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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • This is partly true. Also, contrary to mall-ninja rhetoric, one doesn’t and shouldn’t primarily carry to go be a vigilante hero, but as a last resort for their own protection. I’ll admit my original comment was coming from strong emotion. Lol

    I think the discourse on self-protection has taken a bizarre turn during our lifetimes, where the right and the NRA turned firearms into an unhealthy fetish, and the liberal politicians turned them into frightening campfire stories by spreading fear and ignorance. Both just using it as another tug-rope to “Be opposite those other guys.”

    Shockingly, there are plenty of normal, responsible armed people who fit neither category. Even socialists. They’re just quiet and respectable so they go unnoticed.

    But on the whole, this cultural propaganda has resulted in a heavily skewed situation where those with the means to deter tyranny are in lockstep with it, and those with the will to deter tyranny get a bit flummoxed when clever signs aren’t enough.

    I’m very torn myself, because clever non-violent solutions are obviously preferred, but at the same time these thugs are bullies and cowards, who tend to be confused and frightened when they actually encounter resistance from their would-be victims.




  • I actually felt like the Elder Scrolls games handled this elegantly. The interactable doors could be wonky but also strategic, but for cell changing doors, on today’s hardware you barely even notice the loading screen.

    It felt like it kept each area of the game nice and concise, but also it still felt so connected! Especially with how characters could follow you between cell changes after Morrowind. (SURPRISE, pants-ruining Oblivion guard jumpscare!)



  • A browser based Doom or Quake engine world sim to run around playing with others sounds like such an awesome concept. I’d love that!! And in the 90"s no less. That would’ve been crazy impressive.

    Microsoft and MMOs, man. I remember they were gonna make a really neat online fantasy one for the Xbox and canned it, too.

    That’s such a wild story. Thanks for sharing that with us! I wish they wouldn’t have cold shouldered you like that…

    Here’s how I was imagining that went down the whole time I was reading it lmao. Just for you.



  • Haha that does sound slightly familiar! Like Mario Kart’s Lakatu on steroids. 😂

    Lol okay solved! Colliding with an opening door just yeets an NPC (safely) out of the way.

    Haha there needs to be a “monkey’s paw” community but around what new bugs pop up when someone proposes a fix for a mechanic.


    New bug report: Essential NPC unable to be interacted with because they walk toward the door to greet the player and get clipped through the opposite wall at high speed.

    Sometimes they fall through the map and the game crashes when they reach -9999 meters, other times they die intersecting the wall and it soft locks the main quest.


    Fun story rq: Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the most bizarre bug where, if you talked to a gang before getting the quest to go clear them out, on the second visit one of them would just spawn… like…on the moon, apparently? (A ridiculous distance upwards, not even visible except by objective marker) Made the quest unbeatable until they patched it hahaha.


  • Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:

    • Doors violently push anyone out of the way, possibly “crushing” them into walls or
    • Force themselves back closed, turning any random NPC / obstacle on the other side into an unbeatable lock or
    • Just trap an unfortunate NPC in a corner on the other side, or
    • If they use the physics system to swing open, in which case they’ll look smooth but possibly bonk the player/actor going through them a few times and could potentially (and comically) insta-kill them if physics is feeling grumpy.

    The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.

    Gamedev is magical.

    Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.

    The ability to “slowly quietly open”, and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.



  • extremely good “search engines” or interactive versions of “stack overflow”

    Which is such a decent use of them! I’ve used it on my own hardware a few times just to say “Hey give me a comparison of these things”, or “How would I write a function that does this?” Or “Please explain this more simply…more simply…more simply…”

    I see it as a search engine that connects nodes of concepts together, basically.

    And it’s great for that. And it’s impressive!

    But all the hype monkeys out there are trying to pedestal it like some kind of techno-super-intelligence, completely ignoring what it is good for in favor of “It’ll replace all human coders” fever dreams.



  • Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

    Totally can be! Absolutely!

    Although Blender’s amazingly usable now and has had lots of love in that regard! But it took a LOT of support to get this far.

    Good UX is crazy important.

    I think I’m more irritated at the people who seem to show up in so many FOSS discussions, expect FOSS alternatives to compete 1:1 with their billion-dollar corpo-ware of choice, demand the world of it, offer zero support, and then declare “it sucks and isn’t ready for the real world” because it’s not so perfect that Autodesk and Adobe are like “Well we’ve had a good run, guys.” and give up lol.

    I sympathize because I know where the frustration comes from. They’re sick of their tools being held hostage by interests that constantly seek to screw them! But change requires flexibility, cooperation, and support.

    I think a lot of people just don’t want to say “I want Maya/Photoshop/Excel/Solidworks/Windows/etc…but free and without dark-patterns!” (Don’t we all lol) Because they know that sounds unreasonable (yarr aside lol) , but people tend to get settled and comfortable with whatever got to them first.

    But taking that out on the community isn’t helping anybody.

    Constructive criticism of UI/UX is absolutely essential though, and requires a lot more understanding of how humans interact with things than simply “Well, billion-dollar-ware has always done it this way.” Haha



  • I am sympathetic but also so damn tired of seeing what essentially translates to:

    “Look, [megacorpo] bought out my school’s ecosystem so that’s all I learned. It’s “industry standard”, I can’t believe this FOSS can’t even do this one niche corporate-job feature, therefore it’s objectively terrible / not ready / inferior / useless for job work.”

    Which can usually be further boiled down to:

    “I tried it but it wasn’t a carbon copy of my preferred corpo-ware without any strings attached so it basically sucks.”


  • These kinda “3d” archery shoots were so much fun.

    One optional /bonus target at the end had a steel plate with a T-Rex painted on it, and a narrow hole in the middle to shoot through… And beside it was a graveyard hay bale full of obliterated arrows of those that tried. (Don’t touch shattered carbon fiber, kids!)

    One required a kneeling shot and through a large PVC tube to hit a turkey target at the end…I kid you not, I used a bent aluminum arrow, it bounced off the wall of the tube, and right into the bullseye. Sadly this was well before reliable pocket video but I did get a picture of the resulting shot with my Palm Zire 71! …I wonder if I still have that picture now somewhere…

    It was really cool seeing people shooting with everything from modern recurves, to compound bows (my flavor), to very fine “primitive” bows.

    Archery though. Love it. Really fun sport. Great people, lots of skill. I was taught by an olympic coach but enjoyed the more practical “simulationist” kind of shoots like these.





  • Exactly why these people are heroes.

    By the world’s standards of chasing economic advantage, safety, and comfort, they make no sense. They rarely achieve widespread recognition, they put themselves in harm’s way, and they persist in a turbulent, cynical, and often thankless field.

    But the work they do is vital to a functioning society, which is why one of a dictator’s first moves is attacking the free press.(As we’ve been seeing firsthand across the world).

    Yeah, the “journalism industry” has had its challenges lately, especially when large corporate outfits have been insulting their readers with increasingly cynical business practices, and people are distracted more and more by vapid, empty content.

    But this is a problem in almost every industry right now.

    My point is that, regardless what the business may or may not be doing, these people are in this field to fight for something greater, and we need to support those people.