Ross Scott

WHAT IS THIS: GOG gave me 10 copies of Iron Harvest to give away to people, so I'll be giving them out here on September 12th. HOW TO ENTER: This has nothing to do with GOG or the game, but tying back to my GUI video, an online archive of Winamp skins was recently made public that shows an incredible variety with over 65k skins. 1. Go here: https://skins.webamp.org/ 2. Browse through the collection and pick out the skin you like the most. This should be something you would skin your whole OS with this theme if you could. 3. Right click on the image, click "copy image address" and post in this thread. If you could also list the name of the skin (it's shown at the bottom when you click on it on the site), that would be appreciated, but not mandatory. That's it! I'll pick the top 10 I think are the best sometime on Saturday, September 12th. I'll announce the winners here and private message them the keys for the game. ADDITIONAL TIPS: -Many of the skins just have a big picture of a celebrity or a scene from a movie, don't pick these, these will NOT win. I want to see stuff that looks like it's its own coherent look for a GUI. -I'll probably be biased towards stuff that looks slick and would make a great theme for an OS in general. If it's really cool looking, those might win also. -Only one entry per person. If you want to show off more you found, try to use the "spoiler" tag in the post (the eye icon) for those. If you post more than one, I'm automatically going to assume the first skin listed is your entry and not count the others. -Only one winner per skin. If multiple people pick the same skin, I'll select one of them at random, so you have better odds if you pick a skin nobody else has already.

This stuff is just meant as a proof of life that I'm still working on things. I agree it's not as interesting, that's why I make the old chats unlisted. More real videos coming!

Ask questions or topics to discuss here for the next videochat with fans on 5:00pm UTC on September 6th at twitch.tv/rossbroadcast. Running behind again, but FM + RGD are both partially done, don't know which will be completed first, but they're coming ASAP! This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

It was probably the high after having a video completed, it feels like a weight off my back when that happens. Actually only one person responded, then disappeared on me. I may end up having to do this myself. I absolutely can't afford to offer thousands for this unfortunately. That would be closer to the entire budget for the movie.

I get what you're saying, but I don't see how it matters outside of theory. Yes, there's a difference between not being able to produce enough food v. mismanaging the economy so that vast numbers of people don't have resources in order to purchase food. In either scenario, people go hungry. Housing is a good example of this. We're projected to evict 40 million people in the USA. Do we just not have homes for them? No, of course we do, but we're managing things so we don't. Unless there is a major intervention, that throws tens of millions of people out on the street. This raises instability for society all around and I honestly don't know how that plays out, but probably nothing good. I think you may not understand how peak oil works. We could have oil for thousands of years or even infinite in theory, that's actually irrelevant. Peak oil is when we hit maximum rate of production. Yes, there's tons of shale oil, but it's more energy intensive to get out of the ground. So, regardless of the cost, we get less oil back for the amount of oil we spend extracting it compared to traditional wells. Peak oil is all about the RATE of production. So say in order for us to be functioning as normal, we need X oil outputted each day. We could have infinite fields, but if we can only extract them at a rate of X - 1, then we start having problems and that contracts the economy. Since our economy is fragile and we're incredibly dependent on oil, this causes job losses, increased prices in essential goods and almost inevitably causes a depression. I think my analogy to a car engine overheating in the video is an apt one. We can go through a depression, which causes a drop in demand of oil. As soon as we try to recover because demand has dropped, if we're successful, we'll slam up against the limits of supply again, over and over. I don't see a way out of this with our current economic system. As for CO2 relationship, that almost is irrelevant also. I think you might be mistaken on that and the reason that projections have been off is the oceans absorb more heat than we anticipated, but again, it's almost besides the point. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere reacts with saltwater to make it more acidic, thus killing off large swaths of the ecosystem. Maybe fossil fuel burning is the main culprit, maybe it's a loss of biomass from human activity, maybe it's mass cultivation of cattle that's increasing the temperature. Again, in my eyes, we're still headed to the same destination. So even if increased CO2 isn't the main culprit for the warming itself, we ARE still warming and the CO2 IS raising hell with the health of ocean. You can call me closed-minded, but I'm not interested in a debate on whether man-made global warming is happening or not. Speaking purely anecdotally, I haven't seen snow for the past couple winters in Poland and summers are more intense than what used to happen. I tend to trust the bulk of evidence by the scientific community to be the closest thing we have to truth, it's not like this is all based on one fringe study. I'm a fan of Carl Sagan's quote of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." At this point, I think humans NOT warming the planet is the extraordinary claim. Think what you want, I'm convinced we have huge problems. Now the EXTENT of how bad this will all be and by when is a complete unknown to me, I'm definitely interested in theories along those lines.

