Other people: I get ads for nothing but guns and ammo and creepy scam shit on Facebook. My Facebook ads:

One of the weirdest things about the weather getting colder is that I constantly think about videogames that I played when it was cold, in the past, and I want to play them.

Who was the first "guy in the chair"? The earliest instance I can think of off-hand was Whoopi Goldberg's character, Terry, in Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), but there had to be others around that era.

Friendly tip for folks. My discord got hacked yesterday and my computer was acting funky ever since. Turns out it was malware installed through a blender file I bought as part of an asset pack on CG Trader. I didn’t know blender files were being used this way, but I figured I’d spread the word.

The insistence on making these robots bipedal is probably the most obvious giveaway that it's all a big carny gimmick

People should have given me this money, instead. I could have funded many fine games, made by people who know what they're doing, and even if they never made a single penny back, most of the money would still be left over.

There's no way you can convince me that humans were not meant to cradle a mug of their favorite hot beverage in their hands when they are cold. Pottery must have been invented before humans moved into colder climates, or else no one would have borne the indignity of doing without.

Back in the 1980s, all you needed for a TV concept was a tall, mysterious Vietnam vet and a cool vehicle. This was multiple entire shows.

credits that include the names of everyone who worked on the game at any point

Many freelancers in the United States rely on ACA marketplace plans for their health insurance. In an industry that has already been working overtime to turn gamedevs into gig workers, freelance and contract devs are about to get even more squeezed. This is unacceptable.

We just had a cold snap, in Texas, and I suddenly realized that I can smell the cold outside. Why does cold have a smell? It’s not synesthesia, because my fridge and freezer don’t smell like this. Maybe it’s a natural phenomenon like petrichor.

There's no way to do this ethically, and this should be obvious to anyone involved. Stop. Now.

This account smells like good, dark-roast coffee, and late at night, the skunk in the back yard. Please, God, somebody make it stop.

I saw someone claiming to be a 10x engineer today. 10x engineers are a mythology, based on a misunderstanding of study results, so making such a claim is risible.

that's me in the corner that's me in the float point losing my precision

These people are so fucking weird about AI.

I hate it when a tea company is like, "We use no plastics in our teabags," and then they're like, "We use a proprietary blah blah blah sugar cane blah blah something blah," and it's basically bioplastic.

Somehow, apps managed to add new features for decades, without ever being as utterly pushy and disruptive about it as they are about gen-AI features. The whole thing is so deeply weird.

If you see this, post a vampire that isn't Dracula.

I've sung songs in German, but I don't know German. Just because the words were coming out of my mouth doesn't mean that I knew what meaning I was conveying. Recitation is not the same thing as knowledge -- much less, the ability to apply knowledge.

Would you hire someone with no ethics to do a job? No? Then you shouldn't use a chatbot to do it. Chatbots do not have a functional understanding of ethics. Sure, you can get them to blather about ethics, but they are incapable of applying that information in any meaningful way.

I had this problem with university classes. If a prof was a jerk to me about showing up late, I just plain didn't want to go anymore.

While I understand that the term is originally Japanese, I always feel like "emoji" is plural, and I want to singularize it as "emoj" or "emojus" or something.

Finally got around to trying a Quorn mycoprotein product, and I would buy it again.

What's it like inside your head?

I predict that within the next 3 years, someone whose idea of a perfect partner is a 24/7 ego-stroking affirmation engine will try to knock off a prominent figure working for one of the major LLM companies, because they believe a minor algorithm change "killed" their synthetic honeybunch.

Has anyone out there tried Vizz eyedrops yet? I am intensely curious about these, but I haven't heard any first-hand experiences yet. If these darn things work, I am gonna knock my eye doctor right over with my eagerness, next time I'm in there. www.pharmacytimes.com/view/vizz-be...

I encountered the worst game soundtrack I have ever heard in my entire life relatively early. This cursed 16 note melody is seared into my brain like a PacMan knockoff was burned into the CRT screen of my Grandpa's TRS-80 Model III. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyUI...

All four books will be mostly empty, except for some doodles, so it hardly matters. In thirty years, they will be repurposed for math, because I didn't have any graph paper in reach. The empty math notebook repurposed for math will be especially funny.

Deconstruct a recipe badly. Deconstructed Birthday Cake: Two Poached Eggs over wheatberry pilaf with vanilla pudding sauce, and a pinch of Himalayan pink salt sprinkled over the top.

If you love indie games, then it’s worth supporting the ACA subsidy fight in the US. There are plenty of indies like me depend on the ACA to buy affordable healthcare. Without the enhanced subsidies, it could be priced out of reach for a lot of people.

Confession: I still do my game programming math on paper. It's not for aesthetic or tactile reasons. It's the ability to start mathing without losing my train-of-thought while I wait for an app to start up, and start a new document, etc.

At some point in my programming career, I started saying, "I don't believe in mysteries." Unless something is in a black box I can't get to, there is no such thing as "acting weird." I have to find out what's actually going wrong.

I believe in the right to bear water. Unless you're going into a clean room, or a location where you can't have drinking water around for safety reasons, you should be able to bring your water with you, always. It's inhumane to deny people this.

Since we can’t rely on the HHS, CDC, or FDA to say it, I will: MAKE SURE YOU ARE VACCINATED AGAINST MEASLES. GET YOUR MMR. Measles cases have reached their HIGHEST point since the disease WAS ELIMINATED from the United States in 2000. We are at the tipping point for the return of ENDEMIC measles.

This is actually pretty cool. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

People who think folks want to talk to their computers have clearly not spent enough of their career suffering in an open office plan with their rank-and-file employees. I had to program in a cubeland next to a call center once, and it made me feel hostile all day long.

I just remembered how my grandma used to take me to see the gliders fly around at Harris Hill Overlook in Elmira, NY. It's weird, I hadn't thought about that for decades.

Fire him.

I think that one of the biggest mistakes made in activism is in misreading the motivations of the rank-and-file members of the opposition, and especially assuming that the motivation of the people pulling the strings is the same as the motivation of the rank-and-file.

Oceans of Slumber - Nights in White Satin www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sP...

Unity Editor: Open Preferences? What a strange, exotic activity you are attempting to do. Too much of a challenge. I think I'm just going to freeze, instead.

"May you eternally have crumbs in your bra" may be a worse curse than "May you eternally wear irregular socks," but it only works on people who wear bras.

Don’t ever let a tech CEO tell you they’re “curing cancer.” If you donated all that investment money to actual cancer research, it would most likely get us way closer to that goal than whatever tech they’re pitching.

“Deployed update late Friday.”

My "Require alt text before posting" setting got randomly cleared, at some point. If you use this setting, you may want to make sure it's still turned on.

My "Require alt text before posting" setting got randomly cleared, at some point. If you use this setting, you may want to make sure it's still turned on.

This is so unintentionally funny, but at the same time, I do feel really bad for the people who work there, and have to deal with this nightmare policy up-close. www.wired.com/story/meta-m...

I used to say "a programmer's work is never really done until they have automated themselves out of a job," but, to be clear: That isn't the same thing as replacing a programmer with an LLM.

JetBrains Rider's line completion suggestion feature is like I'm trying to give someone directions to drive somewhere, but there's someone standing next to me, trying to finish all of my sentences, and every time they screw up, it's incredibly distracting, and derails my train of thought.