Anecdotal, but I grew up in the heyday of malls and my local mall was one of the largest, and is now one of the most famous dead malls. The mall was in decline when Amazon was still in its infancy, mostly still selling books. Buying clothes online was considered lunacy at the time because there was no fitting rooms to try things on. Still, vacancy was on the rise in the mall and once a few violent crimes started happening inside that was all she wrote. “Big Box” stores like Walmart became more of a draw than driving all the way to the mall.

I think the reasons for the death of the mall are more complex, just like the death of the department store. There were lots of weird tax incentives, both for developers, and for (mostly white) residents fleeing the urban core during the 90s. Those were not sustainable. Malls themselves were a bit of a private equity shell game which couldn’t last. The story of dead malls is more about capitalism and land use policy than just Amazon.

I’ll never forget Forest Fair Mall in those first years though. It’s 1.5 MILLION square feet, and it was absolutely packed, especially during Christmas. Humongous fountains, sand sculptures, live music… every single spot of its airfield-like parking lot was full. The only thing today that I think comes close, if younger people want the experience, is the main concourse of a top ten airport.

That sucks to hear, at one point I was really hoping it would become a viable yt alternative. Not that I ever expected their cryptocurrency to “moon” but it was at least an interesting idea to compensate people for seeding video.

When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king’s ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).

The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.

Thank you. It’s a new construction and the builder seems to generally pick really good subs, and I’m pretty sure whoever installed it did the entire house, so they should be familiar with it. I’ll give them a call.

Can I pester you with a question? Feel free to tell me to get bent because I know your time is worth money and this is just the internet. We have a new Trane system that was flawless when it was first put in, but over the past five months the blower has started making louder and louder vibration noises. Almost like it’s slightly off balance. If it was an older system I wouldn’t think twice, but it was dead quiet at first, just the sound of moving air pretty much.

Part of me wants to open up the cabinet and just see if there’s some sort of vibration pad that’s gotten loose, but I also don’t want to to void a warranty, or something. It seems so trivial a thing. We live in the boonies and a service call is pretty onerous for a tech. I thought maybe there could be balancing weights, like a car wheel or a lawnmower blade, but your comment about motors being sealed is making me think twice.

I paint. I sold through a gallery for awhile but it just wasn’t worth it when I could make ten times more for far less work doing my original job, so now it’s back to just for fun. Also I hate painting portraits of rich people but if you don’t do that it’s really hard to make money. I also hated the mandatory social media removed. Engaging in that ecosystem disgusts me.

Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!

I think some people want to find morels so bad they get a sort of “buck fever” and convince themselves they’ve found one. That’s all I can imagine because to my eyes they would be hard to mix up. Same with chanterelle and false chanterelle. Like… sure, I guess if you are profoundly incautious.

Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she’s had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won’t run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven’t seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.

Between deer pressure and Lymantria dispar I’m worried my woods will never see a mature oak again after the current over story dies out.

Was it this thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.

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.

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.