Discussion

Muhahahaha! Hack successful. By publicly announcing my brain was irrationally not doing a thing, my brain decided that was too stupid for words and now I have done the thing. I only procrastinated the five minute job for 6 hours, so not too bad at all.

I have one, simple, straight forward job that I was planning to do today. And my brain has decided it doesn't want to do it.

Ideally... I'll do the thing at some point. But the much bigger challenge is not trying to force it, which I know from #ADHD experience will just block me from doing everything else.

@VisualInk Also, achievement unlocked: I managed to write the word 'complement' in a public post without spelling it 'compliment'.

Good news! The school term is starting, and that means more opportunities for 11+ year olds to take our paired narrative game creation courses: one to learn how to write #InteractiveFiction in the form of a #VisualNovel, and the other to create artwork and sound effects for 2D #GameDev (including, not coincidentally, for visual novels - but also for any other 2D game).

The two courses both start w/c 14th September and run online on Zoom. You can book and find out more at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/... .

Although the courses complement each other, they can be taken independently so don't feel there's any pressure to sign up for both.

@[email protected] @[email protected] "I kept on losing the passwords for my password managers, so now my password manager password manager is set up and I can get all the other passwords using the one master password on the postit note on the top of my monitor"

@[email protected] Could be worse. You could have used 'simple', immediately cursing you to create a thesis of insanity inducing unnecessary complexity and a type system represented in xml.

@[email protected] @[email protected] It's honestly unclear to me whether King has any idea what he's doing. Not in the sense he's a bad writer - by any metric I can think of that would be a stupid claim to make. But in the sense that he always gives the impression of not really understanding what's going on in his own writing process. That said: many, many people have found his book on writing helpful and I've never been published so...

@[email protected] Oh yes, this. Chronic fatigue means that I've just lost an entire day (and broken my deliberate exercise pattern) to my wife needing a neck massage to release a trapped nerve, because the 20 minutes it took used all my energy for the day.

Do I regret it? Nope. Has it taken 18+ months to reach the stage where this sort of interrupt is closer to 'tomorrow will need to be a new day one' rather than spiralling into a week plus of black thoughts and depression? Yes. Yes, it has.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Not sure if the first one is true, but I love the rumour that one of the tests listed for the original 2CV was "can be picked up and carried out of a field by no more than four farmers if it gets stuck in mud". "Can drive across a dry ploughed field without breaking a case of eggs on the back seat" was an actual documented requirement.

@[email protected] Cowards! If they're not even going to animate the wave motion for actual motion sickness, why even bother?

Last week, I worked with a small group of 9-14 year olds to build a game almost, but not totally, unlike space invaders.

youtu.be/l7-sgNSvW9c

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-...

@[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.

@[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.

@[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.

@[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)

@[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

@[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.

@[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.