Listen to the Rain

Studying isn't useless! Who would have thought!

One thing that paying for Japanese lessons has done is that it's encouraged me to pick up my studies in other parts of my life. Playing video games in Japanese, finally trying to read those manga we bought in Japan but that I've never really opened before, and writing more Japanese as well, like the notes we wrote back to our students in Japan after we visited last summer. But the lessons are also paying off in and of themselves, and I'm noticing that my ability to speak Japanese is getting better. I'm still heavily limited by my vocabulary, but that's because memorizing a giant list of words and their meanings is probably the most difficult task of language-learning, in term of effort that must be expended.

For example, at the last class I was at, we read an essay by Hideo Levy about the difficulty of translating the Japanese word 文学者 (bungakusha, the dictionary gives "scholar of literature"). Levy writes that there are connotations of bungakusha being the guardians of the essential Yamato spirit by means of literature, and mentions how as a younger man he was very annoyed about being an eminent writer but not being considered a bungakusha because he wasn't born in Japan, so people thought he lacked a certain...something.

So we started talking about the difficulty of translation, and I brought up playing Pokemon Fire Red and how I had posted a screenshot that was pretty difficult to translate into English in an elegant way. Here it is:



Literally, it's just "I am the best in the world," but that doesn't really capture the way that someone saing kono ore-sama is elevating themselves above the person they're talking to, and translating that sense into English is nearly impossible without being really clumsy. The royal "we" kind of works, but that has its own connotations in English that this doesn't. Translating is hard, is what I'm saying. And I'm just a guy with a dictionary and some study, so I don't have to worry about my audience's knowledge, technical limitations (like in a game), meddling executives, and so on. But on the other hand, we were able to talk for forty in minutes, 85% of the time in Japanese, about difficult translating, pronoun selection in Japanese, and the time that libby_may's husband and melishus_b wandered around a park in Hiroshima offering people absinthe and two Japanese men chatted with us for about an hour.

All that money and time I'm putting in is working! Just need to keep 頑張るing. まだまだだけど、できるよな。

Something interesting that's come up in the course of reading 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ is that both Aya-sensei and I each have our area of expertise to share. She obviously speaks Japanese natively, but she's nisei--she was raised in America, went to American schools, and so on. She has relatives in Japan and lived in Tokyo for several years, but has spent most of her life here. That means that, for example, she has no experience with the Japanese education system.

This came up with the sentence:

「なんか緊張感がないよな」ぼくは言った。「夏休みだというのに、ちっとも勉強に身が入らない」

Which I would translate as:

"Ahh, I'm not feeling pressured at all," I said. "Even though it's summer vacation, I don't have any energy for studying."

So of course if you think of the American education system, that makes no sense. "Even though"? Shouldn't that be "because"?

Well, no, because the Japanese school year begins in April and summer vacation comes during the first semester. Students have to go to club activities and often get homework assignments they have to finish during their vacations. This gives context to the next line, where Aki tells Sakutarō that he'll be fine even if he doesn't try (literally that he's in the 安全圏, a word that means "buffer zone" but which Aya-sensei told me is slang for people who will pass their exams no matter what they do).

It's like when I told Aya-sensei what a 大和撫子 (Yamato nadeshiko) is, which gave her a word for this concept that crops up again and again in Japanese entertainment. It's minor, but it's nice that things aren't just one way.

(Bullet = dodged)

Background: Aya-sensei and I are reading 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ and got to a part where Sakutarō is being an idiot. He's angry at Aki because the other boys in his class are bullying him for spending time with her, so he writes in to a Christmas Eve radio show with a song request, talking about how they were going to play Romeo and Juliet in the Culture Festival (true) but she got sick with leukemia (false) and is probably listening from her hospital bed (false). Aki confronts him the next day, and says that she doesn't mind if he talks about her, but there are people out there who are really suffering and she hates it when people are mean to them.

This led to a discussion about how Aki is the ideal stereotype of Japanese womanhood (大和撫子 in Japanese): soft-spoken, self-effacing, beautiful, courteous, caring, with long black hair. Aya-sensei mentioned the pressure that Japanese women are under to conform to this ideal and how she--being raised in America--feels like a lumbering barbarian (not her exact words) when she's around other Japanese women.

Then she asked me if I liked that kind of personality.


