I couldn't think of a better title for this entry, so I decided to simply go with the one that felt the most honest at the moment I wrote it, and in retrospect the most dishonest one as I write this now.
This is my preferred style of writing. Let it fall out and simply think about it later.
I set myself the challenge to improve as a writer in the past few months. This is and will continue to be a major daily obective for me. I write often, but frequently move on to the next exciting new thing before I finish. I wish to start giving more attention and love to the things I create, so I have resolved to try something that I have never tried before - Set a structured and scheduled plan.
I initially did this by setting myself a more short term goal. Daily wordcount minimums, month long end goals, and other stuff like that. More an exercise in seeing if I could do it, but also one in moving those muscles with consistency, testing and pushing my limitations, an ultimately experimenting with the what if of setting myself limitations and criteria.
When I was younger I fell into the trap that many aspiring artists stumble into where I viewed my lack of self discipline as a strength. I followed no rules, and nothing mattered. Naturally this was spurred on by most of my fellowed creatives embracing a similiar frame of thinking in a lot of ways. Discipline wasn't necessary if you were a true talent. Mental health was for those who lacked anything really meaningful or special to say. Alcohol and/or drugs were necessary to break through the walls of the mind and reality.
I've seen so many versions of this in my lifetime from amateurs, professionals, and even casual observers of the arts. The older I have become the more I've seen all versions of those kinds of things proven to be untrue. Any person I know who is really creating meaningful and great art has come to the same conclusions. Anyone I know who didn't self destructed, lost steam and faded away.
It's a hard thing to say out loud without having it sound like complete nonsense, but there are so many people in this world who are only happy when it rains. Particularly in the arts. Having a vice or a self percieved or assigned weakness is an excellent way to evade a sense of accountability for oneself. If we live in such a just and modern world it should be able to accomodate and celebrate idleness
I personally don't want to become another meaningless statistic like that.
It's not entirely the fault of those people that they see no hope.
I came from a very small town. It wasn't known for producing great artists, and in fact was more well known for being a place where you wouldn't live if you were doing anything great. I thought I'd never met anyone like that, and I knew no one who had walked the path I aspired towards as a young artist.
When I moved to Sydney in my mid twenties I met the opposite of that. Famous people, creative geniuses, the most ambitious people. It was hard not to be inspired.
But surely enough I met plenty of the opposite of as well. In my hometown at least if you lived there you were probably content with what you had, a life was pretty okay even if you were poor, or stupid, or whatever else. Life went on. In the city however, for every high achiever, there were plenty more who just couldn't or wouldn't make it happen. Their cynicism passed down to the next crop, and they took their cyncism as an indisputable fact and indicator just to give up.
The more I got to know these people the more I also began to understand that even in a city like Sydney it was possible to be surrounded with people who had not only lost hope, but used it as an excuse to not even search for it. It baffled me in a way. Here we are in a city filled with tens of millions of people, formed by the will and ambition of tens of millions more over two centuries, and they had no one in their world telling them to keep going. That they just needed to perserve.
At this point I admit even I too had no hope at one point. I was surrounded by people who preached no hope and lived in a daily state of self pity, while changing nothing. I think I believed them because I loved them and trusted them. Those people loved and trusted me too. They percieved a truth in me that was worthy of that, so it didn't seem unfeasible that they were themselves effortlessly perceptive of the world and themselves too.
This ended for me when I decided I didn't want to live in self pity anymore. It seemed like a waste of time and my life. I could deal with failure and pitfalls in life. I couldn't accept looking at myself as something pathetic, unworthy and incapable. I just simply knew that wasn't true.
The reason I knew this is because I actually did have great people around me. People who had achieved incredible things. I am not talking about my artist friends, although as time passed many of them manifested their ambitions into reality.
The most shining example I can think of is my own father. He was born in great poverty in a developing country where the poor were extremely poor, and upward mobility was not something to be considered. By his own admission he didn't have a home with electricity until he was 28 in a train station bathroom when he moved here. In more recent years he confided that he often thought of himself a tiny and insignificant, and that the station in life he was born to was simply something a person of his status never was meant to escape.
When he decided to immigrate here to Australia, by his own account everyone thought he was stupid. He couldn't speak english, had virtually no money or connections in Australia, no job waiting for him, and that he was going to be chewed alive by a country that would never welcome him. The alternative was staying in his home country, and despite the many great challenges both theoretical and actual that faced his future, he resolved that moving to Australia was something to be done if he was to change his circumstances. Not just for himself, but for his whole family both existing and future.
