More old and not-so-old drawings.

Already in the middle of December.  I used to experience so many feelings, but now the seasons and special occasions are flying by.  Is it because the schools at my age don't decorate their halls?  And I ignore the television, the news, the outside.  I'm losing track of time.  I'd like to go out once more, very soon.  The malls will be decorated at least.

I wonder how that approach to drawing worked out.  I think I was too easy on myself.  If you reach a moment when you don't want to go on then you keep on going.  Is that right?  I haven't made a habit of drawing yet.  Even after doing something I'm still afraid to pick up the pencil the next day.  I think I waited too long on the personal drawings as well.  Way too much time for doubt to creep in and end up having second thoughts.  See, if I just went "And that's the end of my post, and here's some stuff I doodled on the side" then it wouldn't be a big deal.  Instead I go on talking and talking and it creates an expectation.  And it doesn't matter that it's a small unimportant blog; I should know to be careful of what goes on the internet.  But really, who's going to care for this.  It's all in my head, right?


I believe this was the modified contour drawing exercise...well, it says that on the paper but it's not really legible.  2012-02-11.  Not much to say about this one aside it making me feel more miserable than anything else the book threw at me up to that point.  Hard work is such a foreign concept.  I guess it's...okay to the untrained eye for a first attempt.  Discrepancies are easy to spot.  Obviously, I'd loathe to do this again.

How much time did it say to set aside?  An hour?  This took like four times as long.  At some point I have to learn to be efficient rather than take my sweet time accomplishing what essentially amounts to nothing.  Shiny trash is still trash.

An exercise in negative space drawing.  Draw one of the shapes on the viewfinder then scale up the rest on paper, focusing on the space between objects.  Picked an easy target; no excess curves.  2012/02/17.

Found a sketchbook from around 1998 with more of my stuff scribbled in.

I was quite fascinated with the evening sky back then, be it from a plane trip from England across the Atlantic or from Bowser in the Sky.  I dreamed about additional Bowser levels to play through...a total of seven counting the first three in Super Mario 64.  The level designs for all of them were never finalized (and the later ones would have been out of my scope to illustrate), but I went through a few ideas for the fourth level which can be seen in the first, second, and third image.

There's not much to see in the sixth image, but I definitely remember that was going to be the sixth level.  You can already see the structure meant to serve as a huge pool, and a bone fish was supposed to be swimming around in it with a red coin somewhere on its body.  Further into the level Mario would be jumping across the rooftops of residential areas.  It would be in the evening.  The image for the seventh level was dominated by a scene of Mario walking across a thin, weaving beam connecting two of the many skyscrapers in the city at night.  A stationary fire spitter (called a kuromame I guess) would sit further down on one of the beams that branched off.  The view was top-down; you could see the lights of activity below.  It would be weird, but worth considering for a future illustration.    

(Programming) Thinking up a turn system. (Part 1)

To get something out of the way real quick, I think I monitor my words a little too much while typing.  I mean it's good to make sure things come out as intended, but...it's already a bit of a time eater on top of sharing things, which could be time spent working.  It's a silly thing to gripe over when there's so many other activities I spend time that feel wasteful.  Another point is when I monitor my speech I don't think I convey my words the way I'd like to anyway.  I see people out there with much more colorful ways of expressing themselves, and I look at myself and...well, I can only be me, right?  But no, it's something I can and should learn to change if I really feel the need to.  For now I'll try not to pause myself too much to write down what's on my mind.  However, I'd like to cut down on "things" and "stuff," among other things.

So I put up programming as a description for this blog, and...what programming "stuff" have I talked about anyway?  I don't fancy myself to be an individual of ideas; I'm merely going through the book to know more and hope it magically qualifies me for a job.  Awful.  What ever happened to going above and beyond?  At least I'm capable enough to follow a book.

