A short time ago, on my way home, I had a near fatal accident. For what seemed like an eternity, I was caught halfway between this world and the next. I figured I had a short time left, so I asked the devil’s right hand man what people get wrong about the hereafter.

“Well, first off, it was Lucifer’s idea to provide punishment. God was lamenting having to let in everyone in to heaven, when Lucifer suggested some deserved punishment. He volunteered to create a special place to torment them. That whole story about Lucifer falling out of grace is just typical human silliness, like sitcom canned laughter.”

I asked who determines where a dead person goes? “In some cases — murderers, lifelong wife abusers, kitty torturers — it’s pretty obvious they get the basement floor. I get first dibs to decide, and if I figure they’re not bad enough to earn a spot here, I let them go up.”

I asked if he keeps up on current world issues and whatnot. “Of course! Those corporate asshats who cause massive human suffering for their next quarterly earnings are top of my list. Luigi Mangione was a hero — inscribing delay, deny, depose on the bullets — it’s those kind of touches that make me smile.”

I hard a hard time believing a murderer, no matter how well intentioned, would go up. “No can do, he has to be down here. But I get to choose what he does, so I give him charge over all HMO CXOs, they all have it coming. Man, is he gifted! You should see the alternate reality he created for those sheisters, poor and unable to get any good healthcare, always being denied a scan, denied a visit, the contract always changes when they try to make a claim, such genius! I’m thinking of giving him staff to handle all the corpos who only exist for wealth extraction.”

He knew I was thinking about Jeffrey Epstein — after all, it isn’t just the Lord Almighty who can knows our thoughts! “For someone like Epstein, I take personal care of their torment. He lives the lives of the women he trafficked, but at the moment of penetration, it’s always in the ass, and feels like blowfish spines filled with itching cream. Then he lives the lives of all the men, but at the critical juncture, they can’t get it up, and when they look down they see their mother splayed out giving them birth. He sees a beautiful woman on a beach but can’t reach her. His screams are the stuff of legend.”

My mind wandered towards the Orange Hitler. “He will never be able to find a bathroom, his gender will keep changing constantly like that brilliant movie with Keanu Reeves whose face is ever changing, always unrecognizable.”

“There are numerous endings before it starts again, like his bladder bursting or having nothing to pee out of. There’s even combination endings, like the doors are locked but only for him, and as he scrambles out in the street to find a place to piss, he arrives just in time to see his family being shot in the face in their car just for being there. His whole world is limited to Minneapolis, he can’t escape it, and nobody ever helps him.”

“When he walks out in the street he gets handcuffed by Vanilla Ice with an ICE jacket singing Ice Ice Baby.”

I had a great time discussing these details with the Number 2 ruler of the eternal fires of damnation. But alas, all good things must come to an end, and I woke up safe and sound in a hospital bed, with the memories lingering for just a brief moment.

Doom is a popular video game from the 90s. It has since been ported to many devices, pretty much anything with a screen and computer chip capable of running it. EG, thermostats, printers, old Atari game machines from the 80s, etc. It is a right of passage to get Doom running on something it was never designed for.

Enter TransDoom, where the object is to kill as many trans people as possible, getting points for each death, losing points at the end of a level for any you failed to kill. There are also characters you should not kill, or you face a setback.

Below the characters I came up with, using Adobe Firefly image generator:

Trans Man

• 1,000 points for each kill
• Their clothing quickly disappears in flames, revealing they are really a woman pretending to be a man

Trans Woman

• 10,000 points per kill
• Their death cry is that they just want to see more tits

Adolf Grump

• Lose 10,000 points per kill
• Shouts “I just want to grab her pussy” as he muscles women and trans women into bathrooms
• Shouts in German about how the trannys will bring about the end of civilization, and we must preserve the Aryan race

Android Tater

• Lose 8,000 points per kill
• Shouts that noone can trust their eyes anymore, the trans people are attacking cis people in the real matrix we all live in

KKK Growling

• Lose 7,000 points per kill
• Muddles about, accidentally liking the wrong tweets on her phone, rambles about men in dresses in girls bathrooms, and seems uncertain about conversion therapies.