The way our current economy is structured, I think it does. Publicly traded corporations earn most revenue in the economy. Their CEOs have fiduciary duties to maximize profit. If they're lax in that duty, they can be sued or fired. This means there's no "enough" revenue. They need to increase it year after year to satisfy shareholders. If growth STOPS or REVERSES for most companies, we have a recession or depression which can affect billions negatively, leading to more homelessness, hunger, inability to afford basic goods and services, etc. So in order for things to be "okay" under the economy, there has to be ongoing growth. Our economic system simply isn't designed for anything else. I'm not saying you can't design an economic system that doesn't rely on growth, I'm saying that's not what we currently have, at all. Regarding the homelessness comment, we've also had the greatest extraction of resources at any point in history also. This makes anything look better by comparison for the short term. As demand outstrips supply for essential resources, this could unleash poverty like we've never seen before. My point being is you say homelessness now isn't as bad as in the 18th century. That may not be the case by the end of the 21st if enough systems collapse. Demographic growth may be leveling off, but my understanding is it would settle at 11 billion. If that's still WAY past the carrying capacity of the Earth, that's still unsustainable. A figure I remember when I did Oil's Well is that without oil, the carrying capacity of the earth is about 1 billion. Now technology may have made that number better, but considering the ecological impact we're having on the planet right now, I think all signs point to us being overextended. We're collapsing ecosystems also and many biologists argue we're in the sixth mass extinction. I honestly don't know how that plays out for the survival of humanity other than "probably not great." Even without that though, much of the progress and breakthroughs and population explosion we've had for the past 150 years or so can largely be traced back to oil. It's what fueled the machines we used to develop better technology and even now, is absolutely essential for transportation. Alternatives do exist to oil. However, there's nothing even CLOSE as far as the SCALE we use it at without massive, massive infrastructure changes that are decades off in good times. I mean I think I get what you're saying. We have absolutely copious amounts of resources that if they were wisely managed, could probably last us millennia. That's not what we're doing though. An analogy I make is to imagine a pioneer colony like Jamestown. Imagine they hunted all the game in the area and harvest all edibles and had enough food to last the winter if they were careful about it. Now imagine instead of rationing, they decided to have massive feasts every day in celebration and ended up going through all their food stores in a month. Things would look GREAT and promising in that first month. They would probably all be dead by the third month. Even though the situation is more complex, I see that general kind of dynamic playing out on a much larger and longer scale.

August videochat with fans. More rambling, I don't remember any one topic dominating, but it's kind of a blur. This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

Don't worry, next stop is escapism land and we may not be coming back. The next Game Dungeon might be almost manic, I'll have to see how it goes.

