Best posts made by Sparks

@scar said in RL things I love:

@auspice He clocked me good. I already have enough snakes.

I would've though there's no such thing as enough snakes for you, @scar.

@ixokai said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@auspice Today I learned I have a super-power, the ability to be tortured by lights.

Fuck you evolution. -.-

I would like it if the ability to hear lights and such was paired with actual super-powers, like telekinesis or something similar.

I feel it's only fair if, in return for the migraines, sufferers get abilities like Eleven in Stranger Things.

@Roz — one of the reasons I do want to finish up Atlantis 2.0 as a clean rewrite is that the new core would work on iOS as well. Along with the paired 'muprox' proxy system (meant for you to install on a server somewhere) which would let you Handoff a connection between your Mac and your iPad/iPhone without having to disconnect/reconnect, or to detach when going from work to home, and reattach later with scrollback...

(Plus, it could watch for pages and push notify you even if you were detached from the session, and let you reply nicely.)

I just need the time/energy to finish the rewrite.

@insomniac7809 said in Fandom and entitlement:

But when Lupin and Tonks got together, it was acknowledged that they were in a relationship, even though the relationship doesn't really matter for the plot. Say it and move on.

That Grindlewald and Dumbledore are together is buried in subtext, even though their history is a major plot point in the narrative.

This.

Straight relationships are acknowledged in the text of major stories, whether or not they're relevant to the plot. We've seen people get away with more on TV in recent years, but in movies? Anything else gets buried in the subtext.

In Captain Marvel, are Carol Danvers and Maria Rambeau in love? Like 70 or 80% of the fanbase say yes (and Brie Larsen sure as heck implies it constantly in interviews). Is that ever openly stated in the film? No. The subtext is, admittedly, extremely loud, but it remains subtext.

(And, I will note, unlike many straight relationships which get acknowledged in text, Carol's relationship with Maria and Monica actually is relevant to the plotline. The film just never openly defines what that plot-relevant relationship is, leaving themselves wiggle room.)

When people talk about wanting to see a movie commit to showing a visible gay relationship, I think what they mean is not "the story has to be rewritten to focus on this" but rather, "It would've been nice if, while changing absolutely nothing else in the film, at some point Carol or Maria had even one line that referred to the other as their girlfriend or partner to surface that relationship from subtext into text."

I mean, Paul Dini has outright said he's seen animated series cancelled because the viewership among girls was too high; network execs said that "girls won't buy the toys", and therefore the show wouldn't be as profitable as it could be, so they'd rather replace it with something that can have a more profitable toy line.

There was some discussion about this around the time Sucker Punch came out, as well.

Emma Watson and Olivia Wilde have commented on related topics.

I could keep looking, but I have to leave for an RL thing.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

But also..what is wrong with your company, that you've never had a woman on this team, ever? Maybe you should hire all the women. Start making a dent in that problem.

I admit I'm lucky; in my company, one of the three DoE (director of engineering; one for software, one for electrical, one for mechanical) roles is filled by a woman. Two program leads (the people who report directly to their DoE and keep that engineering discipline running smoothly, and mentor other engineers) are women. About 10 of the engineers, across all disciplines, are women, as are more than half of the project managers. (And, as is true at many companies, most of the HR and finance departments.)

But it's still like... maybe 28 women, total, in the Seattle office? Out of around 110 people? It's way better than a lot of places I've worked, yes, but that's still only around 26%.

So, I've mentioned before that there are certain books that have opening lines that really stick with you; the one I cite most often is from the Dresden Files books, and is "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

One of my other top five favorite opening lines is "Dear you, the body you're wearing used to be mine." It is the opening line of the first book of the Rook Files (called simply "The Rook"), about a woman named Myfanwy Thomas who finds herself with no memory, in an alley, surrounded by a ring of dead bodies, with a note to her from the woman she used to be until only moments earlier. Her life only gets more complicated from there.

Years ago, a little before the second book ("Stiletto") came out, The Rook was picked up to be turned into a TV series. Season one of that series lands on Starz at the end of this month. And the trailer looks fantastic. I am very much looking forward to it, and I hope it does the book proper justice.

Nine months.

Nine months I've been on aimovig. In that time, I have had very few migraines, and without exception they all responded immediately to the abortive. (I've had one cluster headache, which is freaking terrible; cluster headaches are like migraines on the "Nightmare" difficulty setting, where the pain has a high enough chance of causing suicidal thoughts that they're actually also known as "suicide headaches". But I generally only get 1-2 clusters a year, and the aimovig was never going to help with those, so that's no surprise.)

Today, I woke up with a migraine. Oh well, this has happened once or twice before. "Shoot," says I, "I guess I better take my migraine abortive before I attend my teleconference with the UK office! It only takes an hour at most to kick in, so I'll be more than ready to go into the office today once the two hours of teleconferencing meetings are done."

That was three and a half hours ago.

