On the one hand it's doing so at a rate that I can't really be bothered blocking it, but it just seems such a pointless waste.

Some bot appears to be downloading the entire git history of my blog via http requests to every file on every commit on the repository.

Which is obviously a hugely productive use of my and their bandwidth given most of the files are identical on every commit...

After quite a very long time alternating Elvanse and Medikinet, I took today a day off meds (ADHD ones) to remember what it was to be without them.

It's night and day.

Thoughts need to be repeated like ten times in my head to be able to form a full sentence above all the noise. No wonder it is exhausting.

Now I also get why people laugh at their docs when they say "take a day off from time to time". This is TORTURE once you get used to your brain new OS. I'm walking to fetch Miguel to view an apartment and I'm wondering whether to get an extra Elvanse 50 bottle or Medikinet 60 out of the closest pharmacy

@actuallyadhd

As a special bonus for reading this far, on the same album the band hired Brian Blessed for no other reason than to laugh at the beginning and end of a track. Have a look for 'The Joust' by Eden Burning, you won't be disappointed by the laugh.

For some reason, that song, at that moment, was exactly what was needed to break through the depressive shell and remind of a whole bunch of core things that had got buried in the numbness. And it's a good song, you should go l listen to it as well.

The only problem being I'm still driving down the motorway at 70mph and I can't see a thing through the tears. Fortunately, I didn't die. So that's also good.

In the mean time, I've joined RockSoc and started buying CDs, so I haven't listened to a tape for a while. But now I need to drive myself home from uni, and the car only has a tape player. So I drive for a while, but it's a four hour drive and I'm tired so I stop, find the cassette, and drop it in the car stereo. And after a while, it starts playing Hem Me In, and I start crying. I mean, really streams coming down my face crying.

Fast forward a few years and I'm at university, and I'm depressed. I don't know enough about mental health yet to know it, but the combination of a bunch of stuff including the knowledge I'm failing my degree badly overall despite seeming to understand things faster than my year mates individually (hello undiagnosed #adhd) and some things having gone very wrong for a close friend means I very much am depressed whether I know it or not.

Seems like I'm on an old music kick today, so gather around boys and girls (and the rest of you) for the tail of the song that turned my life around and nearly killed me.

Back in the day ('94-95?) I got roped into helping at a concert for a band called Eden Burning. Not huge, not unknown, very fun love, the recordings showed a bit their roots as live performers and not having lots of production money. I bought a tape, but while a couple of the songs were good the combination of them sounding better live and my not so good tape player speakers meant it didn't listen to it all that much.

@mavnn
Thank you! For some reason though my client is picking up bonfire.mavnn.eu to highlight instead of the video.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Just saw a post (unfortunately on LinkedIn, which I'm reluctant to link to) where the head of developer relations was apologising because it wasn't even deliberate; they'd added a selection of useful tips to highlight third party tools with copilot integrations for the LLM to use in 'appropriate situations' and well, it's an LLM so it just started spamming absolutely everything with them.

Which means that, as far as I can make out, none of the third parties being advertise knew this was happening, wanted it to happen, or paid for it to happen. Which was kind of nice to know given I use at least one of the tools it was spamming about.

@[email protected] unfucking believable.

@mwl her original article about it is: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/la-timeless/how-not-to-say-the-wrong-thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology)

Starting to put together a hacky program to federate my blog by reading the rss feed to publish articles with #activitypub and then provide a known url to show any replies that I can drop onto the actual blog pages.

But that means creating a directory for the code, which means a name, 'activity_rss' sounds good but that's too long, I know...

mkdir arss

Fortunately my brain caught up with me before I actually hit enter.

Aldi clearance shelf: instant drink powder!! 🩷Pink Latte🩷

me: okay, notoriously hit-or-miss Aldi clearance shelf, I'll try it

(I pour the powder into the mug. it is clearly white) not looking good for the Aldi clearance shelf

(I add hot water. it somehow turns bright pink) okay, I retract my thoughts about the Aldi clearance shelf

(I taste it) I reinstate some of my thoughts about the Aldi clearance shelf.

Building interactive fiction in Ink sometimes feels like an exercise in smoke and mirrors; there are times where you want to script events where it feels like the reader has agency when actually their decision doesn't change the future story at all, and there are times where you want the future story to be impacted by a decision but you don't want to reveal it immediately.

One example came up this week when I was asked how you could ask a series of questions without revealing whether each individual question was answered correctly - but changing what happens after depending on the overall number that were correct.

How could we do that?

To begin with, anytime we want to track a number or a score in Ink we want a variable.

VAR correct_answers = 0 

Next, we're going to want to do the same thing after every correct answer: add one to the score, and then carry on the story from where we were. "Do the same thing in multiple places in the story" is what tunnels are for; knots/sections that use the special ->-> operator to return the story back to where ever you came from.

=== good_answer ~correct_answers = correct_answers + 1 // or you can use the special short hand // that means the same thing as above // ~correct_answers += 1 ->-> 

Finally, we want each question to provide two or more possible answers, but which ever one you pick the story will continue the same way - just maybe via a side trip to the good_answer knot. Multiple choices which all go the same place use a "gather" (which is just a - on its own line to mark the end of a block of choices).

By using a gather we can avoid having to make every question its own knot, diverting to it, and then having to divert on to the next question. Instead, we can have them all in a single place with a nice clear flow (and a lot less typing).

=== questions Is a wombat a wom, or a bat? * [Wom] * [Bat] * [What?] -> good_answer -> - Is the pineapple a pine, or an apple? * [I dispute the nature of your question] -> good_answer -> * [Pine] * [Apple] - You have answered {correct_answers} questions correctly. -> END 

Putting it all together, our script would look something like this:

VAR correct_answers = 0 -> questions === good_answer ~correct_answers = correct_answers + 1 // or you can use the special short hand // that means the same thing as above // ~correct_answers += 1 ->-> === questions Is a wombat a wom, or a bat? * [Wom] * [Bat] * [What?] -> good_answer -> - Is the pineapple a pine, or an apple? * [I dispute the nature of your question] -> good_answer -> * [Pine] * [Apple] - You have answered {correct_answers} questions correctly. -> END 

If you want to try it out, you can paste the whole lot into the 'demo' script editor at VisualInk and give it a run for yourself, experimenting with changes as they catch your fancy.

Discussion of this post is probably happening as replies to its announcement on the fediverse.