projects makes me feel like shit, but it’s missing the public humiliation factor so it won’t get me moving. A possible solution is to create deadlines for yourself and share them with people who will hold you accountable, or to whom you at least feel accountable. I also try to imagine how I will feel in a week, month, or year down the road when I still haven’t done THE THING, and realize that it’s only going to get worse the longer I go. This isn’t 100% successful but it does work sometimes.

This isn’t that rare. It is half the reason people hire personal trainers. The military also uses this technique, by framing failures as letting down your comrades rather than yourself.

This is a tricky thing to balance because using negativity and self criticism can become destructive. My grandma used to have a coal burning stove for heat. She said it was awful because too little coal and it would go out and was really hard to re-light. But too much coal and it would explode and blow coal dust all over their little house. I feel like self hate is kind of like that oven. Unfortunately nothing else has ever truly worked for me.

Also, I should add, one thought that brought me some self-forgiveness was the evolutionary roots of laziness. If you think about it, as an organism, if you’re well fed and in a good location your best bet is to chill under a shade tree until something comes up. As humans we are kind of cursed with extra simulation cores in our brain that can constantly iterate every single permutation of the future, and that leads to anxiety, but laziness is actually a virtue from an evolutionary perspective. So cut yourself some slack now and then.

The couple of times I had to do this I was in a bathroom stall by myself, and I had to put the jar through a little hatch in the wall. There was one of those little liquid crystal fishtank thermometers on the jar, and I couldn’t flush the toilet, but beyond that nothing crazy. I don’t think you get actively meatgazed unless it’s the military or the test is for something really serious.

I was the lowest rung CSR punching bag for many years, so no. I think that whole experience is what conditioned me to do what I’ve always done when I have bad service: cancel, chargeback (if necessary), move on. I’ve probably only left one or two bad reviews in my life, just to warn others of egregiously unsafe practices. One of those business reached out afterwards to “make it right”. Nope, no contact.

Those years also taught me that if you fill out a customer service survey and you give anything less than straight 10’s across the board then you are actively hurting the employee.

For me this was Stone Butch Blues.