:I'm going to be a bit unsure on that until I know more about what's hard for nonmagical therapists to work with - and I suppose what things there are good drugs for, I think that came up a tiny bit in the movie but I didn't follow the details because of the language barrier - but, er, Mindhealing is pretty good with anything where the main issue is traumatic associations, or - intrusive thoughts, excessive guilt or shame, generally poorly-regulated emotions. It can be pretty good for helping people who are generally very anxious, or scared of specific situations or objects or animals, and it's tolerable at the sort of madness where people hear voices or end up convinced they're the reincarnation of King Valdemar. It's not very good at helping people whose main problem is that they have trouble concentrating, or find themselves constantly avoiding tasks even though they're important and shouldn't be hard, and I'm hard-pressed to think what I would do about the example patient in the movie who had a problem with pulling out her hair and they gave her a toy for fidgeting with: 

Pause. 

:On a totally different note, now I really want a toy for fidgeting with. It's brilliant: 

"Oh, sure, I can get you a few - any particular sort you like the look of -"

:The one they showed that was a sort of wheel inside another wheel where you could spin both at different speeds was neat. And they showed one that was squishy. I'm guessing there are more kinds because there are a thousand kinds of soup here - I considered trying to find somewhere to look at the options but I'm not good enough at the laptop to find things reliably and Leareth was busy: 

"I'll get you a few to try," says Dree, writing this down. "And pull a therapist out of the House of Truth comments."

:Thank you. Er, I think that's the main things I wanted to cover: 

Leareth is still apparently engrossed in his conversation with Shory. He looks so animated and focused and is now, with great concentration, pecking out some new baffling nonword into his code editor. Melody can't help but grin about it. 

:I can't believe he managed to pick what's apparently an incredibly frustrating pastime and - just, this is the most I've seen him try to do things since the war. It seems really good for him: 

"Some people really like programming, as long as they don't have too offputting an experience with it while they're learning! Makes good money, too, though probably he'll make better money doing the magic stuff."

Leareth is delightedly listening to Shory's explanation of some of the next instructions in the tutorial, which he had found very confusing before for vocabulary reasons. It's pretty clear to Shory that he's grasping the concepts involved in programming very quickly.

It is probably also kind of painful for her to watch him laboriously hunt for each letter on the keyboard as he tries to type. 

Yuuup she is going to recommend a typing game for him. Or he could try speech to text but that's not necessarily much faster if the errors won't jump out at you visually.

This world has really good pedagogy practices! Leareth is so impressed. He will definitely do the typing-practice game. 

...Also what is 'speech to text', if he's understanding the concept correctly then that's incredible. How does it work? 

In Shory's experience not well! You have to speak very distinctly, the computer's bad at guessing from context - and none of its training data will have his specific accent. But she can find a simple app for it and install it on the loaner laptop so he can play with it.

Leareth will definitely play with it! And also try to find documentation of how it was built!

...Later. Right now he wants to make the best use he can of Shory's presumably-limited time, and get her to explain standard programming concepts (it's a lot easier to follow an in-person explanation when he can use Thoughtsensing to make up for the language gap), and maybe she could suggest some other tutorials he could look at next, or simple projects he could try in order to get practice at this?

Yup, Shory is full of opinions on this. Apparently she has a part time job teaching teenagers to code.

Leareth writes down all of her suggestions and takes lots of notes! He does this on a piece of paper from Melody's note-paper stash that she packed - it's noticeable different from local mass-produced paper - and mostly in Rethwellani, which obviously uses a completely unrecognizable alphabet. (It's still much easier and lower-friction for him than either translating his thoughts into Kayshu or using the laptop keyboard interface.) 

"Maybe you should get a linguist to come over when you're ready," Shory says, peering at the notes.

:Oh - are they going to be interested in the languages from Velgarth? I do also speak the local language from Arda but I am not as fluent in their writing system so I do not use it for note-taking:

"I don't see why they wouldn't be interested in all of 'em."

:I will keep that in mind: It sounds tiring and stressful, though. Unlike programming, which is AMAZING. 

...Leareth is only now consciously noticing that, when it comes to programming, he - seems to not be having any problems related to taking actions on purpose being scary? This is actually really surprising? Just yesterday he was scared about ordering groceries, and now he is considering following a tutorial to make his own simple 'app' and this is really a much stronger example of doing something that will affect the world on purpose, and yet it's fine? 

He can try to figure out what's going on there later. Right now it seems much more interesting to listen to Shory explaining conditional if-else statements. 

This is adorable to watch. 

Shory is excited to help with that! What does he want his app to do? Most people start with a simple game or to-do list of some kind.

He'll make a to-do list one! Presumably it will be worse than just using someone else's program for to-do lists, but he will have made it himself, which is oddly appealing. 

Yup! You can make it look and act however you want if you learn how! It's very motivating.

It's so motivating!

It also turns out that making an 'app' involves a whole lot of steps! Leareth is soon back in the position of having a dozen tabs open with search queries on all the various things he was curious about or needed clarification on. 

Some of the websites have advertisements on them. (Their loaner laptop does not have an ad blocker installed). They're mostly very polite and unobtrusive ads; there are some videos but they don't autoplay. 

At some point Leareth is trying to look up documentation on a particular additional library that he could import and which would provide lots of neat features for easily making a pretty visual layout, and there is an advertisement banner on the sidebar for some sort of fictional media that's apparently like a novel but mainly in pictures (thoughts and dialogue are included in text, set in bubbles linked to the character in question). It's an adventure story and the scene depicted in the ad involves the characters, several of which do not look especially human, exploring a beautifully-drawn bleak stone fortress of some kind and trying to get through a locked door. 

Any resemblance to the architecture of Angband is presumably a coincidence and entirely by accident, but Leareth is nonetheless now frozen to the spot and kind of panicking. 

Shory doesn't notice at all and goes on nattering about what programming language she thinks he should pick up after he's gotten reasonably fluent in this beginner's one.

448 picks up her head and whines and licks his elbow.

Leareth is at this point barely aware of his surroundings. He...feels like there's something he's supposed to do? Probably? 

Doing literally anything feels impossible, right now, but after what feels like an eternity (it's actually about ten seconds), 448's licking manages to penetrate the haze of panic. Leareth is very glad that he had settled on a hand signal rather than a verbal command for the blankets thing, because he sort of feels like he can't breathe, and talking is out of the question. 

He manages to make the signal - then has to do it a second time because it needs to actually be in 448's line of sight - and then puts his head down on the table beside the laptop. 

Blanket pile! 448 is ON IT. Shory has noticed by this point and scooted her chair away to give him some space and is exchanging concerned looks with Dree.