I wasn't aware it was DX12 only, fair enough, so 5.5 years if we start getting some more DX12 ones I wasn't referring to anything actually, just that maybe in the future an indie dev could make something in a similar vein. As for Cyberpunk 2077, I've been intentionally staying in the dark on it, my guess is it's going to be sort of an outlook from another time looking at an alternative reality, but I really don't know. I'm not expecting it to be prophetic, just awesome. I KNEW somebody was going to draw that conclusion and was hesitant whether I should spell it out in the video. Answer: no. I'm saying it should be illegal for contracts to state that the developer can NOT release on another platform. If they don't want to port to another platform by their own volition, that's fine. I'm not saying they should be REQUIRED to release on something else. I realize this is a really radical stance to take, but it's literally what was in place for movies for a long time. This might literally be the last video I make where I get into heavy topics (aside from dead games, I'm not done with that). I just kind of wanted to get it out of the way. I'm not kidding about wanting to go back to the escapism side! I simplified it for sure, the article is a good read. Your take on it is apt, however it ALSO includes the massive defunding, so it's a combo-punch. True, it doesn't literally mean it's codified they are above the law, I just see this as a significant change historically. The IRS had them, but they fought back by essentially exerting power over the agency itself and it's going to leave a substantial impact on the agency. I've only seen evasion tactics in the past, not actual power plays like this. Oh it will decline with a major MAJOR collapse, but by then it almost doesn't matter. With all the talk of renewable energy, the #1 use of oil is in transportation. Demand can grow and fall, but demand for GOODS, like FOOD, can only drop so much! My understanding is we're decades behind where we need to be on that in order to have a smooth transition and that's assuming an otherwise normal infrastructure and economy. Some bad times coming! I can believe slightly less dire, I really am lost on the time table, I feel proud I thought of The Mist analogy for my perception on the matter. I think we're in agreement that it's all about trajectory. If I saw WWII-levels of change occurring on this, I wouldn't be making foregone conclusions, but we're really not on a good path. I didn't even get as pessimistic as I could have. Since global warming isn't the only threat on the table. There's just the plain footprint of humanity which is devastating the ecosystem in other way. Maybe we can engineer our way out of it, maybe we can't. I always think of the faith in technology solutions being the equivalent of pulling an all nighter to prepare for a test instead of studying ahead. Maybe it will be enough, maybe it won't! " (I disagree with the "infinite growth is not sustainable in a finite world" school of thought, but that's a different matter) " I could almost be willing to do a debate on that. At some point, you run into Newton's conversation of energy being issue. I guess if you got into real sci-fi territory, like the mass generators in Supreme Commander, you open up options, but I think ultimately there are limits. I think of Moore's Law. It held true a LONG time, but eventually stopped working due to physical limitations. Well you JUST SAID you don't hold out hope for political solutions, that's 100% a political solution. Anyway, If anyone was confused, my purpose wasn't to be doom and gloom, but more I feel like too many discussions on climate bury the lede, whereas I'm coming at this from a "let's assume we're going to continue not being smart collectively and figure out where that takes us" perspective. Hey, it's not like I KNOW, I'm in the fog of badness! To be honest I'm not even sure we have a complete disagreement on the conclusion, from what you were saying it sounds like I drift 10% one direction, you drift 10% the other.

The third Game Dungeon Follow-up! This ended up taking about as much time to make as I thought it would, though it's a little deceptive, since I did an overkill amount and had to shelf a lot of what I was going to say for a future follow-up episode. I tried to limit it to what I thought most needed a response instead. More videos planned for this month, "Coming soon!" This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

Here's the July videochat. This went on longer than I meant for it to. I remember discussing EA, Game box covers, corporations, Trackmania, and more games. Game Dungeon follow-up episode will be next in line! This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

I tried that one in the store, I liked the shape and how it had a ring finger button, but the thumb buttons are a non-starter for me. I have meaty thumbs and I just can't see myself adjusting to buttons that small, ever. If it had a modular design like the Roccat Nyth, I would probably go for it.

Whoops, oh well.

