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January 23, 2024

Hey y’all! Last I left you, I was going through it to say the least. I would throw that entry out the window and ignore that I ever wrote it, but I don’t think that’d be quite appropriate. I wouldn’t feel comfortable erasing a part of my life that I deliberately and brazenly put out there. I just can’t bring myself to lie by omission like that. So the entry’s staying up and we’re moving on. Rest assured, though, that I’m currently in contact with my local health system in trying to find a good therapist who’ll help me through the tough times ahead.

Speaking of moving on, I’ve been in my parent’s house for the past month or so, and just the other day I moved back into my shared abode to the north. Yeah, it’s cold, but it’s where I need to be. Especially given that I haven’t had golden curry in *FOREVER*. Or, really, any given Eastern dish. For Christmas, I got a brand new set of wooden kitchen utensils, a cooking-scrapbook that I really should write about at some point, and a beautiful new… I want to say 1/2 oz of genuine saffron from Spain. I want to be able to use all of it somehow. Probably for paella or something. Meaning I had to get the hell outta there.

So yeah, the other day I had tofu golden curry, yesterday I had an amount of buffalo chicken that screwed up my stomach up to this very point, and today I had a nice bigol fillet of salmon and a nice bigol serving of broccoli. And you know what? I’m about to run through that gauntlet again for the next three days. Minus the part about the buffalo chicken and the stomach garbage.

But of course that’s all just food stuff. How about programming? What happened to writing about different pieces of media with great passion? With that, I think it’s best we all wait until I actually have a good therapist in line and I’ve gained some of my energy back through said food stuff. I can’t really be passionate about something if I don’t have the energy to be passionate about it, right? Best that I trust the process and wait until I find myself in a good place again. That way I think I can give you what you deserve: a barely cohesive set of words roughly outlining the inner machinations of my mind. Which are an enigma.

Post written while watching: The X-Files on Satellite Television

January 4, 2024

Hey y'all! That's a Long Time between the last entry and this one. Wow. Let me start with a bit of a disclaimer: I am in no way claiming that I have it any worse than anyone else. I've just found myself between a rock and a hard place and I need a place to vent and log some next steps I want to take. Yes, I have a journal that I could write this in, but in the case that everything turns out for the better, I want this period of my life to be on the record so that I can prove that it is possible to get out of a deep rut. That all being said...

The past .5-.75 years have been a bit... eventful? Wobbly? However you want to phrase that, it's definitely been. A lot of self-searching, worrying, shifting of habits for better or for worse, cooking, coding, job searching, I could really go on. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to give you a Git-like update. By that I mean I'm going to give you an aggregate set of differences between the last entry and the current one instead of telling you all of the individual differences that led up to where I am in life right now. Doing the latter would get very complicated and I'm convinced that it would take me way too long to write about, not to mention that you would probably lose all interest about half of the way through.

Looking back at that last post I almost want to copy-paste it into this one, but I think that would only serve to understate the degree to which all of my previous changes have occurred.

I don't think I can beat around the Bush of Truth anymore. I'm burt. Tired. Pooped, even. A medical issue and a lack of therapy have rocked my life for a year, I can't seem to leave the job I've been trying to get out of for about the same amount of time, my list of hobbies hasn't changed but those that I've been able to work on has depleted drastically since I began to be wracked with the terrors of adult life. This isn't to mention the medically-perscribed diet that gave me an ED which, when combined with my admittedly extreme exercise routine compared to the average person, added onto my mental and physical issues. This has been a long time coming, and I'm just tired of having to deal with it every day.

There are a few things I've been doing to try and fix this lately. I've ejected streaming altogether. It doesn't have the same shine that it did when I started a few years back. If I were just playing games on my own it'd be different. I'd have the mental capacity to delve deep and enjoy them in the analytical way I tend to enjoy that kind of media. Streaming restricted my capacity to do things like that, and so I dropped it. Simple as that. I've also tried cooking for myself. I do that for myself anyway, but I felt that cooking for myself would allow me to have more control over my diet, helping me to live with my aforementioned condition that the docs imposed upon me. That was a great idea in theory, but that just results in me obsessing over food for a good 3-4 hours in my day. It's just not sustainable. Of course, I've also tried searching for other jobs, but seeing the situation I've found myself in currently I think we can all agree that hasn't really turned out with many net positive results.

So I've found myself in the middle of a real fixer-upper. At this point I think the best solution is just to stop caring altogether and do what I feel like whenever I feel like doing it. We'll see what that means for my life (and this site) down the road. I don't want to fill this feed with negative vibes, so hopefully that's motivation enough to turn this whole situation into a story where the guy who peaked in high school manages to peak again much further down the line. Stay tuned y'all, though this is a bit of a harsh entry I have hope that things will turn around for the better.

