Carl Cravens @CarlCravens@mastodon.xyz

I think it's important to realize that a lot of the fediverse are in their 40' and 50's, and many of us were brought up with the idea that the f-word is offensive. We don't use it in casual everyday speech. I use it, but when I do, you know I'm angry.

If don't know you, and you come at me with "f*** your idea" I will block you out of reflex, because I see that as intentional offense. Even though my millennial coworkers throw that word around casually every day.

I think some players don't understand that game play, at its core, is about _frustration_. You have a goal, the game designer frustrates your attempts to reach that goal. Players ask to have the frustration removed, then complain that the game is just a boring walking simulator.

It's always interesting to me when fans of a video game are asking the devs to remove restrictions that drive play
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An example of this is SoD2 requests for bigger bases. Bases are carefully balanced, with a mix of large and small "slots" for facilities, plus some built-ins that can't be removed. There are more facilities to choose from than slots.

You can have a defense tower, or a lounge, you can't have both. Choose.

Removing that choice removes play and just makes the base a checklist.

I've always been confused at how Magnatune landed on a "$299 one-time fee for lifetime access" as their only way to buy their music.

That feels like a huge barrier, even though I used to be part of their subscription service and 3 years at $10 a month would cost more. At $18 an album, that would buy you less than 17 albums. But an up-front $299 is still a huge barrier.

Vampire-zombie hybrids are just called vampires. You do not call them "vambies". I will not buy your game if you do.

Looking at you, "The Infected".

I am so pleased to see so many people who loved Vangelis' music. When I was in high school in a small Kansas town, his music felt like a secret pleasure only I knew about. Nobody else could understand it's beauty.

Got that good ol' jury summons.

It's amazing to me that I lived in Kansas until my late 40's and _never once_ did I get a jury summons. I moved to NJ and I got one my second year living here. My service was cancelled before I went in, and now here 5 years later, I have another summons. (Though I live in a different county now, so I won't be serving in Atlantic City.)

Well, that's disappointing. Vangelis has passed away. There was a time I was buying every album he put out.
Vangelis, Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre form the basis of my twenties musical tastes. Vangelis was the first of these I discovered, in high school, before I'd ever heard of Chariots of Fire. As beautiful as that theme is, Soil Festivities and Albedo 0.39 are his albums I think of the most.

"Hey, Jon, let's break some rules." Thank you for breaking the rules.

My offsite backup provider emailed me last year with a great offer... switch to annual billing at the _same price_ and they'd double my storage. I thought that was cool, so I took it, even though I didn't really need double the space.

With my backup needs changing, I went to review my offsite situation and discovered it wasn't such a great deal... they _lowered their prices for everybody_, and this was a ploy to get me to pay annually. I do get an extra 7% off the listed annual rate, though.

The existence of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A implies the existence of a Galaxy Slot B.

BackupPC changed the storage pool format with v4 and completely broke how I did offsite backups of just the most recent backups and there's just no easy fix. Have to throw out my backup scripts and start over.

Heck, I've got enough storage on my backup service... I could just sync the entire pool. But in a disaster, I'd have to download the whole 500GB pool to restore even one server. In the old scheme, I could download a single backup.

sysadmins: You ever do that thing where you write a very clever and elegant solution to a problem adjacent to someone else's software, only to have the maintainer of the software you're working with change everything and negate your elegant solution?

And your disappointment is less around "I have to solve this again" as "all my beautiful, clever work is nullified"?

I'm not sure you can really comprehend how box-shaped our skulls are until you shave your head with a razor blade. That compound curve above and behind the ears is a finicky to get a close shave on.

This is definitely one place that the "floating head" electric shavers have an advantage... they hug that curve well. The disadvantage being that they're rough on my scalp and I like the feeling of a good razor shave better.

One last bit: PERL DEVELOPERS

Do not store your user-editable settings in Perl scripts using Data::Dumper!

There are many modules for storing/retrieving settings. Dumping a dictionary does not maintain the key order, and trying to diff config files after changes is a real PITA. (Especially when your default config file has never been run through that process, which changes whitespace, etc.)