If you want what we actually know without the graphic stuff...

Looks like it was an icing issue resulting in a right bank into an extremely fast descent into terrain.

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/flight-tracking-news/major-incident/learjet-60-crashes-near-west-palm-beach-florida/

Be careful on the internet today. An auto playing video just played the final ATC transmissions from the Learjet crash in Florida as the pilot realises they are about to die. I'm not squeamish about plane stuff but that's not a thing that is ever going to leave my head and I REALLY wish I hadn't heard it. 😕

Deck & Conn 1.3 update is out, along with a 20% off discount.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3828500/view/692023929008560758

I'm not saying it should be guillotines, but... it should be guillotines.

Listening to techno and fucking around with Linux.

That's how you Saturday correctly.

Cultural exchange program date:

Introduced Y to the Commodore 64, BASIC coding (she's a professional tech worker but slightly too young to have grown up with the glory of C64s) and Maniac Mansion (she'd been coding BASIC on the C64 for two hours before I showed her MM, and she gasped audibly watching the intro - "HOW THE FUCK DID THEY DO THAT?")

In exchange? She began teaching me how to pick locks. Felt a very @alice kind of trade, really.

Deck & Conn and Dungeons of Freeport are part of the October sale! 20% off, and they're also bundled together if you've not gotten either of them and want to. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/85388/Deck_and_Conn_x_Dungeons_of_Freeport/

I remember, years ago, watching Apple keynotes and, corpo-fap aside, often being excited for some new device or other. Have felt the complete opposite for basically a decade at this point.

Yesterday I got my XTEiNK 4 Pro. A simple enough ePaper device. Had a play with it, nuked the OS and seamlessly installed CrossInk instead, turning it into a MUCH better device.

That? That's the good feeling. The only good feeling a device can give me these days. When it lets me do what I want with it.

It's not -gadgets- that I've lost excitement for, it's hating that what I"m usually being sold is just another hook, going into my skin, keeping me tethered to some corporate service or other.

Probably the most fun I've had shooting a film, honestly.

(Okay being completely honest that's just the kit I owned, we didn't go out of our way to be patriotic or anything. But it was amusing to realise the most critical of our tools were all produced by Aussie companies, for this anyway. Australia doesn't normally make anything worth a damn.)

Oh, and being it's an Australian parody film, we made sure as much of our kit was Aussie as possible.

Filmed on a Blackmagic 6K Pocket Cinema Camera, and on-set audio recorded on Røde wireless and boom mics. Edited, of course, on Da Vinci Resolve.

I'm going to blog about this later, but this is the short film we shot back in May for my birthday. Myself and the my collaborator & star, Martelle, share a birthday. She asked, as she often does, what I wanted to do for our birthday. A shared party maybe?

I said no, we drink with friends all the time. What if, instead, we cajoled our friends into making a film with us? It is, after all, our favourite thing to do.

She thought this was a swell idea, so we came up with the concept, wrote the script, build the props and found fine people for each role within 10 days.

Post took a bit longer, especially as we had to get some audio recording for g'day-GPT and another character, but in the end, it's one of the silliest and most enjoyable things I've worked on.

Featuring the inimitable @stilgherrian as the Martians' onboard computer, g'day-GPT!

THE UFOs FROM OUTER SPACE!

The only science fiction film which DARES ask the question... what if Martians were Aussies?

Watch it now!

https://youtu.be/XA_1cjceSDk

And if you don't already own my play-once-a-day Roguelike, you can both Deck & Conn AND DFP in a bundle!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/85388/Deck_and_Conn_x_Dungeons_of_Freeport/

Deck & Conn, my dieselpunk turn-based spaceship command game is OUT NOW on Steam! It's on Linux, macOS and Windows, with a 20% launch discount!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3828500/Deck__Conn/

I just noticed that in the new Naked Gun, they renamed the Crypto Dot Com Arena in LA to the Ponzi Scheme Dot Com Arena.

A+ work

I'm on call for a friend today, and it's not an uncommon situation.

What I am on call for?

She's going on a first date with a guy. A coffee in the afternoon. That's it. Not staying over, not drinking, and not far from her house. Just a coffee. He seems nice. But she has given me the time, the venue, and when I should reach out if she hasn't checked in.

This isn't common. There is nothing this man did wrong on text. In fact, the reverse - this was a guy she liked enough via text to choose to meet up with at all. He's the BEST case scenario. And she's still anxious and wants someone to be aware of what she's going to do.

There's no way to fix this if you're a man who dates women. You can't individually be better. It's a huge systemic problem that'll take massive cultural shifts in how we raise and nurture our kids, over generations.

And for those in that situation now, it fucking sucks.

RE: https://old.mermaid.town/@futzle/117175788454918982

This is fucked. Australians: if you have the capacity to lodge a complaint, please do so.

Harry Potter is at this point essentially a transphobic dogwhistle and promoting it directly funds anti-trans activism, and AusPost doing this is unacceptable.

Up to date on Strange New Worlds. I’m shocked at all the people hating on the puppet episode. It’s the most fun I’ve had watching an episode of TV in a while. People need to chill the hell out and learn joy again.

(PS. This isn’t your cue to tell me you hated it.)