There recently has been a security breach at a service (Cloudflare) used by many companies.

It was ugly: data, including passwords and personal details - was sent, in easily decryptable form, to unrelated websites, and this data was promptly indexed by search engines. Google & Co are trying to scrub this from their databases, but, well, yeah.

I had not known that DW was one of the possibly affected parties.

There's a short list in this article and the full, very long list (with a shorter highlights one) on Github.



Uber, Patreon, Medium, and Yelp are on the list, along with two password managers, authy.com and 1password.com, which claims to be not affected, but siderea just warned that Dreamwidth is also on the list, so I've just changed my passwords just in case.

I will not delete this account, but for now I have disabled the automatic crossposts from DW.

Even if you have no interest in computer programming, this is an article worth reading: It examines a 'great hacking feat' from a different perspective: not as an act of great daring, but taking into account the people whose jobs are made harder (if not impossible) by some guys having fun (and deciding how programming 'should work').

I am, as an aside, so very, very deeply impressed with Margaret Hamilton who had the confidence to diagnose that no, it was not her software that was wrong, there was something wrong with the hardware. Which are the time was still fairly experimental and should not have malfunctioned in this manner.

From where I'm sitting it's a tale of unexpected consequences and of arrogance.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1082517.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

More details at http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/314610.html - shorter post: they're closing down at the end of the month, they're still taking money, but they're no longer paying authors.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1082275.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

We've just come back from seeing Rogue 1 (which was good fun, but ultimately a story we knew the ending of; I liked it, I am glad I saw it, but it didn't push my buttons quite as much as The Force Awakens did), so the news of Carrie Fisher's death seems particularly poignant.

(George Michael. Richard Adams. Seems like every time I blink someone who has touched lives dies.)

Farewell, General Leia. May the Force be with you. We will fight on.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1081966.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Firstly, I wish y'all a Merry Christmas, but secondly, I have a spare key for Broken Age (a point and click game that I haven't even played once). If you're short on funds and would like to try this, or know someone who'd appreciate it, ping me.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1081611.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

At least two of my livejournal friends have been hacked in the recent move of LJ servers to Russia. One was an account that hasn't been active since 2013, which I would have thought is a 'good' target, but the other was active within the last month. They're not the same -the b_twin_1 (who I don't have a contact for) account has posted a number of Putin press conference items, while brooksmoses has only a single item were Putin says that people who lose elections should do so gracefully, but, yeah. Let's stamp this trend out, shall we?

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1081469.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

A number of the Macphun photography apps are currently deeply discounted in the Appstore. Intensify, for instance, which retails for £45 through the website, is £3.99, so if you're looking at photo enhancement apps, this is the time to pounce. I've been using a number of their offerings for a couple of years now, and have been _very_ pleased with the results, to the degree that I've uninstalled various other apps I also own because I never use them anymore and when I try to, I find them cumbersome and unsatisfactory.

(The deal for Luminar is somewhat better on the Website because they give you additional materials.)

Ah, Luminar. I do not often fall in love with apps _that_ much - the last was Storyist - but this one hits all of my buttons.

- It's well designed. Everything works smoothly, the interface is smooth and slick and has a lot of useful settings and controls right where I expect them.

- It lets me create. Cool stuff happens when I use this app, I really like the results. There's a lot of 'oh, wow' coming from my direction at the moment.

- it makes me feel competent. I have another app, which gives me in its (much narrower) domain results of similar quality, but that one just has a list of presets to click, with no adjustments and no explanations. It's a good quick fix solution, particularly as there's much less cognitive load when you have only eight settings to choose from (instead of several dozens *plus* all of the individual filters). But 'apply this' is not very satisfying. I don't know why it works, I can't replicate the effect other than by using the exact same app, and I definitely cannot work out what's happening, and how I might tweak it to suit a different photo or solve a different problem.

- I'm learning *what* to apply and *how* to apply it. Twice this morning, after selecting a preset visually (they all give you previews of what your image will look like when they'e applied) I was able to apply an additional filter with not too much random moving of sliders to see what happens: I had a fair idea what effect I wanted, and which filter might be able to provide it. I'm still at the start of learning what all of these settings *really* do, but the app is set up in a way that completely cuts out the 'aaaargh, too many settings' bit and lets you go 'oh, combine filters a, b, and c, and you get this effect. Got it.'. I'm hoping that by the end of 2017 I have a much better handle on image processing - what *can* those tools do for me - but I feel that I am well on the way.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1081183.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

(I'm not getting money for this; these are offers that I'd wish I'd have heard about if I had missed them.)

1) PacktPub is selling all of its books and video courses for $5 right now (until January 9th). Usual offer prices tend to be $15-25; list prices considerably higher. So far, I've found the books I own good value for money - solidly written, aware of best practice. If you want to level up your learning in any computer field (programming and software), this is a good opportunity.


2) I have five invitations for the SetApp beta. (beta until January, $10/month afterwards, which you may find useful or not; but the beta - which involves fully-fledged software - is definitely worth it. Included software is a bunch of utilities, but also includes Aeon Timeline 2. I'm still not sure what I think of this service as a whole - you need to have the SetApp app installed to be able to use any of the other software, so if that ever breaks, you're without - but on the other hand, it's definitely worth 'some hassle'. Whether it's worth $10/month... I don't know. I cannot afford a regular payment for software I would not otherwise have paid money for, though after trying HazeOver, I'd definitely buy that one.

And I failed my savings throw against advertising (I've known about this software for some time) and bought Luminar at a deep discount. I took a break from editing (intense! So, so good, but very intense) and played with the demo a bit. Ho-ly Cow.






That was a quick play with a couple of images, just to see what I could do with it... nice. £40 is pricey, but it beats the >£200 regular price tag, which will never happen. One of the things I want to do more of in 2017 is play with photo software. I'm still an utter fan of trying to get pictures right straight out of the camera, but I want to learn what's possible, and where I could take pictures. Post processing is time-intensive. (And if you always run the same filters, you may be better off changing your camera settings, or saving up for a camera that does not have the same shortcomings.) But there's a world of Doing Stuff With Images out there that I know very little about, and which I want to explore further.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1080788.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I have just built a version of the app I'm working on, and have started to use it. Which promptly showed up a bug - I forgot to change my data in response to checking an item off the list - but that doesn't provide much of a problem right now.

My first app. It has a long way to go, and I have - the above bug aside - a fair few things I need to implement before it's ready to be tested by anyone who is not-me, but I wrote myself a tool and it's 70% useful. It is at least as useful as the app it is replacing.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1080477.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I'll get the rant out of my system first. I loved the idea of iBooks author from the moment I first heard about it: a DTP-like app that lets you create ebooks with good layout options, pictures, and various widgets. I saw stunning examples, installed it, and... somehow never got around to doing much with it at all.

I think I've just remembered why.

