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

Do you ever go through some old stuff and just

?????

I looked through my beading box in search for some extra beads I thought I had from a necklace I want to re-string and am agog at the sheer amount of random stuff I have in here. Packages upon unopened packages of glass seed beads and glass pearls and findings and

the fuck did I think I was going to do with all these beyond 'OOH SHINY MUST HOARD'?

I need to come up with some sort of plan for what to make with this stuff, and if I can't, it needs to get donated and quit taking up room for years on end. It's fun to have shinies to hoard but I live in a 52 square meter apartment with another person, I don't have the space to hoard every bit of fancy nonsense that takes my attention.

(what I'm going to do with anything I actually manage to make is another question entirely. There's only so much jewelry I can or want to wear, and I need to cull my existing jewelry collection again as it is...)

 

Sell it??? Used to make a nice bit of pocket money when I was making and selling necklaces in high school. Not enough to pay bills as a grown adult mind you, but enough to cover the cost of buying new material to keep enjoying my hobby as well as get a couple treats a week (coffee, candy, etc).

 

If I were still in a country with US style tax laws sure, but Finnish tax laws as they’ve been told to me make me EXTREMELY wary of selling anything even semi regularly. As I understand it, one has to register as a business to do any regular sales activity, or face heavy fines.

This is why I never got a Patreon— I’d have to register as a business and pay taxes accordingly no matter what I earned.

 

I have discovered that my windbreaker is only water resistant, not waterproof.

I’m glad it’s still fairly warm and I don’t get cold easily...

 

Yisun's Shadowbringers look: Twunk.

 

My current guiding light with Yisun's fashion sense: what's most likely to cause the Exarch to run straight into a wall.

 

I'm assuming you play on EU servers but just in case: you weren't the shirtless cowboy Au Ra I ran into in Praetorium last week, were you?

 

I don't actually! I play on Aether because that's where the friend that peer pressured me into playing is. Ping isn't great but oh well.

But no, it wasn't me! I almost never do MSQ roulette.

 

Mog station sale coincided with me going 100% ABS OUT on Yisun's outfits, so I bought him a crop top.

 

I feel like catboys have a reputation for being slutty but I honestly see way more auri dudes with no shirt on :P he looks awesome, what shirt is that!

 

I feel like I've seen more half-dressed (or less) auri men too. I feel like Miqos are unfairly slandered - maybe because when I see a pastel Soft Gay character, they're very often miqo boys (who may or may not be half dressed) and people just carelessly conflate the two.

It's the Southern Seas vest! Despite the unclear previews on Mogstation it is dyeable. I hardly ever see anyone wearing it which is strange to me because it has Big Gay energy.

 

Been sick for most of the past week - just a cold, and fortunately a far less miserable one than the previous (this one looks like it'll run a week, total; the last one was a solid two and had worse symptoms for longer). I hate being sick - especially during warm weather, that just makes it worse - and I'm kind of annoyed with myself that I couldn't bring myself to do any work even though I stayed home, but I can't bring myself to care that much about it right now other than a vague, tired guilt. So like... whatever. I'll worry about it on Monday -- I'm feeling a lot better today but a very light workout to get out all the stiff soreness wore me right out, so I'm still not up to much.

Been playing a lot of FFXIV as a result and feeling pretty lonely. I know there's no helping it - the hours I play are mostly incompatible with everyone I know - but I don't have to like it. Grouping up with strangers is fine - most people are fine, and even though I have a talent for getting some really bizarre groups that make me wonder if I fell into an evil mirror universe, they're still rare on the whole - but I miss hanging out with friends. T_T

 

I think... I’m finally done with the Java course???

I’m going back and checking some things the score tracker says I didn’t do that I don’t remember skipping, but... there they are. My memory is not great and the site doesn’t save your place so I’m sure I did miss some stuff, but some things I’m pretty sure were added well after I already passed them - some of the assignments I completed were recently updated, so it’s not out of the question they added more stuff earlier in the course. (Some of them were skill self- evaluations — and I see I DID answer some things on the same page, so they must be new. Bah.)

I feel like I didn’t learn enough to do much with. Idk if that’s just normal and more learning is through doing, but I very much have a sense of “That’s it?”

 

Oh wait one of the incomplete assignments is that damn asteroids game. Fuck that.

 

The last incomplete thing is this 'sandbox' project where you can 'draw' three types of materials - metal, which stays in place, sand, which falls until it hits either the bottom of the window or metal, and water, which does the same. Sand can only flow to the spaces SW, S, and SE; water flows the same, but if those directions are blocked it can also flow W or E. Sand can displace water, but not the other way around. All the UI functionality is given; the assignment is to make the materials work as expected. Kind of pointless, but not hair-tearingly frustrating or convoluted like that stupid Asteriods game, and kind of fun to make work.

Anyway, I had it working (messily and not completely as intended) but the automatic tests said there was an error (that when sand falls from 100 on the y axis some of it should go to 105, which ???) that I couldn't figure out how to fix, so today I gave up and looked at the model solution. That made me realize what a disaster my code was (it was really bad with everything in one method because I was in 'just get this shit done' mode) so I cleaned it up a lot using the model solution as a guide but not going with it exactly - it did some things that probably work but idk why or how they work so I didn't want to use them, and it had two methods that didn't seem to be used anywhere.

Code tidied up, I ran it and noticed I had fixed an out of bounds error that my previous version had had that hadn't counted against me in the tests but bugged me all the same... but it still had the same problem as my first version.

