Background

There's been some talk on ~ before, and it seems like there are quite a few people who are either interested in, learning, or working in game development, so I thought this could be a fun programming challenge.

This one is fairly open-ended: make a game in 1 hour. Any game, any engine, don't worry about art or sound or anything.

Doing is the best way to learn. Most people's first project is something overly ambitious, and when they find that it's more difficult than they thought, they can get discouraged, or even give up entirely. This is why the 1 hour limit is important: it forces you to finish something, even if it's small. When you're done, you can come out of it saying you made a game, and you learned from it.

Chances are the game might not be fun, look bad, be buggy, etc. But don't worry about that, everyone's game will have problems, and if you do create something really fun or innovative, congratulations, you have a prototype that you can expand on later!

"Rules"

Like I said before, these "rules" are pretty simple: make a game in (approximately) 1 hour. You can use any tools you want. If you use external assets (art, sound), it's probably best you use something you have the rights to (see resources). If you're completely new to game development/programming, your goal could even be to finish a tutorial.

If you're the kind of person who tends to get carried away with these things, you might want to post a comment saying you're starting, then another one once you've finished your game.

Please share your finished game, I'm sure everyone would love to try them! If your game is web-based, it can be hosted for free on Github Pages or Itch.io. If downloadable, it can be hosted for free on Google Drive, Mega, Dropbox, Itch.io, etc.

Resources

Engines

If you're a beginner, a good engine to start with is LÖVE. It's very simple, and uses Lua, which is very easy to learn.

If you're familiar with another language, you could use a library to make it in that language. Some examples:

C++: SFML, SDL, Allegro

Javascript: kontra, Phaser, pixi.js

Python: pygame

Rust: Piston, ggez, Amethyst

If you want something more complex, consider Godot, Unity, or Unreal.

You can also try something visual like Construct, Clickteam Fusion, or GDevelop

Art

For such a short time constraint, I'd suggest you use your own "programmer art": just use some basic shapes. Your primary focus should be gameplay.

If you think you have time to find something, try looking on OpenGameArt.

Sound

You can make simple sound effects very quickly with sfxr (or in this case, a web port of sfxr called jsfxr).

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Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 3 - The Waldo Moment

A failed comedian who voices a popular cartoon bear named Waldo finds himself mixing in politics when TV executives want Waldo to run for office.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Sorry (again) for being a bit late with this thread!

Ursula K. Le Guin was my favourite SciFi & Fantasy writer. Her passing earlier in the year was a great loss.

I'm reading her scifi-fantasy book Always Coming Home (1985), a compilation of "in-universe" codices and oral traditions as seen by an anthropologist. Her works were usually put in the "soft scifi" bin, as opposed to the "harder" genre. What caught my attention was a passage from the book, as appeared in an oral narrative (p. 161):

There are records of the red brick people in the Memory of the Exchange, of course, but I don't think many people have ever looked at them. They would be hard to make sense of. The City mind [a vast autonomous network of computers] thinks that sense has been made if a writing is read, if a message is transmitted, but we don't think that way.

Here we're called to notice the information vs. meaning distinction, for which a lot has been said and will be said. It was striking to me how the definition of "sense" according to the "City mind" closely paralleled the concept of information in Claude E. Shannon's seminal paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (PDF link). There, "information" simply meant what was transmitted between a sender and a receiver. It gave rise to a consistent definition of the amount of information based on the Shannon entropy.

However, we implicitly feel that this concept of information isn't encompassing enough to include meaning -- a vague term, but one we feel to be important. It seems that meaning enters information only as we (or someone) interpret it. In the words of computer scientist Melanie A. Mitchell, "meaning" seems to have an evolutionary value (Complexity: a Guided Tour, 2009). I feel that we could as well say, meaning may be bonded to the bodily and messy reality where flesh and blood living is at stake.

Returning to the passage in the novel, for me it was read as a rare spark of "hard" science in Le Guin's scifi works. Was it possible that she actually read into the information theory for inspiration? I don't know. But it appears to have captured the tension in the "ever-thorny issue" of meaning vs. information. For the computers, "sense" follows the information-theory concept of information; but for the human people in the story, it "would be hard to make sense of" the information in that way.

Do you have similar "aha" moments, where you find a insightful moment of grasping an important "hard-science" idea while immersed in a "soft" scifi/fantasy work?

Or, we can talk about anything vaguely connected to this post :) Let me know.

Summary

A look at the situation of Rohingya women living in Bangladeshi refugee camps, with a focus on health, medicine, and education.

Extracts

Before coming to a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Rashida had never seen a foreigner.

[...] the biggest shock she had was when a community health worker suspected Rashida was pregnant again and took her to the clinic for an examination.

"What I found out that day was that you can stop having babies if you want to," she says. "I had never heard of family planning."

Rashida has since thought hard and discussed this with her husband. Their shelter is cramped, and their future uncertain.

"Three children is a nice family size," she says. "After that, I don't want any more. What I want is to learn something. When we go back home I'd like to be able to work, not just look after children."

Bakoko [a midwife from Uganda] teaches new mothers how to wrap babies and put on nappies. She examines pregnant women to check for signs of eclampsia, the biggest threat to pregnant women's lives. And she teaches women to check for multiple pregnancies, and to care for women before and after they give birth. She has saved numerous lives.

