goddstream

I'm a veteran calcium oxalate stone former; I've ended up in hospital three times because of them, and my last scan showed I currently am carrying 16 of them, (plus 3 bonus bladder stones). I'd thought I'd pass on what I've learned in the last 30 years; if helps one person, then I've been useful.

1. Drink lots of water (actually a very dilute lime juice/cranberry juice mix). I aim for 4 litres/1 gallon a day, more in hot weather.

2. Don't drink spirits (specifically - note to self - half a bottle of bourbon, no matter how delicious). They cause some weird kind of dehydration, which makes the stones painful.

3. If you start getting discomfort from a stone, drink more water. It seems to 'float' them somehow, and can usually make the discomfort go away.

4. The stones act like little breeding grounds for bacteria. So, if you have stones you will be prone to chronic infections. If you are a chap, then this can lead to chronic bacterial prostatitus, which can cause all manner of problems, leading to a having a catheter fitted. But, if you have bladder stones, the stones will break the little plastic widget that stops the catheter from falling out, which means it has to be refitted. So, you may need to take a low-level antibiotic like nitrofuratoin (there is some evidence that cranberry juice can also help, because it reduces the stickiness of bacteria).

5. If you are passing a stone, and they offer you morphine, decline it and hold out for something more powerful. Morphine seems to contract the tubes, only offers partial relief, and makes the problem worse in my experience. I once had an IM injection of (something beginning with pent~ - I wasn't in the mood to take notes at the time) which worked very well.

6. Avoid foods containing high oxalate levels, like spinach.

7. Don't take medical advice from strangers on the internet (like me).

The Picol code has always been a fascinating read, until you get to the comment /* XXX: escape handling missing! */ and realise it won't escape/eval stuff inside strings, so you think ha! and roll up your sleeves and get tapping ... then you think ha! I could just improve that bit of code, and ... before you know it the sun's coming up and you didn't feed the dog last night. Speaking for a friend, obviously.

Justine's posts are always worth reading, even if their subject is outside your normal area of interest.

What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?

I don't like ads, on the internet or TV, and therefore refuse to inflict them on anyone who plays the little game apps that I release, otherwise I'd be a hypocrite.

Well done to Josh for having the humanity for just making a thing that people enjoy, and stopping there.

I was once told, by a car rental chap, that the rental companies don't make money renting out cars; instead, they make money by putting some miles on the cars in their fleet, and then reselling them at a profit.

He told me that the deals the rental companies have with the manufacturers are along the lines of "you will buy 5000 cars at a large discount, but you can't sell them until they have 5000 miles on the clock". So they buy lots of cars at a HUGE discount and then later sell them for MORE than they bought them for.

If this is true, then it makes sense for the rental companies to invest in EVs, because (a) there is customer demand for them, but more (b) because the market for second hand EVs is good.

Genius. How can any programmer be bored on a Sunday when there are things like this. What a time to be alive.

Interesting, but it made me wonder - are there any programming languages that you can use with a proportional font? Python would not be on the list...

Me too! Pascal has a natural "flow" that I lost when I transitioned to C.

Okay, roughly in the same boat here. Every time I'm deep in a project, I start looking wistfully at other 2D game engines and seemingly waste a few days looking through the docs and tutorials for Flutter/Xamarin/Monogame/Unity/Godot/Ggez/Heaps.io/OpenFL etc etc. I'm currently pausing a Solar2D project and guiltily going through the tutorials for Defold.

So, what have you tried and didn't like, and why? Sell me on Ebiten?