In many ways, iBooksAuthor is a badly designed piece of software. It had incredible potential, but it's also a pain in the arse.

( Unintuitive and unresponsiveCollapse )

This is, in short, software that I cannot operate without a manual. I *have* a manual (thanks O'Reilly's free library) but finding the time to read it and the time to locate the information I need at any moment and putting it into practice is *work* and takes time away from programming because it occupies the same brain cells.

This is not to say that I don't admire this software.I'm excited when I think of all the things I will be able to do with it (and if I were happy to use a pre-made template, I could do a lot more with it already). But it's also a pain in the arse to use, and could be much better, which annoys me - why does this make stuff that should be easy so damn hard?

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1080120.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Today I implemented a quick-and-dirty version of the next step (one of many, no fixed order) in my current project.
Then I sat down and worked out a somewhat more sophisticated version of the same thing, with a behaviour that is well within the bounds of Mac apps (rather than feeling like a kludge).
Then I fixed all of the awkward bits about this and made sure that my app behaves well: if I close the preferences window, the colourPicker should close.

And now I'm going to bed on a job well done.

... yeah. This is a big step forward.

The daring-to-be-raw is a new trait - I have all these brilliant ideas, but sometimes it's much better to have a minimum viable product, so that if I can't work it out (or can't work it out easily) I have something that is _functional_ instead of broken.
And with this - clicking on colour buttons means that I get a colour picker and can set the button's colour - I can put the _next_ step back on the 'to-do' list. The next step is that I'd like to use a custom colour picker with a limited, pre-defined number of colours because I like that behaviour so much better; I can always add a colorWell in the corner for people who want more fine control than that. I have ideas about this, but haven't tested it... and there are other features of the app that will go a lot further towards making it *usable*, and the main reason I'm writing it right now is that I want to use it. So functional (and decent) over fancy.

New is also that I was coming up against a badly documented/undocumented feature: Apple provides such an _easy_ way to change colours (a custom control) that duplicating that functionality is not documented. But all the time I've poured into learning stuff is paying off now: I had a fair idea where to look things up and what kind of things I was looking for. It wasn't completely smooth (see 'undocumented: a message got sent astray), but I could read the error message and work out what was going wrong and test my hypothesis and then implement it properly. I also had further tools available: where do I look this up, which class might I need, why isn't this firing... oh, I haven't set the delegate.

Very new is that I started coding late in the day and ran into an undocumented feature and could find no examples and had things go terribly wrong, and I didn't get overly frustrated by this but kept chipping away at the solution and testing various aspects of it until they all clicked.

So, my little daily list of things I'd like to do - which will roll over at a time of your choosing (well, midnight.3am/6am) and which will not nag you with statistics of how often you have procrastinated - is coming along nicely. Once I've implemented saving (ahem), it'll be ready to install on my own computer, with the rest of features to be implemented on the go.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1079874.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Recently I have spent some time on the project 'catalogue all the apps' which meant that I've been digging through my stash and installing some of them. This is the problem with bundles where one or two apps provide good value - you then have five or six others on your drive you paid for and you don't know what to do with.



Some of these are things that would not have occurred to me that I might need or want.

Sip lets you sample any pixel and gives you a huge array of code choices. This not only includes HTML (so useful), but numerous Swift options, both for UIKit and Cocoa. Very, very useful.

HazeOver dims non-active apps on your screen. I strongly dislike FullScreen mode; I *like* seeing other apps in the background, but sometimes, they're distracting. This is a perfect solution - you can still see what's going on, but it's not in your face. *Surprisingly* useful, would buy again.

Mac DVD Ripper Pro (not MacX DVD Ripper Pro, which is a completely different app by completely different people). For all those 'I might want to watch this after all' DVDs - they can now physically leave the house, and I can watch them on my iPad. Win.

Life is billed as a personal journal. It's kind of Twitter for one: you get to jot down things with icon and mood (a far too limited set of moods). There's no 'export' feature, and no push to blog or Facebook, it's just for yourself.

I've been using it for the last week, and I'm finding it surprisingly useful to jot down things in short form which won't get lost amidst general blogging noise. I'm trying to hold myself a bit more accountable and get a few more things done; I've looked at the bulletJournal concept, but I am so not going back to paper!

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1079696.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

puddleshark posted a comparison of two translations of haiku, and I was intrigued enough to google a little because one set resonated much more with me than the other.

Sometimes, you hit a motherlode.

https://www.ut.ee/klassik/sht/2001/sytiste1.pdf is a paper discussing the translation of this one, popular, haiku: there are 32 *further* translations in the appendix.

The article goes over every part of the original, discussing both form and content, the use of punctuation to fulfil the function of the kireji ('cutting word')... it's thorough.

And I feel I've levelled up my japanese, haiku, and translation skills just by reading it.

The livejournal version of this post has a picture of a blackbird taken in winter: not quite the same, but the nearest I'll get to a poetic coincidence.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1079336.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

In the beginning, there were people copying software from their friends and any public computer they came across.

Then there were more elaborate serial number schemes, must-have-floppy/CD-in-drive, bit copy apps, dongles, outcries, putting so much extra stuff on the CD that it was worth buying the app for the extras alone, even more outcries about how piracy kills software development, giving away 'lite' versions on cover CDs, online activation with draconian detection mechanisms, software bundles where for a few dollars you can grab a whole bunch of apps (both pay-what-you-want and otherwise)...

... and now there's another new way of getting your app in front of people: a service called 'Setapp'. It seems to work a little like the Humble Bundle Monthly: you pay $10 a month, and you get an as yet unspecified amount of apps.

This is not a scheme to rent software (looking at you Adobe, whose products I will never again buy because you cannot buy them anymore and which I shall not rent because I like my software to work offline), but more of an auto-subscription to a bundle.

Right now, it's in beta, and the app is a bit rough but perfectly usable. (I've just filed a lengthy report.)

On the positive side, it's in open beta, and you can - as long as you have a Mac - sign up on https://setapp.com, and see whether this is a service you'd be interested in. Personally, I find that I own about half of the apps already (bundles), but there are some interesting ones in the lot. They seem to be a mixture of productivity (Aeon timeline), Utilities, special interest, and simply odd things. There's two mindmaps, for instance, and several markdown editors and snippet managers.

For me, the effort has been worth it: I discovered Sip, which lets you sample any pixel and gives you not just the CSS value, but any number of ways to translate a colour into Swift.

Given how busy Apple's Appstore is, and how bad the interface and search facilities are, I am not surprised that developers are looking for new ways of reaching customers. One of my decluttering tasks at the moment is logging all of the software I have acquired from bundles. Most of it I have not used; sometimes I find a gem that becomes surprisingly useful, but mainly, they're just sitting on a backup drive (because there are too many to keep them on my smallish drive).

