(no subject)

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

- aral balkan (mastodon)
(bolding mine)

(no subject)

picked up FFT again (had gotten slightly stuck in Yardrow, where you meet Rapha for the first time, just needed some grinding.)

and oh lord, Riovannes. that's why everyone online calls it the hardest chapter...

funny thing is i'm actually having a hard time with the exact opposite battles most people do lol.

-> first castle gate battle; reset two times because all the archers, annoyingly long!
-> 1:1 with weigraf: breezed through this the first time; easy as hell because somehow i had the absolute best build to 2OHKO him lol. (dragoon jump to chunk most of his HP + first strike to retaliate before he could kill ramza)
-> THIS THIRD PHASE IS IMPOSSIBLE..... T_T

i'll figure it out between setting the difficulty down + grinding more + looking up cheese hacks but aaauugh. SRPG's, gotta love them. XD

if you want to throw in some suggestions, my main party is: 

- ramza (mostly dragoon)
- mustolido (guns+chemist+haste bot for the arithmetician)
- krad (lol) (arithmetician, with strong levels in black magic + guns + summoning. i'm trying to make her a regen/reraise tank)
- zihark (mostly ninja+monk, started training him as a samurai but i keep using him as vanish bait)
- agrias (equally dragoon + obvious holy knight. jump is too good to pass up.)