The Truth About VASL

Spencer Armstrong

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You can't keep a good man down.
Or Don neither. :p

OK, a serious comment on Jackson's post.

I appreciate the sentiment, but the unhappy truth is that we (the VASL Cabal) don't do a good job of training people to help. That is partly (wholly?) my fault. New volunteers need really good documentation, hands-on training time with experienced folk, and relevant tasks to develop their skills with. The Ye Olde Booke, while tremendous fun, is aged in several ways. Relevant tasks (ie, working on the boards, counters, or extensions for new products) don't seem to be a problem. But the biggest thing is hands-on training time, which I just haven't made since I went to Emeritus status several years ago and concentrated on doing printable maps in Illustrator. BigAl can speak for himself, and perhaps he's a lot better at that than I am, but it's an understandable problem - you only have a certain amount of time to do VASL stuff, and when you're training others, you're not getting VASL stuff done. Yes, of course, the goal of training others is to eventually have them take over doing VASL stuff for you, but that's an investment in an uncertain outcome.

And make no mistake, being a long-term contributor to VASL requires a lot of time and, as Carl Nogueira once said, the ability to deal with a lot of tedium :). Every pixel has to be right. For some (who probably skew somewhere uncomfortable on the autism spectrum ;)), that's not a problem, and it's tremendously satisfying to see VASL things work and wonderfully gratifying to receive the appreciation of the community. You folks have always been appreciative and that's friggin' awesome. Let me give a shout-out to Federico Kors, who's made some great contributions on the coding side as well.

So. I don't know what the answer is, but I wanted to comment on the situation because no, it's not what we wish it would be. I apologize to Spencer and Jackson for not engaging with their honest and sincere desire to help, and I'm sure there are others who just haven't gotten the training they need to help. Those are well-intended offers on their part to contribute to the community, and it stinks if we can't utilize that. At the same time, I'm largely/mostly retired from VASL, and I've earned the right to spend my ASL time however I want.

It would be easy to say, "you can help by contributing money", but that's not the model VASL works on, for good reasons, and was never the reason for Rodney Kinney developing VASL in the first place.
Enh...I always say: You can't convince someone to play ASL. They either look at it and say "This is the best thing ever!" or "What the actual fuck?" Working on VASL is the same. I'm on my second attempt at Ogredom and I think it's amazing, but the blunt fact is that seriously major life changes have torpedoed me both times. I'll get back to it and (I think) soon. Working on the VASL stuff actually sounds better than ASL right now, but both are in the the fourth row of seating in my seats-four Mazda 3 right now. Grr.
 
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