I managed to deflect a bit by talking about schoolpsychnerd, who has a lot of those traits. She's softer-spoken (except when advocating for students under her care), loves cooking for people, likes cute things, tends to think of others, dresses more feminine, and probably most importantly for the purposes of the question, Aya-sensei has met her. So we talked a bit about schoolpsychnerd, and then the conversation moved on.

But I realize that that's actually kind of a reasonable accomplishment--I extracted myself from a conversational land mine in another language. I mean, it wasn't really a trap, but it was structured as one, and I avoided it. Points to me!

Like I mentioned, I've been reading 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ and I'm pretty sure that it's helped me identify one of the problems I'm having in trying to learn Japanese--I compartmentalize too much. I have a tendency to want to look every word up I don't know, so I stop when I find something, make a note on the PDF I have of the book with the word and its reading and pronunciation, then go back to the text. But it means that sometimes I'm reading whole sentences, and sometimes I'm reading it one word at a time, which makes it pretty hard to draw meaning from it.

What I really need to do is to read everything through once first, not look anything up, and see how much I understand. Then read it through and note down all the words I don't know, then read it through again with the notes in case I can't remember something.

On the plus side, I've noticed that reading actual written Japanese is helping some vocab stick in my head because I have context for it. It's like how I'll always remember that アライグマ literally means "washing bear," which means "raccoon," because of Kazu trying to explain it with "洗濯ぐま" ("laundry bear").

As for the actual book, I'm enjoying it. I started off feeling like it was being crassly manipulative, but once it moved past the opening frame of sadness and taking someone's ashes far away and went back to the meet cute, it got better. Though it's pretty heavy-handed:

にもかかわらず少女の髪からは、シャンプーというかリンスというか、ほんのり甘い匂いが漂ってきた。

Translation:
But in spite of [walking with a distance between them], from the girl's hair the sweet scent of shampoo and condition hung faintly in the air.

Later, then come around a turn in the path and find a field of hydrangeas, and Aki turns to Sakutarō with sparkles in her eyes and exclaims how much she loves hydrangeas and asks him if he wants to go to hanami together. I can almost see the sweatdrop on his face when he says yes. But it's definitely good practice!

I realized I haven't talked about Japanese tutoring in a while, so here's an update!

I had a rather long period in September when a variety of things, like my tutor being unexpectedly out of town, stomach trouble, and Yom Kippur kept me from meeting for a month, but since then I've gotten back into the groove. I mentioned to Aya-sensei in the first class that I could study up on grammar and vocab on my own time, and what I really needed was someone to actually practice all those words and bits I use, so class is mostly just us talking about whatever comes to mind. She's been giving me articles from NHK's Easy Japanese News section, and sometimes we stick to the topic, and sometimes we don't.

For example, last week's article was about a robot that supposedly can read people's moods and provide recommendations about restaurants and so on and we didn't say two words about it. Instead we ended up talking about Shabbat and what schoolpsychnerd and I do for it--ろうそくを点けて、ワインを飲んで、パンを食べて、祈ります--how long it takes, why Jews go out to Chinese food on Christmas, etc. And I actually really like that we get sent off on tangents so easily, because in a real conversation I'm not going to be able to refer to a script or prepared materials most of the time, I'm going to have to think on my feet, and talking about totally random topics definitely does that.

My stomach still ties up in knots on the way to class every week and I'd rather be hit by a meteor than go, but when I get there it's fine. I mean, that's pretty much the story of my mind, right? Everything is terrible until it happens and things turn out better than expected.

Yesterday was a team building day at work. As much as I complained about it, it was actually pretty well-run and inoffensive. No stupid trust fall exercises or silly games, the icebreaker was just "introduce yourself to a couple people you haven't met," and the majority of the day was talking about what it is exactly our department does--summary: we're the ones who make all the money--or discussing different communication styles through the lens of the DiSC, which I had never heard of before. You may be unsurprised to hear that I scored by far the highest on C, with S as the second-highest category.

And even with that low level of intrusiveness, by the end of the day I was still:



And then tonight I have Japanese tutoring, which is also very well run and extremely helpful in providing a chance for me to actually speak Japanese instead of just reading it (which I'm pretty good at, though still not at newspaper level), but takes a lot of energy to deal with.

That's the eternal paradox of my mental state. Even things I am really looking forward to I often end up dreading at times, with my anticipation wildly careening around like a bat in a Castlevania level. I know it drives schoolpsychnerd crazy sometimes how I'll agree to go to an event, then a few days later act like going will literally lead to my death, then be excited again, all with unpredictable frequency and lengths of time.