You bring up a lot of points here. The short version is I both agree and disagree with you. I'm going to focus on some parts I think you may not have thought out as thoroughly, so it might seem like I'm being overly negative, but just assume the stuff I'm NOT bringing up I more or less agree with you: I think we actually both agree that mouse TARGETS are awful. One line I left out of the video is that ideally, if you knew what you were doing, you should be able to navigate a GUI blind. You're claiming this isn't possible on the mouse. Under NORMAL circumstances, you're correct. This is why I was so excited about mouse gestures. You CAN use those blind! I would postulate it's not the mouse itself that's the problem, so much as how we've designed the GUI to use it. If "using the mouse" only meant a series of rapid swipes that you could literally do blindfolded, I think we would have far closer parity to the keyboard. I'm probably not changing your mind, but I wanted to try to plant the seed that the way mouse is used now doesn't have to be the end-all. I think simply as a pure peripheral, it has more potential than you've giving it credit for, even though I'm in agreement most of what we have now is awful. See, that might show the difference in philosophy in our approaches. I think we both recognize there's a problem, but I see changing what the web looks like as a lost cause, I look at that as ceded ground; I'm not going to win that battle. So the best I can do is find the most efficient options to adapt to the world we have before us. That world means that if you're having a mouse, SOME tasks will be faster, even though I'm completely with you that even the ones as that are faster may not be as fast as they theoretically COULD be, however if that ONLY works and theory and can't adapt to the real world, then that's something I write off. Sometime like a random website is something I'll never have control over, so I need to find tools on MY end to interact with it faster. A final point I think you're missing: Even in your perfect world where you had full control over the development software, I think there would STILL be functions that would be faster via a mouse. This comes to visual manipulation in particular. I work a lot with multimedia. Say I need to resize an image, but I don't know exactly what the dimensions should be, I need to see it in front of me to know what's just right. Say I need to scan a video and find the exact point, but I don't know where on the timeline it is, I need to scan until I find the exact point. Sure, with a keyboard, I can press arrow keys one at a time, or skip by 10% or 10 frames, etc, but it's going to be a tedious process and depending on how close I am, I'm probably tapping the keys 20 times or more to get the image or video position JUST right. Unless there's something I haven't though of, the keyboard is ill-suited to these types of tasks regardless of how the software is designed. You said it yourself: the mouse is a continuum. It hits every single point in its path and be can used similarly to an analog device, which a lot of multimedia simply has a need for. So for me personally, because I can never escape this AND we live in a mouse oriented world, going full-keyboard just isn't the answer for maximum efficiency, because my workload is too diverse. If it's a more limited situation like what you were describing, yes, keyboard only + a full redesign could be the fastest option. Anyway, I'll talk about this in the followup video.

I think the constellation style still has smaller targets than would be optimal for maximum efficiency, but the hex-style movements could have potential, especially if the user could scale the size to what they wanted. It certainly seems to have enough going for it to consider it as another option. To answer your question for what I do know about programs I can't recall the name of, it's like this: -Programs I definitely know what they are -Programs I maybe recognize if I see their names -Programs I can't remember what they are This is why my "Core" folder had significance. I wanted to separate as many common workhorse programs from the pack as I could to minimize what I'm sifting through. I remember programs I use frequently for years, I don't necessarily remember one I only need every 6 months or couple years or so. I think you're looking at this in reverse. I want to see what the best looking GUI Linux has in terms of functionality and appearance. That can be shown via screenshots or videos, installing the OS isn't necessary for me to get a sense of that. If I'm not impressed by either, that makes me feel like I'm in no man's land with Linux and isn't going to make me want to switch. Now those are both highly subjective, but if 98% of what I'm being shown is terminals + flat themes, that's not what's going to win me over. This why I was hoping for more variety of looks. If I'm convinced Linux has a great solution, I'll pursue it then worry about the distro then. In other words, I want my goal laid out for me, THEN figure out how to get there. As for gaming, that's a separate animal from the GUI. Go to this thread if you want to talk about that. I plan to look into Linux gaming more thoroughly in the future, specifically for legacy 3D accelerate games looking the best they can (forced AA, etc.).

I got around to looking at this, best I can tell, there's no way to replicate the functionality of the start menu here (in other words a dropdown menu showing all the programs you have installed dynamically). Am I missing something in the options? It looks more like a customizable shortcut launcher. I did see a dropdown menu option, but I couldn't figure how to get it to display the start menu programs. Compound that with the fact that the Start menu is really composed of at least 2 folders. For example, on my computer, the start menu programs are split among the following folders: C:\Users\GIZMONIC\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs So you would need a dropdown folder that could merge the contents of both those. I'm not sure if either of those are possible.

Isaiah: More text hiding so as not to spam the chat: The bottom line, which may explain many of the perceived contradictions I have is that the GUI is not a one-size-fits all situation. An operation that's efficient for one task may be awful for another. Again, it all comes down to time and effort, wanting to minimize both of those across a variety of situations. Also, this is actually helpful for the followup, I can explain the general logic in the followup video which should help clear up confusion for anyone else who thought I wasn't making sense.