oh this bloviating asshat

Yeah fuckface, borders are this thing in geopolitics which ALSO involves OTHER sovereign nations that might not WANT your fucking moron face there

GiMP needs to die. It is a misbegotten heap of well-intentioned, functional, held-together-with-love-and-bubble-gum half effort

It’s such a nutty claim for me to make… but I really believe any person on the Web circa 97-2005 and was involved in any kind of Web-based gaming has directly played at least one. Shockwave, Flash, Facebook no difference.

If you played any kind of web- or Internet-enabled, State-run lottery product anywhere in the world between 2010-2015 I would bet my actual life. And since the games I made were all localized for international audiences they were world-wide!

If you’ve been on a Riverboat Casino in the past 2 decades you’ve 100% played because I ran the game studio that made the games for a major supplier of riverboat Video Lottery Terminal games.

Holy shit… I never actually stopped and realized how many lives my crappy games touched…

What reparations are owed to the Indigenous people of the Vietnamese highlands, perpetrated against them for centuries against the other Indigenous people of the Vietnam lowlands?

The cruel reality is that humans kill and steal from each other in competition for resources and security. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bullet to the head or a dishonored agreemen. Land belongs to nobody, and whoever shows up and beats the fuck out of whoever’s there now “owns” it. It is very hard for people to look at several hundred K of years of human history and realize it’s always been this way and never will change.

I made several hundred games over my 20+ year career. I started making games for the world’s first touchscreen internet-enabled kiosks, the Playdium arcade in Toronto, etc. Moved onto online game development as senior dev for GameLoft.com, made the first online pari-mutuel gaming system, introduced online lottery technology to the world’s “Big 3” lotto companies. Made the first 3D tennis game. Honestly too much to even discuss as I could go on for hundreds of pages. Most people who are older than 30 have played my games and wouldn’t know it.

I gave everything away and now I live a simple life where I volunteer, work at crisis shelters, do recovery mentorship, housing outreach and other things. I am happy and I do not care about the trappings of the material world anymore. I chased the hologram until I caught it and discovered its true nature.

Just as casual conversation, what items or categories of goods do you usually deal with? Just wondering, as I myself have noticed “the boat” rocking back and forth between different online buying options for years. I live a pretty minimalist life now (used to be heavy tech) so I don’t buy much anymore and am pretty out of the loop now.

Effectively ALL of what I was told about what makes a satisfying and successful life. I was told the right thing to do is work hard, go to school, get a good stable job, get married, settle down, have kids, buy a house, own several depreciating assets.

Life is about being happy. Nothing else. Do what makes you happy, because that car, vacation, or other piece of consumer shit won’t. Nor will living by scripts somebody else wrote for you.

I had my house paid off at 30 and was traveling 5-6 times a year. High-level in the gaming, lottery and promotions industries. Misery. Now I have a humble life and I paint and craft things and I go dancing. And I’m happy. I could pick up the tools again and make a highly successful Steam game, but I won’t. I already proved my point in my career and creative output, and I don’t want to anymore.

Kindly do not portray DDG as an “alternative” because it is now trash as well.

2 years ago it was the alternative, today its a sidegrade at best