Discussion
Last week, I worked with a small group of 9-14 year olds to build a game almost, but not totally, unlike space invaders.
It is quite silly. And the week of first time #gamedev was great fun.
If you're looking for a silly and simple #godot project, the code is at code.mavnn.eu/mavnn/michael-...
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Azure AD B2C has been one of the worst Microsoft products ever. But it worked.
Now it’s being replaced by Microsoft Entra External ID and oh my. I had no idea it could be worse. It’s so much worse! This product is completely broken. 😞
@[email protected] Worse than AD is quite a high bar to jump. I'm (somewhat reluctantly) impressed. And very grateful I have no reason to use either right now.
LOADS of things impact whether you memorize content in a lab task (mostly attention) that are not the same as capacity to comprehend
@[email protected] Watch 90% of the participants with #adhd be marked as having zero comprehension. My wife was baffled for years that I could relay the content of conversations easily while being completely incapable of repeating the words that were actually said verbatim.
@mavnn Fair. I figure there's always going to be a few random graphic Ts or workout outfits or whatever.
@[email protected] I have nearly a full week of branded corp t-shirts from previous employers that I wouldn't particularly want to wear in public but it feels wasteful to throw away, so... yeah. You're probably safe.
Maybe I should do the tech CEO wardrobe: 14 copies of the same outfit, and wash clothes every 2 weeks.
@[email protected] I think the protip version is having 15 copies so you don't have to stand around stark naked on laundry day. (Or be boring and separate out the PJ wash cycle and only do laundry as overnight washer dryer cycles I suppose)
My hope is that this article will serve as a single landing-point for folks curious about what I mean by "High-Trust Trad" roleplaying, or HTT.
https://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2026/08/whats-forever-for.html
But, I know about hope, and the Internet. 😁
@[email protected] the mention of combinatorics reminded me to finally post about something: bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
I was teaching some 11-14 year olds to write choice based #interactivefiction this year, and at one point in the course I ask if there are any #ttrpg players (answer: always yes so far).
Then I propose that choice based fiction has a lot in common with with #ttrpg but one huge difference that changes everything for the author/GM: the magic moments in #ttrpg are when the players have their characters solve a problem in a way the GM never thought of, but is perfect for those characters in that game. While the magic in choice games comes when the author offers a choice the player would never have thought of, but is perfect in light of the choices made in this play of this game.
Which means in #ttrpg your role as GM is to encourage the explosion of possibilities, while in choice it is to make all the possibilities special (which requires them to be limited).
Interestingly, they all agreed without hesitation that unexpected in character problem solving was exactly what was magic in #ttrpg compared to #crpg
@mavnn I mean, some of them deserve to be eaten. 😆
@[email protected] True - I still haven't had a chance to try your tofu suggestion properly, although I have stolen inspiration on prepping tofu pieces.
@[email protected] Has it started staring back yet? That's normally a sign you have something. Or a warning. Maybe both. If it starts eating the other blog posts, you officially have a problem.
@DejahEntendu There's another point of rejection I've noticed in recent years, and really _only_ in recent years:
- Roleplaying isn't an actual thing anyone can do.
I find it interesting to see that one gain traction (it's not common, but it exists). But it's not interesting enough to really want to talk further with those folks, since we have no common ground to meet on in good faith. 😮
@[email protected] @[email protected] So, one thing I've learned in a couple of decades of software development - which, fundamentally, is the job of solving other people's problems - is that a lot of people are really, really, bad at understanding that there other people in the world who don't think like they do.
I mean: unbelieveably bad at it. And not just the devs, although it is enough of a problem among devs that I've been promoted several times on the basis of having been able to ask someone what they think and comprehend that the response implied they were thinking about the problem differently from me.
hand editing an rss feed and, honestly, so satisfying.
the web is really mostly still just text folks. reclaim it.
@[email protected] I needed a website recently that had a whole two pages, and I nearly fired up a static site generator before I stopped myself and just... wrote HTML? It was nice. Kind of relaxing. No build cycle, super simple CSS.
This post has been on my mind a lot in the last couple of weeks.
I'm tutoring a new student who has decided to take a computer science foundation to decide whether he wants to consider starting a full degree course, and it is being a delightful, challenging, and bizarre experience because he's never tried programming. At all. No Scratch, no after school Python, nothing - nobody in his circle of acquintances had the background to get him started and it had become this semi-mythical challenge in his mind to get started.
For example, he reached out because he started reading the course material and then came to me saying "I understand the ideas, and it sounds fascinating... but where am I suppose to type the Python?"
Aside: with all due respect to Python as a good starter language, installing Python as your introduction to programming is... not ideal.
