So, courtesy of Zoom's technical issues this afternoon, over the next few days y'all can look forward to some short videos on conditional and non-linear #interactivefiction content in #ink , because I'm not letting people down on the course content just because video chat decided not to work.

Some days, the internet is a wonder of technology giving access to opportunities and contacts that would be impossible otherwise.

Other days, the internet is watching two members or your group of five unable to access the video chat that worked fine last week, and two others able to join but not hear anything.

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.

So excited! After just one session with Ink, one of our under 11 students has started producing multiple #visualnovels. Bearing in mind he's not been shown anything but 'diverts' and 'knots' (ways to jump to named parts of your script) they are pretty solid. I'm going to be sharing more of them later, but I was excited enough I wanted to share at least one straight away 😁

visualink.mavnn.eu/published...

@[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.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I must admit that I loath Deadpool who doesn't really come across as loveable to me at all, so I may not be the best judge there. And you don't get much blanker than Wick.

But I suppose I'm not really seeing the line between people like Punisher and Lone Wolf, so I may have missed part of the essence of what you're saying.​

Writing bios is the weirdest thing. I just had to write one for a local authority in the UK who want to know why I might be qualified to teach secondary school level computer science to somebody, and to my ears it both sounds weirdly boastful while at the same time I know that it probably doesn't include what some of the officials are looking for/expecting.

"Why does it matter that he's taught hundreds of people over 15+ years? He didn't even finish his degree, and he has no initials after his name at all!"

@[email protected] @[email protected] Isn't this also basically the Punisher, Deadpool, etc? Obviously not nice people, sometimes in fairly upbeat settings (if not always upbeat stories) but who only interact with enemies who are so obivously worse than them that they appear... not quite as morally bankrupt. See also things like John Wick, although that has the whole glanced at initially redemption overtones that are almost part of the character if you squint hard enough.​

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] ​Ah, yes. That is hard. Although mentioning remote work has reminded me of somebody else. @[email protected] , do you happen to know anybody in Padua who can recommend reputable estate agents? I know it's not right in your stomping grounds but I don't have many contacts "up North"

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] A lot of the best deals here go by word of mouth, so if he is moving there for a job or similar it may also be worth asking any local contacts. It's far more acceptable here to both ask for and recieve help with this type of thing from 'professional' contacts than it can be in the some parts of the UK.​

@[email protected] It's almost as if software architecture needs to try and solve real, specific, problems rather than being chosen according to fashion. Who would have thought?​

@[email protected] "I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million security researches all face palmed at once..." ​

@[email protected] @[email protected] I needed to speak to a plumber about irrigation for a large garden a few years ago, and yeah. Whole new world of plumbing knowledge and terminology I didn't understand layered on top of horticultural terminology I didn't understand.​