Andy Brokaw

Musk says to boycott Netflix over a show. I take this as an endorsement and start watching it.

Dead End: Paranormal Park is a cute horror themed cartoon. That had me sobbing 3 episodes in over how accurately it bared core parts of me as it explored austism flavored anxiety and enduring abusive intolerance from a grandmother (SPECIFICALLY over not closely following outdated expectations for people with your birth genitals, one of my big crimes)

So thanks for the recommendation, Elon!

#DeadEnd

An hour of work and a thousand words later, I diagnosed the writing problem that kept me from typing all day as me wanting to see Yves's friends responding to the conversation with his co-parents rather than the conversation itself.

But I may ALSO be coming down with a virus.

#Writing #WritingProblems

One of the things breaking my concentration today was what I thought was faint meowing from outside. It stopped whenever I turned off Floggy Molly to hear it better. But I finally tracked its origin!

It's not a cat. It's a chicken.

My neighbor's chicken is singing accompaniment to Flogging Molly.

#FloggingMolly #Chickens #StrangeLookingCat

Completed Module 3 of #Nand2Tetris Part 2.

I had to create a VM Translator to convert VM language to Assembly. Tedious. Not that fun, to be honest. Essentially it’s a text parsing challenge.

Next module is continued work on the VM Translator. 😓

I’ve completed Module 2 of #Nand2Tetris Part 2.

Or… it’s a bit confusing because Coursera calls it Module 2, but internally it is Unit 0. (I’ll stick with it the Coursera naming)

This week was re-hash of Week 4 from Part 1 of the course. So it’s really just a refresher on the Hack CPU machine language & its assembly language.

Completed Module 1 of #Nand2Tetris Part 2.

It’s just an overview week with a (very) simple assignment. Now it’s on to module 2 where the real fun begins!

Finally starting #Nand2Tetris Part 2!

Like Yves's child Ystra, I crochet. And also like zir, I have created way more scarfs than any one family could need. Then I progressed to creating more blankets that we will ever need. And now I'm working on having too many sweaters.

#Crochet #BookCharacters

I saw snow today! It wasn't much and it wasn't photogenic, but it made me smile.

In a time filled with distress and misery, it's important to note the small pieces of happiness.

#FindJoy
#SnowIsMyHappyPlace

Completed #Nand2Tetris Part 1.

Really great course! I’m looking forward to Part 2.

I’m about halfway through #Nand2Tetris Part 1. And, wow, what a great course. I already feel like I have a much better understanding of how computers work.

I've just watched the final episode of Inside No 9, and what a way for them to go out. Absolutely loved it.

Thank you to Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for 9 seasons of truly wonderful television.

Can't really decide which episode was my favourite, so here's my top 5:

* Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room
* Boo To A Goose
* The Devil Of Christmas
* The Riddle Of The Sphinx
* A Random Act Of Kindness

#InsideNo9

Finished Lecture 11 of #MissingSemester. It’s the final lecture, and no exercises this week!

So that’s a wrap on this course. 🎉

(No certificate for this one)

Finished Lecture 10 of #MissingSemester. This one is titled “Potpourri” and, as you expect, quickly covers a bunch of random topics.

There are no exercises for this lecture.

I finished Lecture 9 from #MissingSemester. This lecture is a 1hr overt view of security and cryptography. It mostly just covers the basics of what hash functions are, what symmetric and asymmetric cryptography are, etc. No mathematics or nothing too in depth here.

I finished Lecture 8 from #MissingSemester on “Metaprogramming.” So: make files, CI/CD pipelines, and testing.

Note: I’ve been a bit lax on doing the assignments. The assignments themselves are written in a very lax way. I’ve been more interested in consuming the lectures.

Lecture 7 of #MissingSemester is on debugging.

I’m definitely guilty of overusing print debugging though.

Finished #MissingSemester Lecture 6 on Git. Part of the assignment is to fork the course website, make a small change, then submit a pull request. (I added a link to home on the 404 page)

Finished lecture 5 of #MissingSemester. Lots of interesting terminal stuff I had no idea about

It makes me want to set up a Linux server that I can SSH into, but I have no idea what I’d use it for.

Lecture four of #MissingSemester is titled “Data Wrangling” though a lot of it is focused on Regular Expressions.

You know I used to hate RegEx. But then there was a time I wanted to use it with Power Automate and found out that PA doesn’t support RegEx. Then I truly knew what I was missing. Splitting and looping through strings to search for a pattern is a not fun.

I finished the third #MissingSemester lecture, which is on Vim.

On one hand, I can see why people love it so much. You really can fly through your files and code quickly with Vim.

