I honestly find those sections of his books kind of comfy. If I “wrote what I know” about those days in my life the protagonist would wolf down a boiled chicken breast over the sink in complete silence.

I liked the four or five books I read, but I did laugh out loud the third time a bachelor character cracked a beer, put on a jazz record, and prepared an elaborate dinner for one.

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

Yeah it’s technically better (crisper, higher res, etc) but the visual language is totally different and IMO worse. That fire just doesn’t look as hot, for example.

Lighting as an art form is highly coupled with the given tech. Something as small as just changing the shadow method can require artists relighting a whole game. My guess is they aren’t doing this or maybe are pushing the stark lighting the same way depth of field, colored lights, lens flares etc got juiced in previous generations.

That’s always wrong. The tech should service the art, not the other way around.

KDEnlive is improving, however Resolve is still more powerful and mature. That said, DaVinci’s business model seems precarious. It feels like they could, at any moment, enshittify Resolve and force users into a subscription just to maintain access to old edits. I think for that reason KDEnlive is better for almost all users. If you are a professional filmmaker then the color and vfx workflows of Resolve are probably worth paying for, but in that case it’s probably a FinalCut vs Resolve question anyway.

Literally why witch hunts existed. It was just a way for authorities to expropriate the wealth of some random dowager who won’t remarry (and therefore automatically cede all property to her new husband).

That sounds like a “premultiplied alpha” issue. Although I’m not familiar with this specific workflow, I always suspect premultiplied alpha issues when there’s a halo like that. If there’s an option try toggling it.

Bugs? My favs are buggy to the point some of these bugs became their own mechanics

This is pretty much half of competitive Brood War.

Coming from Python I feel like it’s my partner and best friend. In fact the whole damn tool chain is amazing.

Ubiquitous in the games industry unfortunately, for at least the art side but often code as well.

That’s one kind, and Rust’s “ownership” concept does mean there’s built-in compile time checks to prevent dangling pointers or unreachable memory. But there’s also just never de-allocating stuff you allocated even though it’s still reachable. Like you could just make a loop that allocates memory and never stops and that’s a memory leak, or more generally a “resource leak”, if you prefer.

Rust is really good at keeping you from having a reference to something that you think is valid but it turns out it got mutated way down in some class hierarchy and now it’s dead, so you have a null pointer or you double free, or whatever. But it can’t stop the case where your code is technically valid but the resource leak is caused by bad “logic” in your design, if that makes sense.

Last place I was at called them build “masters” for this reason.

Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.

Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar’s Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.

It’s been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the “glue” language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.

Thank you for the encouragement. I’ve been thinking about it.

At AAA studios you can pour your heart and craft into creating something beautiful along with hundreds of other wonderful colleagues, for years, only to have it ruined by management who literally doesn’t give af. Not only do they not play games, or even like games, they are proud of this fact in a sort of, “sell me this pen” type of way. These people always existed but the “financialization” of the industry means they are everywhere now. Even one of these people in the wrong place can be poison, and they are everywhere. This mutated organelle has made the entire studio system too neoplastic to perform its primary function.

It’s like training for years as a chef, slaving away in a hot kitchen for the big opening, then having the owner (who hasn’t cooked in decades) insist you serve your food in the toilet because “hey it’s porcelain, it’s the same as fine china”. Then when the restaurant bombs you get fired and he gets a huge bonus because he’s a genius cost cutter and you couldn’t sell his vision. Nobody cares that you made the best bisque of your life when its served in a toilet. How many times can that happen before you say, “fuck it”?

Well for me it was ten years. Not laid off, but just couldn’t take it anymore. I could probably get another job with my resume, but I just can’t bring myself to apply again. Through a little planning and extremely good luck I’m not really under any pressure. Makes me feel like a fool because a lot of people work worse jobs, but then I remember how sad and angry I was all the time. When I look at job postings those feelings return. The problem is I still like it and want to do it. I feel forced out because I care about making good stuff instead of just “line go up”. I would take a huge pay cut to work on a team that had the “magic” again.

Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.

In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier’d back because the director couldn’t be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.

Media and Entertainment side sucks too. No hate on the actual devs, I know a few of the Maya devs personally and they are competent and want to help, but M+E is like 4% of Autodesk revenue so management doesn’t really give a fuck. At least there’s still Houdini and Blender is getting better as the time as well.