MoonMelon

Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.

A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).

"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember [literally anything that's free of plastic]."

There's a nuke underwater somewhere off Tybee Island, GA.

Denethor prefers tomatoes raw. More explosive power.

Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar's Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.

It's been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the "glue" language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.

I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.

I think about that a lot.

I worked there during this time, and this pretty much confirms what everyone feared when the merger was announced. Part of me wants to read this book, but I know it will make me really mad.

Just a little anecdote, we had a meeting shortly after where Frank Pierce told us that major changes would basically happen over Morhaime's dead body. So when he left (and Pierce also) it was clear that it was over.

I agree with this. It's the artists, not necessarily the "style" itself. Basically the fundamentals of visual language are what's hard to master, just like writing beautiful poetry requires mastery of a written/spoken language. Artists that have spent the time and put enough thought and practice into creating their own unique voice will be difficult to replicate.

Some modern artists I can think off of the top of my head:

• Piotr Jabłoński's art for the Dishonored series
• Laurel Austin and Wei Wang's art that created the modern Blizzard look.
• Disney Studios' Nine Old Men.
• Craig Mullins the "grandfather" of digital painting.
• Traditional painters like Arthur Gain, Richard Schmid, Ruo Li, Mark Boedges, and on and on.

It's an interesting article, I couldn't help but think of how "Pirate Speak" really comes from Robert Newton's acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech's debasement of culture it's still a "top down" artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn't figured that shit out yet.

These big pharmacies have their own PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers) also, which is this middleman that sits between employee healthcare plans, drug manufacturers, and the pharmacy. CVS's is called Caremark.