the girly who shall end all girls

dhampreysa is doing some DW automation with a Google Sheet. I remembered hearing that the DW API didn’t really exist/was in shambles. Which is kind of true, but Ye Olde XML-RPC is still out there. And there’s a Python library for it, so maybe I’ll do a thing.

I need to figure out my exact use case; probably my own version of a linkspam builder or recreating my old ‘shiny thing’ quick posts that were killed by gmail formatting woes. Other ideas for machine-assisted posting are welcome in comments, if I do anything it will all end up Unlicensed on GitHub.

In other news, I wrote this with a Bluetooth keyboard attached to the iPad. Surprisingly nice - got it for travel to do double duty as a detached keyboard for the work laptop (a Mac from the era of terribad keyboards) and with the iPad as a sort of substitute for my laptop. I’m not expecting to do much personal coding on the trip and I would like to be able to read comics, so I think this is going to be a great compromise even though I may regret the ergonomics after a full work day. It’s a Logitech k480 which comes with a nice groove to prop your touchscreen device in and of all things has satisfyingly clicky keys. I like it so far.

I have been finished with my certificate long enough that UW has turned off my pro zoom account.

chewie makes characters, removes characters, and reports on how many Fate points an individual character has when you ask. it offers a reasonably helpful message when you try to do things with a character that doesn't exist. i'm satisfied that it does plenty for us to start playing, and i'll make adjustments after we've used it a bit.

C and i did some Yoga with Adriene tonight and i feel like a wet noodle. still going to run a bath, though. the library finally brought me the new Courtney Milan.

we had our first Saturday night session of D&D with our eight-person,* four-time-zone party. the DM and half the party are folks i played RPGs with in college and haven't seen since i moved to the west coast. it went surprisingly well both from a gaming standpoint and in terms of picking up like we never stopped hanging out.

it was interesting to see how other people use Roll20 + Discord.

this game (D&D): Discord video chat, Roll20 text chat and rolls.
Friday game (Savage Worlds): Discord audio, text chat, and rolls.
Tuesday game (D&D, same group as Friday): Discord audio and text chat, Roll20 rolls.

C and i have to train ourselves out of having side conversations in Discord chat, no one is looking at it. (and C has to figure out how to get Discord to recognize his camera.) the other thing is that in terms of using the character sheet, the Friday gamers are much more sophisticated, in terms of using the chat features and the GM tools the Saturday gamers know more. i'm really missing the money we put into the Friday game, where we have copies of all the sourcebooks for our GM and therefore available to everyone in the game. working with just the SRD (a limited free version of the rules) is limiting...but the Saturday gamers know tricks with having other players that own the books do character sheet updates. so it's hacky but workable.

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this afternoon (after i finished fussing with my character sheet for the evening game) i added Fate die rolling to my Discord bot, Chewie. it's very basic right now (like it shows your default username instead of your server nickname when it attributes the roll) but it works and in the process fixed an existing bug Chewie had with commands. i need to look at the rulebook to think about what other Fate features it needs after i get the name thing right.

i started by looking at another Fate roller project on GitHub, but it didn't work as written. i know the guy advertised the project on Reddit, but i had to change enough things that i'm not sure that it worked before it was apparently abandoned. or maybe the discord.py library changed drastically between when it was first written and now.**






*our DM asked eight, expecting 30% or so to say no, but no one did.
**i don't know, though. there was a math function that had nothing to do with discord.py that didn't work. and they didn't know how to format line breaks. still, they saved me a ton of time finding the right formatting for displaying emojis for the dice and had a folder of the dice art itself. i should try to contribute back my changes.

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.

i stayed up late several nights this week to finish the homework i was complaining about on Monday. as it was, there was a point where i gave up on getting 100% test coverage and just turned the damn thing in. (there were three fucking lines that i couldn't seem to exercise.) i asked for any advice on how to actually get that last bit in the comment on my pull request.