Now almost all his family live here. He took the risk, perserved through the challenges and hardships, and lives a life he never imagined was accessible to him. He was the first person in his family to get a university education, he was able to help his parents and sibilings improve their own lives, he owns a spacious modern and comfortable home with electricity and a paid off mortgage.
Throughout all those challenges he was also an excellent father. He still is an excellent father. Naturally like any father and son relationship we will disagree and even butt heads. The world he came from is completely different from mine. At the same time he recognises that the world and time I matured in is extremely different from his own, and has its own challenges. He doesn't pretend to understand it completely, but I know he will always do his best.
So in retrospect I realised I always had people in my life who achieved greatness. My father isn't the only example. I see it in many members of my family now. I I see it in my grandmothers uncompromising loving nature despite growing up in a deeply unloving home. I see it in my older step-brother and his amazing family and providing his daughter with the love and support he felt she deserved. I see it in the intense determination for individuality and adaptability of my mother's parents. I see it in the relience of all my close family in the hardest moments of our collective lives as a family when we lost several members in a short space of time and became a small tightly bonded unit.
Many of the people I know who live in a perpetual state of lost hope never had people like that around them. Even with all the opportunity within their grasp, they were only surrounded with people who told them that greatness is for other people. The people who told that to them were probably told them same thing.
In my times of self doubt I think of all the people in my life who love me and believe in me, and I remind myself of the good fortune I am to have those people in my lives. I sincerely believe that if you love a person you will always see them as deserving of truth. The people who lost hope but loved me likely think they're providing truth. The people who love me and believe in me and cheer my success likely believe it to be the truth too.
They may both be right, or they just are just offering the truth as they can understand it best. Either way, given the choice, even at the times I doubt myself, I remember love isn't merely a word but an action. If their belief in me is the truth I owe it to them to prove them right. As for those who don't believe in me but love me anyway, I owe it to them to succeed so as to prove to them that there is not just hope for me, but for themselves as well.
Now that I think about it, considering what I landed on topic-wise this was an excellent title.
Dream Journal #1
It was something about a boat. It was like a cruise, but it was for a competition I was anxious about not to participating in. I cannot remember what the competition
was except that it made me feel like I was on a school trip. There was no pass or fail. I cannot remember if I even successfully competed. Everyone I thought was
going to be there with me was not.
When the cruise had finished I walked off the boat as everyone else did back on to the port. I started mindlessly walking in a direction thinking it was the right
way. After about three blocks I realised there was a faster way I remembered the first time from the port going a completely different direction, so I walked back
to the port. The traffic had increased significantly.
I think about what would define me as a successful writer at the end of my life, and I realise that the only real thing that could determine success in my mind is if I wrote every day that I could.
I don't care about fame. I only want as much money as I need to not starve, have a place to live, and take care of myself and the people around me. Ideally enough money that I would never be bothered by the world trying to claim my time as its own - which is every day.
That isn't to say I don't wish to be generous with my time or share my time, but it is an undeniable reality as far as I'm concerned that I cannot go a single day of my life in this day and age without people demand my time as if it were their own.
This is a big problem.
Friends demand my time. The government demands my time. Businesses demand my time. Family demands my time. Even in modern times with the rise of video games that fall under the "Games as a service" model, video games demand my time.
I hate looking at my phone as a result. Nothing seems to be more of a concentrated portal to claim my time than my phone. I never even wanted my phone, but I got it because my father was frustrated with the limitation of my "dumb phone".
Some days I will completely ignore my phone. It feels good, but inevitably it causes its own problems. Missed calls from scammers, missed calls from family and friends and texts asking why I'm not responding. dozens of notifications for things I don't care about like the weather or a news article about some dumb celebrity, or emails I don't really feel the need to read.
But then inevitably sooner or later ignoring that phone even for a day has some consequences. Recently I missed out on a social event for the pre-release of a hobby of mine. The event asked for almost double the usual fee which I had learned too late, so I had to inform the other people going that I had not budgeted for it and wouldn't be attending. One of those friends told me that they had informed me of the price and event a couple of weeks in advance so we wouldn't miss it. I told him truthfully that it must have been lost in the mix of notifications.
He seemed a little frustrated at me for this, and rightfully so. He cares a lot about this thing. My attendance wasn't essential, but it mattered to him.
On the other hand however it underlined that notion that my time was not treated as my time, but time for others to claim. My phone the biggest culprit.
It is normal to just always be online now. I'm old enough that I spent a little more than half my life where that wasn't the case. Being online was a choice in my youth and early adulthood. Now it's expected.
