Anime is Oddtaxi

Something that I realized way later than I should.

During some of my Godot development, I've finally hit the debugger tab of the editor while the game was running, saw the "Video RAM" and found something very odd. My 2D game was eating up over 500MB of VRAM, which was way too much for what was on screen. Since the debugger lists all the files currently in memory, I could see how much RAM each file consumed.

My characters were made of several separate files (2 arms, 1 leg, 1 torso, 1 head) and all those files had the same total resolution of ~1000x1000, but different "useful" areas, like 200x200 on the head, 40x100 on each arm. Turns out each goddamn pixel of each file had to be kept in RAM, because, unlike disk space, the game "needs" to be aware of the WHOLE image, because it doesn't know whether RGBA(0,0,0,0) at XY 0,0 is any more or less important than whatever is at XY 120,250.

Yeah, after I cropped the images to only have the area they actually have drawn, VRAM usage dropped to ~200MB (the drawn area was still large)

If anyone ever complains that your game is slow, or that you should optimize how you organize your images, it's very likely you should look into that for better performance.

It's been ages since I last saw ep 1 and, while looking for the despecialized original trilogy, I came across the prequel fan edits. "Eh, why not?"

Gotta say, I was expecting the pacing or the story to kinda fall flat, but this was a very enjoyable watch. There's a lot that was cut, nearly all the "whimsy" was removed, also the whole underwater trip when the jedis first land on Naboo. This leads to the Gungan alliance being a "jar jar ex machina", but it worked well enough in my opinion. Other than that, I think the movie works really well in every aspect.

The torrent I got also comes with a .docx that lists the whole movie script with all the stuff that was cut in red, and new additions (very few) in blue. A smaller list of changes can be read here - Besides removing a lot of jar jar's antics and any references to midichlorians (I personally never cared about that), one notable change near the end was making Anakin blow up the command ship before Padme and her group capture the Viceroy, so it makes it seem that the droids being deactivated is what allowed them to complete their objective.

One thing that I noticed during the final battle was that the Trade Federation pretty much dropped the blockade, as they only left one command ship in orbit, compared to the dozens at the beginning of the movie. I guess that was because the land invasion worked, so there was no further need to keep the orbital blockade.

PS: I couldn't stop laughing when Obi Wan fell because of that fucking meme

PPS: I always liked how Naboo looks, but this time I really paused to look a bit better at the architecture, and it has such a nice mix of mediterranean marble of yellowish tones and cyan roofs. With the current image quality and all, it was much easier to pick out "ancient CG" and in many places it looked like a "old last gen game", but it had that late 90s charm that warms my hearth with nostalgia.

PPPS: The worst part about watching SW as an older person is seeing all those damn walkways without a single guardrail anywhere. Coruscant is even worse, that transport vehicle full of VIP heading to the senate is fully open without so much as seatbelts.

TLDR; some fan complains that the comics depicted a troll war as a "touch football game between overweight accountants" instead of something truly gruesome and that a sex scene was "just rocks". It's a long rant that boils down to "your stuff is too cutesy".

The author rebukes that nonsense because she knows she has younger readers and she doesn't need to do that explicit sex and violence anyway.

Most major news sites, as well as some other sites of reading content like Medium, have a paywall for certain articles, but those are easily defeated by people who bother to search the internet.

As I suspect said companies are aware of that, and they don't react to properly protect their paid stuff, what do they expect to gain?

Asking because while I see that paint hardeners exist in the USA, there doesn't seem to be anything similar in my country (Brazil)

What could I use as a substitute to harden paints? Are there any catalysts or powders that would work?

Google and DDG always show sites/articles about epoxy resins whenever I search for "acrylic hardener", is it safe to assume that catalysts for epoxy, like polyamide, will work with acrylics?

I make the specification of non-linux because otherwise this would just become a thread full of obscure distros that do the same thing as a million other distros.

Some lesser known OSs:

• AROS - based on Amiga OS, has some derivatives like IcarOS and MorphOS
• Haiku - based on BeOS
• Redox - Unix-like, made in Rust (might technically count as linux?)
• Serenity - Unix-like, very late 90s look and feel
• Kolibri - Tiny OS, the image is ~44MB. It also has a smaller version that fits in a single floppy.
• PhantomOS - When 3 Russians decide to turn everything about a typical OS upside down.

Video is nearly 3 years old now, but I think it's worth watching. Her presentation starts at around 2:30.

Basically, she explains how Redbean, a tiny (~450kb) and very fast C http server, works and how the same executable can be used to deploy it on most operating systems (she starts explaining that around 14:30)

Justine is also the mind behind Sector LISP, Lambda Calculus in 383 bytes, considerable optimizations to LLamaAI, plus several other things.

For those that can't read the image:

>playing some mtg with my college group that meets up at my best friend's every friday
>one of the players asks if his friend can join next time we play
>nobody has a problem with it
>next friday rolls around
>everybody gets set up
>knock on the door
>best friend opens the door
>immediate regret
>actual fucking fecal smell emanates from this mass of unkempt hairy adipose
>try my god damndest to be polite and try to ignore the smell and just play.
>he picks up the game pretty quickly, and thankfully he doesn't speak too often because each time he opens his mouth the halitose burns my nostrils.
>we tolerate this for exactly 10 minutes before the poli-sci dude in our group slams his can of altoids on the plaguelord's side of the table and blurts "do not fucking speak in my direction again until you've fucking emptied this your breath smells like death."
>dead fucking silence for 10 seconds.
>plaguelord gets up, apologizes, and leaves
>we try to pretend this never happened.
>next week rolls around, its still on everyone's mind.
>knock on the door
>takes a few moments to recognize the stranger in front of us
>holy shit its the plaguelord, and he's fucking clean
>completely shaved his patchy neckbeard
>is wearing what looks like a brand new clothes, his jeans even still have a sticker on them
>smells vaguely like strawberries instead of rotten onions
>teeth still stained but the halitose is completely gone and replaced with mint.
>apologized for last week, asked if he could play again
>fast forward a few months and now he's a regular at our table, he even brings homemade snacks.
Has this ever happened in your groups or is this some sort of anomaly/divine intervention?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/12852381

With efforts to resuscitate Neopets ramping up, monthly users have nearly tripled to 300,000 in the past six months, and the company is on track to be profitable by the end of 2024, [current Neopets Team CEO] Law said.

Also notable:

Law said that rather than cracking down on fan-created components, the company is embracing them. It launched a “Neopass” login system that allows users to access games across the Neopets system, including third-party and fan-made games.

With efforts to resuscitate Neopets ramping up, monthly users have nearly tripled to 300,000 in the past six months, and the company is on track to be profitable by the end of 2024, [current Neopets Team CEO] Law said.

Also notable:

Law said that rather than cracking down on fan-created components, the company is embracing them. It launched a “Neopass” login system that allows users to access games across the Neopets system, including third-party and fan-made games.