If I am elected president, anyone who has ever claimed to be “building a better future for our children” will have their mouths smashed off with a rifle butt.

Yeah, that’s kind of a thing; the Adobe suite kind of doesn’t have a raster drawing program, Photoshop gets used for that but Photoshop is meant to be a photo editor.

A “digital artist” or “digital painter” will want to use Krita, a “graphic artist” designing logos or signage is gonna want Inkscape, and people wanting to lie via photograph want GIMP.

It is my understanding that Kriita is a raster art program, while Illustrator is a vector art program. Inkscape is a vector art program.

I think they still do that with Thunderbolt.

Hilarious idea: Wi-fi antenna dummy loads.

As far as I know those days have never arrived.

In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..

In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!

It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?

It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.

It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.

Sally Ride married a man. What’s your point?

That, and they’ve done the best job at sabotaging the public’s ability to understand the spec in the first place.

Satisfactory 1.0 released.

Okay, so you know the trope in spy movies where the launch codes or the diamonds or whatever are at the end of a hallway full of lasers, and the protagonist has to do some cool flip moves (if male) or some slinky contortions (if female) to get around the lasers?

I made that as an arcade game with an Arduino. Some red laser pointer diodes, some photosensors, a few lights, bells and whistles, a fog machine, a few big ol buttons, and you’ve got spy laser hallway. It had a separate “break as many lasers as you can” mode as well, played like a combination of DDR and whack-a-mole.

The second coolest thing I ever programmed was probably the GPS MP3 player. A farmer wanted to add an automatic soundtrack to his Halloween hayride, like when the drove through the spooky graveyard it played ghost noises, it would play music for longer stretches on the road. I used a Raspberry Pi with a GPS HAT and wrote up a script in Python that would compare the actual position with a set of coordinates stored in a text file, and if one matched, it would play an associated mp3 file. The effect was kind of lost because the audio was coming from the vehicle itself, but it’s a hay ride, it’s supposed to be kind of lame. The bedsheet ghosts said woo as you drove past, I’m in the special effects industry, dad.

That’s why they killed off Z’an on Farscape, the blue makeup was apparently harming Virginia Hey’s kidneys so she had to quit the role.

There’s makeup, and then there’s having carpet laid on your face.

Indiana Jones’ nazi fighting credentials:

• got Hitler’s autograph

I’ll note that the exact same thing happened to Hayden Christensen. His reputation took a big hit for being the guy who portrayed Anakin Skywalker. He was in the same boat Natalie Portman was and weathered the same storm. The older actors were able to weather it better because they’d had successful projects prior, the younger actors didn’t have that.

Here’s the problem with the Strong Female Character^®: They are never found in movies made out of genuine creative vision. A Strong Female Character^® is always the lead character in a movie whose production has been authorized for the purposes of monetizing an intellectual property the studio has rights to that polling data shows would be popular among the 18-24 demographic within the next 16 months, and the writers and casting directors are hereby ordered to pander to the attached list of races, genders and sexual orientations as per the company Never Offend Anyone Ever policy.

Movies that were made to bring a cool idea to life tend to have better characters in them, because their characteristics are story telling devices and not business decisions. Stunt casting is ALWAYS a business decision.

I watched Episode 3, on DVD at an in-law’s house, basically to get it over with. And on that day ceased being a fan of Star Wars. And as far as I can tell listening to the rest of you, I haven’t missed much.

It seemed to be the pioneer of that, yeah. That was the first one where I got “Say you like this, or we can’t be friends anymore.”

I do shop at Best Buy, usually for computer parts and accessories. Because my local alternatives for computer hardware and peripherals, AV gear etc. are Wal-Mart and maybe our increasingly pathetic Staples. Or Amazon. Best Buy is literally the only place within 20 miles to buy a GPU in a brick and mortar store.

I don’t watch TV ads though. Is this chick a spokesman?

Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can’t when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.

It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.