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itsbenedict · 6 years ago

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Rendering the Incomprehensible Comprehensible

I am confused by the state of the art of psychiatric medicine.

Now, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm a guy what makes computers is be do videogames, and I haven't taken a chemistry class since freshman year of college or a biology class since high school. Pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the field is that I read Slate Star Codex a lot. So, the questions I'm asking here are ones I have to assume actual professionals in the area have answers to.

That question being... why is it made of drugs?

I don't mean in an “oh, these are social problems and we must solve society and overthrow [racism/capitalism/millenialism/makesworldwrong] instead of medicating our free spirits” way. I mean in a... how do drugs work at all, kind of way? It makes sense they work for killing pathogens- all you have to do is come up with a poison that works on what you're trying to kill but not on the host. But for fixing the brain? What?

My model of drug discovery works something like this:

- Scientists poke around at the brain and see a ton of hyper-complicated chemical processes happening in there, and make some educated guesses about what they're doing, based on measurements of levels of certain chemicals in certain places during certain mental states. They've got some vague ideas about what these chemicals are doing, but these are mostly statistical inferences and not detailed causal models. They look at these brain chemicals and how they move around, and infer that if they make some other chemicals that are shaped in specific ways, those chemicals will interfere with these other chemicals and make there be more or less of them under certain conditions. - Armed with these guesses, they go to the lab and synthesize these chemicals, and then spend billions of dollars running gigantic clinical trials to see if, maybe, putting a bunch of these new chemicals in the bloodstream will actually have anything like the desired effect. - Most of the time they don't, because these were just educated guesses based on simplified models, but with enough billions poured into running more trials, they'll eventually find a chemical they can p-hack into looking like it does something, and then exploit FDA regulations to get doctors to prescribe it for a thousand dollars a pill. Sometimes, if they're extremely lucky, they'll find something that has a positive effect that they don't need to statistically mutilate to show, and then we have a groundbreaking discovery.

I may just be super underinformed, but as I understand it... this process weirds me the hell out.

In my current job, I spend a lot of time fixing bugs in old websites. These websites are sometimes large and labyrinthine, full of old uncommented code some contractor wrote years ago before dropping off the face of the earth. This is, ignoring for a moment a completely unignorable difference in degree of complexity, kind of like trying to fix problems with the brain.

When I go in to fix a bug in a website, there's a lot of things I can do. I can look at the page's elements in the browser's dev tools. I can run the debugger and step through the code, looking at all the data and its values at any given point in time. I can go to the git repo and look back through previous versions of the code, to see what changes were made and when, in conjunction with Jira tickets describing what issue those changes were made to fix. And once I've figured out what's happening, I can go into the code, make changes, and see what effect they had.

Now, I can try to imagine what my job would be like if I had to do things like psychopharmacologists did.

First off, no making changes to the code. The code is compiled and minified and obfuscated and still three billion lines long. Even if I did figure out how to make desirable changes, that would be "digital eugenics" and I'd get fired.

Second, commit history only goes like three or four commits back, if I'm lucky. Previous commits have been deleted, since they're set to auto-recycle after a while and nobody knows how to turn that off.

Thirdly, no dev tools. I only have the rendered webpage itself, and when something goes wrong I have to kind of guess at whether it's a styling issue or a data issue or a connectivity issue or what.

What can I do, exactly? Well, I actually do have access to one of the dev tools, kind of: the Network tab. I can see the requests being made to the back-end API. Unfortunately, there is no API documentation, and the requests are just as obfuscated as the code. But I've also got Postman, and what I can kind of do is make my own requests to the API, to see what the output is and how it affects the system.

So, uh... hm, okay, I see a request being made to https://serotonin.presynapticneurone.neural.net. The data payload is gibberish, but I notice that when there's a lot of these requests happening, the webpage renders a little faster, and when there's not as many, it slows down. Maybe if I just copy the gibberish data and fake a bunch of my own requests, it'll go faster? ...Hm, okay, that kind of works on some pages but not others. Still, better than nothing- we have some users complaining about the site being slow, so let's just tell them to-

Oh, shit, wait, users don't know how computers work, I can't just tell them to spam Postman requests to the API endpoint. Um, okay, I'll write a little phone app that automatically spams the requests, and release that to users. Except- oh, for fuck's sake, I need to wait for FDApple to approve it for the app store, and they want us to prove that it works and doesn't contain malware. Except even I don't know if that works, so... okay, it's fine, we'll hire a bunch of testers and do a study that shows that overall it speeds things up, and doesn't kill anyone's machines. Good thing I work for a huge company that can afford to do that.

Aaaaaand here come the results, and- oh, god damn it, the study didn't achieve significance. Let me go get Steve, he can probably fudge the numbers here so the damn app store will let us release the fucking thing, we spent millions on those tests (and the tests of all the other interventions that turned out to do nothing because we didn't have enough information and guessed wrong), and we need to recoup our investment.

Sigh.

So... I'm hearing that the ROI on drug discovery is dropping, and that drug companies have pretty much given up on trying to fix things and have started repackaging the handful of blind hacky API spam tricks that miraculously have a consistent effect. This isn't surprising to me. I would not be surprised if, like, after decades of people banging their heads against a massively overcomplicated system, hitting it with differently-shaped hammers in hopes of getting anything to work... they've found most of the differently-shaped hammers that do anything.

At some point, someone has to invent developer tools, right? Find some way to actually figure out what the hell they're doing?

The big question: given the blatant inadequacy of the existing paradigm, why is the industry still trying to wring blood out of this dried-out stone? At some point, we're going to have to actually figure out what the brain is doing, but it seems like cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy. "We don't know how this thing works" seems like the big obstacle to getting anything done, but most of the effort in this area still seems to be focused on finding new drugs to throw at the thing-we-don't-know-how-it-works.

I know I’m not the first person to ask this question. I’m sure everyone who’s ever had to grapple with psychiatry in any detail is lamenting the same issue, and I’m sure there are people who are working very hard to try and solve the problem. It just... doesn’t seem like those people are getting very much done. The most I hear about is pop science articles claiming that Science Has Discovered The Part Of The Brain That Makes You Love Kittens, which inevitably turn out to be irresponsible reporting of extremely modest correlational findings.

(Maybe AI will help? Maybe the brain is just too complicated to be reduced to something humans can understand on an engineering/problem-solving level, and we need something with a higher understanding-capacity? Except... most of the recent advances in AI are with neural nets that explicitly don't actually understand anything, nor do the researchers growing them.)

Where are we at with this? Are we getting anywhere? Is there encouraging progress in the field of learning-things-about-the-brain? Is the second derivative of that curve non-zero? Metacognitive revolution when?

#i guess i continue to be impatient about science #long post

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tgcnews · 7 years ago

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Jason Miceli & Matt Plourde Inducted into TGC Hall of Fame

Jason Miceli & Matt Plourde were inducted into The Game Crafter Hall of Fame because their game, Queen’s Quest, won the Gamehole Dungeon Crawler Challenge. Congratulations! Their designer interview is below.

Tell us about yourself and how long you've been designing games.

Jason Miceli (JM): Ever since I garbage picked my first copy of Risk when I was 12, I've had the itch;) Needless to say, I grew up a geek, before being a geek was cool. I remember creating (very lightweight) D&D campaigns in middle school, and I started designing my own board games by the time I was in high school (well over 20 years ago). I kicked off my first game design business during college, which turned out to be nothing more than a tremendous tax writeoff... it wasn't until 2012 that my business partner Matt and I had enough life experience, as well as readily available online resources such as The Game Crafter, to do finally something "for real." Thus became Geek Fever Games.

Matt Plourde (MP): I think it started in middle school for me with a game called Hotels. We played it until the cardboard frayed, and then started making our own -bigger- versions of the game until we covered an entire ping-pong table (that version was a bit overboard and took weeks to play). I met my business partner (Jason Miceli) in high school and we designed many games together through the years. Finally, in 2012, we made it official and created Geek Fever Games.

Please tell us about Queen's Quest.

JM: Queen's Quest was designed to be the most authentic roguelike available on the tabletop. Authentic roguelike, right down to the use of ASCII graphics and original 16-color VGA RGB codes. Why? Well, mostly because we COULD, without hiring an artist. For Matt and I, the biggest area we lack skills in is illustration, so candidly the ASCII approach was originally little more than a nice convenience. However, Matt and I are both old-school gamers and devout lovers of the roguelike "genre," so we quickly became super passionate about it, and ultimately felt it might actually have some legs in the marketplace.

