graymess [none/use name]

Did you put them in your ass? Please update.

Stand-off guy

I second screen while working even though my job requires my full audio-visual attention.

The “progressive” independent country of California is still gonna use prison slave labor to put out the fires while our tech oligarchs’ treat machines drain the state’s water and power supply. Look, I live here and would love nothing more than to sever myself from Burgerland without the inconvenience of uprooting my whole life. But if that means pledging my allegiance to President Gavin Newsom, this place can get fucked.

Really nice of that guy to tattoo a perfect target.

The office I work at just blocked hexbear on the wifi lmao. OK, buddy.

Hell yeah.

Try it, I guess? Their servers aren’t in the US. At worst they could take it off the app store, but fucking Fortnite taught kids how to sideload lmao.

Valve only strongly supports Linux because Gabe has like a personal vendetta against Microsoft. Not complaining. I think it’s great that Steam has broken the Windows lockdown on gaming. It’s just funny.

I recently had to digitize dozens of photos from family scrapbooks, many of which had annoying novelty pattern borders cut out of the edges. Sure, I could have just cropped the photos more to hide the stupid zigzagged missing portions. But I had the beta version of Photoshop installed with the generative fill function, so I tried it. Half the time it was garbage, but the other half it filled in a bit of grass or sky convincingly enough that you couldn’t tell the photo was damaged. +1 acceptable use case for generative AI, I guess.

Fuck me, I didn’t even think about that as a possibility.

These fires have left me kind of anxious, not over the possibility of losing my belongings or even the home that my partner and I have managed to buy together. I’m terrified of losing our future. It’s so clear now how fragile it all is. One disaster could ruin any hope we have of keeping a home and saving money for retirement one day. And this is happening right now to thousands of people. Historically LA fires have mostly impacted wealthy neighborhoods, but this is something else. I know someone whose home burned down that they just bought a few months ago. They are completely fucked.

Edit: In case there’s some confusion, I’m not talking about rich suburbs burning down. Yes, of course the mcmansions in the hills are going first. Those idiots insist on living in some of the most flammable regions on the planet and can afford to rebuild over and over. I’m not going to try to justify whether I deserve my home, but it’s a single bedroom condo “worth” under half the median price in LA that I share with my partner. If it burns down, we’ll be priced out of a home permanently while paying off a mortgage for a pile of ash for the next 20 years.

I don’t know about 10x, but I’ve started deleting my comments before finishing them more often than I used to. This mostly comes from me questioning halfway through typing it out if my perspective contributes anything new or if it’s worth the time I would need to fully cover what I want to say. If either answer is no, I’ll delete.

??? Have you been living under a rock or something? That aged like milk over a year ago. Its just stinky cheese now.

Apparently I have? I pretty much stopped paying attention to this story since it seemed as thoroughly poked into as it was gonna get unless some upcoming lawsuits would change anything.

And it’s been a while since I watched it, but I remember a bunch of the interviewed ZA/UM staff agreeing that Kurvitz and the other two were fucking things up a bit and needed to go. That doesn’t mean I side with the fucking shareholders and new leadership. It just means it’s not as simple as the investors screwing over all the workers.

But if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate your perspective. I finally finished DE only this past summer, so I also missed this news unfolding in real time. I probably have some blind spots on the story.

I like the People Make Games investigation, but understandably no one’s got time for that shit. It’s like 2 hours long.
TL;DW: It’s complicated, but I don’t think it’s right to say the workers got stiffed. A lot of people worked on the game, not just the three who were forced out (though those three were considered the core design team). At this point, though, what’s left of ZA/UM is probably an empty office and half a dozen scrapped projects on hard drives. There’s nothing left to support even if you side with the company. I say pirate it.

Edit: The good news is there are like 4 recently announced projects from multiple former Elysium devs that promise to carry on the spirit of the game.

There wouldn’t be much left.

I switched from torrents to Usenet years ago and never regretted it once. Makes everything much easier and simpler.

The parts of LA that burn down every year are typically wealthy suburbs. They’ll never urbanize those neighborhoods. This current wave of fires is hitting a little further in than usual, though not enough to reboot the city meaningfully.

That Pikmin boss is real!

Social media company faking charities for no one’s benefit is a level of dystopia I could never have made up. Conditions are that bad right now they need to pump pretend feelgood posts in people’s feeds to keep their aging userbase satisfied? Or they just stopped asking “why” years ago.