What's one positive/neutral thing that's happened today?

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Today my wife and I went to the bat bitvah of the daughter of one of her old friends. The ceremony itself was lovely, but the notable thing is five minutes into it my wife and I simultaneously realized that the rabbi was an uncanny double for the Italian-American real estate agent who helped us find our house – they looked almost identical, and even their vocal intonations were almost completely the same.

(This is a good thing, I should say – our agent is a really nice guy, and the rabbi seemed likewise!)

Then afterwards we told my wife’s friend, who laughed and mentioned that the rabbi had a brother who was some kind of politician, which helped me figure out the other person he’d reminded me of – a former California state senate leader and the current mayor of Sacramento who I met once or twice (and also really liked).

I dunno, it seems silly to type it all out, but it was one of those combinations of coincidences that don’t mean anything at all but just feel delightful to experience.

[sophia (Sophia de Augustine)]

Got around to punching in some upcoming dates and syncing them with an alert notification on my phone!

[manonamora (M.)]

There was an event in town with a bluegrass band and some fun finger foods. Got to learn how to square dance (and got supper dizzy), and bring back like a tray worth of food home cause they had too much.
We went there a bit on a whim and it was loads of fun!

[inventor200 (Joey (Jess) Tanden)]

I just learned the difference between .zip and .tar.gz files. I was always curious to know why the latter has so much more compression.

Turns out it’s an order of operations.

.zip apparently compresses each file individually, which means they each get their own compression tree stored with them. After that, they all get collected into one archive file.

.tar.gz works the other way around. All files get concatenated into one single archive file, and then the whole archive gets compressed as one unit, which means only one compression tree is created. If there are any similarities between the files, then what would be multiple redundant trees in .zip will get consolidated in .tar.gz.

Fascinating!

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

And on the flipside, if you have a lot of files with completely different structures, .tar.gz can fail to compress either one of them as effectively!

[inventor200 (Joey (Jess) Tanden)]

Yeah I was wondering about this, lol.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

What’s nice about tar is that the archive is independent of the compression.

In the wild you might find:

tar.gz
tar.lz
tar.xz
tar.bz2
and more.

[slugzuki (kit riemer)]

this is sooner than i thought lol. maybe I need a timer widget!

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

So I think I dinged a merit badge today. I am not a car person. I take it to instant oil change frequently and usually go to the dealer for any kind of light. I did have one of those computer code readers at one point but it stopped working when I changed phones.

TL;DR: I worked on my car after getting a check engine light instead of taking it to someone, disconnected the battery using tools(!!!) and learned how to check my radiator coolant despite being sketchy about how cars work.

Too much detail

Anyway last night I got the “vague yellow check engine light” on the way home and was a bit peeved since I had an instant oil change literally days ago. This morning I discovered A: Battery terminals were corroded and growing a science project. B: coolant reservoir was low.

I’ve placated my anger slightly in that likely instant oil change cannot open coolant since there’s not time to let an engine cool down and they have no way to know how long any car has been driven before they open the hood. I’d think they should at least verbally inform me it’s low, but they may have been distracted by my battery corrosion situation. They actually did try to sell me a new battery last time and mentioned corrosion that could have been interfering with the voltage meter but I waved it off since my battery was replaced last year by them and I’m like “Of course it’s dirty; it’s a car engine” and neglected to take my own look under the hood. Bad adulting.

Anyway, after some furious research and YouTube how-tos, I managed to disconnect the terminals (thank god I have a seldom-used ratchet set and saw him use it in the video else I’d still be out there with a wrench…) with new information to disconnect negative terminal first so I wouldn’t die. (My battery actually has a snap lid over the postive terminal with DON’T DISCONNECT THIS FIRST in big letters). And I dutifully scrubbed the terminals with baking soda, a spray bottle of water, and a toothbrush, enjoying the beautiful chemically-activated blue color that developed. Yes, I even used gloves, first nitrile then some gardening gloves I also had.

Coolant was low and looked dirty. I didn’t want to attempt a flush even though apparently I can disconnect the reservoir to do so. I just added 50/50 on top of that (knew my dad stashed that in my trunk for a reason!) and - the car started so I got the battery connected well-enough again, and no light came on. I ran it for a minute to see if it would swallow coolant from the reservoir and it did not, but it might need longer. Major plus: no check engine light. I’m going to keep an eye on it and schedule to have my radiator flushed soon in case since the old coolant might be sludgy, but I’m quite proud of myself.

Now I actually want to go to auto zone and get some fresh 50/50 and get a battery terminal brush and some protectant as seen in the video like I’m some kind of dude who works on cars!

[manonamora (M.)]

@manonamora

I was given Adventuron.

Starting to mess around with the program today. Tutorial A is complete. So far so good. It’s logical.
I like the control+space to make it easier/faster to code.
Now I know how to create a “room”, add objects/people, create blocks and solution to lift them, and have more commands than just directional ones.

I kinda miss the block organisation of the passages like Twine already, or the multiple file with Tweego. The code is not organised by passage but by type of code (which I’m not sure fits for me…). It’s going to be a bit hard to me to track stuff…

Onto the next tutorial!

