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Isn’t Mint still effectively Ubuntu with no Canonical, and less worried about open soirce purity? Could be wrong, been a long while.

I’ve fooled around with Processing a lot, and have used it and later (iirc) a C++ or C# library many years ago to do “programmatic” edits to images and photos I had taken.

Stuff like:

• What if I treat the pixels in an image as one long strip and instead of placing them in left to right strips top to bottom, I lay them down in a spiral? Or in vertical strips despite the original image not being square?
• What if I interleaved a copy of the image upside down every other row of pixels?
• Let’s just apply random fucking math to the different color values!
• Let’s select random rectangular sections of the image and paste them over the original at a random location, rinse and repeat 100 times.
• What if I broke the image down into a grid of equally sized rectangles and shuffled their location?
• What if I averaged the color of each rectangle and added that to the existing color value of those pixels?
• etc etc.

I’d come up with different ways to select portions of the image, different ways to place that back in, and different ways to combine the “pasted” section with original. I tossed together something like 30 different “formulas”, then would do like 10 runs of each one that had random elements, spit out the results into a folder of what ultimately was something like 300 “result” images, and then decide the five or so I liked the best.

Add in the fact that I really don’t have any clue how color math works so I wasn’t basing my ideas off anything but whimsy, and some occasional pre and post processing with both paint.net plugins and audacity (you can sometimes open images as raw binary, avoid the file header, apply audio effects, and save it as raw binary to still have an image but it often just makes a corrupt file).

Had a decent “glitch art” hobby going to keep me occupied in my free time.

I desperately need to find that old code again. I miss tinkering with it.

Unfortunately, the existing results are tied to a flikr account with connections to my real name, so I’d have to find the code and make more to share.

It’s been many years since I played Advance, but I seem to remember her feeling like a bit of a “hard mode”. She was definitely the last one I finished before unlocking the true ending, iirc.

You might want to reach out to some admins of other instances about bot protection measures if you’re having any issues. As I understand it, db0’s bot protection has worked well.

I first read inseperable as insufferable, gave me a chuckle.

I don’t know where the consoles my parents bought me were from, because they were always surprise gifts. But I sure as hell remember where the ones I bought with my own money were from, where a I bought a few particularly important to me games, and where I used to browse with my parents. Not address off the top of my head but I could pretty easily look most up now, or even years ago with the internet.

Kirby’s Dreamland 3 was from a discount bin at the Walmart where my family lived until I was 8. Death and Return of Superman for the SNES was from the video rental store we used to frequent after we moved, when they started selling off their old SNES games. Lots of games from one particular Gamestop in between the grocery store and the movie theater. Midnight release of Smash Bros Brawl there. Got a used N64 and some games for it there during the early 360 era too. PSP and some games for it was my first “real” purchase completely with my own money (no birthday or christmas gift money towards it) and was done at a Gamestop in the corner of a local mall. Moved 8 hours away with a GF and picked up Aladin, Starfox, and Super Metroid for the SNES for prices that would now be robbery from a local retro games store before the collectors started getting into retro games (still haven’t checked if they’re legit or repros, and I should because that store sold a few romhacks on physical cartridge from a different display area in the store). Moved back with my folks after a rough break up. Bubsy 3d from a new store that sells all sorts of used stuff out of what used to be an old Border’s book store where I had previously been to for a midnight Harry Potter release (cut me some slack I was like 10 for the Potter and it was long before any of the drama). Switch from a Gamestop in the town where my wife grew up.

Yes, I wish I remembered more important stuff, but I think people have forgotten what buying video games was like in the “old days”. You had word of mouth, experience with previous games in the series, cart and box art, and maybe a review from a gaming magazine to go off of. So it was an experience. Unless you were one of those kids that was going out to buy a brand new game, you used to actually browse and decide. It was a big deal because you’d get maybe one new game for 6 months at a time. I used to strecth things by trying to get a few used games instead of just one new one. Sometimes you got a flop, like when I bought Croc and Croc 2 because they looked fun and I liked the humor on the back of the box. Not bad games, but I already had experienced Crash Bandicoot 2 and Spyro 3. Early 3D platformer controls like Croc just weren’t my thing by that point.

In some ways I miss it. On the other hand, I have a lot less “meh” games hanging around now.

“Fun” fact I just remembered. Shortly after I graduated high school, a former classmate of mine became the manager of the Gamestop I used to go to the most. While I was out failing out of university, 4chan’s /v/ideogames board started the “meme” of prank calling Gamestops and finding increasingly roundabout ways to ask if they had Battletoads. This former classmate of mine had a total crashout when his store got hit and ended up rage dumping on Facebook, where he had his employment listed publicly. Eventually he started posting the numbers they were getting the calls from trying to get people to spam call back. Cost him his job.

No, that’s because the individually wrapped “singles” will congeal together quite quickly if not individually wrapped, and they were developed back when doctors would reccomend smoking.

We just haven’t decided to care enough since to stop. Also, those aren’t actually cheese and in many countries cannot be sold as such.

Hell isn’t bad enough for the people responsible for “American ‘Cheese’ Singles”.

I actually enjoy the ones with unintentional double meanings. Corporate redid my building at work a few years back.

