What latency? That looks like her phone, connected to what I assume is a battery pack in her bag. Possibly she’s playing the same game on an emulator, to stay sharp.
Maybe, but otoh, I have an $8 NES I can carry around in my pocket that isn’t even emulation, it’s actually an NES, a single-chip NES, and it has like… all the Mario Bros.
Of course, it’d be an absolute nightmare to pull off her speedrun and _not_ have it streaming, so.
I think you guys are missing the fact that she’s standing on the sidewalk, in the middle of winter, staring into the middle distance while gripping the controller as if playing.
Either she’s doing finger exercises, or has massive Tetris Effect going on and is using it to hone her skills. Either way, I don’t think that latency or emulation is an issue.
At one time it was considered a good thing that college students were required to take a wide range of courses so that they became well rounded individuals. But that was before college in the view of most devolved into fancy vocational school, where any class not directly connected with future employment is a waste.
I dunno, I think 90% of my courses for my bachelor’s were worthwhile. Later when I got an accounting cert it was 50% actually useful courses and 50% actually useless garbage because for some reason I need to take several courses to tell me not to do crimes and be corrupt. I think it depends on the quality of the institution you’re at and the field you’re trying to go into.
Then again, it would be great for there to be a better system for skipping early classes if people already have a backing in it. In my experience you have to jump through a *lot* of hoops if you want to convince a university you already know something.
… I think people generally want money people to either have strong internal morality or a good understanding and fear of the law (or both)? Like, stealing somebody’s life savings, can cause them to lose their home/be declared bankrupt, potentially result in them losing their job, relationship (especially if a never-entirely-supportive family were convinced it was their fault, would perhaps only take in one partner and any children), prevent them from accessing medical care or retiring when they otherwise would do… It might not be a violent crime but it can still be utterly devastating! Not looked into it, but wouldn’t be shocked if people have topped themselves over it happening, if it was made to look like a series of bad investments and they were told they had no legal recourse and left in a pit for a few years…
So if you start off with the sort of mindset where you’d never abuse people’s trust, those ethics classes are unnecessary; if you could be swayed by having the chance to siphon off hundreds of thousands of [insert currency here, or default to USD if in local currency that would be the cost of a loaf of bread] and make it look legit… Maybe making people think about the human cost of their potential future actions will discourage them?
True, in America if you take someone’s investments they’ll be homeless with no medical care. Even old people need money for nursing homes or they get evicted. Insurance won’t even pay for a stay long enough to rehab an injury.
I feel like it’s easy to forget most of the cast are college freshmen. Meaning within the brief moments their classes are even mentioned they’re likely learning review or starter material. Amber has probably learned more about programming watching Youtube videos than what her first class will teach her. And inexperienced students do need to learn the basics. Amber should be communicating with her teacher to maybe do some independent extra credit if she wants to do more than cruise.
As a CS graduate from a top school – 95% of courses I took were useless in my professional life. You don’t pay for the courses. You pay for the piece of paper you get at the end of it all.
And the piece of paper basically says “this person can withstand torture at this level” which in itself is a valuable metric for employers.
My Computing degree classes basically started off at the “this is a mouse, this is a keyboard, this is a monitor…” level. They did get more challenging after that (relatively quickly) but I did most of my 3 year course* so ill that my pattern after the first term or so was:
* Get to the first 3 weeks of classes
* Spend 3 weeks ill in bed
* Drag myself to the medical centre, lecturer offices, etc, to sort out the carnage for having just missed a huge chunk of my course and get extensions/exemptions for any missed coursework
* Buy the textbooks
* Read the recommended chapters and lecture notes
* Do an exam
* Collapse for the duration of the holiday
* Rinse, repeat
(Was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Medication helped. Attended more of my last year but still struggled.)
Got a piece of paper. Got a job.
