tiredofsametab

I have domain knowledge for some usages at least, and worked on things that were converted fairly recently from COBOL and places that still had AS/400 and such in use. I am aware I would need experience (beyond personal) before any real money would be there.

I live and work in Japan where dev salaries are much lower so, if I could just get a contract gig in USD, that would be pretty big for me especially with 1usd being 150 JPY or more

It won’t be my first and I’m not going super ambitious or AAA. If it takes me 5 years to do it, that’s fine.

I wrote my first game in straight C with no laptop so literally writing code on paper when not at a PC which I would later type in later

I’ve fallen down the rabbithole. I’m reading a free course (from 2001ish) on Cobol.

COBOL is Maintainable

I now question everything. I mean, technically, basically anything is maintainable in that it’s possible…

I always wonder if I should just learn COBOL and try to just do a few juicy contracts a year and focus on my other pursuits (farming and considering making a game, as well as vacation of course) the rest of the year.

I doubt it. It’s still used in a whole lot of medical and banking applications where there’s a lot of text manipulation since it’s really good at that (HL7 and other EDI stuff for instance).

Thou doughnut. Thou Ohio toilet. A pox upon thy rizz. May thine aura either.

rice cooker, slow cooker, or pressure cooker.

I literally had none of these at the time I mentioned. I had I think two pots and a frying pan.

over 90% of the American population live within 15 minutes of a Walmart (with three quarters being within 5 minutes from one)

Citation? I sure didn’t.

if they don’t already have more than one grocery store in their area.

We had one and that was anywhere close. Again, remember gas money and travel time were issues for me. Like every cent of gas and food money.

Please don’t diminish someone’s ability to really improve their life with very little effort

But it’s fine for you to tell the working poor to basically ‘git gud’ and find money to spend on things, places to spend it, and time to do so? Particularly the ones without vehicles? The ones who deal in cash and don’t have debit or credit cards to order online?

there really is no such thing as a food desert.

Again, there are people who do not have bank accounts or cannot regularly access them to spend money online and most places these days aren’t going to do CoD. This is also just misinformation.

"The consensus established at the NIH workshop was that food insecurity and unhealthy neighborhood food environments contribute to diet-related chronic diseases that worsen health disparities. Addressing these challenges would help tackle nutrition security, a growing priority for the USDA and other federal agencies [83]. Several factors, including social determinants of health such as employment, housing, and education, severely limit access to affordable, nutritious food among various racial/ethnic minority and rural populations. " from the conclusion/summary of https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)66352-X/fulltext which also mentions food deserts elsewhere in the work.

The worst thing we can do is convince people that they are powerless

Of course they’re not powerless, but your “solutions” are blind to just how shit the situation is. I’m telling you this as a very annoyed person who lived it. You’re telling people to come up with time, means, and money out of nowhere. “It’s just $10” is insulting to some people who are choosing between food and medicine or heat or electricity. You are saying to empower yet victim-blaming by saying they’re not doing enough.

I love to cook and always have. When I was working 2 jobs (and some additional freelance/part time) to keep a roof over our heads, there was zero chance I had the time, money, and energy to cook. Living in a food desert, I would have to spend gas money I didn’t have to go to a proper store to buy things and that would eat about 50 minutes more of my already-sleep-deprived day. Don’t even get me started on when I lived out of a car for a while. And I’m fortunate that I even had the car. Public transit was terrible where I lived at the time and basically useless unless you want to spend 3-4 hours a day commuting. There were no sidewalks and multi-lane roads with high speed limits. The social safety net is also in terrible shape, moreso today than back then.

“Only $10” also shows how out-of-touch you can be for the real situation that people have, particularly in areas of the rust belt and coal mining areas where the employers frequently left. I also worked in worker’s comp in healthcare IT and let me tell you that people with lifelong problems from the mines frequently get denied care as the mines fight just about everything, so there are people who have a really rough time and need more care for their families which is still more time and money in places with few jobs left to go around. These people also don’t have the resources to “just move”, either. This doesn’t even go into the opioid epidemic that also is an issue from overprescription in those areas and other confounding factors.

