you may have noticed, or you may have not… writing on this blog is really, really difficult for me. not that i lack inspiration, nor do i not want to share what i've find, quite the opposite…
but since i'm somewhere between a coder and a perfectionist, i keep getting sidetracked by stuff lacking in my barebone blog cms.
on the car game post, i searched a way to show code and lost time and interest to share what i've found. on my corsa master post, i keep wanting to integrate stuff that may help me keep things in this blog alive: scrapping websites to never lose whatever is really interesting to the post and stuff like that.
even worse: i try, time to time, to streamline the process of updating this blog. you may have seen: everything here is static and, as i am writing now, everything is made by hands: images are downloaded and put in content folders, each post is created by hand and its metadata is manually written. and everything is pushed onto a remote gitea instance with actions enabled, doing the only automated thing: uploading the website onto netlify. right now, it's even tiring for me. and i lose the energy to write anything.
what about then?
my original posts and blog were, respectively, on wikijs and then on ghost. both had what i was searching first and foremost: an editor that supports markdown and dragging and dropping images, with the exception of easily customizing themes and adding special stuff like scrapping websites (which i talked about above, something i really care)
they worked but was heavy on maintenance, something that was tiring for both my hubbie and myself. having to take care of a database, and keeping things online at all cost: these seem easy enough if, and only if, you have a machine dedicated to that task and you never trouble yourself with updates.
a big no no on both conditions: our server had and still has some issues, being a single board computer and using basic SD cards. and, it is true, we also have different outlooks regarding how the server should be utilized, and how we manage its software, which led to…
fuck it, let's use hugo
well fuck no, it's a heavy artillery for anything. by being good at doing any kind of static website, it's really… well, too much bother for me. why ?
why do i keep falling in coding rabbit hole
hugo is exactly what makes me feel like doing a timeseek on purpose for a really little payoff. what i mean by that is, i love coding stuff, but i hate doing anything that's out of my comfort zone if it involves my free time and code that should be a write off thing. meaning, i love learning old c++ for old computers anytime, and i would feel amused by how it behaves compared to what we have today. but doing 3 hours straight of "how these fucking git hooks work" or "how the fuck do you make a good template on hugo" just for the sake of showing one page was out of the question.
which led to this custom blog, which did take sometime but that, i wanted to. there's a really thin line of learning and coding something that i despise and that makes me feel like losing my day off, and learning and coding something that rocks and fill my dopamine meter. there needs to be challenges, but challenges that i love: new stuff out of the oven, new language, new paradigms, cool ideas and no bullshit.
and hugo is the archetype of challenges i hate. why is it so convuluted? why is it so opiniated? why do i ask why so many times? doing a challenging thing really doesn't want me to ask if the team behind it were full of themselves, having a phd in talking bullshit or keeping old ideas alive. or worse, adding corporate thinking into good ideas.
ranting time: why dividing challenges into two types? isn't that schyzo pill at its finest? basic c++ may have been made in 3 sprints with an ass of a project manager!
well, i will say that: basic c++ on a old macintosh is everything i love: we can do a lot of speculation and there's a chance we aren't all that wrong on the speculation side (implying you did some research beforehand on how those softwares were made). people who made this may have worked in similiar conditions as in the corporate world we are today, but ideas were young. evangelistic coding bullshit was seen as a rarity: carmack was having his two cents on doom and how a game should focus on gameplay and forget the story, but he was an exception and had a small fanbase at the time (not saying that now, cispools are sucking his toes on the web but i'm getting offtrack). back to the old basic c++, there were certainly a small team behind it, with people still discovering new methods of programing, new ideologies and sure, they may have applied old technics that dated back to the 70s and old mainframes but it's some old technics that isn't celebrated anymore, that isn't glorified anymore and even worse/better depending on how you see it, it's old technics that's been being shat on by those very same evangelistic shitheads we have right now. for me, a contrarian that's doesn't need much to feel satisfied, that's an absolute win.
