Let's play Sudo, a Linux board game

Assembly: He’s the nerd. He speaks very quickly and uses short sentences. Very few people talk to him. He’s considered to be an autist asperger by a majority of the class because he finishes the exams so quickly it’s insane and he faces a lot of difficulties in speaking with others. He’s at school but already dressed like an engineer.

Ada: She’s a foureyes nerd. When she gets the answer she’s doesn’t make any mistake. Ada often corrects the teacher when she writes a line a little ambiguous. She’s building a rocketship in her backyard and she’s always speaking about this weird hobby.

Python: He’s Mr Popular. He likes skate, brags about all the parties he’s invited to. He’s good in all the subjects taught in class but he’ll do them a bit slower than the others. Everyone loves him because he explainsthings so well, sometimes the teacher herself asks Python to explain some part of the course. He’s dressed with a hoodie, a baggy and glasses on the top of the head ;)

Java: She is one of the toppers of the class and very popular. She’s very good in all the topics. The teacher loves her but she’s a very talkative person.

Scala/Kotlin: They are twin sisters and the best friends of Java. Unfortunately, they are not as popular and it’s often Java who takes the lead in the group. It’s very difficult to distinguish one from another. Both are far less talkative than Java but Scala speaks a bit differently than Kotlin and Java.

C: He’s the topper of the class. He’s so fast in completing the exams that the teacher really thinks he’s copying Assembly’s work. He has a little brother C++ and they share a lot in common together. He’s the chess major and often plays chess with Assembly and his big brother.

Go: He’s the new kid on the bloc. He doesn’t like C++ and his friends and he wants to prove he can do better than them. Of course, he prefers playing Go over Chess.

APL: He’s a lonely guy. No one understands him when he speaks. Even the teacher is surprised when APL shows a correct answer after several lines of incomprehensible pictograms. People think that he was born in a foreign country… or a foreign planet ?

HTML/CSS: These twin brothers are very different. One is dressed in black and white and the other is dressed with everything except black and white. HTML is very talkative and annoying and the CSS is very artistic. CSS is the best student in Art lessons and HTML performs well in written expression.

LaTeX: She’s friend of HTML. The teacher likes her because she has a gift of writing. LaTeX likes the mathematical courses because she can draw fancy greek letters. The teacher knows this well and she is often asked to write a formula on the black board.

VBA: He’s in the back, looking through the windows. Not really interested in the courses taught in class. In the exams, he answers always with a table.

C#: He’s in the back playing yet another game on his smartphone. He likes being next to the windows also.

JavaScript: People often mix up Java and JavaScript because they have a similar name. But they are definitly not the same. Javascript spends a lot of time with HTMLand CSS. He’s as artistic as CSS but he prefers things that move. He likes actions and movies. CSS dreams to be a painter wheras JavaScript wants to be a film-maker.

Haskell: He’s a goth. Dressed up in dark. Doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t understand why others write pages when he can write a couple of lines to answer the same question.

Julia: She’s the newest student here. She doesn’t have any friends yet but her secret aim is to be as popular as Python and as fast as C.

Credit: Thomas jalabert

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Had a video game thought a few years ago. Wrote it down. Created a board game of it last year. Tweaked it. This year I am diving into Unreal Engine 4, Maya and C++ to make it come to life...

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

Yesterday we started coding with my eldest son, with some board game (based in scratch), and it was so fucking amazing! I'm partial, but he's a fucking code genius!!!
In the game, the child "code" some functionality with cards and the adult (me) compute them 'doing the actions'.
I'm so fucking proud!!! Well, I'm always proud of my children, and there the English language doesn't convey very well my thinking as the verb to be doesn't differentiate the intrinsic state of a subject and a passing state:
SOY TAN ORGULLOSO DE MIS HIJOS!

Shalom my dudes!
A quick GT from my college years:

>be me
>barely knew how to program but eager to learn more and more
>end of first semester, teacher assigns a couple of classic games for extra points
>battleship, pacman, sudoku, tetris, etc. All done in C
>end up with tetris
>2 days later I have the final build, including all the tech shit like walljump
>start thinking to myself "this looks really fucking ugly, what's wrong with me??"
>look up graphic libraries for C when a light flashes on my computer screen
>*NCURSES*
>the next 2 weeks were a montage of me learning linux, understanding ncurses and redoing my code (plus bug fixing)
>presentation day
>palms are spaghetti
>knees? Spaghetti
>arms? Spaghetti
>class is impressed with my work
>professor comes up to the board and tells me that I get a 0 because it wasn't "pure C"
>clenched my jaw and walked towards the dean office
>"hey, mind if I show you something?"
>open my laptop and show him the game
>he's having a blast since every time you do a 5 row crunch (a tetris), a piece of clothing of a random model comes off
>explain to him what happened in the classroom
>he looks at my code, runs it on a plagiarism checker and tells me that he will edit the grade himself
> a week later there's a 10 on my grading area
>feelsgoodman

Found where my GitHub activity has been hiding

Unity3D Game Dev Interview

Interviewer: What is reflection and why would you use it?

