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

Did I add functionality to my prompt generator to ask the user for the number of items per prompt, the files to read from, and if duplicates of any given set of items are allowed instead of actually writing? I sure did!

I don’t yet have any checking for invalid input because I’m too tired today to figure out how to do it and it’s still a text interface, but it works!

Now I should probably, uh... actually write something from these prompts.

 

HAY FRIENDS I NEED OPINIONS


This is the appearance I'm going to fantasia an alt to, but I'm stuck on if I want their forename to be Einar, Grimur, or Mimir (with the surname of Mourningstar). Their personality pretty much fits this default expression. Opinions?

 

I like Mimir!
(also: gods, the leonhart outfit is so good)

 

I vote Grimur, and also I love their eyebrows

 

I like Mimir except I think pronouncing three m’s so close together with the surname factored in is a bit challenging, so I vote for Grimur, though Einar is lovely too.

 

I really like the flow of Mimir Mourningstar and I love the eyebrows and nose on that character

 

Puts a vote in for Mimir - the alliteration is pleasing

 

Thank you folks! I went with Mimir. :)

I'll get some pictures of them tomorrow.

 

I only had time to do Iolis's stuff today so you get a picture of him instead.

Spoiler: large picture

My boy has two modes: elegant and all tarted up. This is the latter. (SE give men real short shorts already...)

 

i *love* the thigh high boots

 

Here we go--



hot butch bunny :3

 

Please tell me you did voice 12
Also I'm so grateful for viera eyebrows tbh

 

I absolutely chose voice 12. :3

I'm so glad I was able to give them fierce eyebrows. Can't get them quite as angry as highlander eyebrows, but this is damn good.

 

I'm hoping that they convert hairstyles for viera soon, and that includes some short ones - I feel pretty peeved they only got 8 and of those, the shortest one kinda has 'I want to speak to your manager' vibes. I'd love to have the one that's really short on top with the cropped sides, but failing that, I'd happily shell out money for Aymeric's hairstyle, even though I wouldn't be able (or want) to use the armor.

 

Went back to that asteroids assignment to see if I could focus and realized it was one of the ones where they give all the pieces in the text and the student has to assemble them, kind of like following a lego assembly kit but where the instructions show first one way to do things, then a better one.

It is intensely boring to me. Copy-pasting code is not even a quarter as interesting as lego kits.

Anyway I got enough of that one done and submitted that I can download the last chapter of assignments so I’m just going to leave it and move on because Zzzz. I do like working with code - making that dinky little prompt generator was deeply satisfying - but I absolutely do not like trying to learn in the way this course is teaching.

 

Oh hey, a questionnaire on how I feel about what I’ve learned in this section and a comment field for suggestions on how to make the course better!

*leaves one hell of a lot of words*

I did not like that the questionnaire asked if we pursued outside reading, with what seemed to be the assumption we were supposed to. Like??? I did because expectations were covered so poorly half the time I had no idea how they wanted us to accomplish things, and had to dig through a variety of search results of varying levels of quality to cobble together an understanding. The course made precious few suggestions for outside reading, which were mostly links to javadocs.

It’s billed as an ‘advanced’ course, but it follows right after the complete beginner course so it isn’t THAT advanced, and it swings wildly between hand holding and sink or swim, with a lot of unstated assumptions.

BAD TEACHING. BAD!!!

 

Oh gosh. My python class was an intermediate class, which meant you’d probably be lost in the woods forever if you didn’t have at least comfortable basic familiarity with programming, but still walked you through the logic of the language while building upon itself. So probably kind of where they have positioned the advanced class.

My teacher insisted we not try to do outside reading to solve any of the problems. Like, she wasn’t trying to stop the motivated from fulfilling their potential, she just knew that what we’d probably come up with would be overly specific, often bad code we wouldn’t actually understand. And so pretty much at that point it’s plagiarism, not learning. She said if you use a language feature in an assignment that wasn’t covered in class, the textbook, or the help files you’d reasonably expect to be pulling up, that wasn’t necessarily bad, but she would be asking you to explain the details of how your code worked, and you’d better be prepared to answer. I respected that so much. What it did in practice was put the burden of covering everything relevant to the assignments squarely on her and her teaching.

