Category: Uncategorized

So how do you get a fairy godmother?

A UI is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not good.

If your game has mandatory tutorials for things like how to tap the screen or what a mouse is, you built your game wrong.

And decades from now I will say to my kids, I was there, I witnessed it, I was part of it.

I went looking for something today and didn’t find it.

The equivalences between Tiananmen Square, 1989 and today are understandable, but some big differences remain.

First, probably thousands of people died in Tiananmen Square and throughout the country in response to those protests. Thousands. The official tally, which no one believes, is still around three hundred. People have died in the protests and riots, but not thousands.

Secondly, these protests may change things. If people can maintain their dedication and passion, they can vote to change the President, their senators and representatives, and most important to them personally, change the local government. It’s local government that really affects people and establishes police culture.

I believe in the power of a vote. I believe in the power of the masses. If people want to change their governments, democracy allows them to. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that Trump won’t leave office if he’s voted out, and I cannot reconcile that with the sharp language coming from the military. They’re upholding their oaths to the Constitution. Not the president.

A lot of people seem to think Soldiers and veterans, and I’ll speak of us exclusively, are some mindless army of stormtroopers. Those people think we’re the legions of Bond villains, willing to die for no reason. They don’t realize we’re cognizant, make choices, and think because they don’t know us and write us off with stereotypes.

It’s a lack of perspective. Many of them disagree with us, and instead of really believing people are different, they assume we’re stupid or not people. Perhaps we’re evil. Cops do it to minorities. Everyone does it to members of congress (congress-critters or Moscow Mitch). But it’s laying bare the sharp limitations of the dialogue in America, probably the world, and how we revel in stereotyping those we do not agree with.

You don’t overcome injustice with more, and you don’t defeat disunity by destroying the disunited.

I wonder how much of a role the coronavirus lockdown is causing. I know my temper is shorter than usual. I also know what happened to George Floyd is a travesty, and it’s just the most recent and most published in a long bloody trail from antiquity to now.

But I doubt, deeply, that more anger is the solution. I don’t see any part of the world and think, If they were just angrier, their lives would be better.

There’s way too much fear, and I don’t know the solution to that either. I don’t think it’s guns and violence. Those are symptoms, and the police are scared. Badly, deeply, scared.

The Chinese Communist Party is scared, deeply scared, of its people.

The word triggering took its psychological connotation from a method of defeating phobias. Patients were exposed to ‘triggering’ phenomena, things they were afraid of, in safe situations. The course of treatment desensitized them to their fears. Perhaps understanding is the path forward, with it learning and education. But safety isn’t made in knowledge, but by love and care.

The Amazon description page typo was fixed. However like Hydra, they return, and I found one inside the book.

I’m offering a typo bounty like a bug bounty. The first person to find a typo gets a free copy of the book.

Also, if you buy the Kindle version and enable updates, in about a month I’m going to push version 1 which will just be errors corrected.

You ever wonder if God watches the human race like park rangers watch wildlife? Caring, but with a strict non-interference policy?

“Look, I’m sorry you were eaten by wolves/killed in war, but that’s a natural outcome.”

It’s been an interesting week in the USA.

You generally find what you’re looking for, so let’s look at some of the good things going on.

The Dragon spacecraft was delayed and later launched successfully. Good on NASA for making the right call to wait, good on the many people who build the thing, launched it, and are monitoring it now.

Various members of their communities came out to clean up someone else’s mess in cities like Minneapolis and Atlanta. People are rising to the occasion. If society grows when old men plant trees they won’t sit in the shade in, society heals happens when communities clean up wreckage they didn’t break.

Pandemic fatalities in the US and much of Europe are coming down significantly.

Mara and the Trolls comes out Sunday night/Monday morning in kindle format.

Target fixation is a thing in car driving, wherein if you look at something, you’ll probably drive your car there. On a track they tell you to look at the road, because if you look at the tree, you’ll hit the tree. In life, look at the positive. Accidents happen, but you’ll probably head towards where you aim.

In the wake of the Minneapolis protests and riots, locals are coming together to clean up. One of the leaders is Marvin Applewhite.

He has a GoFundMe, but I can’t confirm any of the details in it. I don’t want to post a direct link because it might be a scam. You can find it by searching for “Marvin Applewhite GoFundMe.”

A couple of thoughts struck me.

The first, which someone commented, is that the news doesn’t show this. I don’t think most news is inherently biased to show minorities in bad light so much as they only show the bad light of anything. It’s the old ‘people aren’t out to get you, they’re out to help themselves.’ The news is very much going after sturm und drang. So of course riots and arson will get primetime coverage, and that’s going to dominate over the people trying to help and repair. That’s not right, but it’s different.

Secondly, from pictures, I believe people are out there trying to fix things. In the wake of the anger, people are cleaning. There always are.