I did call Godot lighter than Unity or Unreal, which I believe to be factually accurate. I have run Godot on a 2014 era laptop, it runs well on a system of that vintage.

It is a full featured 2D/3D game engine and development environment, which can be a lot to take in. A lot of what I learned about game development I learned from a Youtube channel called Clear Code, who made the same snake game in both Pygame and Godot.

Python and Pygame does away with the cluttered IDE, and you can build a functioning game in one file, then you translate those concepts to a more full-on game engine which is going to be a bit more practicable for making larger games with things like tilesets and more complicated physics and collisions and whatnot. I’d hate to try making a Zelda-like game in something like Pygame. Fear the men who made A Link to the Past in 6502 assembly.

I’ll join the chorus recommending Godot. A lot lighter than Unity or Unreal, it’s open source, well documented and quite capable. It’s got a lot of features, in a lot of ways it isn’t “dead simple.”

I might recommend starting off using Python’s Pygame library. Do something like create Flappy Bird in it, that will give you a pretty good idea of how a video game works under the hood, and it’ll run on a potato.

For pixel art you might go with LibreSprite or Pixelorama. These will allow you to create tile sets for backgrounds as well as character sprites.

If you’re looking to get into 3D art, you’ve basically got to go with Blender.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?

This, I think, is related to where I draw the line between a ‘moon’ and a ‘sattelite.’ If an average human can hit escape velocity under muscle power, it’s a satellite. If you can strand someone there, it’s a moon.

The US doesn’t have an official language, it also doesn’t have an official national casserole.

English proficiency is required by law in a lot of places for various things; you’ll find it in just about every subpart of FAR parts 61 and 65, for example.

Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.

Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.

Three. Wordpad also existed.

I hope my cat doesn’t learn that trick.

Well tough shit, I learned something anyway.

Yeah, you know, they were trying to get Half Life 2 out as a launch title but the game was delayed?

Let me Wikipedia that for you…It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it’s basically just a link to Wordpad.

According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.

It has been my experience that you can just forget about disk space usage when sysadmin-ing an old person.

The olds that I’ve set up with computers basically don’t move in. They go to a couple websites. They don’t create files, they don’t install a lot of software, they aren’t playing all 500GB of Red Dead Redemption 2. Like, I’ve gotten ready to move files across, prepared full on network connections or brought large external SSDs to transfer files from one computer to another or to copy them off of Windows to copy them back on with Linux…half a gig of pictures, maybe.

We’re talking about folks who might not install any software on the computer at all because they live in a browser.

I have Mint installed on my Aunt’s laptop, which she basically never uses. Fun thing I learned: APT can get constipated if it doesn’t run in a few months. It got itself somewhere you couldn’t GUI out of so I had to use the terminal. It needed something like an apt clean or an apt --fix-broken or something, the error message it gave me told me what command to run, but that needed to happen.

I think you’re alright, Mint’s whole thing is being defuckulated Ubuntu.

PDF is one of those weird “not for editing” formats, like STL. Hence why it’s often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.

It used to be even hackier. You’d have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you’d start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you’d select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan’s Own Favorite Contraptions.

The main problem with LibreOffice as a whole is the vast install base of MS Office. If you can work from the beginning in LibreOffice and store things as ODTs and ODSs, you’ll have a fine time. The second you need to work with someone who uses MS Office or deal with legacy documents made in Office, it beats your chin on the floor.

At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.

• Word, the top of the line component of the flagship Office product
• Works, their “for home and small business” product that was honestly good enough for basically everyone, to the point you have to ask why anyone would buy Office, which is almost certainly why Works got canned, and
• Wordpad, because a GUI OS is basically useless without a rich text editor.

I seem to remember hearing this story: Back in the 2000s, Google did all their back-end stuff in C++ to make sure it was performant, and when they acquired Youtube they found it was made in Python, slow to run, fast to develop.

Well let’s see, what’s on the market in the video game console vertical?

• Playstation 5, initially released in 2020 with 84 million units shipped. Still not an amazing software library, it’s been since the PS3 that I’ve heard of anything on Playstation that even made me want to go over to a friend’s house to play that with them.
• Xbox Series S and X, again released in 2020, only 24 million units sold between the two models, and I’m amazed that many people bought one given how many balls Microsoft’s gaming division has dropped since the 360, to include naming the consoles the “Series S and X” immediately after the “One S and One X”. They’ve all but announced they’re exiting the entertainment-capable software market entirely; it wouldn’t surprise me if they removed the ability to render knock knock jokes from TrueType fonts at this point.
• Switch 2, the only main console that came out this year, in 6 months it’s sold 10 million units pretty much entirely out of force of habit I think because we’re entering our third human generation of “You buy a Nintendo for children.” The library consists of $80 games, most of which are Switch games that run at higher resolution and frame rates. And they’ve been egregiously anti-consumer this generation, like, more than usual and that’s saying something. Oh, and doesn’t the console fall out from between the joycons now?
• Steam Deck, released in 2003 2023, has sold some 4 million units, it almost doesn’t count as it’s a gaming laptop with face buttons and joysticks instead of a keyboard, is also here.

For some context:

• Playstation 4 sold 117 million units
• Xbox One sold 58 million
• Switch sold 154 million

Prices are going up, fewer games are being made, “monetization” is getting more and more egregious, and again I wonder how many people are buying Nintendos for children out of sheer force of habit.

Oh just give it a minute. Europeans pretending they’re not following right behind the US, that their own right wing retards aren’t consolidating power.