* It was actually a 4 year double major sandwich course, with a year’s placement, but it turns out academic stress is a major trigger for me, healthwise, and I was a lot better on the placement even though it was kinda rubbish. Of course, a few years after graduating, I switched birth control and that triggered my background chronic headaches to turn into proper migraines, so now between being on a low dose immunosuppressant to stop my immune system from beating me up, it naturally sucking (because it exhausts itself beating me up), hardcore chronic migraines, the sleep deprivation that comes with 3 kids… My health sucks 🤷🏻♀️
at least if it’s a blowoff course/superfluous to her she can breeze through it/do other things in the meantime while in class. i would think ‘maybe she could make connections with ppl that have potential’ but i don’t think she’d be social enough for that (versus like, hacking everyone’s info and seeing who she’d trust enough to approach)
It is rather interesting, I learned more about coding games by working alongside professional programmers on indie teams than I ever did in any formal course. 🤔
That being said my two years of University cut short by COVID and its aftermath were for Physics, which taught me the critical thinking and math that’s really useful for action games, so heh.
Mine was in java, but it wasn’t about teaching java. More like this is what objects are, this is what functions are, this is what iteration means, recursion, inheritance, libraries, …
Mine was basically the same, but we used Visual Basic because Java was dead by then. (Remember when it was supposed to be the cross-platform programming language of the future?)
My first college computing course involved writing the FORTRAN in printed paper grids, handing those in to be punched and a week later getting back the paper with an incomprehensible error message.
A couple of years later I discovered Smalltalk and I’ve used it ever since.
didn’t she already prove she knew more than the previous prof and he told her she was ‘grandstanding’, maybe she could have a better convo with the current one and just speed run through getting a good grade and doing whatever in class
When I got my comp sci degree close to 20 years ago, we had to go through “this is an icon, this is what a word processor does” courses. A disappointing number of people washed out at that stage.
Nowadays you can’t even trust that every student is going to be familiar with the traditional desktop metaphor, since they’re so used to smart devices and if they used laptops in K-12 they probably did everything on web apps in Chrome OS.
If the school’s still teaching new students a 20-year-old version of Office, they’ve got bigger issues. (Office Assistant hasn’t been included since Office 2003. No, I don’t count Clippit’s inclusion as an emoji or as a watermark in the “office supplies” theme.)
Huh. When I was in school, the introductory CS class was 200-level. A CS major spent the first year taking math and trying to get those required Humanities courses out of the way. One of the reasons I went with the engineering/technology school’s computing track instead was that I could study my major field right away. (Still had to show up for psychology and economics intro. courses and test out of English, though.)
All our CS classes were in the school of engineering. There were still humanities requirements, just not that specific. The only class I remember where there was a choice between A&S and Eng was statistics.
101 and 102 were very large classes, so students could figure out if that’s what they wanted to major in or just get a basic understanding. You could do them as a sophomore and still get all your CS major classes done though, the person who talked me into signing up with them was a sophomore.
Amber is about as healthy as she was at the start of the strip, I guess.
On that note, it’s actually kinda interesting how much her interests have shifted over the course of less than six months real time but years in real life. Started with WoW, then it was Pokemon Go, and now Mario Bros.
Granted it’s not super unusual, but a WoW raider would probably still be playing on the side.
I gave up WoW when I realized I was paying Blizzard to have a second job. Raiding wasn’t fun anymkre; like the rest of WoW it was addicting, but none of it was fun.
not sure if outta chara tho be cute to see a scene/fanart of amber and dina’s doing each other’s hair (tho joyce is the only one canonically we’ve seen wanting to brush/style anyone else’s hair)
I ask this question whenever one of the cast ever talks about classes, what does Amber actually want to do? What is her major/career goal? She want to make video games? Might not be wise since the game industry is imploding right now.
we know dorothy want(ed) to become president and sarah a lawyer, but idk if many other aspirations stated but i imagine if she was willing, she could make more money/profit of being a streamer, but otherwise, i don’t think we learn too much about ppl’s ambitions
Walky taking telecommunications b/c it’s ‘easy’ and billie/jen was in journalism? but other than wanting to become a part of a school paper, idk if she wanted to work for like, whatever the hugest/most famous ver of the Indiana papers are, assuming she doesn’t get a nepo baby job
maybe she’ll end up working for carla’s company and take care of the borderline legal/illegal things to help out
Heh, the Daily Student might be the most famous paper still made in Indiana. When I was a kid my city had two major papers; now we have zero, unless you count the thing that is basically USA Today with a thin wrapper of local ball scores and sewer bond debates.
