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

Hours later and I am still FUMING about that fucking Hive thing and everything that is WRONG about it and how INSULTED I am at how kinda low-key condescending my advisor was about it. FUCK this ~drop you into a swimming pool and seeing how well you can swim~ 'method' of training - that isn't training, it's HAZING. I think it's reasonable and sane to want clear expectations from the course and its teachers and to actually have teachers to provide guidance and curate information, because there is so goddamn much information on the Internet it's easy to straight up drown in the middle of the deluge, trying to figure out what's useful, what's irrelevant, and what's straight up bullshit.

I also did some reading up on the the other iterations of the original school that bear the 42 name (because geek references mean it's cool, right????????) and holy fucking yikes! They start with learning C and writing all of their own libraries from scratch, to a weirdly arbitrary structural standard, and boy does that sound like a fucking monumental waste of time!

And now I'm extra mad because my clean laundry reeks of laundry soap because the neighbor who uses way too fucking much and won't stop had the laundry time before ours, and for some reason J keeps doing the 'throw in the clothes anyway and hope they don't reek too much' thing instead of like... seeing if the machine has a cleaning cycle, or at least a running short hot water cycle with the machine empty. I told him to please do that the next time this happens rather than just proceeding as normal and 'hoping' our clothes don't reek afterward, which.... he should know.... and now I have to at least re-wash all my underwear, and may have to do my shirts too.

Getting some pvp in in ffxiv didn't even make me feel any better. >:[

 

My gaming time is already tied up in ffxiv and Nier for the next month but goddamn if I couldn't have used the cheerful chaos of goose game today. Oh well.

Jade's route in Pesterquest came out today, at least. I probably shouldn't have played it today, though, as it made me very sad. The good ending is good, but man. My poor baby girl. ; ;

 

I’m very fucking put off by this hive thing’s lack of information on what exactly the curriculum is. It’s bizarrely vague. And we can’t know if it’s actually okay despite appearances because it’s new so nobody can say yet.

And also apparently this school was created by a mobile gaming company that seems to be struggling financially?! That lost a billion dollars of revenue in 2018, which was more than half their revenue??? Wut. Where’s the money for three years of tuition free coursework? No wonder they can’t afford amenities such as VPN connections for remote learning, or teachers.

Honestly the one single thing that raises the most red flags for me is that, despite insisting at every possible opportunity that you really don’t need any coding experience at all, they have a bit about whether it’s a still a good program for you if you’re an experienced programmer, and they fucking say yes. There’s some really wishy washy explanation about how everyone can find something rewarding in Hive. You could say that about almost anything. You could probably say that about prison or terminal illness. That just screams to me that they’re not in a position where they can afford to turn anyone away and/or they really do not have any actual plan for what they’re trying to teach and are hoping to wing it.

 

say what

omg. I was too busy being mad about everything else to look up the guy starting it. No fucking wonder it comes across as Grinding Capitalism: The School.

Did you look up Ecole 42, which is what it's based on? It seems to have a plan... of sorts. The US branch's website was also very vague, but the few personal accounts I could find made it sound like it's designed specifically to always keep students on their back foot and unbalanced, and with assignments that are so difficult that most people fail them. Remote learning wasn't allowed ostensibly to prevent cheating. Even the accounts praising the school made it sound like an abusive relationship.

So they probably do have a plan... of sorts, which conveniently makes it so they hardly have to have any staff to pay at all and can funnel it all into the expensive, trendy location.

The experience thing is definitely pretty bad, and one of the personal accounts I read from Ecole 42 said that people who didn't have any coding experience - or any C experience - usually didn't last the first month.

 

I did not look up the other schools. I was so busy boggling over how convenient it was that they were saving so much money on necessities that I didn’t think to.

My immediate thought about the cheating was, “But that what the teacher and curriculum design is for! ...Oh, right.”

 

LOL

Y-yeah...