MP: I’ll use Jason’s answer^^

Where did the idea for this game come from?

JM: Umm... I think I was simply trying to come up with styles/themes/genres that I haven't seen done elsewhere. This just popped into my brain space. I came up with other interesting ideas at the same time, but this was the one that stuck out as both unique and something we could feasibly do ourselves. So it seemed prudent to pursue.

MP: Same as Jason’s answer ^^

What makes this game special/unique?

JM: Aside from the obvious untapped theme, we're also proud to have devised a game framework that allows for asymmetric gameplay, a non-traditional game flow (players do not have individual turns in Queen's Quest), a rich dungeon-crawler experience, and of course strict adherence to the authenticity of a true roguelike. That last part introduces elements such as: procedurally generated dungeons, tons of random monster possibilities, non-linear gameplay, random boss monsters, and perma-death.

MP: Same as Jason’s answer ^^

Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it somewhere we can link to?

JM: You bet! We created a WIP thread on BoardGameGeek here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1813026/wip-queens-quest-tabletop-roguelike

MP: Same answer ^^

Did you already have the idea for Queen's Quest in your head before the Gamehole Con Dungeon Crawler Challenge was announced?

JM: Yes. We hadn't taken it much further than a playable combat system, but the overall concepts and design intent were there. We actually wanted to get it in the previous year's Gamehole Gauntlet contest, and then again the TGC Big Box contest, but timing just didn't work out in either case. Once I saw a Dungeon Crawler contest emerged, it was clear we owed it to ourselves to complete the game and get it submitted!

MP: I come from a long-history of tabletop RPG’ing, so I’ve always wanted to build a dungeon crawler that captured some of the best elements of a tabletop RPG, without the time commitment. Both Jason & I had disparate notes on how this should come together, and I think we successfully crafted a fantastic experience.

What made you decide to enter your game into the contest?

JM: We knew from the start that we had something really special with Queen's Quest. We felt we had a great shot at winning the contest, but even if we didn't we knew we wanted to complete the game and see what could become of it. As with most TGC contests, the deadline helped force our hand to accomplish just that.

MP: Same answer ^^

Would you have been motivated to work on the game as much as you did without the contest?

JM: In this case, yes. Maybe not on the same timeline, but as mentioned above, this one was already gaining legs and deserved to be taken to the next level.

MP: Same answer ^^

Has winning inspired you to enter more contests or design more games?

JM: I'm going to say no to this... I think my own inspiration has been present and abundant since day 1 of starting Geek Fever Games, and it has only increased over time. If we didn't win this contest, I think I would still be just as motivated to continue pushing, both with this game and countless others. I'm THRILLED we won, and that fact has already helped us with several publisher negotiations, but I don't believe the win itself changed much for my own level of inspiration - I'm guess I'm driven by a primal need!

MP: Yes and no. On the “Yes” side, it was thrilling to win one of these contests and the Rodney is a great trophy. 😊 I do like designing to tight constraints, so I can see myself entering more contests.

On the “No” side, the reality is that we’re always working on multiple projects and something’s always in the hopper. Winning the contest didn’t help with motivation – the ideas need to get out somehow, and we’re in constant design-mode.

Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter has had on your success as a game designer?

JM: TGC has been immensely important to Geek Fever's growth and success. The very presence of TGC was the primary reason we decided to kick off Geek Fever Games in 2012 (based on our understanding at the time, we figured it provided us a real shot), and since that time TGC has remained our strongest resource, partner, safety net, and friend in the industry. With the ability to create prototypes, print (self-)published games, sell games via TGC's storefront, gain extra income through designer tables, gain PR opportunities through the podcast and other networking, participate in design contests, and most recently stay productive with the new component studio, how could any indie designer even exist these days without using TGC?

MP: ^^ same answer

What’s next for you?

JM: Until more recently my answer would have been "making it to Essen" with one of our games, getting a game reviewed by Tom Vasel / The Dice Tower, and printing a long-run with a mainstream publisher. With these milestones now behind us, next on the list would be having a game go to reprint (underway as we speak), launching an expansion to an existing published game (also underway), designing for a known IP / license (we're pitching to acquire one or two soon), and eventually landing a game on the shelves at Target (some possibilities are in the works). Clearly some lofty goals in there, but we're up to the challenge!

MP: I’m currently designing a tabletop RPG, which is a different animal altogether and something I’ve always wanted to do. Aside from that, I attend all the conventions with Geek Fever Games and/or one of our publishers – so feel free to drop by our booth in 2018, wherever we are. And, Geek Fever is constantly developing games, so I’m always helping my partners with their designs and such.

Any last words of encouragement or advice to all of the designers reading this?

JM: *Execution* is the key! Great ideas are a dime a dozen... you gotta push push PUSH to drive your little gem through all these crazy obstacles and hurdles. You need to learn more stuff than you ever thought possible. You need to push your introverted self to new levels of discomfort. You need to grow the thickest skin and elicit painful but honest feedback about your game, and then you need to learn what to do with that feedback - not everything may be directly applicable, but some of it may be the most important feedback, even if that represents the need to strip your baby down to studs and rebuild. It's super hard work... but the rewards on the other end are otherworldly!

MP: It’s a saturated market, but there’s a reason it’s saturated – we’re in the midst of a Board Game Renaissance!! Embrace it! Enjoy it! My specific advice actually comes from my *brief* days as an author: Get in front of people! Even Stephen King *still* attends conventions, meets fans and signs books. He understands that to remain relevant, he needs to remain in front of people. Schlep yourself to conventions, unpubs and other events with your game(s). Talk to people. Play with people. And, eventually, demo your game with the aim to sell it to people. Stay relevant & active.

Cheers!

#the game crafter #hall of fame #board games #game design #board game design

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sheminecrafts · 7 years ago

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‘SmartLens’ app created by a high schooler is a step towards all-purpose visual search

A couple of years ago I was eagerly expectant of an app that would identify anything you pointed it at. Turns out the problem was much harder than anyone expected — but that didn’t stop high school senior Michael Royzen from trying. His app, SmartLens, attempts to solve the problem of seeing something and wanting to identify and learn more about it — with mixed success, to be sure, but it’s something I don’t mind having in my pocket.

Royzen reached out to me a while back and I was curious — as well as skeptical — about the idea that where the likes of Google and Apple have so far failed (or at least failed to release anything good), a high schooler working in his spare time would succeed. I met him at a coffee shop to see the app in action and was pleasantly surprised, but a little baffled.

The idea is simple, of course: You point your phone’s camera at something and the app attempts to identify it using an enormous but highly optimized classification agent trained on tens of millions of images. It connects to Wikipedia and Amazon to let you immediately learn more about what you’ve ID’ed, or buy it.

It recognizes more than 17,000 objects — things like different species of fruit and flower, landmarks, tools and so on. The app had little trouble telling an apple from a (weird-looking) mango, a banana from a plantain and even identified the pistachios I’d ordered as a snack. Later, in my own testing, I found it quite useful for identifying the plants springing up in my neighborhood: periwinkles, anemones, wood sorrel, it got them all, though not without the occasional hesitation.

The kicker is that this all happens offline — it’s not sending an image over the cell network or Wi-Fi to a server somewhere to be analyzed. It all happens on-device and within a second or two. Royzen scraped his own image database from various sources and trained up multiple convolutional neural networks using days of AWS EC2 compute time.

Then there are far more than that number in products that it recognizes by reading the text of the item and querying the Amazon database. It ID’ed books, a bottle of pills and other packaged goods almost instantly, providing links to buy them. Wikipedia links pop up if you’re online as well, though a considerable amount of basic descriptions are kept on the device.

On that note, it must be said that SmartLens is a more than 500-megabyte download. Royzen’s model is huge, since it must keep all the recognition data and offline content right there on the phone. This is a much different approach to the problem than Amazon’s own product recognition engine on the Fire Phone (RIP) or Google Goggles (RIP) or the scan feature in Google Photos (which was pretty useless for things SmartLens reliably did in half a second).

