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@Hephaestic My art teachers in elementary school did finish paintings and even sold them. Maybe they didn't make enough money so they also had to teach as a second job, but they were involved with the medium.

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Thoughts on fusion:

Compression based -> I'm not convinced, lets say you can make a shockwave that amplifies the pressure by 1000x, now you just need 250 MILLION atmospheres instead of 250 billion.

I'm not generally a fan of doing things "the right way", usually the right way is the way everyone has already researched and proved unfeasible. I want to cheat, I want to attack the problem in a way that nobody is thinking about.

Here's a brief summary of where I'm thinking there might be cheat codes:

1. Chemical reaction that triggers fusion -> Take for example some kind of hydrogenated nitroglycerine, when the molecule - reorganizes - you can imagine it creating enough localized energy to fuse the hydrogen atoms.

Ironically when you start down this road, you end up bumping into all of the Stanley Meyer water car stuff. If you pay close attention to his videos, you'll notice that he never really made enough hydrogen to run an engine. An obvious point is that the tubes carrying the hydrogen are hilariously under-sized. If there was ever anything to his claims (which I still find dubious), it is that he found a way to make hydrogen burn much more violently than is justified by the chemical energy. There are other people who claimed to have figured this out as well, and they speak about three distinct types of hydrogen combustion, only one of which will work in an engine. If you take them at their word that they got the car to run, but refuse to believe that they understood at all what was happening, the most likely explanation is that they somehow managed to make some of that hydrogen go nuclear.

2. A catalyst. Perhaps there's some kind of metal that squeezes hydrogen into close proximity in a lattice or something and then a little bit of energy is all it takes to fuse it.

Interestingly this is precisely what was supposed to be happening in the Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion experiment. To quote ChatGPT: "Palladium has a unique property: it can absorb large amounts of hydrogen or deuterium into its lattice structure"

3. I was going to say modifications on a Farnsworth fusor, but these things have been built so many times, I'm pretty sure every idea has already been tried, so I don't think there are any cheat codes to be found there.

4. From the work of Mike McCulloch on Quantized Inertia, trying to see if there's a way to go around the rules.

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I think #4 is probably the best direct path, a lot of work has been done on #2 and cold fusion remains at best a neat party trick. That said, the Stanley Meyer / HHO stuff is like a rock in my shoe, it's hard to stop thinking about it...
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@Pawlicker I should've said that it was VB.Net, so basically C# without the curly braces. XNA was supported on it, but only briefly as Microsoft would discontinue XNA entirely shortly after.

They probably went with VB.NET only because of the drag-and-drop interface for GUI programs (our class skipped CLI programs entirely). This was high school so they didn't expect that many students to actually enter said field.

@Pawlicker I took a programming class in high school and at the very tail end of it we were programming games, but it was in Visual Basic using Windows Forms, and moving images across said forms. Obviously, they couldn't teach us XNA due to timing, but those games looked like Hong Kong '97 in terms of quality.

@Pawlicker I wondered why they couldn't just do what Bob Ross did and give a step by step tutorial while encouraging people to give their own spin, but then I realized that he could only do landscapes and his painting style required the use of knives which obviously can't happen at school.

I don't know why they couldn't at least have one project that just involved drawing simple cartoons. That's what kids love.

@Pawlicker They never taught any technique. They just give you some example picture, sculpture, etc and tell you to make your own version of it.

None of this shit would've happened if I didn't had this anti-art attitude during my elementary school years.

My mind correlated art (regardless of it's form) with painting and "no fun allowed" old ladies who took the thing seriously and worshiped a time period that even predates them. Of course, I blame the mandatory art classes that also had professional painters teaching them. I also had shitty hand-writing and nobody could help me because I'm left-handed and have other dexterity issues, but if it weren't for those, I probably would have never gotten into computers in the first place because I had an AlphaSmart because of it.

I can appreciate art now and I realized that it was stupid of me to correlate all art with classical Renaissance paintings. I can draw somewhat, but I can only do full frontal or behind shots. I can't draw from angles. I can also do some pixel art, but working within those constraints is difficult. Case in point 16x16 character sprites.

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gamedev 

Octorok-like enemies now shoot after walking a certain distance instead of being timer-based. SFML's built-in timers run with no way to pause which is why you often see them shooting when the player enters a room. This is honestly a better approach to this.

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@Pawlicker Why did that place even exist? Was Mastodon too capitalist for them because the AGPL still allows commercial use?

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Did you know gold is more plentiful than lead when you analyze the bulk composition of the earth? You’re probably thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I thought gold was rare!’ Well, you’re right! Confused? Let me explain.
https://activistpost.com/2024/12/study-sheds-light-on-how-gold-reaches-the-earths-surface.html

@RapistGoku Thanks, but I don't know if they could fit the template sprites in the OP link.

@RapistGoku I've tried CivitAI, but they use some virtual currency that you can only replenish by participating in their forums or paying actual money.

I know there are also some AI tools that you can download and run locally, but I currently don't have a powerful PC for that.

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@adachi @mischievoustomato @munir @Suiseiseki @waifu @dj We are in a "Death of the Author" situation. It might not matter what RMS thinks or promotes when _some_ of his most devout supporters misinterpret his ideas and preach something RMS didn't intent to/say.

One of such people is in this thread and started the whole discussion about this topic mostly unprompted. I've had multiple discussions with Suiseiseki exactly about promoting free software as much as possible, while also being pragmatic about it when simply no functioning/usable options exist and there's zero chance of changing him. He lives in his own bubble, unable to understand that a world where free software can't replace everything for everyone exists. Barely understanding what BIOS, microcode and system bootstrap are, while saying that updating proprietary microcode makes Libreboot proprietary, because they dared to update already broken software that is _already_ burned into the CPU die. In this case GNUBoot is actually counterproductive to spreading freedom, just like the flawed policy it follows. While Libreboot is better for user's freedom than normal BIOS, he won't acknowledge it because it breaks FSF's own policies. And if you get him into a corner that he can't "escape" with free software, he'll just play the skill issue card and be done with it.

I actually fully agree with RMS here in this case, even though some of his ideas and FSF policies are deeply flawed.

Anyway, to reference the copypasta, the pragmatic type of free software promoter you are referring to is a FOSSoid :D Don't take it seriously though, it was just written as a bait while I was on a long train ride and had nothing to do.

https://fluffytail.org/objects/029c91e1-fb26-4fb0-9d95-c361312d1896

>Finally decide to replace the placeholder player sprite in my game with an original creation
>Use a simple, CC0 base character spritesheet from OpenGameArt (link below)
>Realize that I can't draw hair on a 16x16 sprite
>Also realize that I can't pull a Miyamoto and draw hats

opengameart.org/content/base-c

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@xianc78
One of my resolutions this year is to get serious about video game development and actually try crossing that line. Worries about becoming a starving artist don't apply when everyone is being starved and frozen out of everything.
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