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

Bleh I'm behind. Somehow, two days of taking walks + one vacuuming equaled total exhaustion yesterday, and every time I tried to read the text my eyes just slid right off. I really just should have laid down for most of the day, but I'm eternally resistant to doing anything that's even nap-adjacent.

This course text is often difficult for me to parse normally, though:

Spoiler: A paragraph from the current section on file handling

The most natural way of learning how to use external files is probably to learn how to read one. Unlike editing a text file in an editor such as Notepad or OpenOffice Writer, in programming the first thing to know is whether the intention is to read or write the file. This is important, as the first thing to do when using a file is the creation of a file handle, which requires the intended usage of a file as a parameter, while the name of the used file is obviously the other parameter.​

I'm already aware of the basics of file handling from the other two programming courses and reading that last sentence still makes me feel like I'm suffocating.

NEVERTHELESS, I am plodding through.

 

This kills the programmer. Damn that’s inscrutable.

 

This course is a lot shallower than I thought -- it only dips into object oriented programming on the very last chapter, which doesn't look any longer than the ones I've already done. I've been doing one chapter a day since I put my big kid pants on about it and that has me at 5/10, so I'll likely be done by next weekend.

O_o;

I don't know what I'll do from there... this particular organization doesn't look to have any additional Python courses. I guess I could take the intro C++ course but at this point I'm tired of hopping, I just want to pick one and stick with it. All I want to do is write my little stories and make my silly little games and have that be worth it enough to society to make a living on. ;_;

 

All right, now I'm actually angry at this course.

This assignment has been to write a 'notebook' type program -- it's basically to teach how to use lists and pickle. The actual programming part is fine, but what is not fine is how sloppily the assignment conveyed how the menu text should read -- it's given partly as a mishmash in the instructions, and partly in the example output -- and for absolutely no reason two commands have different text, even though their function is the same and could be tucked away neatly in a module, and the second one's expected text is kind of tortured. I realize the person who wrote this is ESL, but really?

But that's not the thing that's really pissing me off. Thing thing that is is how the example output shows the delete a note command taking an index number, but the autograder expects the program to expect the user to give the number as they'd see it (so if they wanted to delete note 1, they'd give 1 as the note to delete), EVEN THOUGH in the very same program that if the user wants to edit a note, they have to enter the index number.

I don't know if it's carelessness or it a shitty 'gotchya', but it's shoddy work either way and I WILL be sending some heated feedback.

 

Oh, also, in the quiz section if you get a question wrong, you don't just miss a point, you also lose a point, because nothing says 'I'm helping you learn' by punishing the student, right?

 

In considerably less grumpy news, my Palace of the Dead group has been making fantastic progress:



The 151+ floors look so cool.

We got to 170 tonight, and plan to finish our push to 200 next week. This is my first time through so I'm pretty excited! And we'll likely do another run after this one concludes to get more timeworn artifacts and, well, just for fun. POTD can be mind-numbing, but it's fun when it's actually progressing through the floors and not just grinding the same set for leveling, and spread out over the course of some time. I would not want to try to do a full set in one day.

 

Bleh. I usually don't drink alcohol because I have no tolerance and more often than not it leaves me feeling Fucked Up and not in a good way, but I saw a rose & lime hard cider that I just had to try...

Well, the floaty fuzziness would be pleasant if I didn't also keep drifting in and out of an awful headache and stomachache. Duly noted, body, let's not do that again.

 

Thinking about it, not sure how much of the ick is the alcohol and how much is the sulphites. I already knew sulphites and I don't get along but I was like, well surely this once won't hurt... Yeah, well.

The stomachache is new, though. :| (and yes, I'm still suffering the aftereffects. Blurgh.)

 

I'm done!



The little step there is when I did the first chapter and went MEEEEEH for a few months, and then the graph going almost perfectly straight up is the two weeks in which I got off my ass and just did it.

From here... idk on the programming front, but I need to tackle the Elements of AI course I signed up for for my own enrichment (and to get a better idea of wtf people are really talking about when they're talking about AI, as well as be able to actually understand the writing of a long-term acquaintance who regularly tackles the ethics behind how AI is used, e.g. in facial recognition) and see if I should bulldoze through the beginner's Finnish course I accidentally signed up for (I just wanted to see what level it started at, but clicking it through the student dashboard put me in the request to sign up queue and there was no way to take myself out) or if I can get removed and sign up for a more advanced one.

 

I kind of bribed myself to push through the course -- not in a "you can have X if you get to Y" because that just leads to me going "well I can have X any time I want, I'm an adult with my own money," but in a "when you get to Y, buy X" way, which actually worked really well?? Usually when I want to just buy myself a fun thing I kinda drag my feet about it and dither because I hate spending money, but making it a goal worked out, even though I thought I didn't feel all that excited about it...