“With the several past generations of smartphones containing desktop-class processors and the advent of native machine learning APIs that can harness them (and GPUs), the hardware exists for a blazing-fast visual search engine,” Royzen wrote in an email. But none of the large companies you would expect to create one has done so. Why?

The app size and toll on the processor is one thing, for sure, but the edge and on-device processing is where all this stuff will go eventually — Royzen is just getting an early start. The likely truth is twofold: it’s hard to make money and the quality of the search isn’t high enough.

It must be said at this point that SmartLens, while smart, is far from infallible. Its suggestions for what an item might be are almost always hilariously wrong for a moment before arriving at, as it often does, the correct answer.

It identified one book I had as “White Whale,” and no, it wasn’t Moby Dick. An actual whale paperweight it decided was a trowel. Many items briefly flashed guesses of “Human being” or “Product design” before getting to a guess with higher confidence. One flowering bush it identified as four or five different plants — including, of course, Human Being. My monitor was a “computer display,” “liquid crystal display,” “computer monitor,” “computer,” “computer screen,” “display device” and more. Game controllers were all “control.” A spatula was a wooden spoon (close enough), with the inexplicable subheading “booby prize.” What?!

This level of performance (and weirdness in general, however entertaining) wouldn’t be tolerated in a standalone product released by Google or Apple. Google Lens was slow and bad, but it’s just an optional feature in a working, useful app. If it put out a visual search app that identified flowers as people, the company would never hear the end of it.

And the other side of it is the monetization aspect. Although it’s theoretically convenient to be able to snap a picture of a book your friend has and instantly order it, it isn’t so much more convenient than taking a picture and searching for it later, or just typing the first few words into Google or Amazon, which will do the rest for you.

Meanwhile for the user there is still confusion. What can it identify? What can’t it identify? What do I need it to identify? It’s meant to ID many things, from dog breeds and storefronts, but it likely won’t identify, for example, a cool Bluetooth speaker or mechanical watch your friend has, or the creator of a painting at a local gallery (some paintings are recognized, though). As I used it I felt like I was only ever going to use it for a handful of tasks in which it had proven itself, like identifying flowers, but would be hesitant to try it on many other things when I might just be frustrated by some unknown incapability or unreliability.

And yet the idea that in the very near future there will not be something just like SmartLens is ridiculous to me. It seems so clearly something we will all take for granted in a few years. And it’ll be on-device, no need to upload your image to a server somewhere to be analyzed on your behalf.

Royzen’s app has its issues, but it works very well in many circumstances and has obvious utility. The idea that you could point your phone at the restaurant you’re across the street from and see Yelp reviews two seconds later — no need to open up a map or type in an address or name — is an extremely natural expansion of existing search paradigms.

“Visual search is still a niche, but my goal is to give people the taste of a future where one app can deliver useful information about anything around them — today,” wrote Royzen. “Still, it’s inevitable that big companies will launch their competing offerings eventually. My strategy is to beat them to market as the first universal visual search app and amass as many users as possible so I can stay ahead (or be acquired).”

My biggest gripe of all, however, is not the functionality of the app, but in how Royzen has decided to monetize it. Users can download it for free but upon opening it are immediately prompted to sign up for a $2/month subscription — before they can even see whether the app works or not. If I didn’t already know what the app did and didn’t do, I would delete it without a second thought upon seeing that dialog, and even knowing what I do, I’m not likely to pay in perpetuity for it.

A one-time fee to activate the app would be more than reasonable, and there’s always the option of referral codes for those Amazon purchases. But demanding rent from users who haven’t even tested the product is a non-starter. I’ve told Royzen my concerns and I hope he reconsiders.

It would also be nice to scan images you’ve already taken, or save images associated with searches. UI improvements like a confidence indicator or some kind of feedback to let you know it’s still working on identification would be nice as well — features that are at least theoretically on the way.

In the end I’m impressed with Royzen’s efforts — when I take a step back it’s amazing to me that it’s possible for a single person, let alone one in high school, to put together an app capable of completing such sophisticated computer vision tasks. It’s the kind of (over-) ambitious app-building one expects to come out of a big, playful company like the Google of a decade ago. This may be more of a curiosity than a tool right now, but so were the first text-based search engines.

SmartLens is in the App Store now — give it a shot.

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rebeccahpedersen · 7 years ago

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Going On Vacation!

TorontoRealtyBlog

Folks, I haven’t had a vacation since last August.

And as a thrice-divorced client once told me, “Don’t worry about your family, they’ll be fine! Just keep working, and they’ll always be there when you get home.”

So with that in mind, we’re heading to Atlantis. Yes! Atlantis!

They say it’s a myth, but I just knew this wonderful underwater city existed…

I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to learn that the “Atlantis” we’re going to is a resort in the Bahamas, and not a secret, mysterious city that exists underwater, like in the above photo.

What the hell am I going to do with this Bare Velocity 5mm wetsuit? Not to mention all the tanks of oxygen…

Yes, we’re going to Atlantis.

It took a lot of back and forth, but eventually we settled on this resort on Paradise Island, Bahamas.

It was where we initially started looking, but then Ramon just absolutely rocked my world, and threw our plans into disarray.

You know those “Live Chat” pop-ups that exist on most sites, including real estate websites? Well the Atlantis website has a live-chat pop-up, and somebody named “Ramon” asked me if he could help, so I thought, “Okay, sure!”

I wrote, “Ramon, I see on the website that kids need to be at least 3-years-old to use a lot of the facilities in this extremely ‘child-friendly’ resort. My daughter is about 1 1/2 years old, can she not play with the Lego, watch the movies, or pet the turtles?”

Ramon responded, “Thank you for your interest in Atlantis. All the activities require that children must be at least 3-years-old.”

Somewhat defeated, and I guess, unsure of the reason for the requirement, I said, “But my 1 1/2 year old daughter plays Lego here in Toronto, and watches movies.”

Ramon repeated, “Unfortunately, all the activities require that children must be at least 3-years-old.”

So then I turned into a jerk and said, “Geez, Atlantis is marketed everywhere as this ‘family-friendly’ resort, I guess it’s not, eh?”

And amazingly, Ramon responded, “It is, just for families with children over 3-years-old.”

So I said, “Great, I’ll go to Florida.”

And Ramon said, “Thank you for choosing Atlantis!”

Hurt, and vindictive, I replied, “But I’m NOT choosing Atlantis, Ramon!”

He told me to have a great day, and closed the chat window, on me!

So with Atlantis out of the picture, we started to look for other places to go to – preferably ones that were more family-friendly.

My travel agent (yes, I have one…) suggested the “Sandals” for families, known as “Beaches.” I guess the marketing people weren’t feeling original on the day they picked the name, but I digress…

Quite happy with Sandals in the past, my wife and I were encouraged by the idea of an all-inclusive resort, by the same company as Sandals, but for families! The only problem was the locations.

Something called…………Zika Virus?

Turks & Caicos, Negril, Ocho Rio…

…zika, zika, zika.

And look, the odds are low, and depending on who you ask, it’s not an issue.

But with Baby Fleming V2.0 in the master plan, why risk it?

So with the islands out of the question, we started to look where most other people look: Florida.

I’m not a huge fan of Florida, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because everybody goes to Florida, and I’m not really an assimilation/conformity kind of guy. I’m also very binary, so I think if you’re going to do something, you should go all out. And if I’m going to take a week off work, I should make it count, and go to a tropical island, rather than some random B- resort a swamp-like state.

So we started looking around, randomly Googling “best places to vacation for families in Florida,” and I realized just how many SEO experts, sitting in how many coding-caves across the world, were waiting for a sucker just like me.

We found a couple of places online in the Florida Keys that looked good, but when I showed my wife the series of over-water bridges and highways that connect the Keys, she freaked out. I suppose all the facilities that are temporarily shut down because of Hurricane Irma didn’t help me plead my case…

Google took us everywhere from North Captiva Island, to Longboat Key and back.

But when my wife found some random resort that wasn’t even on the ocean, but rather on a small lake that looked like a swamp, I was so depressed by the idea that I said, “We need a new plan.”

I came home that evening, and my wife was beaming.

“I got it! I have it all figured out!” she said.

And like the advertising gimmick has taught us to say over the years, she shouted, “We’re going to Disney World”

I forced a fake smile; who wouldn’t? I love my wife, I’d go to Nunavut if she wanted to.