I know a lot of people were annoyed about those introvert vs. extrovert articles going around last year and the year before since they painted all introverts as anxiety-ridden wrecks with a deep and fulfilling inner life ruined by those damn extroverts shitting their interactions all over everything, most memorably summed up in this tweet:

extroverts love doing cocaine and having fights in sewers, while introverts cry and practice forbidden alchemy. there is no middle ground.

— ruben ferdinand🐙 (@urbanfriendden) November 17, 2013

And reasonably so. I know plenty of introverts who love social interaction and just need a bit of alone time to recover from it. But not me.

I really am excited about your invitations and the vast majority of the time, when I arrive, I have a great time and I'm glad I came. But often my instinctual first response to any event is, "Uh, I have some forbidden alchemy to do that night..."

Last weekend was ACEN, which I've been going for nine years at this point, though admittedly not consistently. My interests have changed at this point so that I'm not really all that into anime anymore and barely know what's coming out and what's popular, but ACEN is still a great place to catch up with friends that are scattered around the country (or just out of our non-car-owning transit radius) but meet up for a weekend. Several of the people I saw actually didn't even buy con badges, they just came for the company. Honestly I might be getting to that point myself based on the panel content, but I like wandering around the dealer's room too much to just give up on officially attending. The selection is often more interesting than you can find online, probably because there's a lack of IP lawyers standing around like hawks.

And now, the daily breakdown.

Friday
I took only a half-day off from work, because I didn't think that there would be much I wanted to see in the morning and because the AMA started it's summer half-day program on the day ACEN started, fortunately. I expected that schoolpsychnerd and I would arrive at about the same time, but literally as she was walking out the door a student came in who needed immediate attention and she ended up staying much longer than she intended and not arriving at the hotel until around 5:45. Since I had assumed she would be coming around the same time as I did and because I didn't want to haul a lunchbag to and from the con and because I'm really cheap, I didn't have lunch with me and so I ended up mostly just lounging around the room Friday afternoon. I did wander down to the dealer's room and over to redpikachu's booth (Natural Pop! Made with love) to buy another cute stuffed animal. Last time it was a frog, and this time it was a corgi, and when schoolpsychnerd finally arrived I gave it to her, and, well:


So happy!
We both ate a ton of food, because schoolpsychnerd hadn't gotten to eat lunch either with all the chaos at her school so we stuffed ourselves on apples, bananas, Syrian cheese, olives, almonds, homemade beef jerky, and dark chocolate. Then we went and met fiendishfanfares's husband, who had kindly offered to let us borrow his work laptop to give our panel on Saturday, for info about which see the Saturday section. Then we went back to our room again, powered up the laptop and transferred the presentation over, and ran through it once to make sure that we would be able to pull it off. Having done that successfully and confidently, we headed down to the AMV room.

Watching the AMV contest entries is somewhat of a tradition for schoolpsychnerd and I, though it was most prevalent in 2005-2008, when we were attending multiple cons per year and could see AMVs riffing off of AMVs we had seen at previous cons (like this Azumanga Daioh AMV, made as a parody of this Evangelion AMV which aired six months previous). In 2012 ACEN didn't have any AMV Contest because of some leadership kerfuffle, and since we didn't attend in 2013, and since we hadn't gone from 2009-2011 at all due to the whole living in Japan thing, so I was curious what had become of it and...well, there was barely anything to it. I remember at Otakon they'd have the AMV Contest entry viewings in one of the auditoriums, but this year at ACEN it was in one of the small video rooms and there were never more than a couple dozen people in there at a time. We didn't even get a sheet with the AMVs listed to vote on them like I remember previously. I was glad I managed to identify a VNV Nation just by the style (it was Control, set to a racing anime called Redline), but otherwise the contest was kind of sad, and we only stayed for a bit because a friend had invited us to go to Anime Hell.

We headed over to the place where Anime Hell was supposed to play, but they weren't letting anyone stand in line yet, so we headed up to our room for a bit to wait for the signal. When we got a text, we immediately took the stairs down and walked over to the ballroom, followed the enormous line that had somehow sprung up in the last 15 minutes, and at the very moment that we reached the end of the line, staff announced that the line was closed. While standing off to the side and trying to decide what to do, we ran into stephen_poon and some other people we knew, and after a brief chat, schoolpsychnerd, stephen_poon, and I headed over to the Hyatt's lobby bar for a drink and a chat. We were there for maybe five minutes before they called last call, so after some conversation we headed over to Red Bar for a while.