So about that RPG I brought up before.  After the initial rush of writing up whatever I could to stuff in there it's finally slowed to a crawl.  Burst of inspiration then run out of fuel, a common pattern.  The same could be said for my initial desire to learn to draw.  I guess the main thing that's stopping me is teaching myself to make something that's interactive and not stuck in the console or simple text boxes.  Sure there's other things that need working on, but...yeah.  That's where my passion slammed headfirst into a wall.

Programming is largely about using preexisting code.  I think that's what they say.  And I suppose you'd have to balance using other people's code while also knowing how it works to an extent.  Which I'm not doing right now.  Instead of searching for other works I wanted to think it up.  It certainly won't work like that all the time.  Let's see what this slow mind thought up, then?

Initially (way back then) when I was playing with the battle system I had an 'if' statement for whether or not the player is faster than the enemy.  If so the player gets to execute the commands first followed by the enemy.  Otherwise...I copied the entire block of code and flipped it so the enemy could go first.  Pretty clunky, and soon after when I got the idea of facing multiple opponents or even having a party system it would be guaranteed to be really ugly.  The idea for a queue system crept up, but I didn't feel I was ready to read up on that section.  It's a shame; I probably would have had fun thinking up how to do it with the arrays I had, but that code will inevitably become a relic when replaced with a proper class.  Just like my old inventory system that would shift back for removed items.

A few weeks ago I returned to the game to tinker with the battle system after learning about queues.  What kind do I want?  This is where it would help to have a lot of exposure to the type of game you want to work on, but I've holed myself up too much.  Even then I'm surprised at the number of games I've played, but that's by my standard.

At first I thought of the Pokemon games.  Each participant gets a single move each turn, to be spent in an order determined by speed or priority modifiers.  No, let's not stop there!  How about people who can execute more actions than others?  Golden Sun (only played the first) came to mind with certain bosses who could attack twice in the time it takes all four party members to make a move.  Won't it be tougher on balancing?  Sure, but who needs to worry about balance in a non-competitive game like this.  Plus it would be fun to see how it could be broken, and if no one is around to play it to even find out as is likely the case, well, at least I didn't spend all that time tweaking it.  A corrupt thought process, perhaps.

A visible queue system like in Final Fantasy X would be awesome (where the idea first came to mind).  It even shows the impact actions would have on the list when you have certain stuff selected!

If I was clever I'd put something clever here.

I forgot it had purple bars.  Let's read into the game later.

Next source of influence came from the semi-roguelike Elona.  Nice, plain speed stat.  Plenty of freedom.  I don't know the inner workings of it but since it had an ingame clock I think you'd be running on "standard" time with a speed of 100.  If I was brave enough I'd ask the people who worked on porting it.  In Java, no less.

Okay, we have a turn-based battle involving people of various speeds, some who can take more turns than another.  The first thought was to include an initiative stat that starts at 0 and is modified by speed.  Let's say you have:

Player 1: Speed = 50
Player 2: Speed = 25         

The first turn passes and player 1 will have an initiative of 50, and player 2 with 25.  This is sort of done on paper in the program so it's still figuring out who gets a turn.  We'll have an 'if' statement to check if either player has an initiative of 100 (the turn's standard), and if so that player will be added to the queue and have their initiative reduced by 100.  If more than one player is eligible for being added to the queue we'll go by their initiative levels in descending order.  If any of them have matching initiative levels we'll break the tie by speed.  If their speed is tied we'll flip a coin/roll the dice or give preferential treatment to the player.  And if we want to be super nitpicky we'll have the system remember who won the coinflip and give it to the other party next time.

Let's try again:

Player 1: Speed = 200
Player 2: Speed = 150

We'll represent them in parentheses (player1, player2) which will display their initiative levels.  The player who gets to be added to the queue will have their name printed in front and their initiative level will be subtracted.  Initiative level must be greater than or equal to 100 to qualify for a turn.

(0, 0)

<Turn 1>

(200, 150)
Player 1 (100, 150) wins by initiative
Player 2 (100, 50) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 50)

<Turn 2>

(200, 200)
Player 1 (100, 200) wins by speed
Player 2 (100, 100) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 100) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0)

<Turn 3>

(200, 150)

And so on.


