nickhembery

[nickhembery]

Reblogging just for the pun

anyway sound off. at what stage do ppl think Han figured out the Force was real. the boring answer is after seeing Obi-wan vanish but i think he could rationalise that away as his eyes playing tricks on him. what do we think.

[nickhembery]

reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them

[nickhembery]

lion taming

Experiments with getting control of the executive dysfunciton continue. We're entering weird and dangerous territory.

This week I start a new system: I can't eat breakfast until I've exercised. I ate breakfast late every day, but I also exercised each day. So it's working. It'll get hard when we're in autumn and winter again though. The house is very cold in winter mornings. Maybe I'll just have a routine going by then. We'll see.

I'm building on this early success with more stipulatory functions. First, straight after breakfast, do a cleaning task. Wash up, hoover, whatever. Aim of the game: keep house clean. Second, after dinner/tea, read a little of a book. I've got this pile of books I bought at an event last year that have just been sitting there. I need to read them. And I will, a little at a time.

I need to figure out a time slot for getting some writing done. I've not worked on that for a couple weeks. Too much anxiety.

The anxiety comes from the same thing that can up-end this routine and learning to control my own brain thing: I need to change job again.

The long and short of it is money. I'm okay for right now, but things get iffy in the medium-term and are looking bad in the long-term. I'm not sure how to fix this problem though. I've got an appointment with a careers adviser in a few days, I'll see if they've got any ideas.

[nickhembery]

Getting organised V3

So I've confirmed that habit apps don't work for me. I can keep them going for a few days but as soon as something happens to disrupt my routine I stop looking at them, then inertia sets in and I never reopen them.

To solve this problem I'm going back to the thing I abandoned to try the habit app. Paper diary. The thing I was doing was manually writing down my daily checklist things. Some of these were very basic things, but I need the reminder. But the list of things got very big and the paper diary I had for this year was very small. The very thin ones with a whole week taking up two pages. Not enough real estate per day for all my reminders. So I switched to the app, then I got sick (had to take time off work for the first time in years (last time I took time off for sick was many years ago - but there was a time I got sick during a holiday from work).

So to get back in the saddle of paper diary I bought a A5 page a day diary. It's actually a bit big, I'm going for a A6 next year. But I've put my list in it, got my important dates written down, feeling good about it.

Also need to reaffirm my (half-joke) mid-life crisis ideas. When I was sick I started playing video games again. You get incredbly bored when you're not working and don't have the energy to go outside. I also just started scrolling on youtube.

So I've taken youtube off the homescreen of my phone and I'm only going to watch my subscriptions again. It's mostly news now that I watch and there's a lot to keep track of. Video games, crypto scams, facism.

Going to try and keep a physical book handy for when I get bored so I don't doomscroll. I have a few of those. I have a literal pile that I want to read but I find it hard to read books with my eyes. It's why I got into audiobooks.

This is all about the executive dysfuncion. Making bad decisions. It's easier to watch TV than wash the dishes. If I can't learn to control it, then I'm never going to get anywhere.

[nickhembery]

this blog hates donald trump

Look how many people hate him. I’m pretty damn happy about that 😁😁😁😁😁😁

[nickhembery]

decisions have been made

Progress is being made with the book. I recently declared the second draft of two of the nine sections done. This was a good milestone. It took a while as I rewrote the end of one and the start of the other. And then I was looking at my spreadsheet of wordcounts of chapters and sections and had an idea.

The structure of the book if that everything happens around an Event. The Event happens halfway through the fourth of the nine sections, so at the halfway point of the whole thing. So the first half is the lead up to the Event and the second half is about the fallout. Except, the sections aren't of equal length. And, they're all too long. A single book can't be 300k words long. I went back and forth on a) making the book a collection of novellas, meaning a lot of adding, or b) keeping as a single book, meaning masses and masses of cutting.

The idea I had was to take the sixth section out of the book entirely and split the rest into two volumes. The first volume is the lead up to the Event and it happening near the end. The second volume is all after the Event. The sixth section is the longest individual section, the most standalone and the one that doesn't add to overall story very much. In fact, it mostly adds lore to the sections before it.

