Born a sconie right on Lake Michigan, lived in Iowa for a handleful of years for college, then moved to Sota where I live currently. Software Engineer for 20+ years, Ham Radio Operator, lover of retro graming, old time radio and the outdoors.

Mastodon: jecxjo@mastodon.sdf.org

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 9th, 2022

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  • Back then i only had a few games but among all my friends we had a pretty good collection. As an adult playing on a retro console I’ve started to go through a lot of the games i never tried or didn’t own and only played a few times.

    While I’d say the total NES library is a majority of garbage games (publishers just figuring out how to make games, not how to make good games) I think the big thing i noticed is that the good 8bit games look and feel drastically different than the garbage ones. When you learn the history of the games then it makes sense.

    The quality of the sprites, the extensive design of menus, transitions and other interactions, the storyline and dialogue. Even with only 8bits and crappy resolution the output for many of the good games actually looked and played well back then and even now. But I’d say about 90% of the NES catalog was garbage back then and still is now.


  • I think the difference is that in the 8bit generation yhe majority of the game were bad relative to each other. The peak of the bell curve for 8bit was between mediocre to kinda bad games.

    While there are more games in later generations, it feels like the console manufacturers took more control and regulated what was published. Bad games happen now because of shitty business decisions and bad story writing. You dont see garbage being published just because you can.



  • All of my gaming is super retro or low tech. I do have an XBoxOne but i rarely use it. Computer is old so games on there are mostly old old stuff from the 90s and early 2000s.

    Hardware wise i have an Anbernic 353V that I do a lot of retro gaming. Not a huge fan of the Gameboy style setup but its a good cheap machine.

    My kids have Switches and thats what kicked me from supporting Nintendo after they go obsolete. The Joycons on one suck and I’ve replaced the connector hardware twice now. The best version is the Lite but you cant connect it to a TV which is dumb. Their family sharing is broken (wife has digital game, i havs DLC, we are SOL).



  • Think less about time sharing and more about using all the computers you own together.

    You would have a netbook with no compute power as your UI sitting on your couch. You could connect to your beefy desktop to do all the computations for your video editor or playing a game and never have to be sitting at your desk.

    You could also have a big file store device with lots of drives to store stuff.

    We can do some of this now, I ssh into my desktop from my couch and have a NFS in the basement. But they all operate as separate devices that i have to really work at getting to operate together. Plan9 was designed where you’d just pick devices off of the network and the tasks operated normally. Pick your video card, local or over the network to the beefier GPU.





  • Not a photographer but worked at the restaurant where a wedding party had their rehearsal dinner.

    The groom stood up and gave a toast, all well and good. Not sure if he didnt habe parents or what but the bride’s father talked a moment and gave the groom a few jabs that slowly turned into him almost roasting the guy. Took it that the bride’s father didn’t really like the guy. Groom made a jab back and the father slung it right back at him.

    And that is when the groom goes off and slugs the bride’s father square in the face and down he goes. Groom says a bunch of “fuck you and fuck you” and walks out of the restaurant. We ended up having to walk all these people to their cars because they were afraid the groom might come back and do something (ha like I’m going to protect your great aunt mulva if he comes back with a gun!).

    A couple came into the restaurant a few weeks later, friends of one side of the wedding party. Turns out the groom went back to the hotel, packed up his stuff and left to go back home. Had all the bride’s stuff packed and on a moving truck to her parents place before the weekend was out. Groom just flat out nope’d her.




  • As for jogging people’s memories…

    So whenever i have to get approval from higher ups that i know they will forget and get annoyed about it i ask that they all stand up and state “i agree / approve to XYZ.” People will laugh and say “really?!?”.

    At my last job one of my bosses decided on something that went against what all us in engineering said. So i told him to stand up in front of everyone and say “i acknowledge that this goes against the suggestions by engineering but I would like the team to implement… whatever the feature was.” Two months later he came to a meeting all pissed about how this feature wasn’t working and when he saw me enter the meeting he said “fuck, this is my fault isn’t it?”


  • A friend from college does software dev for a place that does 4x10-4 and he said the way the fixed issues was by asking for ROI on everything you do. Need to schedule a meeting? Is it worth the cost of people’s time? If so make sure you get the right people, habe everything planned out before calling it so you get your work done promptly.

    At first everyone was like fuck, more crap you have to do. But eventually they figured out that much of their time was wasted on crap no one needed to do. Some people stuck around for an hour or two after work to hang out and others took back their lives. Productivity actually increased because people were not as burned out.


  • I’m a lead software developer. Finally working a place where we do reasonable schedules with a good amount of padding for problems popping up.

    If i wasnt in pointless meetings and focused on actual productive time thats about what most of my team does and we hit all our schedules.

    When i worked at Samsung they were doing 4 day weeks and no one was doing 8hr days


  • A few things that would help:

    A 4 day work week with both ends of the day brought in to maybe 10-4 (sorry didnt mean 10-3). Things like going to the bank require me to either run during my lunch break or do it on a day off. 4x10-4 means i have a day and edges of days to do tasks i can’t do on the weekend.

    Unlimited PTO. If my tasks are done and I’m paid a salary there is no reason i need to sit around doing nothing. If more work is expected then I’d expect more compensation.

    And lastly mandatory cost of living connected to inflation every year. My last job started during the pandemic. In 2 years the effective inflation rate was 15% and yet i was only given 3% over that time while getting good marks on my reviews. That means in that time i was paid a crazy amount less my last day than my first. I dont care about the actual number of dollars I’m paid but I’d like to buy the same number of eggs mext year as this year if I’m expected to do the same amount of work. This shouldn’t be thought of as a bonus, but rather keeping my level of compensation matched woth my level of expectations for my job.