I took a drive today. Around my old stomping grounds, streets I haven’t driven down in years if not decades. Past the hospital where I was born, past the high school I graduated from. Down the highway where my driver’s ed teacher when I was 15 kept bitching at me to lift my head off the headrest. I made sure to drive that stretch of road with my head on the headrest.

I drove past my great grandmother’s old house, where some of my earliest memories were formed. It’s been standing abandoned long enough that trees are growing through the porch now. Past the Yamaha dealership where I bought my first motorcycle, which is now a machine parts warehouse. Past the airport where I got my pilot’s license.

I stopped at the lake by my old college and walked the trail around it, stopping at some of the little fishing piers, benches to look at the lake and the woods. I stopped at the foot bridge over the creek that feeds the lake and just looked upstream and listened to the water babble over the tree roots.

The entire time I was out, my mind could only do two things: hum Auld Lang Syne and envision swimming straight out to sea.

On a related note, the above text felt like an answer to this question.

I always say the moon landings were faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real a half dozen times.

Pilot here. You want to know how important weather data is for safe air travel?

It’s yes% important.

The one I remember being really weird was the PS3.

What do you think the election of 2028 was going to look like after Kamala’s term?

How many "possibly the last ever election"s were the Democrats planning to win in a row? There didn’t seem to be any intention to back away from that precipice.

A lot of 2D games made their art that way; earlier I called Factorio “Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit” because AoE’s graphics are 2D sprites made from 3D graphics. I mean, think about it, would you rather draw the little villager walking frame by frame by hand in a pixel art editor in 8 or 16 different angles depending on if the model is symmetrical, or model and animate it in 3D and then frame capture it from several angles? Hell there’s probably tools to do the latter automatically. I bet Blender can just do that.

It is my understanding that Factorio’s art is 3D modeled and rigged, and then 2D animation frames are captured from that so the game doesn’t have to actually render 10,000 inserters every tick.

Factorio does look like Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit. And given pollution is a major mechanic in the game it’s on theme.

Mindustry meanwhile has the look of a game you’d find on one of those old 101 games on 1 CD! complilations you’d find back in the 90’s, and yet it runs…well like every other game that’s ever been packaged as a .deb.

I don’t really hitch horses with a game whose main gameplay loop involves keeping an eye on things that are off screen.

And that is why I shall no longer vote Democrat.

You’re trying so very hard not to actually listen to me. Just like the Democrats.

Piss into the wind some more there, bud.

did they actually get the license to the Monkey Island name? That’s owned by Disney by now isn’t it?

Until it’s been used.

Anything that color in one of those containers…isn’t gravy. And if it was before it went in, it isn’t anymore.

2024 was the last time I’ll ever vote for a Democrat, especially given how I’m being spoken to for doing it.

I’m done voting for the side that calls me their enemy no matter what I do. I’m done going out of my way for people who hate me. I’m done doing “the right thing” for people who are offended at the idea of expressing gratitude. It’s been this way my entire adult life and I’ve got a belly full.

“Hey, you’re going to need the support of white men to win this election, so you should probably address their concerns in good faith here.” Nope. That wasn’t acceptable to the Left. The people who said that got shouted down. A couple ads like the one linked below plus others got made that were very obviously designed to conform to feminist attitudes toward men first and demand of men second. They did indeed recognize that they needed my vote, but weren’t willing to try seeing eye to eye with me at all. Saving the nation from fascism and preserving their own rights, freedoms and lives in the process wasn’t a good enough reason to speak to people like me with respect. And now they can burn for it. And they’re going to blame me for it, just like they’ve blamed me for everything their entire lives.

I’m envisioning a pit, rather than a hill? Probably full of quicklime?

The only question anyone has on their minds is, does it still have the UX of a road accident?

It is my understanding that Inkscape does not support the CMYK colorspace and is thus a non-starter for any work that involves printing.

I want to find the man who put sound effects in Microsoft Minesweeper, whenever that happened? When it went from grey Windows 95 looking to the blue background and the smiley face disappeared. I want to find the guy who put those sound effects in the game, and I want to hand plane his scrotum off and then send him home with nothing holding his testicles on but his fruit of the looms.

English class is just a place to go to be wrong according to someone with no actual skills.

English itself is the result of numerous rounds of multilingual people mashing together the most efficient bits of other languages. The rules are so inconsistent that there kind of aren’t any. Also, written English and spoken English are two different languages with different rules, which is why you sound pompous when reading aloud formal essays and why you have to invent emoticons and even start to do rich formatting and change fonts to translate casual conversation into writing.

Take a persuasive writing class at an American college, typically numbered as ENG-112, they might touch on a few points about how to create effective arguments, they’re mostly going to grade on pedantic points of grammar, punctuation, spelling and MLA formatting. They’re not going to teach you a damn thing about teaching, partially because they’re obligated to generate test scores and testing a skill-based curriculum is more difficult than a pedantic rule following one, and mostly because they don’t have any actual teaching skills themselves.

Which is why there is a nationwide industry of your high school teacher teaching you how to use semicolons and a college professor marking you wrong for doing it that way.