I worked there during this time, and this pretty much confirms what everyone feared when the merger was announced. Part of me wants to read this book, but I know it will make me really mad.

Just a little anecdote, we had a meeting shortly after where Frank Pierce told us that major changes would basically happen over Morhaime’s dead body. So when he left (and Pierce also) it was clear that it was over.

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:

• Piotr Jabłoński’s art for the Dishonored series
• Laurel Austin and Wei Wang’s art that created the modern Blizzard look.
• Disney Studios’ Nine Old Men.
• Craig Mullins the “grandfather” of digital painting.
• Traditional painters like Arthur Gain, Richard Schmid, Ruo Li, Mark Boedges, and on and on.

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.

These big pharmacies have their own PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers) also, which is this middleman that sits between employee healthcare plans, drug manufacturers, and the pharmacy. CVS’s is called Caremark.

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.

Not a huge fan of snakes. It’s not to phobia levels, but I get a huge adrenaline rush when I see one, even if a fraction of a second later my forebrain identifies it as harmless. I love being in nature, so it’s just something I have to deal with.

I’ve had several rattlesnake encounters and it’s at least one guaranteed nightmare every time. The dream is always the same: I’m standing somewhere at dusk, often barefoot. Under a nearby, low object I see a rattlesnake. Then I see another to the side. Then another behind me. Then I realize they are everywhere.

I really hate ticks, so I appreciate their rodent killing service. But if we never ran into each other again that would suit me fine.

Agreed, and there’s a good chance that log is full of one thing spamming over and over, and the devs would love to know what it is.

Thank you for the encouragement. I’ve been thinking about it.

At AAA studios you can pour your heart and craft into creating something beautiful along with hundreds of other wonderful colleagues, for years, only to have it ruined by management who literally doesn’t give af. Not only do they not play games, or even like games, they are proud of this fact in a sort of, “sell me this pen” type of way. These people always existed but the “financialization” of the industry means they are everywhere now. Even one of these people in the wrong place can be poison, and they are everywhere. This mutated organelle has made the entire studio system too neoplastic to perform its primary function.

It’s like training for years as a chef, slaving away in a hot kitchen for the big opening, then having the owner (who hasn’t cooked in decades) insist you serve your food in the toilet because “hey it’s porcelain, it’s the same as fine china”. Then when the restaurant bombs you get fired and he gets a huge bonus because he’s a genius cost cutter and you couldn’t sell his vision. Nobody cares that you made the best bisque of your life when its served in a toilet. How many times can that happen before you say, “fuck it”?

Well for me it was ten years. Not laid off, but just couldn’t take it anymore. I could probably get another job with my resume, but I just can’t bring myself to apply again. Through a little planning and extremely good luck I’m not really under any pressure. Makes me feel like a fool because a lot of people work worse jobs, but then I remember how sad and angry I was all the time. When I look at job postings those feelings return. The problem is I still like it and want to do it. I feel forced out because I care about making good stuff instead of just “line go up”. I would take a huge pay cut to work on a team that had the “magic” again.

I really hate shit like the first quote because willows are incredible trees. They’ve also been super useful to humanity for tens of thousands of years, from everything from baskets to aspirin. You can chop off a willow branch and stick it in the ground and it grows a new tree. Try that with oak (although oaks are also cool).

Whoever wrote that knows nothing about trees. They just thought, “bendy weak not-bendy stronk.” Oh not a modern, commercial timber species, must suck. Drives me nuts they pretend to be “men of the land” then say some stupid bullshit like that. It doesn’t make them sound hard. A stone age man could make a fishing net out of that willow that would feed his family for a year. Fuck outta here.

Just spitballing but you’d have to align the desired shape somehow, perhaps with a singular value decomposition. Once its transform was normalized you could compare its shape, or perhaps its convex hull, with a database of banned shapes.

The problem is this is pretty easy to defeat (by adding extra sprues and spikes to the object, breaking it into two shapes, etc) and the more aggressive you get with the check the more you risk false positives.

An AI training set would involve creating a dataset of all the banned shapes, then generating tens of thousands of permutations of them however you believe people might try to trick it. Ultimately the AI would lock onto some small feature of the shape that scores it as positive, perhaps something trivial. That also leads to weird false positives. This also creates an arms race as people figure out what that feature is subvert it.

This problem is much harder in 3D than in 2D (currency). Since you can also cut, file, and glue shit that comes out of a 3D printer later I don’t think this is a solvable problem. Like most gun control measures in the USA it appears to be aesthetics.

You could also just aggressively go false positive all over the place and say “fuck the users”, with exceptions for cops. This is basically the USA’s approach to drones.

Yeah this is an extremely thin wrapper on GPT4All, literally just feeding in the above prompt. I’m not knocking the author for trying/sharing this but you’d probably be better off just installing GPT4All. That said, do you think this would have kept Ted out of prison?

You: The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Model: Honestly, I think the whole Industrial Revolution thing has just been a total mess for humanity as a whole. Like, what was supposed to be some kind of progress or advancement ended up causing way more problems than it solved. And don’t even get me started on all the environmental and social issues that came with it… ugh, it’s like we took two steps forward but then tripped over our own feet and fell back a few paces.

The low men.

Reminds me of a Reddit post a while ago where someone was claiming ten thousand people were crushed by tanks and hosed down the sewer at Tiananmen Square. Ten thousand.

Even entertaining the notion that is true, picture ten thousand human bodies. Can you image the sewer infrastructure required to handle that much crushed matter?

That must be why communists invest so much in infrastructure. Here in the good old USA we stick with undersized sewer pipe that’s thirty years past its useful life for reasons of freedom and safety. When it can’t even handle storm water we know we’re safe from hosing.

It’s annoying when the vacuum system has a small leak so, over that long road trip, the car is always slooooowly losing speed. It’s such a nightmare to diagnose, at least as a DIYer.

I watched a program about Tangier Island, Maryland. The main street frequently has ankle deep water now. They are all Trumpers and are convinced it’s just erosion, but want the government to step in and fix it somehow.

So there you go. People can literally be standing in water and not believe it’s happening.

I would add Grist to that list for climate focused reporting.

Yes, there are propane powered mosquito traps that emit heat and CO2. Supposedly they are effective but costly.

Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.

In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier’d back because the director couldn’t be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.