There's not a single developer that has lost out through the bundles - I would not have bought any of those apps at full price if I hadn't managed to snag them in a bundle - but there are some developers that have gained, because I am now upgrading or buying other apps from them, and recommending their apps to my friends.

I suspect that my experience is far from unique. The existence of this new service seems to support that.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1079123.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Since there's more than one programmer on my list: Packt (whose titles I've generally found pretty decent) is giving away a book a day until December 26th.

https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning

It's going to be a complete grab bag, but worth checking.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1079011.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Skyrim: so good I bought it twice.

Well, I'd wanted to play this since forever, particularly since telophase chronicled The Adventures of Murderface McKenzie.

( First adventures; with picciesCollapse )

This was one of the great - and surprising - revelations of 2016. My favourite type of game, other than Tetris-type matching games are big productions in which I run around sticking swords into people and peppering them with arrows and/or magic.

( Practice makes... at least reasonably competentCollapse )
This was good practice for Skyrim which offers very few options. (And no, I shall not try to install a controller for a windows emulator... Bad Idea.) I don't find the combat intuitive, but so far, my flailing has allowed me to kill everybody who attacked me and I didn't get damaged too badly, nothing a little potion couldn't solve. (Apart from dying in an attempt to escape the first scene, but... let's not talk about that, right?).

So I now feel confident that I will master this, and I love, love love (have I mentioned I love this?) what I've seen so far. There's so much _story_ here, it makes my heart sing, and it's immersive and beautiful, and...

Tomorrow is another day.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1078658.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Screenie is an app I have been using for a while: it lets you save screenshots to a folder other than the desktop, and gives you visual access in the menu bar. I've found it invaluable for programming tutorials where I take a LOT of screenshots and want to dump them into my blogpost, and I like the convenience of having my desktop uncluttered.

Right now, today, on 'cyber Monday', it's free.
https://www.thnkdev.com/Screenie/

This is a tool that has made my life better.

If you can, please support the developers.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1078422.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I'm wishing you the best of luck.

(I'm reasonably certain that I'm preaching to the choir here when I say 'GO VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON')

https://twitter.com/CrappyCrapson/status/795269635591507969

sums it up as well as anybody: This is the real thing. This is a danger to humanity, and there is nothing Trump can offer you that outweigh the misery he will cause. It's not just that I want to see Clinton in the White House in her own right - she has shown a lot of statesmanship during the campaign, she has listened to concerns and adjusted her policies, and she knows what the job entails: against a man endorsed by the KKK and neo-nazi organisations - a man who *hired* a known neo-nazi and who freely spouts fascist paroles - I would back George W. Bush, and by every god known to me, I am not a fan.

And please vote downticket as well: Republicans have already said that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, they want the Supreme Court vacancy to remain open for the next four years. Make that impossible. Vote. For goodness sake, vote.

After a good number of Brits voted for Brexit - some undoubtedly moved by good arguments, but many more deceived, and more than a few fuelled by a hatred of The Other that is as irrational as it is toxic - my faith in humanity has pretty much shattered. As absurd as it sounds that a conman with several bankruptcies, a man who has been accused of numerous accounts of sexual misconduct (and whose own words make one believe that at least a significant proportion of those accusations are true, to put things very, very mildly), a man who has shown no sign of having the diplomatic skill of the average seven-year old, is being seen as a valid alternative to an educated, experienced, and skilled woman - this is how the media has presented the situation and this is how a significant number of people appears to think.

I am scared of the complacency of decent people. This is not the time to vote third party, or abstain.

Go. Fucking. Vote. For. Hillary.


And let us not forget that Pence - the would-be vice president - is a flaming dumpster fire in his own right.

#nodapl might just be a taster of what the future brings under President Trump: a blatant disregard of civil rights and a militarised police force moving against protestors. (We've seen this before. We'll see this again. But under President Trump, it will happen with federal support.) Living in a country where the government has just tightened a policy that will make considerable numbers of people homeless and which has increased the number of children living in poverty sharply (and 'poverty' not just means 'can't have the latest toys and must wear hand-down clothes: this is real, hardcore, 'family cannot eat or heat their home' territory), I can only say 'yes, it WILL be that bad. It will be worse.'

And that, dear America, is why I wish you all the luck in the world. You need it.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1078121.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

There are some aspects of Pokemon Go that I like. Going around in unfamiliar places and having local points of interest pointed out to me as 'Pokestops' - they're often things I would have missed on my own.

But the game as a game is lousy, and badly programmed, and as a developer, that annoys me a lot.


Problems include...

( ComplaintsKnight complainsCollapse )



So, yeah. Still playing, but desperately wishing this game was a better version of itself.

Another thing that might improve it is if you could report broken or missing Pokestops: yesterday I visited two sculptures that don't exist. I'd love to be able to report them as missing; and I'd love to be able to report things that should be Pokestops like new sculptures or newly-opened landmarks so that the game remains lively and up-to-date.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1077925.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

'Uncle Bob' Martin is a bit of a legend in certain parts of the programming community: the vocal advocate of a particular programming style, with a 'cranky old man shouting at clouds' persona. (I've seen his standup routine. It was informative, but also very showy... and it didn't convince me.)

This is a series of seven videos. Each of them retails for $14 per viewer, or $20 if you want to download it.

For this, you get 8h of two people pair programming - the wise old wizard who is new to Swift, and his plucky apprentice (Justin Martin, his son) who is familiar with Objective-C and thus the iOS frameworks. They'll pair program a Go app, and you'll get to see them stumbling through the process and fighting the language and the frameworks.


( More MusingsCollapse )

The real question isn't 'do you want to acquire these coding skills' (which, after reading the descriptions and looking at the code, I would answer with 'not really' but 'can they sell you the lifestyle'. And it's worth watching the intro video for that - this is very much the brogramming, casual, manspreading, bare-feet-on-the-table subculture that is, I guess, supposed to appeal to me enough to hand over nearly a hundred dollars?

No thanks.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1077660.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I spent the last couple of weeks with my backup computer [*], which is lightweight, underpowered (compared to my main machine), and which has a small hard drive with next to nothing on it. I gave in and downloaded LOTR War in the North, and like it tremendously. (It runs very smoothly; I'm impressed. AFAIK, it runs at least as well as it did on my old Macbook Pro, which was no slouch.)

I have no idea how far into the game I am or how much I've played, but I guess around 20h, all in all.

Yesterday, a wasp flew into the bathroom while I was using it. This is not optimal - it's a very small room, and I am allergic to wasp stings. So obviously, I pulled up my trousers, did not roll up my sleeves, and set out to kill it if I could. (In a me-or-it scenario, I look after myself. I have no problem with bees, but wasps are another matter - and this one was pissed off and FAST.)

Here's the thing. I've spent a considerable amount of the past two weeks (alright, and of the months beforehand) training my reflexes and my hand-eye coordination. When the wasp, instead of settling, flew straight at me, I felt confident to swat it - I could judge the distance/speed, I knew where my weapon was (wasps - another reason not to buy hardbacks!), I knew how and when to move. Gaming for the win.

