#i’m going to be learning JavaScript next week | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cleverhottubmiracle · 5 months ago

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I can honestly say that when I look at my face in the mirror, I am not thinking, “Oh, I WISH I looked like I did when I was 21.” Of course, my neck was tighter, my cheeks were fuller, and I didn’t see sunken eye beds. But, I do not care anything about going back. Because that face didn’t come with 3 amazing teenage children, I didn’t have the job I currently do (that I like a lot more than the job I had at 21), and I wasn’t married to my wonderful husband at 21. Plus, I have learned so much about proper skincare as I have gotten older! I don’t remember where I heard this quote, but I’ve decided it’s one of my favorite ways to think about our beauty and skincare routines as we age. “It’s not about looking younger, it’s about looking your best for the age you’re at.” Now whether you’re in your fourth, fifth, or sixth+ decade of life, you already have experienced the skin changes of more texture, dullness, and uneven skin tone that is definitely more prone to lines and wrinkles. But don’t let this get you down, because there ARE things you can do and use to revitalize your changing skin, which I’m going to share with you today. I’ve seen incredible results with the following tweaks I’ve made in my skincare routine over the past couple of years thanks to my relationships with licensed estheticians and friends in dermatology, who I have learned from. And a lot of trial and error in my line of work as a professional makeup artist and content creator! *Stating the obvious here, but I realize we all have different needs/wants when it comes to our skin, so keep that in mind when reading about my magic bullets. And when in doubt whether you should try what has worked for me, consult a professional. Turn on your JavaScript to view content I would describe my skin as: Normal to dry, I’m not super sensitive to any ingredients (throw all the acids and ahas/bhas, let’s see what happens!), I will turn 47 next week on 1/30, I haven’t done filler in over 2 years, and been Botox free for almost 9 years now, I am insanely religious with my skincare routine. None of this would make a bit of difference if I wasn’t super committed. So before that makeup is ever applied, you have to “prep the canvas” so that the paint (makeup) looks exquisite every time. Even if you’re not a pro at makeup, if your skin is VERY well taken care of, the makeup you use (despite the price tag), will just look better. Point blank. Because I’m a to-do list girly (anyone else??) I am going to leave you all a numbered list below to follow along with and see which of these tweaks/improvements you might want to start trying to implement in your own beauty routine. Be Consistent with All of Your Skincare None of these products/techniques will work unless you do them consistently. And no, it’s not too late, just get started, and then stay the course. No one got a 6 pack of ab muscles by only doing sit ups once every other week. Start Dermaplaning Start DERMAPLANING if you’re not already. Dermaplaning is a minimally invasive treatment that can help you remove unwanted peach fuzz hair and provides significant exfoliation of dead skin at the surface level with zero downtime to it. Why do it? Your skincare will sink in and work more effectively, your makeup will go on MUCH smoother (there’s no hair or rough skin in the way anymore!), and your bare skin will have an immediate subtle glow. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like seeing my mustache when the sun hits my upper lip while I’m applying my lipcolor – ha ha!!! True deep dermaplaning must be done in an office with a scalpel, but I have found that doing it myself at home with these #1 Amazon facial razors, is good enough for me. I use these razors about 2-3x a month, and I prefer to do it on dry skin after washing my face, but others like to use a facial oil. I’m serious about this one – it’s a game changer. Yes I nicked myself the first couple times, but after you get the hang of it, you can glide right through it and will realize how significantly better your skin surface will look. Turn on your JavaScript to view content High Tech Skincare: Red Light Therapy Give RED LIGHT THERAPY a try. It’s not a gimmick. I was skeptical after the 3 weeks of using my Currentbody Series 2 LED mask, $469. and not feeling like I was seeing any difference in my skin. But then, I kept going daily, and after about a month into it, it started to show. Brighter, more even skin tone, and I swear, my elevens in between my brows seemed not as deep. I’ve never been more impressed by an at-home treatment like this. I wear my mask 10 minutes a day, 5 days a week, in the evenings while I lay in bed before I go to sleep (with clean makeup free skin). You’ll be doing the most for your skin, by doing the least. See me wearing it in action on my Instagram here. (come follow along with me there too if you’re not already!) Skincare Heroes: Retinol + Vitamin C Add in a RETINOL at night, and a VITAMIN C in the morning to your skincare routine. These are the two most recommended