Pastor Haggis

The last time I pirated a game was for Freelancer. Couldn’t buy it anywhere except a CD and there was no guarantee it would work so I pirated it, it wasn’t what I expected, so I removed it.

I also downloaded a Halo CE crack for PC but I owned the physical disk and just used it to play with friends at a LAN party.

Otherwise there’s no reason to pirate anything gaming related, short of protest or something.

TV, movies and music are so hard to find. Lots of people will tell me “no just use Spotify”. No. Go try to listen to Turn the Page by Bob Seger, and not a live version. The only versions Spotify has are the live and the Metallica versions. Try to find Whitesnake’s Deep Purple cover album. I used to never pirate music because I could buy the few albums they didn’t have and upload them to Google music. Now, there’s no option for that. I’d rather have a smaller library with the music I want than a massive one that’s missing my favorites,

The difference is that Dwarf Fortress only released on Steam because they had financial worries due to some health scares. They decided to release it on steam and charge for it but they wanted to deliver a major overhaul of the UI to justify selling it, even though people wanted to pay them for years.

DF has been in development for 20 years but it’s essentially a full game that they’ve been making better. Yeah it’s buggy (they simulate so goddamn much of course it’ll have bugs), but it’s at least a full experience that you can replay many times and never have the same experience.

Star Citizen does not deliver a full game, it’s just a glorified tech demo. It’s cool tech, but it’s not worth playing in my opinion.

Every time I call one of my higher ups at work he’ll say something dumb like “Dominos pizza how can I help you” or “This is the product owner help line, no we can’t change your due dates”.

I generally get a chuckle out of it.

Last time he called me his therapist.

Yup. Buy CDs, vinyl or digital from Bandcamp or from the artist direct and then host it on Plex.

I’ve thought about trying jellyfin but Plexamp is just so nice that I don’t think I could leave it.

A few of my communities came over but the big one I’m missing is the college football sub with flairs and everything so I can discriminate against those of lesser teams.

The one here just isn’t the same.

Well the time between me asking and me getting a new job was like 9 months. I was actually patient and waited a while before I looked but eventually couldn’t wait. So I got the offer and then asked for a counter and they wouldn’t do it.

I’m odd because I vastly prefer in-office work so that’s never been a deal-breaker for me. I like the option to work from home if needed, but the nature of my new job means I just don’t have anything to do from home and have to be on-site.

But I too have received unpaid “promotions” recently, but they’re generally because I seek out more responsibilities and take on more hats than I need out of necessity. “Oh no one is handling our new hires and I need to build a team? Guess I’m doing team allocation now.” “We’re out of seats and I need 3 seats for my team? Guess I’m in charge of that now.” “We’re out of VMs and have to steal them from other people to reallocate? Guess I’m organizing that effort too.”

That’s just good experience though as I’m using it for leverage to get a promotion next year, potentially moving to a management position.

Yeah their new VP basically said “we don’t do mid-year raises” which is just dumb, they also never conveyed to me that I did receive a raise, but it was a 1.2% COL increase, which was a slap in the face. I received a higher COL increase after I had been with my new company for only 3 months at the end of last year.

My former boss and my dad used to work together which is how I had learned about the job to begin with and they happened to go out for drinks with some other guys and my boss just asked my dad point blank “Am I going to lose Haggis?” My dad just said “If you can’t get him 5% by the end of the year, he’ll probably jump.” My boss responded with “Well it’s been fun working with him.” He genuinely tried everything he could, had a 3 page document written up about why I deserved a mid-level position, explained why he couldn’t lose me and the company just said “eh, wait till next year.”

I applied for another job and had the recruiter reach out to me within 20 minutes due to it being a company I had worked for prior (left because I didn’t like the project I was on and wanted a change of pace) and within an hour and a half of applying they had called me and then two weeks later I was given an offer. The offer was the crazy part because I was making about 74k as a junior at the other job, I asked for 85 as a “high ball” to hope they would give me at least 80 and they told me they would beat that, so the next time they asked I said 90 and they just gave me 92 anyway. Definitely felt nice to be more appreciated.