It has not kicked in. The migraine is, in fact, actively getting worse. I will be working from a dark, quiet room at home today, and may take a half day.

I shouldn't despair. This is just one headache; it's not even the worst migraine I've had by a long shot. But it's the first one in nine months that hasn't responded to the abortive. And now that aimovig has been out long enough, they're seeing that some percentage of folks stop seeing as much effect—sometimes any effect—from it around 8-10 months into treatment. I've been waiting nervously to see if I skated through that window, because the neurologist says that so far she hasn't heard of anyone who makes it through that spot having the aimovig lose effectiveness.

And so all I can think is "Please let this be a fluke. Please don't let this be the first step of a return to the old state." Because that possibility makes me want to cry.

Nine months of understanding what it is to not have a constant low-grade migraine. To not have 2-3 spikes of severe migraine a week. Of actually being able to go out on a sunny day and not worry about whether the sun would turn into a death laser aimed through my eyes at my brain. To not worry about "should I go see that movie with friends, because theater sound systems are awfully loud?"

Please, whatever entity controls medical reactions, let this one be a fluke...

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

@Rinel I love the guy's explanation for why there is no male version of his product though. "Uhm, well, there are more pictures of nekkid women on the interwebs!".

Stay classy, guy.

As much as I loathe this entire thing, from a standpoint of pure machine learning that claim is actually not entirely wrong. From the standpoint of training a GAN, you want as many examples as possible of the thing that the Generative part of Generative Adversarial Network is meant to, well, generate, covering as wide a range as possible. And whether or not the images are more numerous, I suspect there is a far wider dataset available for women than men. Which would actually mean this GAN would be more easily trained for women than men.

It's the "We pulled it because we did not realize people might misuse it" that bugs me the most. It's like:

"Heavens," said the man who had written a program to harvest as many images of naked women as possible, in order to teach a GAN to generate images of naked women using a picture of a clothed woman as a starting point, "we had no idea people might use this to make naked images of specific women of whom they had clothed pictures!"

This is the sort of thing where anyone with even a halfway decent grasp of machine learning could basically just download StyleGAN and build this in maybe two weeks; literally, collecting the the dataset to train the two adversaries is going to take more time than writing the code to generate the model will. So now that someone's pointed out, "Hey, this can be done", I fully expect within several months there's going to be at least two new versions of this floating around.

Being ADHD, working on your bullet journal for the next month, having your morning dose of ADHD medication wear off right as you end up smearing ink everywhere in the bujo (ruining pages you'd just worked on for an hour and a half), and finding yourself on the verge of frustrated tears over something so dumb. And then having to go take another dose of the meds, sit down, and redo everything again.

Some of it may be stress over family health stuff, some of it was the ADHD medication wearing off, but it feels like creating the charts and lists for the next month in a freaking journal should never drive someone to that point, even if a mess gets made.

Oh hey, a disturbing number of these ring true for me. Probably for you also!

@Selerik ...have these people ever done project management?

@Rinel said in Good TV:

@Sparks said in Good TV:

where the first two games are in their own little alternate continuity, the third seems to take place within the book continuity, set right after the final book.)

Wait a minute

hold up

you're saying I can read books and skip the first two games, and just play the good one?

This is like the best news ever.

As Roz says, you don't even need to read the books; the third game does manage to stand on its own. There are bits of the game you may get more out of if you've read the books; Avallac'h is a more understandable character if you've read last two books, for instance. The vision of a particular character (who does not otherwise appear in the game outside of that vision) dying is a direct reference to events in Lady of the Lake. Etc.

If you do decide to read the books, there's only a few you really need to read; most of the others are short story collections or side-stories. However, the story collections are worth reading; they flesh out the earliest parts of Geralt and Yennefer's relationship pretty well, and a lot of characters who are later big players in the saga first show up in those stories. Also, the second of the collections (Sword of Destiny) has an extremely important and notable event in young-Ciri's life, as well as some useful backstory on her tale in general. And you get to see Geralt being both worst dad (in one story) and best dad (in another).

In terms of series chronology, with the bolded ones being the actual books of the Blood of Elves saga (i.e., Ciri's story), and italics being the games:

• The Last Wish
• Season of Storms
• The Sword of Destiny
• Blood of Elves
• Time of Contempt
• Baptism of Fire
• Tower of the Swallow
• Lady of the Lake
• The Witcher (sort-of; it's supposedly set five years after the events of Lady of the Lake, but doesn't really seem to adhere to the book canon, and doesn't really seem to be part of the saga)
• Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (again... sort of?)
• Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (snaps back into alignment with the books abruptly, no question this one is in line with established book canon, and it very directly resolves story threads from Lady of the Lake and centers in large part around Ciri, making it clearly part of the actual Blood of Elves saga; despite this, they did an excellent job of making the story stand on its own)

I am enjoying the feeling of accomplishment after having emptied out eight drawers of stuff in my bathroom and sorted the contents, cleaned the drawers out, put in little containers to divide things up, then put the sorted stuff into those containers. I actually know where everything in the bathroom is now!

