MrHoatzin

I read yer blog

The Cove, close to the San Antonio College, started out as a laundromat. Then they opened up a car wash, so people can wash their cars too, made sense. Then they opened up a little food place, so you can eat while you wash things. Food was good so it soon evolved into local-food-only fancy hippie establishment. So they built a bar, have live shows. Then they grew out a beer garden with a playground in the middle, and annexed some kind of dwelling that they turned into a party rental house. You can still do your laundry there.

I am kinda freaked out/impressed by the .4% of the "poor" who don't have refrigerators.

ugh, wolf blitzer, I can't watch that shit

Argh, so I'm not alone in this!

Just an album of individual unmixed tracks, their seasonal variations, and various warning barks for boarding, disembarkation, etc.

I have been lucky to have had Doug Tabacco show me around Disneyland once, another true master of esoteric Disneyland lore. If there is any doubt: he has in his possession (and has once shared with me) the soundtrack to It's A Small World After All.

It looks like I might get a chance to develop a curriculum from nothing and then teach video game design at this weekend/after-school art program for inner-city kids! I have about 3/5 of the qualifications that they're looking for. I don't have a portfolio of games under my belt and I've never taught kids before... still, I think I'd make for an effective teacher of arty programmings... I hope... I have an art degree, I can program in a bunch of different languages (and should have no problem boning up on any new ones if I have to), I have thought at length about structure of games for decades now, and even though I play few games these days, I play all the artistically interesting and novel things that come out... and I also know 3/4s of the people working there (NEPOTISMS CRONYISMS ARGLEBARGLE etc)... I have one more interview to go through, yet to be scheduled. The first one went p well and they did make me an offer—a part-time nonprofit offer, as one would expect, which is fine—a year of freelancing web dev has been kind to me, so I'm not really doing this for the moneys anyway. So far so good! They want to start off with this thing called Scratch, which looks pretty full-featured for a Fisher-Price™ programming language. I want to throw in Twine early on. I really have no idea about how much I can push these kids or expect from them, I have no idea what kinds of games they like, play, or want to make either, but I can see teaching Processing maybe... if the program grows up to include high school kids, definitely. It would also be cool to do a larger project-oriented something or other, where they're split into roles and make a bigger game all together or in small teams. So maybe Unity would come in handy? One thing that is kinda wacky and limiting is that their lab is all Macs, so that throws out Game Maker and AGS... Anyway: ideas, recommendations, tips on curriculum and general teaching appreciated! One fun fact: I was super excited to hear that this organization has a solid history of about 70% girl participation throughout their middle and high school programs (visual arts, theater, film) and they expect the same for the video game design dealio! Pheuh! I was actually anxious I would have to beat gamerness out of a herd of nerdy boys. Having the scales tipping like this will make that task easier if it even is an issue. Now that I made this thread, it will somehow fall through and I'll be a sad.

I think I've figured out my first lesson: I'll make them make music! I made a little demo. This is quite a lot of fun so far and it hasn't even begun yet. I feel like this might make for a pretty inspired project idea. It would cover all kinds of useful concepts that they can use immediately to make things, let's them do it creatively and is inherently approachable by illustrating in real time through music. I'll walk them through setting it up from the outside in, start with a simple beat and then add things to it. Loops, conditionals, variables, even-odd alternating through modulus, expressive algebra, scope, functional programming, the runtime environment, and some light interface design to round it all off. Do you think it might be too much for a bunch of 11-14yos who might never have thought about programming at all before? I feel like the likeliness that few if any of them have made music before makes for a net positive. I mean, I've never made music before and that little demo surprisingly doesn't suck as much as it should... but then again, I know how to program... I wonder how good these kids are at math and if this math-looking stuff will scare them. Also I am kinda looking forward to the cacophony of this classroom. Scratch is a pretty badass environment for teaching programming too. The only shortcoming I found is that I wish it had boolean variables, or some kind of notion of string truthiness, and didn't make you go through the trouble of comparing integers/vaguely typeless strings to 1.

Woo! Canada's Royal Ombudsman for Meritocracy delivers!

Is it just me or is government in general everywhere super suspect? Third parties (or fourth or whatever) are only uncorrupted because they have been away from power forever. In the US there hasn't been a way to vote for any kind of substantive change in 50 years, with left or right governments, and this is increasingly evident to a lot of people. It could be that I am relatively lonely in seeing through the smoke and mirrors and live in a bubble/echo chamber of disaffection. Anyway, I look at Yugoslavia. Breaking that mess up didn't solve anything, it just allowed local demagogues to rip their people off. Since the Roman empire, peoples around Europe have looked to sovereignty as the panacea to all the oppression and it has yet to really work. Sovereignty being a little Roman empire to call our own. So even with sovereignty we're all still under capitalism. Even 20th century communism was a kind of capitalism when you think about it, a bureaucratic capitalism, with an elite ruling the masses of commodified labor. So TLDR, fuck the state in general. Individual clowns inside the machine, whichever team they play for, just fucking won't help us.

Man, those Cossacks just keep coming

That expression is priceless.

Sometimes white dudes need to shut up?

A text response speed slider in the preferences would be a nice touch.

Crock pot is super forgiving with chicken. One thing to remember is to always do higher temp for 4 hours—if you do the lower temp for 8 hrs the bones will explode and it will be near impossible to eat. There is this tamarind chutney that is not very sweet, sold in jars in hippie food places. I can't remember what it's called. Just lay the chicken (with maybe baby potatoes, chunks of carrot, peas, whatever veggies you got at hand) on the bottom, cover it with the chutney and forget it for four hours. Any kind of canned pasta sauce works as well.

That is my plan! Absolutely no talking down. I hope to keep any rigid top-down instruction to a minimum. I'm there to show them some neat games they may not have experienced before, get them thinking critically about them, and help them figure out how to make things like those games themselves. Right now they're still quite amorphous in my mind so "these kids" is the best I have to call them. Lately I've been hanging out with some artists and theater peeps who're about half-a-dozen-or-so years younger than me and calling them "kids" even though they're fully-formed human beings, peers and colleagues. I should probably knock that out...

Ah, ok. Seemed like you've been warming benches for longer for some reason. Rigidly structured institutions!

WTF Miffy, that's some grade A nonsense! You've been on top of the whole teaching thing for so long and job shit is still fucked up and bullshit? Makes no sense! You should call Canada's Royal Ombudsman for Meritocracy and tell him what for. Speaking of teaching, that Teach Kids to Program Arty Video Games Extracurricular Program Thing I mentioned in the dev forum is in the bag! I bagged it. Ooh yeah. Job pimp over here. I have until Oct 4th to figure out what to teach, learn to teach, and then proceed not to fuck it up for at least a semester. Direct any pointers you may have for a green teacher type into that thread.

All states are evil, Russians just have raging boners for strong leaders.

The fact that it's Clem's hat makes me just a tad queasy… aside from that I'd proudly display the calendar in my garage.

So womanly of him to be doing things for attention.

I am not saying it is. I am saying that taxonomy tries and fails to make it simple—whether we go with the straight vs gay official binary breakdown or the wacky tumblr overkill table.

Personally, I find that too much fiddly identity nomenclature gets in the way of human interaction.

Them's some truly magical artifacts.