When your own soldiers come back to attack you: “Stop hitting yourself”

I love þat you’re trying to bring ðe þ and ð (back) into English.

The ball was a blue pool ball, on a wooden table that I can’t describe because I suck at describing things (but I do have a visual of it). I didn’t even imagine the person beyond the hand coming up to push it off.

The ball color might have been decided on the moment I read the question, I’m not sure whether it was part of my image before that. Person is still nondescript even after trying to “zoom out”. I just can’t seem to come up with it.

In my classes on analytics, we were taught to prefer using normalised axes starting at 0 to more accurately put changes into perspective.

Honestly, yeah. I spent decades developing and maintaining it, hopefully will spend a few more decades with it, but after that? I have no use for it anymore, but if it’s still in decent condition, it would be a shame to waste it.

I’d rather have it be of some use to someone, and “drink mead out of it” is very high up the list, right after “use it for science or education” and right before “use it for semi-realistic (but doubly awesome) historical weapon tests or demos”. Other contenders are “deco piece”, “movie/theatre prop” and “ritual implement”.

Actually, that probably applies to most of my body. Reuse or repurpose as much as you can, turn the rest into fertiliser.

Failing that (if my spouse or family can’t stand the thought of cremating my remains, I don’t want to force them), at least bury me with some weapons. Not because I believe in Valhalla, I just want to troll some future archaeologist. Bonus points for mixing eras and qualities, e.g. a wallhanger 1700s cavalry sabre, weapons-grade Xiphos and a non-functional gun reproduction, dressed in a 900s Samurai armour.

Wait, you’ve had a skull grow on you? You’re boned

Safe-ish, until some other driver on the crossing road approaches way faster than estimated, sees the light go yellow and floors it. Sure, they might see it in time, but there’s a risk they don’t. My dad once didn’t see a crossing car at a yield intersection despite looking that way and got T-boned. He didn’t think he was doing anything unsafe either.

Still safer than just blazing through though, so I guess partial credit for being carefully impatient?

To be fair, seeing a complex equation simplify down to a concise result is kinda hot 😳

Honestly, I was never a fan of his music (his voice specifically), but I hella respect his grit.

Bribe them with snacks. Source: Am IT. Have been bribed with snacks. You can bet that user got priority treatment from that day on.

I’ve twice now gotten a position without prior knowledge of the tools in question. I think a lot is just taking a gamble on your ability to learn as you go - which clearly worked out in your case.

I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn’t actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.

I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that’s a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you’ve heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.

Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don’t code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.