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

I couldn't work on fuckall this weekend besides puttering around Stardew Valley because I was too sick to think straight - and it's been a relatively minor cold but the last three days were easily the worst of it - and so I'm feeling bad and stressed about it especially as there's one pretty lengthy assignment left and I only have today and tomorrow morning to get it done and I've already had to miss out on points from one assignment, so I went and checked the course guide to see how deep in the hole I might be and

*checks points category* *sees that it's category C* *sees that quite a few things are category C*

RELIEF...

My pride might be dinged that I'm missing a significant chunk off of the full points score but passing is passing and I'll take it. I'll still be doing the category B and C assignments but I'm going to stop twisting myself into knots about them!!

 

Despite this I spent most of the last 8 hours getting 2/3rd of the way through the next assignment... :''')

 

Me: Oh neat, this application has a second for preferred name!
Application: WHOA not so fast buddy, we mean only of your *legal* names in case you go by your middle name :)
Application: Trans people whomst??

I WANT to put '[deadname] or Rhys' in the first name section just so I can put Rhys in the preferred name section but I don't know how bad of an idea that is. Is that a bad idea? *frets*

(Being referred to by my deadname really really upsets me, it turns out!)

 

I fudged it and immediately felt bad for doing so :') OH WELL....

 

This is the most relatable thing, holy shit. I didn’t really know what to do with myself when working on my perfectionism led to getting really good grades.

I can see how it happened. I declined to take classes that were harder than required. I improved my time management astronomically by not letting myself spend unlimited consecutive hours on essays, which I’m very slow at. I didn’t attend the extra credit sessions for material I didn’t need extra help with, that would have fucked up my entire weekend rhythm without making a real difference in my grade anyway. So yeah, I absolutely was a much more productive and reliable student. But a lot of it amounted to deciding not to stress about things and then deciding that since I wasn’t stressing I could do this one extra problem, or spend a little more time polishing my concluding paragraph, or get ahead on my reading over here...

It was a mixed victory. I didn’t solve my perfectionism. I didn’t fail at self improvement though, or at my classes. I’ll take it, honestly.

 

Van Halen is butt rock and it isn't even good butt rock.

 

Apparently they revolutionized rock or some bullshit by not being blues-inspired like every other rock band up until then, according to one article I skimmed, which, uh. I'm not really read up on my musical history but that sounds kind of bullshit.

Wikipedia is a less grandiose and the claim is they're credited with "restoring hard rock to the forefront of the music scene", which still feels kind of "Sure, Jan" to me, but whatever, at least it makes more sense. My overall impression is that they were a big deal within their genre like... 30-40 years ago, and then like a lot of rock dinosaurs enjoy some amount of popularity today but are not exactly a musical staple, no matter how much their fans want to think they are.

(I finally looked up more about the young artist people are ragging on and her music apparently takes influence from a very wide range of genres, none of which are hard rock. Lots of pop, to which I saw one stan huffing and puffing that if she's influenced by pop she should know about Van Halen, then!... which is hilarious that they aren't aware of pop as a genre of its own and seem to think it just means popular, and uh, Van Halen hasn't been that popular for decades, my dude.)

 

Urgh. Winter ennui has hit. Now it's all uphill until February at least. x_x

 

Dark season dumps solidarity fistbump

 

In retrospect I think I'm still recovering from the cold I came down with last weekend, considering I just did one of the easier workout videos I like to do and was struggling by the 7 minute mark, so being actually physically run down is going to contribute pretty significantly @_@

Not that SAD isn't happening, but it doesn't usually come with this big of a side of my brain doing the exhausted toddler whining thing.

 

The malaise continues. It's supposed to be nicer weather tomorrow; still a bit sick or not, I think I need a decently long walk out in the actual for-real daylight before I shrivel up. I'm not sure it'll help but goddamn am I tired of feeling so drained.

It's mental malaise as well as physical, though. Resigned exhaustion at the holidays -- it's "no presents!" again this year; I need to ask J if he's willing to clarify with his family if they mean no presents for real this year, or it's going to be another 'we said no presents but people are doing presents anyway' year like last year. Disappointment that I've fallen flat on my face with writing. And then frustrated, sad helplessness--

Spoiler: sad family stuff

A couple of days ago I found out that one of my cousins, A, was run over by a garbage truck. He's been homeless (which I didn't know -- I knew he'd vanished from the internet but not why, and my aunt only posted a cryptic "he's been having a hard time" quite a while back, and then a more alarming "if anyone is in contact with him please tell him to contact his mom"), and was sleeping on a walkway under a tarp, and the driver of the truck just decided to assume that the tarp wasn't covering anything and backed up over him. Worse? Turns out that witnesses at the scene HAD TO STOP THE DRIVER FROM LEAVING. He was straight up going to leave without helping the guy he'd just run the fuck over.

