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!

You’re right. I used to be “no mow” when I lived in the city and the burbs, but now that I have a rural acreage, I’ve realized that you have to use every trick in the book to even have a chance against invasives.

Tomorrow I’m renting a brush mower to take out an acre of 8 foot tall Himalayan blackberry that’s completely choked out a meadow. It’s flowered, but hasn’t set fruit, so I need to get it now. I’ll have to follow that up with herbicide application in late summer because it has vigorous root energy storage. That’ll be year one of at least three years of restoration. This is on top of wineberry, tree of heaven, stilt grass, japanese honeysuckle, and autumn olive. It physically blocks animals, consumes all the sunlight, and none of this shit supports native lepidoptera so it totally fucks up the food chain.

I wish I could just let it be and it would be fine, but that ship sailed a hundred years ago. The upside is in areas where there’s been active remediation the forest looks fucking fantastic.

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.

I really like misr wat. If you can find the berbere spice mix and red lentils I highly recommend it.

A couple friends of mine worked on the PS3 launch title “Lair” back in the day. Sony brass demanded, at the 11th hour, that they completely change the control scheme to use the braindead PS3 motion controller nonsense. The game wasn’t perfect but, before that decision, it was at least playable. Game launch was a disaster. San Diego studio closed. Execs who made that decision probably got promoted. They’ve always been like this.

Was it this thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.

I’ve been fighting tree of heaven for years, and I’ve had the most success with triclopyr ester mixed with oil. The product I use is called Pathfinder. Can’t use it close to water though. But I’ve been able to take a couple totally infested acres down to just the occasional seedling. No hacking required, which is nice, just soak the trunk around the base in late summer.

This is true. Some things are completely outsourced to vendor companies with their own employees. You rarely interact with these people at all, or even know their names. All communication goes through a telephone game. Then the primary studio itself will have contract employees and also “permanent staff”.

Management likes to go on and on about how staff are “family”, but then treat them like shit and lay them off anyway. They also like to be subtly shitty to contract workers whenever possible, like free donuts in the break room! ~(for staff only)~

Really, management is just shitty to everyone. Having been in both positions I honestly prefer contract. At least then I’m not expected to participate in their “corporate culture”.

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.

You might be remembering Sonny Landham, who was a costar of Ventura in Predator, hosted many shit takes, and also tried to break into politics.

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.

Pretty happy with my Lemur Pro, 3.5 years in. I just replaced the battery, which was fairly painless. Also had to replace the wireless radio, which was as easy as popping in a new one. I wasn’t happy that it failed, but apparently that’s industry wide, not just these laptops. Replacement was like $35. Other than that I’ve only had cosmetic issues, like the System76 sticker came off, which I don’t care about.

When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called “coordinators” and “producers”) used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.

In game dev unfortunately it’s exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \\ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.