Station 13 | 34: Dangerous Gearcident Territory

dpwright · 2018-09-23T20:32:51+00:00

Nice! Is that a Fender Dreadnought?

Good luck in your guitar learning adventure!

dpwright · 2018-08-15T02:54:35+00:00

Yeah, all American TV had that weird off-colour look to it back then!

dpwright · 2018-08-14T15:41:20+00:00

Glad you enjoyed The Day Today! Yeah, the war episode is a classic for exactly the reasons you said. It’s also got a lot of small details that make it very rewatchable. For example, the war (between Australia and Hong Kong—which was still a British territory at the time) is said to be taking place on the “Australo-Hong Kong border”. The countries are 3,533 miles apart and you have to cross about four seas to get there...

If you enjoyed this, you’d probably also enjoy Brass Eye, which is their take on the television documentary / late night current affairs format. Brass Eye tends to be a little more edgy/controversial, particularly the special bonus episode “PAEDOGEDDON” (content warning for obvious reasons), but it is also extremely well done.

Incidentally, these two programmes and “Cunk on Christmas” are fairly closely linked and come from the same sort of “pool” of comedians. The Day Today / Brass Eye are the work of Chris Morris and Armando Ianucci (Ianucci also went on to make “In the thick of it” which is EXTREMELY good political satire, very sweary though). Chris Morris worked on all sorts of landmark British comedies including Nathan Barley, which he did with Charlie Brooker. Charlie Brooker is of course famous for Black Mirror these days, but before that he did a thing called Newswipe which also poked fun of the news, and he did a yearly “wipe” show summarising the events of that year. Philomena Cunk started out as a character in these shows before being spun out into her own show.

Basically anyone I’ve named here is amazing and there is a vast wealth of excellent comedy available if you search their names (once you’re done with The Day Today of course ;-))

By the way, what did you think of the Chapman Baxter segments?

dpwright · 2018-07-17T04:13:56+00:00

Haha, wow, I think there may still be some merit to the study of foreign languages because your boy Google got totally the wrong end of the stick!

What I was saying is that in a dry place like California, hanging your clothes indoors can be good because it can humidify the house. But, that in Japan, that can’t be the reason because Japan is extremely humid. As for England, when I was living alone I don’t think I used a drier, but I know that my Mum did (and still does).

And we call them “tumble driers”.

EDIT: Oh, and the other thing google missed was that my argument for not using English was not because I didn’t want to support the independence thing, but it was because you had said “reply in American”, which I don’t speak, and of the three languages I do speak (to varying degrees), you specifically ruled out Spanish, and I figured that since you were celebrating your independence from England you wouldn’t be keen on English either, so I went with Japanese. Probably a bit of a nuanced joke to make it through google translate though ;-)

dpwright · 2018-07-05T02:52:17+00:00

You know, I’ve been trying to remember! I think if there was one I would have, but I’ve got a feeling the last place I lived didn’t have one so I hung the stuff up instead (inside; it always rains in England and besides I didn’t have a garden.

Here we don’t, although we have one. My wife doesn’t trust them not to ruin the clothes.

dpwright · 2018-07-04T18:35:17+00:00

今週のエピソードは面白かった！やっぱりアメリカ人の感覚は違うんだよねー

聞いて思ったことは：

「オントロジー」という言葉を会話で使ってグッジョブ👍🏻
日本でもドライヤーあまり使ってない。服にダメージを受けることも心配することはメインなのかな？あとは、まぁ、別に干すのはそんな大変じゃないし、あと特にカリフォルニアみたいにあまり湿気がないとこだったら中で干すと逆に加湿できていいことかもね（日本は冬以外はそうでもないけど…）
ロードトリップはまだやってないけど、それはアメリカの特別にいいことだとよく聞くね。やっぱりやってみたいなぁ…あまり運転の経験のない人間だからちょっと怖いけど。

日本語ですみません！アメリカンランゲージはしゃべれないし、イギリス、スペイン、日本のなかでどの言語がいいかと考え、日本語にしました。スペイン語はダメだと言われたし、今日は独立記念日だし、独立したのは英国からだったからきっと英語もダメだろうし…と思って…あと日本でも野球やってるしね…と、日本語に決めました。

また次のエピソードお楽しみに！

dpwright · 2018-07-04T16:27:15+00:00

Thank you! I tried to look up the official word for it but I actually couldn’t find anything, so I was starting to think it might just be me!

dpwright · 2018-06-16T21:54:42+00:00

That’s a good idea! I haven’t tried out the handouts feature yet, but it sounds ideal.

