Had an ‘ok’ nights sleep. Jamie killed my alarm so overslept somewhat though. Got stuck into work and basically wasted most of the day on trying to sort strings out. Someone in the past in their infinite wisdom decided it would be a great idea to output them using multi-byte, which is fine if you know what locale you’re in, or in the case of multi-player what locale everyone else is in. So I changed it to Utf8, then everyone kind of moaned (mostly for valid reasons), so I changed it back again. Spent all afternoon and all evening working on DX warnings, getting some really strange shit come up. Like we copy a multi sampled texture to a normal render target, binding it to a Texture2D, god knows how it works, it produces a DX warning saying that it doesn’t. Weather was dryish but miserable, Sasha had to make do with a shorter walk. I was kind of fuming by that stage anyway and my chest was feeling very tight.

Got a message from an old friend I worked with over twenty years ago. He was starting a new job at a media company. He was saying that artists were finding it difficult to find jobs. He was an artist, he once said, “Programmers are like secretaries without the tea making skills.” At the time I didn’t have a comeback. But twenty years later, I came back with, “Any fucker can use a pencil.” It was worth the wait.