I've only been teaching him for a few weeks, but it has immediately solidified one aspect of the quoted post: we confuse 'hard' and 'unfamiliar' way too much. For him, the fact that dividing by zero must be an error is intuitive because he has the maths to understand why - while I can spend a long time trying to explain "why can't it just be zero?" to younger students. He struggled for most of an hour to write a "for" loop to print the odd numbers up to "N", but then sent me a message shortly after the session to say "so why do we have for loops, it seems obvious a while loop could always be used instead".
I... don't have good answers to some of the questions this raises around how to teach and train people, especially as I look at teaching groups of students and having been roped into helping support some teachers teaching whole classes of students. The moment you step outside the bounds of "the shared curriculum so far", or have a student from outside the system, or account for neurodiversity, or somebody has done a related hobby. With an individual you can start from the familiar (in this case maths foundations and, oddly, some useful psychology analogies), but with a group that isn't going to work.
Is this "news"? Not really - it isn't even the first time I've thought about this. I suppose I'm mostly posting because I do feel like it's actually quite hard to spot the issue of familiarity versus difficulty for anyone who isn't involved in training/teaching, so I wanted to share...
This post has been on my mind a lot in the last couple of weeks.
I'm tutoring a new student who has decided to take a computer science foundation to decide whether he wants to consider starting a full degree course, and it is being a delightful, challenging, and bizarre experience because he's never tried programming. At all. No Scratch, no after school Python, nothing - nobody in his circle of acquintances had the background to get him started and it had become this semi-mythical challenge in his mind to get started.
For example, he reached out because he started reading the course material and then came to me saying "I understand the ideas, and it sounds fascinating... but where am I suppose to type the Python?"
Aside: with all due respect to Python as a good starter language, installing Python as your introduction to programming is... not ideal.
I've only been teaching him for a few weeks, but it has immediately solidified one aspect of the quoted post: we confuse 'hard' and 'unfamiliar' way too much. For him, the fact that dividing by zero must be an error is intuitive because he has the maths to understand why - while I can spend a long time trying to explain "why can't it just be zero?" to younger students. He struggled for most of an hour to write a "for" loop to print the odd numbers up to "N", but then sent me a message shortly after the session to say "so why do we have for loops, it seems obvious a while loop could always be used instead".
I... don't have good answers to some of the questions this raises around how to teach and train people, especially as I look at teaching groups of students and having been roped into helping support some teachers teaching whole classes of students. The moment you step outside the bounds of "the shared curriculum so far", or have a student from outside the system, or account for neurodiversity, or somebody has done a related hobby. With an individual you can start from the familiar (in this case maths foundations and, oddly, some useful psychology analogies), but with a group that isn't going to work.
Well done Google. You've managed to change your previously pretty good spam filtering on my email recently and it now marks genuine security updates from checks notes Google as spam, as well as notices from an explicitly trusted bank email address.
Oof. New internet provider confirmed in advance that they could action a request for a public IP address same day. They just failed to mention that the request couldn't be made until the old provider 'confirmed successful transfer of the line' - a process that they're allowed to take up to five days on.
Entirely not coincidentally, most of my websites have been offline for 5 days including this one.
Take that bureaucracy! I'm officially not a criminal once more!
...to avoid misunderstandings, it was the official bit I needed to renew, not the 'not a criminal' bit. I should probably mention that bit.
One of my teacher friends often says that people confuse "few people are able to do x" with "x reveals who is good" and I think about that a lot
@[email protected] Yes! As someone who's given programming instruction to people with a wide range of experience there's certain topics I can point at that people consider "advanced" which I can trivially teach to ten year olds (recursion, anyone?) while there are others which are considered trivial by "trained" programmers that actually require a wealth of background knowledge they've forgotten they ever learned - like doing almost anything involving a network.
After some technical hitches, and can now find all the VisualInk courses coming up in the future at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...
With a couple of bonus extra #GameDev courses that aren't VisualInk specific. #VisualNovel #InteractiveFiction
So, Wix (website building app) allows you to have courses, and courses can have members of staff assigned to scheduled sessions, and then the query API will return you course details including a staffMemberIds field so you can show who's involved in teaching a course on your webpage.
...except that said field is populated with all the staff members assigned to repeating scheduled sessions, and only to them. Obviously, if you only teach one session of a course, or the course only has one session you're not really teaching anything.
Hopefully this public service announcement will allow me to pay forward some of the three-ish hours I just spent tearing my hair out before I found this nugget in the docs, where it is just stated as if it is a completely sane and normal piece of behaviour for an API. The workaround? Make the single session a repeating session that finishes repeating before it's second scheduled date. That makes you a real teacher on the course.
On a rather closely related note, you can now see all of my upcoming courses for the summer and the Autumn term on my ThinkersMeetup page: thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...
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