Now let's try something more extreme:

Player 1: Speed = 600
Player 2: Speed = 300

(0, 0)

<Turn 1>

(600, 300)
Player 1 (500, 300) wins by initiative
Player 1 (400, 300) wins by initiative
Player 1 (300, 300) wins by initiative
Player 1 (200, 300) wins by speed
Player 2 (200, 200) wins by initiative
Player 1 (100, 200) wins by speed
Player 2 (100, 100) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 100) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0)

Okay, at least player 1 gets twice as many moves in a turn but it's sort of bad to let so many of them be up front.  So I was stumped on this for a few minutes (those were some long minutes) wondering how I could get the distribution of turns to properly scale. 

All right then, if we're basing this off of how many actions someone can perform in a given turn then why not let the person with the fastest speed set the pace?  If we have someone with 600 speed then everyone (including the turn which runs at 100 speed) would have to reach that before they can do something.  So it's like executing mini turns inside the actual turn because of relative speeds.

Player 1: Speed = 600
Player 2: Speed = 400
Player 3: Speed = 100
Turn: "Speed" = 100

The standardized initiative level to perform an action is set to the highest speed: 600

We'll have the format as (player 1, player 2, player 3) - (turn)

(0, 0, 0) - (0)

<Turn 1 begins>

(600, 400, 100) - (100)
Player 1 (0, 400, 100) - (100)

(600, 800, 200) - (200)
Player 2 (600, 200, 200) - (200) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 200, 200) - (200)

(600, 600, 300) - (300)
Player 1 (0, 600, 300) - (300) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0, 300) - (300)

(600, 400, 400) - (400)
Player 1 (0, 400, 400) - (400)

(600, 800, 500) - (500)
Player 2 (600, 200, 500) - (500) wins by initiative
Player 1 (0, 200, 500) - (500)

(600, 600, 600) - (600)
Player 1 (0, 600, 600) - (600) wins by speed
Player 2 (0, 0, 600) - (600) wins by speed
Player 3 (0, 0, 0) - (600) wins by speed*

(0, 0, 0) - (0) turn completes  

<Turn 1 ends>

*For all purposes the turn will always be dead last when initiatives are tied, even if the
player is slower than it (would come into play over the course of multiple turns).

The spread looks better now, doesn't it?

Actually, the very, very first idea was to have a large counter of sorts incrementing all these values at different rates, but that's sounds more suitable for realtime stuff.  I guess this would be comparable to an imaginary race to cross a 100 meter lap as many times as possible in 10 seconds.  You have one going at 50 m/s, another at 20 m/s...they'll cover different distances after a second (or fractions of a second if we want a smooth motion).  The second, minute, and hour hand on a clock would work, too.  Why didn't I think of that earlier?  

Cutting it off here.  I didn't intend for it to be this lengthy but then those examples came up.  Perhaps I should reformat the blog to be wider or figure out how to create a text area with a scroll bar to save space.  A few more things come to mind to cover.  There's the case of initiative levels "spilling over" because the speed of the turn didn't divide evenly into the standardized initiative.  And what if the player with the highest speed dies somewhere in there?  I've thought about it briefly but haven't put it into code yet because I'm forever a slacker.  I should have some to share when I post the second part.
  

Childhood Drawings

One of the sections in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" covered the symbol system developed in your childhood years of drawing.  This apparently interferes with beginners who attempt to draw what they see in front of them; features are substituted with simpler representations in the form of symbols that appear when they recall it from memory.

Before this section the book took a trip down memory lane, trying to dig up a picture of a landscape I may have drawn using a set of symbols when I was five or six.  I don't doubt my involvement in such a drawing at that age, but I wasn't be able to piece it together and thus couldn't follow along when the book asks you to draw that landscape from your early years.  I thought nothing more of that landscape, but a few weeks ago when searching for the kiwi story I brought up in a previous post I stumbled upon a small cache of drawings I forgot ever existed.