Up until I went to actually buy the thing (a digital-only Switch game) and the Nintendo e-Shop gave me a "this product is not available" error. Suddenly, I was as miserable as I was when it was coming up on my 7th birthday and I had just been told that there was no budget for birthday presents (although it took me a while to figure out why I was about to cry into the pot of chili I was stirring).

Once I figured that out, though, I was able to calm myself down enough to realize that I might have better luck buying from the e-shop directly via my Switch -- and success! I now own Cozy Grove, which I got because Ursula Vernon has been playing it and described it as "Animal Crossing, but with death instead of capitalism". I'm still feeling fragile about it, but I think that's residual from being hungry. I just finished dinner, so... time to try out my new game! 8D

 

Game verdict: extremely charming. Reminds me a little bit of Glitch in aesthetic and tone -- I know the Glitch main artist went to work for Spry Fox for a while, and even if he didn't work on Cozy Grove, I'm guessing his influence remains. It looks to have way more of an actual storyline than Animal Crossing, while being (so far) less sandboxy. Is clearly meant to be played a little each day, as the story quests run out after a while and you're told (in various ways) to come back tomorrow.

Also, I feel a lot better now. Playing it for a while reassured my brain that yes, that promise really was kept, everything is okay.

 

It's... hm. Interesting isn't really the word I want, but it's what I have at the moment -- interesting to me that this still affects me so hard, so I've been prodding at it all evening. Poverty can hurt, and broken promises hurt of course, but there's more to this than just those two things--

Spoiler: This is a little dark.

Well-meant but broken promises happened a lot in my early childhood, but it's why those broken promises happened that made them so awful. My mom had a drug addiction, and awful boyfriends, and from about age... four? onward, there was a constant undercurrent of dread in my life. I wasn't afraid of her, I was afraid for her.

At the time she couldn't afford anything for my birthday (or for Christmas before that), we were living in someone's furnished basement. I'm... not sure who they were, exactly, to be so kind as to let us live there, or what rent they charged, but I think they kept us fed because I don't remember going hungry. I don't remember them being anything but pretty nice, honestly, and they aren't the point. I just remember having absolutely no extras... but somehow I didn't entirely connect it to my mom's habits until now, which, in retrospect, would have been very expensive.

I didn't know that at the time of course, I was a first grader! I did know, however, that those habits scared the shit out of me, and that when she'd go out to party I'd spend a lot of the time I was supposed to be in bed pacing the apartment and hoping she'd come back safe. Alive.

Things were bad enough that my grandmother staged an intervention that spring, and even with as much distaste as I have for AA and NA, I'm glad she got my mom into detox and into a treatment program. She saved my mom's life, and going to live with her gave me the first feeling of actual safety I'd had in years.

So, yeah. Broken promises are tied, way back in the back of my brain, to that misery. So even if it's not even a broken promise, just a delayed one, my brain trips into miserable, scared, and alone mode.

 

Ah Tumblr, the land of banned nipples, except for blogs that reblog endless porn vids and ads. ¬_¬

 

>:/

 

I have an uncle who’s an alcoholic.

Spoiler

He came to stay with us for a couple days. We had a pretty good idea of why he might be so eager to drive several states over and crash on our couch for a couple days, because his arrival was preceded by an absolute flurry of frantic phone calls from family in his area. All we could tell them was that no, he wasn’t here yet, because we didn’t know any more than they did. It was a little off-putting and stressful even though it wasn’t directed at us.

My mom’s doctor had advised her that it was not a good idea to try to enforce a no-alcohol policy with a guest who was drinking as much as he was. Cold turkey could cause a medical emergency if he didn’t just up and leave. So my parents bought some nice bottles of wine, and he had free access to them. My dad had a glass with him after dinner, and they spent a while chatting.

At around 11 at night I wandered into the kitchen. There were wine glasses everywhere in two different rooms, most empty, one still a quarter full on the kitchen table. I couldn’t find my uncle and dad anywhere. My dad’s car was gone.

I’ve never seen my parents drunk, and I can’t imagine my dad drinking and driving. It wouldn’t be like him at all. I was still literally worried sick. I was pacing and fidgeting. I really wanted to call my dad’s phone, but my instinct was that it would not be a good idea for the same reasons that the flurry of relatives calling was not helpful. I started praying, because there wasn’t a hell of a lot else to do.

As I was praying, giving myself a bit of space to think, I put two and two together. My fear and my family members’ fear. I’d just had a tiny taste of what they were experiencing that would drive them to make so many angry phone calls, even knowing full well it was a hammer to the wedge between them and my uncle. Of course they were calling constantly. I was already picturing a car in a ditch for far less reason. Hearing someone’s voice or an update may not change the situation at all, but at least it means your fears haven’t come true yet.

