I had to include "Adventure". It was one of my first experiences with any kind of computer. I actually played it on a teletype, with one of those 300 baud dial-in modems with the cradle for the handset.

My uncle, who worked as a programmer in the early 1970s brought the teletype to my parents' house, and this was one of the things we did (there was also "Star Trek", which was kind of like Battleship -- you can still find it in Linux distributions to play on the console, and ASCII art).

This was a time when kids did not normally have childhood experiences interacting with a computer -- which seems hard to imagine today, but it was true.

Okay, so people are posting "9 games" they found formative, so I have a wonderful opportunity to date myself here. :muppets_waldorf:

But here we go -- a good span of the history of computer gaming. But not recently.

As a DIY-er in a field of professionals, you have to deal with shifting foundations, as the pros try to solve their problems. And information is spotty.

So, I spent about 6 hrs just trying to figure out the best strategy, based on competing sources of information. Then, once I made a choice, 5 hrs implementing it. Only to hit a wall at 2 AM.

So then, of course, I have to sleep. Downtime mounts up. Also the intermediate state, with old and new servers both running, costs even more than the oversized server that I'm trying to get away from.
😬

A downside of self-hosting (or self-managed hosting), is that it's only sustainable while you can pay for the platform costs and also put in the labor to keep it working. Expensive on both counts.

Currently, my PeerTube and Misskey instances are in maintenance limbo. It's very distressing. And this is an overhead cost I can't really avoid or delegate.

There's a mistake somewhere. If it's mine, I should be able to fix it. If it's upstream, I may be able to work around it.

But it's pretty stressful, either way. 😬 :oh_no_bubble:

I know that this isn't strictly malicious. These are defensive measures to deal with badly-behaved spammers, offensive DDOS attacks, and scraper bots.

I get it. I also run websites. But the result is a toxic, broken web.

And that makes me sad and somewhat afraid of the consequences of us going down this path.

Well, shit.

My ISP blocks half of Europe's websites, because apparently they have the entire fricking Hetzner cloud blocked.

But now that I use a Squid proxy to get around the ISP's bullshit, Cloudflare blocks me from accessing websites, because accessing from a Digital Ocean IP is suspect or something.

Remember when the fricking web had "web sites" and we had "web browsers" and they just fricking WORKED..?

Now, all this paranoid bullshit is just splitting the web up and disconnecting us all.

This sucks.

[EDIT: it seems I need to clarify that I'm being hyberbolic -- it's not *literally* all of Hetzner. It's just that blocked sites keep turning out to be on the Hetzner cloud in Germany or Finland, when I investigate. The guy just has an overly-aggressive IP block list, as does Cloudflare]

Denial is very different from ignorance. Denial is knowing that something is true, but pretending very hard that it is not.

If I'm getting ready for localization of my film and I want to add both subtitles and descriptive audio, should I just use SRT for both?

Obviously they would be used differently, and I will likely record the English descriptive audio myself. But it seems like SRT would provide a good representation for other language readings. Does that make sense?

#Film #AskFedi #Accessibility #A11y #Localization #L10n #Translation

As silly as this is, this skit does cover some important territory on the subject of race and prejudice, in just over two minutes, as the best satire can.

Pretty sure there are still people who need the primer.

IDK why YT thought I needed this 16 y.o. video today, but here's Catherine Tate at the "Ginger Hair Safe House":

🤭

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_DVHUEjnuU

The truth is that vampires are the warm fuzzy myth we made up to cope with the far more terrifying reality of unaccountable rich and powerful people.

I'm seeing a lot of concern over heavy news today and boosts. So I want to call your attention to a useful, but perhaps little-known Mastodon feature:

If you want to follow an account on Mastodon, but you don't like the posts that they boost from others, you can hide these from an option on their profile (in the web UI) without having to unfollow them.

There are many strongly held opinions on the "correct" use of CW and what ought to be boosted, so this can be a useful way to cope.

Messed-up metaphors:

I just heard some pundit trying to be clever, saying "They're not just reading the tea leaves, they're already boiling them..."
🤨
Okay, to be clear, the order is:

1) Boil the water
2) Pour the hot water into the cup (or pot) with the tea
3) Drink the tea, leaving tea leaves at the bottom
4) THEN you can "read the tea leaves" at the bottom of the cup, see?
:kermit: 🍵

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.

Day 3:

Krita

I think it's particularly important to mention Krita in the context of Inkscape and Gimp to differentiate them. For a long time, I basically thought of Gimp and Krita as competitors, but they serve different goals:

Gimp is, as the name says, for "image manipulation", whereas Krita is a DIGITAL PAINTING application. It is more focused on creating the art in the application than on tweaking existing elements. And while Krita and Gimp have limited vector art capabilities, they come nowhere near Inkscape in that category.

Since I'm not much of a digital painter, though, I have not really put Krita through its paces, nor trained myself extensively on it.

My daughter HAS, and she creates a LOT of character art using it. So she is the real Krita expert in the family. The "KitCAT" logo below is one I commissioned from her as a studio mascot.

But it has some other useful features for me -- the one I use the most is that it can open 16-bit graphics I use for some backdrop textures in Blender and also the Multilayer EXR files generated from Blender. This makes it the easiest way for me to check them (the attachment below shows a recent "Ink" render, including masks for "billboard extras").

https://krita.org/en/

#Krita

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.

Day 2:

Gnu Image Manipulation Program

Known as #GIMP or as #GnuIMP by those who don't like the other name.

This is my go-to tool for basic image processing of photos and images for publication. It's a pretty common workflow for me to crop and/or enhance photos in Gimp and then load the output into Inkscape for layout work.

Also, FWIW, I learned it before I learned Photoshop, which frankly seemed kind of like a backward step to me, particularly in the way that Photoshop filters never seemed to have any controls (at the time -- this was 25 years ago and I haven't used Photoshop since then).

Which fuels my general belief that terms like "more intuitive" or "more powerful" are mostly a function of what you are familiar with.

It's one of the earliest graphics creation software packages I learned on Linux, and so it's become so much second nature that I hardly think about it anymore.

These days I use it all the time to crop and rescale screen captures, so I've attached one of cropping a screencap of itself.

https://www.gimp.org/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.

Okay.... Day 1....

Inkscape

A vector graphics editor (edits SVG documents).

I use this in a lot of different ways whenever I need a drawing:

* Presentation slides
* Graphic illustrations/diagrams
* "Decal" graphics for 3D textures
* Layout of images or other graphics
* Video poster/cover graphics
* Book design

https://inkscape.org

Also included in most desktop Linux distributions, I believe.

#Inkscape

I agree that 50-year mortgages are absurd.

But...

Honestly, I thought 30-year mortgages were absurd.

and

Literally, "mortgage" means you pay "until death". That's the "mort". Establishing fixed durations was an easement.

and also..

Maybe housing just shouldn't be that expensive?

At least this DVD was a free library discard. Feels slightly less bad knowing I didn't waste money on it. Still -- it was good enough that I need to get a copy somewhere, now.

Not saying which movie, because some doofus would tell me how it ends!

I have watched 83% of a movie, because 17% was unwatchable due to a corrupted DVD.

This is a very unpleasantly incomplete antsy sensation. 😝

I will obviously have to acquire another copy.

So, regarding... "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".

How does that series continue? Is it like 3X is back to shaming you, and 4X is on me,, or what...?
:kermit:

To be clear: it is perfectly okay for you to care about seaslugs. They are pretty cool!

And while not as cool, corporations can be very useful organizations.