After a lovely conversation about stephen_poon's trip to Spain, and about Japan with another friend who had come to visit us in 2011, and then schoolpsychnerd said our farewells and headed off to Let's Play Oregon Trail, which we'd been to previously and had a lot of fun watching. It was about an hour in, and while the players this year had done better than last time (where the panicked players had forgotten to buy any weapons and were only able to hunt because the organizers took pity on them and let them buy a pistol), they still kept trying to hunt fast-moving birds with shotguns and not having much luck. After basically everyone starved to death within 30 miles of Independence, Missouri due to chronic incompetence, we succumbed to our tiredness, went back to the room, and slept.

Saturday
We were planning to go to a panel on Chicago's Anime Scene, but we thought that it would be best if we didn't set an alarm, and we woke up just a bit too late to go, so instead we went down to the dealer's room again since schoolpsychnerd had arrived too late on Friday to go before it closed. I had seen that Do Bats Eat Cats had a space in the Artists' Alley, and after seeing their jewelry at a store near us, and now that Japan paid us and we have money, schoolpsychnerd wanted some new earrings.

After getting those, we looked around for a booth selling Japanese tableware to replace the ones we had that have broken over the year, but couldn't find anything. I had figured that somewhere would have chopsticks, or tea cups, or something, but no. The most we found some was kitschy anime mugs. I know we'll be able to get them at the Ginza Festival in August, but it would have been nice to do it now.

Then it was time for our presentation: "Seifuku and Bunkasai: Japanese Education in Anime," which was about the differences in our experience of the Japanese education system vs. how we've seen it portrayed in anime. You can download our slides here if you didn't or couldn't attend, and we have plenty of stories to tell if you want. It's always hard to judge these things, but I think it went well. A few people came up and thanked us afterward, including a guy who had just been shortlisted for JET and was leaving in July, who hadn't been sure he would learn anything in the panel and actually learned a lot, and a woman who asked us about Keion. Also, not many people left during the panel, which is a good sign.

After a break back to our room for lunch (more homemade beef jerky, apples, olives, nuts, and cheese), we went back down to the AMV room and parked in there while waiting on word from one of our friends, and then when we got a text and he was in the General Gaming room, we headed over there and played Once Upon a Time, about which you can read a review I wrote here. A few games of that finished, we went back to the dealer's room again because I wanted an 8-bit Legend of Zelda heart keychain, but while we couldn't find one of those, we found this set of magnets:

Do do do doooo!

On the way back from the dealer's room to the Hyatt, we ran into fiendishfanfares and her family, and while we had missed her daughter's cosplay, we did get to see video of her doing a kamehameha as only a toddler can. Then it was back to the AMV room to catch the re-airing of the contest videos, and while this time the freestyle videos were playing instead of the drama ones, we didn't stay that long because we hadn't eaten lunch in favor of a very large brunch, and they hadn't even handed out a voting card for the AMVs.

Dinner was at the Hyatt's restaurant, which intially looked incredibly expensive for average food, except it turned out that they had a "teriyaki buffet" for $22 that, well:


I was pleasant surprised, considering how much of a hipster foodie snob I am. They also had a dessert bar with cheesecake, which is an excellent way to my heart.

After another brief rest in the room, we headed out to a succession of room parties that lasted the rest of the night, though with one nice interruption. A friend I met in elementary school and have talked to sporadically in the years since then messaged me to let me know that he'd be in Red Bar meeting with some people he knew, and having picked up that I was at ACEN based on my Facebook posts, he asked if we wanted to meet up for a drink.

And we did, and despite all the comments I make about being aloof and having trouble with small talk and blah blah blah, we had no trouble keeping a conversation going despite not really talking in depth since middle school. He also sold us on Wizard World, and while I'm not sure we're going to make it this year due to its proximity, though we might go for the day on Saturday, but we'll certainly try to get there in the future. I've been leery of going to comic conventions, just because I know so little about comics--I had to ask schoolpsychnerd who the Avengers were--but since so much of ACEN was us talking to friends, Wizard World or the various other cons in Chicago could easily be the same thing. And maybe I'd learn something and no longer be a comic Fake Geek Guy.

