@[email protected] @[email protected] My grandmother used to train great danes, an other type of large dog with a generally good temperament. Nearly all small little dogs (puppies or just smaller breeds) seemed entirely happy to play with, try to threaten and/or, for the adult dogs, romantically engage with the danes despite it being obviously physically impossible for them to impact the danes at all (many of the smaller dogs were shorter than the danes' knees). That did rather immediately change on the one occasion I saw a dane get actually angry with a smaller dog, but even then the caution only lasted as long as the growling did.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...

We have some bite sized introduction to #ink posts for writing #interactivefiction / #visualnovels up on YouTube and I’m hoping to do a few more next week. I’ll definitely be doing a follow on about conditions (the different comparison operators and “switch” statements) and I’ll probably also do a video version of this blog post.

If you’ve got requests or ideas for other focused mini-videos let me know commenting here or over at the IntFiction forums (intfiction.org/t/ink-introdu...)

@[email protected] Thanks. One of the things I hate about the combination of #chronicfatigue brain fog and #adhd impulsivity is that I know there's a huge danger of my brain just randomly starting sealioning and mansplaining across the people I follow as my brain just starts spewing random responses to stimuli. At least on this occasion I noticed...

@[email protected] Also, I just read your post and that wasn't what you were asking at all. Sorry, replying to posts with a sleep dep headache is never a wise move.

@[email protected] I happened to be looking at the hashtag code in Mastodon and I think it normalises the hashtags to all lower case for comparison/following. So it should, hopefully, work with any of them.

Me: searches for @[email protected] 's Futzing Function blog post by name

Google: here's an AI summary of the post and links to three other sites discussing it

Me: really? Google decided not to index Glyph's blog? Are they summarising based on the discussions about the post or something? goes and checks

Google: nope! We indexed it, you can search for the blog itself, we just decided that if you search for a specific post we'll put in the AI summary and remove the link to the actual article from the results

@[email protected] I'm guessing either cheap outsourced humans or pipe the audio in short sections to a pirated copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking from 1998 to feed into a swear word regex. I mean - it doesn't actually need to be accurate, just trigger often enough people get scared and (most importantly) management think it's working. The very idea is pretty gruesome though.

tags.pub/ is a useful service as well.

@[email protected] @[email protected] you can follow tags from across multiple servers by following @ [hashtag you want to follow] @ tags.pub (without the spaces). The service was set up by @[email protected] who helped write the specifications that underpin the Fediverse, so it is trustworthy. If you follow @[email protected], it will broadcast your own hashtagged posts.

@[email protected] Hi! Would you be the right person to ask if tags.pub is currently having issues? It doesn't seem to be boosting any of my posts at the moment, but I updated my own server so I'm not entirely sure which side the issue is on. I'm suspicious though, as I haven't seen anything from any of the tags I follow for a while either.

@[email protected] these are great.

bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...

Using #krita practice to avoid vitamin D deficiency part 2.

Turns out that when you're suffering from #chronicfatigue and don't have the energy to walk anywhere, it's really easy to get vitamin D deficiency because of the lack of sunlight. Last year I ended up needing to inject myself with extra vitamin D to get back to workable levels, this year I'm trying to be deliberate not repeating that experience.

Public service announcement over, tl;dr get some sunlight, don't give yourself skin cancer either

Rapid fire character with multiple emotes practice. #krita is looking a great tool for this kind of work, although its huge power and flexibility might make it hard to introduce to some of our younger #visualnovel authors.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Yeap, zig had been on my short list to learn for a while now and that is one of the main reasons (along with comp time and solid cross compilation).

@[email protected] oh, nice package. I hadn't spotted that existed.

@[email protected] Erm. Looks like I've also found a weird bug in the markdown to HTML translation in social 1.0.2, by the way. The double backticks above in the function names were typed as underscores.

There is something about Ruby that makes me completely incapable of finding anything in a Ruby on Rails code base. Firstly, everything is arranged with according to conventions I don't know. Not my preference, but that I could learn or look up. But then there's also vast amount of stuff that just appears out of nowhere.

For instance, currently I suspect there's a mismatch between the url sent by @[email protected] in a Mention tag on an activitypub activity, and the result of calling short``account``url on a Mastodon account model for a remote account. But... there is no function called short``account``url in the Mastodon code base, it doesn't seem to be one of the standard Rails Router helper methods, it just... gets called in a bunch of places and ✨️magic✨️ occurs.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Which is where this type of conflict is so rich for stories! Nobody in the situation was "wrong", but several players were set up with conflicting information, backgrounds, and incentives and suddenly no person is wrong but every thing is wrong.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

> In a tragedy, the bad thing could be averted, but isn't, because the protagonist would have to act against their own nature to avert it. This gives tragedy its sense of inevitability and makes it so fun to read.

I think this is the difference though: if you don't have the conversation because of a character flaw, that's tragedy. If you don't have the conversation because you get interrupted by a series of increasingly contrived coincidences you have at best a weak farce.

> My sympathy for having been stuck on the inside of real-life failures, though. Seeing large corporations fail to do what must be done is the reason I've always avoided management jobs and just been a senior IC. You are made of sterner stuff than me if you risked that, and I'm sorry to hear it treated you that badly.

Thank you, but I'm not made of that sterner stuff either! Part of the problem/the saving grace was that I didn't go into management, I was supposed to be an IC with training and education responsibilities. But training one type of good practice/workflow doesn't work if the manager who wanted the training done is no longer in the position to actually push doing the things that are being trained (and the new manager is actively pushing other ways of doing things that are fine in themselves, but clash with what you've been asked to teach people)

@[email protected] Having been twice made responsible for institutional change in the workplace and then having the person who appointed me lose the authority to push the changes, I have a painfully direct experience of how tough it can be to break out of the Abilene Paradox with a group that has someone well spoken and charismatic in authority who doesn't understand what's happening in the rest of the group. Lots of well meaning people doing things that seem sane, rational, and empathic individually, leading to a Not Good™ and emotionally distructive overall situation.

Hmm. I think I'm leaking my trauma. But it definitely makes for a stronger plot than 'I need to delay the PoV character five minutes or the entire story ends because they can have a conversation.'