Damn, Jedi Outcast used to be my favorite game for a looooong time. I remember so many online sessions and LAN parties with one on one lightsaber duels.

It’s probably mostly a matter of getting used to the way Darktable does things and where it puts certain controls.

That’s what Camera Raw’s basic tab looks like (not my screenshot, I’m at the linux laptop right now). It has most of what I need for a photo to look “okay” before I dive into the other tabs for more in-depth edits. I’m sure Darktable has equivalent functions to all of those (they’re very basic after all) but at least with the default UI presets, I need to look through many different tabs and modules with unfamiliar names to find them.

Then there’s warnings like “White balance applied twice”. Apparently I’m not allowed to use the white balance sliders because the color calibration module already applies white balance? But that module doesn’t provide an intuitive way to select color temperature and tint?

I’m sure I could get used to all of that. But right now I don’t have the time or energy to learn a completely new editing workflow from scratch. Many open source tools suffer from programmer UI syndrome (I’m allowed to say that, I’m a programmer myself). They do everything the lead maintainer needs them to do but you often need to be intimately familiar with the software’s inner workings to understand what each control in the UI does. I don’t want to think about the differences between “linear Bradford (ICC v4)”, “non-linear Bradford” and “CAT16 (CIECAM16)” color calibration formulas, especially not when I’ve set my UI to “workflow: beginner”. I just want to make my photo a tiny bit warmer. Give me sensible defaults and put the super detailed settings out of the way until I need them.

I switched my laptop to Arch a bit over a year ago but my desktop is still on Windows 11.

The main thing that’s holding me back is the lack of raw photo editing software that matches my workflow. I’ve tried RawTherapee, Darktable, RapidRAW and a couple of others. So far, everything was either cumbersome to use, was missing important features or had suboptimal performance. With dozens if not hundreds of candidates, even one more minute of editing time per photo can quickly add up. Many of my gigs are event photography and my clients often want at least the roughly edited previews within 24-48 hours.

If any of you knows a tool that accurately replicates the UX, feature set and performance of (ideally) Adobe Camera Raw or (not so ideally) Lightroom, you’d make me the happiest photography nerd on the planet. Bonus points if it correctly imports existing development settings in case I need to re-edit or re-export older photos.

PSA: if you recommend I use GIMP, like so many before you did, I will block you. GIMP is not a raw editor and it can’t even open most raw formats without help from one of the tools I mentioned above.

The wayback machine has a snapshot of my personal Age of Empires 2 and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds fan site from October 2002. Digging around a bit, the site and its forum must have been online since at least August of the same year. (Edit: if you dig around long enough you’ll probably find forum accounts from 2001 or even older but those old phpBB forums usually only have a fraction of their threads preserved).

The oldest thing that’s still in use is a forum account from September 2003. Last post with that account was two weeks ago. The community is not as active as it used to be but we still do in-person meetups at least twice a year.

People who post Ask Lemmy threads then delete them (or their whole account) a day later.

Mastodon does in fact not render markdown from other instances. They get converted to HTML by the sender instance.

International Women’s Day and start of daylight saving time in the USA. I guess this post is referring to the latter.

Hopping on a train alone for a couple of hours has been my default mode of transportation since long before I was 18. Mostly to visit friends so I didn’t have to worry about a place to stay overnight so if you don’t have that, maybe start out with a day trip.

That’s the universal human experience. Listen to every marginally famous person and they will tell you that a single negative comment feels like it weighs more than 100 positive ones. Then factor in that people who disagree feel compelled to voice their opinion while those who agree often silently nod to themselves and move on. So the 100 positive comments are likely representative of 500 people who agree but don’t say anything.

So far, you seem to be doing well. Don’t let a couple of the haters get to you.

Of course, if a pattern appears of many comments criticizing the same thing, then you can think about if there’s something you should change about your behavior. But even then, the change should come from your own realization that you want to change something, not from a desire to appeal to the faceless mass of terminally online weirdos.

Alice really is one of the most wholesome people on the fediverse.

From your other posts, I guess you are around 18 and this is your first long-term relationship. If that’s the case, don’t worry too much about it. Don’t expect your first relationship to last forever. Or your second. Or third. Enjoy what you have for as long as it lasts but don’t be afraid to move on when either of you becomes uncomfortable with it. If you treat every relationship as if it must last forever, you won’t recognize the signs if something develops in the wrong direction and you risk locking yourself into something you don’t want, just because you don’t realize that you have other options.

Breakups hurt like hell but they also help you grow. With each one you learn something about yourself, your life goals and what you like and dislike in a partner. I’m in my late 30s now and if you count everything that lasted longer than a year, I’m in my third long-term relationship right now, with a hand full of shorter ones in between. The longest one lasted for about seven years and ended because we figured out that our plans for the future had changed in a way that no longer fit together. Breaking up was the right choice and maybe we should have done it a bit earlier but at the same time, I’m grateful for every single day we had and regret nothing.

So in short: see where the journey goes. Be open-minded either way. Maybe you’ll stay together for another month, another year or another decade. Enjoy each other for as long as you’re both happy but don’t be afraid of ending things when you’re not.