The book mentioned how kids, when they grow older, place more emphasis on realism and attention to detail rather than the composition of the drawing.  The pictures I viewed gave that same feeling.  They felt just right, or that would be me fooling myself into thinking that because of nostalgia.  It might be the use of coloring pencils.  I haven't colored since...back then most likely.  It's also true that my drawings from this year are just random things tacked on a sheet of paper.  I haven't tried my hand at a whole picture yet.  I have an initial idea of one thing I want to try, and...I should get started on it already.

Hopefully the volume of pictures in one spot doesn't cause any loading issues.  Then again, I probably shouldn't be leaving ten exanded posts visible on a single page either.  Also, I'm lazy and would rather just drag this stuff on the screen than mess with the HTML, but there's a fair number of these.


So yeah, early stuff.  I won't go naming things here (or maybe I'll do it at the end of the post) since what it represents should be pretty well-known.  Although, I only have a vague idea of what's in the third picture.  I'm surprised I drew the bridge like that.  Also, making use of that 12" x 18" space!  Sort of.



Platformers and RTS games.  I can remember other images I drew now, but there's no telling where they could be.  Had to chuckle at the next two, but at least I was drawing and not dancing around the issue.  And it's possible to make out what's in there, mostly.  I suppose I can be relieved at that.



I guess I had a thing for ants.  Hey, it's actually dated 2003/03/28.  Second one was 2003/06/02.  Just...freedom.  I'm sure I didn't overthink the layout of the colony when I was doing it.  Do it as you go.



This one's definitely a no-brainer.  They looked a little too detailed, and a quick Google image search brings up the same poses I probably copied from.  The version of the fire I drew back then is more creative than anything I can muster right now.  Also interesting to note how I wanted to include the entirety of the right eye when viewing the face at that angle.  To do otherwise is sorcery!



Ah, what to say about this one.  For starters, that is such an unintentionally mean title!  I remember my disappointment over the grade.  I was like, "I don't even like writing and I spent this effort on drawing all while being afraid of how the person would turn out, and you gave me a 90 over this!"



This one is a bit more obscure, especially since there aren't any people around and it's not exactly a recreation of any scene.  And for some reason I labeled everything in the second image so there's actually a dead giveaway if you can read the text.  Dated once more: 2003/07/17, 2003/07/28, and 2003/08/04. 



Yep, coloring pencils.  They really make it feel more genuine.  I thought the last three pages were quite nice; I the miss the idea behind these pictures.  Over the years I haven't graduated; I've just become more deliberate and unable to produce simple drawings at will.  "No, you can't do this.  You're older now.  Childish drawings should be left to children."  Even the "serious" works are still crushed in detail by the complex drawings of nine-year-olds shown in the book.  Who knew they could draw at that level?  I don't know where I sit, then.  My childhood is officially uncreative.

I've already typed enough, though.  Not enough drawing.  At this rate I'll be the Touhou equivalent of that person who plays casually for five years and doesn't have a 1CC of Normal yet.

But real quick first, back to the pictures.  Starting with the first row we have the castle in Super Mario 64.  The third image is probably a mix of the Big Ben and my idea of a fortress of some kind.  Bottom of the first picture in the second row is drawn from the inside of the ship in Rusty Bucket Bay from Banjo-Kazooie.  Credits to the demo screen for ingraining that level in my memory.  Next two are from Brood War, followed by the mission Hell's Fury in Command & Conquer: Covert Ops.  Not idea about the fifth one.  Perhaps something from Raptor: Call of the Shadows or X-COM or a mix.

Third row drawings were inspired by SimAnt.  I always fantasized owning an ant farm where it's thin across the board so you can see the tunnels they build.  Main issue was shipping a queen over.  Fourth row for Pokemon, fifth row for the Amelia Bedelia series.

Sixth row is Ed, Edd n Eddy.  Third picture in particular pertained to the Jawbreakers! game released on the GBA.  Just an idea for extra levels.  And I guess the second picture follows the theme of makeshift...everything.  For the ladder we have: wood, umbrella, pencil, bat, crowbar, and...titanium. 

