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In a striking change to most years, the weather has not plunged like 30 degrees after the new year and the weather report even shows that it's above freezing for the next week! On the one hand it's nice to be walking to work and not have to button my coat--the universal sign that winter has arrived--but on the other hand a warm Chicago winter is not exactly an encouraging sign for the global temperature mean. Nonetheless, it's supposed to be 5°C today so maybe I'll take a walk along the river at lunch.
We finished all of our 年賀状 (nengajō, "New Year's Cards") this week--we were waiting on a few addresses. In Japan, 年賀状 are strictly formal without much personalization at all. They have a few set phrases offering good wishes for the new year, you stamp your personal seal on them by the dozen, and drop them in the mail. The mail carriers pick them up and hold them during the month of December and then deliver them in a blizzard--something like two billion 年賀状--on New Year's Day. They're premade and all you need to do was address them, and in past years that's mostly what I did, though I did translate the Japanese on them for the benefit of the mostly non-Japanese-speaking recipients. This year,![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
sashagee wanted the absolutely cutest 年賀状 out there, so I presented her with a few candidates and she went with this one:
The year of the rabbit! It doesn't include the rest of the standard text, usually something like 旧年中は大変お世話になりました。今年も宜しくお願い致します。 ("You have been of great assistance to me in the last year and I look forward to our continued good relations in the new year"), but I suggested that we modify the tradition a bit and put photos on our family on it. I'm certainly never going to send anyone a Christmas card but there is social value in updating your friends on how your family looks, so I put a photo on there from our trip to the arboretum andsashagee wrote a simple good wishes standard message (shades of the standard 年賀状). I ordered fifty of them and that's usually more than enough for my purposes but this year we ran out! Next year we'll have to order a hundred since we're sending 年賀状 to sashagee's family and friends now which expands the circle of recipients by a lot. Next year, I'll be writing 年賀状 for a while at the end of December. At least two people working on them makes it faster.
I'm still working on my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and last night I spent two hours trying to solve a problem. I decided to make the starting Teleporter profession an "Imperial Terran Navy Liaison," a psychic from an alternate dimension where Earth has an interstellar empire who got dumped on post-apocalyptic Cataclysm Earth after a jump drive accident, so I thought I would give them a hypertech gun that was standard issue in their home reality, balanced by virtue of never being able to reload it. Easy, I thought. Cue hours of "invalid ammo type" errors and me frantically scrolling through documentation, loading up a Teleporter and finding the ammo type was "0 Null", reading existing documentation and examples of guns and trying to figure out what was wrong, searching through the Discord and Reddit, the classic woes of computer programming. And sure, JSON doesn't involve math or formal logic, but it does involve proper semantics being extremely important, and something was missing.
In the end, I solved it by writing these four lines:
The problem was while I had defined the ITN B47 Fusion Pistol, and the magazine that goes in that pistol, and the physical ammo that's placed in that magazine, I hadn't made the definition of that physical ammo as an ammunition type--it was just an item with type AMMO, not an ammunition_type.
As soon as I put in that extra definition, all the errors went away. At least for the other error I got (teleporter's "attune to location" ability not working) it was because I had assigned the same id to two different things. That ammo problem...ugh.
As my father often says, the more you know about computers, the more surprised you are they ever work.
We finished all of our 年賀状 (nengajō, "New Year's Cards") this week--we were waiting on a few addresses. In Japan, 年賀状 are strictly formal without much personalization at all. They have a few set phrases offering good wishes for the new year, you stamp your personal seal on them by the dozen, and drop them in the mail. The mail carriers pick them up and hold them during the month of December and then deliver them in a blizzard--something like two billion 年賀状--on New Year's Day. They're premade and all you need to do was address them, and in past years that's mostly what I did, though I did translate the Japanese on them for the benefit of the mostly non-Japanese-speaking recipients. This year,
sashagee wanted the absolutely cutest 年賀状 out there, so I presented her with a few candidates and she went with this one:The year of the rabbit! It doesn't include the rest of the standard text, usually something like 旧年中は大変お世話になりました。今年も宜しくお願い致します。 ("You have been of great assistance to me in the last year and I look forward to our continued good relations in the new year"), but I suggested that we modify the tradition a bit and put photos on our family on it. I'm certainly never going to send anyone a Christmas card but there is social value in updating your friends on how your family looks, so I put a photo on there from our trip to the arboretum and
sashagee wrote a simple good wishes standard message (shades of the standard 年賀状). I ordered fifty of them and that's usually more than enough for my purposes but this year we ran out! Next year we'll have to order a hundred since we're sending 年賀状 to sashagee's family and friends now which expands the circle of recipients by a lot. Next year, I'll be writing 年賀状 for a while at the end of December. At least two people working on them makes it faster.I'm still working on my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and last night I spent two hours trying to solve a problem. I decided to make the starting Teleporter profession an "Imperial Terran Navy Liaison," a psychic from an alternate dimension where Earth has an interstellar empire who got dumped on post-apocalyptic Cataclysm Earth after a jump drive accident, so I thought I would give them a hypertech gun that was standard issue in their home reality, balanced by virtue of never being able to reload it. Easy, I thought. Cue hours of "invalid ammo type" errors and me frantically scrolling through documentation, loading up a Teleporter and finding the ammo type was "0 Null", reading existing documentation and examples of guns and trying to figure out what was wrong, searching through the Discord and Reddit, the classic woes of computer programming. And sure, JSON doesn't involve math or formal logic, but it does involve proper semantics being extremely important, and something was missing.
In the end, I solved it by writing these four lines:
{
"type": "ammunition_type",
"id": "mom_fusion_ammo",
"name": "B47 fusion shot",
"default": "mom_fusion_ammo"
}The problem was while I had defined the ITN B47 Fusion Pistol, and the magazine that goes in that pistol, and the physical ammo that's placed in that magazine, I hadn't made the definition of that physical ammo as an ammunition type--it was just an item with type AMMO, not an ammunition_type.
As soon as I put in that extra definition, all the errors went away. At least for the other error I got (teleporter's "attune to location" ability not working) it was because I had assigned the same id to two different things. That ammo problem...ugh. As my father often says, the more you know about computers, the more surprised you are they ever work.