So A has been in the hospital with a broken tibia and severe lacerations, which is awful but not as bad as I was fearing. His mom posted a photo of him in his hospital room (awake and sitting upright) and it just.. really hurt to see him. He's always been thin but now he's skin and bones, his hair -- which has been iron gray since he was 18 -- is now completely white and wispy like an old person's, and overall he looks closer to my mom's age than mine.

He's a year younger than I am.

We're not close, but we've maintained a kind of distant fondness in our adulthood. I know he's been having a rough time for a long time, but it's heartbreaking to know he's been having it so bad -- and now fucking... this. My mom said he has a place to stay now, but how long is that going to last? I'm afraid for him.

A lot of the kids in my extended family have had a hell of a time of growing up and being grown up. There's a very clear line of mental illness running through my family that no one seems to want to talk about. Myself and my cousin closest in age managed to start pulling up out of it in our 30s via getting actual professional help, but A... clearly didn't. To say nothing of A's older brother -- I have no idea what's happened to him. Nobody talks about him -- hell, maybe they don't know. What internet presence he did have is now dead links and other people with the same name.

It's 'funny', in a way that's completely depressing, that once it was clear that I was growing up to be a weird feral goblin, that I was expected to be the family disappointment, a high school dropout with a substance abuse problem and a kid or two way too young... and while I sure as HELL had my problems, I was one of the few who graduated high school easily, did not have children, and did not ever have a substance abuse problem. My cousins who grew up more well-to-do? That didn't insulate them, because there's always been a lot more going on than who gets to eat all organic food or wear the nicest clothes or what the hell ever.

It used to be kind of a bitter comfort to me that I turned out okay despite everything, but now it just makes me really sad.

 

Shaved off a few days of Depression Stubble before it became Depression Beard - and god it's weird that I could grow a beard now if I wanted to, I've been on T long enough, and my thick hair genes apply as much to my facial hair as they do to the rest of the hair on my head. I don't know that I could ever stand it, the stubble is in and of itself low-key upsetting, but I guess if I ever need to make a plan to be incognito somewhere I know I can grow a beard? No one who used to know me would ever think to recognize me behind a face full of bristle. I'm not sure I would recognize me, honestly....

 

CRIES ABOUT RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS

I don't like recursion, no sir. I also barely understand it. :')

I also don't like how Eclipse does the most baffling fucking things. A project from last week kept showing an error in one of its classes (not one I was altering!) even though the classes I was meant to complete went through the autograder with no errors and should have worked. I hadn't touched the class that was complaining, I closed the project and opened it again, and I could not figure out for the life of me WHY it was complaining, the error made no sense. Today I finally opened a known clean version of that class from the zip file I have, copied over the code and saved. No error! Then I ctrl-z'd back to what it had been before...... no error.

??????????????? why does this happen

anyway I'm clearly not finishing the last two assignments before the deadline -- and I don't care! I don't need the points! Even looking at the very last one gave me a headache -- it's in a custom language read by the associated Scala program that gives instructions for simple AI robots to battle. The assignment is to write our own robot in that dinky model language but I am so crashingly NOT INTERESTED in that kind of thing I'd only do it if I absolutely had to.

And I don't, so I won't. *throws confetti!!*

SAD is definitely playing a factor here, and that I pretty much constantly have a headache lately (it was very nearly a migraine yesterday - my teeth felt like they were vibrating), so my field of fucks is especially barren at the moment and things I'd normally be merely 'meh' about are an intense DO NOT WANT instead. Self-care is making myself do a certain amount of them anyway because they need to get done, but anything that I can safely get away with not doing is not going to get done. I'm a big baby and I don't care. :T

 

Oh man, recursion. It took me years to figure out that it might be something I'd ever want to do at all, which made it nearly impossible to learn it. I had no motivation to do that. It's complex enough that they always try to start you out with easy problems, which seems to mean almost exclusively problems for which recursion is not a necessary or good solution.

Spoiler: recursion rambling

There was one thing that struck me as both easy to acknowledge as a real problem that would need solving, and a problem for which I didn't actually have an answer I liked any better. That was navigating directories with an unknown subdirectory situation.