• We have a picture mural of the local city skyline featuring a big billboard that they couldn’t be bothered to get marketing to photoshop into one of ours. It’s an ad for a local real estate company and apartment group with known ties to organized crime. It’s named for the owner’s last name and I shudder to think how much money these people burned on SEO shifting results to not immediately return all the sordid details of the court case that landed one of the brothers in jail for some serious shit including connections to homicides (those didn’t stick, but the financial crimes did). Makes me giggle because in one of the wall sized photo murals this billboard is like 4ft wide. Who the fuck approved that?

• We also have “inspirational quotes” up on the walls. Big custom ordered vinyl sticker shit. One from Winnie the Pooh effectively works out to “Don’t waste time thinking shit through, just work! Fuckin’ YOLO!”. My coworkers now say we’ll blame Winnie the Pooh if one of our projects blows up.

Most that hit Lemmy are pretty damn obvious and get banned quickly by mods and instance admins.

So far the slightly more complex reddit style ones haven’t been turned on us yet. Probably don’t think the smaller userbase is worth the effort.

Man, pidgin was the fucking best back in the late 00s - mid 10s. Everyone was spread across a handful of different chat programs and systems and you could use one program for all of them.

I think I had AIM, MSN (Windows Live Messenger? I remember they rebranded it like 4 times), Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and Facebook Messenger all set up. Iirc I even had multiple AIM accounts signed in on it at one point.

Unfortunately smart phones coralled everyone into whichever had support on them, which I remember to be Facebook Messenger. Then walled garden shenanigans closed down shit further.

While technically true, you have to be kidding me if you think there aren’t relevant laws for a situation like this.

Some people would pay good money for that!

Mostly in the areas unmaintained to the degree that someone can pull off grafitti of this size and get a nice picture of it in the light.

It’s a massive fucking amount of land. Of course there’s a lot of shitholes. There’s also a lot of natural beauty about as well.

No, you see he’s got a metal stick shoved in there, so it would blow out the back of the barrel and leave him without a scratch! Haven’t you ever seen Looney Tunes?

You can’t trick me with your fake news! We must never forget the lives lost in the battle against the giant man, lest history repeat itself.

Does a shocking and infuriating result of a court case really qualify as a “You Should Know”?

On top of the outrageous hyperbole going on here. Just because someone got away with something heinous doesn’t mean the laws have changed.

Bluey and Bingo (and I believe the other children on the show) were voiced by actual kids.

I know you didn’t ask for commentary on your friend, but I’d be concerned that he’s convinced he’s going to “win” you over through just spending tons of time with you. Wearing you down. Probably not how he thinks about it explicitly, but that definitely appears to be his strategy.

Asking you out to dinner after a rejection, and not at least distancing himself from you for a while after it (still just following you around constantly and the other codependent behavior) is a little concerning. Also, your phrasing of “first confession”. He’s told you, you know. It sounds like he doesn’t respect your decision enough to let it lie. It raises some serious red “nice guy” flags.

If he can’t get over it and handle you as just a friend, it’s not your responsibility to cut ties (it’s his feelings after all, not yours), but it might be in your best interest to enforce some distance. He’s not going to get over his feelings if he’s spending every free moment with you.

It sounds like you have some absolutely shit (but not particularly uncommon) professors. Quizzes and tests on programming concepts you haven’t gotten to yet? Fuckers.

I also totally get the struggle of not being given enough time to get the concepts because you have to implement them in an assignment ASAP. It’s one of my biggest complaints (of very many) about how programming is taught at universities. While your approach shouldn’t be necessary, it absolutely will give you a leg up.

I dropped out of a “New Ivy” university BS in Computer Science, then eventually went back and got an Associates degree in Computer Information Systems (bit more broad with hardware, sysadmin, IT troubleshooting, and project management courses on top of a lighter programming course load). I used to think I’d kill myself if I had to program 8 hours a day. Now I’m the lead scripting and automation monkey on a sysadmin/sysengineering/infra architecture/infra ops team and for the most part I enjoy it, including days with 8hrs of scripting.

My advice to learners is to focus on the concepts and problem solving aspects of it as much as your courses will allow you to. Eventually you’ll reach a point with your experience coding, develop your toolkit and skills so that the focus will be “How do I break down this big problem into smaller and smaller chunks, then how do I accomplish those” rather than “how do I do if statements in this language?”.

At a job, you can always look up language specific syntax as long as you have the right terms to look for it online. I spend more time thinking over how I’m going to solve the problem than what specifically I’m typing for code.

And as far as your main point goes about short form content?

Lazy students have existed for far earlier than your generation, and will continue to for long after. While there are far more easily available dopamine injection addictive things now, lazy and unmotivated students find a way. Tiktok wasn’t a thing until after I was out, but by god I wasted entire semesters modding Smash Bros Brawl and playing shit on Steam, hanging out with friends instead of studying and doing assignments.

I won’t deny that the more modern distractions are backed by an unimaginably large industry, with head-spinning amounts of psychological research put in towards keeping people hooked. It’s a problem, and it’s getting worse the more money they find they can make off it. But there have always been different levels of investment in studies and craft.

they will hint strongly that I should get it done on my time off.

They can fuck right off. Do whatever you can to not bring work home with you. If they haven’t hired enough manpower to complete the tasks they need done without someone working overtime or during time off? That’s on your manager, not you.

Don’t do work when you aren’t paid for it.