Making this change, that gives me one book of just over 100k, another of 129k and a novella of 60k. If I cut down the second one enough, I think a duology of two 100k books with a bonus novella on the side is marketable.

There's still a lot of work to do. So much editing, rewrites. But I feel good about this decision. It means there isn't a lot of wasted effort of writing that has to be cut out. And it's better to say "I spent six years writing 2.5 books" than "I spent six years writing 1 book".

But all that is just one decision.

The other decision is that I decided to go with 3d for game making. There's a lot to learn, but at least I'm not learning two conflicting methods by making 2d and 3d stuff.

Making games will have to wait though. I really want to focus on the book(s) now. I've got a good pace going. If I keep it up I think I'll finish this second draft by the end of the year, then I'll be asking people to look at it for me. From there, more editing and looking into publishing. Scary.

[nickhembery]

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

[nickhembery]

Wrongly right and a shorter path

Two or three years ago there was a weird news story in video games. A screenshot of a game in development leaked, I think GTA6, and someone commented on this picture and confidently stated their opinion, that games were developed by making in-game assets first (what your characters, items and environments looked like) and actual game mechanics were added later as developers figured out how the game would work. The response to this comment as it went viral were quite funny.

Lots of real game developers posted various in-development images and videos of their past games to point out how wrong the original opinion was. Characters running through plain grey environments. Players represented by giant lozenges with googley eyes (in what would later be a pirate game). A bunch more that I can't recall.

The point was that you had to design the gameplay first and add the graphics later. You build the house before you paint the walls.

But.

As I've been learning about game development I've watched lots of tutorials there has been a distinctive pattern. They all start with a simple process, open the development program, start a new project file, and then LOAD IN PRE-MADE ASSETS. The characters. The weapons. The tiles of floors and walls. To start to code a game you have to be able to test it at the drop of a hat. To test it you have to run it. To run it you have to have something on screen to see. To have something on screen you need assets.

So this commenter who was so confidently wrong was also sort of right?

Before I start experimenting and trying to make my own game I need to a) buy/acquire some existing assets or b) make some really crappy placeholder myself.

I'm going with option b for the main character right now and will likely go with option a for other things. I'm aiming for a complex player that can go about with weapon hidden or showing (changeable weapons) and maybe changeable (visible) armour too. The latter would be difficult in a low-pixel 2d style. There's just not enough real estate on the character to get clear changes going. That's if I end up going with 2d.

One of the frustrating parts of how this game engine works in 2d is that for a character to be animated (idle stance, moving feet when walking, swinging weapons when attacking) then every single frame has to be a separate drawing. With four directions to face, eight different movements and between 2 and 5 frames per action loop, then I'm looking at 108 separate drawings for the character, and another 80 for each changeable weapon. That's a really big sprite sheet. So I'm actually wondering if it would be easier to make in 3d.

3d still has the same pre-make assets and individual animations, but an animation is a single file, rather than a set of images that have to be drawn. But there's a whole load of other complications that will come in with making a game 3d over 2d. I need to learn more before I can make a decision.

[nickhembery]

Off the rails

I hate how easily I can stop doing a project. All it takes is a couple things going wrong or diverting my attention and everything grinds to a halt. Stopped writing. Stopped posting. Skipped one, maybe two of these blogs. Stopped language lessons.

At least now the big distraction is over. Time for a soft reset. Language lessons restart tomorrow. Social posts restart a moment after I post this blog. Will do a little writing tomorrow. I'll also start the last game making tutorial before actually making something for myself. I say start because it's a nine hour youtube video. There will be lots of pausing to take notes, so will take me several days to get through.

And I've also started a big undertaking. I have a lot of trouble getting to sleep, and generally find that having music on helps. It needs to be the right music though, bopping dance tracks are not relaxing. So I need to make an appropriate playlist from my music collection. This has a hurdle though. Start to finish, my collection is several days long, it will take a while to get through it all. So long, that I don't think my phone will last that amount of time. It's an old phone, it'll need replacing this year, next year at the latest. I did have playlists on my last phone, but of course there was no way to transfer those across. And my last attempt to make playlists on my current phone was scuppered by google switching off the music player app. (you own nothing on your phone when they can stop an app from launching) To get around the app and phone longevity problem, I'm going to record my choices for the playlist in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is saved on a cloud account so will carried between phones. And eventually, I'll have something to help me get to sleep easier.

