Playing Canasta again for the first time in ages since Yahoo Games went down.  Still winning most my games with no contest and remembering the last 10+ cards played.  If anyone wants to 1v1, I'm on Canasta-Palace.com



Edit: And made it to 5-stars rating in one day. Bahaha!

Guy punches himself in the mirror and hurts his fist.  He gets pissed, punches his reflection's face, and knocks himself out.

- a dream I just woke up from. If anyone wants to do this as an animation on commission, let me know lol

So many people over the years kept asking why I didn't just build @TechTraderAI on Quantopian (besides the technical impracticalities), and here is the answer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/quant-trading-platform-quantopian-closes-down

Some posts still online (example Reddit), but mostly in-person and at conferences/events.  

Especially after Adobe used a killswitch on everything built on Flash, the last thing you want to do anymore is make anything important on someone else's platform where you are dependent on them to keep things running.

Funny to think only 6 years ago I was naively trying to share everything like candy.  Different times for sure.

Below are steps so that, from your personal email account, you can "send as" from the same email address as that used in a Google Group under a business account.  The information is not really spelled out anywhere, so I'm writing this down for future reference.

1.  Login to the business account primary email (the owner / admin).
2.  From Gmail, go to Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as.  Add the Google Group address here once.
3.  Login to your personal email account in Gmail, which should also be a member of the Google Group to receive messages.
4.  Go to Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as.  Add the same Google Group address here again.

For the login credentials, you'll need to use a user email (non-Google group) from the domain of the business and for password, it needs to be an app password generated specifically for this.

Nothing Lasts Forever by Benjamin Walfisch (@benwallfisch)

Kagerou Project on Guitar Cover by Osamuraisan (@niconicosamurai)

Vocaloid Piano Covers by tjpiano (@tojio_)

Million Medley by marasy8 (@marasy8)

Drifting by Kristen Personius

The Love of a Dunmer by Bosa (@JonBabbLiberty)

Jet Set Radio Future OST by Hideki Naganuma (@Hideki_Naganuma)

Yorushika Piano Full Medley arranged by Polalice Alvireo (@PolaliceAlvireo)

1. Kid watches people fly on TV. Parent: "Humans can't actually fly. Our bodies are too heavy. It's just a myth."
2. 1000 yrs later... Extremely fat kid watches people run on TV. Parent: "Humans can't actually run. Our bodies are too heavy. It's just a myth."
=======================================
Just a random idea for a comic that came to mind.
(but I do secretly believe we used to be able to fly)

Another mystery/horror story that came as a dream (and somewhat terrifying one at that)...

----------------------------------

A group of friends are traveling to a new city and staying there for a bit. It is a tropical beach city - a sandy, walkable, small town with low-rise, shack-like residences.  They play video games as a team online the first night and joke about why they bother to name the group if they can't beat anyone yet.  After midnight, they order food delivered on GrubHub, since it's too late to go out and fall asleep after eating.

The next morning,...[More]

General notes and things I wish I knew as I delved deeper into #UE4:
- Package build by default includes unused assets, which can bloat the size of your game.  Go to Project Settings -> Packaging -> List of Maps to package only assets referenced by that map.  To be more aggressive and reduce unused assets in general (or to keep smaller backups), right-click your map and Migrate to a new project to create a new folder with only the assets used in your game.  More tips on this here.
- Shipping build will give you an instant 10-15 FPS increase, if you're trying to squeeze performance (ie for VR).  However, it disables using command line arguments (such as to create listen servers); the way to get around that is to build both shipping and dev in the same folder.  You can then create shortcuts to target the shipping or dev exe file depending if you want to launch server or client version of the game.
- Do not use numbers in the project folder name.  Otherwise builds will fail to run.
- Do not use Duplicate, as it moves the object slightly.  Use copy+paste.
- Never use...[More]

Sims 3 Generations Build Mode OST by Steve Jablonsky (@jablonsky_steve)

In case anyone finds it useful, this is the code I use to automatically detect US holidays.  I don't claim credit for it - added bits and pieces over the years from various sources until it was complete enough that I didn't have to worry about it anymore.

[code]
        public bool isHoliday(DateTime date)
        {
    ...[More]

Getting a Black Screen Trying to Login After a Remote Desktop Session

I recently started on occasion having a black screen come up when logging in.  This happens if I previously signed into Windows remotely.  The mouse is gone, keyboard does not work, etc.  It turns out this is caused by Nvidia's GeForce Experience ShadowPlay.  Disabling Shadowplay stops this from happening.

More details here:
https://superuser.com/questions/1026423/windows-10-black-screen-after-local-login-and-previous-remote-desktop-session

For those still using SMF1, PHP5 or later will throw a lot of deprecated errors and warnings, which quickly clog the error log.  This thread below isolates the 3 changes you need to clear them:
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=534915.0

To stop error logging internally to SMF:

To stop errors showing on the page itself:

"Game module could not be loaded. There may be an operating system error or the module may not be properly set up."

After reinstalling Unreal Engine, my project stopped loading up. The above error message was extremely unhelpful, especially as any search for it online referred to moving DLLs around which had nothing to do with my issue. It turns out what was missing was the exact version of Visual Studio that I had when I last worked on my project. It has to be the exact version with the extras for C++ game development included. Any newer or older version still returns the same error. In my case, it was Visual Studio 2019 paired with Unreal Engine 4.23.1; it took me a few reinstalls just to figure that out because the help docs point you instead to Visual Studio 2017.
This is more a reminder for myself in the future to avoid losing a day to this again, but maybe it helps save someone else the time as well.