pro-aging ingredients you can add to your skincare routine after age 30+. You can see by the pic below, that I’m a believer in using both! In addition to SPF of course, but I’m sure you all know this by now! Retinol (a vitamin A derivative) is widely known to target most of our pressing aging skin concerns and is the ingredient that does it all medically and cosmetically. It helps promote skin renewal + turnover, reduces acne breakouts, and boosts collagen production. Apply this after your red light mask for extra help! Some can be sensitive to retinols, so keep that in mind, which is why they should only be used at night when you’re not exposed to the sun. I live and die by the Paula’s Choice Pro Retinaldehyde Dual Retinoid Treatment, $68, right now. It literally has a 5 star rating on Sephora, so that speaks volumes. This $8 Good Molecules Gentle Retinol Cream gets great reviews for being easy on sensitive skin. Vitamin C is a known antioxidant that helps fight harmful free radicals, achieve brighter skin, and prevent dark spots. Currently, I’m switching between using the power duo from Paula’s Choice, the 5% Vitamin C Sheer Moisturizer with SPF 50, $45, and then 2 times a week, their C15 Super Booster Serum, with Vitamin C, E, and Ferulic Acid, $55. Lash Growth Serum Boost your lashes with a LASH GROWTH SERUM. I know this isn’t technically your skin, but your lash line is a pretty important part of your face and could probably use some help if you’re noticing thinning and shorter lashes as you age. There’s nothing girlier or more feminine than a luscious set of lashes to highlight your eyes. I’ve started back with the Babe Lash serum, $49, and it’s already making my lashes look fuller and healthier. Again, give this type of treatment at least 4-5 weeks before you bail on it. They seem to grow back overnight. Turn on your JavaScript to view content Don’t Forget Your Neck, Chest & Hands Remember the NECK, CHEST, AND HANDS when it comes to your skincare. Don’t ignore body care in these areas where aging shows the quickest next to our faces! I never wipe off excess of my pro-aging skincare, I add it to these three areas everytime! Our skin on our body needs moisture just as much as the face does, but often gets ignored. I apply body lotion DAILY – lots of it, don’t be stingy here. Naturium’s Bio Lipid Restoring lotion, $15, is an amazing affordable skincare brand, and helps keep skin silky smooth with the likes of ingredients of omega fatty acids, shea butter and B vitamins. Skincare: Facial Oil Consider adding a FACIAL OIL before you apply your foundation. I follow so many celebrity makeup artists online, and a common theme is a majority of them use facial oils on their mature clients to help give more radiance in their complexion. And yes, even oily skin can benefit from the correct facial oil bc it can help balance sebum production and control oiliness throughout the day! I apply a few pats of this Elemis Pro- Collagen Marine oil, $90, after my moisturizer, but before I put on foundation. Makes my skin look glowy everytime! For oily skin, try out Sunday Riley’s Ultra Clarifying face oil, $80. High-Five Habit: An Effective Skincare Strategy Try Mel Robbin’s HIGH 5 HABIT in the mirror every day. Do you take a good look in the mirror at your reflection? I’m not just talking about the act of putting on makeup and skincare, but do you reealllly take a look at yourself? We know we should treat ourselves with kindness, but at times it seems especially hard with the aging process. So I have started implementing this somewhat “silly” act/habit that motivational speaker, lawyer, and best-selling author Mel Robbins harps on. Whether it’s in the morning when I’m about to start my getting ready process, or if I forget, I’ll try to do it once in the day whenever I find a mirror. I tell ya, sometimes the simplest routines, can be really effective. Watch her short explanation here as to why this act scientifically helps boost your mood and confidence. Turn on your JavaScript to view content The Rest of My Look Details My royal blue Amazon balloon-sleeved sweater, $39, is mega cozy and comes in many color options! // The cool nights short bathrobe from Soma (on sale!), $49 is a pretty way to sit and do your skincare routine if you’re hot natured! I really want this elegant Peacock Anthropologie robe though, $188, they finally brought back! // My Sandbar statement ring is still available in limited sizing, $98. // My Makeup By Mario lip color combo of liner and glossy lip plumping serum is a new fave. Find this duo here along with exact shades. // Foundation is more of a tinted moisture balm called “What the Foundation” by Jones Road in shade “Beige,” $47. // Wearing true brown mascara from Voluminous lash paradise, $12, in this post, and kind of loving the break from black when the look calls for it. If you want to try the sultry smokey-eyed look but don’t know where to start, I have given you a step-by-step tutorial here, from last week! About The Author Jennifer Duvall Jennifer is our beauty & makeup contributor. She posts a weekly column on Saturdays She also runs her own website & YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking below. Source link

