Nostalgia, code wrangling, etc.

Hello everyone!

Thank you for reading me.

Today I almost went to bed, then I thought... "no! my blog!" ahah. I have now: a blog, a diary, and some quick daily notes on my agenda for archiving purposes. Isn't that a bit too much? I don't know, I think I like it. Writing by hand, typing and taking notes... all three feel different for me, and they all bring out different moods and ideas. I used to type almost as fast as I thought (and with only four fingers! And without looking either. I do make lots of typos, but I really refuse to take the time to learn how to touch-type properly, so. :p)

Anyway. Today the weather was dreadful again, and we forced ourselves to take a few steps outside-- haven't moved much or enough recently. I hope to get back to it properly soon, I do miss having movement in my life! Little by little, I will get back to it!

We saw some nice trees, now the blooming season really is upon us, and then we heard my mum calling after her dog so we came back to help (the dog came back at the same time as we did lol). I had started the day completely untethered and frazzled, and while the walk did help, I still... spent most of the day in a bit of a State(tm).

It doesn't help that early on I was reminded of an album I used to listen to a lot when I was at my lowest fifteen years ago or so, and then of course I had to find the album, and it was nowhere to be found; and so I had to dig my old external drive that has all my oldest archives in it-- I lost all the truly old stuff, unfortunately-- and it's like the worst trip down to bad memory lane, aka the 2000-2010s. That was hard! It was really painful, actually. I suffered so much back then, and I am still carrying this even now. I hope I can be a little lighter, going forward... And that also was a good opportunity to start cleaning up that external drive, and to introduce my partner to Simon and Garfunkel, so not all is lost.

After an hour or so of low-key crying and moving files around, I decided I was done for the day. I'm always worried this external drive is too old and will die on me next time I try to use it, but so far that hasn't happened, so I'm trying not to be so anxious about it.

I started another website-- yes! another!!-- that I'd like to use as a directory for all the links and the info's I can find on kitsuke, which is basically "the art of wearing kimono" and other traditional Japanese clothing. I'm too tall, too fat, and too genderqueer to properly practice kitsuke, but I'm still very interested in it. I took my inspiration from the Benten Pond palette and the artwork it was itself inspired by. The webdesign is based on the Drop template by NomnomNami again, and I'm not done, because I have to refactor some of the CSS to make it work better with the palette. I really like this template though! It's a great base for me to have fun with.

And after an hour or so of that, I was feeling much better, so I left it where it's at to spend a couple of hours on my farming game project! Well! Do you remember this tutorial I mentioned previously? It doesn't explain things very well... and its code isn't too good either! I can tell, because I tried to add running for the player character to the state machine that had an idle state and a walking state, and oooooh dearest, wasn't that fun!! Wasn't that a trip!!! I managed it, but it left me a bit of a sour taste. I think there would have been more elegant ways to do it! (Humpf, don't I sound like I'm ungrateful and nagging? I hope not!) And now I'm a bit worried that... this tutorial, which is less of a tutorial and more of a step-by-step, is going to make me to half of what I want for my project, in a way that won't let me add to it easily. But on the other hand, I'm still learning a lot, and at least it's giving me a workflow/ideas of what steps to do in what order, so I'm going to keep at it for now. But ah! Frustrating!! Frustrating!!!

I wish I could have gone to school for this... But there are many advantages for me to learn at my own pace, and I'm not trying to become a professional programmer ready to plop into a company, I'm trying to make my silly little farming game.

Okay! That was a lot of words! I'm off to bed now!

Bye~