But the idea of going to Disney World didn’t set well with me.

You see, I’m a seasoned traveller, and I know that the one distinction you need to make at the very start of planning a get-away is to decide whether you’re going on a trip, or a vacation.

The two could not possibly be more different.

Who wants to do a vineyard tour in Italy? Sound fun?

Well, that’s a trip.

That’s a grind. A “schlep,” if you will.

It’s a long flight, it’s in a different time zone, and you’re constantly on the move, from town to town, riding buses, in and out of hotels, packing and unpacking. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful journey; a fantasy for many! One that I’d love to embark upon one day.

But it’s not a vacation. It’s a trip.

Now you might not want a vacation. You might look at your cousins, who visit their grandparents’ condo twice per year, plop by the pool, sit on their phones all day, and then head to a strip mall for dinner every night, and think, “I have no interest in that.” And I can’t say I blame you.

To each, their own, no doubt. And there is truly something for everyone.

But right now, in my life, and looking at what’s best for my wife and child, I think we need to avoid a trip, and take a resting vacation.

So……..Disney World. Right.

Buses to monorails, monorails to shuttles, shuttles to golf carts. That’s a non-stop schlep, and the thought of doing that every day for a week made me cringe.

This trip is for me, but more importantly, it’s for my daughter, and for our family. I don’t see my daughter as much as I’d like to, and at 17-months-old, it’s now that I can really “connect” with her, spending 24 hours per day together, for eight days.

As much as I liked the idea of Maya laughing at Goofy, or being wowed by Mickey, I know in my heart that she won’t remember any of this. She’s just too young.

And buses, monorails, shuttles, and golf carts are going to wear her down. Not to mention, wear my wife and I out.

My wife came to this conclusion on her own, thankfully! I feared the plan from the get-go, and ultimately nature took its course.

So now what? Where did we go from here?

I know this is the classic definition of “first word problems,” trust me. The irony of not being able to find a suitable place to vacation is not lost on me. This is just a story, so call it what it is.

But after two weeks of back-and-forth on locations, we finally came full circle.

And you know who made the decision in the end? Our daughter.

Like most children her age, Maya seems to be completely and utterly enthralled by just about anything. She could find a leaf on the ground outside, and play with it for an hour.

We were in Winners one day, and Maya was entertaining herself by picking up shoes, looking at herself in the mirror, and well, just about anything or anyone she came across. My wife looked at me and said, “I’m pretty sure we could take her anywhere, and she would have a good time.”

We watched her move around, from item to item, fascinated by everything in her path.

And we soon realized that we didn’t need “Lego World” at Atlantis, or their “Sea Adventure” program for children 3-and-up for Maya to have a good time. As my wife said, “We’ll probably walk from the room to the beach, and she’ll stop every ten feet to play with a stick.”

So in the end, we figured we may as well just go to Atlantis!

She can play with what’s allowed to, just as Ramon told me during our epic live-chat session.

She’ll make her own good time, as she always does, wherever she goes.

The weather is better than in Florida, it’s a direct flight, and believe it or not – it costs less than Disney World anyhow!

I am bringing my laptop with me. It’s unavoidable in this business, but I’m looking forward to some quality time with the two special ladies in my life!

I won’t be posting new material until next Monday, but I won’t leave the blog to get stale – I’m going to turn back the clocks on a couple of old videos for Wednesday and Friday!

See you back on Monday the 30th!

The post Going On Vacation! appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

Originated from https://ift.tt/2Jlj9Y7

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mysteryshelf · 8 years ago

Text

FRIDAY SF & FANTASY - Esme's Wish

Welcome to

THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF!

DISCLAIMER: This content has been provided to THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF by YA Bound Book Tours. No compensation was received. This information required by the Federal Trade Commission.

Esme’s Wish by Elizabeth Foster Genre: YA Fantasy/Mystery Release Date: October 2017 Odyssey Books

Summary:

This was her last chance. Her hand twisted high in the air.

When fifteen-year-old Esme Silver objects at her father’s wedding, her protest is dismissed as the impulsive reaction of a stubborn, selfish teenager. Everyone else has accepted the loss of Esme’s mother – so why can’t she?

But Esme is suspicious. She is sure that others are covering up the real reason for her mother’s disappearance – that ‘lost at sea’ is code for something more terrible, something she has a right to know.

After Esme is accidentally swept into the enchanted world of Aeolia, the truth begins to unfold. With her newfound friends, Daniel and Lillian, Esme retraces her mother’s steps in the glittering canal city of Esperance, untangling the threads of Ariane’s double life. But the more Esme discovers about her mother, the more she questions whether she really knew her at all…

Add to Goodreads

Preview part of the first chapter on Kobo – https://www.goodreads.com/buy_buttons/6/follow?book_id=33634667

Purchase your copy of Esme’s Wish at elizabethfoster.com.au

Book Trailer:

youtube

Advance Praise:

“I found the story very unique […] this book overtook my expectations […] A beautiful, fantastical mystery. I would love to read multiple books following this one.” – Tamsyn, 15

“I was enchanted by the world, awed by the creatures and as motivated as Esme to find out what happened to her mother.” – Angie, 14

Esme’s Wish is a captivating, excellently-written novel. Author Elizabeth Foster did a great job of keeping me reading as I followed Esme’s journey to investigate the disappearance of her mother, a brilliant painter. […] This colorful, well-constructed tale is as much detective story as fantasy and deftly blends both elements into a page-turning plot that hooks the reader in. I was fascinated by the creative water world of Aeolia, described in Elizabeth Foster’s limpid, seductive prose. –Sarah Scheele for Readers’ Favorite 5 STARS

Interview with the Author

What initially got you interested in writing?

I’ve always loved to read. One day, many years ago, after finishing the Harry Potter series, I realised how much I missed the sense of escapism it gave me, and I decided to write a book of my own.

What genres do you write in?

Esme’s Wish is a fantasy with elements of mystery and adventure.

What drew you to writing these specific genres?

My favourite book as a child was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I loved the idea of climbing into a wardrobe and ending up somewhere entirely different. I like travelling, too, and I love magic, so the genre just seems a natural fit.

How did you break into the field?

Work, work, work. It has taken a long time to fulfill my dream of becoming a published author. I worked very hard at every element of my craft, listened to all the feedback I could and rewrote endless drafts. Eventually my work made its way out of the slush pile (that being the morass of unread manuscripts that pile up in a publisher’s inbox.)

What do you want readers to take away from reading your works?

I love to forget about everyday life when I read, and I hope I can provide the same immersion for others, too.

What do you find most rewarding about writing?

When I sit down to write, I enter a bubble which I never want to leave. The hardest part is starting!

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Disciplining myself enough to start! Initially, I also found it very hard to take the critique needed to improve, and deal with rejection from publishers. Eventually I developed the thick skin necessary to survive and realized that criticism is an inevitable part of the creative process.

What advice would you give to people wanting to enter the field?

Read, read, read, but read discerningly. Read widely and read outside your preferred genres. But write about subjects you enjoy, especially when just starting out. The self-doubt can be crippling but if you focus on things that interest you, it is easier to slip out of anxiety and into the world you are writing about.

What type of books do you enjoy reading?

Anything with a great story and an interesting voice, even non-fiction. But mostly classics, fantasy and children’s novels.

Is there anything else besides writing you think people would find interesting about you?

I guess this is still related to writing, but I’m a case in point that it’s never too late to find your passion. When I was younger, I always felt like I should be doing something creative, but I didn’t know what. I delayed exploring my creative side until I was older, and wish I’d listened to that inner voice much earlier. To those who think they’re too old to write (or paint, learn an instrument, anything really): start now, you won’t regret it. And to those who are still young: for the love of god, don’t wait as long as I did!

What are the best ways to connect with you, or find out more about your work?

Find out more about me on my website at elizabethfoster.com.au. Follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

About the Author

Elizabeth Foster read avidly as a child, but only discovered the joys of writing some years ago, when reading to her own kids reminded her of how much she missed getting lost in other worlds. Elizabeth lives in Sydney, where she can be found scribbling in cafés, indulging her love of both words and coffee. Esme’s Wish is her debut novel.