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norajworld · 5 months ago

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chilimili212 · 5 months ago

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sapphistvampyr · 4 years ago

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Four days holiday and I’m bored out of my mind 😞

#I finished all my homework #and the shops are closed #What else is there to do?#i’m going to be learning JavaScript next week

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system76 · 4 years ago

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Marquita Wiggins is Developing her Open Source Graphic Design Program: Designy

The Unleash Your Potential Program provides a System76 computer to six winners for accelerating the completion of their next project. This week, we interviewed Marquita Wiggins, who is in the early stages of developing her open source Canva alternative, Designy.

What prompted you to want to create Designy?

I like Canva, but because it’s owned by a company that keeps the software closed down, there’s no ability for people who know how to code to be like, “Oh, I want this. Let’s add it and make Canva even better.” To my knowledge, there aren’t any free tools out there that give the Canva Pro treatment. So I’d like to make a tool that’s better, and also free.

You mentioned you had heavy experience using Canva. What’s your background with it?

I work in marketing for WBEZ, a public radio station. I’ve been doing that for about three years. A good portion of my work involves designing, so I’m always in either Canva or Illustrator.

I like the ease of Canva because I can work on designs from my work laptop, or I can use someone else’s laptop and log in if I’m somewhere else. And then with Illustrator, you can expand artboards as much as you want.

What sorts of improvements are you implementing in your open source alternative?

When you’re working on a design in Canva, it’s very linear. Let’s say I am working on a poster, and I just started it, and I just want to keep iterating on small changes. In order to do that, you have to locate the artboard that you’re working on, and you can’t view them all on the board at the same time. The reason I like Illustrator is I like to have eight different artboards up at the same time, and I can zoom out and see all my iterations at the same time, and then zoom into the one I want to make changes on. That is my number one feature that I love about Illustrator, and that’s what I want to bring to Designy.

I’d also give Designy the ability to create templates and share them with other people on the same software. If you create a template, you can then put it on the template board for other people to use. In Canva, you can’t just put templates up in the marketplace. Canva creates your templates, and those are the only ones you’re able to see unless you know somebody who also uses Canva, and they send you the template to use.

Do you have a background in coding?

Not really. In my last job I sent out all the emails for the organization, and I also managed the website, so I did use HTML and CSS for that, but I was never an expert in it. That said, I was an expert Googler. I was able to make massive changes to the website by Googling what I needed to do and then figuring out the code for it.

I’ve been interested in the computer programming space for a while, and I’ve always dabbled in it and learned more about HTML and CSS. When I saw this program pop up, I felt that this was my opportunity to learn a lot more, and also be able to create something that would be useful to myself.

What software are you using to develop it?

I’m going to be using Javascript for the front end, Java for the back end, and likely MonoDB for the database. I’m almost done learning Javascript now, and it’s a lot! So after that, I’ll start building the front end of the site, and then learn Java, connect it to the back end, and then MonoDB for the database.

This was the perfect opportunity to get the momentum going on learning how to do this, because now I can’t stop until it’s done!

Why did you choose Javascript?

When Canva was created, they created it using Javascript, so I figured why not use the same software that they originally used? I think right now they’ve moved on to something else, but when they originally started they used Javascript.

What are your initial thoughts on Pop!_OS?

I never used Linux until I got this laptop, so it was a bit of a learning curve to figure out how to do certain things. I haven’t really downloaded that much—I only really use Visual Studio Code and Firefox, and I also downloaded the Brave browser on it—but I like the navigation. I like that I can open up Visual Studio Code and then open up Firefox and the auto-tiling will automatically arrange the windows. I wish more companies would develop that feature.

How has your experience been with the Oryx Pro so far?

It’s great! It has a huge screen, so I don’t even have to use an external monitor. I have it on a riser with an external keyboard. I haven’t had any issues so far.

Did you encounter any challenges in setting up your system out of the box?

It was super smooth. I don’t even know if it took 15 minutes from unboxing it to actually being able to use it. I also like that I’m able to secure my data with encryption before I log into my account.

You mentioned Designy will have a beta. What’s the plan for that currently?

I’m thinking the beta phase will start in March when it’s all done, where I’m sharing it with other people, getting feedback, and making changes. I’ll be using Reddit a lot to get folks to try it out and let me know what they think. It’ll also be up on GitHub, so people will be able to push updates if they have a change they want me to make.

I’m going to finish the front end of the site in November and the back end of the site will be done in January. The database connection will be done in February. I know there may be a lot of weird bugs and whatnot that other people will find, so the beta helps me work all that out. The goal is to put this out to the public and then iterate on it, so maybe down the line it’ll transition from Javascript to something else.

Is there anything we didn’t ask about that you wanted to share?

A random fact is I have a dog named Mr. President. People seem to get a kick out of that.

Stay tuned for further updates from Marquita Wiggins’ Designy and other cool projects from our UYPP winners!