Afterwards, I closed the door, wedged it close as much as I could, and left the house until caper_est came home. [**]

[**] A slight exaggeration. I had to go out and do some shopping, and I did return before he did, but I left the wasp to him. It had already left.

[*] This was a necessity - I need a backup computer, and none of mine were fit to do serious work on for any length of time. We now also have a second Mac for caper_est to play with Swift on, and a machine I can take out of the house for events and write-ins without constantly worrying about it. ((Or taking my old computer, an external keyboard, an external mouse, and a power brick that must be plugged in). Due to circumstances, I decided to take it to Wales rather than my main machine, and I'm happy to report that while I missed some of my software, overall, it was a pretty damn good experience. I _enjoy_ being back on 15" - programming was a bit more awkward - but it was perfectly adequate, and not being able to play all of the newest games is *definitely* something that I can live with. Not being able to play Shadows of Mordor (see: 256GB hard drive, 70GB game files) is a bit annoying, but hardly life-threatening, and the editing went without a hitch, other than manuscript-side ones. I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do this.)

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1077463.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I don't like everything about NaNoWriMo - I'm not keen on the donation drive, which seemed to get more obnoxious every year; and I'm not the kind of writer for whom it is a good match, but I've made good friends through NaNo, and I love the energy.

But while I plan to attend some meetups this year, I won't take part. I'm trying to finish my current novel, and I'd love to get some advice on how to tackle it.

My main problem is that my protagonist had a tremendous story arc behind him. He's gone from being laissez-faire (and, to be fair, somewhat depressed) to facing up to his responsibilities and putting in the work. He's keeping his promises, he's dealing fairly with people, he swallows his resentments and uses his people skills, and...

I'm nearly at the end of the book. There's one thing that needs to happen - he'll face an old nemesis and needs to keep his temper, (he cannot win that confrontation, only come out of it with his pride and conscience intact), and then he needs to take all those newly-honed soft skills and face down someone who could flatten his home town should he want to: and right now, the guy is pissed off. With certain justification.

Only my protagonist will not - can not - engage in a power struggle. Instead he'll use headology to defuse the situation and broker a compromise.

There's a lot of sitting around and talking going on. Right now, my protag is acquiring the skills he'll need - knowledge, history - but it looks pretty much like a walk in the park. He's _competent_ (and I like that), and he's exercising that competence on a daily basis.

I have no idea how to write this well. I really do not want to raise the stakes and sharpen the conflicts and throw metaphorical rocks at him and all that - this is a competent person just coming into his own, so while he might be _feeling_ insecure, he gets over each hurdle as it appears before him. The final feat he'll pull off *is* desperate - but not particularly urgent, other than for a few people he cares about and in a general politics kind of way.

This book is part of a long cycle, so no single book has all of the answers. Something else I feel I don't have a template for.

So that's what I'll be doing in November, instead of writing shallow scenes for an as-yet unknown novel.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1077067.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

That's 'mid' as in 'deeply involved, have played some time' not 'half way through' and I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that I've just reached Rivendell.

Wow, I needed that. I've had this game in my library for a couple of years now, and I've tried to play it but struggled with the controls (they need a certain type of skill), the inventory system (it sucks and it's somewhat broken), and the concept of 'WTF am I supposed to do' which is part of the eternal dilemma: you cannot get better at this type of game if you don't play it, but you cannot play it unless you already have some basic skills.

If you want to learn to play, I highly recommend 'FATE' (MacGamestore link; wait for a reduction; try the demo to see whether it runs) which is completely unapologetic about what it is. (Reviewed here)

Even on a low graphic setting, War in the North is a game full of gorgeous, ever-so-well imagined settings. It has a reasonably linear storyline, but enough side quests and corners you can poke into to not feel completely railroaded. It builds on LOTR without retconning the story: you're one of a party of three (dwarf fighter, elven mage, Dúnedain archer) who go and keep Aragorn's back free and investigate various *other* nasties. There's plenty left to do in Middle Earth. So far, I haven't found the easy setting to be too challenging: it's nice and exciting but doesn't need my full brain/fast reflexes/super-duper tactical skills. I'm probably not making the most out of all the options, but then again, I'm playing this for relaxation.

The MacGamestore version runs nicely in the background and runs smoothly on a not particularly high-powered Mac; at 10.5GB it won't kill your hard drive, either. (Looking at you, 70GB Shadows of Mordor.)

So all niggles aside, this is a gorgeous game, it feels rich and deep, and I admit that I like Middle Earth as a setting; the nods to the main storyline are enhancing the feel.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1076821.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

The world, right now, is pretty grim. (The UK government appears to have read and memorised the fashist's handbook: The registration of foreign employees seems off the table right now, but the registration of school children - with at least one school sending 'you're probably ok' to parents of white pupils and 'you must register your child's nationality' to the rest - is very much under way. What would you have done in the 1930s? DO THAT NOW.)

Anyway,

http://www.catipsum.com

does exactly what it needs to - paragraphs of text for mockups.

Unwrap toilet paper lie on your belly and purr when you are asleep wake up human for food at 4am or hunt by meowing loudly at 5am next to human slave food dispenser, stare at ceiling throwup on your pillow knock dish off table head butt cant eat out of my own dish.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1076528.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

On Sunday, we set out to the Open Day of a local [*] riding stable.

[*] Local as in 12 miles, 45 minutes drive on a really good day, which don't happen on the North Circular. To ride, I need to start out two hours early, and plan on taking that much time coming back. This is, give or take, the closest yard to where I live. If I weren't freelancing, I couldn't do this.


I wasn't sure what to expect, but what it turned out to be was a chance for everyone - this yard has an RDA division, so they *meant* everyone - to take a short guided walk out past the local park. (Usually, rides go into the park - it's across the road and around the corner - but given the volume of people, we stayed on a (deserted) road for this.

For caper_est this was a chance to sit on a horse and get what the whole fuss is about. For me, it was a chance to sit on a bombproof horse with no expectations, and to shoo the assembled brain weasels away.

I've booked a lesson in October, earliest date I could. We'll see how this works out in the long run - I *appreciate* bomb-proof cobs, but my heart belongs to a different type of horse - but it will at least give me a chance to get back into the saddle and find my confidence again, which had been considerably shaken long before this enforced break.

(Harry - a Haflinger, of all things - was the first horse in a long time that I have felt absolutely safe on. And ok, there was no cantering involved - I don't know what the weasels will do when I attempt that - but once I'd mounted, I was home.)

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1076304.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

(This essay was inspired by Think Like a Programmer (V. Anton Spraul))

I picked this up in a Humblebundle full of book on languages I have little or no contact with; I mainly bought it for 'Learn you a Haskell for Great Good' which has been recommended to me, but since I'm currently knee deep in two manuscripts, Haskell will have to wait.