Post written while listening to: Veneer by Jose Gonzalez

March 27, 2023

You may have noticed that it's been a hot second since I posted on here. That's because I've been busy putting my nose to the grindstone trying to get my everything in working order! That's like... personal projects, organization of interests, job prospects, trying to improve QOL, work stuff, all wrapped into one tiny lil Package Of Busy and Eugh-ness. That being said, for the time being, I feel like I'm going to start eliminating things from my ridiculously long list of pasttimes, starting with my regularly-scheduled Monday streams. I feel like I'm not bringing the energy (or the content for that matter) into those that I generally want to, and this would give me the time I need to brush up on some skills that I'd like to improve and get more things in order in my life. If you see some other things fade from the page here and there, don't be alarmed, that's just me trying to find my place, kinda feeling out what I like most about my free time and trying to isolate and let those specific things grow in place of the stuff that doesn't seem to be as big of a deal to me! After all, you can't really expect some random 22-year-old on the internet to honestly know what it's doing with its life, right?

If you're worried, though, I'm still gonna keep streaming, just maybe once a week. I've got games. I've got japes and vibes. I contribute! I'm also gonna see if I can start focusing more on my art skills (ie. culinary and digital), finding some cool open source projects to work on, and getting out to (*shiver*) meet more people in places like makerspaces and such since those seem to be pretty bigol chill points in my life. Oh yeah, and make more posts like this here in the future! And now... let Zen begin.

Post written while listening to: Music that You May Consider Liminal by a variety of artists

January 23, 2023

God, building up the confidence to actually contribute to an open source project is insanely daunting. For me at least, there was a huge amount of uneasiness getting myself to communicate with other people and ensure what I was going to bring to the table was meaningful and helpful to everyone involved. I managed to get on with it though! Somewhere floating off in the aether of GitHub, literally one word's worth of my code is helping Godot become its best self!

If you don't really know what Godot is, I wouldn't blame you. All focus is in either Unreal, Unity, or custom game engines. Godot is particularly special in the sense that it's a game engine that's completely open-source and community-built. Of course there's an administration to the whole endeavor in the same sense that a Discord server has a moderation team, but that kind of administration is necessary for the creation of a meaningful project this big. Having made that comparison though, I would almost compare the process of contributing to Godot as an uber-professional hyper-utilitarian version of a Discord server. As long as the issues or comments you're adding to the repository are helpful and relevant or otherwise show intent to move the project along, you're completely in the clear.

What governs all of that is the documentation relating directly to the repository. This is the stuff I feverishly read 60 times over in the months leading up to my 1-word commit. As much as I like to talk to myself, I get super nervous in new social situations, and so I end up overanalyzing what kinds of things I need to say when. Luckily for this particular social situation, there is a defined set of rules for exactly that, and so I began doing nothing but making sure I knew what I was doing by reading documentation. Well, also by looking at other issue threads and pull requests, but that's just leading into that next step which was actually finding an issue I felt comfortable applying my newfound knowledge towards.

I didn't want to jump into the deep end immediately, since I feel like learning everything about the internal workings of the engine at the same time I was trying to learn how to communicate in open-source projects was probably not the right way to go. I searched through all of the issues tagged "good first issue" to see if something clicked easily for me. That came through pretty quickly, since I'd found an issue from some hours previous to my search just begging for someone to come and fix it. I found what was causing the problem in what was probably a couple of hours. What took me that long to figure that out? Well, y'know, when you don't know how a program is structured internally, it's a bit difficult to understand what's going on until you're fully immersed. Turns out that just means your first easy commits take a grossly long time to solve. Boo hoo I guess.

When I did find that fix, with poise and confidence, I stuck my chest out and commented on that issue, giving a clear and consice thought on what the problem might be. The response? The professional version of "k.". Sick.

So then I made a pull request and that was that. The admins saw the change I made, pretty much said "Yeah, that looks right to us," a couple of automatic tests were run, and my code was pulled into the repository without me having to make any further actions. I have to say, not the most socially distressed I've been in my life, but it was certainly not the most comfy I've been either. Absolutely worth every bit of stress.

Listen. If you're a programmer and you've wanted to be a part of something big before, I highly encourage you to look into open source. There's something very fulfilling about stepping into a world where you aren't comfortable, contributing to a project where the end goal lies outside of anything you've done before. If you've been wanting to contribute but haven't built up the courage to do so, dude same. But also taking that first jump isn't quite as bad as you might think. Of course, everyone's going to have their own experience, but as long as you follow the rules given to you and whatever mistakes you make aren't wildly awful, I promise you that nothing drastically horrid will occur outside of maybe a slap on the wrist. If this social wreck can do this, I promise that you can as well!

Post written while listening to: Outer Wilds (Original Soundtrack) - Andrew Prahlow

January 10, 2023

I have done Jack Squat to contribute to any kind of open source project at all. At face value, that might seem a bit disappointing, but you may be surprised to hear that that's not exactly the case! See, having just graduated college in the middle of December, I'm attempting to reclaim whatever bits of sanity I had remaining in my tiny little skull, so I've been doing my best to avoid too much thinking and stress by, in part, cutting programming out of my life altogether for about one month. It's only fair; I've been doing nothing but thinking for ~16 years straight with pretty much zero breaks. So yeah, success!

