My Documents/Fraps Videos/hl2 2008-01-13 18-49-11-77.avi

ever fought a boss and thought "am i just stupid or is this too hard, or maybe it isn't too hard, i can't tell"? ever walked into a new area and thought "what kind of ability am i even meant to use in here"? you are connecting deeply with the developer. you are walking in their shoes, thinking what they thought, and feeling what they felt

playing a metroidvania allows the gamer to experience firsthand the developer's own struggle navigating a mazelike world of engine APIs while subduing hostile internet users on their quest to gradually add more and more new abilities to the player's character controller code until the game feels fun and not simply broken and incomplete

accessibility features often help way more folk than you think they do. for example, putting alt text on your topical, pop-culture-related memes helps people who are old to accomplish the task of knowing what the fuck that thing even is that you are talking about

one way that discussing AI is difficult is you'll say "i don't think LLMs are good at creativity" and someone will reply "from what i've seen, they actually are very creative" and. what do you say to that. the only honest response is "i guess you must have no taste maybe? like, you must just suck at being creative yourself if you're that easily impressed. i now think less of you than i did before you said that. what the hell" and you don't wanna say that really, because it's a bit antisocial

when the small creature decides *your* lap is the place to transform into an ammonite

i sit down at the park. and this one comes along. and now i am stuck here forever

when i see software with a really barebones web presence, i assume it's gonna probably be around in a working state for 20+ years. seeing software with a really polished website *always* gave me the vibe that i'd be lucky if it lasted 3 years. nowadays that's a signal that it may not even still be around in 3 weeks

in the uk nowadays, every time you want to go to the toilet (even your own) you have to upload your ID. once you’ve done that, it’s pretty straightforward: they let you book in ahead of time, and it’s best to reserve a slot 3-4 days in advance, though if you have a toilet card (loocard saver or regular season card) its best to book at least a week in advance, because if there’s anything wrong with your ID/facial scan verification they need to escalate it to support which can take 5 working days

*guy reading something he doesnt understand*

guy: i dont understand this. can you understand it for me? here i'll paste you the document

LLM: sure! i'm happy to understand this for you. i've read it and i understand it completely

guy: thanks so much for your help

in the uk, very occasionally, there is a feather or bit of chicken poo on your egg. nobody is really bothered or offended by this. american eggs, on the other hand, are power-washed to remove all traces of it, because in america, it is actually illegal to know about The Cloaca

i restarted firefox, and that seemed to fix it. oddly, the only thing open in firefox was this mastodon tab

for the first time ever in 25+ years of using microsoft windows, i've just encountered the clipboard stop working entirely. ctrl-c/v just don't do anything, in any program, nor do any of the equivalent menu option

(for comparison, this happens to me on X11 about once every year or two)

maybe i have a poorly calibrated sense of taste when it comes to games, because all games look like slop to me. this has been the case for 15+ years. all games i ever see look like some phone game, or a generic gritty modern/fantasy/sci-fi/cartoon cosy nothing. even hollow knight looked like slop when i first saw it. it's like, idk, my favorite game, but i avoided playing it for the best part of a decade because the art style activated the "tim burton" and "yucky flash game" neurons in my brain

i had no idea that the goose house made the big walk. i just assumed it was some kind of slop game because of the genre, popularity, and that pudgy, nothing-y art style

lots of guys out there like "in 2026 there's no excuse to keep using [30 year old thing which works], we should all be using [3 year old thing which is better on some metrics but is quite a lot slower and way less supported, and so jawdroppingly complex that only a small number of implementations will ever be created, and will require a huge effort to upgrade to, and people will still use the old thing anyway]. to not use the new thing? that disrespects the concept of Technology and Progress"

the sad look in the programmer's eye where you explain that the reason the game has colors that look good is that those are the colors the artists chose

today is the important day of the year where i bleed the radiators. like a medieval physician employed at the court of the boiler. i have a wadded rag of fabric and this special brass implement which i twist. i have to ensure the 4 humors of the central heating system are in balance: clear water, rusty water, methane, and some kind of fluming effluvium. i think the rusty water represents blood, but don't take my word for it, i'm not an expert. speak to a bearer of the crest of the hound of wales

the internal disaster recovery playbooks at major organizations are sprawling wikis written entirely by claude. when something is going horrendously wrong and employees are frantically reading through internal documentation to work out how to prevent total collapse, they will be squinting at instructions such as "The purpose of the narrower lever is what isolates it: harm flowing through the cross-level tier. What it gets you is what's saved: full user capture, where convergence is the target."