GDScript for the Godot game engine. I’m passable in Python and Lua for some basic things, but I’ve been obsessed with a game idea. I refuse to use AI for anything more than maybe prototyping, so I’m essentially learning what I need to as I go since I’m a one-man-band.

Dogs have the ability to read body language. So a gentle behaviour like kissing or cuddling would definitely be perceived differently than an abrupt gesture like poking them.

where they seem eager to engage with content they don’t even like or that pisses them off. It’s like joining a bicycle forum only to find out everyone mostly just spends their time there shitting on tricycles.

Rage Farming or “scientifically”, The Commodification of Trauma

I don’t get it either. But I still fall for it myself without even realizing it. It’s truly bizarre that we all have that tendancy to some degree; I can’t fathom why such a behaviour would have evolved to be necessary.

I lost my girl at 8. Didn’t quite get there. :-(

One reason is that I doubt whether animals really understand this

You would be objectively wrong on that. It’s been shown that affection to animals fires off the same parts of the brain in them as it does in humans, and delivers the same chemicals.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6826447/

Just because animals can’t communicate like you or me (though I firmly believe pets have a language that you can understand if you own one long enough), it doesn’t mean they don’t have the same feelings of bonding and closeness. Biologically we’re all very similar, so the Oxytocin that we get from being loved is identical to the oxytocin that THEY get when being loved.

Within less than an hour, Rule 34 will come into effect and someone will make a porn-film about them.

I was a tech-manager at Staples when those launched and it was an absolute shit-storm right from the start with returns and complaints.

The only thing crazier from that time was an HP WebOS tablet (I can’t remember the name) that launched with pretty big fanfare with HP trying to take a marketing page out of Apples playbook, only to have it fail so completely that they announced a week later that support was being dropped and any remaining stock was offered to anyone who wanted at 99 bucks.

Wild days indeed.

Jide Remix Ultratablet.

Kinda glitchy from the start. Got one minor software update before the company decided to focus first only on their mini-desktops and soon after, B2B; dropping the consumer support entirely.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad is the released the proprietary blobs for others to use to keep up support. The hardware was nice, and the concept was one of the first to try an “Android version of a Surface”. But to my knowledge, no ROMs have ever been made for it.

True about the pay.

In general I just feel like our representatives are too far removed from the people they’re supposed to serve.

Here in Canada, we’ve had a couple of floor-crossers from the Conservatives to the Liberals, and social media is up in arms about how that shouldn’t be allowed. “We voted Conservative, not Liberal”. Whenever someone points out (and rightly so) that in the parliamentary system you’re voting for an individual, not a party, they freak out and say that’s not how it works.

They fundamentally have no idea how a representative democracy is supposed to work.

A part of that comes from an American culture bleeding up into Canada a bit, with people thinking they vote directly for the Prime Minister the same was Americans directly vote for their president. But a bigger part of it is that those representatives spend more time in Ottawa than in their own ridings. And if a representative loses their seat in an election, they can just pick a different riding where they don’t even live and run again. It’s ridiculous.

Basically democratic socialism but with a few rules:

1. No billionaires. After 500 million, it’s taxed at 100%
2. No Corporations. Private business ownership only. No Shareholders or Hedge Funds. Basically no wall street.
3. Lobbying on behalf of an industry is banned.
4. No party “whips” that exist to make a representative vote the party line even if they’re personally disagree with the party on that particular issue. Representatives need to truly represent their constituents, not their party. In fact, fuck the entire concept of “party politics”. Ditch it.
5. By law, a representative has to have actually lived in their riding for 5 years or more.
6. Representatives are required to spend at least 80% of their time in their constituency, in their office. It’s a 9-5 job. No more of this showing up to vote bullshit and then fucking off to Mexico. You serve your constituents, and your job is to be in your office to listen to them tell you what they want 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. Otherwise, what do they pay you for?
7. With the exception of meeting twice a year in person, most bills in congress/parliament are able to be done completely virtually. The representative studies the issue, consults with his constituents and votes accordingly. They do so without any input from their so-called peers. The only input they are allowed is from their constituents and legitimate experts in whatever field they are looking into.
8. Representatives have a strict two term limit and an age limit.
9. At any point, your constituents (and ONLY your constituents) can trigger a recall election due to no-confidence.
10. You’re a “servant of the people”; not the other way around. You get a working man’s salary; enough to live and a small dispensation for travel expenses, office staff, etc… But using your position to enrich your own personal wealth is grounds for an immediate arrest.

