@[email protected] 😱 And I thought our local hospital was bad at communication...
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(everyone's different, so adjust to taste)
- Check for 'comfort' entertainment: I often reread a few books I've had since being a teenager (known comfort) or trashy fanfiction (new but I don't feel bad about not paying full attention) to provide enough distraction to rest in these situations.
- Depending on the relational dynamics, either offer to screen comms or suggest do not disturb for notifications with checks at specific times of day. Even people wanting to support can be a huge drain.
- Avoid the news if possible. Stuff out there can be important and meaningful, but sometimes we don't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with it.
I'm running courses for under 18s on creating #interactivefiction (specifically, #visualnovels ) but I just had a request from one of the parents for an adult version of the course.
Would you, or anyone you know be interested in a short course on writing interactive fiction? Would probably run at around 5 hours over 5 weeks, homework optional, costing around 55 GBP.
More about me/the existing courses at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...
(Please share if this seems even vaguely interesting)
So - week starting the 12th I'm starting a new run of Coding Games with a Story, a five week course teaching young people how to write interactive fiction (in the form of visual novels, using Ink). Build stories that change based on the player's choices while learning about both good story telling and telling computers to do what you want - and then publish your experiments for other people to try.
For people who already know the mechanics of writing interactive fiction (taught at one of my courses or not) and who want the encouragement and structure of a writing club to build a full game, I'm also starting the Interactive Fiction Writing Club.
So - know anyone 9-18 who wants to tell stories that are also games? Nows the time for them to sign up!
You can find the courses I'm running here: thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...
@julesh - Yes, I've been taking a perhaps overly keyboard-centric approach in this talk. (It makes sense because you can't do everything in an hour, and I play the keyboard, as do a lot of theorists.) Violinists live in another universe. A good violinist will apparently use equal-tempered, Pythagorean tuning or just intonation depending on context!
I saw a good video about this yesterday. I find it a bit mind-boggling and can't help but wonder if they're faking it. But there are actually lots of videos about this, so if they're faking it they do so en masse.
@[email protected] @[email protected] see also guitarists who play fretless guitars and adjust tuning on the fly. Humans do some pretty amazing things on occasion.
@[email protected] @[email protected] omniscience vs. the right to data deletion could keep a lot of lawyers rich for a very long time
Peace and joy to y'all. And merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate!
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so, yesterday your local badidea had a "nervous system cut out for a moment there" incident and shattered her macbook pro.
I was horrified and furious with myself beyond belief, but the good news is that a helpful young man at The Phone Lab in Gelderlandplein, Amsterdam resurrected it with OEM parts in just under 24 hours. A little ship of theseus'd, but the motherboard survived. (He kindly transplanted my lid stickers for me, though now they're upside-down...)
I apparently dropped it so hard that it woke up thinking today was April Fool's Day in either 2021 or 2027.
@[email protected] Hope you're managing to recover - reality connection glitches are right up there on the not at all pleasant scale.
Coding is a lot more fun when you don't have to keep jumping around to check you've used exactly the right names for things. Which means we're constantly trying to up our game with the VisualInk editor to make the suggestions it gives as fast, context aware, and accurate as possible. Today we've rolled out intelligent suggestions for asset names and divert targets as you type!
@[email protected] If you ask the wrong type of pedant, they'll tell you (for even more confusion) that it's only a whetstone if you use oil on it, otherwise it's a water stone. "don't oil up that water stone, and especially don't get the whetstone wet!"
@[email protected] of course, this is the same school of pedantry that will try and tell you that you're using the 'wrong' names for types of swords as if there's a central historical authority rather than each author going 'I'm gonna call these ones long because I feel like it'.
it's quite funny how "whetstone" comes from whet, to sharpen, but is also often wet, covered in water, too
whet your tools with a wet whetstone
@[email protected] If you ask the wrong type of pedant, they'll tell you (for even more confusion) that it's only a whetstone if you use oil on it, otherwise it's a water stone. "don't oil up that water stone, and especially don't get the whetstone wet!"
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On the one hand, customisation is a bit limited (there's no way to override themes, etc) - on the other, for prototyping the lack of distraction on detail while you test the idea can be really helpful. And at the end of it you still have an Ink file you can use anywhere Ink is usable.
And because of the constraints, we can do things like having seamless support for mobile devices without you having to think about it.
Interested in quickly prototyping your #ink based #interactivefiction or #visualnovel? We're starting to look a pretty decent choice, with collaborative editing sessions and (if you're logged in) instant shareable "play" links.
On the one hand, customisation is a bit limited (there's no way to override themes, etc) - on the other, for prototyping the lack of distraction on detail while you test the idea can be really helpful. And at the end of it you still have an Ink file you can use anywhere Ink is usable.
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Interested in quickly prototyping your #ink based #interactivefiction or #visualnovel? We're starting to look a pretty decent choice, with collaborative editing sessions and (if you're logged in) instant shareable "play" links.
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That feeling when you realise tab didn't complete the filename you thought and that you've just tried to open a 30gb file on a USB drive in vi over an ssh connection.
There's this weird moment in refactoring code, when after hours/days of redesign, changes, and testing you bask in the glow of a job well done and all the improvements you've made... before running the code and seeing absolutely nothing different in how it functions from the outside because that's what refactoring means.
I suspect that people making physical components with care and precision that they know will never be seen, and will be noticed only in the absence of problems coming from them, most have a similar experience. You feel pride in the job well done, but it is also somewhat anti-climatic when you look at the finished product.
There's this weird moment in refactoring code, when after hours/days of redesign, changes, and testing you bask in the glow of a job well done and all the improvements you've made... before running the code and seeing absolutely nothing different in how it functions from the outside because that's what refactoring means.
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Three bugs appear.
“Ah, with my senior software developer senses I detect these are in fact not three separate bugs, but a single bug manifesting in different ways. A greener developer would have fallen into this trap and spent all day chasing shadows!”
*7 hours of struggling*
They are three separate bugs.
@[email protected] @[email protected] see also: a greener developer would assume that this is obviously a bug in the compiler because the behaviour is so inexplicable, but my senior software developer humility teaches me it is surely my mistake
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Here at VisualInk we love writing the narrative side of visual novels in Ink, a programming language specifically designed to help manage the complexity of branching narrative without getting overly technical.
But it does miss one feature that is really useful in visual novels: tracking ordered "stacks" of values. So we added it.
Blog post here: blog.mavnn.co.uk/2025/12/12/...
