Rose

I can’t believe they posted a Tetris clone to begin with.

Tetris is a game where the perfection is taken away from you. You will only be left with your mistakes, mistakes that haunt you and which keep piling up when pressure increases and it just keeps happening until you lose. You are left with an imperfect wall.

Also it’s a game from Russia.

So, definitely a metaphor for the Trump administration and the border wall.

I had to let out a depressed chuckle when someone referred to Pangram as “industry standard”. …just because that particular service had been the centre of the Shy Girl controversy and they had dragged themselves to the limelight again when another novel got accused of AI use.

The Shy Girl controversy is a doozy. People raised their eyebrows and thought the novel was written with AI. Pangram CEO elbowed his way to the limelight and proved, using his fine AI product, that this novel is [insert some absurdly specific high percentage] AI. The author was like “Well I handed my novel to someone else, and they used AI to copyedit the book!” The publisher was like “So you used someone else afterall, after declaring you were the sole author? Consider the publishing agreement revoked.” People were like “Due to AI use, right? 😀 Due to AI use, right? 😕” The publisher was like “…No, we have a few AI projects cooking.”

This is absolutely the biggest source of anxiety I have right now as someone who has been writing a really heartfelt novel for over a decade. (Things got delayed due to… personal stuff. Also I started drinking beer like a proper author. It didn’t help, actually.)

Back when I started this, I had been publishing some short stories under CC licences. I guess that has to be an option once again (and as much as I hate it as an open source nerd, -NC might make an appearance.)

To adapt a phrase: “If no one is wearing a regulation uniform, then everyone is.”

Yeah, for most things, GIMP user interface is absolutely fine.

Most of my mild grumbles about GIMP are not really usability problems, rather just features that would be nice to have. (We got better layer groups now, yesss. Non-destructive plugins are finally within the viewing distance. Yay.) There is stuff that GIMP doesn’t do but competing open source apps do, and while there’s interoperability, it could always be better. (I hear GIMP is finally going to come up with a replacement for xcf files, hope they cooperate with Krita devs and blow the dust off the OpenRaster project.)

The only really aggravating GIMP usability thing is that exporting is very janky (would rather have one single unified export dialog with all the settings), but I assume that’s just a thing because of the way GIMP file plugins have worked in the past.

Costco runs it’s own rigorous food inspection program

Life was easy back in the day. People asked me to fix their computer. “I installed Firefox 3.5 and ABP. Life should be good for you now.”

Come back years later annnnnnd they have been goaded to use Chrome and have trillions of bullshit apps. Was like “sorry, you have to actually pay me real money to fix this, people in this industry are actually very well compensated”