Finally getting a generator. I live in a rural area. Not having a generator was a huge hole in my setup. We also got a wood stove earlier this year for backup heat. I had longer term plans for solar but now it looks like that may be impossible since China makes all the equipment, and it’s already difficult to balance the utility with the expense.
Management always wearing the same thing in public appearances is fucking weird. Steve Jobs, Zuck, Todd Howard, probably more I just haven’t noticed. It’s like they’re trying to be cartoons.
I was forced to take 4 years of Latin and I’ve basically reverted to “Salve Magistra, Italia Peninsula Est” levels. It never clicked with me. Every week was a struggle, I was a terrible student, and I remember jack shit. At best it helped me remember the names of stuff in anatomy class, which was actually interesting. I think the way it was taught is the worst fucking way to learn a language, like most 19th century educational theory.
High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal’s new “Nanite” tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.
without any account
Did they make this easier? I have a Sage and I had to open a SQLite database file on the e-reader, then flip some flag, to bypass account sign in. But that was a few years ago.
Broodwar remaster was also good. If they faithfully uprez the graphics, fix severe bugs, and do nothing else then there’s hope. The 2D remasters have a good track record so far.
That said, had anyone played WC2 recently? It’s pretty rough. It’s fun for nostalgia sake and if you’re into the lore of Warcraft or the history of RTS, but it doesn’t hold up like Broodwar still does.
It’s the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, “Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people”.
But if you take a step back it’s reasonable to ask, “WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don’t spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’ forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose.”
So given that realization it’s also reasonable when told you must choose to say, “Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt.”
That’s the essential argument. There’s the realpolitik decision to do “less harm”, but you can also reject the fucked up premise.
Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.
Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.
Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.
Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.
A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).
“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember [literally anything that’s free of plastic].”
There’s a nuke underwater somewhere off Tybee Island, GA.
Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar’s Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.
It’s been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the “glue” language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.
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:
It’s an interesting article, I couldn’t help but think of how “Pirate Speak” really comes from Robert Newton’s acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech’s debasement of culture it’s still a “top down” artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn’t figured that shit out yet.
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.
Last place I was at called them build “masters” for this reason.