You don't even really need to seek the internet anymore, you just have it. Even if you didn't have a phone, the internet will find its way to you.
Just before the COVID events I got a job where portions of the training were done on mobile phones. My "dumb phone" was a phone that only really did calls and texts. It wasn't made for the internet and it couldn't install apps. This was a problem.
When COVID happened a lot of places required checking in somehow. Most used a QR code you would scan. I couldn't do that. They would typically have a physical sign in sheet if you didn't, but some businesses just assumed you had a phone.
A phone and the internet always being with you is the new normal. It doesn't feel healthy. It feels predatory.
A person should be able to choose to not be reachable. It's their time. They only have a finite amount of it. Any time taken, lost or spent is never coming back.
Time is possibly the most valuable thing a person can possess.
The older I get the more precious time becomes. I theoretically have a fair bit of life ahead of me, but I am at a point where a person typically has almost as much time behind them as they do ahead of them.
When I do anything I think about how that time is used. Time lost to worthless things is impossible to avoid. I've done it before, and I'll do it again. Just like anyone else. But even with my leisure I weigh it.
Many people consider video games as a waste of time. I would be inclined to argue that they either don't understand video games, or they simply have only not played the right ones.
To me the best video games I've played have been on par with the greatest novels I've ever read, and in some ways even exceeded them in my memory. It's one thing to read a story about a struggle being overcome, it's another thing to use my own hands and senses to guide them through it. Their struggle becomes your struggle. Their success becomes your success. That sensation is something that can't be taken away from you. It's an experience you can carry with you into every aspect of your life. You've overcome before, and you can do it again.
It's why I personally don't really do online games anymore. Online games, particularly Games as a Service games, are an endless treadmill. Designed deliberately to be so. The games are only as successful as their ability to maximise your time and investment in them. Designed to get you to feel a sense of fear of missing out if you don't get the new player skin or participate in the next limited time special event. Fear that if you stop playing that all the time you put into it levelling up, harvesting resources and buying/unlocking items was for nothing. That's why most of them are free to play.
They don't even feel socially fulfilling anymore. A world of spiteful bitter people that see each failure or shortcoming of the faceless people around them as a poison on their enjoyment and success in the game. Too many people treat the people online as if they're not real people, but instead other characters in their power fantasy that aren't doing their part to fulfill the power fantasy part.
In the early days of online games you would typically find a server and get to know the people. Even if you never met in person, you got to know each other and came to know the person and not just the player. It wasn't terribly difficult to find a server, but it still took a bit of time and effort to find one that felt suitable on a social level and a skill level if that mettered to you.
Now with automated matchmaking you're just randomly lumped in together with a bunch of people of a similar skill level. If you are bad at the game, everyone is bad at the game, but depending on a persons self awareness and maturity, they may and often will find an excuse to blame anyone but themselves. It doesn't matter how they treat the people around them because they'll probably never cross paths again. There's no point taking the steps to form a healthy relationship of any kind.
But I still love video games. I am glad my life has ran parallel with their transition from infancy to a medium on par with film, literature, visual art, music and all the other great forms. It brings the language of all those things into it and gives them a new dimension.
I only want to play games with an ending these days. I don't want to be an on an endless treadmill. I want the game to have a purpose beyond simply being a game and generating profit. I want it to want me to arrive at a destination and step off at that final station a changed person. I want it to be okay with me going off and enjoying the next game that will hopefully want me to do the same.
I plan to play less games the next year, but play more high quality ones. Ones that respect my time and don't take it, but simply ask for it. Games that will respect my desire to commit my time to being more than a person who plays games.
Dream Journal #2
Went for a walk with my grandmother. We ended up at a library computer lab. Then there was a brief power surge which shut down and rebooted all the computers which upset the three other people there. My grandmother briefly panicked thinking it was the act of a ghost. She calmed down after seeing no one was scared and she seemed to understand the explanation that it was just a power surge.
We decided to continue our walk outside but quickly discovered it was raining very heavily and stayed near the exist of the building with the door open waiting for it to ease up. Then my grandfather walked in from the rain completely dry. We went back into the computer lab with my grandmother who told me she was just going to stay in the computer lab with him for a while, and that I should go find my dad.
I walked down a hall and came across someone playing a fighting game on an arcade cabinet. The guy informed me that it was a modification of an existing game. He said his version of the game was called X Man Cena Gang.
I wrote a list of goals I wanted to achieve in the new year.
There are other things for all these lists that I'd like to add, but I felt compelled to apply some limitations. There's certainly plenty of ones I would like to add to the last list in particular, but if I added all of those I'd have no time for the others. Some series are just one or two games, but I have chosen to list ones that cover a broad number that connect and lead to a final point.