I think the problem is that while sand will pile up against the left side of the window in a way that slopes right down from the side( like |\), it won't do that on the right side - it should be like /|, but instead it's like /\| - but I have zero idea what that message has to do with it or why it's doing that.

Then I was completely out of time so I couldn't poke at it further. Next week I'll see if the model solution even works as intended, as it had a part that I'm pretty sure makes it malfunction. If it does work and doesn't throw that error I'll poke at mine some more; if it doesn't I'll give it up as a waste of time and re-submit what I have with a comment in the program complaining that the model solution doesn't even work right.

 

My advisor asked me what I was going to do next, to which I was very ????

I'm not at a total loss; the last bit of the course recommends going on to the Intro to Databases course they have online for free, and after that a more advanced course that has a mathematics course as a prereq, both of which are only available by taking an actual in-person classes. My Finnish isn't good enough for that so that's on hold, obviously. (I also don't remember how to do much beyond basic math at all anymore since it's been 23 years since I last had a math class...) She also recommended to me the Elements of AI online course, but I'm not feeling super into it, I guess because I don't feel like I can do much yet with what I have, and throwing AI into the pile seems a little overly ambitious at this point.

 

Mimir's a handsome guy.

 

For a language like Java, I feel like that is pretty normal to not really feel like you can do much after only a few classes. I’ve successfully done some really serious classes like computer systems 2 and algorithms in C. Yet if someone asked me to write a complete and useful application in C that doesn’t look like crap.exe, I believe I would be legally, ethically, and professionally required to laugh in their face. I’m sure I could eventually do it, but nobody would be enhanced by the experience. Except maybe me, in that I suppose it’s practice. So I guess that’s okay, as long as I’m getting paid to be really unprepared for an extended period of time and we’re all clear about that.

I think the only languages where I’ve immediately felt I could turn around and make programs for seriously useful spontaneous shit were visual basic and python. They’re exceedingly high level and hook seamlessly into various APIs without much obvious fuss to the programmer, so it’s pretty easy to just take the tools and flee the building. I was programming utilities in python before I knew how to actually write any halfway decent python, because being a C programmer with a focus on data structures and algorithms does not prepare you to be a good python programmer, and I’m still afraid of OOP. I hiss like a vampire encountering a cross without ever realizing that crosses don’t hurt vampires in this continuity. The ability to make working utilities without agreeing to the language’s paradigms says way more about the approachability of the language than me as a programmer. I’ve totally, utterly failed to learn several languages in 30 days. Including Java.

That’s not to excuse the class. It sounds like a really bad class that’s trying desperately to get students to be interested by throwing shiny things at them at the expense of actually teaching the language. I really hate that approach to teaching programming. People who learn languages because the shiny thing looks interesting are usually learning in spite of their angle of approach, not because of it. It’s not good if your course emulates the experience of trying to learn without access to a course.

I think databases is a truly fabulous idea. I really liked the database classes I took. It felt like the database people actually have some handle on stuff like reasonable scope for beginners, and being really solid about the basic ideas and how to make them happen practically. I hope that’s not an aberration and other people can also experience the relief. In any case, I suspect databases is a better bet for Cool Computer Skills than elements of AI without any frightening math prerequisites. Last I looked, AI was very heavily about neural networks these days, and those are fun to use but pretty disappointing to program imo. You set it up and then it does all the truly interesting stuff by itself? You get to tweak which algorithms it uses and read reports about the results. Yay? It’s useful and does very cool things, but it didn’t make me feel like a cool tv hacker, and that made me sad. I have my priorities.

 

This is legit. XD

I'll move onto the database course, then - it has a shorter timeline than the Java one (the Java one is meant to be done ten hours a week over the course of some months, but ofc it went slower for me having to struggle through a language I'm not skilled with) but the assignments might be more complex, idk. Anyway, it sounds like a useful continuation of what I do know. And after that... idk. Having to potentially re-learn a bunch of math doesn't scare me - I took all the math classes my high school offered of my own volition! - it just makes me really tired. XD; I wish I'd been able to go into computer science like I actually wanted to after high school so I wouldn't have had time to forget it all, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It sounds like it's worth studying Python as well. The Elements of AI thing I'll give a miss, at least for now - especially since it's the ethics of AI that are most interesting to me, and for that I can go read the work of a twitter acquaintance who does a lot of work around that.

 

Finally played Doki Doki Literature Club today and I wish I'd known less about it going into it - it's an interesting game and very well constructed, but my mind is far from blown. I think some of the impact is lost since I find boring white bread dating sim protagonist archetype annoying, especially since the player can't make him respond in any interesting fashion to things getting weird.

Spoiler: spoilery meta musings

As a deconstruction of dating sims it didn't really work for me - I figure Monika was still obsessed with the player even though she knew she was in a game and could mess with its files because, ultimately, she was still part of a game and programmed to be obsessed with the player - but it fell a little flat for me. I feel like the player character and player gets off relatively scot-free? Maybe that's because I don't relate to the white bread dating sim protag archetype, so my expectations weren't turned on their head/I don't feel that I was personally messed with.

I suppose what I would have preferred is the game more obviously poking holes in/deriding the player character's motivations and expectations, and the girls turning against him rather than against each other. I'm really tired of the whole girls infighting about a boy thing in fiction, even if it is in a deconstruction of the genre that even says outright the girls are programmed to love the player character.

It's a fine game, I'm just not the target audience.