Me: Gives overview of system and how I've used it in games before.

Interviewer: Sorry that was a trick question, Reflection is really dangerous and slow. You need to go back and learn the basics.

Me: ???...

A huge portion of Unity is built upon Reflection based systems, the entire Monobehaviour base relies on it. Their events system uses it, animation and timeline. I guess their team needs to go back to the drawing board.

How is this person a senior dev?

I have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

I wish I had this board game when I was a kid

I was assigned my first ever huge software project in college (a complex board game made in only pure java) and was assigned a group by my professor. Since I'm doing well in the class, I was given kids who want me to teach them everything (from GitHub to simple oop) on top of programming most of the system because they can't or don't want to. So to make things easier I gave out some relatively simple and specific jobs in GitHub using the issues system that apparently nobody reads. Thankfully one person decided to take initiative and start their feature but one commit later the entire system crashed and everything is broken FML can't wait to program this entire thing by myself.

Programme that simulates the rolling of the dice when playing the Risk board game.

No more dice that fall off the table. No more dice that throw the figures into disarray.

May 2020, for me, was still a massively shit month. All of my tech has eaten some amount of shit:

- Spare PC: Board and last spare PSU up in literal smoke all at once.

- PS3: Suddenly rejects *just* the OEM HDD. Also refuses all CFW for seemingly no reason despite being hacked.

- Xbox One: External HDD is having more and more corrupt reads and is taking longer and longer to serve data.

- Wii: Nearly ate shit as the OS disappeared mid-game for fucking no reason but thanks to my 5-year-ago forethought, saved. (God bless pre-boot homebrew menus)

- Phone: grabbed it to read an overheat warning with cold-ass hands, screen exploded.

- Desktop: Literally just now, PSU and possibly GPU fucking died mid-game.

Anything else? You still got like 4 days, you still got time to fucking kill me, May, you fucking bitch

It's official. I'm making multiplayer Minesweeper.

There's a Trello board, Discord server, and GitHub repo.

Initial gamemodes will be singleplayer, public (like agar.io) and vs (2+ players, support for teams is planned).

My big idea besides that is to have interesting powerups you can buy or find, adding a component of luck and some exciting new rules to the game.

And I may even put ads on it and try to feed myself.

On your standard epitome of being a geek, I started to show my coworkers how to play Cardfight Vanguard, a TCG since we all love TCG's (we play Magic, Pokemon and a few others) and we had made Friday our official "TCG or Board Game" day.

List of games we have played:
Star Wars CCG (dear lord this game is BEAUTIFUL shame it is no longer being published)

Magic the Gathering, we have a love hate relationship with this game, mana plays a big reason as to why we do not fully love it, it sucks getting stuck with no possibility of drawing proper mana.

Pokemon - Easy to get into, easy to play, there is nt much more to say, by far, our favorite in terms of how much money we can make out of selling rare cards that we do not use.

Dice Masters - My Personal favorite, and I am also the undisputed champion of our group

Cardfight Vanguard is my current favorite, very tactical in a lot of ways, luck of the draw hits in a funny way, I feel it is properly balanced, not much bullshit ass rules or mana issues. Reminds me of Duel Masters, I used to LOVE that Game, but Wizards of the Coast and the anime fucked it up so well....

Anyone here likes playing card games?

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

Technically couldn't get fired seeing as this was a schoolproject, but let's rant anyway!

So for a final assignment we had to create a WordFeud/Scrabble like game in Java with 7 others. We really got to know eachother and had a lot of giggles with the project.

At one moment one of us got bored and decided to photoshop the head of the person who's grading us unto one of the board tiles and we laughed and laughed...