The ones I suspect I will need to be the most flexible about are the things I want to do more, not because I don't think I could do it but rather because I have to account for times when I may be too ill or have other major commitments.
Of all of these I am determined to succeed in a minimum two. However, the first three lists I am strongly committed towards completing all goals. I have admittedly already created a schedule and plan for the things I want to create in particular, but until they exist it feels foolish to just assume it will be as simple as that.
But in writing that, I think I have to get into the mindset that it is impossible for me to fail at achieving all these things.
I feel like speaking to the desire to learn Ruby in particular.
When I was in my early twenties a programming language framework called Ruby On Rails became the hot new language. I had not bothered to learn it at the time because I was too busy writing and practicing musical instruments 10 hours a day almost every day of the week, and the techno wizard aspirations of my teens had dwindled significantly by that point. I was still loosely aware of it being an up and coming thing in the computer world through my daily browsing of the Something Awful forums.
Later in my thirties however I came back to programming to discover Ruby On Rails had barely any presence in the more recent landscape of programming and web development. I'd yesterday in thinking about this list learned it had been the contender in one of those technological battles that seem to happen from time to time where a format (or language in this case) has a winner and loser. Like VHS and Betamax, Bluray and HDDVD, DVD and Laser Disc, iPhone and Blackberry it appears that Ruby had been in a similar competition with Python.
Python these days is almost universally considered the language to learn if you want to start learning programming. It has lots of plain language and is efficient in making things quickly. It's a good language, and I've used it to make many thing. Personally I always found it a boring language too.
As it turns out much like all those other technological battles for dominance, the winner was determined by how much it could be applied and by whom. The data science community seemingly embraced Python, educators embraced it for its simplicity. I can't pretend to know the full extent of how it was embraced, but those were the examples that seemed to pop up a lot
Ruby uses plain language as well. My brief investigation into trying it here: https://try.ruby-lang.org/ revealed it to be as easy to use as Python, and in my opinion seemed to ring more true to the notion of being able to program in plain English for most of the part.
Another reason I was curious about it was because I knew it was still somewhat popular in Japan. As it turns out it was a product of Japan, created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz) in 1995. My early exposure to it in the mid 2000s lead me to believe it was a product of the new Millenium (another reason I wanted to learn Ruby as I will explain later), but what had actually happened was Ruby had not really had an English version until around 1999, and even then it took a few more years for it to become popularised in the western world through the Ruby On Rails framework. Ruby On Rails probably coinciding with the internet rebuilding from the Dot Com Bubble bursting to the centralised hypercapitalist internet we know today.
Not that Ruby was responsible for that. That was on the developers and the people that pay them.
Over time other languages have emerged that do what Ruby did best just as well or better. But as it turns out Ruby is still very much present in the world, even outside of Japan.
Twitch is built on it. The biggest digital storefront service Shopify is still built on it. Even streaming services like Hulu are still built on it.
Of course I'm not planning to learn Ruby to get rich. Although I've seen many accounts of people claiming that because most people learn Python as their "plain language" programming language, while the pool of jobs for Ruby is smaller the pay tends to be higher (in part because hiring is based to a notable extent on what languages businesses systems are alread built on in addition to how easy it is to find a programmer for a language).
I will of course address the millenium reason. But before that I want to talk about the reason the language exists, which is a big factor in my motivation to learn it.
Yukihiro Matsumoto by his own account said he created the language because he wanted to program in a language he thought would be fun and easy for a developer to build things using, but couldn't really find a suitable language that already existed. He also noted that developers tend to look at programming languages as something to be measured by how much easier it would make things for the computer, often at the cost of making it easier for the programmer.
This left a real impression on me. I admired his intent to making programming pleasurable. Using Ruby was the first time I felt like I was having fun programming, as opposed to just feeling a sense of satisfaction when I finally got something to work correctly. I am a big fan of the Sherry Turkle books. She is a Socialogist and Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Since the early 1980s she has been studying and writing about the relationship between humans and machines. The first and earliest book of hers I read was The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit published in 1984 https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2327/The-Second-SelfComputers-and-the-Human-Spirit
In The Second Self she observed people, adults and children regardless of gender personifying their machines as they provided it instructions. Almost having a conversation with it, and imprinting part of themselves on the programming.