I think Amber’s goal is to get a degree. She probably can’t tell you the objective that this furthers, in any detail.
Indie might be the way to go if she’s even into game dev that is. Amber’s ability to hyperfixate might be an advantage with that route. Although she may need some partners or learn how to art and animate depending on her ideas because rarely is coding enough.
seems like she’s in computer science out of the momentum of already being somewhat competent in that area for her education level
not like you actually have to have your dreams sorted by that age though
I mean. Judging by my own college experience, the majority of university freshman either have no idea what they actually want to do for a living, have only a vague idea of what they want to do for a living, are bouncing between multiple possibilities, even if they HAVE declared their major already. Even Amber may not necessarily have drawn out her career plan in any detail beyond “I want to be a software engineer of some kind”.
That’s not to say that NO freshman ever have detailed plans, of course. Off the top of my head, Dorothy wanted (until recently) to be a politician (and eventually, POTUS), Joyce wants to be an elementary school teacher, Dina wants to be a paleontologist studying dinosaurs, and Jacob wants to be a lawyer. It also wouldn’t surprise me if Becky and Sal both have at least somewhat concrete ideas about where they want to take their career paths post-graduation (e.g. get into a biotech lab as an assistant, start up a band and do tours). That’s almost half of the frosh main cast right there, I think.
Though it appears that IU, at least when Willis went there, may not have been
successful at using placement testing to place freshmen in courses of appropriate challenge, other institutions, at least in my experience, have been successful in such placement, sometimes erring in the other direction; I submitted some essays I had written in an introductory English class at one school, to a school I was transferring to, and they placed me in a much more challenging Honors English class, that I promptly proceeded to do much worse in.
It’s been since 2018 since we’ve seen Alex, Norville, or Buckets of Blood Guy. I assume this strip is a seque to their storylines which will take up the rest of the chapter, and not Carla and Charlie in Leslie’s class right now.
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Amber that Latency is gonna be awful
Not that it matters when it’s drilled into your muscle memory, but that’s gonna feel terrible to play.
What latency? That looks like her phone, connected to what I assume is a battery pack in her bag. Possibly she’s playing the same game on an emulator, to stay sharp.
That’s an NES controller.
I think she made a rig to be wirelessly connected to her stream, so that she can play while away from her computer.
I could be wrong but I think the setup is
controller -> backpack -> wireless -> laptop at dorm -> streamMaybe, but otoh, I have an $8 NES I can carry around in my pocket that isn’t even emulation, it’s actually an NES, a single-chip NES, and it has like… all the Mario Bros.
Of course, it’d be an absolute nightmare to pull off her speedrun and _not_ have it streaming, so.
she could be practicing individual splits, so there’s no possibility of actually getting a complete legal run that’s not recorded
I think you guys are missing the fact that she’s standing on the sidewalk, in the middle of winter, staring into the middle distance while gripping the controller as if playing.
Either she’s doing finger exercises, or has massive Tetris Effect going on and is using it to hone her skills. Either way, I don’t think that latency or emulation is an issue.
Blindfolded speedruns are a thing, I am assuming that is what is happening here.
…And what, may I ask, is this delightful-sounding gadget?
They show up regularly on Ali Express in different forms. Watch for a while, you’ll find them. ^_^
Latency’s going to be there regardless, unless she plays on real hardware connected to a CRT TV so she can race the beam.
If she’s not actually learning, is the course really worth taking? Seems like a waste of money.
She’d waste money just to piss off her dad, except…
Degrees require you to take a lot of worthless courses.
-Every college graduate ever
At one time it was considered a good thing that college students were required to take a wide range of courses so that they became well rounded individuals. But that was before college in the view of most devolved into fancy vocational school, where any class not directly connected with future employment is a waste.