This was a problem I'd encountered before with downloaded user created content for The Sims. You never know if someone just zipped the files, put the files in a folder and zipped the folder, or created an entire structure of subdirectories where you have to open a folder called "floors" which oddly contains nothing but a folder called "tiles", only to discover the creator has sorted some but not all of the files into further subfolders called "red" and "beige". I got really tired of moving files out of folders. It's extremely tedious and takes forever unless you're restrained about your downloading, which I'm not. I wanted a script to do it for me so I could just grab them and dump them in my downloads folder.

So what do you do with that, as far as scripts? Open a path to the location of the folder in question, then look to see if there are subdirectories and/or files. If there are files, move them. If there are subdirectories, open them. Look in each subdirectory to see if there are subdirectories and/or files. Rinse and repeat. At each level you may be looking at more than one subdirectory as well as zero or more files. You need to deal with all of those, and you don't know how deep it goes.

Recursion is a very neat solution to this. Your base case is that your function moves the files out of a folder and into your target location. That's the entire point. The subdirectories are an annoying complication, but they're still basically minor variations on moving files out of a folder. So you can write a recursive function. Perhaps before you move any files you check for any subdirectories. You don't have different needs for subdirectories than you do for their parent directories, because it's still a path to a folder that may contain files and folders. You still want to open the path and deal with both those things. You've already got a function for that. So for each subdirectory, you have your function call itself.

Recursion uses an area of computer memory called the stack. It's not all that important what it is or how it does, except that it's used for storing data for programs that are currently running. It behaves like a stack data structure, which I believe was portrayed correctly in Homestuck. You put new things at the top of the stack, and you can't get to any older things until you've taken every newer thing off the top in order. Putting something on the stack is called pushing, which reminds me of putting a Pez in a Pez dispenser tbh. Retrieving something from the stack (and erasing it from the stack's memory in the process) is called popping. That also reminds me of Pez.

This is what happens, more or less. You call your function, passing it the path of the "floors" directory. The computer loads the function into working memory, and allocates enough memory on the stack for all its data storage needs. (I'm just gonna call this pushing the function onto the stack although I believe it's just the data storage, not the actual code, that goes on the stack, technically speaking.) The function starts by looking for subdirectories. It finds one called "tiles". The function calls itself, but when it calls it passes the path to "tiles". The computer creates a new instance of your function and pushes it onto the stack, on top of the first one. The first one's on hold, we're doing "tiles" now. The new instance behaves exactly the same as if it were the first and only instance; it doesn't care who called it or why. It just goes to the location it was given and does its thing. It goes to the "tiles" directory and looks for a subdirectory and finds "beige". It in turn calls a new instance of itself with the path for the "beige" folder, and the computer pushes that instance on top of the stack. There are no subdirectories inside "beige", so the current instance of the function can begin to look for files. It moves each file, and then it's done with everything, so it returns. The computer pops the "beige" instance off the stack. It's gone. Now the top item on the stack is the "tiles" instance, which continues from where it left off. It carries on looking for subdirectories and finds "red". It calls another instance of itself to look at the "red" path, which the computer obligingly pushes onto the stack. It does its thing, returns when it has run out of things to do, and gets popped from the stack, leaving "tiles" at the top again. When the "tiles" instance runs out of subfolders, it will be able to look for any files within the "tiles" directory and move any it finds. Then it will be done, so it will return and the computer will pop it from the stack. Then the only instance of our function left on the stack is the original "floors" instance. It left off having just having made a call about the "tiles" subdirectory, and that function returned successfully, so it continues. It sees no other subdirectories, and it also sees no files, so it returns and is removed from the stack. The stack has no instances of the function anymore. We have recursed and we are done.

Recursion is a relatively intensive prospect. There's only so much space on the stack, and there needs to be storage to account for every single instance of a function that has started but not yet returned. I don't know what happens if you overflow the stack, but I'd imagine it could make your machine really slow if you're trying to allocate the entire stack but in really small pieces, and then if there is no safety net built into the language you're using, either the operating system will save you from yourself and terminate your program, or it won't and your whole machine will probably crash.

I have not had a ton of call to use recursion, but I have found that I saw places where I could use it only after I got somewhat comfortable with it. So maybe I could have recursed more but didn't realize it.

I'm suspecting web crawling might work a heck of a lot like subdirectory navigation, but I haven't had cause to try it...