[manonamora (M.)]

I think I now have the bases to create something
And @sophia gave me a really neat idea to tie the theme (either good health or chicken wire) to the genre (romance), and have a fun little puzzle in the process. Will I pull it off? Probably not Will it be fun to try? Probably

[AmandaB]

The painted buntings have arrived!!! They look like something a 5-year-old colored with primary-colored crayons. This has sent Tom into a frenzy of bunting-centered seed purchases as he woos them to nest here.

Also, it’s fawn season. We’re lousy with fawns every year-- the mother deer just leave them curled up in the grass somewhere while they do mama-deer things, and you can trip over them if you’re not careful. Last year, we had an electrician at the studio, and he asked if we had a bathroom, and we told him he could walk the 5 minutes to our house, or he could just pee behind the studio like we do (probably TMI, but it’s a major advantage of country living). Anyway, he goes out behind the studio and we hear him scream, and it turns out he nearly peed on a fawn, just curled up small and still in the grass by the trees. So we are going into full fawn-alert mode so that no fawns get peed on or stepped on.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

@AmandaB

The painted buntings have arrived!!! They look like something a 5-year-old colored with primary-colored crayons. This has sent Tom into a frenzy of bunting-centered seed purchases as he woos them to nest here.

I did not click the link before finishing reading this paragraph, which made for some confusion since previously I was only familiar with the one kind of bunting.

[HAL9000]

For me, this is a little win in a battle towards a big win.

Today I made my first real, concerted effort to make a Twine game… and I didn’t even code a lick. Up until this point (a few months, in my spare time), I was merely coding and trying to push Twine as hard as I could with JavaScript and CSS. Lots of learning, which I love. I sometimes think I love learning more than doing. But I wasn’t really making a game…

Anyway, I loaded up a blank document in my word processor (is it still called that?) and started typing away at a story, passage by passage, just to lay things out. I only started with a simple premise of a starfighter pilot trapped in a cockpit, with depleting life support in a damaged ship adrift in space amongst the wreckage of a great battle. I started adding choices and conditional choices, as a functional cockpit began to take shape… it became a little unmanageable at times, but I persisted. I needed to realize the scope of how conditions would affect the story down the line. I need the player to have freedom, but limitations. A confined story environment and a plot ticking down allows for a lot of limitations.

As I wrote the story (or puzzle escape room, perhaps more accurately), I started to feel the anxiety of the protagonist. Hours of writing about one’s clock winding down can do that, I suppose. Then I started questioning myself and thinking about how I was probably writing a game suited for parsers (which I have no experience with coding), instead of a choice based game, but I persisted still. And then I saw the game… how it would look, feel, and how it could benefit from being a choice based game. I saw how the choices could be categorized into separate systems that play off each other. There is no spoon! Now I’m pumped, and exhausted. I share this because if you say you’re going to do it, in front of an audience, you have to commit. I have to see this through… or die trying.

I spent the better part of my day off writing a story that I had no idea where it would go when I sat down. Now that I have about 70% of the plot written out (probably only 35% there in reality, am I right?), I feel a lot more respect for those who create in this genre. I was always a bystander, and not one who has witnessed much. Now I’m taking my first steps into the fire. You guys never said it would be this hot! Damn you all!

A game that takes maybe 15-20 minutes to play will take about… well, I’ll find out how long it’ll take to make.

As a side note, my computer broke around Christmas time. My friend lent me his old one that stutters on a 720p youtube video. Now that I have a machine that can’t run even simple graphic games… it’s been the best thing for me and my desire to make IF. When life throws you lemons…

[dsherwood]

I just spotted one in my backyard. So exciting. We usually don’t see them until June. I have only seen 1 indigo bunting and that was a couple years ago. Thankfully, the painted variety stop by every year.

I hope a few will nest on your property. That will be fun!

[AmandaB]

@dsherwood

I have only seen 1 indigo bunting and that was a couple years ago

The Merlin app, which if you don’t have you must immediately get, keeps telling us we’ve got an indigo bunting somewhere, but we’ve yet to actually see him. The app has been telling us we’ve got golden-cheeked warblers (which are endangered) for weeks, but we just saw one of the little guys today. My husband is a major, crazy birder who has spent years and a lot of money attracting birds, and is very successful at it, and now our property has turned into one big, loud, colorful aviary. It’s grand.

[sophia (Sophia de Augustine)]

Asides from waiting for a confirmation email (that should arrive optimistically on Thursday morning, but no later than end of business day Friday), I’ve wrapped up my academic responsibilities. I set up my summer planner, wrote letters for Pinkunz, Manon, and Kat, and am utterly sleepy. Summer’s in! Which means I’ll be in bed for the foreseeable week.

[inventor200 (Joey (Jess) Tanden)]

@sophia

I’ve wrapped up my academic responsibilities.

WOO!!!

[manonamora (M.)]

@sophia

wrote letters for Pinkunz, Manon, and Kat,

O