captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

You want to show me a tape measure, caliper or micrometer marked in thirds of a millimeter?

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I don’t give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don’t care. It’s the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.

The logic should be “Let’s open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening” not “Let’s change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening.” You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. “Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5” or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don’t know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the “problem.”

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

Each and every time this comes up. I say that I am familiar with the metric system and use it for quite a few things, but I specifically prefer woodworking in fractional inches because working in base 12 and power-of-two fractions is closer to the tasks I need to perform in the wood shop than base ten decimal math does.

I give real-world examples like “divide 19mm, a commonly used stock thickness, by three to make a tenon, you get something point 3333 repeating of course” and they 1. downvote and 2. Invent sizes that we don’t conventionally mill stock to thinking they found a “gotcha.” “Well what’s 2 inches divided by three?” we don’t mill stock to 2 inches thick, we’d use 1 1/2", a third of which is 1/2". Y’all actually do use 19mm.

But Americans use inch fractions so inch fractions must be dumb and bad, right?

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I think we were the first with metric money? We still pay for things in centidollars.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

I was a pilot in a past life. Night flight is quite different than day flight, because it’s darker up there than you think. A lot of nations outright don’t allow night VFR requiring night flight to be done IFR, some others have optional night flight endorsements or ratings for night VFR. But it’s a training requirement for American private pilots.

Because it is a regulatory matter, there has to be a strict definition of “night time.” Which is where we get the concept of “civil twilight” which IIRC is the moment when the center point of the sun’s disc is between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon. “Night time” is officially the time when the sun is 6 or more degrees below the horizon. Exactly when this happens changes every single day as the days get longer and shorter, so you still have to look it up. The exact moment of local solar noon is even less important unless you’re navigating by sextant, and the way we currently solve this kind of problem is we maintain an accurate clock calibrated in GMT, UTC or Unix Timecode depending on your exact use case, and then we do the math on the fly to convert to local time. When is local solar noon today at my exact location? 18:32:40 GMT.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Well yes, largely for the same reason people are driving around on bald tires, paper thin brake pads and three drops of oil in the sump. It’s because the education system has failed them in one way or another.

I have noticed two trends over time:

You’re increasingly likely to be told to edit the registry to customize a Windows machine. Back in the 98/ME/XP days, you just didn’t hear about the registry. You might have known it existed if you were some kid with your dad’s hand-me-down Pentium III HP Pavilion, but you NEVER touched it. Sometime around Windows 8 you started to see guides talking about “If you want to put it back to behaving like Win 7 did, just add this registry key.”

You are decreasingly likely to be told to open the terminal and run some arcane command to customize a Linux machine. GUI tools in distros designed for newcomers, casual users or gamers (things like Mint, Pop!_OS or Nobara) are increasingly complete and rely on users manually editing config files or running commands for fewer and fewer “typical” tasks.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.

To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can’t support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there’s an outside chance if it’s going to be printed, Krita can’t draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing…hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

GIMP has a well deserved reputation for responding to “this is not nice to use” with “Good!” There are lots of ways to design image editors, sure. Many of those ways are awful.

Blender used to suck, too. Then they made a decision to improve. Which GIMP is bound and determined not to do. So it needs to go in the box with HURD and someone needs to do better from scratch.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

GIMP literally sucks on purpose. Anyone waiting around for GIMP to do what Blender did and suddenly become usable has missed the point.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Based on my experience migrating from Mint to Pop!_OS, the next step is migrate back to Mint.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Fairly early on, when discussing defederating with an instance called “exploding heads”, I laid out criteria I would consider worthy of defederation, which you can find here

I was primarily concerned with unwanted traffic going out over the rest of the Fediverse, hosting illegal content like child porn, or being a rampant hive of racism and calls to violence.

So far I’ve basically heard people accuse Lemmy.ml of being rather Chinese in their moderation in-house. Is that all we’ve got?

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Because if the complaint is “They ban you over there for failing an ideological purity test” the solution is we have our own Lemmy instance, start or participate in an equivalent community here.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Note to self: Buy stock in deadly neurotoxin manufacturers.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

*grunned.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

An automatic car has no clutch; automatic transmissions aren’t just manual transmissions that do the work for you. It has a thing called a torque converter which is kind of a hydraulic pump and hydraulic motor in one unit which allows the engine to deliver torque and yet still slip.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Ritchie’s Basilisk.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

TIL that wrath is circumspect and demure.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Maybe a “play bot” is like, when you run the practice mode the game pits you against bots instead of real players. I’ve seen cases of older games starting to spawn in bots like that so that the few remaining players don’t realize how empty all the servers are.

Then there’s cheat bots which…I’m not sure why people do that?

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

I used a Pi 4 as a desktop computer for awhile. If you’re going to do that, get the most RAM you can.

I also ended up using Ubuntu MATE rather than Raspberry Pi OS. PiOS didn’t hold up do daily use, their PIXEL desktop isn’t particularly well made.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I think I’m leaning toward pine as well. You could cut into it and smell, I imagine most people now the scent of pine since it’s a popular air freshener/household cleaner scent for some reason (I’m from a pine forest, pine doesn’t smell ‘clean’ to me.)

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

This is not fiction. This is how it works.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

At 4 seconds in the trailer above, player character is walking out of the low cave and looking up at the bottle village, and above is a beehive like object up on top of the cliff; top-center of the frame. I don’t remember that being there.

At 1:05 we get a look at what I’m talking about, I know the chair we’re sitting in from the original game, I think Gehn would preside over executions from here, he would open the trap door in the floor to either drown the Rivenese or feed them to Wharks. The player has to use this control to close the trap door so they can stand there and ride the dunk manacles up to the jail cell. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Here is the same vantage point from the original game (at around the 2 minute mark). The “cage pyramid” is similar in both along the near wall of the lagoon with the town opposite. But in the new trailer, there’s an additional alter-like structure in the center of the lagoon that wasn’t there before.

Both of these may just be additional background scenery or they may be altered gameplay features. Both of these details I notice are from a fairly early stage of the game so I wonder if they might add some guidance to players in the early game?

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

The house on the giant stump is where Catherine is being held captive.

One of the things about the original game is you were locked to certain viewpoints which made it a lot easier to make sure players picked up on details; you couldn’t just walk through an area staring at the sky etc. but you couldn’t take in your surroundings. There’s a lot of details about the environment that was always there but is difficult to know about because there aren’t any perspectives that look at them.

Looks like they did a great job keeping the visual aesthetic of the game, fairly realistically rendered environments and textures. It looks like Riven.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

This video from DavidXNewton’s playthrough of the game shows him arriving there at about the 12 minute mark. The only way to get there is from a linking book in Gehn’s…world? And I believe it’s the last new location you visit in the game.

There are features I don’t recognize, like on the bottle village island there’s some large beehive looking structure I don’t remember, there’s also a structure in the middle of the lagoon I don’t recognize, and the withered looking tree with the walkway around it right near the end, so I suspect it has been slightly retooled.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Cheers for TheDude!