Link

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-25/bangladesh-rohingya-young-women-coxs-bazar-refugee-camp/10161260

I do the following:

• Use a VPN (NordVPN)
• Use Firefox with a tweaked about:config and the following security extensions:
  • uBlock Origin
  • NoScript
  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • Privacy Badger
  • Decentraleyes
  • Cookie Autodelete
  • Skip Redirect
  • CanvasBlocker
• Run Linux Mint (I know, Ubuntu-based distros aren't ideal but I'm a Linux beginner)
• Don't have any social media as of a year ago
• Don't use any Google services, including YouTube, Google Search, or Gmail
• Use a password manager (KeePassXC)

The next step would be for me to switch from iPhone to Android running Lineage OS, but money is a bit tight right now. As for day-to-day lifestyle choices, I try to use cash whenever possible and never sign up for things like store rewards programs.

What's your setup? Do you consider yourself a privacy-minded individual? Are you more concerned with protecting yourself from corporate or government entities?

Hi! I've recently graduated as a BA of Italian philology. But I am interested in pursuing my further studies and academical career in linguistics, studying language contact and linguistic strata in particular. I was wondering if anybody took a similar path and am interested in advice from such folks and also any other humanists here. I'm studying some online material and will try to partecipate in some local university's linguistics BA as a visiting student (I guess it's called a freemover in English) if I can find an affordable option. Also I have found out recommended reading material from local universities I'm interested in and some papers about my field. Do you know of any useful resources for making the transition smoother? What has been you experience if you've taken a similar path to your studies? Thanks in advance!

Since we are currently discussing tagging conventions in other areas of ~ I thought it would be useful to start one in this group.

The 'football' tag is currently used for both association football and American football. This is not a surprise, but we should agree on how to handle this from now on, in order to not hinder the tagging functionality (ie people wanting to filter out one of the sports).

Here are some ideas, to kickstart the discussion:

• Use soccer for association football and football for American football

• use football for association football and other terms (like NFL, NCAA) for American football

• don't use the football tag and use association and American football instead.

• Use tag groups to solve this issue, ie football.association and football.american

Nothing really matters and I can't enjoy anything anymore knowing that. Games are not that fun anymore, talking to people is boring, we are basically waiting for death and I can't enjoy myself or will myself to work on anything anymore... How do I move past that?

When I was in high school I went to China through an education program. On the plane there I was seated next to an elderly Chinese woman on my left and a mother and daughter to my right.

While talking with the daughter and mother at some point the elderly woman became involved. She spoke cantonese and my mandarin was limited so the mother helped to translate.

The elderly woman took out paper and pen from her bag and began to have me write me characters. Some time after, she put her hands on my face and began to massage it in circular motions. It was strange but pleasant because clearly her intentions were good. I looked over to the man who was leading my fellow students, and got a thumbs up as he mouthed "just go with it".

I'd never experienced such caring from a complete stranger. It was a lovely introduction into their culture and genuine happiness to share it.

We now have the opportunity to continue our 100-word writing prompt fun :)

@Kat, the initiator of this writing club, nominated me as her successor as this round's topic keeper (or if we allow some fantasy, the "queen of stories", as in the Decameron). I'm very happy, honoured, nervous ... and so eager to read your contributions!

As a reminder of the rules, let us make the written piece exactly 100 words. Next weekend, I'll pass the garland to one of the writers, and they'll become the monarch of stories, bring to us a new topic.

This week's prompt is in the title:

I can see [them], but [they] cannot see me.

Here the pronoun they, in the brackets, is a generic one. It can be anyone, anything, or ... let us know :)

I spend far too much time looking for a reply button before I realise I have to scroll to the bottom.
Also, it'd be a lot less work in big threads, where you might be scrolling for a while to get to the reply box.
Yes, I'm that lazy.
I noticed that sometimes I don't engage if it's a big thread because of this, if the topic being discussed is only of passing interest for example.

Summary

The article is an interview with Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish refugee who has been detained by the Australian government on Manus Island since 2015. Boochani discusses his experiences of detention and the book he has written about those experiences.

Extract

I don't remember exactly when I started to write the first words but I remember that I thought my writing of this time was like a mission and duty ... to make readers aware of this prison camp. I imagined there would be unknown readers from around the world ... That's why I wrote it in a literary language. Not only for this historical period or those people who are involved in this plight ... I wrote this book so that it extends beyond geographical bounds and generational imaginaries.

This chapter about the way they exiled us to Manus was one of the hardest parts to write … If you remember, years ago, I wrote a letter to you and complained that I was scared of writing, that I hate writing. You answered me, saying: ‘Behrouz I wrote about my relatives who were killed.’ Your grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins … I knew that I had to do it to survive. I knew that I could expose this system through these words … I could get back my identity through writing this book and not allowing this system to reduce me to a number.

Link

https://www.theage.com.au/national/australia-s-barbaric-policy-confronted-by-boochani-s-prison-memoir-20180821-p4zyt7.html

Summary

The Belfast Court of Appeal ruled two months ago that weddings in Northern Ireland performed by Humanist celebrants must be deemed legal. These weddings are now starting to be performed.

The article contains comments by various people, including two couples about to be married. It also has some background about legality of Humanist wedding ceremonies in other parts of Great Britain.

Extract

In June, the Belfast Court of Appeal ruled that humanist marriages must be legally recognised in Northern Ireland. This weekend, the first two legal marriages to follow that ruling will occur.

Link

https://humanism.org.uk/2018/08/22/first-legal-humanist-marriages-in-northern-ireland-since-court-ruling-to-occur-this-weekend/