A site that started as a forum for one particular class in one old (pre-dates WoW) MMO.

The population dipped a little when Facebook took off then nosedived again 6+ years later when reddit started getting super popular, but there are still a handful and change of us around with old friends dropping in to visit here and there.

Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

If it works, make sure you understand why.

If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

Keep going until you have a working new feature.

Then try a more complicated feature.

After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.

the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

Oh. Yeah.

There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

Well

You don’t know what

We can find

Why don’t you die for me little n00b

On a magic Corp Por ride

For gaming and everything else I couldn’t easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn’t know Linux well yet?

Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3’s just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

Production mac’s were still running os8 back then.

It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.

So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

All while still drinking and streaming video.

I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.