Instant world building via cultural idioms.

"Today is a good day to..." #worldbuilding #creativewriting

chaos.social/users/weirdunit...

I've worked with enough Polish developers that I can probably research a reasonable estimate of this for several different projects 😀

@[email protected] Italy also has a bonus extra option of take away pizza 'by the cut' (al taglio) which you order by weight - often in hectogram units. So you order 'tre etti' (three hundred grams) and the guy cuts a slice of the right size off a huge rectangular pizza, generally by eye, and generally very accurately. Great for much confusion in shops not used to dealing with tourists. Also genuinely convenient for ordering the amount of food you actually want/need.

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This is genuinely really good news; Erasmus has been such a positive life changing events for many people I know and the UK dropping out of it was one of many tragedies from Brexit.

@[email protected] Yeah, there was a craze at one point in the uk of trying to configure hotspots to do all kinds of weird things, like try and take over your DNS, or prevent you from 'abusing the service' by using streaming services or - evil of evils - VPNs. You might be downloading anything over that VPN! I even once had one try and ask me to accept a certificate, presumably so it could man in the middle me to make sure I was following the hotspot usage policy or something.
Given that most coffee shops don't refit their wifi hotspots very often, a lot of them are still around.

@[email protected] Are you using a wifi hotspot somewhere? They're often configured really badly in the UK in my experience. If you're using mobile, that sounds stranger.

@[email protected] (insert rant here about people needing to justify their lived experience with 'published papers' to actually be listened to)

@[email protected] He was one of the first people to point out that's not really how humans work; 'high potential'/'profoundly gifted' humans don't think like everybody else more quickly, way instead tend to have more bandwidth, make more connections, make intuitive and emotional jumps that they post-hoc justify afterwards - all the things you're saying. Just with some scientific papers to wave in the face of professionals and teachers who are determined to double down on 'that child can't be bright, they aren't perfectly behaved!'.

@[email protected] I think that was a large part of his point - he was writing in the 70s so that was reasonably radical and it's not like there aren't still a lot of misconceptions about 'giftedness' (such a terrible term, as you say). I've seen his work and the follow on work that built on it (Silverman etc) used to push back against the idea of the 'gifted genius', mature beyond their years, striding forwards with logical certainity because being intelligent obviously means 'being able to do more of the same thing overbody else can.'

@[email protected] I love watching that happen! My mum once went through the whole process of ordering a meal in a kebab shop in the UK speaking Turkish (which is what the staff were using talking to each other). He not only replied in English, but then asked his co-worker why they'd complimented an English speaker on their Turkish...

@[email protected]

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

There seems to be a bit of a caffeine failure epidemic going around at the moment

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

I wonder if I should be concerned that I have a mental list of bad driven songs for when the caffeine fails mentally loaded up and ready to go at all times

@[email protected]

• Wing - Dopamine DnB remix
• Liquid Tension Experiment - pretty much anything?

@[email protected] In a variety of styles...

• Propellerheads - Spybreak!
• Bon Jovi - Keep the faith
• Gravity Kills - Guilty
• Paul Simon - You can call me Al
• KMFDM - Ultra

mastodon.social/users/creati...

And now I feel old. Also, Creative Commons is great.

@[email protected] Have you come across Dabrowski? The over simplified version is that he postulates that high development potential ("giftedness") isn't comorbid with emotional over excitability, but is driven by it. Well, that, or you self implode (he refers to growth via positive and negative disintegration as the excitability refuses to allow statis). I'm enormously over simplifying to the point of being dangerous inaccurate, but it may be worth a look if you haven't seen it before. dabrowskicenter.org/developm...

mastodon.gamedev.place/users...

One thing deeply lacking in the UK school system is some study of philosophy. I'm actually really glad my son has had the opportunity to study some here in Italy even if he's aiming towards engineering as a degree (and so is he!). I can't help thinking that the world could do with more people thinking about why we do things just at the moment.

@[email protected] Makes sense, I'm from down south with a some years in the Midlands, so I obviously speak proper like and don't know how you northerners would mangle the language :). I think I tend to use post for the postie and as a verb, and mail as the noun ("The postie delivers the mail" "I'm going to post the letter") but I'm pretty sure I'm not consistent in using either.

I mean, I did also set up a new database, fix some backups, add health monitoring to a server, and find a new potential business partner. I just didn't actually mean to do any of that and the washing still isn't hung.

Had a whole chat conversation with someone this morning in which I mentioned I was really struggling to get things done today.

Reader, did I check I had taken my #adhd meditation? No, of course not. I just carried on struggling all morning before seeing the medication after lunch when I took out the next dose.