I live in Japan and am overweight, though slowly dropping it. Two years ago, I went back for the first time in like 6+ years and was shocked and horrified at how huge people were.

A lot aren’t going to have a huge opinion because easily-modded games aren’t a thing due to platform. PC gaming was always a very niche hobby here with most people not owning PCs. That has somewhat started to change recently, but that basically left other platforms where mods were either available (for free or paid) from the publisher or very difficult to go about at all as compared to modding common games on PC.

Based on my incredibly non-scientific “watching some stuff on youtube over the years” method, my money would be on Minecraft turning things around a bit as I did see Japanese creators playing a lot of modded minecraft on youtube.

Not all modding goes that far, but I do think you put well how many see it. I should also note that things like ALTTPR do not make money and are free for any to download and use with their own ROM (i.e. require that you own the game yourself). The are simply meant to add replayability and variety.

Re-arranging the items, varying the power/defense of enemies, etc. doesn’t seem to fit that case very well to me. There are, of course, mods that do a lot more than those are definitely more akin to what you wrote.

I love ALTTPR (link to the past randomizer) and my wife is amazed that people would upload themselves playing it because it alters the author’s work (even though it just removes custscenes and moves around items and screen transitions, basically). People have apparently gotten in trouble for streaming it in Japan on monetized channels. As someone who lives in Japan, it’s why I don’t upload it even on something not monetized. I own a physical copy of the game as well.

Most Japanese see it this way which, to me, is really weird when all kinds of grey-market anime and managa stuff has a blind eye turned toward it.

Because of decisions that Blizzard under Kotick made, both in terms of products but also how they treated their customers, employees, and fans, I haven’t given them a cent of my money nor playtime. Maybe someday I’ll be convinced to come back to them. Bethesda’s basically there as well for Fallout76 leading up to its release and after. Take2 and Gearbox as well.

As someone who speaks conversational Japanese (well, probably more since I do banking, doctor, etc. on my own, but my grammar is far from perfect), and fluent English, Google’s AI can make some… questionable choices when translating at least. My wife (fluent Japanese speaker who knows a little English) and I decided to play with its translator function when I got a pixel phone and once again a bit latter trying to come up with some English practice for her.

Japanese is definitely a bit more difficult to work with since it’s so context-dependent and has lots of homophones (one reason translating things into Japanese and back can be interesting, particularly in the older days of Google Translate). It’s fine for short, concise, and non-complex sentences, but even certain formal grammar and honorifics can be bad with the AI translation services.

• moved in my early 30s
• had studied Japanese in a couple of classes and then mostly on my own, but I could navigate and order food. My reading was (and still is) fairly bad
• not really. Partly due to age, but I do quite like it here. It would take something huge to make me move again
• no real stories that I can think of. Expect communication issues and accidental hurt feelings due to language/culture issues at first as it’s pretty unavoidable whilst learning.

Everyone I’ve known here who works in film, anime, manga, etc. work ridiculous hours with shit work-life balance. I’m sure that’s not true of everyone, but especially the smaller studios. It is something that needs to be addressed and, to its credit, the government has imposed more penalties on crazy work hours and upped enforcement, but it’s hard to catch the people who aren’t reporting their actual hours even if there are now penalties on the employees themselves as well for not doing so. There need to be some big, systemic changes in a lot of those areas here because it is also, in part, a culture issue.

identifying anime and video games as core industries in its revised Cool Japan strategy.

I’ll be impressed if the ‘Cool Japan’ program is proven to be more than primarily for domestic consumption to say “look! we’re doing something!”

You should be glad we raped, plundered, murdered, and enslaved you!

Imagine if someone in government said this about Japan and Korea, Manchuria, etc. (and this is something that some far-right Japanese groups believe and say and is met with predictable reprehension domestically and abroad).

I can try to answer. I’ve lived in Japan for almost a decade (this is my 10th year).

Yeah, some is specific to Japan, though there will be similar hurdles anywhere the US has an agreement (and that the target country’s institutions actually follow it, I suppose).

I have a couple of retirement accounts in the US that I contributed to before (I moved overseas in my early 30s) that I basically can’t touch for a number of reasons right now. Just wanted to throw it out there.