I think there’s mostly three types of outside sources you’d expect to find while trying to research on your own. You got your snippets of eldritch incantations that are technically passable as code and might even work, but come with useless and slightly unfriendly explanations that make you feel uncomfortable about pursuing real understanding. Then there are between three and infinite texts for beginners that all come from or are fighting against the reigning pedological approach and all have about equal amounts of not much more to offer, though some of them are very witty, which I do appreciate. Then finally there is the really legit information in the form of mathematical formulas complete with proofs, which might be extremely useful if you were an expert programmer or maybe a mathematician, and needed the most cutting edge information on algorithms under very specific circumstances, as researched by grad students. (There’s a fourth category involving detailed explanations of exactly how a language or algorithm is handled by the computer at the lowest possible level it’s reasonable to discuss and probably has informative tables or graphs, but that probably isn’t gonna come up in top search results unless you’re actually looking for it.)

I can testify that a large portion of the actionable information on image processing available on the internet comes from one single textbook, but I only know that because I own a copy that I used for school.

So uh, yeah. Expecting students to pursue their own outside reading to learn programming is even stranger than anything else I’ve heard about this course. Like, okay maybe they aren’t the best teachers, but don’t they have any faith in their own work at all? Have they seen the internet recently? Are they so completely divorced from reality that they think Stack Overflow is a good idea for students at this level?

 

Your Python teacher sounds like a gem and imo that's the best way to teach something like this.

I'm glad I have enough... general knowledge about the shape of programming, I guess, to be able to know when the search results I've found aren't applicable to what I'm trying to do, because yeah, most of them are exactly as you described. I knew if it didn't build on what I did know/understand in a way that I could follow it was useless to me, and if it looked like an awful lot of work to accomplish what I was trying to do it was useless to me.

The course has some assignments where we write our own assignment of something in the beginning part of the course, and later have assignments where we peer review two other people's created assignments, and a couple of them stood out as having overly complex model solutions or getting too clever with code (and one of these, I'm not sure how it managed to get submitted at all, because it threw an error when I tried to get it to run). I'm thinking those students encountered solutions that they didn't entirely understand and implemented them without knowing how or why they worked.

Bafflingly, the older version of the course I had been working through was much better about actually teaching in the way your Python teacher did, and only pointed at outside resources when it was for like, a specific mathematical formula for something.

 

I thiiiiink I remember casually hearing that her specific area of research was pedagogy of programming, which would make a lot of sense in retrospect. She was indeed a gem. I’m very grateful to have taken her class. After her intro speech I was very silent about the fact that I was probably far too experienced for the intended demographic of the course. Mostly because it was fucking challenging enough just being there, and I did not see any benefit to upending my schedule to challenge myself further and I dunno, compete for the title of Iron Coder and qualify for the dean’s list of masochism completionist scholars? But really, I don’t think I could have had a better python class than that one.

 

Trying to find ideas for cold rice bowl meals is an exercise in patience, since those seem to be the trendy thing for hip granola bloggers who just discovered the idea of having a one-bowl meal and call them bullshit like 'healing bowls' and 'buddha bowls'. What I'm looking for is 'I'm fucking sick of salad for lunch' bowls. 'Doesn't require 20€ worth of ingredients' bowls. 'Will keep me full enough that I won't feel like I'm dying by the time I get home' bowls. 'Fuck off with your tofu' bowls.

Anyway, I found a thing with roasted sweet potatoes and chickpeas that looks pretty good. Not sure how well it will feed me but it's worth a try, especially since it isn't More Salad, Oh God, Help. Unfortunately sweet potatoes are currently 5€ a kilo, so that kinda hurt. X_x