In the meantime, I've been applying to jobs, cooking, reading, drawing, and yknow...

Getting this thing lined up. This is my second attempt at getting pixel art down right, and it lines right up with my second attempt at low-poly modelling. Boy, my 3D design teacher must be so proud (/s). In all seriousness, given those facts, I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out, and I'm really glad that I've been able to figure out how to make this work, since I'm going to translate those skills over to making some character models if I ever get the chance. In the meantime though, I'll be right here stuck with using these models to visualize some things for my now-8-month-old yesterweb manifesto. Honestly, I'm not even concerned as to how the video itself will come out, since I got to learn so much technical skill from this endeavor just by attempting the project. So far, this has been an absolute blast of an adventure.

Outside of that, just more stream experimentation, more bread baking (the one I made last week was supposed to be ye olde normal bread but I added like twice as much water as was needed and I just had to turn it into a ridiculously wet focaccia which was frankly kinda amazing). Hopefully with my newfound ability to create low-fidelity 3D models the process of outputting my manifesto'll come along much quicker. More updates coming soon, and hopefully much sooner than you think!

Oh yeah and I got this lil guy in the mail today, if you wanna know a lil insight into a larger, more secret project in the works *-,,o

Post written while listening to: My own playlist... Iowa After the Storm (The Things I Didn't Want To Leave Behind)

Happy new year! I mean, I'm not making this blog as any part of a new year resolution, but the timing definitely lines up, huh? Nah, I've more been meaning to get it going for a while at this point. I've always been interested in throwing my general going-about-of-things onto some kind of platform, and for the longest time that vent was social media. Well, we're currently seeing where that's all going, so I made the anticipatory step of finally giving in to my need to contribute to the mighty tear-down of the corporate web and create my own space on the web. And here we are!

So here's the part where I talk about what I mean by my "general going-about-of-things". That would just be a stream of consciousness. A place to put words whenever they appear in my brain. I would love to eventually put a comments box up on these posts so that people can tell me how much I need to shut up, but unfortunately I specialize in low-level programming languages and I still have to do some research to get that kinda thing running… Guess that's goal numero dos.

This being largely stream-of-consciousness, you're going to find a lot of types of posts here! It'll probably be mostly status updates on current projects, life, and current events. Still, it would be great if I could mostly fit long sweeping essays on old web- and video game-related topics, bursts of frustration, and individual pre-packaged jokes that popped into my head while I was in the shower into this blog instead of anything too personal or serious. Knowing how I've tried to keep diaries in the past and how I've written before, anything can go.

In addition, I do keep a dream journal. Yes, like from the movie.

The general process is this: whenever I catch one of these things, I just kinda write it down in this little pocket notebook I carry around from time to time. Then, if I think it's good enough, I'll scrub it up to make it seem almost as if I wasn't completely zonked outta my mind by the morning crusties when I wrote it. I'll give an example at the end of this post since that's where a lot of these them might end up anyway.

That being said, here's what I'm working on right now so you can get a sense of what kind of things I'll be talking about exactly:

• 3D modelling and texturing some low-poly objects for a video essay that will double as a manifesto (insert obligatory progress pic here):

  
• Finding a way to contribute code to the Godot game engine, a C-based completely open-source game engine
• Twitch streaming
• Re-learning Python

As far as intellectual projects go, that about does it! And as for my post here… yup, it's about time for that to come to a close here too! Thanks for being interested enough to read a wall of text by a person who just can't keep their mouth shut. Hopefully this was interesting enough to come back to here and there. If you want to stay up to date with my site as I continue to try to make this look in any way clean and professional, feel free to follow me here (Neocities - Apollo's Hangar)! I'll post here whenever I really feel the mighty need to, which translates to maybe 1-3 times a month. Fingies crossed that this'll keep me accountable for progress on my projects and that I'll be satisfied by this hole I can throw words into. Catch ya at a later date!

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An entry from the journal: December 15, 2022

I moved into a crappy apartment in a crappy new town. It looks a bit like Chicago might, but only after a nuclear apocolypse occurred and now the pallette of the area is dark grey and red. I've been walking around town a bunch, and eventually I get stopped in front of a light post next to an old beaten-up strip mall. It was by a homeless woman, who I talked to for a good amount of time before I gave her all of the change I had in my pocket, which turned out to be a large amount. I went back on my way.

A day or so later, I walked by the same place, but this time there was a group of other people, all of which were around the same age as me, making their way into the strip mall. There was a box on the post now, which seemed to belong too the homeless woman. The contents were falling out, so I tried to put it all back in. That's when someone from the group asked me if I was the one who helped that woman. I said yes, and was immediately brought into the group as a friend.

We all walked into a door at the front of the mall. In this shop, I was immediately hit by a sense that I can only describe as existential euphoria. The shop was selling a specific type of recreational drug, the vapors of which were floating around the room. In the back, there were dressing rooms, all of them themed. I never did enter any of those rooms. By the end of it all, I regretted not entering.

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Post written while listening to: Mice Parade by Mice Parade