[nickhembery]

Missing deadlines

I said there were things I was going to do every day/week/month. That's not going perfectly.

It's tough to post something on social media everyday when you really don't have much to talk about. So posting every day hasn't failed pretty quickly. But I'm posting most days. That's okay. Quite often I have a thought, start trying to write a tweet, I get a version of it, look at it, decide "that's stupid", close the app and do something else. The other tough part is how I'm working nights now. I get up in the morning and try my best to fill my free time with things and stuff before work starts. And when work does start, I'm generally not thinking about social media. So when the shift ends and I'm getting ready for bed, I really don't know what to post about.

Weekly blogs like this are going better. If I don't post on Saturday then I make it on Sunday. Except I'm pretty sure I'm already repeating myself about updates week to week. Not hit any big milestones after those first couple. I think next week I'll write about my convention plans for the year. I need to make a note in my diary.

Monthly medium blogs. Just posted the first one, on the 1st of February. Yeah. The difficulty with that is a) it's such a rare thing I struggle to remember I need to do it, b) it's a 'professional' thing, so I need to make sure it's perfect before hitting publish, c) for my first one I picked an idea that isn't really that good, so wasn't that enthused about it. But, I'm committed to 12 this year, so the quantity vs quality slider is moving a bit. The next one will be better though.

The important thing to remember is that these are goals and they don't have to be completed to the letter. If I don't post 365 tweets, 52 tumbles and 12 mediums nothing is going to happen. Sometimes I can take the time to do other stuff. Yesterday I stayed up until 3am watching TV. That was a mistake. I thought I had the end of a show but there's actually another 4 episodes. So today was a bit of a struggle, but I managed to do some editing and watch tutorials on game making.

It's all about pushing ahead when you can. Edit a bit, write a bit, learn a bit, progress a bit. Another step forward.

[nickhembery]

We're not in Easy Mode anymore, Dorothy

After all the excitement of Gardening Week, I forgot to talk about progress in other projects.

Language learning too a bit of a bump. I stopped using duolingo and tried another service called lingodeer. It's almost identical except the mascot is a deer, and the big problem I found with it. Like duolingo, it starts with a lot of easy wins to build confidence and get the dopamine pumping so you come back and pay them money. What it also has at the end of each lesson is a question that's basically impossible. It asks you to write a sentence you have heard using letters it hasn't taught you yet. So a scripted loss, every single time. I quite that service and got a new one. Renshuu, a mobile app. I'm happily starting simple, learning all those letters lingodeer didn't teach me before moving on to harder stuff.

The book is coming along. I have officially finished the first draft. Again. You may recall I completed a first draft, started editing, and in looking at the first chapter of the first section I realised there was a massive plot hole and the entire last section had to be redone. It's redone now, all typed up. So back to editing.

Learning game development is a bit bumpy. I finished all the beginner stuff I'd done before, did some more reading and then moved on to a 'your first game' tutorial. I'm definitely making the thing and it works, but I don't know how any of the pieces interact or why they're needed. It's like I'm building a house and there is a loud-bearing wall, but I have no idea which one it is. Fortunately, there's lots of other tutorials and free courses to try.

Learning and writing is happening. Good times.

[nickhembery]

thought too big for a tweet

Been thinking a lot lately about all the generative AI crap going on. Companies that make it stole a whole mass of data, put it into a machine that confidently lies while eating up masses of power and water, but can't really do much that's useful. Every application made so far to replace people in their jobs doesn't, and applications to help/assist workers aren't that helpful.

But the companies are still losing masses of money every day running giant data centres, so to try and make some back they're forcing it on everyone and raising prices on other services. It's this whole doom spiral of make line go up and keep the number positive.

And the thought I keep coming back to is that it didn't have to be this way. OpenAI didn't need to release ChatGPT to the public. They could have kept a tiny closed system going, where only the investors could pull up the app on their phones at parties to wow friends and claim they're going to be in the next PayPal mafia. And no one else would have cared and the operation could have kept going for years without needing to raise billions more investment and freak out the world economy.