I always say part of the reason I like programming is because it's a process of explaining how I see and understand things to something that at its core only understands yes and no logic. One of my favourite examples of this is when making a game with enemies, I need to explain to the computer the concept of fear. In order to do that I would need to help it understand why and when it would want to preserve itself. I would need to give it an understanding of when it is in danger and when it is not, and what its options would be to preserve itself. This often also involves giving it a sense of empathy by making it consider the condition and wellbeing of its friends around it. At this point its possible to go even deep and give that enemy a personality. Maybe it's very brave. Maybe it's a coward, maybe it's greedy, maybe it's sentimental. Maybe it's even sexually aroused.
I would need to help the computer understand these things, but I can only explain it as best I can understand it. So I need to reflect on it, and help it see things the same way. Through that part of me becomes part of the machine. As long as that code exists somewhere, part of me exists. Programming in a way is the closest thing I can think of to immortality. Even when I pass away someday, my code can still exist. Maybe if I have descendants of some kind, they will even be able to understand who I was, how I behaved and thought, all because it was expressed in something that can live forever.
I enjoyed talking to my computer like a person using Ruby
Sherry Turkle observed a lot of things in that 1984 book that became even more true as time passed. With the rise of the internet, people started creating whole new personalities on the internet. A version of them that was seperate from themselves. I mentioned in the previous entry that people can be quite callous in online video games. Particularly in team ones its not uncommon for people to be cruel even to their own team mates in victory. Growing up I played a lot of sports, and if I ever spoke to any of my team mates the way people speak to their team mates in online games I would have been promptly and rightfully punched in the mouth.
This phenomenom of identity through technology and internet is evident even in the arts. When I started doing stand-up comedy in my mid to late twenties most of the people I knew were somewhat familiar with the internet. We knew how to use a computer well having grown up with them, and we were familiar with the internet, but social media was still in its infancy. When I came back to it in more recent times there was a new crop of comedians and it was fascinating to see. So many of them, even if they weren't necessarily good at stand-up comedy yet, had fully defined and cultivated "brands". At the risk of sounding disparaging, they figured out how to be a professional and a product before they had even figured out how to be funny or in many cases before they'd even written a joke or thought about being a stand-up comedian.
It had dawned on me that a whole generation had grown up forming their personalities and identities through the internet. Especially during COVID lockdown era I imagine. Their online identity wasn't just a second identity like in the past, the online identity was as much a part of their true identity and the one that walks around in the world. Their minds and ideas being tuned to trends and alogrithms so fast and efficiently that it's become just natural.
I remember reading that book The Talent Code many years ago that popularised the 10,000 hours to master something concept. One example was an explanation why certain South American teams seemed to dominated international soccer, and why the average South American in general seemed to possess a higher degree of skill in the game even on a casual level. It observed that despite being a continent filled with poverty, it just seemed better at the game than places with more money, better facilities, better everything. One of the answers it landed on was futbol. A sort of smaller version of the game. What the author observed was that many of the professional players from South America had in common was they often started and grew up playing futbol. The ball was smaller, it didn't require a whole field and didn't even need much space, and could be played with smaller teams. What this resulted in was a game where every player was touching the ball more often, and also operating in a more limited space which required more technical play instead of big kicks.
I once witnessed my own father score a goal in a game from the halfway line at a full field game. I thought it was so impressive. I still do. He amusingly didn't seem to think it was a big deal. I still can picture it. He paused for about two seconds with the ball at his feet, looked out at the field in front of him, and then I guess observing either a lack of good passing options, or a positioning vulnerability on the goalkeepers part and did what seemed like actually quite a gentle kick. It seemed to float through the air at a speed where anyone could have corrected themselves to address it, and then simply and precisely plopped into the goal in a top corner outside of the goalkeepers reach.
My dad would often talk about not even having shoes to play when he grew up, and the kids in his neighbourhood making a ball from their socks collectively bundled together and playing on the street. I imagine his experience is not that far from the futbol theory.
Much like those fulbol players getting their 10,000 hours with the ball, this new generation of people are constantly in touch with the internet and what is happening. They don't even need to search for it anymore. It's in every thing they do. I of course have spent a lot of time with computers and the internet myself. But my identity and internet was formed outside of it. I have also seen enough of the internet to not want to interact with sometimes.
The version of the internet that exists now is also just not really the version I thought and hoped it could be. My family was a surprisingly early adopter of the internet despite not having much money. My dad worked hard but after my mother passed away in the early 1990s he was supporting himself and his sons on a single parent income while coming to terms with everything. I don't know why we got it early. Maybe 1996. My first encounter with it was the local library. I was amazed by it. Straight away I could see its potential. I thought it would fix almost all the worlds problem. It made the world seem like a smaller and more understanding place. All geographical and cultural boundaries could be broken down. Hidden knowledge became knowledge for all. Then businesses tried to monetise it unsuccessfully, which resulted in the dot com bubble bursting, which was good to me. The internet still felt open and a wild frontier. Then Web 2.0 happened where the businesses learned from their mistakes, and now the internet is a dystopian coporate mind sludge factory for most of the part.
