@[email protected] Many years ago there was a TV show on the BBC called Mastermind in which the contestants could pick a specialist subject to be asked question about.

"Your special subject is personal failure" is not a choice I recall, I must admit, but I feel I wouldn't score too badly!

What's this? New courses? And being announced more than a week in advance?

thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...

If you're interested in either writing or creating assets for a #visualnovel, we've got you covered. Five weeks on each as online sessions for 11-16 year olds in the European afternoon/US morning. #creativewriting #gamedev #homeed

It occurs to me that I don't remember many individual commits from my career with pride, and of that small number every single one was a net decrease in code size (and normally associated with a large increase in either performance or reliability)

hachyderm.io/users/lizardbil...

@[email protected] "... we're making billions! Billions I tell you!"

"Profit?"

"Don't be silly. Lines!"

Don't know where y'all are at, but round here it's spring time #flowers #DoomScrollingBreak

@[email protected] @[email protected]

The South Carolina pastor who prayed over a 22-foot-high golden statue of President Donald Trump last week says it is not an idolatrous golden calf as described in the book of Exodus.

Mark Burns is a self-appointed pastor who previously lied about his educational background and previous military service. He unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, 2022 and 2024. He was an early and ardent supporter of Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Brutal from opening from [checks notes] Baptist News Global. Even the url is sharp and pointy: baptistnews.com/article/its-...

@[email protected] @[email protected] Thank you!

Hi @[email protected]! You asked people to let you know if there was weird behaviour or bugs with tags.pub. I'm not sure if this is on the tags.pub end or on the @[email protected] end, but at the moment I seem to be able to federate exactly one outbound activity each time Bonfire restarts to tags.pub and then ask further pushes are rejected with a 400 error and a response about a missing Created field. Unfortunately I haven't found an easy way to see the outgoing request, so I don't know what info they're being signed with (I don't know if @[email protected] can suggest a way of me extracting that info?)

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

The backlash when there's progress part is undoubtably real; I saw at least a couple of people who were nominally egalitarian just flat out refuse to believe that #metoo was real, for example. And when someone points out to the meeting chair that they have asked the only non-male person to take the minutes again they basically have the choice of deciding they want to change or just deciding that maybe "the women" were really always the problem after all. Doesn't stop the pushback grossing me out though!

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] about the age range thing: I hope that's true. I'm also in a smallish town in Italy, so gender related social dynamics have a bunch of other factors playing in.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I think there is some of that, but honestly I think the reality is a lot more complex than a single chart (or my initial exasperated comment). People feeling 'allowed to say what they really think' is a thing, but so is people changing opinion, even quite fast, and not having the self awareness to notice. We all tend to assume we've always been like we are now, and a lot of people don't challenge the assumption.

@[email protected] @[email protected] As a man, can I just say... W. T. A. F?

My 18 year old son complains regularly about the attitudes of his cohort but I was hoping that was more along the lines of "I know it's bad, but at least it's better than it used to be" rather than straight up "you're right, and it's getting worse"

Turns out the standard drag and drop for controls in #godot is really well thought out and nicely implemented, which makes it a pity that the first several pages of hits I got when searching for the docs were about hand implementing your own with the physics engine. Which, if dragging objects that interact with the game world is actually part of your gameplay fair enough - but I don't think that's what a lot of the tutorial authors were actually thinking about.

Also, it really does feel that internet search is much less of a solved problem than it was ten years ago.

Random shout out to @scottmccloud.bsky.social@bsk... for his fantastic Understanding Comics book, which despite me having the drawing skills of a wet haddock is still one of the most practically useful introductions to visual communication I've ever read. Hugely recommended, I've been coming back to it for many years now.

I'll be referencing it repeatedly in introduction to creating digital assets for #visualnovel course I'm putting together for next half term. #gamedev

@[email protected] @[email protected] Probably doesn't really need saying that they were a founder who had just received funding for an AI start up.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I once heard someone say straight faced that they were excited to see 'the beginnings of Accelerando coming true' (exact wording might be incorrect, it was a couple of years ago). I was... surprised? Baffled? I felt something, at least. And it wasn't excited.

@[email protected] @[email protected] yeah, for better or worse my accent is pretty Queen's (King's?) English. I have ample experience of being told I sound posh from my time living in the Midlands! So not that similar in the vowel sounds between the two. Brains are weird though - in writing this post out it has occurred to me I've made the typo both touch typing with a Dvorak keyboard and using a swiping keyboard on my phone and now it makes even less sense.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I have typed 'good' instead of 'code' with reasonable frequency over the course of years and I have no idea why. I don't associate them as concepts, they don't sound the same, they don't repeat letters in the same places. Just my fingers have decided that's how 'code' is typed.

Putting together a grant proposal where a lot of the point is making the end result easy to deploy, easy to backup, and fool inexperience proof to upgrade and it is hard to hit the balance between 'the actual functionality is this super straight forward thing' and 'the point of funding it would be to make using this thing super straight forward' without the whole word count becoming either implementation details or vague fluff unrelated to the actual idea.

Ironically, I could put together the whole thing much more easily as a SaaS product running on servers I control than as a project people can run for themselves, but when the point of the project is to allow you to keep control of your own data that doesn't really help anyone.

@[email protected] @[email protected] The ships in the Lensmen books (the series the name Triplanetary comes from) are described as huge metallic spheres for the heavier ships ("maulers") and teardrop shaped for the faster classes. So - sounds about right.