Find out more about Elizabeth at http://www.elizabethfoster.com.au

Author Links:

Goodreads│Twitter│Instagram

GIVEAWAY:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Blog Tour Organized by:

YA Bound Book Tours

FRIDAY SF & FANTASY – Esme’s Wish was originally published on the Wordpress version of The Pulp and Mystery Shelf with Shannon Muir

#shannon muir #pulp and mystery shelf

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fesahaawit · 8 years ago

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My Journey To Freedom: $12 to $1,800,000 in 32 Years

[Hey guys! This is the start of Mr. 1500‘s weekly Wednesday posts here on the blog. We thought we’d kick it off with the backstory on how he came to reach financial independence, as it’s something most of us are still striving for (including myself!). We hope you enjoy the new column!]

******

At the age of 43, with a net worth of over $1,800,000, I left my job.

April 13th of this year was my last day of work. I left a high paying position where I worked from home, had incredible flexibility, and worked with great people. I gave up a lot, but haven’t looked back for even a moment.

Just 17 years ago, I was neck-deep in $60,000 of suffocating college-loan debt.

But we have to back up even further to explain how I got to where I am today. While I’ve made most of my money in the past 5 years (this is how compound interest works), the events that propelled my journey to financial independence (FI) started when I was a child.

There are six of them that stand out. The first one happened over 30 years ago when I was just 12.

The Six Events that Propelled Me to FI

#1) Losing 6 Weeks of Pay

Age: 12 Net worth: $12.00, and then $0.00

My parents called my sister and I into the kitchen for a big announcement. In less than two months, we’d be going on a vacation to Silver Dollar City, an amusement park in Missouri. My mother also told us that they’d start paying us an allowance of $2.00/week so we’d have money in case we wanted to buy a souvenir there. Whoopee!

Looking back, my parents got a great deal. To earn my $2.00, I had to:

mow the grass (a large lawn with an ancient lawnmower)

trim the bushes (it felt like there were a million of them)

cut the grass under the bushes with a hand trimmer

take out the trash

pick up dog poop

All of this work took at least 4 hours per week, but I was so excited to be earning money that I didn’t care. By the time we jumped in the family van for vacation, I had $12.00 in my brown, velcro wallet. I felt rich. Then, it was gone.

On the first day at the amusement park, I lost my wallet and along with it, all $12.00. I checked the Lost and Found, but it wasn’t there. My mother was a strict, no bullsh*t type of person who was less than sympathetic. At one point, I was lamenting my loss when she looked at me and said:

You should have been more careful. I guess you won’t be getting anything.

I felt broken. I had put in lots of work to earn that $12.00 and it was gone.

That day taught me not to be careless with money. And it went deeper than simply keeping my wallet safe. It was the first time I appreciated the work that goes into earning money. I’ve been mindful with how I spend my dollars ever since.

#2) The Most Valuable Day of My Life

Age: 20 Net worth: -$40,000 (college debt)

When I was in my junior year of college, a girlfriend told me that we should go to a weekend investing seminar that she learned about in accounting class. I immediately thought that it was a pyramid scheme or some kind of scam, so I resisted. She was really excited about it, so I gave in and we signed up.

The seminar was legitimate. It was given by a non-profit group whose goal was to educate people on the importance of saving and the basics of investing. Early on in the seminar, one of the speakers explained that anyone with dreams of getting rich quick should leave. For those who were patient though, there were ways to acquire wealth. I learned about compound interest, diversification, the effect of mutual fund fees on returns and why individual stocks are a bad idea for most people. This was the information that everyone needs to know, but isn’t usually taught in school.

However, the most valuable advice came during the second day of the seminar. The instructor was talking about the importance of giving investments enough time to grow. He paused for a moment and looked around. Eventually, he locked eyes with me in the back row and said what may be the most important words I’ve ever heard:

Your advantage is your youth. Start now.

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. And the fire was lit. It would still be a while before I started to earn real money, but when I did, I started saving. The girlfriend and I didn’t last, but the lessons did.

#3) Finding a Good Partner

Age: 26 Net worth: -$60,000 (more college debt)

My wife and I have been married for 15 years and I couldn’t be more fortunate. In my wife, I have someone who:

isn’t interested in silly status items like $800 purses

works hard

is a genuinely good person

And it almost didn’t happen. When I met her, I was so busy with work that I had no interest in dating. In one of my better decisions, I relented. The rest is history and mostly marital bliss.

She has put up with a lifestyle that most wouldn’t tolerate. Mostly relating to live-in flipping. In the most recent example, we spent the last four years fixing up a home while raising two children. For much of that time, we both worked. At the low point, it was about 10 degrees outside and the furnace went out. To add to the misery, the house was torn apart and everything was covered in drywall dust from demolition.

Current home, before and after

I don’t remember her ever complaining. We’ve been able to accomplish what we have because we complement each other.

#4) Flipping my First Home

Age: 30 Net worth: $120,000 (college debt conquered!)

I became a home flipper by accident. I had bought a small home after college and it needed some work. Contractors are a pain to deal with, so I taught myself basic plumbing, electricity and tile setting.

We unexpectedly made $100,000 in profit when we sold the home. Best of all, the gains were tax-free (see the 2 out of 5 year IRS rule). Shortly before closing on the sale, my wife and I looked at each other and said:

Let’s do this again.

We bought another home that needed a lot of cosmetic work, but was structurally sound. We did this with almost every house from that point on. The core of our nest egg was built flipping homes.

#5) A Bad Day at Work

Age: 37 Net worth: $700,000 ($550,000 in investments and $150,000 in home equity)

I was a saver and was doing pretty well. How many 37-year-olds are closing in on a net worth of $1,000,000? But I was living a normal life. We had just bought a nice home in a cookie-cutter suburb. Our kids had good schools. Life was fine. Then, my job gave me a huge kick in the ass.

I had a horrible day at work. I was a software developer and there was a bad bug in the code. I thought I was going to get fired and the stress was incredible. I hardly ate for a week and lost 10 pounds. At one point in the ordeal, I said to myself:

I can’t do this for another 25 years.

I googled something like:

How do I retire early?

Google introduced me to JD Roth and Mr. Money Mustache (MMM), but I was skeptical. I thought they were both selling some kind of scam. MMM retired in his early 30s. No one does that. And then I looked at the numbers he presented. People may lie, but numbers don’t. This MMM guy was telling the truth. On the same day I discovered early retirement, I did 3 things:

Calculated my FI number: I needed about $40,000/year or a million dollars in savings to retire per the 4% Rule.

Figured out how long it would take to accumulate $1,000,000: 1500 days was the magic number.

Changed up our life: We would sell our $400,000, 4500 square foot home and move into something much more modest. Our next home was an unloved rental that had gone into foreclosure.

The code bug wasn’t as bad as I initially suspected, and I didn’t lose my job. However, I was now on the path to early retirement.

#6) Finding my Passion

Age: 41 Net worth: $1,000,000+

There was one great big thing I didn’t realize when I started my journey to early retirement. It was this:

Money is nothing more than a facilitator. It’s just a tool. Money is an empty goal.

So, I had a goal of leaving work, but I had no idea of what I’d do after I left. For a while, I felt like an idiot:

You have this huge goal of quitting work that you’ve been writing about for a couple of years, but you have no idea of what happens after that? Better figure it out dude!

I felt lost, empty and ridiculous. You can’t retire to nothing.

And then I realized that the answer had been with me the whole time:

Write, dummy, write!

My Passion Reignited

I had always enjoyed writing and even considered studying journalism in college. I decided against it because the job prospects weren’t so great. I ended up working as a software developer, but never forgot about my passion for writing. Thus, why I started 1500Days.com.

While I did eventually start making money from 1500 Days, in the first 3 years it made less than $1,000. But that didn’t stop me from working furiously on it. I was staying up until midnight during the week, working on weekends and carrying around a notebook to record ideas at all times. I did it because I loved writing. I considered giving up a couple times, but when I stepped away, I realized how much I’d miss it if I hit the Delete button. I always went back.

Working as a software developer, I brought in substantial income. Working as a blogger, I bring in substantial happiness. While I’m thankful for the money, the latter is much better.

And now look – I’m writing here at Budgets Are Sexy! :)

And that’s how I became financially independent in 32 years.

My Journey To Freedom: $12 to $1,800,000 in 32 Years posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

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heliosfinance · 8 years ago

Text

My Journey To Freedom: $12 to $1,800,000 in 32 Years

******

At the age of 43, with a net worth of over $1,800,000, I left my job.