So far, I've flicked through the first (OOP) part of 'Eloquent Javascript (Marijn Haverbeke)' which I would wholeheartedly recommend: it explains some of the weirdness of Javascript, but most of the code was recognisable in terms of organisation. The author gives off a vibe of extreme competence: he is able to explain the quirks and oddnesses in the language, offers best practices, and if Javascript if your thing, you'll be a better programmer after reading it. (It's Creative Commons licensed here Go take a look.)

While reading this - and this is relevant to the discussion of the book that made me want to sit down and write a proper essay - I noticed that there was a fair amount of cognitive load involved in Javascript, particularly the example that had you imaging walls and plants and animals with # and o and x. If I could get a Mac Programming makeover, I'd learn to use graphics much, much earlier, and I would take more time to add visual elements to my programming efforts instead of trying to solve everything with printing to console.

The good news is that Spraul (and others) believe that one can learn to think like a programmer. Since programming is a creative effort, that should give not only programmers but writers heart: creative thinking can be taught (and learnt).

Unfortunately, what this book will teach you is how to think like a procedural C++ programmer, and that is what sparked this rant...

( Learning to ThinkCollapse )

I learnt *a lot* more about programming from Functional Swift

And while I would like to say that 'it is not that this book has nothing useful to contribute' I'm not sure that 'always have a plan for solving a problem' is it - but I would have liked it to go much deeper into the problem of 'how to break up a large problem into smaller ones' because there's not just one strategy. (This is a problem I have with a number of programming books: when they show you how to incrementally build algorithms, they often are too specific, whereas I like a certain level of abstraction. This particularly clashes with the 'write the minimum code to pass a test' TDD school of coding.)

- plan on how to solve it
- restate the problem
- divide it into smaller pieces
- start with what you know
- reduce the scope of the problem by adding or removing constraints
- look for analogies between the unsolved problem and one you have solved
- experiment
- don't get frustrated

The last point is one that everybody ought to embroider on the back of their computer chair: techniques for recognising rising frustration, and walking away/working on something else/splitting the problem further/giving yourself a solvable challenge and boosting your confidence IS good advice, and advice I should take more often. (I have a new policy of only starting big challenges when I know I have a couple of days to resolve them. Over 10-15 hours I can usually make considerable progress, whereas 2-3h of cutting my teeth on a problem, batting my head against a wall, and then having to walk away for several days because I have no time to program creates much more frustration.

But... yeah. There's simplifications and there's teaching people something they'll have to unlearn immediately; this book falls squarely in the latter category and I'm kind of surprised that it was published in 2012 rather than ten years earlier. Or fifteen.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1076013.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

This was a game I picked up at some point in a sale; and although I hadn't seen the film, I liked the look of it.

Right now I'm working on a mss, so I have put aside Shadows of Mordor to pick up a nice, easy, brainless kid's game. What could possibly go wrong?

( Spoiler: a number of thingsCollapse )


So I'm happy I played it through. It was not the somewhat primitive graphics that got to me, or the extremely linear gameplay, but the fact that I was fighting my controls and the camera angle much, much more than I was fighting enemies.

I'm just glad that I didn't give this to a child of the intended age group, because it was, all in all, a very unsatisfactory experience. I do admit that I liked having a very simple reward system (no loot, just gold coins) and a very limited upgrade path (not much cognitive stress there) - I am not immune to 'ooh, shiny, I got a sword that's giving me a two percent advantage on skill x' but a lot of the time I feel as if I've been dropped into an advanced calculus class: you're tracking ten or twenty different attributes, and you get modifiers that are either absolute, percentage, or level-based. How people can work out without a calculator which items they should equip, I don't know.


Ah well. I've learnt a few things about game design.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1075828.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I am enjoying the days between paying projects, and filling them with walks, programming and sleeping.

With my new phone firmly in hand, I decided to start learning a bit of Japanese again; it irks me that I cannot even sound out words.

The other day, I found a link to http://realkana.com/study/, and found it surprisingly effective in making me recall Hiragana.

I like the idea; I do not love relying on a website. So today - it was a *very* rainy day - I thought 'I ought to be able to do something like this.'

At half past four this afternoon, I created a new project. Just before eleven, I was able to show it off: right now the interface is somewhat awkward (too many clicks on exactly the right field needed) and there is no content beyond あいうえ, but I have an app that will allow me to enter new content, save it to disc, and do a very primitive form of quizzing myself (type and get immediate feedback of yes or no. With smileys.)

That's not too shabby. The last time I tried to use my programming skills to solve a small problem I had it ended up costing me a couple of weeks; this time I did not need any new skills (and had a chance to review old ones after a syntax change). Nonetheless I learnt a lot of valuable things:


- all the time I've invested into learning individual things like 'how to save a file' and 'how to create a table' is starting to pay off. I still can't do all of the steps off the top of my head, but at least I have a single location where I can look them up. At the moment, since Swift is going through a syntax change, reviewing these things is a Good Thing; the posts may not be live, but I'm still working on them.
- algorithms - the bits where you write clever functions that manipulate data and which do clever things with flow control make up about 5% of programming effort. I had to experiment a bit with giving myself three tries - type it wrong go oops, try again, or was it that-? and if that's still wrong, move on to the next thing. But mostly, it's very straightforward.
- app design - actually transferring data from one part of the app to another, and doing things like saving data on exit - is the hardest part. I still feel I have no clue what I'm doing and making it up on the spot.
- most of the bits in the middle were taking up by hooking up this text field to that part of the data and avoiding things like comparing a string to itself (they match! They always match! What miracle!)

I have A LOT of ideas on how to improve it, but my first port of call is finding a better pattern for data entry. This actually will involve digging far deeper into the framework than I have so far; I want it to be intuitive, fluent, click here and tab to the next field - but that's not the built-in behaviour, and getting it right will take more time and effort.

This sort of thing - polishing stuff - is not my strength.

I've also made a mistake on how to hand data from one part of the app to another; but I think I know how to fix *that* one, at least. But overall: yes. This is a level of skill I have been hoping for: the ability to see something a computer can do easily, find there is no tool for it, and roll my own.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1075498.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

So. It's been a week. In this week I have caught 18 Pokemon and hatched one (11 different species); and have 8 more eggs to incubate.

And I'm just about fed up with it. I like the _idea_ of a game where you walk around and collect things much better than I thought I would, but the implementation stinks.

( ComplaintsCollapse )

Overall, I am very disappointed that something that could be fun seems to a) designed to get the most out of me-the-product (including designing the game so that I'm more likely to pay money to keep playing) and which is b) incredibly glitchy from where I'm sitting. Losing all of my pokeballs (while hitting the damn thing) has shifted my enjoyment from 'amusing distraction on occasion' to 'I really cannot be having with this shit' when you are, for whatever reason, lacking the coordination to actually catch pokemon and the only ways of being able to catch more pokemon are a) grinding by visiting every pokestop on the planet or b) paying money (which I will not; it is a line I shall not cross[*]), you're pretty much excluded from the fun.

