MoonMelon @ MoonMelon @lemmy.ml Posts 2Comments 212Joined 1 yr. ago
This is true. Some things are completely outsourced to vendor companies with their own employees. You rarely interact with these people at all, or even know their names. All communication goes through a telephone game. Then the primary studio itself will have contract employees and also "permanent staff".
Management likes to go on and on about how staff are "family", but then treat them like shit and lay them off anyway. They also like to be subtly shitty to contract workers whenever possible, like free donuts in the break room! (for staff only)
Really, management is just shitty to everyone. Having been in both positions I honestly prefer contract. At least then I'm not expected to participate in their "corporate culture".
Wasn't it the railroads at the end of the 19th century? Yeah... they would kick our asses.
The show was also conceived with Bart as the main character, with the world being from Bart's perspective. As a kid Bart's age of course your dad is dumb. Homer is the irl name of Matt Groenig's dad.
As the show progressed the writers ended up latching onto Homer more and he gradually became the core of the show. Also the characters "Flanderized" (literally!) more and more as time went on and he became more ridiculous. The Frank Grimes episode is pretty genius for capturing all this in a funny way.
I remember "pre-existing condition" exclusions. Insurance companies hired teams of investigators who would comb through the medical histories of patients who made expensive claims (like chemotherapy). They would find something, anything, in that person's medical history that they could claim was "pre-existing", from some time prior to being covered, and deny the claim. Often this was done in full knowledge that the denial could be appealed. But they also had statistics that if that patient died from their disease the family was unlikely to pursue an appeal.
Having a gap of any length of time in your insurance history could be devastating. I had to buy personal insurance once during this time (circa 2001). I was young with no medical conditions and in good health, and it was $160 a month with a deductible so high it was basically worthless except for catastrophic emergencies. I was making $8.50 an hour at the time. But it prevented me from having a gap in coverage that could be used later, perhaps many years later, to deny claims.
Of course the only solution that's politically viable is apparently a giant subsidy to capital. Same with Section 8. Same with education loans. We're incapable of anything else it seems.
Insurance companies still do many versions of this with a byzantine coding system, complex "out of network" exclusions, etc. Anything to deny a claim. It's a capitalist version of a "work-to-rule" slowdown, where they can make new rules. Since it's your health they can afford to wait forever. The asymmetry favors them. It's about as close as you can get to directly chucking human bodies into a furnace to power a money machine and still maintain a veil of propriety. True evil. If there was any justice in the world, the food that these executives bought would turn to ash in the mouths of their children.
Speaking as someone who's worked inside a couple "AAA" studios, sympathy to a union has definitely increased in the past decade. It's no coincidence that bonuses and profit sharing (a major part of compensation) have plummeted over that same time. As much as fans hate unambitious and venal design choices in recent games I assure them that devs hate them just as much or even more, since they ruin years of work. We have steadily decreasing feedback into these choices and are expected more and more to stick to our corner pushing pixels and writing code. Morale is probably the lowest I've ever experienced and mandatory RTO adds insult to injury.
The various QA Union success stories have lots of support on the dev side. However many people believe it's impossible somehow, or that they personally would get laid off or have their job outsourced if there is even a hint of organizing. Especially the past 12 months, the bloodbath has workers terrified. Everyone is trying to keep their heads down as much as possible. I unfortunately don't see this ending well unless funding loosens up and people can start small studios again. There was a wave of this during Covid but those studios are all dying now. It's seriously depressing. I'm a refugee from the VFX world and I feel like I'm watching the sequel.
Only on mobile though, on desktop have different criteria. Perhaps give the text box an arbitrary max length of like 30 characters on sign-in but not on account creation.
You might be remembering Sonny Landham, who was a costar of Ventura in Predator, hosted many shit takes, and also tried to break into politics.
I made a 3d model in Blender and showed it to an architect, with the huge caveat that I only work in vfx and games and have absolutely no idea how to build real things, so please just consider it a "napkin sketch". This model was just flat colors, I didn't bother with texture maps.
I also used QGIS to show him a map of the site, along with some LIDAR elevation data I downloaded from a government website. He just took elevation/plan images and did a great job translating it into a real set of drawings with some major improvements.
After that I took his drawings and did a 3d model in FreeCAD, to help determine where our existing furniture will fit before I broke my back moving it around.
That's strange, trying a few permutations here and I can't get it to break. But at any rate, here's the content:
[embedded players for sound files]
About
Play the below sounds through your phone speaker and hold it next to a Gatekeeper Systems wheels to lock/unlock. Check me out on twitter @stoppingcart
How It Works
Most electronic shopping cart wheels listen for a 7.8 kHz signal from an underground wire to know when to lock and unlock. A management remote can send a different signal at 7.8 kHz to the wheel to unlock it. Since 7.8 kHz is in the audio range, you can use the parasitic EMF from your phone's speaker to "transmit" a similar code by playing a crafted audio file. Link to my original DEFCON 29 Talk
This is similar to the feeling I got a few days ago when I finally got to use the shopping cart wheel unlocker that's been in the back of my mind since watching the Defcon talk about it. Instead of the misconfigured and disabled cart being a giant roadblock in the store I was able to take it and use it normally. Feels good.
https://www.begaydocrime.com/carts
WARNING: DO NOT PLAY SOUNDS ON THIS PAGE THROUGH HEADPHONES
Pretty happy with my Lemur Pro, 3.5 years in. I just replaced the battery, which was fairly painless. Also had to replace the wireless radio, which was as easy as popping in a new one. I wasn't happy that it failed, but apparently that's industry wide, not just these laptops. Replacement was like $35. Other than that I've only had cosmetic issues, like the System76 sticker came off, which I don't care about.
When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called "coordinators" and "producers") used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.
In game dev unfortunately it's exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.