I mean, I can't speak to OP in particular, but there were definitely lots of years where people made shit for free, sold nothing, and didn't consider it a job.

Like, there was no real mechanism for stick figure martial arts animations to make any money at all. Newgrounds or Ebaum's World must have made some money from ads, but I don't think any of that was profit-shared with the creators back in those days. Some of the creators were straight up anonymous because they didn't even think to put their names on their stuff.

Obviously celebrities and ads and stuff still existed on the earth at the time, but it didn't spread to the internet in a big way until later.

At least that's how I remember it...

I don't know about this particular title, but I feel like Kickstarter games get a bit of a bad rap for taking a long time or not making it to release. But that's because the whole point of a Kickstarter game is that we, the public, are acting as the publisher. Putting up money in advance, making an investment, hoping for a great game.

And just like with traditional publishers, sometimes games take years and years to make, and some of your investments crumble and don't make it.

It's just that we the public rarely hear about a traditionally published game until it's already been in development for a while. Until it seems likely to succeed. We're not used to taking pitches while a game studio figures their shit out. And even then, some traditionally published games crash and burn too!

And that's all ignoring the fact that a bunch of crowdfunded games are typically by greener devs who maybe don't know how things are done. But what I'm saying is that even the normal game industry has long lead times and has some burn outs, it's just that normally an entire community hasn't built up around them, because they haven't even been announced yet.

I guess is what I'm saying is that publishing is hard and risky, and crowdfunding is collective publishing, not advanced purchasing. That doesn't immediately mean that anyone who tries and fails is a scam artist. Most of them probably spent that money trying their best for as long as they could, and nothing great came out the other side. That's just what business ventures look like, unfortunately.

Actually, that Hertha Ayrton quote at the end? About the cats or whatever? That was actually me. I said that.

I don't normally do this, but I see this from time to time, so just so you know:

wary: feeling or showing caution about possible dangers or problems.

leery: cautious or wary due to realistic suspicions

weary: feeling or showing tiredness, especially as a result of excessive exertion or lack of sleep

I'm sorry if this was annoying rather than helpful!

Some tips:

• Unless the code is very small, or your feature is very big, try to put blinders on, and focus only on the code you absolutely need to to get your feature built. Use search tools to comb through the code to find the relevant methods while reading as little surrounding code as possible, tweak those methods to be different, and call that a first draft. If the maintainer wants the code refactored or differently arranged, they can help with that as part of the review process
• Being unable to build sucks, it really does. But if the software is released for your platform, it means someone out there is able to build it. And these days that someone is often an automated build tool that runs per release. See if you can figure out how this tool works. What build steps it uses, what environment it runs in, etc. If you can't figure that out, try contacting the person who releases the builds
• If the software is in apt (if you're on a Debian-based system), you can use apt build-dep, apt source, and debuild to try and recreate the native apt build process. These tools will give you the source that built the system package, and its dependencies, and allow you to build a deb yourself out of it. Test the build to make sure it's working as-is. If it is, and if the software's dependencies haven't changed too much, you can even use apt to fetch the old version that's in the repos, update the code to reflect the upstream release, and then test the build there to see if it still builds. If so, now you have something you can start working off.
• If you aren't on an apt system, but do have a package manager, I assume there's an equivalent to the workflow mentioned above
• If your change is subtle enough that you think it's pretty low-risk, you could just edit the code even though you can't build it. This might be sufficient for bug-fixes where you just need to check something is greater than zero, or features where you pass a true instead of a false in certain conditions or something. You should probably mention this in your PR / MR / Patch so the reviewer knows to test building it before merging.
• This one is a bit wild, but let's say you're on a Mac or Windows machine, and the build instructions only work for Linux. You can just run a virtual machine that's got Ubuntu or something running on it, and use it as your build environment. These days you can probably be in a simpler situation with Docker or something more lightweight, but as a worst-case scenario, a full virtual machine is there for you if you need it
• And finally, if the tool isn't a crazy popular or busy tool, it's possible the maintainer or other people in the community are more approachable than you think. If they are looking for contributions, then getting a willing contributor's build environment setup is a benefit to the project. Improving their build docs helps not just you, but potential future contributors as well. A project will usually be more helpful towards someone who says "I'm trying to build this feature, but I'm running into trouble" compared to someone saying "why doesn't your tool do X". You may need to be a bit patient, they're probably doing this on volunteer hours, but they might be happy to help you get your stuff sorted out

Good luck out there, and try not to be discouraged!

Nah, I mean, I was around when George Bush was the guy. I didn't like him, I didn't feel he was a good leader, or fit for the office. I would try to convince people not to support him or the war(s) in the middle east. But he was not a threat to democracy. Except maybe through The Patriot Act...