After a nice conversation and a following succession of room parties and meeting with friends, we elected to skip the rave and the various events happening late at night and went to bed at 12:30.

Sunday
We woke up late and missed the panels we wanted to go to again, including one called "ACEN over 30," which I suspect was placed at 9:15 a.m. because all of us old-timers can't stay up raving until 5 a.m. like the kiddies can. But we slept past it, and after cleaning our room and checking out, we headed down to the dealer's room for one last look around and I managed to find an 8-bit heart keychain. Then we went back to the AMV room, found it was closed, and with nothing further to do and feeling pretty tired, we headed out to the Blue Line and went home.


I'm not sure I'm really the audience for ACEN anymore. I think in the last year we've watched...maybe a dozen episodes of anime, and quite possibly less, because I don't remember when we finished Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's not that I dislike it or anything, it's just that there's so many things competing for my attention that it tends to fall into a lower tier. I didn't even attend any panels this year other than the one that schoolpsychnerd and I presented.

Despite that, I'm probably going to still keep coming, because it's a great excuse to see people and catch up. Even if I'm not happily going to the various panels and dancing for hours, there's enough there to keep me interested. Maybe we'll even do more panels. I don't care about all the fan panels that take up a big chunk of the schedule, but living in Japan for years does give us a perspective that I suspect a lot of the attendees for ACEN wish they had.

Oh, and cosplay I liked:


Probably the most accurate Sephiroth I've ever seen. Ah, those early Playstation graphics.


Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games, and this is one of my favorite cosplays.


I'm dorchadas and this is my favorite Mass Effect cosplay at ACEN.


I didn't actually see this guy, I just grabbed the photo from Twitter. But that's awesome.

Well, that's finished, then. You can play my final project in the form I submitted it here--click the arrow in the upper left to start the game.

In some ways, the fears I expressed in previous posts were correct. A lot of the syntax we learned dealt with the specific implementation of Python that was used for the class that is not going to be the same anywhere else. Ways to load images, and take in mouse clicks and keyboard commands, and implement elements of the GUI, and so on. It's possible that they're similar to some kind of standard interpretation, but if so, I have no idea because we didn't learn about that. But programming isn't all just memorizing specific commands. It's more about learning ways of thinking and problem-solving skills that you can transfer over into any other programming language other than the one you started learning on, though this is obviously more or less difficult depending on the construction of the particular language.

I did run into some fun moments when I was developing this:



That was how it looked after I implemented multiple asteroids spawning and multiple missiles firing, but before I included anything about collisions. I messed around with it not just for the picture, but also to see if it was possible to have so many objects on the screen at one time that the game crashed, which it didn't. It did suffer from a lot of slowdown, which you'll also see if you try to play the finished version, but fixing that is one of the things I want to mess with now that the actual course is done. Right now it checks for collisions 60 times a second and it doesn't take position into account at all so it checks the entire screen every time even if there's only two objects on opposite ends of the screen. Hacking that down to maybe 4 times a second would probably make it work a lot better. See, an increasing number of objects becomes geometrically more intensive, because each object has to check for collision with everything already there, and everything already there has to check collision with it. Doing that when there's 12 asteroids and a ship and a few missiles and it's all being done through a browser-based code implementation which already slows everything down anyway is overkill.

On a further subject, look at the explosions in the game above. They weren't required as part of the assignment, but they were listed as a bonus step if we felt like we would be able to implement them, and I figured I'd give it a try. It only took about 15 minutes and was pretty easy. It was just loading the game, shooting things, getting an error message, fixing that, repeat until I finally didn't get any error messages. It was pretty much the perfect ideal of what bug-fixing should be like. Though once it worked, the explosion graphic was cycling through the various frames way too quickly and in the wrong location for the sprites, so that had to be fixed, but that just required checking how big the sprite was to make sure that I would cycle through to the next frame properly.

There's still more I want to do now, for my own personal improvement. Make the playing area bigger and the ship and missiles smaller. Maybe add powerups, that make missiles go further, or that shoot out two or three missiles with each press of the fire button, or a shield that blocks a single hit. A limited teleport that moves the ship elsewhere. Make the asteroids only spawn near the edge of the screen and drift toward the center instead of randomly appearing out of nowhere. Porting it over to regular Python instead of Codeskulptor's version of it.