So I will probably keep this on my phone for another week, at the end of which I shall attempt to catch as many pokemon as I can, and then take a picture of my pokedex and delete the app.


[*] I like buying games. I'm happy to give developers money. I'd love to buy Plants vs. Zombies II (sniff). But I will not buy an in-app purchase that is designed to make a game easier to play, PARTICULARLY not when the game is designed to guide me towards those purchases. (I have no moral objection to skins - gear you buy that's not influencing the game play but that makes you happy and which pays the developers' bills.) I hate being manipulated, and I hate it even more that other people, who are not as resistant as I am (particularly children, but also other vulnerable people) are being parted from money they can often ill afford. I do wish to not support this.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1075425.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

https://storify.com/Hamm_Tips/comic-panel-walk-through


Jesse Hamm not only understands his craft exceedingly well, he's able and willing to share his process.

(As an aside: I wish writers would do this sort of thing, but I haven't seen it other than in short, specific examples, targeted at individuals. I find this kind of process-sharing invaluable: I am very process-oriented, and learning how an artist not just comes up with a brilliant idea, but develops their first draft and then makes every element work for the good of the whole: that's pretty priceless, and not something you can easily learn from general instruction.)


Comics are not only drawn entirely from the imagination, but they're a narrative art: they tell stories. (Some pictures or photographs do, but in a photograph you have far less control over what you want to display and how you display it.)

One thing I find invaluable about this process description is the level of detail. I'm certain that many good artists will go through a similar process inside their heads, but it needs the articulation before anyone can learn it.

Editing comics must be *really* challenging, because some of this is exactly the stuff that I'd expect an editor to point out _once it has gone wrong_. And I suppose if it goes wrong _enough_, then a lot of people will be able to see it. But there's also going to be a lot of middle ground, which some readers might not pick up on, but which will just seem... somewhat off to many. Like changes in the level of diction, or overuse of certain speech patterns: things that lead writing to _feel_ clumsy, without necessarily being obvious to the reader.

I speak the language of comics much less than I speak the language of words.

Once things are explained, though, it turns out that a lot of what the artist is doing in the panels often has an equivalent in text: setting the scene, creating a narrative arc, using associations and contrasts, making changes to avoid distracting the reader from things that are not important to the story, using repetition to anchor the reader (signalling 'this is the same vantage point'); but with enough variation to avoid signalling 'this pattern is important'..

There's *a lot* of stuff in this article, and I'll need some time to digest it and think about how this might transfer to either graphical stuff I do or writing.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1075093.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I'm meaning to change providers anyway, so a disruption is neither here nor there, but I'm just completely wiping all of my Wordpress installations because my main site has just been hacked again.

This time, I've been denied access, so one of the several hundred attempts each week was successful.

Instead of trying to work *that* one out, I've just the lot. I had a look at the site with FTP (yay for self-hosting) and there were just too many files recently modified on dates that I didn't do anything on the site.

And with something this sophisticated, I cannot trust the database or my backups, either, so I'm going to rely on my MacJournal drafts and restore the content from scratch, AGAIN, but probably not on Wordpress this time, because I'm sick and tired of having all my work wiped out.

My site is a collection of articles, mostly how-tos (with a few bug reports) on how to use the Cocoa frameworks in Swift. It has no members (I stopped accepting comments because of potential security risks), no e-commerce, no advertising, it's basically just a blob sitting in hosted webspace with no intrinsic values other than to me, and anyone who wants its functionality can spend five minutes setting up a Wordpress account of their own.

Instead, it has been under attack by more hackers than it has regular page views, constantly, relentlessly, and despite all the security measures I've taken, eventually someone got past them. If big companies get hacked - people who employ teams of experts to prevent this, then I'm not feeling guilty that I did, but I spent a month of programming time digging deep into WP security measures and employed them all... and someone needed to prove they were the bigger dick and ruin my blog just because they can.

I was planning on not renewing my hosting account with fatcow.com anyway, so now I am looking for options that aren't just constricted to WordPress hosting. (On the other side, I *do* need to have POP/IMAP access - in other words, both webspace AND e-mail for the same domains.)

On many levels I like Wordpress, but I cannot see how I, as a private individual (who is computer literate and programs) can make it any more secure than I already did. So unless there's a way of setting things up server-side that refutes all and any attempts to access my installation unless they come from me, I am stumped as to how to continue.

I miss my site, but it's abundantly clear that setting up another Wordpress installation will, sooner or later, have the same result unless there are some drastic changes; at this point I am right out of ideas about what else one could do stop a bunch of very determined hackers.

And no, other than hosting fees, I cannot pay for this.

I am up against an enemy with vastly more resources than I have. And they're winning. And there seems very little I can do.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1074880.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

It's confusing? After all the loops you jump through to sign up, you finally get to a screen that tells you that there are Pokemon nearby.

Now, if I created a game that is based on hooking people on something, and someone had just signed up (and possibly wasn't sure they'd want to continue) I would throw them a bone - a pokemon or two that they could catch.

When I moved around, I did not seem to get any closer to the pokemon that show up on my map. When I stand still, my avatar moves around anyway.

It wasn't until the next session that it occurred to me to actually click on the pokemon that show up on the map.

So, fine. I've got a charmander sitting on top of my computer (get off it!) and a bouncing pokeball on the screen.

AND NO INSTRUCTIONS.

And an interface that is so bad that I wonder why fifty million people play this: I just kept randomly lobbing the ball at the pokemon until it eventually caught it, but I have no idea 'how you do it' - both my failures and my eventual success were completely random events, completely devoid of any feedback or explanation.

Then I play twenty questions with 'what do you want other people to call you' (type nickname, get told it's not available, type new nickname, etc etc until you get lucky) and

There were THREE pokemon around me when I started this. I now get told how wonderful I am (fuck off, NPC, you should have noticed I was struggling and helped me; I must have used up a month's allowance of pokeballs to catch this one, *are* they a limited resource? Any time I hear 'in-app purchase' I get suspicious) and my other two Pokemon are gone.

Instead there's a new one. And it's sitting on my computer, too, so I can't even share a screenshot. This time, I catch it more easily.

And then I get told to go all over the world to catch more pokemon.

This is a game how?

Obviously, people are enjoying this tremendously, but for someone who has a background in neither pokemon nor location-based games, this app seems to be designed for people who are surrounded by people who will tell them how to use it, because if you come to it cold, you won't get any explanations or help at all. Where's the 'play' aspect? What am I missing?

And yes, I could simply google 'how to play PokemonGo' but the point is that I shouldn't have to - I should be able to pick up this app if I feel curious, and get intrigued by it. As a programmer, I can learn a lot from this; as a potential player, it leaves me annoyed.

