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Dec. 6th, 2015 10:30 pmOn Friday, my office hosted a troop of Girl Scouts. We gave them a little taste of video game programming, art, and design using Scratch, a web-based development environment targeted at children.
These things are always a bit of controlled chaos. For instance, we split the girls up into four teams, each of which shared a workstation. We started with our artists giving them some guidance on how we create art assets for our games, then we imported their creations into the Scratch environment. We had up to three girls at each computer, accompanied by an artist, all working at once. It was very busy!
When it game time to start programming, one team had already started working, and another team was still wrapping up their art. We had originally planned to have me direct everybody through an exercise, but i just printed out my cheat sheet and gave a copy to each of the developer coaches and told them to go at their own pace.
It all worked out fine; it always does. This is the second such visit the current team has hosted, but we did six days of class visits in April, before we lost several of our team and hired new people. So we've got a bit of experience now.
Then i joined Master at the HRC building in DC, which was hosting a film presented by Reel Affirmations, Desert Migration. The film portrays thirteen men who, dying from HIV / AIDS, moved to Palm Springs, California to die, only to survive, thanks to the new drugs that became available in the mid-90's. After the film, there was a panel, which included the director.
It was an interesting film. It was the same struggle, reflected through thirteen different lives. i had forgotten about viatical settlements, where a terminal patient would sell their life insurance policy for a lump sum and sign the death benefit over to the company who purchased it from them. The company would continue making the insurance payments and collect when the patient died. One of the panelists made this choice, and whoever bought it is still making the payments, checking in from time to time to see if he's died yet.
There is a lot of attention paid to people who have survived long-term with HIV infection, that they watched their friends die in horrific numbers. One of the questions posed to the panelists made everybody remember that the people who didn't become infected also went through the same experience.
The youngest of the men in the film was just ten years older than me. i could have been one of them, except that i got my diagnosis in 2003, and there were already effect treatments. Since then, the treatments have only gotten better.
The film was interesting, and provided food for thought, but it didn't really have a strong emotional impact. i was pleased to see the names of a couple of my square dancing friends listed in the credits.
These things are always a bit of controlled chaos. For instance, we split the girls up into four teams, each of which shared a workstation. We started with our artists giving them some guidance on how we create art assets for our games, then we imported their creations into the Scratch environment. We had up to three girls at each computer, accompanied by an artist, all working at once. It was very busy!
When it game time to start programming, one team had already started working, and another team was still wrapping up their art. We had originally planned to have me direct everybody through an exercise, but i just printed out my cheat sheet and gave a copy to each of the developer coaches and told them to go at their own pace.
It all worked out fine; it always does. This is the second such visit the current team has hosted, but we did six days of class visits in April, before we lost several of our team and hired new people. So we've got a bit of experience now.
Then i joined Master at the HRC building in DC, which was hosting a film presented by Reel Affirmations, Desert Migration. The film portrays thirteen men who, dying from HIV / AIDS, moved to Palm Springs, California to die, only to survive, thanks to the new drugs that became available in the mid-90's. After the film, there was a panel, which included the director.
It was an interesting film. It was the same struggle, reflected through thirteen different lives. i had forgotten about viatical settlements, where a terminal patient would sell their life insurance policy for a lump sum and sign the death benefit over to the company who purchased it from them. The company would continue making the insurance payments and collect when the patient died. One of the panelists made this choice, and whoever bought it is still making the payments, checking in from time to time to see if he's died yet.
There is a lot of attention paid to people who have survived long-term with HIV infection, that they watched their friends die in horrific numbers. One of the questions posed to the panelists made everybody remember that the people who didn't become infected also went through the same experience.
The youngest of the men in the film was just ten years older than me. i could have been one of them, except that i got my diagnosis in 2003, and there were already effect treatments. Since then, the treatments have only gotten better.
The film was interesting, and provided food for thought, but it didn't really have a strong emotional impact. i was pleased to see the names of a couple of my square dancing friends listed in the credits.