Businesses fail all the time. But before they do, their employees can keep getting paid while there's money in the coffers. Sam Altman could have done that. CEO of OpenAI, doing talks, giving demos, getting people interested, publishing papers and collecting the pay cheques. For years and years and years. But no, he had to be a billionaire. So they went too fast, dumped their plagarism machine on the world and fucked everything right up.

[nickhembery]

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

[nickhembery]

Welcome back to Gardening Week

Yeah, sorting out my garden took up most of my mental energy this week. My back garden backs onto a garage building that has other gardens on two of its sides. From one of these gardens, a massive ivy plant has snaked up the wall, around the corner, and across the wall over my garden. Here's what the view was like from my kitchen window.

That's about a lot of growth. I doubt it has ever been cut back in the 25 years these houses have been stood up. Getting rid of it wouldn't be easy, but it would be relatively simple. The ivy on my wall has all come from one place, that single corner. So I thought if I cut up through that, along the edge of the wall, I could separate the ivy from the root and be able to pull it off the wall. So I borrowed a ladder and some shears and got to work.

The first hurdle is how high off the ground all this is. That's my borrowed ladder at mazimum height, after some progress. At this stage, I had successfully cut through the root parts, but there was a lot still stuck to the wall. I made solid progress after the first day, cutting and pulling. The ivy was sneaky in how much of it there was. But the height problem came to the fore. There were branches stuck to the wall, but I could only reach the bottom of them and didn't have enough leverage to pry them from the wall. I briefly considered holding onto the branches then jumping off the ladder, but that's how you break ankles, among other things. So I borrowed some rope. Tying that to the branches, climbing down the ladder then pulling from ground level yielded results.

After a couple rounds with the rope, the wall was looking a lot better.

There's still bits up there of course, too high to reach right now, so more work is needed. But I'm happy with how this went. The amount of ivy I had left to dispose of was much more than expected.

Yes sir, yes sir, thirteen bags full. I had to work really hard to cram it all into my car so I could drive to the tip. Two of my three mirrors were covered up so I went very slowly and very carefully. But I got there with no accidents and I don't have to worry about that again.

Not sure what I'm going to do next. Think I'll take a break from big house decorating stuff to work on the book. I'm in the annoying phase of just typing up what I've already handwritten and want to get through it as fast as possible. Holding the notebooks on the page I'm looking at is a big pain. I'm considering photing the pages, then putting the photos up on a second monitor to type from. No danger of AI hijacking and that little bit more efficient.

More on that next week I suppose.

[nickhembery]

two milestones and a hiccup

Two steps forward, one step back, as the title suggests.

The first big achievement is finished the beginner's instruction on coding that I'd done before. I've got notes saved in a scrivener file so that I can add to it and keep it managable as it grows. I need to move on to new material, actually code some test projects and so on. A bit daunting, but just a little bit of reading each day will get me through.

The second big achievement is finishing the draft of the book. The ninth section was written entirely by hand, so now I need to type it up. No pictures and OCR this time, I don't want google feeding my story into an AI. Those damned terms of service are vague enough to claim they can while definitely not saying they won't. They'd already done it with subtitles on YouTube videos, so don't assume googledocs are off limits to them. Anyway, after I type up Section 9 it's back to editing. It was editing the very first chapter of Section 1 that made me realise the massive plot hole that necessitated completely rewriting Section 9. So basically starting over with editing.

The hiccup is that I stopped using duolingo. So have stopped learning a language. I'm looking at alternatives, will pick one or two to go with tomorrow and start again next week. I think one of them has the same gamification as duolingo to keep my dopamine-craving brain engaged.

Also, the parts for the front door curtain arrived. The pole was no good so I replaced that quickly, and now I have a curtain in front of my front door! I'm very pleased. It should stop my door being such a heat sink. Next, I'm going to cut down ivy that's all over a wall next to my garden. I need to remember to take before and after photos.

More onwards!

[nickhembery]

firing on most cylindars

The mid-life crisis has gotten off to a good start. Four days in, I have posted on social media each day, done a lesson on duolingo each day, learned some games programming each day, written a little each day. But, we're still in Easy Mode.