Part of my renewed interest in programming and web development in recent years has been the acceptance that the internet will never go back to being what I thought made it good, and it will never become what I thought it could be.
However, that doesn't stop me from making at least small parts of it what I thought it could be, and use it to do the things I felt it was capable of doing. I may not be able to change it all, but I can have some control over my own small part of it. In the process of doing that, despite the internet being a shithole of misinformation and predatory behaviour, by contributing good things to it that are within my control I can at least make it slightly closer to how I dreamed it.
Which finally leads me to the Millenium aspect of Ruby. Ruby was made in 1995 as I established before, but in my english speaking mind was something of the early 2000s. As a result in my mind it's something that was created with a vision for technology not dissimilar to what I was dreaming of between 1995 and 2005 myself. Lately I've been writing a lot about technology, in some way mourning the loss of what could of been right now, but also trying to be hopeful for the future. For that reason Ruby is something I want to be interacting with every day. I know Ruby has had many developments since that time and adapted, but I think it would be beneficial to spend time with my computer, thinking in terms of something that was created with the future in mind that I was looking towards too.
I want that spirit and mindset to be living in my life every day. I don't simply want to make things in Ruby, or communicate with my computer in Ruby. I want to live in a mindset where I am hopeful for the future of technology and creativity, and I will do that by building things every day with a programming language made for a time when its creator felt the same way.
I want that hopefulness to seep into everything I do, and in the best case become part of mindset of the people who understand and appreciate it.
Dream Journal #3
Brown.
I slept until midday and did nothing except practice Spanish, and now I'm playing Metal Gear Solid. I'm also halfway through the Hideo Kojima essay book.
This is not how I wanted to start my year. But I have stuff to do tomorrow so I'll make up for it then.
Dream Journal #4
I am at a small house party at an unfamiliar house. I am playing video games and chatting to my friend Amy through text message.
The video game is pretty old but I have the living room to myself as the party is mostly contained in my friend Dave's room. There are almost a dozen people in there when I briefly poke my head in to chat.
I go back to the living room to play my games, wrapped up heavily in blankets. I get a text message from my dad asking me to help with something, and that we'd get some driving practice along the way.
As I am talking to my dad and Amy through text messages, get an additional text from another friend Paige. She says she has a vacancy for a housemate at an old place with all her other former housemates and her husband.
I am convinced to move in but tell her I need to help my dad first.
I am suddenly driving a Suburu Impreza 555. The blue and yellow rally car kind. I am driving poorly. My dad is in the front passenger seat encouraging me. at a roundabout I am trying to get a good angle to merge into the roundabout, rocking back and forth slowly in the car, only moving forward on momentum, reversing very slightly. I lose focus for a moment and roll forward gently and almost roll over an old lady and almost into another car waiting to merge.
I just barely manage to evade both turning the wheel right, but then overcompensate by turning left once I cleared past them, still moving on momentum alone I steer on to the curb and loop left in an anti-clockwise direction until I'm directly behind 3 waiting cars.
At this point my dad suggests we switch seats for a bit. It is at this point I learn my name is some Japanese name I made up.
Almost finished with Metal Gear Solid. It isn't a long game but the last few parts of the game feel like kind of a grind. Hideo Kojima is my favourite video game designer and even now almost two decades after I first played it the game still surprises me with things I had not noticed before or never encountered.
This modern version includes a script for all the dialogue and additional notes as well. Written like a screenplay of sorts. There's so much dialogue that you just have to be right place, right time, right person to really ever know even existed outside of seeing them written in this or a guide online or something. There is so much of it I just want to write down to learn more about later, but most of the time I forget.
I need to start carrying around a notepad for things like that. I really should be doing that in general. There's so many things I forget just due to my general nature. I used to keep a notebook on me all the time to write down everything when I had my dumb phone. It couldn't show maps so I had to research how to get to and from places in advance. I even had a street directory for Sydney, which was very difficult for me to find one to buy because most physical stores don't bother stocking them anymore. I didn't even think to check online.
I only stopped using the notepad when I got a new smartphone really. I finished filling up my notebook, and then I just used my phone from there on. I wish I hadn't stopped.
