The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

What really yanks my chain is that the old version of the course that I had to move on from was worse at the beginning as far as explaining concepts and integrating them, but SO MUCH BETTER in the latter parts in comparison because it still... explained things instead of linking a javadoc and shrugging and suggested what concepts we should be trying in assignments...

 

Wow yeah that sounds like it's just dropping you in the deep end. Even my upper level CS courses in college didn't just link you the docs and shrug.

You are definitely not a dumbass! It takes a while to get to the point where one can solve a coding problem with just a dream and a handful of documentation, and even then it's never really just that, there are design patterns and best practices as guides. Over time you build up a tool box, like any other craft.

 

ty ;_; the self-doubt gremlins have been chewing on me something fierce about this no matter what my good sense says.

 

Shadowbringers is fantastic and I'm taking my time with it, so expect me to be scarce for uh... gotta get through the story and level up another job and level up crafters, then the new 8-mans release in two weeks... so quite a while.

 

it's so good
it's so good
it's ssoooo sdjfksdlafjd;slaGOOD

 

Sometimes my ADHD meds upset my stomach all day even when I take them with food, which is annoying. More annoying is that they almost always fuck with my already kind of fucky body temperature regulation so on days I take them I'm running a bit warm, and on and off will have chunks of time where I'll start feeling extremely, unpleasantly too hot and kind of sick that will sometimes fade on its own, but sometimes I have to sit in front of a fan on take a cold shower to cool down. It's gross and it sucks and I'm not sure if it's random or if I just need to hydrate better...?

 

I changed my rehabilitation plan a bit for my final three months there to add working on a writing portfolio and vague looking into freelance work/writing tutoring. I am, of course, internally freaking out about this because I have no idea what even has potential, or if I should bother thinking that way and just pick a direction and work on what I have a voice for. But how do I pick a direction? What can I even write about regularly without running out of things to say? How on earth is this going to translate into money so I can do the whole eating and paying my bills thing???? AHHHHHH!!!

I need a pep talk. ._.;

 

Nobody:
Me: what if I made a nsfw blogette in clearance 7 so I could talk about VIERA GENDER AND JUNK HEADCANONS

( seriously, they’re weird - rabbit people who “aren’t particularly fecund” and in-lore are not able to be differentiated between male and female until puberty? Something is UP here.)

 

hi hello I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

 

Today’s Java course fuckery: resizing and tiling an image with PixelWriter, because why not do something pointlessly convoluted, I guess?

This, after a dead easy “change this line graph into a bar graph” assignment. I get the feeling that the end of this course is all random filler...

 

(Have not forgotten about viera, just been busy, then laid low by a migraine for a couple of days)

 

Avoiding my programming assignment responsibilities by writing a prompt list generator instead

It’s very simple and just reads from three text files, randomly puts an item from each list together with no duplicates until at least one is gone through, and writes them all to a separate file. Maybe I’ll get fancier later and have it actually ask for files and generate based on how many were given but ehhhh.

(This happened to me the last time I took a programming course way back in high school- get to a certain point, get bored/frustrated/confused by the coursework, wander off and do my own projects... at least now I have more focus than to do a rambling, over ambitious text adventure that never gets anywhere!)

 

For real though, I'm having a hard time with this course. The last couple of assignments I just... have had a hell of a time parsing the concepts at all. Like the one I complained about - the assignment was the generate an image from a file with PixelWriter, then generate a half-sized version on top of it, then generate that half-sized version tiled 2x2, then invert the colors ("it's art in Andy Warhol's style" said the assignment. "Whoever wrote this fundamentally misunderstands that apeing the general method of the style does not make it 'in the style'", said me). I could figure out what general thing I needed to do to make these things happen, but I just... sat there and stared at NetBeans for a while and could not figure out how to get it out. I ended up looking at the model solution and it was about as simple as I guessed it was, but my brain just went NOPE. It was like forgetting how to tie my shoelaces or something.

This next assignment is walking through creating an Asteroids clone and again, I can't seem to hold a word of it in my head.