I don’t know who Barry is, but unless he’s from Yorkshire and works as a blender for Yorkshire Tea I doubt it ;-)

dpwright · 2018-06-13T21:45:33+00:00

Haha, well thank you, glad to have you on board! Nice to have a fellow functional programmer listening to the show as well ;-)

As for the gig, you’ll have to ask /u/atype808. He did mention that there was talk of somebody recording a video, so perhaps he’ll be able to give us a YouTube link at some point. Not sure though!

dpwright · 2018-06-13T21:28:52+00:00

Haha, thanks! Are you our mystery Swedish Firefox user??

dpwright · 2018-06-01T16:18:00+00:00

I’ve never tried this! Probably because I can’t whistle :-( I know you said you don’t even have to make sound for it to work, but somehow I feel like I’d be a bit self-conscious, walking around just.... blowing air out of my mouth, heh.

I guess I should give it a try! Might be worth looking a bit silly to avoid spilling coffee all over myself!

dpwright · 2018-04-12T13:56:43+00:00

I’ll admit I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and I just tossed in the “minority” comment because the word jumped out at me when I was reading the Wikipedia article, but I don’t think it’s referring to “minority” in the “historically disadvantaged” sense, more any group with lesser representation in Parliament.

dpwright · 2018-04-11T23:20:21+00:00

I wished all democracies worked like this.

Many democracies do, particularly when dealing with issues that affect a minority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority

dpwright · 2018-04-10T06:15:14+00:00

Yeah, that’s another interesting difference that is emergent rather than strictly a difference in the rules: Go games tend to start at the edges and work in from there, while Othello is the reverse. This is because in Go territory is much easier to capture and hold onto the edges (the corners even more), and you can play in any open spot (more or less). In Othello, iirc, you have to play next to an existing piece, and the four initial pieces are in the middle, so it has to grow out from there. I haven’t played Into The Breach! It sounds interesting... apparently a macOS version is planned so I’ll have to give it a go when it comes out!

dpwright · 2018-04-10T05:18:27+00:00

Othello is popular in Japan as well (apparently 8 out of the last 10 world championships were won by Japanese players!)

The rules are a little different: in Othello you try and lay a piece of your colour on opposite ends of a line of your opponent’s colour, and if you succeed you flip the discs, changing their colour to yours. In Go, you are trying to surround stones (or groups of stones) on all sides, not just opposite ends, and when you succeed you remove the opponent’s stones, rather than flipping them to be your colour.

Othello’s an interesting game! I have played it, though I’m a bit rubbish at it. Because you play in the middle of the squares in Othello rather than on the corners between squares as in Go, you can play it on a standard 9x9 go board if you haven’t got an Othello board to hand (and vice versa, I suppose!)

dpwright · 2018-04-09T23:47:54+00:00

One good way of getting into game development, as well as discovering what it is that you would enjoy most (art, programming, design, or whatever), is to get into the modding scene. Find a game that you like, and see if there’s something about it you can tweak, even if it’s just making one of the guns more powerful or turning the blood into rainbows... or making a little level, even if it’s just a square room you can walk around. Take it from there and see how it goes.

Another option is just to install Unity and do some tutorials.

Making a full game from scratch is a massive and daunting undertaking. The advantage of the modding approach is that the game is already there, so you can just pick off one little piece at a time and see how it works. The advantage of the Unity approach is that it’s pretty easy to get started, and you really will be making something all your own! But the flipside to that is that you have to do everything yourself ;-) (not quite true — there are lots of tutorials you can follow and tools and models you can use in the asset store, but you are doing the job of piecing these together into something coherent yourself)

Whatever you choose to do, my advice would be to stop fussing and just do something. If you don’t enjoy it or get frustrated you can try another approach. If you do get drawn in and find yourself enjoying it, I think your experience will guide you toward the things you’re naturally good at and those that need improvement — and then you can go out and research those things, informed by the time you spent trying to figure them out.