I'll take it out a few times on walks and see whether I can catch some pictures, but so far, I am decidedly underwhelmed.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1074419.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

For the past decade or so - ever since cover CDs on computer magazines stopped to be a thing - I have gotten the majority of my software through bundle deals.


Currently, you can get 7 Mac apps via https://bundlehunt.com for $17.

I haven't played with all of mine yet - I've *just* come out of a deadline - but SuperCard is in the bundle, as are two photo apps from Macphun (I already had Intensify and Tonality; so getting more was a no-brainer, and both FX Studio CK (filters that are *not* your standard system filters everybody has) and Focus CK are looking really, really fun for messing about with images. As is CODIJY (PLEASE do not name your product something unpronounceable), a colouring app.

There are other yummy things in the bundle - Kinemac (animation), Yummy FTP (which I have used; not the bestest evar, but solid, and a number more.

For that price, you cannot go much wrong.

I love the chance to play with new software; I particularly love it when I don't have to spend a fortune. I was planning to buy a game to celebrate the end of the MSS; this actually looks like more fun.





Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1073937.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/07/a-short-guide-for-artists-on-how-to-de-objectify-f.html


This is a really useful resource, and illustrates how much we've been accustomed to the male gaze.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1073899.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

In a discussion elsewhere, i posted a comment and wanted to write down this insight where I can retrieve it again if I need to:

A lot of the resistance to throwing things away comes from wanting to have things. A spare whatever when i need it. Another x. The thingy that I like.

If I cannot lay my hands on it, if I can merely deduce its presence in my life by the fact that I brought it into the house and didn't throw it away, so it must be somewhere, I don't 'have' it. Schroedinger's' tool/toy/book is pretty useless, after all.

And in some ways decluttering is actually easier: if I *know* I don't have something, I can buy it. (I can walk to Ikea. I have a 154h-week supermarket (not *quite* 24/7) in walking distance, and several more where I can drive to them. There are huge shopping centres a bus/tube ride away, and there's the internet: if I want something, I can get it, as long as I can afford it.) The calculations about whether the old one will turn up and then this one is wasted suck time and energy; 'I'm out of x, I could do with y, I don't need z' actually produces less stress than maybe having something and maybe not.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1073582.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Shift-Q restyles my text. This is not a key mapping that the key mapping system is aware of.


When you're dealing with <restyle paragraph>antitative and <restyle paragraph>alitative methods, this is a Bad Thing.


Maggie [*] to the rescue.

[*] a subscriber to an e-mail list I am a member of, from before my time - the recommended way of dealing with sudden Word weirdness is to delete the end of the file (select the last character and to the end of the file). Not failsafe, but 'maggying' works surprisingly often; it seems to catch a corrupt control character.

Bah.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1073355.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

If you're in the UK and eligible to vote (I'm not), please go to the polls today and vote remain.

On the one hand, this is an intensely personal matter for me. I'm a EU citizen, and I have benefited greatly from Freedom of Movement - in reality (it made it much, much easier for me to move, back in 1996) and because there's always been this great pool of options: if I had wanted to live and work in any of the other EU countries, it would have been _easy_. I know many, MANY people benefitting from this - some live in one country and work in another, some move for university, work, or a thousand personal reasons. So I have a stake in this.

I also really appreciate the 'common European' narrative that has replaced the intense nationalism of yesteryear... or mostly replaced it. The 'Brexit' campaign has been ugly - xenophobic, racist, violent. An outspokenly pro-Europe (and pro-humanitarian) MP was murdered for her beliefs, which was the very ugly culmination of a very ugly campaign.

There may be much about Europe-the-institution that is less than perfect, but Europe-the-location is and will remain on our doorstep, and there really is no way to run Britain that does not include negotiation with Europe. Europe WILL determine a considerable amount of rules, which is what negotiations are all about, and the less Britain has to offer, the worse those conditions will be. Britain needs Europe a lot more than Europe needs Britain. Negotiations will reflect that. If the Brexiteers had a workable plan - a social model and an economic policy that was impossible to achieve within Europe but which promised much better result than our current tax haven/impoverished workforce (with 2-3 million children living in poverty until poverty was redefined, where 'poverty' = 'unable to eat') - then I might agree that leaving Europe could be a sensible option. Only I don't see Europe holding us back (on the contrary, one of the ways money flows back from Europe is by supporting disadvantaged regions. Money the Tories are often keen to turn down so they can keep the 'we're only ever paying in' narrative up; which obviously is more important than flood relief.)

Putting my historian's hat on: I am very, very frightened, and I don't say that lightly.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1072690.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

In between editing the latest mss, I'm currently playing 'Shadows of Mordor' and really want to write more about this game when I have a bit of time.


It's a hard game. (It's also quite gory and has some mechanics that are somewhat uncomfortable; in our household we refer to gaming as 'slaying orcs' since that very often is what you end up doing; here it's literal, and the game mechanics include a need to torture and brutally interrogate orcs. This is... problematic.

I've been inspired by telophase's description of playing Skyrim.

She writes

Because I have not got used to the controls, which require you to use one joystick to turn and one joystick to move, while at the same time mashing buttons to fight, Murderface only attacks in one direction because he cannot turn and only survives things like wolf pack attacks because Toby is sitting in the other chair saying TURN! TURN! USE YOUR RIGHT JOYSTICK! at me. (Not in a bad way; he finds this hilarious.)

I draw my hat before someone who is dedicated enough to take anti-nausea meds to play a game that sounds so hostile.

Part of the explanation is in this post - I have started to read Living in Oblivion and it's hilarious.

But this has led me to think more about the idea of 'playing' with a game: not do everything as you're "supposed" to do, but changing the rules to fit you. I do it all the time with board games. It's *harder* to do with code (though there seems to be a culture of mods that allows a lot of changes; the Steam Workshop kind of legitimises that), but nobody can tell you *how* to play.

( Snail's Pace? Yep. Also, fun.Collapse )

I may not be _good_ at this, but I am starting to be at least somewhat competent. I have only scratched the surface of the story (the game says I've done 8% of the story...) and played as short, sharp, exciting bouts of intense tests of skill this game is fun for me regardless of my skill level. (We will spread a veil over the first few hours where I rage quit more than once.)

If this isn't 'how I'm supposed to play' then who is losing out by it? Not me, because I'm having fun playing a game I want to play. Not anyone else, because everybody is free to play it like *they* want.

I'm a little bit sad that I have to bend the game mechanics to enjoy it - I'd prefer a save mechanism that doesn't care how often I save or reload, and I wish I'd figured out what I need and what makes playing fun for me (plus how to implement that) earlier, but yeah. I'm happy. And I'm chucking a lot of 'meh' games because having found something I truly deeply love and that will occupy me at least in part for the next few months means that I am even less willing than before to invest time and energy to learn something that *doesn't* pay me back. Life too short and all that.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1072506.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Shadows of Mordor is currently on sale on the Humble Store

I want to write about this game, but right now I'm busy enough that I haven't managed to shape the words in the way I wanted to.

