@[email protected] ​As a European, I've never done anything like basing an entire fantasy campaign in Texas. Admittedly only because the players could never find a good time to actually play...

Annnnd... I ranted this thinking I'd solved the current problem, but now my blog's xml file has a table of contents.

Why? I haven't changed any toc related properties, the config explicitly turns it off, but apparently because I turned off indenting the xml for being too slow I now have a table of contents.

Rant... possibly over again.

Despite learning multiple programming languages over decades, none cause me as much frustration as ELisp. Every single time I want to customize something in Emacs, I think I know how to do it, I can see examples that do what I want to do, I write something and... inexplicable random behaviour occurs.

I actually like Emacs, hugely enjoy using OrgMode and OrgRoam, and like lisps in general but there's just something about Elisp that always manages to catch me out, and it's never anything that feels transferable to the next problem I want to solve.

Okay. That's out of my system. Rant over, and no I am not looking for help at this time.

@[email protected] For things with a direct relationship, yeah, I just wire things up in code (or even within a scene using the editor). I'm more looking at signals that are likely to have several listeners (or varying listeners) or 'central' nodes like the player which I don't want to make a singleton but I also don't want to hand a reference around to every single other node in the game (enemies giving 😜 if they die, shops charging money, etc). Maybe I'm over thinking it, but a message bus the player listens to seems to deal with a lot of these issues.

Okay, #gamedev people out there. I'm building a slightly larger project in #godot for the first time and despite my normal functional programming background Godot seems to be engineered to lean heavily into "original" (i.e. message passing) OO programming. It does it in a really nice way too, so I'm not even too sad.

The question: how have you chosen to connect signals together in your projects? I'm leaning towards a singleton autoloaded message bus, but it feels like something that may have downsides I haven't spotted yet due to my lack of experience with the engine.

@[email protected] because insisting on emailing bots is such a well known and successful spam technique.

Actually... I'm now realising that in our brave new llm manages my email world, that may be true and now I'm sad. ​

@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yes. Blank keycaps and using Dvorak (I needed to learn a different layout as part of dealing with a repetitive strain injury years back) make my desktop virtually unusable to anyone else.​

@[email protected] where does closing your eyes and visualising very hard fall in this scale? /s​

beige.party/users/Anomnomnom... ​

Having #adhd and currently suffering from #chronicfatigue, this is what I believe the cool kids call a 'current mood'. Assuming current can be measured in years...

@[email protected] @[email protected] Even if the current AI tech is good enough to write all our code for us (which I don't think it is), we'd still want to teach people to code the same way that we still teach people to add up even though we have calculators. Even if you have a machine to do something for you, knowing how and why to do the thing in the first place is a valuable skill to understand the world around you and use the machine effectively. Having a calculator to do division for you doesn't help if you don't understand that division means splitting up an amount equally.

So... while I think "coding as a profession is going away!" is extremely likely to be untrue with current LLM based AI for both legal and technical reasons, I am absolutely certain that we will have valid reasons to teach people to code for a very long time yet.​

@[email protected] I still get the warm fuzzies each time I remember the day that my wife asked me "why did you forget {x}?" and my teenage son answered for me "Isn't the real question why would the family member with ADHD remember it?"

(Side note: my wife is actually pretty good at understanding the executive function side of my ADHD in general, but having an insanely good memory herself she (ironically) constantly forgets that I forget things)

Need to tweak some audio settings on my wireless headphones, which are a good few years old now. The lastest version of the software to do so is a 600mb download...

It's taken a good few years, but I have learned that it's always better to write at least two or three implementations of a repeating code pattern before trying to generalize it, because there's always situational tweaks you haven't thought of each time you reuse it.

But it is still so very satisfying to go back after the third, write that general interface, and watch hundreds of lines of code wash away.

@[email protected] Why go for the lesser embarrasment? Given the levels of communication skills displayed in other areas, I think it's entirely possible three F-15s were shot down accidentally by friendly $5000 drones...​

So, the year I'm recovering from chronic fatigue probably isn't the ideal year to try #NaNoRenO. But then, I did just build @VisualInk... #VisualNovels

@[email protected] @[email protected] Or has mastodon running on a NAS...​

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I think one of the hardest things to adjust to coming from the UK, is that bureaucracy in the UK may be ridiculous but in general you're told everything that needs to happen up front. In ITA you tend to gets things sprung on you as you go along, and frequently no one person in the process knows the details of the whole process.

Coming from the UK, this is extremely difficult to tell apart from people being dishonest and trying to take advantage, and unfortunately its just as true dealing with the authorities as it is dealing with businesses.​ Translation issues amplify this enormously, so finding at least one trusted person locally really is a priority.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yeah. I think there we're getting into the fact that Western comics tend to pass between authors while manga are often very much single author driven. I've seen Punisher arcs where he's presented with a straight up heroic character (which... doesn't really ring true to me, honestly) and one's where he is all about the revenge and really the only redeeming quality he has is that the people he wants revenge on are not very nice™. Manga tend to be more consistent on character motivation from what I've seen.

Still poking at the edge of whether I've understood you (I'm actually pretty interested in what we can learn from the different ways that other cultures approach storytelling, hence the digging), would somebody like the original (book) James Bond fit the bill? Obviously a nasty piece of work in many ways, choosing to keep the world a safer place for everybody else as a line of work bit with little evidence that I remember that he does for any particular moral reason.​

Also: just to be very clear, I know that many people working in education are not about the pieces of paper and the bureaucracy. But I've also worked in local councils, and I can tell you straight up that a small subset of the back office are absolutely obsessed with having the correct string of letters in the expected places and making sure that people are in the "right" box in the system.