Would I recommend this class? Not really. Even for a free class, I think it focused far too much on the idiosyncrasies of the class's specific implementation of Python and had several lazy practices, like the use of global variables because the GUI can't handle input any other way. That's not to say that I thought it was worthless, because it wasn't, but there are a bunch of other free sources for learning programming if, like me, you're cheapassunwilling to spend money.

This week was all about classes and objects and object-oriented programming.

Hmm. It's a good thing this class doesn't cover hardware or I'd be writing about master/slave systems.

Anyway, this week we programmed a graphical implementation of Blackjack. To my surprise, the graphical part was really easy--it was the logic of getting the cards to work that was hard and required some banging of my head against the wall. The way they suggested we did it involved three object classes: a Card class that handles the individual cards, including assigning values and suits to each of them and retrieving the proper image for drawing a single card to the GUI, all of which was implemented already in the program template we got; a Hand class that combines cards into a hand, deals with drawing new cards from the deck, and calculates the value of the hand for comparison, and a Deck class that assembled the proper 52 cards into a deck, figured out which card was on top and passed that card to each hand, and shuffled itself when starting a new game. Each class also had a method to report its contents which wasn't useful in the final program but was really, really helpful when I was trying to figure out what the hell was going wrong.

And oh, did things go wrong. Not with the graphical part--that was actually really easy to implement. But getting Hand and Deck to work was an adventure. First I couldn't get it to properly calculate the value of a hand, so it was a wildcard whether you won or lost. Then it was ignoring the ace special rules completely, so the classic blackjack hand was only worth 11. Then the Deck wasn't properly drawing cards, so I was pulling cards aren't that weren't on the top. Then when I fixed that and got both hands implemented, hitting worked, but standing caused an Index Out of Range error on an attempt to access a relative list element (blahblah[-1], which should get the last element in the list no matter how long the list is). Then I went and fiddled with something totally unrelated to fix the problem that after a single game the hands weren't cleared, so a new game would start with the hands from the previous game plus two new cards for each player. When I fixed that, all of a sudden the list index stopped returning errors because reasons, and despite extensive testing I couldn't get the index errors to show up again. Then I had a problem with calculating the score properly because sometimes I was doing it one way and sometimes another way, and sometimes the testing statement I printed showed the one way when it was actually using the other way, which is why you shouldn't rely entirely on print statements to debug your code. Then I extensively tested the program as an implementation in the console and made sure everything worked.

Then I implemented the GUI without problems. Crazy, right?

I don't have as much to report this week. We learned how to use lists and tuples (etymology if, like me, you had no idea what that was), and programmed Pong.

Well, more like pseudo-Pong. See, our implementation doesn't keep track of the ball bouncing off the sides or corners of the paddle by using a "gutter" that's the same width as the paddle. That allows us to avoid having to do complicated math to figure out what direction the ball would have to bounce if it hit the edge, and by going all elementary physics and treating the ball as a spherical object in a vacuum--which, well, it is--we can just reverse the appropriate components of the velocity. It's pretty simplistic, though it was good practice for proper ordering of if-statements and a reminder that copying and pasting code can often be more trouble than just re-writing the same code. I spent ~15 minutes trying to figure out why the paddles were working in one direction but going berzerk in the other until I realized that when I copied the movement code from one paddle to the other, I didn't change all the variables, so the right paddle controlled itself and the left paddle controlled itself and the right paddle. Oops.

If you want to play an awesome version of Pong, don't play my version. Play Plasma Pong.

The overuse of global variables continues, and seems to be completely due to lazy coding for the GUI they're using. As near as I can tell, most UI elements that take player input cannot accept any input other than from the UI itself and can't call other functions, which makes passing variables around among functions difficult at best. It's something I'll have to keep in mind when I try to become a programmer, motherfucker.

I'm growing increasingly concerned that the processes I'm learning in this class aren't necessarily transferable, though I suppose that's also true of people who spend a long time with one company and have to work with their proprietary systems. See, the class is about learning to program through making games, and to facilitate this, the teachers made a bare-bones GUI that we use to get images and text to appear. That's all well and good, but I'm running up against programming best practices here. Global variables are bad, but as near as I can tell, the GUI requires the use of global variables to function at all, since some of the functions for manipulating the GUI don't take any inputs. It give me an added impetus to make sure I understand the underlying principles rather than just blinding writing random things until it works.

