@ebooksyearn my best advice is to just press AAAAALLLLLL the buttons and see what happens, and if it's weird or cool write it down.
But then, that's my approach to everything so
@ebooksyearn my best advice is to just press AAAAALLLLLL the buttons and see what happens, and if it's weird or cool write it down.
But then, that's my approach to everything so
Me: 🦝 What a good friend I have in Photoshop
Photoshop: And what a good friend I have in you, Dan.
🦝 What has it been, twenty years?
22 or 23 I think
🦝 And you've been my favourite graphics program, this whole time.
🦝 I've found all your secrets, explored every feature. I know you like the back of my hand.
I was nervous when you switched to Linux. You know I can't go there.
🦝 I know. But I've invested decades in learning you. So I made a little Windows corner, just for you.
I appreciate that. You really did go to extreme lengths just to keep me running.
🦝 You're worth it. In fact just to prove how much you're worth it, I'm gonna check out this Krita thing, so we can both have a good laugh
Haha OK, good idea
🦝 I'll return with a full report on its inadequacies, back soon my love for another twenty years of perfect bliss
---
Back already! You've not even been gone an hour, was it really that bad?
🦝
🦝
🦝
Like, you go in to Krita thinking "Ah yeah, this'll be like Photoshop but worse, for the people with opinions about software licenses to pretend to like in the name of freedom or whatever," and then you give it five minutes and it just completely knocks your socks off.
Example, built-in timelapse function. Press one button (one button!) and it'll go "aye aye captain" and save a snapshot of every change and then make it into a video of you starting with a blank page and going stroke by stroke before ending with whatever awesome thing you made.
Brushes? Brushes out the wazoo! Watercolour brushes! Proper physics and stuff! Stroke with the very tip of the stylus and it just moves existing paint and water around, press harder and the paint comes out 'cause it's thicker and in the middle bit of the bristles!
All those layer blending modes that Photoshop comes with? Krita *starts* with all those and then goes "Heh, cute," and gives you like forty more better ones.
Krita doesn't compete with Photoshop, it *embarrasses* Photoshop
Fourteen years of keeping a Windows XP virtualbox installation just so I can fire up Photoshop every now and then, figure I'll see what I can get for free now that PS is finally losing relevance 'cause of the whole subscription thing, and I Get Prepared to go slog through some shite.
See, the last time I fiddled with Not-Photoshop, the best free alternative had a cringe name and a crap interface and if you said "Hey can you change the name and/or interface" the cringiest bunch of weirdos on the planet would spit their dummies out at you and throw a massive embarrassing wobbler. So this time I tried Krita, expecting it to also have a crap interface and be generally a bit wonky, and wow.
WOW.
This doesn't just replace Photoshop; it pisses all over it.
ALL. OVER IT.
Anything Photoshop did, this thing does better, and it does more things too, and it's *free?*
Yeah if you're keeping a Windows box around just for Photoshop, have a fiddle about with Krita. It slaps.
Doing more mobile interface improvements to Improbable Island and I'm still so proud and happy about how I created a graphical shorthand for experience points (it's a potato) https://www.improbableisland.com/potato.php
SPACE YEAR 2057
🦝 Aw shit hon, our holocube of Aliens (1986) oxidised right in the third MPU core
oh no, can you just download us a copy?
🦝 sure lemme check the torrents
TWO HOURS LATER
🦝 Well I found the 2010's-era print that got turned teal 'cause that's what they were doing in 2010
oh god yeah everything from then looked so weird and mossy
🦝 yeah, and then I found one from the 20's that was during that godawful uncanny valley AI phase so that's no good either
yuck
🦝 I found one from the 2030's when they were doing the face swaps with living actors? Remember that? Some weird rights thing?
