It’s more than OK to be myself

The most touching part about this story was at the end “… and now she’s going to join too, so she can discover what she can achieve in her own life.” That helping to discover part is what I found really inspiring.

GirlGuidesCANBlog

I like being a Pathfinder. I’ve made so many new friends and they’re really inclusive and accepting. They make sure I always know that it’s ok to be myself. Through Pathfinders, I also get to do a lot of things that I don’t usually do such as geocaching, playing some really weird, different games and camping.

Because I am an above the knee amputee, I have to find different solutions every day to situations that most people wouldn’t even realize were a problem. Guiding is about being confident and resilient and resourceful. For example, when I’m not wearing my prosthetic, I use crutches. I love my crutches because I can go really fast and they are easier for me to use than my heavy prosthetic, which causes me to fall more easily. But when I use my crutches, my hands are kind of already occupied. So carrying my books and…

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Inktober 2016 – final pictures

Inktober 2016 is over and I’m putting up the final set of pictures. This was really fun month and I’m planning to do this next year too. If nothing else, I learned to ink quite a bit faster. I also finally bought a brush pen, which is hilariously fun to draw with.

Inktober 2016 – week 4

Time really flies. Another week has gone by and I have another set of images to share. This time they’re centered around super heroes. Unlike in the sports pictures, in these I tried to have somewhat more defined characters and lines. The idea was to depict some super heroes in situations they aren’t often seen.

Inktober 2016 – week 3

During this week I did bunch of sports pictures using online pictures as reference. Instead of getting each and every detail right, I wanted to try and capture the overall form of people doing sports.

Inktober 2016 – week 2

Second week of inktober is finished and I managed to ink one picture every day. Yay me!

Inktober 2016 – week 1

Inktober is a fun challenge where the goal is to practice inking over course of month and consistently ink pictures. You can do one a day, one every other day or even one a week. As long as you’re consistent and keep practicing, you’re good to go.

I decided to do some random sketches of various monsters in Herculeum (albeit most of them aren’t in the game yet) and ink them. I haven’t had nearly enough practice with brush recently, so brush will be the main tool. There’s going to be a small blurb about the monster included too.

Doing what you think you want to do

Spend more than 5 minutes in software development and you’ll come across with plenty of rules, guidelines and traditions about how to write software so it doesn’t spontaneously combust. Sometimes these are not much more than anecdotes: “Bob once tried to use technology X and it failed horribly. I wouldn’t ever dream of using technology X because of that.”. Sometimes they have catchy name: “DRY, Don’t Repeat Yourself“. Sometimes they are semi-formally specified in form of software design pattern. In any case, there seem to be lots and lots of guidelines about what to do and what not to. And it’s good, because writing software is hard, complex and difficult undertaking.

The Reasoned Schemer

The Reasoned Schemer by Friedman, Byrd and Kiselyov is one of those deceptivingly thin books that are packed full of content. It’s written in the same style as The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer, namely in form of questions and answers that slowly teach you how relational programs are written. Slowly probably isn’t the correct word though, as the book is only 160 or so pages long, so the pace is actually quite high and at least I couldn’t internalize everything in one go (not even after re-reading it multiple times).

Currying in apocrita

While apocrita is very limited language, it’s already complete enough that I can experiment with ideas and see how they work in practice (or in this case, how to implement an old and well known idea). And that old idea is currying (technically partial application, but close enough).

In partial application the language will detect if a function is being called without enough parameters. Instead of throwing an error, a new function is created and returned. This new function captures all the parameters that were supplied to the original function and can be called either normally or partially applied again (if there are more than one parameter left).

Making failure fun

Most of the time we play games to “beat” or to “conquer” them. It’s a battle between what ever traps and contraptions the game designer put in and player’s skills. Playing field isn’t necessarily level at all, as the designer decides what tools and options player has at their disposal. As a result, there’s certain perceived fairness that player expect. Designer could easily make a level that is impossible to beat, but that wouldn’t be fun to play for long. Players often equate success in game for having fun and failure is something that takes that fun away. Fail enough and game starts feeling tedious, boring or frustrating and player might choose to play something entirely different instead.