Just 17 years ago, I was neck-deep in $60,000 of suffocating college-loan debt.

There are six of them that stand out. The first one happened over 30 years ago when I was just 12.

The Six Events that Propelled Me to FI

#1) Losing 6 Weeks of Pay

Age: 12 Net worth: $12.00, and then $0.00

Looking back, my parents got a great deal. To earn my $2.00, I had to:

mow the grass (a large lawn with an ancient lawnmower)

trim the bushes (it felt like there were a million of them)

cut the grass under the bushes with a hand trimmer

take out the trash

pick up dog poop

You should have been more careful. I guess you won’t be getting anything.

I felt broken. I had put in lots of work to earn that $12.00 and it was gone.

#2) The Most Valuable Day of My Life

Age: 20 Net worth: -$40,000 (college debt)

Your advantage is your youth. Start now.

#3) Finding a Good Partner

Age: 26 Net worth: -$60,000 (more college debt)

My wife and I have been married for 15 years and I couldn’t be more fortunate. In my wife, I have someone who:

isn’t interested in silly status items like $800 purses

works hard

is a genuinely good person

And it almost didn’t happen. When I met her, I was so busy with work that I had no interest in dating. In one of my better decisions, I relented. The rest is history and mostly marital bliss.

Current home, before and after

I don’t remember her ever complaining. We’ve been able to accomplish what we have because we complement each other.

#4) Flipping my First Home

Age: 30 Net worth: $120,000 (college debt conquered!)

Let’s do this again.

We bought another home that needed a lot of cosmetic work, but was structurally sound. We did this with almost every house from that point on. The core of our nest egg was built flipping homes.

#5) A Bad Day at Work

Age: 37 Net worth: $700,000 ($550,000 in investments and $150,000 in home equity)

I can’t do this for another 25 years.

I googled something like:

How do I retire early?

Calculated my FI number: I needed about $40,000/year or a million dollars in savings to retire per the 4% Rule.

Figured out how long it would take to accumulate $1,000,000: 1500 days was the magic number.

Changed up our life: We would sell our $400,000, 4500 square foot home and move into something much more modest. Our next home was an unloved rental that had gone into foreclosure.

The code bug wasn’t as bad as I initially suspected, and I didn’t lose my job. However, I was now on the path to early retirement.

#6) Finding my Passion

Age: 41 Net worth: $1,000,000+

There was one great big thing I didn’t realize when I started my journey to early retirement. It was this:

Money is nothing more than a facilitator. It’s just a tool. Money is an empty goal.

So, I had a goal of leaving work, but I had no idea of what I’d do after I left. For a while, I felt like an idiot:

You have this huge goal of quitting work that you’ve been writing about for a couple of years, but you have no idea of what happens after that? Better figure it out dude!

I felt lost, empty and ridiculous. You can’t retire to nothing.

And then I realized that the answer had been with me the whole time:

Write, dummy, write!

My Passion Reignited

Working as a software developer, I brought in substantial income. Working as a blogger, I bring in substantial happiness. While I’m thankful for the money, the latter is much better.

And now look – I’m writing here at Budgets Are Sexy! :)

And that’s how I became financially independent in 32 years.

My Journey To Freedom: $12 to $1,800,000 in 32 Years published first on http://ift.tt/2ljLF4B

0 notes

yes-dal456 · 8 years ago

Text

New App Offers Ingenious Option For Guys Who Are Too Shy To Send Dick Pics

Sex Heroes is an ongoing HuffPost Q&A series by Voices Editorial Director Noah Michelson that explores the lives and experiences of individuals who are challenging, and thereby changing, mainstream culture’s understanding of sex and sexuality.

In our modern age of online dating and internet hook ups, dick pics, for better or for worse, have become a kind of digital currency ― especially for gay men. Hop on Grindr or Scruff or any other web app designed to connect men looking for love ― or just someone to get off with ― and it won’t be long before you’re asked to show exactly what you’re packing.

For some, sharing explicit images isn’t a big deal. But for those who are worried about privacy and want to avoid having their nether bits distributed to anyone ― or everyone ― on the internet, dick pics have been seen as a total no-go.

Gyorgy Szucs, the 28-year-old gay CEO and founder of design and code company Creative Robot, wants to help eradicate dick pic stigma while promoting sex and body positivity and what he refers to as “kinkiness.” He’s developed a new app, called Dick Code, that lets users choose from a number of illustrations that most closely match their genitals and then generates a “code” that they can send to whomever they choose without fearing that move might eventually come back to haunt them.

Dick Code asks each user to select from a variety of physical penis characteristics ― from size and girth to hairiness and curvature ― in order to create an intimate profile of their member that is as representative as possible. Dick Codes also offers additional information that a dick pic can’t, like the trajectory and pattern of the individual’s ejaculate.

“I started by drawing many dicks as a practice,” Szucs told me in an email. “First I started with the obvious categories, like size and circumference and then I went on to the ‘dirty’ stuff and added everything that my mind could think of absolutely shamelessly.”

Szucs, who is originally from Hungary but currently resides in Santiago, Chile, also shared with me where the inspiration for Dick Code originally came from, his thoughts on the politics of dick pics (especially involving straight men sending unwanted images to women), his upcoming plans for Vagina Code and Sex Code apps and more.

The Huffington Post: Where did the idea for Dick Code come from? Was there a specific “a ha!” moment of inspiration? Gyorgy Szucs: I received a picture from a friend with drawn penises where you could choose the right one for you. I felt it was incomplete and too complicated to communicate the result. I immediately thought it could be a great web app, especially if I put my kinkiness in it as well.

Do you intend for people to really use it when communicating with others online? Or is it more of an art or conversation piece? I wanted a simple, handy tool that enables people to communicate more about their sexual features. I focused on the parts we tend to be shy about, so I intentionally didn’t give descriptions. I’m a very rational person, so I don’t feel like it’s an art piece ― I just want to help people and bring out their kink.

Dick pics are controversial and can be problematic because they are often sent to people who don’t want them ― especially by straight men to straight women. What are your personal thoughts about the politics of dick pics? It depends. I believe if you receive a dick pic you didn’t ask for, most likely that means the owner of it has an ugly face and/or personality. But if you’re already in a conversation with someone online looking for a hookup, and passed the mental check, I see no problem in exchanging hot pics. Now you can exchange dick codes too.

Do you think that dick pics work differently among gay men versus non-gay people? How do you think women feel about this and do you think straight men would use Dick Code? Let me tell you ― [by looking at Google analytics I learned that] 40 percent of the 1 million visitors I had in four days were women. I thought it would be a gay thing only, but I think now I’ll have to interview straight women too to see what’s going on. Based on the feedback so far, I believe that girls use it to describe their favorite dick. Straight guys don’t really use it, in fact they are mostly disgusted by this, but maybe they will soon be asked by their next date to share their dick code. No escape.

What has the response been? What are people saying? I’m having such fun days. I’m receiving like 50 messages a day about how ingenious the idea is, how easy it became for shy people to be more kinky. They are laughing a lot while still sharing features they never talked about before. And the most amazing part is that people who created and shared their dick code tell me how surprisingly positive the responses are. They believed that their dick was not impressive as it is not “big,” but they had now come to the realization that people (women especially) are kinky deep inside and find certain aspects of a dick impressive, other than just the size.

And of course, girls keep asking for the V[agina] Code. I’m already working on that, I just need lots of help as I’m not experienced in that area.

Are there other “codes” in the works and when will they roll out? Vagina Code and Sex Code. The latter will be basically about sex positions and games. Kinky games. I believe the V Code will come in the following few weeks, and the Sex Code after that. I’ll update the Dick Code page with details.

I’m absolutely shocked by the fact how many women use the Dick Code. I think the V code will be fun for straight guys mostly, but I guess the Sex Code will turn into the next “50 Shades of Grey.”

What do you ultimately want people to take away from this project? I believe it is a fun tool to bring out your kinkiness in a very safe way and share it with your partner. It’s easy to tap innocent drawn images about dirty stuff. It is definitely not just a gay thing. People tell me and now I believe that I started something big, something that might reform online dating and the way we talk about sex. I’ll keep adding ways to it. I hope that dating sites will realize the value and maybe add a field in people’s profile for D, V and Sex Codes.