On the other hand, it’s just such an annoying learning curve. You just have to memorize sooo many commands that the barrier to entry seems quite high. Like, do I really want to go to the trouble of learning all this when I’m just going to be using VSCode anyway?

I’m starting to go through MIT’s “The Missing Semester of Your CS Education” course:

https://missing.csail.mit.edu

The first two lectures are on learning the command line and Bash scripting. It’s pretty good, though I’d highly recommend the FreeCodeCamp course on Relational Databases, which also covers these topics, if you’re interested in this:

https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/relational-database/

But so far, I’m enjoying #MissingSemester.

On the subject of #PolyamorousRomantasy, if you've published a novel that depicts healthy polyamory in any sort of fantasy, please feel free to recommend it to me. Even if I already own it, I'll boost the rec for you. <3

#Writers #Polyam #Romatasy #QueerWriters #PolyamWriters

Bummed out the interstate is closed because it means my lesson tonight is postponed. But I was worried about my Seattle kids dealing with the extreme cold, so I'm less bummed than I could be. (It's currently 15F/-9C and feels like 2/-13.)

#SnoqualmiePass

Dear people who use I-90 outside #Seattle,

Here's the graphic #WSDOT shared elsewhere while warning how much snow #SnoqualmiePass is expecting today. (Needed because their cameras have lost power.)

I live in Hyak and can attest to the accuracy of this illustration. Delay travel if you can, be super careful if you can't, and OBEY RESTRICTIONS.

Lots of fresh snow for me.

Related:
Heard an avalanche. The first I've heard this season, although I'm sure there've been others.

And the interstate keeps fluctuating between open and closed due to collisions and spinouts. Be careful if driving up here!

#SnoqualmiePass #SummitAtSnoqualmie #wawx

I spent over an hour clearing my driveway of snow this morning, but last night's dump was a little too late for the Summit ski area to open this weekend. We're good to go Tuesday, though! (Passholders only. General Public on Wednesday.)

#SummitAtSnoqualmie #SnoqualmiePass #SkiWA #skiing

I could, if I felt adventurous, drive to Seattle. But I cannot go to the nearest real town east of me as a big rig spun out and is completely blocking the interstate.

Technically Snoqualmie Pass is still open, but unless you're only going as far as Easton, it may as well not be.

#SnoqualmiePass

Just got a text from WSDOT saying travel time over Snoqualmie Pass may be extended due to snowfall.

Which means we could be mere minutes from our first "Dumbass trucker refused to slow down and is now blocking the entire interstate" text!

#DriveSafe #wsdot #SnoqualmiePass #LetItSnow

The snow is sticking and the Kraken won. This is the first good day I've had in a while.

#LetItSnow #Kraken #WAWeather #SnoqualmiePass

This is my backyard! It's not just snowing; it's STICKING!

It's not likely to last the day. But this is the first time the snow level has reached me since spring, so I'm doing my my happy dance over here!

#LetItSnow #SnoqualmiePass #WashingtonState

Wrote a 3,678 word short story rough draft today. It's a sweet story, with a young apprentice who rescues a dragon from a unicorn.

It needs revision and I'm not sure what I'll do with it after that. It's been suggested that I find markets to submit stories to and try doing that, but I've seen more articles of magazines shutting down due to AI crap than calls for submissions lately.

#shortstories #writinglife #amwriting #WritingFantasy #WritingRomance

After last night had snowfall rather than rain, I was REALLY hoping the atmospheric river predicted to hit this afternoon would somehow also come in as snow. But the rain pelting my roof tells me it is not. Sadness.

#SnoqulamiePass #Hyak #WAWX

Happy Polyamory Day!

I made a post for the occasion that briefly discusses the polyam-normative society of the series I'm working on, where it's monogamous people who have to out themselves to the person flirting with them at the bar to prevent future misunderstandings and deal with strangers making negative assumptions about them.

https://andorabrokaw.com/2024/11/23/happy-polyamory-day/

#WorldBuilding #PolyamWriters #PolyamoryDay #polyam #PolyamoryDay

Day 35 - #100daysofcode - Completed the final challenge of this year’s #JavaScriptmas and continued to chip away at the #Scrimba JavaScript Deep Dive course (85% complete).

Day 34 - #100daysofcode - Not much bandwidth today, but at least I completed #JavaScriptmas twenty-three.

Day 33 - #100daysofcode - Started the Quality Assurance Cert on #freeCodeCamp and made it 15 lessons in. Continued to chip away at the #Scrimba JavaScript Deep Dive (80% complete). And, of course, #JavaScriptmas day twenty-two.

Day 32 - #100daysofcode - Completed #JavaScriptmas twenty-one. Also worked on a little utility app for someone at work. Oh, and I got a pull request merged on FreeCodeCamp! If was just a typo fix, but still pretty cool, right?