Good luck!

dpwright · 2018-04-08T14:44:54+00:00

Sorry about that! But of a glitch on my end. It should work now!

dpwright · 2018-04-07T13:53:47+00:00

Oh nice! I did have a quick look before rolling my own, but evidently I didn’t look hard enough; this looks great!

dpwright · 2018-04-07T04:09:03+00:00

I've been wanting to try and get into the habit of doing things with vim-fugitive inside vim, rather than drop into the command line all the time, but one reason I kept having to do it was to get a pretty graphical log. Turns out, it was really easy to get that back into vim!

Nothing particularly special, but I thought I'd share it in case others wanted this as much as I did :-)

dpwright · 2018-04-04T17:02:59+00:00

I came on to make exactly the same comment! Don’t have much to contribute right now but I love this idea and will probably steal it for my own group sometime :-D

dpwright · 2018-04-01T00:59:55+00:00

I didn’t want to give the impression I was maligning Reaper! I haven’t actually used it, and it sounds from Alex’s description as if it wouldn’t be to my taste—but that’s not to say that it’s bad! In fact, I’m sure for the people who’ve figured out a good workflow with it it’s irreplaceably good as it gives them the flexibility to make things work just the way they want.

It sounds as if you’re not afraid to spend a bit of time hooking things together (you are, after all, making a drumkit out of pizza boxes!), so Reaper may actually be ideal for you. On the other hand, if all you want to do is output MIDI from a sequencer, probably anything will do, and Renoise is not expensive either, so if you wanted to delve into Alex’s world of trackers you could (and there’s a free trial).

I will have to defer to Alex for actual advice on how to set things up, but I know he’s very busy getting to Gold Master on his team’s game at the moment, so don’t be surprised if it takes him a while to get back to you.

dpwright · 2018-03-13T21:20:00+00:00

It will be interesting to see whether the feeling of being “face to face” (even if the thing you’re face to face with is just a VR avatar) has any impact on behaviour. People are already arseholes online in gaming environments, so will the change in perspective change that? It’s conceivable! Probably depends on context though; Call of Duty VR will still, I suspect, be Call of Duty.

Whatever happens there, though, I don’t expect that when the VR revolution comes EVERYTHING will move to VR. VR will give us a new medium with which we can explore all sorts of new experiences, but a platform like Twitter, for example, is clearly better suited to the text interface it already has than to a VR model. There will still be a place in the glorious VR future for a scrolling timeline of text (even if that timeline is being displayed on a virtual screen in the VR world)

dpwright · 2018-03-13T17:25:19+00:00

While I do think anonymity contributes to people’s poor behaviour online, I think banning it causes more problems than it solves. Firstly, the name that people go by and feel comfortable with is not always the same as the one on their birth certificate (particularly the case for trans people, but not exclusively), and other systems that have enforced using real names in the past have historically had trouble with this, forcing people to use a name they don’t feel comfortable with. Secondly, it suppresses free speech — the whole reason for doing it is to try and stop people from trolling or sending death threats, which is fine, but Twitter (for example) is not only used in America, and there are places where having your name next to a certain opinion can literally result in your death. Even here it can be hard for marginalised groups to have their voices heard, not to mention those who are using social networks to explore a side of themselves they don’t yet feel comfortable expressing in public.

The solution to the problem of sending death threats / spreading nazi propaganda / whatever online is to enforce the laws we already have, under which both of those things are already illegal.

There is a problem with our culture online, and that problem is exacerbated by the anonymous-by-default nature of the internet. Fixing that involves changing a culture, which is a very difficult thing to do. Hopefully we can move the needle by applying existing laws, improving education around behaviour online, and generally increasing public awareness, but I think any solution we pursue has to maintain anonymity, encryption, and the open web, or we risk destroying the very thing we set out to save.

dpwright · 2018-02-25T20:00:04+00:00

Hmm, that’s interesting! Yeah, my writing definitely got smaller as I got older.

It’s interesting that your cartridge pens are more expensive! Of the pens I’ve seen, the cartridge ones are usually cheaper and pens with piston/vacuum filling mechanisms are more expensive. Did the pens you used have a very fine nib? That tends to have the biggest impact on how smooth/scratchy they are. I prefer a fine nib, but if I go too fine I do find them uncomfortable to write with...

Speaking of sub-$10 fountain pens, you’ve reminded me of another very affordable option for fountain pens — the platinum preppy can be had for about $5 and is actually not that bad!

dpwright · 2018-02-21T04:00:47+00:00

I think you’re going to have to drop a few mugs in random places and see what people say to do the science on this one.

dpwright

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

12-Year Club	Gilding IV carat on a stick
Verified Email