 

Do I take the companion course along with the continuation of the course I just took, or can I actually manage two whole courses worth of work... :thinking:

The continuation of Programming 1 is 6? weeks long, while Programming 2 (which is a separate course, because for some reason the continuation of Programming 1 is Programming Studio 2) is 12 weeks. I'm guessing it'll be about 24 hours per week of work at the low end when they're both going, so assuming I can budget my time worth a damn (insert hollow laughter here) that's 4-6 hours per day worth of work, allowing one day per week completely free.

That's ostensibly not a lot? I also need to budget in personal writing time, and fit some eventual editing work in too, though, while still keeping one day per week completely free of intellectual pursuits or I know I will fall to pieces.

Well, I have a while to decide, the application deadline isn't until mid-February, although of course I will want to figure it out sooner than that.

 

Oh wait this other website says the continuation starts on January 11th and goes until the 11th of May, which is... very much not six weeks. ??? Man, whatever. The other one still doesn't start until late February, so that gives me time to decide, and also time to contact a ICT training program for unemployed people and see what they're about and if it'd be compatible with this next course.

On another note entirely, I went and got cat litter and since I had to get groceries after decided I'd just carry the cat litter around (in my backpack) rather than get a cart and put it in there, and while I held up okay my feet and lower legs have been tingly ever since I got home a couple of hours ago. :( Just because I CAN tote 10 liters of cat litter around on my back for a mile doesn't mean I SHOULD.

 

J was sad that I only asked for one chrimbo present so I pointed him at my Steam wishlist (even though I felt kinda bad since I have so many unplayed games but he was like PLEASE LET ME GET YOU ANOTHER THING! so) and he got me My Time at Portia! After some fussing around I pulled out one of my human OCs to run around in the world and



... Ripley looks like a little claymation Nick Cave. XD

 

I really wanna name claymation Ripley's workshop Believe It Or Not but there's not enough spaces :(

 

Been absolutely obsessed with My Time at Portia the past week. I wish I had the energy to be half as productive as I make Ripley be in that game, the man is charging full speed ahead 90% of the day.

I like how in-depth the relationship system is and how it has a solid overarching storyline while still being sandboxy. I don't like the abandoned ruins so much - it's fun and interesting at first to tunnel around and discover objects, but now I've got the desert ruins unlocked and it feels like an awful slog. Sorry Merlin, your museum is going to remain a bit thin on exhibits because there's only so much digging around and discovering yet another fucking tennis racket that I can handle.

The townspeople are mostly charming. However, reading around has led me to the conclusion that I mostly do not understand this game's fandom because their favorites mostly leave me cold. Sam is smug for no good reason and I resent her for acting like she did all the work in the WOW Industries ruins when she was largely useless. Dr. Xu is kind but doesn't seem to have a lot of personality. Emily is nice but extremely bland. Gust is a COMPLETE FUCKING ASSHOLE. Being tsundere ain't cute in a grown man, especially not when it comes in the form of being snotty and negging the player when they don't utterly impress him. He had the nerve to tell me he's a 'straight shooter' -- no buddy, you're an arrogant dickhead who thinks he's too good to have manners, and that shitty little trinket you gave me (under the pretense it was a gift to you that you didn't really want, you liar) doesn't make up for shit. Your master was right, YOU ARE BORING, and the bulk of your actual personality comes from your hair. Your pig is 1000% more interesting than you, and I'm only being nice to you because it makes your dad happy and I want discounts.

(I realize complaining about him trying to buy my affection with a gift is kind of hypocritical considering I hand out presents like Santa to get people to like me, but at least I'm not a jerk about it.)

Who do I like? Alice, Petra, and Mei are great. Phyllis has grown on me, despite the fetishy outfit and the 'spring flowers are almost as beautiful as me!' dialogue at the start. I like Presley even though I'm still a bit mad at him for letting Higgins get away with bullshit at the start of the game. Gale is a sweetheart and I don't feel like I'm making friends with him just for the bonuses. I like Remington a lot and really appreciate he was actually useful in the Mines, although I wish he got to have as much personality as Arlo and Sam got. Speaking of Arlo, I wasn't sure if I'd like him but now I think he's great, and UNLIKE SOME OTHER CIVIL CORPS MEMBERS *looks at Sam* acknowledges it when I kick ass. Django is great -- I love how eccentric he is. Albert and Antoine are kind of grating but they're both interesting. Oaks is ADORABLE. Is it weird I find it cute that he digs through trash like some sort of stray dog?

I think I might like Mint but he's literally never around to talk to but way off at the tunnel construction, so we'll see.

 

That sounds amazing! I may have to check that out.