 

I’d rate C as slightly better than Java as a beginning language, but only on the grounds that it’s not object oriented and therefore nobody is probably gonna try explaining procedural programming and OOP to you at the same time. C++ and Java, which are object oriented and use C-like syntax, are both responses to the paradigms of programming languages that came before them, especially C. That makes them extremely confusing because no one seems to be able to not try to give you a historical explanation of the motivation for classes when they should be explaining curly braces. No. Bad! The syntax is already enough to absorb at one time without also expecting people to learn two entire paradigms so they can see why this one is better for various things than another one they have literally never experienced. Stop, you fools!

C is still a pretty questionable language for beginners. It’s very hard for humans to read and most of the best benefits are totally useless to new programmers. Who wants to investigate the intricacies if floating point numbers?! Oh um, none of you have any reason to know what that is. Well, you’ll be very excited about unrolling loops oh wait never mind, you don’t know what a loop is yet, and actually that’s not very useful anyway anymore unless your compiler is not very good. Like, you’d have to try to find a compiler that bad. Memory allocation... no that’s putting the cart several years ahead of the horse. Well... C will give you a leg up in javascript! Woo!

 

I took to object oriented programming pretty well, but then I did already have a grasp on how procedural programming works in general (that ancient Turbo Pascal class was good for something after all!).

I feel vindicated to know that my wtf instinct about C as a starting language was right.

 

My workshop group went to the zoo on Friday since it was a free entrance day, and it was great because ZOO! but it was also cold and damp because Finland in October, so brrr. I feel like a total weenie because by the end of it I was flagging pretty badly, while everyone else didn't seem to be bothered at all by the cold or two and a half hours of walking and standing. Quite a few people had peeled off and left early, but :| I was so exhausted I had to take a nap later that afternoon and I've crashed for a solid 10-11 hours the past two nights.

My total amount of walking for that day was, according to my phone's pedometer, almost 12k steps for 7.1 km, which counts my walking to and from metro stations as well as walking around the zoo. My shitty weak leg is always going to be a factor (and today it genuinely hurts, compared to the basic muscle exhaustion of the last two days) but for my own sake I think I need to take it up a notch.

(How far 10k steps is is apparently a mystery. One site claims it's about 5 miles, but I'm pretty sure that for me it's more like 3, since 7.1 km is like 4.3 miles. My stride length isn't that short, so what the hell? Is my phone just totally off, even though the distance it measures seems to be pretty accurate?)

At any rate it's not going to be all or mostly walking; I've got some perfectly good exercise videos that I prefer for exercise purposes. I've been wanting to ease into longer ones anyway since the shorter ones don't seem to be doing it for me as well anymore, and this is a good incentive to take it up that notch. Just one notch, though, I AM still a cripple that needs a cane, and lots of Just Standing with no breaks is always going to wear me out badly. I probably would have done a bit better if I'd had some rests and more of a breakfast than an energy bar, too...

 

I bought this sweater and my dumb brain is hyperventilating because with taxes and shipping it was almost *wheezes* 60€ - even though I paid for it out of my birthday-and-editing money, which is STRICTLY for frivolous bullshit, no guilt allowed! And it's not even frivolous, it is both extremely on-brand for my aesthetic and useful for at least six months out of the year and is more polished looking than my two hoodies. But nah jerkbrain is going "Well, it's not like you needed it, you do have those hoodies after all."

It doesn't complain like this when I buy pixel clothes for my mmo characters, but clothes for myself? Oh no, mustn't do that. e_e

 

Dear Mercury Brain,

THAT SWEATER IS TOTALLY AWESOME FOR TONS OF REASONS AND BASICALLY MADE FOR YOU

SO NO MORE FUSSING

YOU'RE ALLOWED NICE THINGS <3

Love,

Aud Brain

 

Comparing this Scala course to that bullshit Hive school, or even the Java course I took earlier, brings to mind a Neil Gaiman quote about librarians: “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”

Anyway I'm enjoying this Scala course - like, genuinely enjoying - in big part because of how it curates information. The material doesn't just cover concepts a bit at a time, it lets us know about related concepts, at which point in the material will be elaborated on in the course (with a link to the applicable chapter!), if the material will be elaborated on in this course at all, and compares how the concept may be dealt with differently in other programming languages.