not saying i will bring back those old technics from the dead, but i feel like looking at them. see them in action, and how they interacted with coders back in the day. and, back to the small team that may have developed that very same basic c++ thing, they were still in a small tech world, with little coporate nonsense to fuck with their mind. you can't sync the schedule with how much code you push through git or even older, svn, simply because all these people had are servers with dumb harddrivers (yes, CVS existed but was only used by true chads: the GNU community) where they put their code so how could agility be born in this cruel world? sure, code was lost, but no stupid executive could directly look at commit amount and say dumb shit out of their asses.
but i am talking out of my ass here, i may seen it through youngster glasses: i wasn't there in the 80s to see how it was done. i only looked at people saying how it was, at testimonials, and we all know how these people can also talk out of their ass. but, here's another thing: even if it wasn't as cool as they may see it, even if the first macintosh was made by a wack steve jobs discovering how pushig people around is funnier than doing cocaine, people still made things they liked and were away from corporate bullshit like schedules shits, like the another world dude coding its vector-based engine, the outcast team that had one hell of the ride with vertex terrain mapping, and, of course, the man himself: carmack, or even the idTeam before everything went to hell because a team can be a team so long as everyone is on the same train. and, that's the big "and", we can still this today: indie games being developed with less care but more polish than a big budget game, or even people in a small corporate blank space, away from the true shit on their small safe island, in studios like ubisoft or blizzard still putting effort and loving what they do and putting fun things in bland games, just because they could and no one was there to shit on them, or, at least, to shit on them enough so they effort was outed out of the game. software wise, we still have gems made by old and new devs that's not falling into any pipelines (you know the ones… the "oh my god gnome is so cool" pipeline with dumb software doing one thing, the same people that loves doing apps only for macs, the oldtimers doing software that will "make you love coding again on windows" with everything i hate and i may forget some because my inner self want to protect me) like the RetroArch team.
another discouraging stuff
stupid ideas in a good idea aside, even if hugo is the archetype of a challenge i hate, there's also challenges that just leave me empty. when i try again and again to experiment and create games out of small ideas, i quickly find out that what i am searching for is nowhere to be seen: everything leads to "oh shit i should really focus myself" and "oh fuck where my inspiration from yesterday go and oh no it's been 3 weeks now i don't feel like doing this no more" because game making isn't as easy and fun as it was before to me…
are you on crack? there's assets store and game engines everywhere
waiiiiit let me explain what i loved about making complicated game scripts in SAMP in 2010 and doing the whole tutorial of GameMaker back in '06, or learning SDL (1) or pygame was, it made me giggle seeing these things coming to life. i mean, i can make a window open??? that was the shit. then the rest followed, inspiration came along simply because it was fun. and when i became more and more angry for doing more complex things, well, that kinda went away and the only thing left was: do people enjoy my games?
and yes, but no, there was so little people playing them.
and the same apply for anything i code or create. drawing was fun, well let me draw with my mouse even: look at those colors go with eachother! *but your perspective is always on the sideline! and you always make the same pose! and your colors are always pastelish!" well yeah fuck you now you made me disgusted. but people loved them, my hubbie still loves my art but my ego is too shattered and to draw again, i need a distraction (pixel art or something that limits me, or a gadget like a tablet) to make me enjoy drawing again, even if this doesn't work everytime (shattered egos need a lot of work, at least i think so, it needs so much of my energy to heal… but also so much focus which a lack, more on that later maybe)
i still made some bangers after i've grown out of everything because of X or Y reason: Bambaclock is a good example of "i have enough time to feel calm, i love GTA Online, let's make a tool". i had so much inspiration that i even made a website design i am still proud of today. the first version of pachitako was also born out of that love of something: youtube dl was so much fun to use.
and i cannot forget a lot, lot of brony projects that had a lot of love poured into (and that helped that they kept me distracted from my depression, and school): a chatbox, a discord bot, a video player (with the first having a lot of love and the second version so much more love).
