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.

@[email protected] Write once, run anywhere

@[email protected] The lights and shutters in my house are triggered via the OpenWebNet protocol which is controlled by a single company, and is a bus protocol not designed to be exposed on the web. I do access it via a tcp gateway but that's just to get the raw bus messages on and off the physical bus wiring, so even net is a stretch. I think they just saw Microsoft call something .NET and went "why didn't we think of that first?"

@[email protected] I was very bemused the first time I applied to an IT company over 20 years ago when the first question was whether I could whiteboard code how I'd check if a word was a palindrome in the language of my choice. Afterwards the interviewer apologised but said that it allowed him to eliminate nearly half of the applicants who made it to interview (i.e. had CVs that looked fine). I can only imagine how much worse that is getting in our brave new world of today.

In this time of the world being a pretty heavy place I wanted to take a moment out to suggest following feeds with a regular pulse of things that are just beautiful, like @[email protected] (fine art/cover art) or @[email protected] (stunning pictures of birds in nature).

Sometimes it is really what you need in the middle of your feed to keep the mental health, er, healthy. The apple a day of the brain.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I can also see a fairly credible world in which Microsoft decides the best possible business plan at this point is to pretend the last fifteen years never happened and hit reset.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Careful though, it probably goes both ways. I could see smorgasbord.py getting quite large quite quickly.

@[email protected] Very nice. Reminds me of Ed Alleyne-Johnson, who've I've known about and been listening to for decades but only today noticed was also the violinist for New Model Army at their peak. Some of his solo busking tracks are spectacular (e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=vizUjKLv... )

Some of the loopstation beatbox is great, but some gets a bit too 'crowded' for my taste (as does some of the competitive skill based beatboxing, honestly). One of the things I love about the Jo Quail track you posted, and Ed, and Wing, is how the skill underpins a love of the actual music. I have the same problem with some jazz, that it starts bleeding from music into technical demo.

Serendipitously, Wing actually ranted about the same thing at length recently in a video where he breakdown how he judged submissions for this years beatbox 'world championship' if you wanted some philisophy in a pre-selected beatbox smorgasbord. youtube.com/watch?v=XKkYLmyT...

@[email protected] That is quite the scenary! For the beatboxing deep dive I won't point you at other stuff by Wing as that's just a case of clicking on his channel, but I don't know how obvious it is that he's also part of a group who do some pretty impressive bits and pieces: youtube.com/channel/UCWuLbEA...

In case y'all are wondering why ADHD medication is a good thing, somebody I follow recently posted about discovering the same track that launched my last hyperfixation deep dive and I didn't immediately fill their mentions with half a dozen suggestions of next things to listen to despite not even knowing their music taste. Impulsive behaviour is a thing when I'm not medicated.

In other news, you should absolutely go check out these tracks from Wing that I didn't spam into someone's notifications because sharing hyperfixations is fun (if you're not spamming)!

• Killing me Softly: not a cover, an original beatbox blues song with a guitar solo. youtu.be/hQZJ-23r_Sg
• Phenomenon: most recent track, deep bass dance track still with lots of musicality: youtu.be/eDcLqMp7idQ
• Doppelganger: Wing sings a nice little introspective song ooutside a cafe but snuck a band into the back of his throat when no one was looking youtu.be/YqRBULfanQI #ADHD #beatbox

@[email protected] the rabbit hole is quite deep...

@[email protected] @[email protected] NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORWAY

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

Starting the day with a moderately spicy take to help me wake up. It's the 'finishing last nights vindaloo' strategy for social media.

@[email protected] Of course, we were never going to do it properly. The very first paid dev work I did was integration software between a UK fire and rescue service and a brand new reporting service set up by the national government for collecting stats.

During the launch, the project lead on the government side pulled me aside to thank me for writing the only implementation out of over fifty that sent xml that validated. Several of the other implementations were written by large consulting firms at orders of magnitude greater cost.