There was a lot of things I didn't agree with that Mitt Romney believes. I think voting him in would have been regressive and bad for gay people, etc, who I care about. I think he is wrong about things. But he's not a threat to democracy. I belive that he believes the things he claims to believe, and that he believes in his heart that he's doing the right thing. I just disagree with him.

John McCain seemed like an honorable man. Again, I felt that his priorities and mine didn't line up, but he was nowhere near a threat to democracy.

The reason this dude is a threat to democracy is because he has openly and repeatedly disregarded voting and the function of government, which is kinda democracy's whole thing. If the votes don't count, and the results don't follow the will of the voters, then it's not a democratic system. If you systematically choose to make it so some segment of your citizens cannot vote, or their voices are not heard, then it's not a democratic system.

Similar to other people, I think you should own it. Try to think of it not as "I betrayed my character" but rather "my character gave in to temptation and regrets it but has to live with the consequences", then use that. Play the character as though they are unhappy with the changes, they regret it, but they must soldier on.

People aren't all perfect archetypes, and characters can have flaws and nuances. And the best part is, if your character up until now had no reason to make the choice you made, maybe it's time for an out of game flashback. Work backwards... what thing could have happened in their backstory that would explain why they made this seemingly incongruous choice? Why did this tempt them when so many other things did not, and why does this cause them so much shame now. That kind of stuff.

Or don't! Just some suggestions, since it sounds like you've got nothing to lose, may as well try some character development!

Well... That's actually probably fair as stated.

BestBuy etc don't sell Apple's products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they've got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they'll buy that from Apple.

So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can't recoup, and it wouldn't impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

This way the retailers can get their money back, but can't get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

The only other way that's semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.

Has anyone here tried https://tru-tone.com/

The ads make them look like the colours of my youth, but ads can make anything look like anything...

I've never been a Twitter/microblog user, but here's how I gather it worked, presented in the order in which it was developed.

Do you ever think "oh, that's a funny/interesting thought I had", but there's no one around to tell? Or not enough people and you think it had more potential than that? Microblog. Unlike a forum, you just dump in out into the void as-is. It's a broadcast. Like if every account was a personal /r/showerthoughts.

From there we make it so I can subscribe to my friends. Now when they post their funny thoughts, or even just being like "I feel like tacos tonight, anyone in SF down?" I'll get their post. Now it's kinda like open group texting. Except I don't choose who sees my random thoughts, they self-select. I just broadcast things out there and whoever might be interested might be interested.

That was basically all that microblogs were, at the beginning. A stream of non-topic'd stuff I said, and you can follow me if you want to hear more like it.

But sometimes I'm surrounded by strangers, like at a conference. At these points I want to know what random people I don't follow are all saying about FooCamp. Search already exists so I can see all tweets with the word "cat" in it, but I can't find a way to fit FooCamp organically into every post, so hashtags get invented as a social convention to say "that was my message, but here are some other keywords for search purposes". Later they got linkified and so people started putting them inline, but originally they were just at the end and just for extra categorization.

So now the tool does two things. I can just broadcast out any thought I have without having to care about where to put it, etc. It all goes on my feed and anyone who has chosen to care about me will see it. And I choose who I care to receive broadcasts from because they're cool, and it doesn't matter what they're talking about. But also I can tag a particular message with some categories, and that will allow strangers to see my messages if they happen to be looking for messages in that category, but obviously a single message can be in multiple categories.

Then later famous people and governments showed up, and people followed them because they love go hear what famous people talk about. But if you don't follow them, then you don't hear from them.

That's basically it! So it's kinda like the opposite of a reddit/lemmy/forum/usenet model. Rather than topics that have content posted by people, it's people who post content that sometimes has a topic. Like a large group-chat (among friends or colleagues) where you're not really sure who is in the chat, but you don't have to care. You can prefer one over the other (I know I do), but fundamentally they're not trying to solve the same problem as lemmy, they're just a totally different model for communication. More like a friend group than a discussion group.

I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn't really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family's computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.

Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn't a third option, it's the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there's no way I'm going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn't better for them in any perceivable way. It's just different and they don't care. If Firefox had 30% market share I'd almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.

So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they're still there and there's no reason for them to move that they care about.

Ok, let me rephrase your rephrase to be what question I think you're trying to ask.

At some point we had decided on a seven day week with week names. That's fine. But we must also have decided at some point that today was Wednesday in this system.

So I think you're asking "what is the first day we all agree was definitely a Sunday, such that all Sundays after were based on that". Or put another way, at what point did the days of the week get locked to the days of our year.

I don't have that answer, but your question confused me, so I've reworded it.