My favourite part of that notebook was the part where I was using it to solve problems for the game 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. Directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi who is another one of my favourite game developers. 999 has a lot of math and logic problems that need to be solved to progress. I'm terrible at math, but I also had too much pride to look up the answers online. Some puzzles took me days to solve, but I loved every part of it. The notebook was filled with handwritten and drawn equations and diagrams. Arrows point around trying to visualise solutions. Many theoretical solutions crossed out or underlined.
When I finished 999 I realised I had a whole documentation of my experience with the game. It made me really happy to have that physical memento of my time with it. Not a trophy, ring or certificate, but the footprints of my journey. Something I could and sometimes do pull out of box and get reminded of how happy it made me. I didn't do it with the second game in the series for some reason. I would like to do it with the third and final entry though.
I would like encourage people who play my games or read my work to create their own notebooks of their times with my creations. Not for me, but for themselves. There's something about the documentation of the struggle that only really feels apparent at the end with triumph.
That might be just partially a generational thing. Games were deliberately designed to be difficult when I was young. Partially to ensure you were putting more money into them in the arcades, but at home it was mostly because the games weren't actually very long due to the limitations of technology at the time. Gradually games did more and more to hold a players hand and prevent them from failing so hard they'd quit.
Which is fine. Although I think now when people play old games its hard to understand the appeal without the instant gratification. Some might use save states so if they fail they can quickly load the game back at a moment they weren't failing or lost. Part of the idea was you were meant to play and fail over and over, because that was the only way you could learn to master the game. Once you mastered it, then you could finish it.
We had less games back then, and less access to them. It's easy to get games these days for free. Free games weren't really a thing when I was a kid. You mostly rented, or new someone who had the games, or knew someone who knew how to copy or pirate games. Now its easier to just buy them with the click of a button and download them right away. Some pirate still but I don't think it's really justified anymore. There's free games, just play those if you can't afford to buy one, or wait until it goes on sale, which it almost always will.
I'm getting off topic however. I like when games have some pushback. It's why I like Dark Souls and the games like that. Ir felt good to complete Dark Souls, because the obstacles were sometimes so great. It challenged you not just in difficulty, but motivation, but at the same time thematically encourages you to push on. To look at a failure as not the end, but part of the process of perserverence and overcoming. You're no one special in Dark Souls really. The only real distinction between you and everyone else in the games world is you haven't given up up yet, until you do. Then you're like everyone in that world. At that point the only real contrasting identities in the games world are the people who did keep going and finish it in the other realities of the game where other players succeeded.
There's a very vocal section of people who have played these games who argue they are too difficult and should have an easy mode. Even arguing that it is ableist not to have these options. The point of the games seems lost on these people, but I'm not a moral authority, nor do I wish to be a moral authority. I think they should just play a different game, or do what it takes to succeed in Dark Souls. Anything else would demonstrate a lack of faith in what Dark Souls is trying to express.
I want to bring back using notebooks for video games. The internet has removed some of the mystery of games, but that doesn't mean a developer can't inspire personal curosity and thought. Elden Ring much like Dark Souls was good at this. I personally thought it was Dark Souls with an easy mode in the sense you could summon things or explore in basically any other direction if things got too hard, and even level up so high that fighting a previously challenging obstacle would become trivial. To me Elden Ring was more a Dark Souls theme park than anything.
But it did cater to is players who craved challenge. The summoning was optional. You could still fight the big bosses at a modest level. I personally selected the Wretch class when I started Elden Ring. Having played every other game like it up to that point I was confident I could start the game at level 1 with no armour or shield, and little more than a generic club. The game quickly humbled me, and I was happy it was still capable of testing me. Not having markers telling me where the next objective was located was nice. It inspired exploration and experimentation. I wasn't worrying about getting through the game, I was just existing in the world and progressing as I figured it out.
It reminded me of the first time I played Morrowind. Everything about that setting felt alien. The world was hostile and strange looking, and it was unclear how the rules of the world worked. You could technically walk straight to final boss after the introduction section if you want to, although it would be extremely difficult. One particular example of it asking you to really think about the world was very early on. You get wind of something hidden, and your only clue is a note indicating its location by following a series of steps such as following a direction, finding a stream, observing a particular shaped rock. I remember writing down each step and following it that way. I thought it was cool the game asked you to just be present in the world. Obviously it has stuck with me for decades now.