(My dad and uncle were perfectly fine. My dad was sober and had just taken my uncle out to a safe and interesting place, like a host might. My dad is a night owl and my uncle has the disrupted sleep patterns of alcoholism, so that’s why they were out so late.)

This was me as an adult who had the option to call a cell phone and a lifetime of reasons to trust that my dad would never do anything as dangerous as driving drunk. I was still fucking terrified. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I were a kid, there were no cell phone, and I had every reason to fear for my parent’s safety.

My cousins would know. They’re delightful people and they don’t fucking deserve that. No one deserves that. My uncle isn’t a bad person, but his addiction has horrific collateral damage that has nothing to do with whether anyone is a good person.

You didn’t deserve that, and I’m so sorry. That sounds nightmarish, but the kind where you only wish you could relax enough to go to bed and have a regular nightmare instead. I’m really glad your mom got help, even if the help available wasn’t as ideal as one might like. And holy shit does it seem reasonable to be really distraught when those memories are shaken up from where they’ve settled. That is a fucking terrible experience under any circumstances.

 

"[author] captures the bisexual experience so well i'd be shocked if they weren't bi, nobody's that good of a writer" is sure not a take I wanted to run into without warning (or, uh, ever), but here we are.

(I'm thinking of a thing I read once of someone talking about how she was certain Lois McMaster Bujold was a survivor of sexual... assault? Abuse? because she wrote about it so geniunely, so relatably -- but when she asked Bujold, Bujold was taken aback because no, she hadn't. Kindness, empathy, and research goes a long way.)

 

I need more shirts... a bunch of my t-shirts and my sleeveless shirts have noticeable wear. Some of it's holes from cat claws (I can't leave anything hanging up where Gordon can get to it, as he will attempt to tear it down and nest in it because Smells Like Favorite Monkey), but a lot of it is just straight up ragged -- frayed collars, holes in the armpits, spots worn thin. I keep being like "why is this so worn out, I haven't had it that long" and then I have to wrack my brain for when I got it and it turns out it was pre-transition -- sometimes WAY pre-transition (which means they're also too big).

I'd love to get something that'd go better with the sarouel/Turkish/boho/whatever you want to call it style pants I have. Something in the style of this shirt, with or without buttons, but plain or a pattern that'd go with the pants better. A vest like in the picture would be pretty awesome too, although I'm not real keen on the fringe. If anyone has any recommendations for men's or fairly gender neutral items along those lines (that don't require sewing) I'd love to have some @_@

 

Also, I've been playing Cozy Grove, which is very cute and very calming but also sometimes sad and downright unsettling. You're a young Spirit Scout who's been sent to an island as a test, with your task to lay the spirits there to rest... except you ended up on a far more haunted island than the one you were supposed to land on. And your boat washed away.

Today I completed the Spirit Scout guide for Charlotte...

Spoiler

She thought she was having you complete it so she could give it to you, but turns out that it was her Spirit Scout guide. She was once a Spirit Scout, possibly the one she mentioned earlier that died on the island. She tells you not to waste your time because the spirits on the island are beyond saving, and when you're ready to give up, there's a spot on the log next to her.

O_O;;;

 

As far as tunics/shirts go, you could try looking for kurta. They come in a variety of lengths and collar styles, and can be fancy fancy or relatively simple in natural fibres. There's also the Hippie Clothing Co, which admitted is mostly grandad-collars in the men's section.

Women's tunic shirts will get you more results if you don't get mad dysphoria from them, but a large proportion will be those weird handkerchief-hem, flowy, quote-unquote flattering styles. Mens tunic shirts throws up a lot of larp and cosplay garments, which YMMV.

Might also be worth checking out ghillie shirts, which are super comfortable.

 

Bad insomnia tonight, but Endwalker hype! MALE VIERA HYPE! EVENTUAL FEMALE HROTHGAR HYPE!!!!!!!!!!!

Considering that last expansion release they said the team really wanted hrothgars but 'the fans' wanted vieras so they split them, in such a way that 'the fans' sounded a lot like cover for interference from above, and they specifically said there would be no new races... the guess amongst me and my fc is that they split them like that to get the foot in the door for hrothgar, knowing that if they implemented both male and female viera they'd have to scrap hrothgar. But having released half of each, and the fan outcry about it, well, they couldn't just let 'the fans' down, could they? Not after Shadowbringers sold so well...

It is of course just a theory but Yoshida is such a savvy businessman I wouldn't put it past him.

Mimir is DEFINITELY getting fantasia'd. Especially because the boys are just as androgynous as I'd hoped...! It looks like they based them off of the female viera, rather than male miqos like they seem to have done with male au ra. GOOD.

Now to try to sleep.... :')