#lunasspecto

[monsterkissed]

lunasspecto

  was looking in to being a therapist and shit and i...

I’m guessing the NHS covers some some basic mental health services? Because with the insurance I have I’d be paying about that much for a therapist here in Massachusetts. I used to get my parents to help me pay for it

my entire mental health thing is covered by the nhs, i’d never be able to afford two different meds and three different kinds of therapy from four different qualified people plus home visits plus travel plus 24 hour on-call otherwise. i’d be broke as fuck by now

idk maybe it’s bc my mother was a surgeon in the nhs so i grew up with that but the idea of paying for health stuff like that has always seemed alien and backwards to me and the idea of charging for it myself as a practitioner is like. i would cry? i would, no exaggeration, not be able to look myself in the face every morning. charging for stuff like cosmetic shit that’s just fashion rather than mending scars or burns or dysphoria, or the kind of therapy that’s less about fixing mental health issues and more like life coaching and stuff is one thing, but medical care people actually need to have some quality of life? charging for that’s straight-up inhumane, you give people that for free and you give them the best service you can get at that. if they shut down the nhs tomorrow they’d be burning whoever authorised it at the stake by lunchtime; there’d be literal riots.

so yeah, that £100 per hour paycheck would be super neat, but i would literally rather stay poor as fuck forever than touch it. so i guess i’m moving forward with a view to following my mum into the nhs?

[prokopetz]

You've mentioned before that the are lots of cool point 'n click adventure games that haven't been properly appreciated. Do you know of any that are like... Beneath a Steel Sky, but without the misogyny?

Depends on what it is about Beneath a Steel Sky you’re interested in.

If you want something that’s similar in terms of both gameplay and aesthetics, your best bet would probably be Technobabylon. It has its own set of issues, mind - I’ve previously discussed it here.

On the other hand, if it’s the late 1980s cyberpunk aesthetics you’re after, but you’re willing to bend on gameplay (i.e., think less Monkey Island, more Snatchers), you could have look at 2064: Read Only Memories. I’m only a couple of hours into it, myself, but so far it seems like a perfectly charming late cyberpunk pastiche. One of the only examples of the type that I can think of with the option to play a non-binary protagonist, too - it even lets you pick your own pronouns.

On the mutant third hand, if you mean you want something that plays like Beneath a Steel Sky and its ilk, but it doesn’t have to be cyberpunk specifically, you should totally check out The Shivah. Short version: you’re a clinically depressed rabbi at a poverty-stricken synagogue in inner-city New York trying to unravel the truth behind a mysterious inheritance. The audiovisual aesthetics are like film noir meets Neo Geo. There’s rabbinical question fighting. High concept as all get-out, naturally, but for some of us that’s a plus!

[apollyptica]

lunasspecto replied to your post:so i got my work schedule get sunday off and...

Nice. I love it when I get two days in a row; it makes me feel like a real person

unfortunately its only for this week since its labour day 

then its only sunday off it looks like 

[fuckyeahasexual]

(1/2) Yo, regarding AVEN: I haven't been a regular there for years, so maybe I've missed something, but last I checked, AVEN was non-profit, volunteer-run, and basically treading water financially. Most of the complaints I've heard about AVEN have to

(2/2) … do with a dysfunctional moderator culture on the forums that often reinforces racism, cissexism, and ableism.

They also agree A is for Allies, and often have threads were aces are encourages to “compromise” with their partners. The second half if community behavior and not directly AVEN’s fault. I personally have a lot of respect for David Jay, so I don’t really like things that come off an infighting but some problems and disagreements need to be acknowledged. I’m not sure if AVEN is non-profit ( or rather wasn’t) I don’t view them as a ‘for-profit’ thing and I know it’s basically volunteer-run. I know @asexualoutreach was assumed to be the first until they found AVEN’S NY registration. This confusion has been going on for a while among other ace bloggers.  I don’t think it really matters since non-profits can waste money like Susan G Komen and non-profit isn’t really a merit bias it’s for tax issues. It’s just saying “our main goal isn’t to make money.” I doubled checked with @theasexualityblog who has worked more personally with each group. 

[wayfindingheart]

lunasspecto said: The cool thing about Fran Allen saying this is that she was coming from a career that started absolutely ages ago, when she really had no choice but to work in assembly, and she saw or participated in the rise of a lot of major programming languages, so it’s not like she was trying to cover for a lack of understanding of the low-level stuff. She understood all this stuff extremely well, but believed that other programmers shouldn’t always have to.

Oh, she’s a she! That’s awesome :) Back on topic: all right, that’s fair then. I mean, I didn’t think she didn’t know what she was talking about or anything, though I guess I did come off that way. The point I meant to make was that programming languages seem to have been just kind of gradually getting more and more abstract throughout the years, so maybe C is just another stop along the road.

[wayfindingheart]

lunasspecto said: Good luck! I don’t really have the background to get into this discussion either. 😜

I dunno, you seemed to be doing a pretty great job there! :) Personally, not having read up on the topic, I’m tempted to argue that C’s just getting on in years, like dozens of languages before it. I mean, if Allen thinks you have to manage the data too closely in C, he should try Assembly sometime! Now that’s a nightmare. I don’t know enough about the subject to really have a firm opinion on that, though. All I can say for sure is that whenever someone starts trying to pinpoint Where It All Went Wrong on any particular subject, I get kinda skeptical.

[wayfindingheart]

lunasspecto said: This reminds me of Fran Allen’s compelling argument that the creation of C is the point where programming went wrong, and that we still haven’t recovered, because this mindset of obligating programmers to keep an eye on the low-level memory management and such underlying their work keeps them from elegantly tackling complex, high-level problems. (I read this in the same book as the Keen Thompson interview, by the way. If you haven’t read Coders at Work I recommend it.)

Coders at Work, huh? I’ll have to look into it. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the background to get really into this discussion, but I will agree that it’s a pain to have to keep track of all these nitty-gritty details. I have a good idea how how my algorithm is supposed to work, but actually getting it to run is another matter entirely. 

[wayfindingheart]

lunasspecto said: I found it very encouraging when I read an interview with Ken Thompson where he said C++ was a needlessly complicated monstrosity of a language with too many features to be useful. I guess he even got into a fight with Stroustrup about it. C++ was, like, the first ~real~ language I tried to learn and it was good to know that some of the Programming Experts also think it’s a terrible mess

Yeah but you take away the features and then you’re just stuck with C, which is at least as bad if not worse. I had to take a network programming class in C last quarter, and oy. That was unpleasant.