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So why a public post about this? Partly because it forces me to acknowledge the improvement myself. Partly to encourage other people hitting such "lack luster" milestones that no, this really is progress.

But also as a public service annoucement that post-viral/chronic fatigue feels and behaves differently to 'being tired'. You can carry out a task that doesn't feel like it is straining you at all - because it is well within your trivial strength levels - but which will leave you brain fogged, physically washed out, and unable to sleep properly for days afterwards. If you're getting hit by feeling like somebody has pulled the plug and feeling, well, stupid hours or even a day or two after being more active than normal, it might be worth looking into a longer description of how normal and chronic fatigue differ. The things that help in each situation are quite different.

Today in #ChronicFatigue : I hit a week of exercising every day, without skipping any. And given it has been 15 months since I stopped work, and this is the first time, I feel the need to celebrate that. In this state it is so easy to do too much and knock yourself out for the day(s) after.

It does feel a bit strange to celebrate though, because exercise in this context is 10 minutes at 4.5 km/h on a treadmill. For those of you not used to metric measures, this is a ludicrously minimal amount of exertion; I normally walk at around 6 km/h and ten minutes is, well, ten minutes. And if I try and do this twice too close together (like walking to get an ice cream, sitting for half an hour, and walking back) I wreck my energy levels and sleep for the following several days. #PostViralFatigue #LongCovid

@[email protected] @[email protected] It is, I may need to check if I can change it as a config setting. Also, apparently you've just discovered that I set up an account on .social in 2018 and completely forgot about it!

@[email protected] Yeah, I'm honestly not quite sure whether it's by design or not; I can see the logic of 'well, if you replied but removed the tag you didn't want to notify the person you're replying to' and I would expect that to work on descendent replies (i.e., letting the original author drop out of being notified on a thread that has gone off topic). I don't know what Mastodon does in the same situation.

@[email protected] It seems I've just made a random discovery: it doesn't look like I get notified here a Bonfire instance if somebody replies without a mention.

Fixing bugs by adding errors: previously VisualInk was hiding some of the runtime errors in your #visualnovel. Although Ink checks a lot of things as you're writing (and VisualInk prevents you running a broken script), some errors only occur when you're playing - like when you try and compare a number and a string that looks like a number. Now you always got told what went wrong, and which section of your script it went wrong in.

Oh, yes, links. We haz them. Have one of them there new fangled hyperlinks to the courses I'm talking about: thinkersmeetup.com/service-p...

So, what kind of things will be covered in our new "Making 2D Game Assets" course for 11-16 year olds?

Example 1: Use layers and a simple art style (pixel art is great for this) to quickly create expressive characters in #krita. Is this just a prototype? Or will the style grow on you and get refined? Either way, you can carry on actually making your game. Meet Pixel Dood and his brother Squarilino Dood. #gamedev #krita #art

@[email protected] @[email protected] I can't think of anything I've done with FUSE that wasn't a crime, a hack around my own ignorance, or both

@[email protected] @[email protected] I've successfully posted to a @[email protected] instance using C2S, partly because the project I'm using to do so is something I'd like to see work in a wide variety of places and I'm hoping that I can do my small part to resolve the chicken and egg aspect of server/client support by producing things that use the API from the client side. I'd love to see broader support.

Also: if you're an employer, why not make this a policy? Apart from the ethical arguments, I've seen many commercial projects stall waiting for an open source feature or taking a hard to maintain internal branch when they could have just submitted the fix upstream for everybody. And it will please the kind of staff who you actually want to retain.

mastodon.social/users/mikemc...

@[email protected] @[email protected] This reminds me of a friend of my brother who loved expensive cars. Office wear was generally t-shirt and jeans, but on the days they had to meet investors he would put on a really nice suit and then take a long lunch break to go test drive a car. Because it turns out that the test drives were in fact wage-restricted, they just didn't have a great way of measuring "wage".

@[email protected] @[email protected] Did you play "Paranoia", by any chance?

Friend computer is looking increasingly representative of what a genuine US military AI would look like every day. #ttrpg

Apart from the group courses at fixed times I'm running at Thinker's Meetup for 11+ year olds, I'm also currently doing online mentoring of #HomeEd individuals or groups who'd like to add #gamedev with #godot, #ComputerScience, or #InteractiveFiction to their activities (whether that's working towards a specific qualification or project based). Drop me a private message if you'd be interested.

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

@[email protected] @[email protected] I... wow. That is quite the advert.

@[email protected] Many years ago there was a TV show on the BBC called Mastermind in which the contestants could pick a specialist subject to be asked question about.

"Your special subject is personal failure" is not a choice I recall, I must admit, but I feel I wouldn't score too badly!

What's this? New courses? And being announced more than a week in advance?

thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...

If you're interested in either writing or creating assets for a #visualnovel, we've got you covered. Five weeks on each as online sessions for 11-16 year olds in the European afternoon/US morning. #creativewriting #gamedev #homeed

It occurs to me that I don't remember many individual commits from my career with pride, and of that small number every single one was a net decrease in code size (and normally associated with a large increase in either performance or reliability)

hachyderm.io/users/lizardbil...

@[email protected] "... we're making billions! Billions I tell you!"

"Profit?"

"Don't be silly. Lines!"

Don't know where y'all are at, but round here it's spring time #flowers #DoomScrollingBreak