I’ll just stick with VSTi plugins

This is amazing!

I have gotten to the point that when a scifi world is made futuristic by having… traffic jams in the sky, and futuristic cities absolutely must have magic sky cars in their skyline but there is ZERO thought towards futuristic mass transit I just shut it off.

We already have flying cars that people use as their primary vehicle, it is called living in the middle nowhere Alaska and owning a bush plane. The thing is, that is actually the only kind of situation where everyone owning a flying car makes sense, extreme isolation, huge empty distances and no roads.

The whole point of a city is NOT to need something like a flying car.

Came here to ask the same question, any SAM would do really :)

Fight Now Or Be Deported Later

Productivity is part of the dominant theology of (at least) Western culture and functionally extends and replaces the societal functions of christian (also other religions) conservatism to centralize power in a rigid and defensive structure of guilt and judgement.

Check out modern board gaming, chess is a mediocre abstract game with no theme that is very unsatisfying to play unless you are evenly matched with someone.

Republicans are saner here than most other places as well. Not

“the pit vipers in this apartment are wayyy less aggressive than most other pit vipers so I consider it a plus”

Read good fiction or literature, those are the bread and butter processes of critically reading truly good fiction that doesn’t hamfistedly oversimplify the human condition.

Here are some recommendations:

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

or

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

I am not talking about scifi that is more interested in the technical details of space war than giving characters depth, though there is plenty of amazing scifi of course!

Why play chess when you can play more fun modern strategy board games (especially to lose) Concordia, Dominion, Agricola, Wingspan, Keyflower, Yellow & Yangtze etc…?

Chess is fine, but there are far more stimulating experiences in modern board gaming that are just as deep and a hell of a lot more fun.

Yes, it is called any decent critically acclaimed video game.

Don’t listen to non-sense about games designed by “experts” to be tuned to make you smarter… it is a bunch of variously smarmy or disengenous people who really do a massive intellectual injustice to the actual experts at interactive media design… video game designers… ALSO modern board game designers.

Modern society is so sick that we would rather listen to tech bro scammers apply pseudo science over artists who don’t bullshit about knowing precisely why something stimulates your mind scientifically and get to the actual hard work of making virtual experiences challenging and meaningful.

Seriously, I find this cottage industry of “brain games” VERY insulting to the decades long movement of video game design.

Look it isn’t that I won’t consider not supporting genocide, it is that your tone and the manner that you bring up the fact that I support the genocide makes me feel bad so out of spite I will continue to support the genocide, and now how do you feel?

This is all your fault.

/s

I love it because at first you think hey, it is a play on Dictator, which must mean the superpower is being able to psychically control an army of ducks, which if I could choose which animal I could mind control with my super power I wouldn’t choose ducks but sure, take what you can get right? There are after all ducks everywhere so there is probably some angle you can play with your super power there.

Nope though, keep lowering your expectations.

I can turn ducks around… but only when they are in the water

Yes, this is basically every large US tech company right now

good, there is no other way to respond to Trump

Kodak went from being a major player in the photography industry to being completely blindsided by digital photography.

Genocide Profiteer not War Profiteer

Fuck you Microsoft, if I wasn’t already done with you for completely enshittifying your operating system, I would DEFINITELY be done with you for this.

Fuck off and continue to become a Kodak or Yahoo or other still existing washout company that totally lost the plot.

Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.

Almost as entitled as the corporations who want to charge us rent to do something relatively simple like this on a modern computer, and have actively attempted to undermine general accessibility to tools like this in order to profit more.

To give a specific example of how powerful Blender is, in geology there are very very very very expensive 3d modelling programs and then there is like… Sketchup which I guess Google hasn’t abandoned? idk… even the basic GIS software for geologic mapping from ESRI is expensive AF, especially if you want to do any fancy 3d rendering or map making.

Enter this guy

You already know this guy is cool as fuck just from that photo, but let me tell you how exactly how lowkey cool Marcus Schwander is.

(btw I have zero connection to this guy, I know next to nothing about him, I literally just found his videos from searching “Blender Geology” on youtube randomly)

His video series shows quite clearly and exhaustively how to do extremely complicated geologic mapping of complex fold belts with lots of faults using Blender. What I can’t stress enough is that the workflow he is detailing in the proprietary software world would be EXTREMELY niche, require exhaustive licensing and setting up payment and getting software keys… blah blah blah and ultimately it would be a very expensive workflow, possibly requiring software licenses that cost thousands of dollars or more (I am not kidding). On top of the prohibitive cost, any kind of documentation, additional plugin development, or content creators who make tutorials about how to use the tools is an order of magnitude rarer for those tools because access to the tools in the first place is so prohibitive (and is usually only along narrow circumstances, not the kind of situation someone would organically decide to make a youtube tutorial channel about a software that costs $30,000 a license necessarily). In contrast, try searching for “Blender tutorial” in youtube and just take a cursory glance and the absurdly exhaustive amount of resources out there about learning Blender.

I have been teaching myself Blender because I want to make similar tutorial videos because it is ridiculous to me idea that in 2025 geologists don’t have an open format to visualize geologic structures and map them in a natural 3d environment that can be then shared with other geologists, in a established non-proprietary format that a geologist can ensure that any other geologist can open and view the model/data themselves, because again if you have a computer you can get Blender…

I am firmly of the belief that Blender should be taught as a basic part of a Geology curriculum along with a GIS class, not a primary focus or anything, but the tool is so general and so broadly useful that I think we owe it to future scientists to teach everybody we can how to use Blender.

As a last point, I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting using Blender to make cool fancy cinematic visualizations of Geology because it looks cool, or suggesting trying to do lots of complex modelling and computation in Blender instead of a GIS software, those are both awesome uses of Blender but what I am suggesting is that by simply teaching the next generation of Geologists how to use a 3d modelling software just for the simple purposes of giving them a tool to sketch out ideas or explore a geologic map from a 3d perspective (which can be useful ESPECIALLY when talking to other people about specific geologic structures that are difficult to explain without a 3d perspective to point to) Blender is going to forever change how Geologists use computers to do Geology.

It is a cool moment because on the flip side… there is a LOT of money in Geology and I think the Blender community could and will absolutely find serious, sustainable long term funding from Geology companies and academia associated entities that could massively bolster development capability and funding security.