whole lotta bananarammstein

it's been a tense few weeks between the election and a reorg at The Eyrie. Biden won, i still have my job, but i'm still pretty adrenalized.

***

in the before times i used to go to a dance party called Bootie. they've got a Twitch channel going, and last night i finally tuned in due to an email with the phrase "trigger warning: hair metal".

man, it was so nice to see Adriana dancing and smiling, and there's something kind of delightful about her being able to converse with folks chatting at her while she works.

these were two gems from the set:
Bananarammstein

Watch on YouTube

Whole Lotta FDT, Jack (lyrics NSFW)

Watch on YouTube

A wild bot appears!

I hated my Python homework this week* - we're learning Django and had to refactor our perfectly nice functions from last week into classes.**

To get that taste out of my mouth, I sat down to work on something I actually wanted - a Discord bot for my RPG group. we've been playing FFG Star Wars, which uses goofy custom dice and has a couple other mechanics to track. fortunately there's a pretty nice bot to help, D1-C3. one of the D1-C3 bot features is to allow the GM to randomly generate an alien. B uses it pretty often, and then most of the time we have to go look up whatever that thing is and try to post a picture.

i suppose i could have made a feature request, but i wanted my own bot with blackjack and hookers. so i tinkered around for a few hours and got a V1 working. my original idea was to make a command to search Wookieepedia, but then i realized there was no need to remember another command and accurately type the alien name when it was already being posted in the channel. so my bot listens for D1-C3 bot's random alien post, and responds.

step one was just to get a text summary from the Wookieepedia page.
step two was to add a hyperlink back to the source page.

fortunately Wookieepedia has meta tags that are perfect for this use case - sharing a page will pull up the main image for the page. so the hyperlink got me a picture for free. (i was feeling pretty down on getting a picture programmatically after looking at the wikia API json and just how many images were on the page with no consistent naming conventions. and then it just showed up for me.)

step three was to make sure my code could handle names like Twi'lek.

then i had to get it off of my computer and onto a server.

anyway, it's (as my instructor says) on the gosh-darned internet now and working for people who aren't me.




*This is class 3. I realized that I may not have written (or at least correctly tagged) anything about class 2 of my 3-class certificate. That's because it was absolutely brutal and I never could have done it without the help of lockdown cancelling anything else that I had to do outside of work. one of the other students said we were doing enough work for two courses - they definitely weren't wrong, especially compared to the workload in this course.
**I still don't like OOP. it feels like doing paperwork while Functional programming feels like being a wizard. fortunately(?) my boss is self-taught and has no attachment to it.