Cis Man

• Automatic level restart
• So manly nobody could ever think he is anything but straight up hetero six pack abs beef steak

Cis Woman

• Lose half your ammunition
• Ultimate feminist who can press her own body weight in the basement gym while her man makes her dinner.

This game would be fun to play, cause Doom is always fun! Bonus features:

• Numerous kinds of weapons to cause all kinds of mayhem
  - Grenades
  - Shotguns
  - Machine guns
  - Pistols
  - Knives
• Players can create their own characters
  - Upload a photo
  - Specify points (can be positive, zero, or negative)
  - Specify perils like end of level, lose ammo, stuck with worst weapon, move slowly, slow firing rate, frequent reloading
  - Use mic to provide a death cry
• Players can create levels and bonus items
• Automatic messages on social media platforms of your choice about:
  - Your kill rate (percentage of all characters in a level)
  - Percentage of trans kills
  - Percentage of special bonus items claimed
  - Percentage of life packs, guns, and ammo collected

Comment about what you want to see in such a game (epecially plot elements and characters).

I really hope somebody makes a game like this, I would proudly play it!

We have very creative payroll accountants

No thanks, I would rather just have the usual payroll accountants ensuring everyone gets paid on time with the correct amount of money — accountants who keep doing the same thing every year. Same goes for plumbers, and many other jobs — I need people who keep doing the same thing, and eventually reach a stage where they are as good as they ever get. These people enable me to have a variety of things I need in my daily life, such as:

• Internet service
• Phone service
• Insurance of various kinds
• Organizing volleyball games
• The job I currently hold
• Car repairs
• Gas stations
• Grocery stores

If you took any two successive years of my developer career, they are probably quite similar. Every now and then, I change companies, but within a given company as long as I am on the same project, I am pretty much doing the same thing from month to month.

Every now and then I get an interesting challenge. One project I worked on needed to use a map. We were using a JS map library to render objects overlaid on the map, and we were using PostGIS to do things like search for the airport nearest a geocoordinate. We needed to generate objects to be rendered on the map. Since we already had two GIS libraries in use, we did want to introduce a third. So we decided to use PL/pgSQL functions to generate these objects.

Generating these objects required revisiting some high school trigonometry I had not used in years of for loops, OOP, reflection, REST, SQL, JSP, HTML, and all kinds of other stuff I can’t even remember anymore. I knew how that trig worked off the top of my head. However, it was a case of using it in the right way, so the generated object would look correct on a map (eg, lines that are supposed to be parallel actually look parallel when zooming in, measured distances are correct, etc). It was a bit of a pain, but I got it right. It was a bit of fun once I got the first one working.

Even though GIS and mapping problems (namely making straight lines on a curved earth) sounds like some new challenge, was it really? In the end I used for loops, grade 11 math, and manual testing using geojson.io. The resulting SQL functions were simply part of the same scripts used to create tables and stuff.

Is debugging Java really different from debugging an SQL function? Is writing JSP code to generate HTML really different from some client side library? Arguably, I’ve been using the same underlying process all along for the last 19 years of writing software professionally. The languages change, the approaches change, but debugging is the same — there are still situations where I don’t have a debugger, and still situations where I do. Determining the best course of action is also the same, try the approach that seems best, and if it doesn’t work out, modify it, or try something else.

The point being, that computer programming is just another job. It isn’t special in any real way — we have managers, coworkers, and tasks we need to perform. We don’t always get along with our coworkers, we don’t always agree with our managers. Some programmers are arrogant and think they are god’s gift to programming. Some say stupid things like a programming language isn’t ready for a given approach. Some do dumb things like use a caching library from the get go, when it is clearly not needed for the small amount of yearly data being added to the system, and small number of
relatively simple queries being performed.

We make the same mistakes as every other kind of job at our company, and grow the same way as every other kind of job. We’re not special. So when one of us writes about some other dev as “repeating the same year” as an insult, they have simply described themselves and everyone else, and virtually every other job on this planet.