umbraroze

@umbraroze@slrpnk.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Liquid Trees⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Insert random copypasta about biotech breakthrough that turns water and CO2 and nutrients into building materials which sounds like space age technology but it’s just trees

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't be Evil⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Parody account

  …Basically indistinguishable from any regular Twitter account. Why did Elon want these accounts labeled, again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommendations for "girly" games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If you like puzzles, and greenery instead of pink:

  Botany Manor, which is fundamentally about the feminine urge to go alone into a giant mansion and grow some cool flowers

  Terra Nil, which is about going to a desolate planet and using the power of technology to grow some cool flowers

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're a broke vampire, just say that⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m an amateur writer. One of the worldbuilding things I wanted to explore for my fantasy/steampunk word was the fact that the life of vampires who originate from commoner class must really suck, pun very much intended. You’d end up as a “high functioning” undead who gets even the few rights you previously had stripped from you. Fertile ground for social commentary.

  So in this setting there’s an autonomous vampire state that’s essentially communist. In other nations, vampires are, if not persecuted outright, at least constantly struggling for recognition, and are exploited as night shift workers in the emerging industry.

  I wish I could find the urban fantasy story that inspired me to explore this. It was also based on the “hey, not all vampires live glorious lifestyles” premise. I think this was in some Humble Bundle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Getting mixed signals from Reddit. Furthermore I shall henceforth be on Lemmy full time.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  These days both Twitter and Reddit have wacky UI messages written by completely different teams. One team is all business-like “Here’s some stern warnings you’re not going to like.” The other team is all casual and wayyy too friendly and fellow-kidsy, like “Did someone say MEMES?” (to which most reasonable people respond “fuck you Elon/Spez, you’re not funny”)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL about dating⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a random amateur fantasy writer. One day, long ago, I was working on an interactive fiction game which was billed as a dating sim where you get to have a night out with one of my characters, who is an alchemist.

  Bulk of the game was supposed to involve helping her examine various ingredients on the shelf of her shop and seeing which had gone bad. You know, dating the stuff can be crucial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For all you inked people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Showing up on time” is the lowest possible bar, isn’t it?

  Recently I found an old school yearbook. My entry was written by someone who barely knew me. Said something about me showing up on time all the time. Now, I was like “holy shit that’s cringe, I don’t want that on my tombstone”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My immediate thought was that there’s some inconsistency with various types of metadata. For example most software will pull the date from the Exif DateTimeOriginal field. But there’s also XMP tags that have the same purpose. Or similar purpose. These standards have plenty of date fields for various uses, and while they serve a noble purpose, the software just craps all over them. (Don’t ask which software. All of them.)

  My guess is that at some point of time, one of those tags got updated, but not the other tags of similar purpose. So the program you’re using could be pulling the date from one field, and when you update it, you’re actually changing some other field.

  Of course all of this is wild because usually no one needs to touch the datestamp anyway (unless you, like, have to correct daylight saving time or clock drift or something). Software changing this to a batch import time? That’s weird and silly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Over the last few years I’ve been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.

  But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It’s as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.

  Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I’m working much faster.

  Now, Krita doesn’t have all of CSP’s niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.

  Similarly CSP’s 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender’s. Which is weird because CSP isn’t a modeling program - you’d think they’d stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Joplin does have an automatic backup plugin. Which I recommend enabling for obvious reasons.

  Also, moving to different versions is kinda tricky sometimes. No matter the software, when moving from very old version to a new one, I always keep the old one around until I’m certain the stuff was moved over cleanly.

  But yeah, having the notes in a database is definitely not as robust as the plain text storage. Wish Joplin would just let you say “I have a git repository”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it’s the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it’s kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn’t see constant refinement either. It doesn’t even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don’t want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It’s like a welding torch without any eye protection.

  I’m using ACDSee on Windows, because it’s operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it’s faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn’t it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you’d think photographers would have pointed this out), but it’s just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.

  Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a cancelled game you really miss?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I sometimes still think about StarCraft: Ghost.

  Pfft, I’m sometimes hoping they’ll eventually make the WarCraft point-and-click adventure game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's a fun new game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  ?OVERFLOW ERROR

  Some day, some day, I’ll be able to afford a 16-bit computer! I hear it’s the latest thing!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rock Auras - Not just for Hippies anymore⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminds me of an old RPG parody that had a spell like this:

  Gas Cloud: To prepare, the caster must eat two loaves of bread and as many plates of pea soup as they can…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone remember how popular the group Head Cleaner was?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Kind of sucks that my Commodore 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies) is giving me read/write errors, and I have no idea where I put my head cleaner floppy long ago. (Have to rely on SD2IEC on my Commodore 64, and it’s not compatible with some turbo loaders or other programs that do weird drive magic.) And, of course, while I might run into head cleaner tapes on specialty shops, good luck running into 5.25" cleaner floppies these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨damn⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But as Blender becomes more popular in the CGI industry, perhaps this harrowing vision of future shall not come to pass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most of my time in Elden Ring has been 1) ogling at the landscapes going “Holy shit this is metal”, and 2) bravely running away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SPIRIT WEAPON⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You need to be able to pick the recipe option then. If someone knows recipes from ancient Rome, they might just be a harmless history nerd. If someone knows recipes from WH40K, well, I don’t know what to say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AIRBUD⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the most important space flights ever was Zond 5. Soviets sent the first Earthlings around the Moon and back. They were tortoises.

  Did the Soviets let these heroic chelonians retire in grace? No, they were euthanised and dissected. I’m sure they could have gotten the scientific data they needed with less invasive methods.

  All astronauts should rescue all space turtles and tortoises they see!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo GameCube is coming to Nintendo Switch's Online Membership⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been incredibly happy lately dumping my GameCube/Wii games (using a softmodded Wii) and running them on PC with Dolphin. Perfectly legit way of playing games I already own, no matter what Nintendo says, and this is also a way to futureproof my GC/Wii collection the way I can actually trust.

  I’m sceptical about how close to Dolphin the official emulation experience on Switch will be able to reach. Based on the N64 debacle, I don’t have massively high hopes. Either way, wouldn’t be paying extra.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are color palettes subject to copyright protection?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Colour palettes are collections of facts. Facts don’t have copyright protection and ability to claim copyright for a collection is pretty tenuous. However, copyright may apply to certain related things.

  For example: Suppose you see that someone is selling a Photoshop colour palette for money, and included the entire palette in the store image. In that case, there’s literally nothing, legally speaking, stopping someone from prodding the image with a colour picker a bunch of times. But there would be copyright protection for the Photoshop palette file itself, because that’s a more tangible piece of data.

  There are also other kinds of intellectual property laws that apply to colours. Pantone gets away with whatever shenanigans they’re doing because of trademarks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today's Survey. One point for everything that you have NEVER DONE⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Two points. I’ve never paid for anything by cheque (we have had bank transfers in Finland for ages) and Blockbuster didn’t operate here (we had our local video rental chains, and the convenience store chain that I used to go to is still in business, just, you know, not having movies for rent any more)