It's so frustrating! It makes me feel really stupid! I know I have problems paying attention or retaining information when a task seems like busywork or doesn't relate to anything else, but this is ridiculous. So are these assignments, though. I feel like the course stopped building up concepts by relating them to ones I've already learned and is just shoving as much stuff at me as it can while there's still course to do it in. Like the SUDDENLY JAVAFX and making it do useless tricks and oh here's how to make graphs and a section on what bar and line graphs are and why it's useful to be able to visualize information and ??????????????????????

I think I might have to admit some kind of defeat and ask the social worker there who knows Java what the good goddamned blazes is up with this course. Am I just not getting it or is this course an absolute disaster in the last sections???

 

Okay like, image processing is a hobby of mine, and I’m honestly confused by what the everloving fuck they’re trying to accomplish there. Scaling isn’t a straightforward topic. It deserves some time to itself. I have no idea why they would suddenly mash it together with tiling and color inversion? Like, yeah those are things a person could conceivably want to do to the same image, but first you’re making bar graphs and now suddenly at least three unrelated image processing topics at once? And now they’ve got you moving on to something else?! Seriously what is wrong with that course.

 

I wish I knew

I... suppose? There might be reasons one might want to scale images in a program that isn’t actually an image processing program (a game, maybe?) but otherwise it’s like... a number of image processing programs already exist.

Unless the real goal was to obliquely practice the nested for loops again, but... why like this.

My advisor isn’t here today and is on vacation next week so that’s a wash, but she’s already sounded less than impressed with some of the instructional choices in this iteration of the course (which is through the University of Helsinki). Idk if she knows it gets this stupid, though.

At any rate, I have writing to work on too, which I’ve ostensibly been doing by populating my prompt generator lists. >_>;

 

This actually made me blanch ever so slightly. I could feel it.

If students are at a point where they may be shaky on nested for loops, they will not be able to understand image processing. You cannot iterate through an image if you don't understand nested loops. Shoving them into image processing if they're still not entirely confident is fucking cruel.

Best case scenario, the tool they're using hides the details from them so they don't have to think about it, in which case they'll probably be confused about what on earth the point is, as they have every right to be. Otherwise, that's an entire separate course, in which you'd expect half the class to be grad students, and all of the students to be comfortable with foundational programming logic.

 

The latter half of this course has taken enough leaps of logic in what it expects in assignments vs what it actually taught that I’m not sure what to think the instructor was thinking. My most charitable take is that he was running out of time/ideas and so just kind of started shoving stuff in. I will be leaving some rather strongly worded feedback, that’s for sure.

 

My brain, as I read over the list of prompts I generated: some of these would be really good for erotic stories though

Me: where were you the last time I actually wanted to write porn?!

 

Now for something happy - a dude at the rehabilitation center started up a conversation with me about what I was doing and where I'm from (since I'm a native English speaker I'm somewhat unusual there), and he mentioned that he hoped he could get back to coding someday, but he doesn't have the energy for it anymore - he's got chronic exhaustion from years of anxiety-related insomnia, and it sounds like it's only relatively recently he uncovered that it was anxiety-related and got out of the social situation that was causing him so much anxiety.

I said that recovery is a long road, and that I've had some pretty major health problems that taken me quite some time to recover from and I'm still not 100% but when I look back at where I was at my lowest I realize I've made a lot of progress. We talked about that for a while and he said thank you, you've given me a lot of hope, you're a very wise man.

I laughed and was like, well, I've been on this earth for 40 years, I'm glad I learned something in all that time, but internally I was 1000% warm fuzzies because 1. I HELPED SOMEONE :D :D :D 2. HOLY SHIT I PASS???

I mean yeah in a perfect world I'd be easily read as a 'them' and it'd be nbd, but this is the world we've got and being referred to as a man in a complimentary way from someone I've only just met is A+. (He didn't even blink when I said I moved here because of my husband, so extra happy points there!)

 

This is extra happy-making because I got called 'miss' on my way home last week from some charity solicitor ("Excuse me, miss, can I have one minute of your time?" no you absolutely cannot pal) which was... honestly baffling as well as upsetting. I know I look younger than I am but I do not look 'miss' young, esp. not to someone who was probably about 15 years younger than me, and I sure as hell wasn't dressed as a 'miss', unless the extremely glittery backpack made him err on the side of "probably girl???".

I just shook my head and looked grim because I was hot and tired but had I been feeling a little feistier I would have told the dude that first of all, it's sir, and second of all, no.