pixelscript

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in What is the weirdest/strangest thing you find comfort in?

Your posts take me back to 2007 where I was doing the same thing on the Nintendo Wii’s Weather Channel.

The Wii hit different.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to aboringdystopia in Imagine voting for someone that wants to get rid of the department of education.

It gets clearer if you flip it around to sound less poetic:

Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

That which can be explained by stupidity, do not attribute to malice.

Or perhaps in more direct words someone might actually say:

If you can explain it with stupidity, it’s probably not malice.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in why do lemmy users hate the use of emojis ?

Your response confuses me.

I agree with everything you said. But I’m not sure which part of what you said is supposed to be a “counterpoint” to what I said…

pixelscript , 7 months ago to technology in Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum

Meanwhile, over at the grand exchange (Amazon), someone is offering, “gold armor trimming, 10k”

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in why do lemmy users hate the use of emojis ?

To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds “Sent from my iPhone” to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you’ve purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of “this is fine” lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.

Here you have a short list of milquetoast, approved-by-committee standard-issue emotion pictographs. Only the most broadly applicable ones. Perfectly weaponizeable for some airplane food communication by some brand on Twitter or Facebook. And people look at these and go, “Look! That one’s sad! I’m sad! These emojis really ‘get’ me! I’m gonna use them!”

They’re expressive, but only in the ways the platform is permitting you to be expressive. A valid counter argument would be, “Some is better than none”. But I can’t shake feeling like I’m being railroaded into communicating my feelings by approximating them into a small handful of simplified, standardized emotions. And I don’t understand how others are satisfied with that.

Emojis only render a specific way on a specific platform, too. So if you’re using an emoji that feels like it fits your current emotion because it has a very specific, nuanced look to it, but you’re on a platform that doesn’t render them the same for every user, you’ll unwittingly send a completely different signal than you were intending, as your emoji will become mangled into some slightly different emotion depending on who receives it. The only two ways out of this are either staying inside a platform’s walled garden so you only use their standard issue emojis, or you just relegate your communication to being described solely by the broad, vague notions that the emojis represent. Both options are restrictive in ways I dislike.

That isn’t to say that I hate emojis, or that I don’t think they can be used creatively. Ironically, in my opinion, the best uses of emoji are for when you’re using one to communicate any emotion other than the one it was intended for. Exhibit A: how 💀 has almost entirely supplanted 😂 in some circles. Usages like that are communicating more than the sums of their parts in only ways that emoji can achieve, and I find that fascinating. It almost feels like a form of social “recapturing”, taking them away from their usual stiff, corporate vibe and making them something transformative.

It only lasts for a time, though. As the mass market clues in on it and starts to cater to it, the novelty disappears. There was a time when 🍑 and 🍆 were clever innuendo. Nowadays there’s no joke there. That’s just what they mean now. The only ones who think themselves clever or fashionable by using them in that way are doing so in shitty Facebook memes.

The problems I have with emojis mostly only affects the face ones, specifically. The way the human mind is a hyper optimized facial recognition machine amplifies the platform exclusivity problem. Like, you can never have just a smiling emoji. You have to use this platform’s smiling emoji, the way they drew it, expressing all the little microdetails they decided to put onto it. And given how complex emotions can be in particular, the inflexibility of a standard set of face emoji to express yourself with feels significantly more restrictive than, say, not being able to find an emoji for some random object.

Just my two cents, though. At the end of the day, if you send a message to someone, they receive it, and they understand exactly what it is you’ve sent, that’s successful communication. Send those emojis with pride if you believe they enrich what you have to express in ways words can’t. As long as you’re being understood by someone, never let anyone, especially not me, tell you how you should and shouldn’t be able to express yourself.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to memes in What's up, my fellow trees?

“Uncanny fakes are worse than reality” is a hot take now?

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in How to find and use markdown in lemmy

Does it actually, though?

