** It has come to my attention that not everybody knows I have two collections of these little stories, which anyone can buy. That is regardless of whether they are a dragon, robot, princess, monster under a bed, reluctant hero, or someone else.
See https://microsff.com/books
(Direct links follow)
1/3
**
"Could I tempt you to do good?"
The Devil laughed. "I am eminently temptable."
"You're not averse to doing good?"
"Of course not! Why would I be?"
"Uh..."
"Look, as long as I gain something I want, I don't care how it affects anyone else."
"I thought you were evil?"
"Am I not?"
#MicroFiction #SmallStories
In several talks, I use a line "all we ever do in iOS is parse JSON. Is there anything else we care about?"
And today it occurred to me that there is. Countdown timers. Seriously, what's with all the questions about countdown timers? https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=%5bswift%5d%20countdown
Whenever I do geometry with Swift, I keep in the back of my head that I use Float/Double comparison wrong, and I ignore it for the sake of "just do it now" (and oh it can't be that bad).
Then I debug this subtle bug for hours.
ulpOfOne
Finished God of War and needed a new game. Kept thinking RDR2 but it’s just so serious and I want a good story without that right now. So thought Zelda, but need to work out accounts on my son’s Switch (it’s his and I don’t want to just barge in w/o talking to him, though I know it’ll be fine).
And finally it hit me: Spider-Man. Yeah. That should be good. Swinging around the city sounds like just what I need.
My Grandma lived to be 100, and she didn’t bake her whole life, but well into my college years she sent me shoeboxes of rugalach and hamentashen. Mostly at Purim, but other times as well.
And suddenly I wonder, years after she’s gone, where the shoe boxes came from? She was 80, 90 years old. She couldn’t possibly have bought so many shoes and I was far from her only grandchild.
I hadn’t really thought of the hunting and gathering she must have done, a year’s intent. I miss her.
Finally getting into God of War. It took me awhile to get reasonably comfortable with the controls. I still wind up doing a lot of actions I don’t really mean to, but it works out well enough that I can keep moving through the story and meet the characters (which is what I really like in these things). I do kind of want to just tool around the lake so Kratos will keep telling stories though :)
I think I looked at @davedelong a little 🤨 when he mentioned these ideas to me the first time, but now that I've seen the whole talk, it's quite compelling. Highly recommended insights on MVC. https://vimeo.com/291601827
DRY is not itself a goal. It is just an engineering principle to be balanced against all other principles. Like "avoid memory churn" or "minimize your algorithmic complexity." The point of DRY is to bring together things that are the same. If you think it's about avoiding typing, you've misunderstood it.
Finally finished Horizon: Zero Dawn. Immediately bought The Frozen Wilds, started a new game and the expansion is also awesome. I really love that game. The dialog is shaky at times, but I love the story, and even after collecting just about everything you can collect (all but the Hunting Grounds), and doing every side mission I could find, I still want to play some more. So glad for the expansion. Hoping a sequel isn't just a rumor.
(I need a good "amazed and delighted" emoji, but all the surprised ones seem negative.)
Microsoft's VS App Center SDK is
?? MIT LICENSED WITH SOURCE ON GITHUB ??
Seriously? I can see the code you're going to inject into my project? I can build it myself? I can stick a debugger on it if things go wrong?
What is this source-ry? Who does that?
It even has a Code of Conduct?!?!
Thank you, Microsoft.
Swift and Go. Love 'em both. They make me mad in completely different ways. Infosec as required. robnapier.net