If you like epic adventure games, if you love Peter Jackson's films, if you can live with a certain amount of gore, and if you're either an experienced button-masher or have the patience to learn to play this, it's a game I really recommend.

I am very much at the beginning of this, and I am not playing 'by the book' - I die too often, I get too frustrated - but I am having FUN playing this nonetheless.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1072192.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I have just suggested to an author to tone down his use of pornography

That was, of course, the term 'pornography' and the linking of it to terms like 'food porn'.

But still. As conversation starters go, this isn't the worst.

;-)


(The Cambridge Dictionary definition is even better than the OED one):

pictures, books, television programmes , newspaper articles, etc. that are intended to be exciting for people interested in a particular subject or particular product:
Half the shows on TV are either food porn or property porn.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1072023.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

This is, obviously, not a subject that is easy to google, but here goes:

does anyone have a link for the use of -porn in compounds such as 'stationary porn' or 'fabric porn'?

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They're celebrating the International Day against DRM (yay!)


https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/day-against-drm


This means that until Wednesday, all of their books are on sale for $10 (£8 in old money), which is a considerable saving compare to their usual offers (list prices tend to be £25-£30, there are plenty of half-price offers to be had, but this is better.

As programming books go, the ones I've read were fine. Not the greatest evar, but fairly solid. At this price, if you've been thinking of picking up the odd one or two, now is a good time.

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via romsfuulynn

This is fantastic and will put a smile on your face. Superb videography and choreography, too.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1070850.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/ah/archaeology-heritage-free-access

Since there are a) archaeologists and b) just general scholars on my flist, and not everybody had journal access through their library, I hope that some of you will enjoy this.

Expires 17th of April.

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(LJ picture specifically for ritaxis)


http://www.northwestdrivingclub.co.uk/balanced-draught.htm

I'm currently attempting to write a (minor) accident of a horse in harness, so I keep looking up a lot of things, and came across the above article on 'balanced draught' which I found very helpful. (I needed my horse to be in a breast collar, for plot reasons - I'd never get him to hold still long enough to safely remove a collar - but now I'm a little bit more informed as to what may have gone wrong and in which ways he would have been uncomfortable.)

This is a good article, and I hope it'll be useful for other writers, too.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1070481.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Money quote (from the BBC)


"I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest,"

We knew that austerity was a political, rather than an economic measure. (Given how many economists have said that you don't improve an economy by selling off all profitable bits, stopping investments and racking up future technical debt, and making sure nobody has money in their pockets to spend, this should come as no surprise to anyone).

I'm surprised that IDS admits this. I hope the opposition (we have one in this country, haven't we?) makes good use of this.

And I *really* hope that the latest round in cruel cuts gets blocked.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1070199.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Since one or the other party here uses CSS, you might enjoy this link - CSS selectors you might not have encountered (I hadn't); some of them - like the first or last element - seem exceedingly useful.

https://medium.com/the-web-crunch-publication/advanced-css-selectors-you-never-knew-about-972d8275d079

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So the universe really wants me to play the Witcher (that's part I of the game; I also own part 2, but I never got around to playing.)

I have a games database, and one of the things I want to do in 2016 is to clear my backlog of games. It's ok to play something for a short time and decide it's not for me - most of my games were purchased for the price of a hot chocolate, and I get my money's worth from the anticipation and the squee of *having* things to try whenever I want them - but I dislike that I've built up a backlog. So this is the equivalent of a 'to read' pile, really.

Anyway, I created a little script that randomises unplayed games, with the intention to give each of them a week or so to see whether I like them. They either then become 'games I play' or get deleted entirely.

The first time I did this, I had (after a little shuffling for continuity) the Witcher at the front of the queue. I played a number of other games, then acquired Lords of Xulima, and pretty much dived into that. I've now played the game through once and started a different party; I've clocked 127 hours gameplay, and I like it a LOT.

But now that I've finished the main story, I will occasionally poke at it when I want something brainless, but I'm ready to engage with something new.

Only the Witcher has been sitting at the top of the queue for a couple of months now. I bought this in 2012 when I discovered GOG.com and they had a nice sale on: I bought two games, the Witcher (for its glorious graphics) and King's Bounty: The Legend for its sheer unadulterated silliness.

I tried to play the Witcher, but could not get into it. I could not coordinate the movement properly, I could not hit people fast or hard enough, I found it somewhat confusing. Then I tried KB, and found it easy to get into, clearly explained, very very funny, and played, and played, and played, and played...
(and then I played KB 2, and discovered Fate, and played some other games...)
and once or twice, I'd try the Witcher again, but it's such a monumental time investment, with very long loading times (miraculously slashed on my current machine, ahem), and I still found it very confusing.

So I gave myself an amnesty, reran the randomiser script, and...

... yeah. The Witcher came out as number 1 in the queue AGAIN. I guess this time I ought to listen.

Right now is a good time for this. My next mss is some way away, and I'm very much in a gaming mood right now; I have the opportunity to spend 2-3h a day getting into a game. So instead of weaselling out again, I tried to see whether it would still run on 10.11.

Several hours and 10GB later, I had a version that runs well (stable & fast so far).

I've now played a couple of hours and have just left the first location and encountered my first other mission.

( First ImpressionsCollapse )

So far, I've found the Witcher quite interesting - I still love the graphics and general feel, and I want to know the story - but I haven't enjoyed it much _as a game_. I *still* find it pretty inaccessible - I have to take in the story, the setting, the mechanics, the movement (and *really* had to switch the mode because moving the mouse made me dizzy just trying to walk places), the fighting, the skills, the complex 3D environment, the skill tree, the alchemy system... and it's all a bit much, even before I try to work out what the deal with my three weapons and four modes (plus three fight modes) is. Mapping strong, fast, and group modes to S/F/G instead of (I think) Z/X/C helped a little, but I'm still floundering A LOT.

This has always been a game I've wanted to love, ever since I first heard of it. We'll see whether I actually get to _play_.

This is a game that assumes that you're a somewhat experienced gamer. Van Helsing I could pick up with only minimal experience; this needs you to bring skills and strategy to the table. And I don't think the game is entirely aware of it; it does not feel deliberate, just that if - as I did the first time - you're unfamiliar with the genre, you'll flail too much to have fun.

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Instead of spending at least half an hour of my time (and possibly much more) going through a large stack of things deciding whether I want to keep them or not, I costed how much a replacement of the useful parts would be.

That shifted several dozen decisions to one. And since the answer was 'less than five pounds' I could answer with a resounding YES: my time and energy are totally worth that much.

WIN.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1069319.html where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.