...until we forgot to undo this during the demonstration >.>

Probably when I was younger and got my AI working for her checkers game I made in Z80 asm for TI-86. Spent so much time on it not working and then seeing it finally working and taking jumps and scoring the board positions and it seemed semi intelligent even thought it was a very weak ai ... Still I was excited 😁

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

I was just begged to play 30 minutes of monopoly with my family
With all those versions of monopoly I'll have to be more precice, it's the worst of them all

It's monopoly fucking zapped, you need an ios device to play it, it's been developed for the iPhone 4 and maybe a tablet because they didn't even update it for current phones, not even iPhone 5
The credit cards are a fucking joke, they work by touching certain parts of the touchscreen and don't work 85% of the time you try to use them, 5% of the time just choosing the wrong person
At least your relieved when 10% chance kicks in where it works for once

Instead they could developed for Android and used nfc tags making it reliable and fun, no it has to be shitty, cheap and frustrating
Like seriously, they could've also used qr codes instead, or just have fucking buttons on the screen because you need the fucking ios app anyway
The minigames are at least a bit of thought, but don't really make sense either
Money doesn't seem to matter, sometimes paying another player when it shouldve been pay to the bank (yeah, not only the credit cards are fucked, the whole money system is shit)
It's a fucking abomination of a game

Halfway through I searched for the company name on the board...
...
....

ITS FUCKING HASBRO, OF COURSE IT'S FUCKING HASBRO THAT FUCKING PEACE OF SHIT FUCKING COMPANY THAT DESERVES TO ROT IN HELL HAVING CREDIT CARDS STUFFED UP THEIR FUCKING ASSES

Best dev experience was coding one of my favorite board games. I started it early on in 2016, and while it isn't completely do finished (AI needs work and tweaks to the UI), it is functional for hot seat play.

I started doing it because I wanted to make a game and learn some things I didn't know, specifically I was interested in making AIs with different strategies. While I set out to learn this, I've learned so much more along the way.

I'm still really happy when I get to work on it, and having something to show people (that they can actually play!) is a great feeling.

For fuck sake why can't people implement instant payment charges when you order something and not when it gets shipped!

Ordered a board game for about $150 AUD about 3 months ago and my batch was just finished so I just got charged... It's not like a have a fucking trip to Melbourne with some mates this weekend .-.

It can't be that hard guys, charge people when they order and not when it's ready -.-

So I just finished my degree and started working here at a small game development company that makes board games for mobiles (android/ios) using Unity. I love Unity and have built some demos and all for my college projects before.

They said there will be a training period but all they make me do is integrate firebase and other ad network plugins into their shitty game project.

And above that I'm offered only $200 a month. My college made me believe that you must get employed however low the salary is, no matter what. Fuck this shit.
I'd rather like to make my own game someday and make money off that than to work at this nihilistic place.

Is told to make a cool football themed board for a planning expo.

Thinks football is stupid, but makes an awesome board with a built in football game made with a Raspberry Pi and optical sensors to detect when you throw a ball through the hole.

Boss tells me that my board doesn’t match the theme and doesn’t even mention the fact that what I made was cool as fuck.

Have to trash the board and make something lame with construction paper footballs instead.

My soul is dead. Business people are such fucking children who punish creativity and reward mediocrity. I need to find a company run by developers.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Live coding interview to code tic tac toe console game and I couldn’t even print out the game board. FML.

Learning to tech to speed up learning.
Using a new cooperative learning technique, AI Lab researchers cut by half the time it took a pair of robot agents to learn to maneuver to opposite sides of a virtual room.

A combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms are responsible for computers achieving dominance at challenging board games like chess and Go, a growing number of video games, including Ms. Pac-Man, and some card games, including poker. But for all the progress, computers still get stuck the closer a game resembles real life, with hidden information, multiple players, continuous play, and a mix of short and long-term rewards that make computing the optimal move hopelessly complex.

Image: Dong-ki Kim

Was looking to do a game collaboration as I can't build most of the ideas I have on my own and as always get stuck with people not being as knowledgeable and not making anything of people who are knowledgeable but look at other devs like scum, and then artists are never just willing to jump on board to make a game with 1 programmer... UGH!

Becoming one of the world's top players in the card game of Yugioh.

A long with actively getting good at other card games and board games.

Chess game: EVERYONE is allowed to participate and move.

Rules:
-once you played a move for one side, youre not allowed to change side
-if you cant visualisate the board, use a real board.
-no takeback
-dont do sabotage!!
-let others play too. Youre not allowed to play three moves in a row.
-use algebraic notation
-if youre black, write three dots in front of your move ( 1. ... d5)

GOOD LUCK!

