pauraque: world of warcraft character (wow)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-07-20 05:53 pm

Sunshine Revival Challenge #6

[community profile] sunshine_revival's next challenge is:
Game Night
Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Well, since you asked. :P

I've played video games for as long as I can remember. My dad was an early adopter of technology and he brought home an IBM clone in the late 1980s, when I was in grade school. He would download tons of games from BBSes for my brother and me. Sometimes these were pirated games from big companies, but this was also a huge heyday for what we would now call "indie" games—stuff coded by one guy in his basement or a couple of college students in the computer lab. Platformers, shooters, puzzle games, arcade clones, roguelikes, RPGs, text adventures, you name it, we played it. Often we didn't know what a game even was until we ran it, because while the original BBS post might have explained what it was, all we saw was an EXE file that was limited to eight characters.

I think gaming was always social for me. Some of the early games my brother and I played did have hot-seat multiplayer (alternating who's sitting at the keyboard) but if it was a single-player game we'd just take turns, and shamelessly order each other around if we thought the other wasn't playing it right. XD When I got a little older and more of my friends started to have computers or consoles at home, inviting people over to play games was a huge thing. I was just recently reminiscing about going over to my friend's house to play Myst, which was a massive phenomenon in 1993. We were young and the logic puzzles were too hard for us, so it would just degenerate into heckling the game and each other until we collapsed in hysterical laughter. That's still one of my favorite gaming memories... and I still don't think I've ever actually beaten Myst.

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tyger: Entei, Suicine, and Raioku sprites (pokémon - legendary beasts)
Tyger ([personal profile] tyger) wrote2025-07-21 04:08 am

Lazy Sunday

I... got less than four hours of sleep when I first woke up, which was. Not fun! That is not enough sleep! So I stayed up long enough to do kitty breakfasttime, in the interests of not getting fucking bitten (and also because it's not fair to them if I sleep through it and make their breakfast super late), and then went back to bed.

Yeaaaaah, I didn't get to the shops until after kitty dinnertime. BUT I DID GO! Forgot some things, and didn't get some other things due to Bag Too Heavy Already, but I got milk and juice, so that's plenty to drink for now! >3

Other than that... caught some shinies in pokemon! Put on Advent Children while I was doing that because I wanted something in the background. Forgot that my copy is JP-only, no subs, so that was uh. A little more thinking about language stuff than I expected! XD It was fine, though, I wasn't exactly wanting to pay close attention to the dialogue (or any of it tbh).

...Sushi, why did you JUST NOW come sit in my lap and start purring. Now is not the time. Give me five minutes to get into pjs and brush my teeth, then you can curl up on me in bed!!!

tyger: Roxas, smirking. (Roxas - smirk)
Tyger ([personal profile] tyger) wrote2025-07-20 02:53 am

Boards: finally stripped!

They're DOOOOONE~! I'm so happy.

Next up is pulling a few nails before sanding (so the sandpaper doesn't, you know, catch and tear up into uselessness), then painting. Might do some tomorrow, not sure yet - I REALLY need to go shopping, I require moar drinks. Also more food, but that's less urgent, the lack of non-water drinks is... resulting in me not drinking much. Which is not great. I have my water glass right here, I just. It cold. And gross. No desire to drink it, though I do make myself when I remember.

In unrelated news, Tortilla has been SO SNUGGLY today omg. Just. I make a vaguely lap-shaped space, I have cat in it. It's very nice! :3 She put her little paws all over my face this morning, too, stretching out while I rubbed her head :x :x :x So soooooft!!!

I did make butter chicken, too! I needed TWO big plates in order to stop feeling hungry, which is telling me I haven't been eating enough again, siiiiigh. At least butter chicken is delicious enough I won't have that problem again until I finish it! Need to get more tortillas and tomatoes etc for wraps, too. Been heating up a couple of chicken nuggets per wrap as the protein, which is actually really good! And warm, which helps in this weather orz.

Anyway, here's to hoping that I fall asleep easily tonight! Haven't the last few nights, though napping during the day is fine. Might be the cold, which is annoying.

pauraque: drawing of a wolf reading a book with a coffee cup (customer service wolf)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-07-19 10:01 am

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner (2025)

Almost immediately upon the release of ChatGPT, everybody in the educational field realized it could produce an unlimited variety of essays that would pass muster in a high school or undergrad classroom, and might even get a better grade than a real student's work. Some concluded this meant the end of teaching students to write. John Warner, a college writing instructor, sees it differently—if the writing assignments we give our students are something ChatGPT can easily do, that means there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we have been teaching writing. This isn't a new problem, it's a decades-old problem that new technology is forcing us to finally confront: in our classrooms, we have forgotten what writing is for.

He argues that the process of writing offers invaluable opportunities not only to communicate ideas but to help us learn to think—to analyze our outer and inner worlds, and to synthesize meaningful conclusions. It's a tool for reflecting on and organizing our messy interiority, and (perhaps) using it to convey to other people something of what it's like to be us. This perfectly aligns with my own experience of writing, in which I often don't entirely understand what I think until I write it (and I am currently learning what I think about this book by writing this post) so I will admit that I'm not the best judge of whether Warner successfully communicates this to people who don't already believe it, but he seems plausibly convincing to me.

But education in the US has become increasingly dominated by teaching to the test rather than teaching anyone to think. (Warner traces this to Cold War-era anxieties over being outcompeted by rising economic powers like Japan, leading American legislators to push hyper-standardized measures of school success.) Students have adapted to this by learning only to write what the teacher expects to read—to produce essays that get everything superficially "right" but offer no individual thoughts or insights.

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matcheslit: Oikawa Tooru from Haikyuu!! (Default)
Carrie ([personal profile] matcheslit) wrote2025-07-19 07:54 pm
Entry tags:
tyger: Animated Lea from BbS. (Lea - うれしいねぇ-)
Tyger ([personal profile] tyger) wrote2025-07-19 03:59 am

Oh hey it's Friday again

So Sibling did come over today! The edge sanding has been done! Despite the machine being called an edge sander, though, it doesn't do corners. For. Reasons. Extremely poorly designed reasons, by all reports, it's apparently a hellish contraption of exceptionally stupid construction. Sibling couldn't find a different type to use, though, alas. :/

So sanding will continue next week, almost definitely on Monday, so there's that to look forward to. 2-3 weeks for the whole job seemed like a pipe dream to me, and hey look I WAS RIGHT. Gonna be at LEAST four weeks, maybe longer. Annoying! Hopefully my room can be opened up again sometime next week, though. Ugh, I need shoes.

As far as my stuff goes, I didn't quite get the last board done, but it's mostly there. Maybe a quarter left, at most? So I'll definitely finish that tomorrow.

Didn't end up cooking curry tonight, though, for the extremely stupid reason of I was too hungry/tired. Like. What the hell, evolution, why is this a thing? But no, you get too hungry and tired and coordination goes away and I definitely could not trust myself with knives and fire and hot oil. :| So that'll be tomorrow too! As soon as I finish the paint stripping, I think. Even if it's only like 2pm, doesn't matter, curry time!