but with a project that i loved, i always hated being brought back to them to update them. i always had something else going on that i was more or less peer-pressured to update these projects. but, you know what? when i was launched back into them, i really enjoyed working on them again for the time being. i still hated people for forcing me back into them tho, i wish they were more delicate, or maybe if i was less twisted…
even in recent years i've tried a couple of game thing, and some i love very much (Treeserator and Puddle), some were more complicated (horse game, magical game) because, even with all the ideas to organize them, someone can go so far with feature creeping, a too ambitious story for your own writing skill (i don't read enough even if i love it and my writing technics are really rusty) and a lack of motivation. forcing motivation sometimes work, sometimes doesn't, just like…
pachitako 2, the forbidden son
so i talked about not finding enjoyement anymore into creating things out of nowhere, at least for games, and then for regular softwares, and i don't like going back into projects when all the inspiration is gone. well, pachitako 2 is a good example.
pachitako simply needed fixing, not much else. but, i hated only fixing it, if i had to go back to it, i would need to make something new. and so i did, and when you do something new, you always let go of a lot of features because fuck you, you have so much time to work on it. i kinda liked, sometimes, working on pachitako 2. but going back to it, well, it's pretty much the same as all other projects: it's so, so hard
worse, i have some light inspiration but even then…
i could argue that i don't feel good enough doing code outside of my work, and, it's true that writing this blog's code was really hard. i could argue that i didn't went lightly on myself when i was in the zone doing one week straight of code without forcing myself to do some pauses. but, i can't argue that i am anxiety. code and anxiety doesn't always play along.
at my job, anxiety can go to shithell because, well, i am not a hardworker at all, coding wise at least, i don't want to go too far except if there's something challenging and new, and stimulating like a new language. but, it's because i get paid and i love it, and i have a time limit: no more code past 5 o'clock.
at home, only the stimulating part keeps me going. that's why i am here, telling you how basic c++ is funny to look at, but i can't bother with Unity. i want to make games using bevy only for the novelty, but i don't want to go further than this. i like more making stuff out of old stuff and that applies to everything in my life: old puters, old cars.
what now ?
well, i will keep on posting that's for sure. by hand or not, i still and will always love sharing my discoveries, even if this blog is a discovery to anyone encountering it by itself.
when i was at the bottom of the barrel, i had that notebook where i would write everything that i hated, that made me feel bad, or where i wrote things to cheer me up by writing it multiple times. i don't remember which therapist made me do this but i am sure of one thing: this helped. it wasn't enough and i still needed medication, and i still do today, but i know that writing is the best therapy for me.
i am shitty with talking, even if i get better each year, i am still something on the autistic spectrum or something like where, growing up, i didn't talk my feelings out. hormones made me talk too much and hurt people. when i was little, i didn't talk to a lot of people, now i finally talk to a lot of people but i am still learning to… sync my mind with what can or will come out of my mouth? anyway, it's still a hard process and getting a "vocal" therapy isn't always the good stuff for me, it's tiring and the results aren't that great, and therapists can't really get into my head, only i can.
throughout the years, i hated voice chats because of that. and talking in real life asked a big effort out of me, so i had to rest a lot. but damn if these MSN messages to random people that i liked at the time, to the messages i send today on Discord and stuff that i write here today helped me through a lot. and it still helps: talking so much in this one post that has no heads nor tails makes me relieved for a time being.
i will keep on sharing, even if it's for two people.
autism more like people are unique on their own and should be respected even with their brain and their education working against them in a society needing them to follow a strict line of rules to not be alienated or feel like it
i dunno how that thing works, i dunno what i have, i dunno what i should be labeled as and, also, i don't give a fuck. i just want to feel good so this thing right up, that makes everyone think they have ADHDSTDLMN and autism, well, i could say it could go straight to hell but… researchers aren't always researching stuff like this for special snowflakes and neurospicy aknownledgements so… fuck whoever makes these people behaving like shit thinking they could use that and throwing shit at people who are really suffering because they want to have their special stuff because this really doesn't help me find what lead i should follow.
don't worry, i feel okay, just a little angry but err, i shouldn't, being angry really doesn't do anything good when you're in your little corner…