#adulting

@Auspice said in The litRPG thread:

I still don't get it.

Does "Sword Art Online is very popular" help?

More seriously, I think litRPG mostly started with a "what if you were stuck in a game" version of portal fantasy (i.e. person from our world gets stuck in another) stories, like Tsukasa waaaaay back in the old .hack//SIGN anime. And that same premise was the beginning of the Sword Art Online novels, Log Horizon, and so on. (As well as books like Rachel Aaron's wonderful Forever Fantasy Online, which the second book of just came out, and which if you're reading litRPG I highly recommend. And I actually think Somnia Online was pretty good, among the self-published ones.)

Those are admittedly the types of litRPG I like best, since I really do like portal fantasy stories.

Now litRPG seems to be enough of its own thing that people do stories where the protagonists aren't stuck in the game, and sometimes the stories even involve their real-world lives. Or where the characters have always been in a given world, but that world happens to have video-game mechanics as guiding natural laws or such.

@deathbird said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Having two (I think) brilliant product ideas and having no clue how to get any ball rolling on it even after googling and reading some stuff about inventions, prototyping, etc. Clearly not entrepreneur material right here.

*puts on "hi, this is literally my day job" hat*

That depends a lot on what the product is, and how much prototyping you need.

Let's say it's an electronic device of some kind. You'll probably want to build an NFF version to start—NFF meaning Non Form Factor, i.e., something that's just bare electronics and enough mechanical pieces to cover any necessary bits of the system. Just enough to prove that your idea is technologically feasible at least in theory.

So you'd get a devkit from one of the SoC (System on Chip) manufacturers; a Nordic nRF52 or whatever. Or if you're planning to go with, say, embedded Linux, it's probably easiest to just go grab a Raspberry Pi 3 to start out with for your main processor, even if you might move to a different SoC for the final product. (Unless you need GPU acceleration for some kind of calculations, in which case, the Nvidia Jetson Nano is a frighteningly capable system.)

Then you'd want a good quality 3D printer to print any mechanical pieces you need, and do it yourself. Alternatively, find your local collective makerspace, get a membership, and go use their equipment; out here in Seattle we have Metrix Create:Space, for instance.

If it's something that's beyond your capabilities, find a techy business partner who can help realize it.

Once you have your NFF proof-of-concept, you can shop it around for funding from investors, or you can hit up crowdfunding sites. (Keeping in mind that a startling percentage of hardware Kickstarters vastly underestimate their needed funding and their timeline, especially when it comes to NPI—New Product Introduction, i.e. the whole manufacturing process.)

Once you have sufficient funding, you can either put together a company with employees to do come up with a form-factor test device as a next step, or you can hire a product development firm to do that for you. Product development firms will likely be pricier on an hourly basis than doing it yourself, but you'll get all the company's accumulated expertise, and it will likely go faster than spinning up your own team. And if you find one that's got a lot of NPI experience, it can save so much pain when it comes to actually going into manufacturing.

(Product development firms being places like Cambridge Consultants. Or Mindtribe, or Punch Through, or Tactile, or whatever. But Cambridge Consultants is the best. #notbiased #myemployer)

Obviously, if it's not an electronic device of some kind, the process will differ.

@Rinel said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

So, ADHD drugs. What they do is to get the dopamine factories running smoothly. You get the same hits as everyone else. No more shortages. No more explosions. Just a steady flow like it's supposed to be.

How they do that is completely outside of my ability to explain, but generally it involves overclocking the factories a bit (this is why benzodiazepines are really bad for ADHD; they slow down the already malfunctioning dopamine creators). There are non-stimulant medicines on the market, but they're newer and less numerous.

It's also why a lot of ADHD meds are really really bad for neurotypical folks, because it can screw up their dopamine production like whoa.

(Meanwhile, an artist whose Patreon I'm part of and who does comics about ADHD posted an early glimpse today at something to use to explain Rejection Sensitivity to folks, and man does it hit home.)

I... uh. Just assumed most people didn't like layered fabrics, other than maybe sufficiently loose sweatshirt/hoodie/jacket over a t-shirt type thing.

Is that... not a thing for most people? *insert nervously grimacing blob emoji here*

@macha said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

And then there's the snob in me, that will be like... "No punctuation? Are you ill?"

Truthfully, if I'm not using punctuation, yes, I either am ill or borderline seriously depressed. If I cannot muster a "Hi!" instead of a "hi" something is wrong to a dire degree.

...which means I freak out when other people are just being lazy or on a phone where they don't want to bother with capitalization or punctuation.

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

To be fair, all those bizarre rules for passwords that companies employ really are bogus bullshit; they're the result of pure cargo cult thinking.

All I can say to that is "Correct Horse Battery Staple".