I would hope that’s the case, however the company is one that contracts to other organizations and my dad’s former position was one of their biggest clients (I was on a different program). He was saying that their turnover rate is going up because they wouldn’t give raises to hardly any of their employees. That and now they’re being laid off due to the main contract losing funding, but that’s just bureaucratic junk.

I guess it’s not quite that level of “fuck this shit I’m out” but I realized that I was doing a significant amount of work that would be outside the description of a junior software engineer. I chatted with my boss and asked for a raise, he went to HR and they said no, so I asked for a promotion and he took it all the way to the VP and they still said no. After that I said “well they must not care about me but this other company is offering a 20k raise so I’m out.”

It did suck because my boss was still probably the best manager I’ve ever had who gave me everything he could to help me succeed but they refused to give me a raise. I don’t miss the work but I for sure miss that team.

Some of the best guitarists around don’t really know what they’re doing - they’re just feeling.

That’s because toan is stored in the balls.

Also yeah, I used to be a concert snare player and then gave up drums entirely. I picked up guitar at 18 and was a better guitarist after a year with no formal training versus 10 years of snare. Once you learn basic chords, you can generally follow a chord chart pretty easily, only needing to learn more when you get into the more complex shapes. Music theory is great but not required to make neat sounding music (I still don’t know it, I just find notes that sound good with each other).

Ukelele would be a good starter though, it’s similar enough that it’ll partially translate but is also like $20 to get into and the strings are cheaper.

This is part of the reason I haven’t gone back to Linux for my gaming PC. I had zero desire to try to set a fan curve in the terminal.

Yeah they basically didn’t care about the API stuff and I don’t know that they ever shut down.

I’m hoping people can start migrating but I’m not hopeful.

Love Sync! I think I’ve purchased it like, 5 times across two Google accounts and the pro/dev/beta or whatever versions over the last 10 years.

I did have a question; if Lemmy were to introduce flairs, would you want to reimplement them? I absolutely loved being able to see which team someone supported on r/cfb so I knew whether or not I could respect their opinion.

This is very important to me.

I need to judge people based on their favorite teams…

Ah okay, I get you now. When I said “full blast or off” what I meant was using the tools I found, I could either turn them on or off, I couldn’t find the granular controls to set like, “at +10 degrees go to 25% power” type thing. And again, maybe I was doing it wrong, but I’m pretty fluent with Linux and just had no idea what I was doing.

Wild. Maybe I did something wrong but I tried finding a simple interface to set fan curves and most places I found were terminal-based, and as much as I love the terminal, I don’t like it for things like fan curves.

Also for OS, last time I went with Pop!_OS and I have that on my laptop now, but I’m not that picky. I just liked that Pop!_OS had drivers built in for Nvidia.

I do plan on trying again, but my #1 priority is standing up this Poweredge R720XD I have sitting behind me. Server racks are too expensive.

I can’t remember if my dad sent me up an Ubuntu server on an azure hosted VM or if we installed it on an old laptop that was shitting out but either way, I’ve always gone back and forth since I was like 13 or 14.

For servers, I use Linux exclusively. I don’t see a need for windows on them and as such have just always used either Ubuntu or RHEL for anything that I need to treat as a server. For laptops, I generally started with windows and then installed Linux a few years later but if I get a new one it’s gonna be Linux out of the gate.

My desktop, on the other hand, is different. I’ve always used windows on my gaming desktops due to compatibility but a few years ago I tried Linux as my only OS for a bit. I loved using it at first, but then I ran into all the issues with trying to run a beefy gaming PC on Linux. Fan curves were a nightmare to set and half the time they couldn’t find my fans so they were either at full blast or off, and I hated the idea of using the bios because I don’t want to turn my PC off to set them. RGB was okay but some of my stuff didn’t get found, and all I wanted was a solid color but it was very hard. Some games didn’t work and they were the ones I wanted most.

Ultimately, I went back to windows but then a year or two later the steam deck came out, so gaming has come a long way. I’m very much considering it again but I have to do my research beforehand to see what tools I’ll need. If anyone has any suggestions, I’ll take them!

Sounds like you were just a quitter. I counted to 100 all the time to show off.