I donno man, seems like a lot of rich people piss is all over us

it was the plan, the vetting of the plan, the sign off of the plan, the execution of the plan.

so I mean yeah, just like generally the plan. I haven't made mead since, because it represents possibly the most monumental TIFU of my entire god damned life

yeah, where else do you expect self published authors to make their mark?

I've extremely enjoyed the self-pub route so many authors can take these days. Some of my favorite series come from people who didn't even want to bother with the traditional publisher and I am so much happier for it.

So I mean, if you have some alternatives for self published authors to reach a broad audience with a minimum of fuss, that's great. I'm just not seeing a valid replacement, myself.

edit: that said, some are dumpster fires in a pit of eternal despair. but I'm a big boy, I can figure that out for myself.

my friend, sometimes ordering a pizza is a valid life choice

Sort of.

I was making a gigantic batch of mead. Like 5 gallons of it, boiling away merrily. I carefully prepared my glass carboy ahead of time and poured the must (aka: that-which-will-be-mead-after-yeast-farts-in-it) into my carboy. This was fine. All according to plan.

The bucket of ice and cold water I added to the sink to cool it down faster so that I could throw the pitched yeast into it... also according to plan.

What was not according to plan was a gunshot sound going off, shards of glass shooting through the air like a grenade, and honey water cascading out over the edge of my sink all over my floor.

I've never felt more broken.

Full disclosure, I work for MSFT, but I do not speak for them. I fucking hate python and am forced to write it a lot while working here, but I want to suggest there's a complementary technological reason for wanting to run it in the cloud. This isn't to say that MSFT will stand to make more money if you are using their cloud services, and I don't have any insight at all into the "gib us money plz" side of this business.

The reason: One of the biggest headaches for IT depts has been attack vectors through office productivity suites. Download a sketchy excel spreadsheet from someone, and suddenly custom macros are purposefully creating avenues for attack, or are attacks themselves. Ken and Debra in accounting aren't security people. They got a spreadsheet from an email that seems superficially plausible, so they pop it open. Suddenly, your entire org is ransomwared just because two people who are just doing their normal duties get tricked.

That's why the ol' VBA shit and all those fancy macro systems from the past got neutered. Sandboxed and isolated, removed entirely, whatever. But a good feature gets lost.

Enter The Cloud, or in other terms, "Someone Else's Computer". As in, someone else's computer out there, far from your corporate network, that has no ability to reach back through your security perimeter and have a rummage around your business guts. The worst thing that will happen is the attack-vector-spreadsheet, itself, might be compromised. Or Microsoft's cloud computers, which are, again, not your computers.

Anyway, that's honestly a great reason for it. And there's also the business cat reasons, which I don't like in principle; I always begrudge businesses their attempts at squeezing us for more and more every single fucking day. So anyway, it probably isn't worth it to the average home user, but IT departments are going to be thrilled, even if the tech budget is going to get even fatter paying for all these users using someone else's computer.

I have strong opinions about home users who can write Python already but choose to use excel, but I'll keep them to myself. They're elitist and basically just me being a little shit, so... you do you, boo.

Sure did, I think it was part of a bunch of tests we had to do for the... Presidential Fitness Award or something?

It was done in Elementary school, so Fall 87->Spring 93? I have no idea if they're still doing any of that crap now though.

I do remember it being the neatest dang thing because our school had like this entire wall of collapsible gym equipment that folded out like a playground with like 2 or 3 story monkeybars and gigantic poofy mats at the bottom, and you better believe some kids fell off.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect they don't let them do that anymore

My natural inclination is toward black gallows humor in situations like these, but I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of people are going to get harmed and laughing is an unacceptable faux pas.

I also have to remind myself that "not knowing what to do with all these feels" may result in unhelpful reactions.

Yet I still want to stand on DeSantis' head and shout "what the hell did you damn well expect you fucking troglodyte". Feelings are tricky.

correct, but now you've just identified two separate types of tearing, both happening at different times. put them together and the perceived frequency will be significantly worse than it was prior.

being able to zero one of those out and only worry about the other means you can hopefully optimize a better solution - as much as one can when you can't realistically atomically update the entire display from top to bottom.

I don't use this word often, but I'm going to now.

Heinous.

such an appropriate name, then!

The whole situation reminds me of a water balloon battle I had as a kid. I kept getting some really good tosses in and one kid really didn't like that. I didn't have the wherewithal at the time to realize I was distressing him, assuming he was having the same fun I was having. Anyway he spent like 10 minutes trying to get the world's biggest water balloon created while he got soaked constantly and balloons broke like mad as he overfilled them.

Eventually, he managed to fill a particularly massive balloon. This thing was absurd sized, to a 9 year old. Properly absurd. I don't even know how he lifted it. But once he finally achieved his goal, he finally staggered to his feet with the balloon, roared a mighty 9 year old battlecry, and charged at me, only to trip on his own feet and tumble to the ground with his face impacting the balloon just as it exploded, soaking him. The meltdown was legendary; we all stopped playing, most of us just watching with bemusement at his misfortune. It was a huge own-goal, a massive self-own, and while I was certainly the motive, I had nothing to do with how it all played out.

I bet Greta feels a similar way, though she probably has way fewer conflicted feelings about the justice behind it, though.