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springsaladgaming · 4 years ago

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Impromptu Update 6/3/21

I’ve made some strides today I think.

Quick shout-out to @nyehilismwriting for sharing this Sugarcube template. I learn way better by doing than just by reading endless guides, so this template has been helping me out a ton on learning the Sugarcube format.

More talk below the cut.

I’ve absolutely still been using my other IF project as a guinea pig to learn how to change elements in the Stylesheet and the JavaScript. One important thing I wanted to do was implement a setting that allowed for the links to change to caps for those who have difficulty differentiating by color. This is mainly for cycling links that appear in the passage, though the setting currently changes the choice links as well.

I’m not sure how necessary a setting like this is, but ultimately I think it’s a good thing to have just in case. Ninelives won’t be using the same color scheme as our guinea pig here, but it’s still better safe than sorry.

Either way, it helped me learn how to add to the settings menu, so I have the basic know-how to add more accessibility options in the future if I need to. A lot of the other elements are similar enough to Harlowe that I’ve been able to style this project just like I had the Harlowe version styled.

I’ve mentioned this briefly before, but the cycling link ability that Twine has will enable me to put a lot of smaller choice elements directly into the narrative rather than on separate pages like with CS. This means that a decent portion of the beginning of Ninelives will be facing rewrites for a smoother narrative experience, which is fine considering it’s all going to be facing rewrites anyway.

One thing I would like to do is move the Saves, Settings, and Restart options to the top of the links listed on the sidebar, as right now they are defaulted to the bottom of any links I add, but I’m honestly not sure what element I would need to change quite yet for that. 🤷‍♀️ I’ll figure it out eventually. Also the styling of the dialog boxes will be reformatted, but I know where to find all that, just haven’t done it yet.

Overall, today has been a pretty good day for some coding work. I’m planning to start working on Chapter 6 tomorrow, and that will be most of what I’m doing next week.

Hope everyone is doing well!

#ninelives impromptu update #ninelives IF #ninelives wip

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queenlua · 4 years ago

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hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue. see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP. and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP. so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on. there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc. you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

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jabuga · 3 years ago

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State of the game (literally)

I'm aiming to have this game published on Steam by October 1st, 2022. That basically means getting it finished by mid September at the latest, so that's around eight months from now. Is that doable? Who knows. Most likely; no.

The current state of the game is actually a bit further along than I'd hoped it would be considering my massive lack of skill with Unity. The character can move around as I want, look at things, interact and describe things they see. There’s context sensitive interaction so all actions are tied to object (doors open, pickups get picked up, buttons get switched, etc).

I’m trying not to overcomplicate things here. This is the first game I am working on with the aim to release which is actually viable to do so, so I’m not overcomplicating things here.

There's a few hurdles to get over here. I am shit at writing stories, all the art needs to be made, I want the game to be fully voice acted as well. Welp.

Art

All of the art is going to be low poly - PS1 style graphics. I mentioned in my first post why; I just like the style. It’s got that tasty retro feel and still eaves some things up to the imagination. If it looks like a door or a statue or blade of grass then normally, that’s good enough. There’s also the general public appeal of it all. These ps1 style horror games are sort of in I suppose now. Or at least they were.

I’ll make art specific blogs at some point but I’m sticking to some rigid rules; my textures are at most 128x128 and the models can’t be so complicated that they look out of place. as for effects, I’ll use whatever looks good rather than sticking to what was possible on a PS1.

Story

I’m shit at writing stories, and I don’t usually read them either unless I know they’re going to be good. It’s tough, then, deciding to make such a story heavy game, but it’s something I am just going to learn. I like things a bit surreal, so the story is really reflecting that. What I have so far may constitute about an hour of gameplay, with fluff and exploration excluded.

Something I've found very hard is making this believable; why is a character here, what are they doing and how is that played out in a videogame? You can’t have a character kill a bunch of guys and then feel remorse for killing a special character, etc.

Design

The game has changed a lot in the 2 months I’ve been working on it (one month I suppose, if you count me going home for Christmas), but I’m somewhat settled on what features it will have, and will not have. For my first game lets just say that I am going to keep it simple.

Sound

Music and effects are one of my final considerations. I’ll likely rely on asset packs, free music and the like for this. When it comes to voice acting, I’m hoping to get some friends to do it. I hope they’re up for it, because there might be a lot.

Development

Might as well say it, I am using Playmaker here. I never got on with learning any programming language other than Javascript and web related languages, and I’m more of a ends suits the means kind of person here.

Playmaker has basically allowed me to think of how something should work and then get it implemented almost immediately. While I know there are gonna be issues later, I’ll stick with it for now and rinse out any niggling issues for Game #2.

