Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.

I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!

It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.

I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.

I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.

And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.

It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?

There are so many weird things about GIMP, and it feels like they add more over time. I’ve moved a layer and then tried to draw on it and had nothing happen. Why? Because the layer was created as an array of pixels the size of the image, and when I move it there’s now a dead zone where there’s no pixels in the visible image. It turns out there’s a special command to expand moved layers to fill the image: https://docs.gimp.org/3.0/en/gimp-layer-resize-to-image.html

There are times using it that it feels like a maze to navigate to just get my changes reflected in the document.

Back in the day there was Hardware Wars.

I know FlyingSquid from another community, and sent them a private message just a few days ago saying hello. (I didn’t know they had been missing at the time.) FS is awesome, and I really hope they’re okay.

I handle this, as do most poor people, by not asking ourselves this question, not even fantasizing about it, for why torture yourself with something you never can do?

Along these lines, I have several important memory locations memorized. POKE 53280 and 1 to change the border and background colors. 828 is the cassette buffer, and 49152 the free memory above BASIC ROM. SYS 64738 resets the machine.

I also can recite the powers of 2 up to 65536.

Way back in Sunday School at the church we went to when I was growing up, they taught them to us in a song. I still remember the whole thing.

Recently, McDonalds announced an initiative to remove all instances of Ronald McDonald from their stores.

So, Ronald McDonald removed all instances of McDonalds from around him.

This is from Graham “Grickle” Annable! He worked at Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts, written/drawn books, designed Puzzle Agent I & II for Telltale Games, has great Youtube cartoons, and posts great cartoons to social media too!

Also, if you agree to this and your wife dies due to allergies in one of your theme parks, they may use the TOS on this trial to rule you agreed to binding arbitration in court.

I saw pigeons at the Washington DC Amtrak station last year. Birds will bird.

There are people like this all around us, an invisible sea through which we swim unknowingly. Sorrow is the human condition, but we don’t see it because most people don’t communicate it.

While the “recent troubles” put energy to my leaving, I have always been uncomfortable with Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Stack Overflow, Quora and Fandom, as corporate-owned repositories who work by, in one way or other, profiting off of freely contributed work.

It used to be that if someone wanted to help people with freely-given information, they’d offer it in a forum, on Usenet, or on a website they started and hosted themselves, or if it fit in there, put it on Wikipedia. Now, people add it to a freaking pile that corporations monetize. Don’t just hand them value! Put it somewhere that won’t beg you to install an app, or beg you to “upgrade” to “Nitro,” or force you to watch intrusive ads, or force people to create an account to see it, or track you! Your volunteer labor should not be a profit center!

Doom, for multiple reasons.

Saying “American people” the way the Beastie Boys would say “Another dimension”