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.

I feel like you think you're talking to a different person than I am. My work computer is a linux box, my work IDE is either Jetbrains CLion or Pycharm, and my 40-hour-a-week-job is writing open source software that I release on behalf of Microsoft. So, yanno, if you want python libraries for graph spectral embeddings or approximate nearest neighbor algorithms, that's me.

The only thing I know about Visual Studio is it is distinctly not built for me, and I don't use it. I wouldn't know the first thing about creating a project in Visual Studio, because in the last 7 years I haven't created a single one in it. Gradle and Kotlin or SBT and Scala, sure. Python and pip, sure.

My problem with Python has nothing to do with the language itself. It has to do with the packaging. Remember that bit about me releasing open source software for Microsoft? Yeah. I'm stuck doing a lot of the packaging.

Friends don't let friends use Python, because then they're complicit in the frankly inhumane conditions in the pypa pit of eternal despair. Hug your numpy packager today!

They could easily vendor python in the excel distribution if they wanted to, though. In fact, it would be the smart thing to do from their perspective; expecting people to keep up to date python versions (and what counts as up to date and what counts as a needless forced upgrade just from typing import List for your typehints turns into : list is super plausibly arguable.)

I can't love python after all the pain and suffering I've had to go through packaging things from extension modules. I've never had a worse experience with computers, and I used to write coldfusion and java swing for money, so that's fucking saying something. The entire distutils ->setuptools->build/PEP517 + bdist vs. sdist is the least gratifying work in my entire career, by far. It's not even interesting, it's just shockingly poorly documented and your only plausible solution is "try literally everything and see which things work". I shouldn't have to fucking emulate a quantum computer just to ship a fucking bdist.

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.