IT HAS A GLOSSARY AND A REFERENCE PAGE SO WE DON'T HAVE TO DIG THROUGH THE CHAPTERS MANUALLY TO REFRESH OUR MEMORIES AND LINKS TO APPLICABLE CHAPTERS WHEN MATERIAL COMES UP AGAIN!!!

That was one of my biggest fucking problems with the Java course - no glossary, no real index, no reference page. If I needed to refresh my memory on something I'd better hope I could figure out where it was covered before and/or be able to decipher the applicable Javadoc (another thing the Scala course did better; it taught us how to read Scaladocs) and just remember how to implement stuff. I took notes, but there was inevitably something I'd forgotten to write down or hadn't realized I needed to write down and I had to go digging through alllll those chapters again. Sure, I was ~figuring it out myself~, but I was largely wasting time with an incredibly user unfriendly interface and years-old Stack Exchange results.

 

Also I finally got back to Nier last night and got through the Forest Castle and

I got to the royal chambers and saw who the king was and was like, "oh no. ohhhh no."

And: oh no. :(

I'm so glad for the auto chips. I generally use evade and autoheal because my reaction times are Not Great, in part to fast the camera moves. I have a reaaaally hard time tracking the action and keeping track of where 2B even is, since I'm always tottering on the edge of motion sickness. (Yes, I've adjusted the various options; things are about as good as they're going to get. I'm just that sensitive.)

 

My sweater got here!!!! It blows my mind that the three day shipping was only 4 euros more than the standard. @_@

The colors aren't as eyepoppingly vibrant as in the website photo but it's still very colorful, and the knit is really nice. I gave it a wash on the delicate cycle and if it's dry by tomorrow, I'll wear it to workshop. 8)

 

Good things about my sweater: bright! Cozy! Gets compliments! Fits well!

Less good things: it’s *so* plush and cozy it’s too hot to wear unless the temps outside are under 50 F. I had to take it off once I got here x_x it’s going to be amazing soon, though.

 

Also good: the sense of humor in this Scala course.

“Run StarryApp. Be disappointed by its flat black output. Exit the app.”

The dry Finnish sense of humor is in fine form in this course :3

 

This is a terrible picture of me, but SWEATER!



(I took it in a mirror but flipped it in photoshop so it looks like the 'real' me)

The sleeves are a little long but it's great otherwise.

 

FFXIV pvp gets a lot of flack from some people - something about the server ticks and how that mode interacts with latency can make it very frustrating - but boy do I enjoy the hell out of the 72-man mode, provided my team isn't being pants-on-head stupid. When people are actually trying to cooperate (and not whinging that they didn't get the team they wanted, we're going to lose because we're not that other team) it's really intense and exciting!

Today's set of matches didn't start off very well - I kept getting teams that wouldn't focus on objectives and scattered around, and one that was indeed pants-on-head stupid (they all rushed in to mash their faces against one of the enemy teams and didn't pull back when the other enemy team started approaching from behind and all 24 of us got squished like a bug) - but after rollover and more of the western hemisphere waking up, matches got a lot less one-sided and I even won a few.

Winning generally feels better than losing, but losing doesn't feel totally awful when I know my team gave it their all and tried their best. When we lose because half or more of us were farting around, doing stupid shit, and ignoring callouts, THAT feels really bad. I'm not the best pvper and I don't do it a lot but when I do I try my best, you know?

 

Mimir is both too old and not a girl, but delinquent schoolgirl is very much their vibe anyway. (Since I don't dress up, it's fun to dress my ffxiv characters up instead.)