Excellent work! I always think that 100% coverage is a questionable goal in practice; however, here is a command you will find really useful to see more details of coverage issues...

so yeah...i got full points on the assignment and teared up a little at getting praise for it.

this week is all about debugging - we have a buggy script that runs the functions we wrote for the previous assignment and we need to use logging and debugging techniques to understand what's going wrong and fix things. this is much more intuitive and fun for me - scratches the same itch as untangling knotted yarn or solving a maze. banging my head against all those objects really does seem to have embedded some OOP understanding; i'm looking at the script and seeing things that are subtly wrong just reading it, which is a nice feeling.

list of things:

• i bought a set of dental tools - the steel picks and wee scrapers. i have scraped my bottom front teeth clean and it is glorious. my teeth look better and feel better and the experience was that perfect combo of mildly disgusting and deeply satisfying, like peeling a sunburn. i don't know when i'll feel safe getting my teeth professionally cleaned again, so this is clutch.

• all that said about safety, my massage therapist is open again as of this week and i have booked a slot for Saturday ohmyfuckinggods i need this so much.

• i took Friday and Monday off. i was planning to do a bunch of stuff around the house, but what i actually did was finish AtLA and take a nap every day. and then last night i started falling asleep after dinner; C bundled me into bed and i slept more than 11 hours. i think i'm probably not going to have trouble nodding off tonight either.

• i wish banking sleep worked. i'm doing some work for a team in Norway on Friday and will have to be ready to go by 6am my time.

• the thing that i didn't stay fully awake through the end of last night was Lady Snowblood, a definite inspiration for Kill Bill. i enjoyed it in spite of a rape scene (which wasn't required for the story to work but was brief not titillating). SO. MUCH. BLOOD. and the world was dirty and lived-in in a way we don't often see in Japanese period pieces.

• i am now 1/3 of the way through my Python certificate and i get a couple weeks without classes. that will give me time to put some of the work i've done up on my public github instead of hidden behind github classroom.

in phrases that only make sense right now: my yoga teacher cancelled class on Thursday because her internet was down. so i decided to try an exercise routine that i had bookmarked. i am not in any kind of shape and doing that cold was brutal. i am still having a little pain when i do things like stand up from a sitting position. (i concerned my gaming friends the other night with the noises i made when i moved from the couch to the kitchen with a hot mike.)

on Friday my Star Wars character successfully infiltrated a star destroyer and carried off some encrypted files. it would have gone off without a hitch if i had gone without the rest of the party. since they were there, they ended up scuttling said star destroyer and a party member lost an arm. but we all lived and we eliminated some obligation.*

***
funny thing about my Python class: i feel like the assignments are really unevenly sized. or maybe there's just an insane contrast in concepts that come easy to me/were covered extensively in intro vs concepts that don't come easy. this week i put in way less time and felt no confusion about what i was doing, bit of an import antigravity** situation.




*obligation is a mechanic that represents character background stuff like Han Solo's debt to Jabba the Hutt.
**the antigravity module is actually part of Python now because humans are silly. mostly it launches that comic in a web browser, but supposedly there's also a solution for geohashing in there.

at the beginning of this year i was trying to write an entry every day. i still try, but life is pretty boring. i write Dad a card several times a week and i'm getting to the point where it's today's weather, how busy i am at work, and how my homework is going.

i struggled with my programming homework last week. there are several lessons that i need to internalize: 1) it is safe to ask for help 2) asking for help is expected (it's why i chose the program, after all) 3) i can turn in imperfect work and make changes based on feedback. i think i've mostly learned these things now, but i had to lose a bunch of sleep and cry first.

probably due to the above, i got a stye and that sucked. i am reminded again that taking care of my eyes and hands has to be a priority, they're too important to everything i love to do.

that said, i took something i learned in class on Tuesday and was able to turn around and automate something at work that was important (and tedious and exacting). really pleased.

this week's homework went better, and the second assignment was genuinely fun. it was based on Tom Swift Under the Milkwood - essentially it's a generator for the kind of almost-plausible text you get in spam sometimes. i used A Princess of Mars as my input. if i get in trouble for the run-on sentences, well, that's Burroughs for you.

i've completed 3+ hexes on the blanket. i say 3+ because i'm using a striping gradient yarn instead of doing all the color changes, and the one hex chart is very clearly supposed to be a flower with a leafy stem at the center. so when i was ready to start a new ball of striped yarn and its first color was green, i started the flower chart, knit up to the end of the stem, and put it on a holder. i need two of the flower ones, so i'm working a different chart until i hit a long run of green again, then i'll switch and do the center of the second flower.

coding good

president bad