You can visit Dick Code here. For more from Szucs, visit his Instagram page.

Is there a sex hero you think deserves to be covered on The Huffington Post? Send an email to Noah Michelson.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2oqaOZc from Blogger http://ift.tt/2pHETHB

#http://www.happiness2arab.tk/2017/04/new-app-offers-ingenious-option-for.html

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ongames · 8 years ago

Text

New App Offers Ingenious Option For Guys Who Are Too Shy To Send Dick Pics

And of course, girls keep asking for the V[agina] Code. I’m already working on that, I just need lots of help as I’m not experienced in that area.

You can visit Dick Code here. For more from Szucs, visit his Instagram page.

Is there a sex hero you think deserves to be covered on The Huffington Post? Send an email to Noah Michelson.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

New App Offers Ingenious Option For Guys Who Are Too Shy To Send Dick Pics published first on http://ift.tt/2lnpciY

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imreviewblog · 8 years ago

Text

New App Offers Ingenious Option For Guys Who Are Too Shy To Send Dick Pics

And of course, girls keep asking for the V[agina] Code. I’m already working on that, I just need lots of help as I’m not experienced in that area.

You can visit Dick Code here. For more from Szucs, visit his Instagram page.

Is there a sex hero you think deserves to be covered on The Huffington Post? Send an email to Noah Michelson.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2pGkPTm

#Healthy Living - The Huffington Post

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metacog · 8 years ago

Text

A precise definition of 'magic'

I've long gravitated towards programming languages with less 'magic', as compared to others with lots. I've even mentioned this in my Principles for Technology Choice essay, where I said:

Pick explicit frameworks and languages. There’s a tendency in some software tools to provide large, all-encompassing abstractions in order to make the programmer’s life easier. I stay away from such tools because they take longer for me to learn, they take more cognitive overhead to debug, and they require more effort to load context when returning to them as old codebases.

I know that this is a conscious tradeoff I’m making: I am willing to sacrifice some speed for more maintainability and legibility. This matters to me because I don’t have much time to maintain my code. Magic is unacceptable under these constraints.

Whenever I express this opinion, however, it's inevitable that someone will chime in and say "what do you mean by magic? C is magical; you never have to worry about the differences in the underlying instruction set. Does that mean that you don't like C, and want to code in assembly instead?"

This is a valid point. The best I've done so far in defence of this argument is to say "well, I guess C isn't a leaky abstraction, whereas frameworks like Rails has lots of leaky abstractions" – but that's no good either. It's an unsatisfactory defence because the magic of a compiler is different from the magic of a web framework. The functional boundaries are different.

And now you can see where this goes ... the person eventually says "you're just saying that you don't understand how Rails works, so you're calling it magic" – which is valid, but I believe that magical abstractions have high cost in the long run; my point is that I don't appreciate the need for that cost!

If you want to generalise a bit, I think programmers stand on a spectrum of comfort with magic. On one end are the Ruby and Javascript communities, with their embrace of unicorns and Zelda. On the other are the Python and Go communities, where the programmers play Call of Duty and eat mud for breakfast. My preferences just happen to be at the Python/Go end of things.

Today, I came across a precise definition of 'magic'. I think it's more useful to discuss this issue using this definition, and discard all the above arguments (which actually conflate a whole bunch of things – Rails is great despite the magic, I believe, because it helps programmers spit out CRUD apps; my distaste for the JS and Ruby world is also somewhat mixed up with my distaste with the speed with which they break APIs, which again I've written about before – see the 'Pick technologies that are respectful of breaking API changes' section of my technology choice essay.)

Jerf writes:

Here's my personal definition for "magic", which is still a bit fuzzy around the edges, but much more solid than most loose definitions of it: A bit of code is magic when it is not sufficient to examine the tokens the code is made up of and go back to the static textual definitions of those tokens to understand what is going on.

In Python-esque pseudo-code, this is magic:

class Something: def method(): return 1 s = Something() s.WhereDidThisMethodComeFrom()

and the last line does something useful, rather than crash with "method not found". You follow `s` back to its definition, you see it's a "Something". You follow back to the Something class... and there's no "WhereDidThisMethodComeFrom". Something came along later and added it. Who? Where? Oftentimes these are so magical that grepping over the entire code base for "WhereDidThisMethodComeFrom" may not help because the name itself maybe constructed.

In more Pythonic Python, the following is middling magic:

@somedecorator class Something: # entire rest of code example pasted here

Following back to "Something" you can at least see that something has decorated it and it's a good guess that that much be involved. Still, it's a bit subtle and decorators aren't generally supposed to do that.

Not magic at all:

class Something(Superclass): # rest of example follows

This is great. A precise definition with clear parameters.

I remember an effort by the Django community to make Django less magical; jerf backs up my memory by saying that Python is mostly non-magical. That is not to say that Python can't be magical, though. My company currently uses Odoo for some of its projects. Odoo is so magical that coding with it sometimes feels like conjuring rabbits out of hats and sawing pretty assistants in half. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, you get assistant guts all over the stage and a bloody saw and you're wondering what the hell happened.

I like unmagical things. I can see now that I have been conflating the productivity boost from Rails with the magic of the framework. I wonder if these two things are related. Next challenge: to see exactly how productive I can get with unmagical tools.

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

When I was 11, my family got its first computer: an AST "Advantage!", which sported a 66 MHz 486 processor, 4 MB ram and 32 MB of hard drive space. It wasn't the greatest computer, even for the time, but it did have QBasic on it, and having always wanted to make games, I immediately dove into coding.

I stuck with QBasic for the following decade or so simply because I was comfortable with it. I made a bunch of shooters, platformers, and actually a lot of weird games. I made one called "Kill the Innocent" (download it here, but you'll need DosBox to make it work), which featured stick figures walking along a bridge, and you aim a gun at them and just kill them. I remember coding a detailed system for how the man's top-hat would float gently to the ground, and a very simple physics system that would allow you to juggle the man's head in mid-air with shotgun blasts. (I guess I was subtly picking up on the ugliness of violence in videogames even back then, although I certainly wasn't conscious of it, being that my AST Advantage was running Doom so often.)

Kill the Innocent

The thing was, though, that in all that time, I really wasn't learning much about programming. I was kinda just re-using the same ten or so programming keywords - everything was hard-coded, nothing was remotely "modular". In other words, I wasn't really learning to program. I had no idea how to "import a spritesheet" or build something that would run on Windows, let alone an iPhone. I just wasn't a programmer, really.

My Difficulties with Learning to Code

I tried over, and over, and over again in my teens and twenties to branch out and learn to code in something a bit more modern. I can't tell you how many "Learn [Insert Language Here]" books I bought, got through the first three chapters of, and then gave up.

The short answer to why I gave up? Basically, it just seemed really hard for me. More specifically, it was a kind of hard that's particularly difficult for me to apply effort towards. I now understand that programming takes a very particular kind of perseverance, and an almost faith-like belief that "I can and will find the answer".

It's possible that part of the reason was that I was an "art person". I wasn't into math or science in school, but I excelled in music, visual arts, and writing. I think I sort of identified myself as a "creative type", and so when some compile error reared its head, and wouldn't go away after the first two, three, four, five times I tried to fix it, it was easy to feel like "well, I'm not a programmer, after all - I'll need a programmer to fix this."

Ultimately, like anything else, you just have to believe that you can do it, and you will do it. But believing that isn't trivial.

The Non-Programming Designer

For the first decade or so of my career as a professional game developer, I've taken a significant or leading role in the following disciplines: visual art, music composition, sound production, graphic design, web design, writing, game design, marketing, and probably a handful of other skills. Basically: literally every single thing required to make a moderately high production value game *EXCEPT* programming, I did.

My thinking was, well, if I'm doing all of that other stuff, it's reasonable to get help from another person to take the programming role, right? That was always my opinion. I actually even kinda resented the idea that not only do I have to be the guy to do the other dozen things for a game, but I also have to program it? I should be able to find someone to fill in that gap.

And actually, I'd argue that that is reasonable, and it's doable. I've gotten several games out the door doing exactly that. To be clear: you can operate as a non-programming designer. I found teams or individuals who were looking for game designers, artists, composers, and filled those roles.

My argument is that while you can do this, to the extent that you're a game designer, you shouldn't.