I’m not trying to insinuate that it doesn’t. I’m just jaded at how many mutually exclusive Markdown-adjacent standards there are out there, and how many implementations there are which claim to adhere to one of the major standards but in actuality either don’t fully support it, extend it with their own nonstandard bullshit, or both.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in Do you prefer digital or physical books?

Pretty sure this is asking about entertainment literature like novels. I have no real opinion, as I very rarely read those.

Now, technical books like school textbooks and reference texts, physical. Absolutely no contest. I loathe clunkily scrolling around on two separate axes to negotiate pages where the content is nonlinear, broken up by interspersed photos, figures, and tables.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in How often do you maintain your relationship with past acquaintances friends etc ?

I don’t, tbh.

Not out of any principle. I’m not, like, eager to be rid of past friends or anything. But if they slip away, well, it just be like that.

I’m more than content to Ship of Theseus my way through life’s transient relationships. You keep some longer than others. New people take the place of long missing ones. That’s just the cycle. It’s fine. Just hang on to the ones you can, and that’s enough. You can’t keep them all around forever.

I’m always receptive to meeting old faces. But I’m not discoverable on any public socials, and I don’t live where most of my old friends were. (And neither do they, for the most part.) So opportunities for it are extremely rare.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to gaming in Game of the Year | Nominees

Mario Wonder is a fantastic game, but it has absolutely no business being on this list.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in If you could go back in time and do, or bring, one thing to mess up the timeline what would it be?

I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.

Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?

In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.

Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think–to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I’d assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I’d also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.

Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I’m less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they’d react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in Weirdest thing you use / you've seen used for decoration?

It’s not usually where the big bucks are, but there is a nonzero amount of money in bad code.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in Weirdest thing you use / you've seen used for decoration?

It’s a simple function definition that’s equivalent to:

<span style="color:#323232;">function confirm(value)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    if (value == true)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        return true;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    else
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        return false;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

Not the most original punchline; I’m sure you’ve seen it before. We were just baffled to actually see it in the wild.

Judging from the way this function was used, there no evidence to suggest it ever contained extra logic that was refactored out over time. I’m wholly convinced someone wrote this as-is and thought it was okay. I also knew that there’s no way this was extracted for DRY purposes, as it was only called in one place, and the rest of the codebase was extremely allergic to DRY.

It was also formatted like complete garbage. Indentation level was not consistent line by line. And, presumably due to some carelessness handling line endings, the entire code file developed double-spacing. Somehow it was checked into version control in that state.

All these little nits, from the code’s utter uselessness to its appalling formatting, compelled us to preserve it. It was like the entire rest of the shitty codebase in microcosm.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to linux in Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?

I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.

The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.

Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.

I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.

pixelscript , 7 months ago to asklemmy in What is a product that you won’t accept a generic alternative for?

As a child I was raised in a household of chewable Tylenol tablets. Those were the only pills I really knew, particularly for mild pain relief.

In gradeschool, I had a day where I developed a splitting headache. I was sent to the ““nurse””, who, by nature of this being a small town American public school, was just the school office secretary armed with a bottle of child dose Advil tablets. I was promptly given a couple tablets to take, and was shooed off to the drinking fountain. Instinctively, I chewed the tablets. Within minutes, they came back to see me, along with my breakfast, and I was quickly sent home. The valuable lesson I took away from that day was, “chewables are for babies, grown-up pills are swallowed whole”.

Growing older, I became accustomed to increasingly annoying pills, which only further cemented that lesson. The culmination was probably being forced to swallow huge capsule pills while having a throat swollen and raw with strep. I just accepted that “real” pills are swallowed whole, and they suck, and that’s just how it is.

Much later in life, I was visiting my parents while recovering from a pub crawl. My mom offered me some Tums to combat some heartburn I was having. Somehow I made it far enough into life to drink alcohol but not know what antacids were. I was handed two US silver dollar sized tablets. Flashing back to my previous mistake when taking unknown pills, I swallowed them whole. I was embarassed to learn after the fact that they are, in fact, meant to be chewed.

The morals of this story:

1. I apparently have no problem swallowing any pill or tablet.
2. I am a fucking idiot and always have been.