Discussion

@[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.

@[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.

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.

mastodon.social/users/grimal...

Starting this Monday I'll be running a live online #godot course teaching #gamedev to 11-16 year olds by building simple arcade games. More details in the quote link!

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