Game designers - real game designers, anyway, are people who are actually experimenting with systems and trying to do something with rulesets. Technically, someone who designs a generic puzzle platformer or tower defense game is, of course, a game designer, but I'm not talking about those people. If you're "designing" a Flappy Bird clone, it's probably fine if you're not the person programming it.

For people like myself who are experimenting with new systems of interactivity, the "get a programmer" plan just really isn't practical, because unlike a Flappy Bird clone, serious game design is hard to get right the first time. Or the tenth. Or the hundredth. You need the flexibility to implement an idea when it comes to you at two in the morning like a lightning bolt. Writing an email or a to-do for someone else who might not get to it for a day or two is just too slow.

You need to be personally in the loop of playtesting, iterating and re-iterating yourself. Tweaking variables, changing how things are arranged - you need to be in there doing that. Otherwise, you have a "play by email" sort of problem where even small things can take a long time to do.

Keep in mind that there is some finite amount of time that you will end up working on your game, so you want to use it as best as you can. As the designer, being the - or a - programmer on the project, you can massively increase the number of "iteration loops" that fit into the development timeline (no matter how long or short that timeline is!)

Finally, I find that I have to balance "making the right design calls" with "making a person feel like I maybe don't respect their time" when working with a programmer. Most of the time, if I ask a programmer to code something, later on we're gonna find out that that thing I asked him to do is going to get thrown in the garbage. It's one thing to warn people up front that this will be the case, but it's another thing to be in the moment, telling a person "yeah, about that thing I made you code last week... we're ditching it". I don't want to be in a position where I might be even a little bit inclined to hesitate to make the right call just because it could piss someone off.

What About Board Games?

Board games are a good place to learn game design, and some designers, depending on their philosophy and goals, may be able to just operate making board games for their whole careers. Here's the thing though: despite the fact that there are way more well-designed board games than there are well-designed videogames, board games, as a medium, have some problems. Lots of people think that for bad reasons, like they hate that they're turn based, or they hate that they have to learn rules, or maybe they just hate that board games don't have Rapid CGI-Beheading Quicktime DLC. Those are not the real reasons. Here are the real reasons that board games are problematic:

Working with physical components causes some problems. It's difficult to have much precision in setting a good information horizon.

Lower "practical information density" - based on the practical limitations of what we could reasonably expect players to fiddle with in terms of rule upkeep, the information density - information per game element - must be oppressively low. For more detail on this and the above point, listen to this episode of my Clockwork Game Design podcast.

Rapid feedback. Make a thing, slam it up on the web, and get feedback from lots of people, strangers even, within hours. Meanwhile getting feedback on a boardgame requires scheduling and a lot of other real-life annoyances.

Commercially not really viable - I assume a lot of designers would like to make a career out of their craft, and, some exceptions aside, it's much harder to do that with paper and cardboard than it is with computer applications.

Ultimately, as I said, I do think board games are a great place for designers to learn a lot about the craft, and I do think it's possible to make some very good games out of just about anything. I just think it's a lot harder to make a great board game than it is to make a great videogame, and I think that making a great videogame is already near-impossibly hard.

Becoming a Programmer

The development of Auro: A Monster-Bumping Adventure took us five years (and counting). A big reason for that was, it was an original strategy game and I wanted to get it right. We could have launched a sorta generic, boring Rogue-like back in 2011 if I didn't care about creating something special. So we iterated, and iterated, and iterated.

But eventually, our first programmer had to move onto other things, and so we got another. And another, and another. Eventually, by about late 2013, we had run out of a lot of programmer-steam, and there were times when Auro kind of seemed like it was dead in the water. So being in that position, I sort of just had no choice - I had to learn to program now, or else all this work would have been for nothing.

Being in that position - and also, maybe, just being a bit older and having more of an attention span - helped me to really dive in and get comfortable with the codebase. Ultimately, I ended up coding a huge chunk of Auro's final code!

More recently, I've been taking an online Unity course through Udemy, as well as reading a few books on programming patterns and things like that. Obviously, I still have a long way to go, but I have gotten to the point where I can at least prototype stuff and iterate on my own, and it's extremely freeing for me as a game designer.

I still do think in an ideal world, a designer would have a "lead programmer" who specializes in that, and can set things up in a way that's not horrible, and help maintain some semblance of order in a codebase - especially for a larger, more complex game.

But what I do know is that game designers like myself, who care about producing new, interesting, deep systems of interactivity, just really need to learn to code. You can't be relying on others, and you can't really be relying on paper and cardboard. Do what it takes - pay a tutor, take a class, or just lock yourself in a hotel room with a book. I'm absolutely not saying you need to become a John Carmack and learn to build new engines with assembly language or anything like that - you just need to be able to use stuff like Game Maker or Unity to get a game from idea to prototype.

If you're a "creative type", videogames need you!

If you enjoyed this article, please support my work at Patreon.com!

#IFTTT #Blogger

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natashacubias274 · 8 years ago

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fesahaawit · 8 years ago

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My Journey To Freedom: $12 to $1,800,000 in 32 Years

******

At the age of 43, with a net worth of over $1,800,000, I left my job.

Just 17 years ago, I was neck-deep in $60,000 of suffocating college-loan debt.

There are six of them that stand out. The first one happened over 30 years ago when I was just 12.

The Six Events that Propelled Me to FI

#1) Losing 6 Weeks of Pay

Age: 12 Net worth: $12.00, and then $0.00

Looking back, my parents got a great deal. To earn my $2.00, I had to:

mow the grass (a large lawn with an ancient lawnmower)

trim the bushes (it felt like there were a million of them)

cut the grass under the bushes with a hand trimmer

take out the trash

pick up dog poop

You should have been more careful. I guess you won’t be getting anything.

I felt broken. I had put in lots of work to earn that $12.00 and it was gone.

#2) The Most Valuable Day of My Life

Age: 20 Net worth: -$40,000 (college debt)

Your advantage is your youth. Start now.

#3) Finding a Good Partner

Age: 26 Net worth: -$60,000 (more college debt)

My wife and I have been married for 15 years and I couldn’t be more fortunate. In my wife, I have someone who:

isn’t interested in silly status items like $800 purses

works hard

is a genuinely good person

And it almost didn’t happen. When I met her, I was so busy with work that I had no interest in dating. In one of my better decisions, I relented. The rest is history and mostly marital bliss.

Current home, before and after

I don’t remember her ever complaining. We’ve been able to accomplish what we have because we complement each other.

#4) Flipping my First Home

Age: 30 Net worth: $120,000 (college debt conquered!)

Let’s do this again.

We bought another home that needed a lot of cosmetic work, but was structurally sound. We did this with almost every house from that point on. The core of our nest egg was built flipping homes.

#5) A Bad Day at Work

Age: 37 Net worth: $700,000 ($550,000 in investments and $150,000 in home equity)

I can’t do this for another 25 years.

I googled something like:

How do I retire early?

Calculated my FI number: I needed about $40,000/year or a million dollars in savings to retire per the 4% Rule.

Figured out how long it would take to accumulate $1,000,000: 1500 days was the magic number.

Changed up our life: We would sell our $400,000, 4500 square foot home and move into something much more modest. Our next home was an unloved rental that had gone into foreclosure.

The code bug wasn’t as bad as I initially suspected, and I didn’t lose my job. However, I was now on the path to early retirement.

#6) Finding my Passion

Age: 41 Net worth: $1,000,000+

There was one great big thing I didn’t realize when I started my journey to early retirement. It was this:

Money is nothing more than a facilitator. It’s just a tool. Money is an empty goal.

So, I had a goal of leaving work, but I had no idea of what I’d do after I left. For a while, I felt like an idiot:

You have this huge goal of quitting work that you’ve been writing about for a couple of years, but you have no idea of what happens after that? Better figure it out dude!

I felt lost, empty and ridiculous. You can’t retire to nothing.

And then I realized that the answer had been with me the whole time:

Write, dummy, write!

My Passion Reignited

Working as a software developer, I brought in substantial income. Working as a blogger, I bring in substantial happiness. While I’m thankful for the money, the latter is much better.

And now look – I’m writing here at Budgets Are Sexy! :)

And that’s how I became financially independent in 32 years.

My Journey To Freedom: $12 to $1,800,000 in 32 Years posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

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