the girly who shall end all girls

1. pirate D added me to his Duolingo Plus family plan, so i've been practicing French. it was my minor in college - my reading comprehension remains pretty good, but I haven't held a conversation for more than ten years. i'm enjoying the gamification of language learning but because this is a refresh rather than completely new, part of me is always analyzing their translation choices and how they introduce concepts. (in my head, "il mange" is usually "he eats" not "he is eating". or i think of "ça va?" as "how's it going?" instead of "how are you doing?". but i'm learning to give the owl the answer it wants.) it's been fun re-accessing dormant knowledge - i start a new area and all this stuff comes up out of cold storage. it's pretty cool. looking forward to getting into a place where i'm learning something new.


2. i quit playing most video games around Gamergate. (yeah, i know, that's what they wanted. but i have so many other hobbies.) on a whim i decided to look into Jedi: Fallen Order when they announced the sequel, and it was all of $10 on xbox. i have definitely gotten more than $10 of joy from it - it's an adventure game with more exploration than boss fights, really reminds me of the joy i got from Tomb Raider back in the day, but with SO MANY MAPS AND HINTS. what the hell, it even tells you where there are doors that you can open and highlights unexplored areas. :old-man-yelling-at-cloud: i wish Cal did backflips, but his lightsaber is cooler than dual Uzis, and driving an spoiler was way too much fun. also, look at this little droid companion:


3. my mother-in-law has been complaining about not being able to play Civilization II anymore for something like 10 years. so i made a VM image of Windows XP SP3 with CivII installed, had C play a few rounds to confirm it works well, and have written up instructions for the east coast kids to set it up for her. fingers crossed. it's a 1995 game - it starts with a setup dialog about how you need 16MB of RAM to use all the 3D effects.

and hey, i am typing on the laptop after taking it to the shop. i did, indeed, damage the ribbon connector for the trackpad. but there was also an overheating issue they fixed so it was still worthwhile to me.

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.

Friday was the first time I used the new keyboard with the work computer, and i rapidly discovered all the stuff i do at work that i had made awkward with that pass at the keyboard layout. and then i made notes and lived with it so that i did work and didn't spend the work day tuning the keyboard. one of the things i had enabled was getting shift results with a long press. and that's how i learned that i tend to rest longer on some keys than others. it made for some rough work with chatting if i didn't want to look like i was MAking aRt. (plus i put delete under my left thumb, which is going to be great, but for now when i go fast i still hit ' instead)

tonight during down time in my D&D game, i tuned, flashed firmware, tuned again. common macros under my thumbs, complete pointer control on layer 2. the dream is to ditch the mouse entirely.

this is the layout as of this evening, we'll see how it survives typing practice tomorrow.

the access saga from a locked post resolved late this afternoon. at first the person who got it fixed sent me an email notification to tell me. you know, the email I couldn't access. (work slack has an emoji that fully expresses getting a dump of three days of unread emails and calendar invites, :joy_cry_blood:)

I did a chat bot workshop for two of the three fucking business days I had no email. All the workshop environment invites were in email. then they tried to contact me in sibling company's slack instance... which I did eventually get into.

Anyhow, the class was really great when i wasn't nearly in tears trying to get a login while the instructor went ahead mile-a-minute. the pace was just fine as long as I had access at the beginning of the segment. (the workshop was sponsored out of an office on the east coast so I've also bolted my lunch in 15 minutes for two days in a row.) really looking forward to putting it to use, but this has been a long long week.

all day planning meeting tomorrow *sigh*

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

really pleased with a thing I did for work today (I made a Java thing work via stubbornness and googling).

also it looks like the paladin will survive the night.

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.

why do people fail at FizzBuzz?*

do they just not remember what modulo does?

or do they get tripped up trying to make it as elegant as they can on the first pass?

something else?



*a coding exercise developed for interviews: print numbers from 1 - 100. if number is divisible by 3, print fizz instead of the number. if number is divisible by 5, print buzz instead of the number. if number is divisible by 15, print fizzbuzz instead of the number.