Recurse Center: week 10, day 3

It’s Thursday already, somehow! I don’t get it. How’d we get here already?

Linz came to me to hear about Our Entertainment and Awesomeness, the “Emoji in Your Bash Prompt” of my week 8. We learned some things, such as “Sublime Text won’t let you insert emoji from the usual special-character-and-emoji palette, BUT you can totally copy-paste emoji into Sublime Text.” I…I can’t believe that OS X’s default Terminal handles emoji better than Sublime. (Someone wrote a plugin, but come on.) I mean, vim handled this pretty okay mostly out-of-the-box. How cool!

So one of the lessons? +1, vim. You done good, kid.

Outside of the computer, I figured out how to put all of my hair up with four bobby pins. (Spoiler: it involves dividing my hair into four even-ish sections.) The humid summer heat of NYC has gotten me really good at learning how to keep ALL OF THE HAIR off of my neck for survival purposes.

I had intentions of learning more about EXIF today, but instead Steve (RC alums and RC alumni day <3 <3) and I ended up talking about traffic feelings and how to make the feelings into a thing.

Let me explain.

Coming from the northwest, I do not come from a car horn honking culture. Car horns are to be used only in times of imminent, scary danger. Any other usage is needlessly aggressive.

However, in New York, there is a whole vocabulary of honking. A honk can mean so, so many different things.

I have learned to tell the difference between different kind of honks. There is the “hey, just want to make sure you know I’m here, because I’m approaching the intersection where you’re jaywalking” chirp. There is the “hey, that was a bad decision you (other driver/pedestrian/bicyclist) made, and it made me scared/frustrated” longer honk.

And then there is the “no one can move, we will be stuck here forever, I haven’t budged in several traffic light cycles, and I have SO MANY FEELINGS” looooong, looooong honk. It is REGULARLY joined by many, many other similar honks. Just, like, five adult people hooooooooooooooooonking their car horns together. Like when one baby starts crying, but there are a bunch of other babies nearby, and now twelve babies are crying.

For reasons I can’t entirely explain, this stopped being irritating and became really hilarious to me, and I usually can’t help but laugh when I hear this phenomenon now. I also regularly say “feelings!” when I hear it. I told Steve about this the other day, and now we BOTH do this when we’re out walking and someone is having feelings in traffic.

Today, this happened again, and I remarked that it’d be awesome if there were just a button you could press to have the feelings for you. And I remembered that Ed built hambutton.com, and by the time we returned from lunch Steve and I had resolved to build Feelings Button.

There are still a lot of Internet Things I have to figure out, because there’s a lot I still don’t understand about hosting/DNS/etc., but I bought my second domain ever, Steve helped me set up a bare-bones webpage and is hosting the content until I figure it out (probably with more of his help), and you can go to feelingsbutton.com, press the steering wheel, and hear me and Steve having feelings so you don’t have to. (It’s also on GitHub!) Wholly in the Ann school of “you can learn a lot by doing things for sh!ts and giggles.”

I even presented! Holy cats.

Anyway. Plenty productive for one day.

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