That should wrap it up.  No pictures about this year's drawing output in this post as I've already posted too much (another reason to delay!).  I haven't found the kiwi story yet. 

On Drawing

That went well.  When's the last time I kept a promise I made for myself?  I wouldn't know.  I've been through this cycle so many times.


Predictably, I didn't follow through with what I planned to do.  It's become a bit of a huge mental block at this point so I occupied myself with other things in the same boat.  That is, drawing.


Back at the start of this year when I cut my playing time and picked up programming I also sought out drawing as a sort of life skill.  Nothing transient like focusing on scoring for games, right?  I started out lost and focused on a random book.  I'm drawing a huge blank as I try to create a list of what was on it without looking at it, but I remember doing a daily exercise on creating dots on a sheet then trying to copy it over on another sheet to improve your ability at estimating space.  I remember feeling discouraged over being off by a few millimeters most of the time, but if I kept doing this then a few months down the road I'd be able to judge whether or not I was improving.  Of course, that didn't happen because I didn't keep up with that practice.

I moved on to "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards shortly after.  The tone of the book was much more personable which I guess works better for someone like me who's intimidated by the entire craft.  I read it from page to page and performed the exercises when they showed up, and all the while there's the doubt that always lingers in the back of the mind.  Perhaps I'm not actualy learning what the book is trying to teach me?  What length time that's estimated for one activity would take me twice as long to accomplish, being slow and deliberate and not what I believe to be in a good way.  The feeling of being engrossed in the work and feeling refreshed afterwards doesn't come to me (well maybe the first one applies a little).  I just feel stressed during the ordeal and exhausted afterwards.  It's a book that could be covered in a five day seminar and I was drawing it out over a few weeks.

Starting from the first book to this one I kept up the practice of drawing for only a month.  After finishing one more exercised I just stopped.  It's not like I wasn't a little impressed with what I created, but I never really believed in what I did.  I was just copying stuff.  Which was the whole point of the book, anyway, drawing what you see.  I can look back and say I should have stayed with it; there was no reason not to.  I simply failed to make a habit of it before I gave up.

For something I wanted to be a hobby I wasn't enjoying myself just yet, and I think I do get hung up too much on the future.  I could use a few pointers from the games I've played so much.  When I started playing the Touhou series was I worried over what I might accomplish or when I'll be able to clear the highest difficulties?  Nope, I just took it easy and slowly ramped up the challenge...maybe too slowly.  I do steer clear of a lot of the hard stuff, but what I do play I stick around with and slowly improve on.  Hell, I even left this as a replay comment back in the beginning of 2009:

"...it scares me very much when I try to accomplish a feat I know I cannot consistently achieve (especially stages 4 and 6) with my level of playing, but I still do it anyways with the silly thought that I can leave it behind me when I make it to this point, that I don't have to worry about improving because I'm really not getting better. But it's getting there, there has definitely been change for the better but I'm still looking at the negatives of my performance. "

But I've apparently forgotten about my mindset back then and I'm back to stressing over how terrible my drawing abilities are and how I have to make up for all the years I never drew anything.  It's all in the past; it's no good to run through the what-ifs.

I did pretty much nothing in the drawing department for the next seven months, then in the middle of September I started up again.  I'd say I'm even less dedicated than I was back then. Now I can't seem to sit still for more than 20 minutes, and there's still some days when I don't draw anything.  My mind wanders so much.  It's...disconcerting to think about.  Something is still better than nothing, and there's no secret to it.  The more you want out of it the more you'll have to put in.  I just want to slowly try to enjoy myself and not end up dropping everything again.

I debated whether or not I should share pictures while I'm doing this or wait until I deemed them suitable for public viewing.  I had a similar situation with the Touhou series where I knew about this forum for a few months and its scoreboards, but I didn't show my face until I could 1CC my first game on Lunatic.  But, well, your levels of self-criticism scale with you and waiting on drawing skills to advance to the point where things "turn out right" would be something for a few years in the future.  So yeah, whatever!  I'll insert them at the end of posts or something.  No expectations; just a guy who posts whatever he wants on his personal blog.