My desktop that was powerful enough to do most things died a few months ago at the worst possible time; it came on the heels of emptying a lot of my savings on vets to find out that my girl had advanced bone cancer, and then even more on sending her over the rainbow bridge and getting her cremated.

So both as a way to save some money and a way to keep my mind off of her, I’ve been putting together a new computer using a few spare parts that I have had laying around. Truth is, my old computer, though old, had been upgraded up the wazoo through the years to the point where most of that stuff could just transfer over (750 watt powersupply, Nvidia 3060 12gb card, max amount of RAM that it could take, etc…)

All I really needed was a new mainboard and processor. As long as I bought a used one that used DDR4 instead of 5, I already had everything I needed.

The “Project” is adapting my second-to-last PC case to accept newer components. (upgrading the front USB ports, things like that) Because it’s an OEM Acer case, I can’t simply order in an upgraded swappable unit, so I’m having to get creative with soldering.

It’ll probably fail and I’ll have to buy a new case too, but oh well. It’s fun to try. I have so many old computer parts laying around, let’s see how Dr. Frankenstein I can go.

Lost my soul-dog to bone cancer at the end of February.

R.I.P. Ripley. Love you, baby-girl.

Corporations are not your friend. Ethics plays no part in it. It’s economics. If they price themselves out of the competition, that’s their problem, not yours.

Can anyone make out what the piece of paper says?

I vote the Fediverse just invents it’s own fake language, like Esperanto, or French.

No one can tell me that Leavitt wasn’t desperately trying to avoid winking when she said “shots will fly”. That smug look on her face said everything.

They’re super confident and cocky in their incometence. And why wouldn’t they be? No one…literally NO ONE…has called them out on it.

Anything by Bear McCreary.

Black Sails is my personal favourite.

https://youtu.be/XFTcA4QLHw0

Exactly. I think this is what we’ve fundamentally lost in our communities. People helping neighbours.

We’re all taught to distrust one another and to be self-sufficient, but that’s never how our society evolved in the first place. Cities evolved because cooperation was needed. Division of labour, etc…

I’m lucky that I live in a small city that still mostly has some of that going on. But it’s getting more rare every year. Elderly lady that lived across the alley from me had too small a backyard for her usual garden, so I said she was free to use mine because I wasn’t needing the space for anything. In return, I got to know my neighbour, and I got veggies come harvest time. She unfortunately passed away two years ago, and the young family that bought the house…haven’t even met them yet; they ignore eye contact whenever we’re both outside.

Maybe I’m just weird because I grew up in the country. We had a small acreage within a cluster of small acreages. And we all knew each other. The family down the way was a mechanic looking at our vehicles for us. When hay baling needed to be done, we would all pitch in and help. My dad was a construction worker, so he’d go help the neighbours build stuff. It’s just how it was for us.

That is very true. However (at least from what I was always taught) the reason employers “require” ANY degree is less about what you learn and more about showing them that you have ability and commitment necessary TO learn.

An employer isn’t generally interested in what you know; they’re always going to teach you their way of doing things anyway.

Employers want to know that you have the focus to actually learn their systems.

So the end result of “fast degrees” will be the opposite of what job hunters think. It’ll just devalue degrees in the eyes of employers because it no longer signifies the very metric they were measuring, which was the ability to pay attention

Even Slenderman needs a break sometimes.