The learning programming and language is going over stuff I've already done months/years ago. It'll be a while before I'm into new territory with language and about a month for programming.

The going without parts of the process are harder. Stopping games is okay. I just do other things. But the youtube restrictions are worse. I kind of picked the worst time of year to do this, every channel I'm subscribed to shut down for a christmas break and only a couple have spun up again.

So there's a serious content drought right now. That combined with purposefully restricting how much language/programming/writing I do each day and taking a few days off work means I've been looking around the house thinking "what do I do now?"

Some serious cleaning has happened. When I bought this house a couple years ago it seemed that it hadn't been cleaned properly in twenty years. Every so often I find something new that I hadn't realised was mucky. To clean this latest one, a sacrificial one-use-only sponge was bought to do the task and after I was done I washed my rubber gloves and the sink I washed the gloves in. No more detail will be forthcoming at this time.

I've also ordered a decorating item I've wanted for a while. I'm getting a curtain to go over my front door. It'll help keep a little more heat in. It's a bit late as there's snow outside right now, but the curtain will be good for years. The parts should arrive in time for next weekend so I can put that up and blog about it.

Onwards!

[nickhembery]

New Year's goals 2025

I identified a big problem with my executive dysfunction is that I often sit down to play video games rather than do other things, and can stay there for hours on end, to the point that my TV triggers its auto-switch off because it thinks I've fallen asleep.

So in order to get stuff done this year I'm not going to play video games. This comes with caveats.

My two big games at the moment are minecraft and runescape. I'm leaving those where they were. Neither have me on paid servers or anything, so they can go on ice easily.

Other games I play are the daily linkedin puzzles. I'm going to keep going with those because they're nice ways to practice thinking differently.

And finally there's an idle game on my phone. I have to keep going with that because I'm using the game as a clock. When I beat the game I'm getting a new phone. The phone is at least six years old and the battery still lasts about a day, so it could go the distance.

As well as not playing video games, there's another thing I won't be doing this year. No main feed on youtube, so no doomscrolling. If I stick with just my subscription channels, then I can run out of stuff to watch. This will enforce boredom and make me do other things.

But, the big question is, then what will I be doing?

Well, there's some big projects that can be worked on.

Number 1: The Book. I'm still re-writing the last section. After that a big editing pass, then finding others to read it for me, and so on.

Number 2: Making Games. Last year a friend was looking for help with making video games. That fizzled out before things really got started, but I could make some stuff solo. There's plenty of online free resources for doing this.

Number 3: Learn another language. At the start of the pandemic I got into duolingo and was doing well for a while, but I hit a wall. My phone wasn't working with the app right so I couldn't do any speaking exercises, and I wasn't taking it seriously enough so that I couldn't progress. But if I apply myself, take notes, maybe buy a subscription, then I could really learn something.

Number 4: I've wanted to add to my steampunk costume for a long time. A helmet and a rifle. Making these would be tough. I've got ideas on how but it will involve experimentation and likely lots of failures. I've never really done the hands-on 'maker' thing before. A good starter sub-project will be putting together a 3d printed prop pistol. I've had the parts in a box for years, but never even dusted them off and glued them together. That'll have to wait until warmer weather though, as the work will be done in my garage.

Number 5: A comic. This is the one I really am not sure if it's possible. I can't draw better than stick figures. But with a video game engine you can set up scenes and make pictures. you can even make it look hand drawn. The big hurdle though is that I don't know if my computer will be able to handle that. I'll have to do tests with different programs to see which (if any) work.

Number 6: Write more. I don't mean the book. I'm going to do something I have actively advicated against in the past. I'm going to do a 'every day/week/month' goal. Every day, tweet/post/toot on social media. A random thought, a commentary, a joke. I'm tired of scrolling my feed, getting to the end then just switching off the apps. Every week, I'm going to post here on tumblr. Shorter, more up to date things, rather than 'here's what I've been up to this decade' mega-posts. Every month, post on medium. That's my professional proofreader blog. I've not posted on it in a while. A spread of regular posts will be good. I doubt I'm actually going to achieve 356 tweets, 52 tumbles and 12 mediums, but even trying for it will be worth it.

Well, today is Day One. Time to get started.