          

Portrait of Igor Stravinsky

16th century drawing.

Starting off are some upside-down drawing exercises.  Not the exercise the book throws at you first, and I'll probably share the scary drawings that came from that later.  For now I'll cheat and make myself look better than I really am by showing these copies of someone else's drawing.  I forgot the path I took for the first picture, but you can see how the right arm looks horribly distorted.  The book did warn against outlining then filling in the blanks or something along those lines.  Small errors will add up and culminate somewhere.  I guess the head was one of the last parts I did since I wasn't mindful of my proportions and it went straight off the edge of the paper.

Did the knight a little later as an extra.  I mean, the book does encourage doing the exercises more than just once, but yeah.  I guess I didn't date the first one when I took the picture but it was 2012-01-30, and then the knight was 2012-02-01 as it says right there.

Yeah, I posted a little early then edited the rest in so I wouldn't have gone through October posting nothing.  Also, the thing I didn't do would be the next exercise in the book.  I have the paper toned and everything since two months ago and never went through with it. 

On Running Away from Situations

I didn't plan to post until a week after the last one, and it was probably going to be about that something I wanted to get done.  Where did I get the idea for writing up a post once every four days?  A few memories came up the other day and I decided to look back on them.

My "solution" to many problems is to look the other way.  If I'm not dealing with it then there's no cause for contention.  A rather poor one-sided fix because the world is always moving on, but that's my selfish force of habit for feeling secure.

Does not playing with the neighborhood kids count?  This one was easy because my mother would always answer the door, never asking me to do the same.  I can't say I feel regretful over what could have been; the life I know right now is the only one I'm certain of.  But...between interacting with people and no interactions at all I'd say the former is the better overall choice.  This is also the same way I cut off interactions with my last friend when I was 14.  I showed up months later for his birthday when he asked (through my mother), and we talked like normal.  It didn't feel right for me to be around after all this time, however, and I excused myself before they served the cake and pizza.  He moved away shortly after.

I took an Oral Communication class in 7th grade for reasons I don't recall.  The first impression was pretty bad because there's half an hour in the beginning of the period to read a book you brought, but I didn't have one the first (or second) day.  Took a zero right there and sat at my desk with nothing else to do but mull over my failure.  I remember being fixated with one of the many posters on the wall.  It was a sort of ladder chart from 0 - 100% with a message between every rung.  The messages read starting from the top: I did (100%), I will (90%), I can (80%), I think I can (70%), I might (60%), I think I might (50%). . . I can't (10%), I won't (0%).  The ones in between were something like "I don't know how" or "Where do I start?"  Overly moping at that age already, huh?  I've just reminded myself of it.

This is when I stumbled upon the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and boy did I love them.  Was it more for the tragic scenes than the redemption in the end?  We weren't bringing our own books for the sake of it; we'd have to choose a selection and read for three to five minutes, right there in front of the class.  I choked up during my first time and the teacher brought me out of the room.  A kindhearted lady, by the way.  She had a talk with one of the students who spoke up while I was frozen in speech ("Is he crying?") and he apologized to me in person some other time out of class.  I didn't mind what he said because I was already moved to tears so it's not like his question served as a catalyst.  A brilliant if outspoken and cynical student, too.  I held a lot of respect for him but I don't think I ever expressed it entirely.

Things became a lot easier when the classroom and its students felt more familiar.  That and when you realize they really don't pay attention to you.  I can care a lot less about running into someone's eyes when looking up and just make eye contact with the teacher.  The stories were interesting so I had no issues with keeping my eyes glued to the page for too long.

Fast forward to 8th grade and I take the second part of the course as my elective, same teacher.  I'm one of her favorites now and I'm still reading from Chicken Soup for the Soul books for my speeches.  At the end of the school year there was a speaking event.  Naturally, I signed up for it after hearing about it from the teacher (because I keep my head down otherwise and miss everything going on outside of class).  Great, a speaking event.  In the auditorium, in front of a panel of judges whom the teacher was a part of and a bunch of other adults.  And 6th and 7th grade classes.