I dunno, I think 90% of my courses for my bachelor’s were worthwhile. Later when I got an accounting cert it was 50% actually useful courses and 50% actually useless garbage because for some reason I need to take several courses to tell me not to do crimes and be corrupt. I think it depends on the quality of the institution you’re at and the field you’re trying to go into.
Then again, it would be great for there to be a better system for skipping early classes if people already have a backing in it. In my experience you have to jump through a *lot* of hoops if you want to convince a university you already know something.
So they are not working?
… I think people generally want money people to either have strong internal morality or a good understanding and fear of the law (or both)? Like, stealing somebody’s life savings, can cause them to lose their home/be declared bankrupt, potentially result in them losing their job, relationship (especially if a never-entirely-supportive family were convinced it was their fault, would perhaps only take in one partner and any children), prevent them from accessing medical care or retiring when they otherwise would do… It might not be a violent crime but it can still be utterly devastating! Not looked into it, but wouldn’t be shocked if people have topped themselves over it happening, if it was made to look like a series of bad investments and they were told they had no legal recourse and left in a pit for a few years…
So if you start off with the sort of mindset where you’d never abuse people’s trust, those ethics classes are unnecessary; if you could be swayed by having the chance to siphon off hundreds of thousands of [insert currency here, or default to USD if in local currency that would be the cost of a loaf of bread] and make it look legit… Maybe making people think about the human cost of their potential future actions will discourage them?
True, in America if you take someone’s investments they’ll be homeless with no medical care. Even old people need money for nursing homes or they get evicted. Insurance won’t even pay for a stay long enough to rehab an injury.
She probably needs it to complete her major and/or as perquisite for higher level courses that will teacher new and exciting things.
It’s likely that she didn’t know that she would know all that the teacher would try to teach her.
I feel like it’s easy to forget most of the cast are college freshmen. Meaning within the brief moments their classes are even mentioned they’re likely learning review or starter material. Amber has probably learned more about programming watching Youtube videos than what her first class will teach her. And inexperienced students do need to learn the basics. Amber should be communicating with her teacher to maybe do some independent extra credit if she wants to do more than cruise.
As a CS graduate from a top school – 95% of courses I took were useless in my professional life. You don’t pay for the courses. You pay for the piece of paper you get at the end of it all.
And the piece of paper basically says “this person can withstand torture at this level” which in itself is a valuable metric for employers.
My Computing degree classes basically started off at the “this is a mouse, this is a keyboard, this is a monitor…” level. They did get more challenging after that (relatively quickly) but I did most of my 3 year course* so ill that my pattern after the first term or so was:
* Get to the first 3 weeks of classes
* Spend 3 weeks ill in bed
* Drag myself to the medical centre, lecturer offices, etc, to sort out the carnage for having just missed a huge chunk of my course and get extensions/exemptions for any missed coursework
* Buy the textbooks
* Read the recommended chapters and lecture notes
* Do an exam
* Collapse for the duration of the holiday
* Rinse, repeat
(Was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Medication helped. Attended more of my last year but still struggled.)
Got a piece of paper. Got a job.
* It was actually a 4 year double major sandwich course, with a year’s placement, but it turns out academic stress is a major trigger for me, healthwise, and I was a lot better on the placement even though it was kinda rubbish. Of course, a few years after graduating, I switched birth control and that triggered my background chronic headaches to turn into proper migraines, so now between being on a low dose immunosuppressant to stop my immune system from beating me up, it naturally sucking (because it exhausts itself beating me up), hardcore chronic migraines, the sleep deprivation that comes with 3 kids… My health sucks 🤷🏻♀️
at least if it’s a blowoff course/superfluous to her she can breeze through it/do other things in the meantime while in class. i would think ‘maybe she could make connections with ppl that have potential’ but i don’t think she’d be social enough for that (versus like, hacking everyone’s info and seeing who she’d trust enough to approach)
Even if you already know the things, it can be useful to get a paper certifying that you know those things.
It’s probably a prerequisite course for the ones she actually wants to take.
9 out of 10 classes, and I’m counting kindergarten thru college, taught nothing I didn’t already know.