I think a lot about how to bring tangible immersion into games. I've done it with old things I played around with that were unreleased or released secretly and anonymously which required going to websites, or even looking at the html in notepad itself. Even in old website I would make I liked to create what I considered "hidden tunnels" to other websites or pages. Things that weren't obvious on the web page, but visible to anyone that looked a little closer. I haven't done that with this yet, but maybe in time I will
I'd like people to want to use a notebook playing my games. Even in visual novels with no gameplay at all it can be fun. A major part of the fun of going through the Higurashi chapters is forming ideas and theories. I will usually write them down among other things I thought work noticing or remembering, and seeing if I can put things together.
Dream Journal #5
Given a choice between red and blue I choose neither. As it turns out selecting either one for myself would have resulted in some kind of robotification of myself. A robot I encounter later argued to me that this is no different from humans choosing a gender for themselves. I tell the robot that I'm happy to address the robot however it identifies.
I'm not sure if it's the heat but I just haven't felt particularly inspired to write despite writing almost every day.
Part of it is me trying to lose weight. I am eating less and exercising more, but I also don't trust my judgement much when I'm hungry. Sometimes despite being hungry I also just forget to eat.
I haven't gone skateboarding this year so far at all. I wake up a little too late - maybe around 9-10am. It's too hot by then. Skating just feels like a morning activity. I go for a jog in the evening every other day, but I hate jogging. I just feel like I need to increase my stamina.
I wrote myself a brief daily workout as well last night, but I have no idea what to do as reps so I think I'm just going to figure out a baseline and incrementally increase it. The workout at the moment is as follows:
This seemed like a good way to cover some practical fitness for cheap. I want to get some equipment later on, but I think it would be best to commit to these equipment-free exercises before throwing money for further exercises.
I started watching a new Korean drama last night on the prompt of my friend who I usually watch these shows at the same time and discuss. It's called 'To All The Guys Who Loved Me'. The premise is a woman had an accident where she almost died and saw her past lives. In every one of these lives she fell in love with the same guy, and it always ended with her suffering for it. When she was revived she resolved to end the cycle of marriage. Her parents thought she was just being an insane child, and it freaked out the other children when she talled about it, so her parents made her go to therapy and forget it, which she did. As an adult those memories start to come back
Like most Korean dramas there is a workplace conflict, and I think this is where the show is showing something particularly striking outside of the unique premise right now. Those workpace settings are an excellent place to develop and portray conflict in a story just because there's naturally friends, rivals and a lot of ambition. Usually a lot of organisational structure and hierarchy too ripe for abuse. They're a cauldron for injustice, and ripe for stories of triumph, revenge and friendship that they return to almost every day and can be related to for virtually anyone in modern society, even if they are just a student.
Dream Journal #6
I was in a class, and the guy next to me was struggling a lot. This was keeping me from doing my own classwork although I was completing it. I just simply had to catch up where possible. The teacher did not like this struggling student and saw my talking to them as time wasting, lumping me in with them and resulting in the teacher being openly very rude and disrespectful of me, the other guy, and our individual attempt at the classwork.
When I confronted the teacher about it in response, they simply pretended I didn't say anything. The class ended and everyone proceeded to pack up the chairs, stacking them against the wall. I decided to wait until after this was done to address the issue further. However as soon it was done the teacher immediately evaded discussing it further by going into the women's bathroom. I was pretty heated but obviously wasn't going to follow her into the women's bathroom or follow her around when she got out, so I shouted to her that I would not be letting it go and would speak to her later about it, and proceeded to head home.
As I was walking downstairs I started contemplating my response. I resolved to call the campus and issue a complaint about the teacher. Just before I did this I stepped outside and saw three light brown wild boar piglets with white spots on them scurrying around. At this point I realised I was dreaming.
Still uninspired, I realised I had really not done much to change my circumstances since falling into this creative rutt.
I have been working this a visual novel called YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World. The one I am going through is the censored remake version. It's fairly famous in the world of people who are into visual novels, although niche to virtually anyone else into video games. A product of mid-nineties Japan. It's also famous for both having an excellent and deep story on top of falling into the adult eroge genre. It also features a multibranch story with a time travel mechanic, which is very common these days as a quality of life feature and storytelling mechanic, but was very innovative for its time.
Excellent story aside it made me realise I don't spend much time with my friends outside of my hobbies these days, and despite going on a date occasionally it's been a while since I've been a in a proper romantic relationship. I wasn't really planning on make it a resolution, and I don't even really want to force it, but I think I should be taking the idea of being in a romantic relationship seriously.
I don't really need much in my life. I am content with very little for myself, any my material aspirations are extremely modest in value. I do like being a provider and supporting people where I can though, and I think it would mean a lot to me to have someone I love in my life for whom I can do that.