He he he

[Cyberpunk 2077 music]

/meme

In SMITE’s case, the characters come from mythological sources and those sources are public domain. However, the way they’re depicted was chosen by the game developer and their depictions are copyrighted by them.

If someone copied the list of characters and made their own game with their own artwork and gameplay and everything, SMITE’s creators could do absolutely nothing about it. But if they copied any substantial elements from SMITE directly, then it starts to go in the direction where lawyers start rising eyebrows. At that point it’s no longer making original stuff based on the same PD material.

In Finland we have this one liquorice candy that looks like chalk. The school children yearn for the chalk. It’s normal.

GIMP (at least in v2) does have a vector path tool and stores the paths with the image! Thing is, they kind of work like selections and you have to explicitly stroke the paths on bitmap layers. It’s a bit more complicated than necessary and not easy to grasp at first.

For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

(Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they’re pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of “power user trick, for those in the know” rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven’t tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can’t do this stuff really says it all.

I’ve only received the spam once. I guess I do not qualify as an active Fediverse user. 😒

Oh yeah, one of the pics that inspired me to study French. I was dreading the numerals but it’s not that bad. You count tens and twenties and sometimes they’re special. And numbers below 20 have specific names, but that’s kinda true in most languages.

A lot of languages have weird corner cases. (Like, in Finnish most numbers are perfectly regular. Except 11-19 which are not “one-ten-and-x” but rather “x-of-the-second”. I’m sure there’s a reasonable etymological reason. At least they’re not “teens”.)

Botted comments and admins not in the helm.

I’ll admit, the thing that made me go from Kbin to Lemmy was seeing tons of spam on unmoderated places. (Not blaming the admin for not being able to manage the site in that particular case, they had more pressing issues.)

I never got such a survey. Guess they figured that bunch of people would cancel the subscription in the month before an announced price hike.

SQL is an Old Language of Ancient Power. You have to write the keywords in all caps.

(Fortran is basically the same, but it’s rarer. Lisp is too, but you don’t need to capitalise everything, as the Ancient Power is contained in the parentheses.)

There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

“…and ripping that CD was annoying, because you then had an over long last track with the secret song, and you had to split the tracks manually and come up with tags on your own, or…”

(Seriously, the only reason I listened rarely to the last song in Halo CE soundtrack was because of this.)

Voyager.

Used Sync, but it’s not maintained. Liked Connect a lot. But, well, if the platform is open source, why not use an open source client too? Switched to Voyager and I’ve been very happy with it, actually.

Long ago, I used Debian on my main PC but decided to go with Ubuntu on the laptop because it was easy to set up.

Later I switched to Debian on the laptop, too, because ultimately I felt Ubuntu was just Debian with extra steps.

Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.

Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.

Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn’t expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.

When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I’d need to close my account.

What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.

And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.

Whenever Elon speaks of programming, he just spouts the most delusional Point-Haired Boss bullshit imaginable. Truly, he has been promoted to the level of his incompetence.

(It is also highly ironic considering the Dilbert creator’s politics.)

I particularly like the 4’33" (downtempo electronica extended mix). 12 minutes and 54 seconds of perfect digital silence. You can almost hear the individual zeroes in the signal

I don’t really watch Star Wars. I’m a more of a Trekkie gal.

🖖

See, you can separate files both ways as long as it’s logical

To me Teams pretty much represents one of Microsoft’s aggravating mortal sins.

Teams got popular. More due to the circumstances than the inherent quality of the app. And once entrenched, Microsoft did what they always do in situations like this. Jack squat.

This could have been a start of a beautiful new era! Strike the iron while it’s hot! Show what the money, resources and the technical know-how at Microsoft’s disposal could do! Fix all of the failings of Skype tech, and really polish up the app! Did Microsoft do that? Naaah. It’s a mediocre app with brand new jank! That’s its destiny now.