@[email protected] This is a beautiful piece!

On a slightly unrelated note, I've been meaning to comment for a while that (having been somewhat involved with publishing over the years) it is so refreshing to hear you talking about your book covers as someone who is obviously inspired by the content of the book so I'll take the opportunity to say that now as well.

I don't know who needs to hear this today, but you're not like everybody else, and the expert advice may not fit you. This brought to you by a reminder I had of talking to one of my son's teachers.

"Don't worry, we've taught plenty of children like your son before!"

When we told the educational psychologist they actually laughed out loud, because the piece of advice that triggered the comment would only be helpful for around 1 in every 5,000 children and would have been actively detrimental to an 'average' pupil his age. 1/2

@[email protected] Thank you! Also, that's a very classy avatar

@[email protected] ​When I was sixteen my drum teacher pulled me in at the last moment for a concert because an orchestra member was ill. I had one job: whack a huge bass drum about six times.

One of those times I whacked it a full beat late, in a moment of complete silence from the rest of the orchestra.

My drum teacher afterwards said "don't worry, the audience will have assumed it was on purpose. Apart from the musicians in the audience - they'll be having a good laugh."

I wonder if you're hitting a similar situation or whether they're just, er, not very good...

Me: You do realise that even Bing have started indexing the new domain, and I didn't even tell them?

Google: We have a button here that does nothing you can click, and we'll tell you your page is in a priority queue!

Me: Okay, so we're really doubling down on the epitaph "Woke up and chose to be worse than Bing". Good to know.

Google: Would you like to see the crawled version?

Me: ...okay?

Google: Ha! The page hasn't been retrieved.

Me: The one you just told me was crawled?

Google: Maybe you need to wait a bit?

Me: ...so, telling you my website has moved means you notice more slowly than if I don't tell you?

Google: Pretty much! Thanks for telling us!

Me, to Google: I'm moving my blog from blog.mavnn.co.uk to blog.mavnn.eu. I've set up redirects and everything. Now I'm submitting a report to tell you.

Google: Okay!

Me, next day: Google, why have unindexed all my mavnn.eu sites, even the unrelated ones?

Google: We've crawled those pages but haven't indexed them yet.

Me: They were already indexed?

Ah, fantastic. I managed to paste the wrong link from the clipboard. If the edit to the post hasn't reached you, the correct link should be: (removed)
Edit: the link has expired now.

Collaborative #interactionfiction editing test take 2. If you're interested in the idea of collaborative editing of #ink scripts or you have 30 seconds to spare, could you try following the link below, editing the file there and then reply here to say you have done so? Thank you!

(The file will be valid for a few hours, I'll edit this post when it goes offline)

Edit: the link has expired now.

Blog: Easy, visual, camera bounds in Godot

I'm building a 2D rogue-like in #godot with one of my students and it was proving a hassle accurately setting camera and world boundaries on levels. This is one way to allow level scenes to set their own boundaries visually in the editor.

#godot #gamedev

blog.mavnn.eu/2026/03/16/cam...

Also, if you want to try out this next version of collaborative #visualnovel writing yourself you can go to visualink.mavnn.eu/script/demo, click the 'Copy edit invite' button and then paste the address you get into a message to send to the person you'd like to collaborate with. The session will end when the initiator closes their tab

@[email protected] @[email protected] You are not alone in that frustration, believe me. And thank you for the actual conversation!​

Edit: Thank you, experiment over and link removed for now. I'll be doing this again soon.

Random request moment! For a limited amount of time, it would do me a huge favour if you could follow this link, make some changes in the text editor you see, and then reply here to let me know you've done so.

I'll edit and update this post when the link becomes inactive, everything you type will be temporary but will also be visible to anybody else who follows the link.

Thank you! (link now removed)

Me, months ago: I will improve the performance of this piece of code by thunking an expensive operation!
Me, this morning: That's weird; how is thunking working when I've declared the private holding property as a const?

Reader, the thunking was not working. It never assigned to the internal private property, and in fact could not do so because it was a const.

@[email protected] @[email protected] ​A couple of weeks ago, somebody mentioned they were using a blog post of mine from 2013 to guide them in their current project. It is, in fact, on a blog titled Mavnn's Blog

@[email protected] if it helps, my son (native English speaker) regularly loses points on multiple choice English text comprehension exercises​ in Italian school because the answers to the questions don't make sense or become ambiguous if you actually have a full understanding of the text - but are straight forward if you only know the English the syllabus expects you to know so far. Multiple choice questions are a great way of testing if you know a syllabus, and a terrible way of testing understanding.

@[email protected] @[email protected] ​Eh. I don't really want to get into a discussion about how theology works (unless you're especially curious?) but I do sometimes feel the need to point out that the right wing crap spouted in a lot of these situations is religious language as a paper thin veneer over the hate, not a coherent theology. In the same way I don't want the hate, I'd rather the push back from it targeted the actual hating rather than the veneer. Which is why I actually like it when people point out (as Victor did) 'this makes no sense even in their own framework' because then I can step up and agree that no, it really doesn't.

@[email protected] @[email protected] You can make the argument (and theologians have) that God normally uses male pronouns for himself so it is respectful to do the same. But to me that sounds exactly the same as respecting anyone else's choice of pronouns?

@[email protected] @[email protected] Even as a Christian myself I always find this line of argument ​bizarre because if you believe the biblical prophets were, well, prophets, they record God referring to himself by both genders depending on what aspects of himself he's taking about.

@[email protected] ​I can kind of grudgingly be convinced they are OK in situations where your system needs to allow for both externally created plugins and has non-trivial life cycle management.

I just often (although not quite universally) feel that the wrong decision in that case was when you decided you needed that system, rather than the DI.