It is rather interesting, I learned more about coding games by working alongside professional programmers on indie teams than I ever did in any formal course. 🤔
That being said my two years of University cut short by COVID and its aftermath were for Physics, which taught me the critical thinking and math that’s really useful for action games, so heh.
NEVER underestimate the power of autistic hyperfocus Danny! ^^
Combine that with ADHD hyperfocus and you’ve got a recipe for malnutrition.
Hence why I always have cereal and a rice cooker at the ready! :9
Or starvation/dehydration, when you forget to eat/drink because of your hyperfocus.
So adaptive! Much game!
Wow!
I mean it’s just an entry level comp sci class right. What are they even teaching? Microsoft office?
Mine taught me Python. It was as fun as it was frustrating.
When I took it, it was Fortran. When I taught it, it was C. But Python works.
Mine was in java, but it wasn’t about teaching java. More like this is what objects are, this is what functions are, this is what iteration means, recursion, inheritance, libraries, …
Mine was basically the same, but we used Visual Basic because Java was dead by then. (Remember when it was supposed to be the cross-platform programming language of the future?)
Wow, somebody else my age!
Fortran on punch cards. I rode a dinosaur to the computer center.
My first college computing course involved writing the FORTRAN in printed paper grids, handing those in to be punched and a week later getting back the paper with an incomprehensible error message.
A couple of years later I discovered Smalltalk and I’ve used it ever since.
We wrote LISP programs longhand on lined paper.
didn’t she already prove she knew more than the previous prof and he told her she was ‘grandstanding’, maybe she could have a better convo with the current one and just speed run through getting a good grade and doing whatever in class
When I got my comp sci degree close to 20 years ago, we had to go through “this is an icon, this is what a word processor does” courses. A disappointing number of people washed out at that stage.
Nowadays you can’t even trust that every student is going to be familiar with the traditional desktop metaphor, since they’re so used to smart devices and if they used laptops in K-12 they probably did everything on web apps in Chrome OS.
Lecture one: How to disable that fucking paper clip.
If the school’s still teaching new students a 20-year-old version of Office, they’ve got bigger issues. (Office Assistant hasn’t been included since Office 2003. No, I don’t count Clippit’s inclusion as an emoji or as a watermark in the “office supplies” theme.)
Probably CS 102. Once you complete that level, the more interesting ones start getting unlocked.
Wrong warping into the culinary arts courses mid-class, to own the libs
Oh man, i just thought of a formatting trick that comment would have been perfect for.
Huh. When I was in school, the introductory CS class was 200-level. A CS major spent the first year taking math and trying to get those required Humanities courses out of the way. One of the reasons I went with the engineering/technology school’s computing track instead was that I could study my major field right away. (Still had to show up for psychology and economics intro. courses and test out of English, though.)
All our CS classes were in the school of engineering. There were still humanities requirements, just not that specific. The only class I remember where there was a choice between A&S and Eng was statistics.
101 and 102 were very large classes, so students could figure out if that’s what they wanted to major in or just get a basic understanding. You could do them as a sophomore and still get all your CS major classes done though, the person who talked me into signing up with them was a sophomore.
Amber is about as healthy as she was at the start of the strip, I guess.
On that note, it’s actually kinda interesting how much her interests have shifted over the course of less than six months real time but years in real life. Started with WoW, then it was Pokemon Go, and now Mario Bros.
Granted it’s not super unusual, but a WoW raider would probably still be playing on the side.
I gave up WoW when I realized I was paying Blizzard to have a second job. Raiding wasn’t fun anymkre; like the rest of WoW it was addicting, but none of it was fun.
she could still rotate/play around multiple games
wonder if she ships bowser/luigi tho lol
I feel Amber on this one, I never leave the house without some form of videogame accompanying me.
But is she still streaming or just practicing?
Phone emulator with an earbud for sound cues.
With the level or muscle memory she’s operating at you wouldn’t need to look at the screen.
To answer the question she’s probably just keeping her hands warmed up till she gets back to her computer proper.
All Mario Bros., yet still no play? Somewhat missing the allegory here.
That hairstyle is one Amber head wide, what’s her haircare routine, I wonder…
Amber is a streamer, video games is work for her, as it is for me.