This week was just learning more ways to manipulate the GUI, though I did learn that graphics coordinates are measured from the upper left of the plane rather than the lower left as one might expect, apparently because of the way old CRTs scanned--from top to bottom and left to right. The actual program was a stopwatch game--stop the stopwatch on a whole number, get a point--and the program dealt with storing the time in deciseconds as an integer, converting that into a minutes:seconds.deciseconds format, and then properly accounting for 60 seconds becoming a new minute, prevent ~.1 from awarding points due to improper rounding, and prevent the player from spamming the stop button on ~.0 to rack up their score.

It's the last one that was a bit concerning. The teachers suggested using a global boolean variable to track whether the stopwatch was running and preventing it from increasing the score if it wasn't, which, okay. The problem is that the GUI includes a timer.is_running() function to innately determine that, which I learned about by reading the documentation, so I just used that. Why didn't the teachers mention that, since they programmed the damn GUI themselves? You'd think that would be relevant in the first assignment where we learned how timers work.

Animecharactersigh.jpg

In other news, I ran into a really odd situation during peer evaluation of last week's project. In the comments on the project, the guy who wrote it copyrighted it. I wouldn't have thought that this was more than an odd quirk of his personality--you're copyrighting a guess the number game? Sure, whatever, dude--except his code didn't even work. And I don't mean in some subtle way that required me to dig into it to figure it out, I mean that I pressed the "Random number 1-100" button and the program threw an error and quit. Not only that, but it was supposed to cycle through again after you ran out of guesses, so you could just keep playing over and over again if you want. His program didn't do that. It went through two cycles, but then threw an error and quit. Not only that, but getting the number correct on the last guess didn't properly credit you. The game just told you you lost and then started over, and then the second cycle was impossible to win because it errored out. I mean, this would have taken literally seconds to figure out from a cursory test, but he didn't do it.

I suppose this is how QA people feel all the time.

Edit: Poking around the class forums on the topic of global variables, I found this quote:

In event driven programming you need to keep state around between event handlers. Using global variables is the easiest way to do this at the beginning level. At the end of the course, I will discuss how you can migrate towards using better practices.

Global variables are bad because they lead to insidious problems that are often hard to track down in larger programs. In the small programs that we are writing here, they are often manageable, even if they are not really desirable (and still can lead to bugs).

So, we'll see how that turns out.

I'm pretty sure this is the week that a lot of people flee in terror when they realize that programming is just math with more words. And not only that, the words are things like "random.randrange()" and "print" and "def" and "if/elif/else" and not actual sentences.

Fucking random.randrange().

Let me explain. In Python, there are two main ways to get a random integer (well, there's probably more, but there are two I know of). There's random.randint(), which returns everything from X to Y inclusive, and random.randrange, which returns everything from X to (Y-1). Forgetting that distinction let me to some problems in my program that I had to go back and fix because the program wasn't returning the full range of possible answers.

The assignment this week was to make a program that plays Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock, has the computer make a random guess, and determine the winner. We haven't learned how to implement dynamic input yet, or how to implement a GUI, so it just takes hardcoded player "guesses" and then returns a range of responses, and it's up to us to show that those responses are properly random and the program interprets who wins and who loses correctly. This takes math.

The hard way is to implement a giant if/elif/else statement using Booleans that takes into account every possible combination of throws, which is really long and annoying, and the easy way is to convert the throws into numbers and use math, since it's possible to plot the throws on a wheel--as in the wiki article linked above--and assign them numbers. Subtract, interpret the number to determine winner or loser, and boom. It didn't take all that long, fortunately, but I do need to go back and look into doing modulo operations with negative numbers. 3 mod 5 is 3, because there's 3 left over after the 0 times 3 is divisible by 5 in integer division, but -2 mod 5 is also 3 because ??? Because of floor division and the difference between 2 and 5? Doing other mod operations makes it seem like that's the case, but I don't want to have developed a rule-of-thumb that turns out to be inaccurate later.

That's the thing--the computer only does what you tell it to, so you need to have at least some understanding of the underlying math or you won't be able to tell when the answer seems wrong. In this week's quiz, I had to build programs to calculate inputs into these formulas: ¼ n s² / tan(π / n) and f(x) = -5x⁵ + 69x² - 47 . Those are the kind of cases where knowing what the answer should be, even as a rough ballpark, is really handy.