josemanuel @josemanuel@qoto.org

My sentiments exactly, except I don't think 2024 will be any better, at least in the short term. This decade has been FUBAR from the very start.

@scummvm Does this version work without PulseAudio?

@BitBun Now I'm curious: what constitutes a failure according to that test?

@karolat I can sort of understand the Python example (I've been there myself), because maybe implementing 'exit' as a way to actually quit the REPL may increase the technical debt in some way that none of us can fathom (I've been there, too); but the Rust issues are just the devs being spiteful of their own users. They can only be attributed to malice.

@BitBun What does that mean? That you're a complete failure as a wife or that your failure rate is 0% and, thus, you're 100% successful?

In the latest issue of the Spanish edition of RetroGamer magazine, there is a piece on Ron Gilbert. In it, the author (and Ron, I guess) wonders why his games were successful in Europe, but not so much in the US, where Sierra and Infocom dominated. The reason is pretty clear: Lucasfilm games were translated, while the others were not.

I'm sure _King's Quest II_ was an awesome game, but I will never know, because I couldn't even understand what the game wanted from me, and the mechanics were so unintuitive and unfriendly that, even after trying with a dictionary, I gave up utterly bored. (Funny anecdote about _Leisure Suit Larry_: after days of trying to bypass the age verification test, all my cousin and I could do in the actual game was to get in the bar, go to the bathroon and URINATE. That's what Sierra games were like for non-English speakers.)

Monkey Island, on the other hand, was funny, well-crafted and just difficult enough to be challenging, but, most importantly, it was in Spanish.

Game magazines did a lot to popularise it, too.

I don't want to derail his thread by disagreeing, but, to be completely honest, I don't even consider BASIC a proper programming language.

It was needlessly hard to type and edit, and impossible to structure your programs in any meaningful way. It wasn't even suitable as a learning tool. Having to number the lines made it hard to get into the ‘Flow’, if you know what I mean. It made programming slow and boring.

Someone in the thread mentioned that people did really cool things with it. Well, people do really cool things with legos, too, but nobody in their right mind would build anything _real_ with them. “I'm gonna build me a house with legos,” said no one ever. (Well, there's always the odd someone, I'm sure.)

@charadon _Learning Perl_ (that's the Llama Book) and its sequels are pretty good.

You know what's cringe? People who add titles to their online names. I don't mean “PhD” or “MD” (even though these are also cringey in this context), but things like “Joannie, Who Appeases the Animals” or “Melissa, The One With Big Wings”. (Hopefully those two examples don't exist. I haven't checked.) Why do people do that? Genuinely curious.

@LibrosdeBabel
Periodistas: Cuando se trata de meter palabras en el diccionario, cualquier analfabetada es buena porque es “de uso común”, pero para elegir la palabra del año con que la usemos nosotros basta.

(Contexto: en el reportaje del informativo de LaSexta entrevistaban a gente de la calle que no sólo no sabía lo que significaba, sino que alguno tenía problemas para pronunciarla. La mayoría sugerían otras mejores.)

Today Skeletor fools himself thinking that being surrounded by a bunch of yes-men will help him in any way.

@lichess His _Manual of Chess_ is still, in my opinion, the best chess book ever published. It helped me understand and appreciate the game instead of just teaching the rules and a few openings, like most, if not all, the others.

Talent is just the absence of fear.

@LydiaConwell@exile.social The reason politics is always shifting to the right, is that people on the right _hate_ people on the left much more than vice versa.

This is relevant because all politicians are shite, but right-wing people will brush aside their representatives' shortcomings for as long as they manage to keep the left from getting elected.

On our side, on the other hand, whenever we see a candidate betraying their voters, we walk away from them, never to return.

This leads to a very interesting phenomenon: the rise of a right-wing working class, which feels alienated by what they call The Left (which is really just a bunch of center-right liberals who no longer care about working and economic conditions). That's why I always advocate for the real left to reach the working class before their hate for us becomes burned deep in their brains.

So, answering your question, how much of that is due to social media? Well, seeing how those on The Left keep using social media to promote a divisive view of the working class (i.e., not recognising working and economic conditions as the main cause of marginalisation, focusing on race and sexuality instead), I'd say a lot.

Just as the artist is entitled to make art as he feels like it, the audience is entitled to like it or not, but, in both cases, we should be intellectually honest. The artist cannot criticise the audience for not liking his art, and the audience must never dismiss art based on their own prejudices.

An extreme case of this is, of course, Leni Riefenstahl, whose movies were nazi propaganda, but one can't judge them based on that, but on their own artistic merits or demerits.

@LydiaConwell@exile.social It is not. Jonathan Demme felt genuinely distressed by that criticism, because he had always been an ally (on a time when nobody was). Besides, Buffalo Bill is _not_ a real transexual, as Lecter explains. He's just a fucking psycho.

@LydiaConwell@exile.social Only one?