Im starting with

1. d4

Hello, gameplay ideas for a board game oriented to learning programming for children

Made a simulation/game in java using swing that runs on this algorithm:

-2D array was made (kinda like a chessboard).
-Random living cell was placed on the board.
Repeat:
-If a cell has X or less cells around it (living) it duplicates.
-If a cell has Y or more cells around it, it dies.

I was amazed at the types of shapes this created. There were so many variables I could play with, and probably spent hours just experiementing. I was really satisfied in the end. 😄

Recalling the the time I was discussing a web dev based assignment with a classmate( And I wouldn't even go as far as to call it web dev, it was just making connect 4 using js and node).

Me: so did you get to implementing your game with firebase.

Classmate: no, but hey did you use loops for making the board?

Me: ?? There were like 50 elements ofc what did you do.

( Sigh* to think it's going to this)
Classmate: copy pasted

Yup 50 elements copy and paste. like the person I was talking to wasn't even incompetent I mean he had like a 3.5 gpa, how is there any correlation between this stupid number and how they actually code if you can't even code loops. The dude was a 2nd year student. And this wasn't even the only person I heard this from.

Apparently the TAs had to post about how to use loops in Js before we had our lab exam cause so many people copy pasted instead of loops, to think that would ever have to be the case.

The future is not bright.

So I have a programming question that has always stopped me from making so much. I wanna make stuff in the terminal like Conways game of life and simple games but I don't know how I would track everything like or how to set up the map/board and how everything moves and just all that.. does that make me a bad programmer? I'm fairly new but still..

And no I dont wanna Google it I'm trying to work on being social even if it's online

I am quite annoyed right now.
So I invite a few friends around to my house for a board game party and I, like many other teenagers in this day in age, decided to take photo of everybody there (including ones of myself). After the party ends I decided to post them to the group chat. Yeah, wrong move. One of the girls starts insulting me and calling me a pervert (I am a girl myself) and as she had been calling me these things for a while now I decided to leave the chat and then by the next school day, she decides to ignore me (this I am not complaining about) and during one of the classes we share I hear her complaining about me and saying some complete Bull about my self. WTF

On vacation today but forgot we had a board game team activity planned so went to the office anyway in the afternoon (love me some board games) and instantly get pounced by people pleading for help. The build machine had imploded and the deploys broke, because of course it does that when you are away.

So decided to build a board game... Game?

It's hex grid based and I have spent a week trying to work out hex grid math and I am at the exact point I was when I started if not further back....

If anyone can recommend some good tutorials or articles for hex math. I will love you forever...

I'm pissed at my laptop. Its using the on board graphics instead of the dedicated graphics card. I've searched everywhere and can't find a solution. I've tried just disabling the on board graphics in the device manager, but then I can't plugin external monitors. And on top of that when opening a game it doesn't even use the GPU it uses the CPU

Anyone have advice? The onboard is AMD Radeon R7 and the card is an AMD RX 560

Need a counter to play in a 2d game. 'Make it look 3d and good' they said. Fuck. Everything I do in Sketchup looks tacky AF. It's a piece to play on a white board with a black grid, like extended noughts and crosses. It doesn't need much.

Hello Microsoft Word, hello drawing tools, long time no see.

Any recommendations for a $100 or so mechanical keyboard, a bit on the quieter side? I used a Cherry MX Blue board back at home and while it felt great, it's not going to fly in my current environment, so I'm looking at reds or browns (I do game a fair bit so reds are okay too, but would prefer browns, hopefully they're quiet enough).

Perhaps not a full sized one, maybe tenkeyless or something. I've been eyeing the Ducky One 2 Horizon mini, love the colours and it looks pretty much exactly like what I want, but I'd like to see what you guys think.

(I would like to build one but don't have the time)

Location: the US

I'd like to make a board game (with cards essentially) with a web technology and take the occasion to learn a new tech.
For now I know pure js, jquery, java servlets, jsp, MVC5 and razor. I would like to learn something lean, new, powerful and useful in a job perspective. Any suggestions?

Well, how i can start...
[Inspired on CipherSaber]
I wanna disguise arcfour as a game (board or virtual), give it for free to kids, and someday tell them the goverment has banned the game because it's basically undistingable from arcfour, and then i'll try to explain for them the crypto controversy, and i know i did my work well if at least one of them decides to write a letter to the goverment.

I mean, i clearly know this is so frigged up, but i wanna know if it could actually work.