Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place)

My friends' love language is small giraffe-themed gifts. Now I just need to make sure my cats don't hunt the giraffe or the monkey down.

For the record, I never meant for giraffes to be a theme for me, I just occasionally mentioned them on various occasions because I thought they were such uncanny animals (in a good way). I consider it a happy accident.

There's something extremely depressing about video game development studios using the word "franchise" in their own announcements about their own work. "Franchise" is a business term. A creative person would perhaps say "setting" or "series", they might even say "sequel" or "spin-off", but franchise makes it sound like you don't even like your own creation anymore.

@Nickiquote I could swear Elon Musk was a Vogon sometimes. The main difference seems to be that rather enjoying being bad at poetry he enjoys being bad at video games.

@blotosmetek These days you never know. I've already been told to try the new AI feature in my IDE at work.

I know everyone knows using metrics in programming for performance tracking can be very silly, but I was reminded of that just today, because today I committed 5 (five) lines of code to the repository, and in doing so I fixed 3 (three) bugs.

@mattblaze @cstross Poisoned by JD Vance while exactly 88 years old. There are no coincidences, there are only messages from the God.

@cstross I know an interesting case where a game development studio developed their next game under a new name, and I think it had to do with the fact that the new game, unlike the previous two, was not porn.

Not really related, but slightly relevant: my cartoon giraffe avatar has stuck to me to the point where people who already know my work and meet me in person for the first time tend to call me "the giraffe guy" before they remember what my actual name was. Awkward.

"Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" has an absolutely clear opinion about fascists, and the upside of it is we seem do agree, but the downside is it's not trivial to make a compelling villain this way. Voss is jut not an interesting character. I find myself just waiting for him to leave scene.

@Lana He's going to stop all transmissions. As an added bonus, this will free up a lot of superheterodynes to help regular heterodynes fight homodynes.

@Lana Obligatory Betrans comment.
(it's an actual company, and fairly large at that)

@HighlandLawyer @jef @cstross @LRRRonEarth @ainmosni I say let's ditch the guillotine and do it Eurovision style: a huge blender you throw people into while a group act wearing really weird wigs and glasses is dancing on top of the lid to a sugary melodic techno tune. We can do quals, semifinals, finals, then at the end countries vote which one gets to kill Musk or whoever happens to be the richest at the moment.

Research indicates an average European teenager's reflexes in a first person shooter are 130ms faster than Elon Musk's, therefore the US will add a 65ms reciprocal lag to all incoming data packets from Europe.

@iris Reminds me of my cats, who tirelessly mine the raw resources in order to provide the market with an abundance of processed goods.

(i.e. they shred cardboard boxes to pieces, or as we like to joke, they make "cartonite")

@EmptySet @Remittancegirl @cstross @trurl @logomancer People in the US would indeed do well to step down from their exceptionalist soapboxes and start studying other countries for a change. There's like a dozen and a half countries in Europe alone that had to build their democratic frameworks from the ground up more or less overnight, and more or less succeeded at it (with some caveats). And it only happened some 30 years ago.

@MEGA @cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl My pet peeve is how the communists invested in housing. This stopped in the late 80s, but when I was finishing my studies in 2004 I still had a clear path to buying my own flat. Then the parliament decided it would be great to make it easier for people to take loans. Housing prices about doubled in three years. The older I get, the more I can't afford a home, which means I pay literally 4x as much for my home as a person who got one from their granny.

@MEGA @cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl In Poland the standard of living has arguably improved since 1990, but a number of things that were taken for granted under communism are now gone. Whole industries were rolled back. Public healthcare is largely gone. One of first things "democratic" rightwingers did was a partial abortion.ban. Transition away from communism pulled the rug from under a lot of people.

@mavu @cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer It's a problem with multiple layers. On the most superficial level it's procedural: the law has loopholes in it and those need to be plugged. On the deepest level (and there are other levels in between) it's a matter of custom and practice, which aren't codifiable, but have to support "democracy as an ideal".

tl;dr there always have been and will be evil people who are smart enough to sabotage what they don't like, and you need to keep adapting.

@Remittancegirl @cstross @logomancer No no, ignorance and incompetence tends to exacerbate the damage. The Nazis murdered 600 thousand people just in my home city. They lost the war precisely because they had gone on a mindless murderous rampage, but they still got to do the rampage.

@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer I see the research for the attack novel is going nicely! These people (especially Musk) strike me as the kind who could botch an assassination attempt in some hilarious manner. Musk hiring the hitman via Twitter, poison tea that leaves spots on one's fingers, this kind of stuff.

@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer For the record "Trumps gets assassinated by tescreals after mid-terms and they try to blame it on DSA" is on my bingo card.