(well, coding them is what i do, not sure if Amber also does that, streamers also do lots of mod stuff)
sometimes hairstyles just happen lol
not sure if outta chara tho be cute to see a scene/fanart of amber and dina’s doing each other’s hair (tho joyce is the only one canonically we’ve seen wanting to brush/style anyone else’s hair)
I ask this question whenever one of the cast ever talks about classes, what does Amber actually want to do? What is her major/career goal? She want to make video games? Might not be wise since the game industry is imploding right now.
we know dorothy want(ed) to become president and sarah a lawyer, but idk if many other aspirations stated but i imagine if she was willing, she could make more money/profit of being a streamer, but otherwise, i don’t think we learn too much about ppl’s ambitions
Walky taking telecommunications b/c it’s ‘easy’ and billie/jen was in journalism? but other than wanting to become a part of a school paper, idk if she wanted to work for like, whatever the hugest/most famous ver of the Indiana papers are, assuming she doesn’t get a nepo baby job
maybe she’ll end up working for carla’s company and take care of the borderline legal/illegal things to help out
Heh, the Daily Student might be the most famous paper still made in Indiana. When I was a kid my city had two major papers; now we have zero, unless you count the thing that is basically USA Today with a thin wrapper of local ball scores and sewer bond debates.
I think Amber’s goal is to get a degree. She probably can’t tell you the objective that this furthers, in any detail.
By the time she is done with her studies it should bounce back. Or she could always go Indie. Video games are not likely to go away.
Indie might be the way to go if she’s even into game dev that is. Amber’s ability to hyperfixate might be an advantage with that route. Although she may need some partners or learn how to art and animate depending on her ideas because rarely is coding enough.
Maybe she could go work with Team Cherry so that we might FINALLY get Silksong XD
seems like she’s in computer science out of the momentum of already being somewhat competent in that area for her education level
not like you actually have to have your dreams sorted by that age though
She’s apparently a superhero skill level hacker, so probably beyond “somewhat competent”.
I mean. Judging by my own college experience, the majority of university freshman either have no idea what they actually want to do for a living, have only a vague idea of what they want to do for a living, are bouncing between multiple possibilities, even if they HAVE declared their major already. Even Amber may not necessarily have drawn out her career plan in any detail beyond “I want to be a software engineer of some kind”.
That’s not to say that NO freshman ever have detailed plans, of course. Off the top of my head, Dorothy wanted (until recently) to be a politician (and eventually, POTUS), Joyce wants to be an elementary school teacher, Dina wants to be a paleontologist studying dinosaurs, and Jacob wants to be a lawyer. It also wouldn’t surprise me if Becky and Sal both have at least somewhat concrete ideas about where they want to take their career paths post-graduation (e.g. get into a biotech lab as an assistant, start up a band and do tours). That’s almost half of the frosh main cast right there, I think.
Mandatory Simpsons reference: All work and no beer makes Homer a…
Go crazy?
Don’t mind if I do! 🤪
BLEHHHBLUBLUBLUBLU!!!
I’ll stick to my Switch – on which i have multiple versions of the same game – Mario all the way down!
although joycon drift is annoying so i use another controller on my switch.
Morning to you all!
Is Amber legit muscle memorying
Jesus Christ
Gotta love the chair streams!
Really, Amber? You have a whole university to play with, and this is how you spend your time?
I suppose Amber could try to get into upper level courses provide a challenge but that would leave less time for Mario. That and pre reqs
Though it appears that IU, at least when Willis went there, may not have been
successful at using placement testing to place freshmen in courses of appropriate challenge, other institutions, at least in my experience, have been successful in such placement, sometimes erring in the other direction; I submitted some essays I had written in an introductory English class at one school, to a school I was transferring to, and they placed me in a much more challenging Honors English class, that I promptly proceeded to do much worse in.
It’s been since 2018 since we’ve seen Alex, Norville, or Buckets of Blood Guy. I assume this strip is a seque to their storylines which will take up the rest of the chapter, and not Carla and Charlie in Leslie’s class right now.
That’s what you get until for assuming, Danny!