I'm all dressed up and my mother drops me off before she goes searching for parking.  I approach the auditorium and take a look inside from one of the side doors.  I see one of the students already speaking.  I look to the left and see the audience, and that was it.  I didn't go in.  I head over to the nearby bathroom and stand there in a closed stall.  Thinking, passing the time.  Was it for 45 minutes?  Up to two hours, maybe?  The lengths I'll go to for such things...

I eventually leave and call my mother after it's over.  When we meet up I give some poor reason as to why I wasn't there for my presentation.  I remember her sounding a little disappointed, and it didn't go any further than that.  Not like I earned a poor grade in class, right?  I just failed to show up for an extracurricular activity and let my teacher and mother down.  I never met up with my teacher again.


So that other post where I mentioned abandoning World of Warcraft?  Yeah, totally dropped everything at once.  Although, is there really any other way of stopping something this than to quit cold turkey?  I mean, yeah, there definitely is, but still.  Maybe a formal farewell would suffice, but I didn't even do that.  Just quit logging in, leaving my post as a guild tank and inconveniencing (maybe too light a word) everyone in the guild.  Such an extremely irresponsible act.  I'll talk about those days later (how much have I put off by now?).     

Totally bought myself another week to work on that other thing.

Blog direction and a personal trait (and small promise).

First meta blog post too, hm?

Hit that point where I couldn't decide on what to write about next.  There's plenty of fillers...dreams, past events, but there should be a balance between that and what goes on right now.  I shouldn't say there's plenty; I'll run out of them before I know it.  If I stuck to a post every four days it would probably last me only four or five months.  Recent things have happened, yeah, but I wouldn't rank it as something worth talking about just yet.  Or maybe that's exactly the sort of thing I should bring up.

Before starting the blog I read up on reasons for blogging, and that led into discussions about expanding and maintaining viewership for generating profit which I wanted no part of.  "I know, I'll place this little disclaimer at the top saying I only blog for my own health!  Then I won't carry the burden of attempting to generate good content to serve the readers."  That's not true, though.  If I didn't care I wouldn't be worrying over the frequency of my posts or what I choose to post about, or using Twitter to announce posts.  It's like a diary I never had, and I read out each entry in front of a wall in an alleyway.  Public, but not that wide out in the open.

I think I also saw blogging as a practice in dedication, a trait I'm very much lacking in.  The hours invested in World of Warcraft and the Touhou series almost all stemmed from a lack of self-control, and it surfaced again recently.  Wanting to outdo someone's run, various challenges...they're not bad things, but if I'm feeling guilty in the back of my mind over how I impulsively spend my time, whether or not I succeeded, then perhaps I should be holding back.  Worse yet is when I play while not really wanting to because I felt bored, despite having other things I could be focusing on.

For the last several days I've been streaming whenever I do play, ranging from 40 minutes to two hours.  Two hours in one sitting is usually the upper limit for me anyway, but I keep it to that single session for the day rather than returning to it for more.  There's also those common experiences I hear about in general when it comes to good runs appearing early, and then it's a lot of restarts until a slightly better one crops up way later, maybe.  After the first day or two of streaming I stayed focused on what I'd be playing for.  I made a mistake once after that by following someone's request to play PCB Lunatic (I don't remember if I was asking for suggestions) which I regretted because there was really nothing to gain from it after being away for so long.  Nah, perhaps it sounds selfish because there's the audience to think about, but really...not worth it at this stage.

Most recent undertaking is a silly no-miss/bomb/border break/focus PCB Normal/Reimu-B (plus scoring) run.  Mental note to talk about the learning process in general in a future post.

So, yeah, I thought I had more to say about dedication, but not at this time it seems.  To reinforce the idea I'm planning to do something I should (but don't) want to do and I should have a post for it...let's say two posts from now, given a post every four days schedule.  Something like that.  It remains to be seen if I can hold myself accountable and continue to do so.