Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!

Condolences for your dad. 42 here, my dad is showing his age majorly now.

Looking back I know I lived every single hour but huge leaps of time are just gone. Like, entire jobs I worked for years I have maybe a half dozen memories. On top of that our work product is gone, the company is gone, the building is gone, the entire industry is changed… it’s like it was all a dream. I definitely understand the old man looking at a city and saying, “this was all orchards”. I used to think it was a wistful phrase, but it’s also an expression of disbelief. When we were embedded it all seemed so important. But it all shuffled off with zero fanfare. It really changes how you experience life, and that’s how I “feel old”.

Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she’s had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won’t run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven’t seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.

A couple friends of mine worked on the PS3 launch title “Lair” back in the day. Sony brass demanded, at the 11th hour, that they completely change the control scheme to use the braindead PS3 motion controller nonsense. The game wasn’t perfect but, before that decision, it was at least playable. Game launch was a disaster. San Diego studio closed. Execs who made that decision probably got promoted. They’ve always been like this.

Trucks can only be 80,000 pounds max and certain weight ratios per axle (varies by state and conditions). If you’re too heavy it could mean shifting the axles, obtaining a special permit, needing an escort, paying a fine, or even being stopped until you can sort it out. It has to do mostly with safety and damage to the roads AFAIK. Also it’s where they check all your paperwork and licenses.

Ohio and North Carolina have a license plate beef over the Wright Brothers. They lived and worked in Ohio (“Birthplace of Aviation”), but the first flight was in Kitty Hawk because of the steady winds (“First in Flight”).

Happens to some SE Asians in North America too, because the edible straw mushroom from SE Asia resembles one here called “death cap”. Amanita phalloides. What’s fucked up is right before it kills you your symptoms actually improve, so people get discharged from the hospital and think they are going to be ok. I forage mushrooms but I stay away from white gilled mushrooms completely.

This is true. Some things are completely outsourced to vendor companies with their own employees. You rarely interact with these people at all, or even know their names. All communication goes through a telephone game. Then the primary studio itself will have contract employees and also “permanent staff”.

Management likes to go on and on about how staff are “family”, but then treat them like shit and lay them off anyway. They also like to be subtly shitty to contract workers whenever possible, like free donuts in the break room! ~(for staff only)~

Really, management is just shitty to everyone. Having been in both positions I honestly prefer contract. At least then I’m not expected to participate in their “corporate culture”.

Wasn’t it the railroads at the end of the 19th century? Yeah… they would kick our asses.

I remember “pre-existing condition” exclusions. Insurance companies hired teams of investigators who would comb through the medical histories of patients who made expensive claims (like chemotherapy). They would find something, anything, in that person’s medical history that they could claim was “pre-existing”, from some time prior to being covered, and deny the claim. Often this was done in full knowledge that the denial could be appealed. But they also had statistics that if that patient died from their disease the family was unlikely to pursue an appeal.

Having a gap of any length of time in your insurance history could be devastating. I had to buy personal insurance once during this time (circa 2001). I was young with no medical conditions and in good health, and it was $160 a month with a deductible so high it was basically worthless except for catastrophic emergencies. I was making $8.50 an hour at the time. But it prevented me from having a gap in coverage that could be used later, perhaps many years later, to deny claims.

Of course the only solution that’s politically viable is apparently a giant subsidy to capital. Same with Section 8. Same with education loans. We’re incapable of anything else it seems.

Insurance companies still do many versions of this with a byzantine coding system, complex “out of network” exclusions, etc. Anything to deny a claim. It’s a capitalist version of a “work-to-rule” slowdown, where they can make new rules. Since it’s your health they can afford to wait forever. The asymmetry favors them. It’s about as close as you can get to directly chucking human bodies into a furnace to power a money machine and still maintain a veil of propriety. True evil. If there was any justice in the world, the food that these executives bought would turn to ash in the mouths of their children.

Speaking as someone who’s worked inside a couple “AAA” studios, sympathy to a union has definitely increased in the past decade. It’s no coincidence that bonuses and profit sharing (a major part of compensation) have plummeted over that same time. As much as fans hate unambitious and venal design choices in recent games I assure them that devs hate them just as much or even more, since they ruin years of work. We have steadily decreasing feedback into these choices and are expected more and more to stick to our corner pushing pixels and writing code. Morale is probably the lowest I’ve ever experienced and mandatory RTO adds insult to injury.

The various QA Union success stories have lots of support on the dev side. However many people believe it’s impossible somehow, or that they personally would get laid off or have their job outsourced if there is even a hint of organizing. Especially the past 12 months, the bloodbath has workers terrified. Everyone is trying to keep their heads down as much as possible. I unfortunately don’t see this ending well unless funding loosens up and people can start small studios again. There was a wave of this during Covid but those studios are all dying now. It’s seriously depressing. I’m a refugee from the VFX world and I feel like I’m watching the sequel.

Only on mobile though, on desktop have different criteria. Perhaps give the text box an arbitrary max length of like 30 characters on sign-in but not on account creation.