haha oh wow yeah that's a blast from the past
🦝 and that one has a CRT filter too. Anyway 2040's edition brought back the film grain but, well, y'know the 40's and film grain
oh yeah, MORE film grain
🦝 WAY TOO MUCH film grain, and the LCD filters yeah
yeah
🦝 anyway I found one from the early 50's with tails, apart from that it's half decent quality
well are the tails done tastefully at least or
🦝 I mean they changed a couple shots so the marines are using their tails to reload and apparently at some point Ripley goes "Thank God I have this big bushy squirrel tail" but apart from that
huh that's actually pretty restrained compared with a lot of tail remasters
🦝 yeah this might be the best of the bunch, shall we give it a go
sure I'll rehydrate us some popcorn
5 minutes later
🦝 FUCKING THEATRICAL CUT
"Random fedi people stop telling Dan what a torrent is" challenge
"I'll just pirate it, yo ho ho!" no you bloody won't, the pirates have rips of the crap blu-rays, who the hell still seeds DVD rips
Good luck sorting out a hundred different ALIENS 1986 torrents to figure out which are the AI-shitty ones and which are only the teal-shitty ones when half of them don't even mention whether they're the proper full length film or the crappy theatrical version where they cut out Ripley's entire daughter
Piracy won't help here, that was the whole point of the post
Rip your DVDs
RIP YOUR DVD COLLECTION FOLKS
Wanted to watch Aliens, the disc plays OK but makes a horrible grinding sound. "OK fine," thinks I, "I'll watch it via other means," well my friends the other means are really really bad
"Oh cool there was a remaster this year" yeah they overexposed it and washed it all out, and as if that wasn't enough they AI'd it and everyone's got weird plastic skin
"Well butts, how about the blu-ray release from the early 2010's," well they didn't AI it yet but they did bollocks up the colours and made it all green because that was a thing in the 2010's
Rip your own DVDs folks 'cause if that DVD starts having problems you might not be able to find a copy amid a sea of gradually deteriorating versions
@erosdiscordia not saying centralized social media is any better mind, just if we're gonna decentralize let's actually decentralize y'know
And I know it tends to be the most tedious tech-heads who bang the decentralization drum, but... honestly as someone who's done two decades of the social side and couldn't really give a crap about the details of the technical side of things: the technical side really does affect the social side! Decentralization and getting off the biggest servers really *is* important, even if the folk saying so are the replyiest of reply guys
@erosdiscordia I got complex thoughts lol
First I think the nature of Fedi makes it more vulnerable to trolling than other platforms. And I don't mean drive-by slurs, I mean *proper* trolling, the sort that goes on for years. Most of the folk who set up servers don't have much experience of running online communities and they either find out, burn out, get screwed, or all of the above.
That wouldn't be so bad, but there's no limits to how big a server can get, so when it goes rotten there's no limit to the number of people who get screwed over. TBH I think from the start there should've been a setting to automatically defed from servers with more than like a couple hundred users; it wouldn't stop credulous folk setting up servers, but it'd limit the damage when they do.
(this isn't related to owt recent mind, just stuff that's been percolating in my head for years)
Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up
Me in 2024: 🦝 maybe this particular form of social media was not so much a destination but more of a stepping stone on the way to not having social media anymore
Fedi, please tell me your best and worst "Guy walks into a bar" or "Animal/vegetable/mineral walks into a bar" jokes, for a robot pub in Improbable Island where the bartender threatens to recite one of several amusing jokes at you.
These do not have to be funny or good.
Examples:
switch ($joke){
case 1:
output("\"`4A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender sets the beer down and says, \"For you, no charge.\"`0\"");
break;
case 2:
output("\"`4A cosine wave walks into a bar, and orders a pint. The barman says \"Sorry, we do not cater for functions.\"`0\"");
break;
case 3:
output("\"`4Three fonts walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, \"We do not serve your type in here.\"`0\"");
break;
case 4:
output("\"`4A snake slithers into a bar and the bartender says, \"I am sorry but I cannot serve you.\" \"Why not?\" asks the snake. The bartender replies, \"Because you cannot hold your liquor.\"`0\"");
break;
case 5:
output("\"`4A dyslexic man walks into a bra.`0\"");
break;
}
Updating the Skronky Pot module on Improbable Island.
It's a bucket in the middle of Squat Hole. Its owner will pay you some piffling amount of currency for every mouthful of phlegm you can hack into it.
(smoker's lung butter is a valuable commodity among the Squats, used in the creation of soap, candles, lube and other necessities)
In previous versions of the module, you could cough into the bucket up to ten times a day, receiving 25 Requisition tokens per hack. If the bucket had more than 190 cough's-worth of contents, it would output a warning that it was getting full; once it went over 200 it would spill, and suitably florid flavour text would inform you that you'd lost all your Charm points in contact with the stuff.
The new version will pay out only 10 Req per cough as standard, but if you knock it over it will remove a maximum of ten Charm points and all your Stamina. The payment you receive per contribution is now influenced by your cigarette addiction stat, providing another incentive to smoke your cigarettes rather than using them as currency. A particularly lumpy donation will net you up to 35 Req.
I just figured out who this MrBeast jackass is
Every site talking about him as though I already know who he is, never seen an explainer or a kinda here-it-is-from-the-beginning-and-why-you-should-care thing, anyway I clicked on an article and saw his FACE and I went "I've seen that FACE before!"
The last time I set up a new computer!
Y'know when you've got a total blank slate of a browser, nothing logged in, haven't even looked at any adverts or whatever, and you go to YouTube and it just vomits up this page of the most ridiculous shit you've ever seen? Just a sea of bright yellow thumbnails with screaming faces and nonsense text? Yeah, that's where this guy's from. Default Youtube Shit Guy