Conclusion and short term goals

Not sure how often I’ll update, but it’s good to have a dev blog again. Funnily enough my last dev blog is celebrating it’s 9 year anniversary on Tumblr (it’s private and pw protected), but nothing came of that other than lots of half made projects.

My next goal is to finish the story and whitebox the game. I’ve gone about things all wrong creating art test assets and putting them in the game, so it’s back to square 1 for now!

Anyway, see you in post 3 in the next week or so.

#devblog #unity #low poly #gamedev #playmaker #madewithunity #steam

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fadingcrusadermentality · 4 years ago

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How I learned to use the <select> tag in HTML

So it’s my third week in my coding boot-camp and it’s project week. A very exciting yet nerve wrecking time. I feel like I’m playing catch-up every single day leading up to our project week. We get assigned our project groups and we’re set free to do our work. A few days later, I wanted our project site to be able to change background images with a simple button and event listener, but sometimes life isn’t so simple. I spent a few hours trying to grab my HTMLs document Body but miserably failed as I added a clickable button to change the “background-image: url(’’)”. I’m sure there’s a way to handle that change through a button, but I went a different route. I found the “<select>” tag method in HTML.

Let’s dissect this picture of code.(above)

<select> </select> (pictured above) The select tag, by itself, creates this clickable drop-down arrow. Inside of <select>, we want to add the “onchange” attribute which will trigger every-time there’s a change. So, we added a function we wanted triggered(more on this later). Now that we have our dropdown arrow, we add our options with <option></option> (pictured below)

Each option here will add a selectable tile in our dropdown menu. The white letters in the picture above will be what is visible to the user. The “value” is what is important to us here, these are the paths we are going to use for our background images. When the user selects 1 of the 4 options, what we’re paying attention to is the “value”. Next Step

Recall that “onchange” is inside the opening “<select>” tag and will trigger every time there is a change. Now that we know that, we create a function to be called. In this case we called it “handleOnChangeEvent” and it will pass the value of whichever selection is made. Now, let’s look at the function. (picture below)

(This function is inside of Javascript) First, document.body.style.backgroundImage, will go into the styling of the background image inside of “Body”, where we will need to place a path inside the parenthesis of “url”. Second, this function will pass “x”, which is just a placeholder for the information (value) inside of our options, into the parentheses of “url”.

So now, in summary, when there is a selection made by our user, the value inside the parentheses of “url” will be replaced by the value of whichever selection has been made. Thus, allowing the user to change the background image with a simple dropdown selection, which we have provided. Holy-smokes that was a lot! I hope this explanation helps somebody out there that’s as lost as I was in that moment. You can definitely try and mess around with the <selection> tag and add different functionalities to your functions. Anyways, thanks for reading!

#selectTag #flatiron #coding #HTML #javascript

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sergiohpsx109 · 4 years ago

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Best Local Seo Techniques: 10 Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier

The best guide to Search Engine Optimization Can Be Fun!

Table of ContentsThe only Is Seo Really Complex? Guide You'll Ever NeedInspect This Report on What Seo Is NotCheck Into Seo Explained to See Why Its Not What You Think

So, those are simply a number of things that I would share and I hope those are useful to you. My name is Keith Goode and I'm the Chief SEO Evangelist for seoClarity. As a practice I do not think SEO is difficult, to be honest. SEO only ends up being tough when other individuals become included that aren't SEOs.

It evolves too quickly. They get used to one rule and a brand-new rule enters into place, when in truth, if you take a look at the evolutionary direction of SEO, it's corresponded throughout its history. It's been consistent with Google's message. Google is driven to bring the finest answer to its users and, as a result of that, it has needed to progress its algorithm to satisfy its own goals.

Most Unusual How Tough Is The Seo Learning Curve? facts

From an organizational perspective, when an entire business has not embraced the importance of SEO, you face issues where you get a designer who heads out and they they code page and then they completely break your canonicals or they obfuscate all the content behind a Javascript script or Flash, nobody utilizes Flash any longer, and in that case, that's when you encounter problems where SEO is hard since SEO is an afterthought.

After material has actually been written. However, when your entire company lags the SEO framework, you tend to have fewer problems. It tends to run more efficiently. It's not best, don't get me wrong it's not definitely best. Often Google tosses little wrenches into the machine. Hreflang for example. Numerous worldwide organizations embraced hreflang.

page has more links. For that reason, Google may rank the U.S. page, so, when it comes to sort of trying to apply the current technique or the current trick, the difficulty obviously is that SEOs wish to apply internationally not little bits at a time, when most companies in fact prefer let's test this very first.

Head out, check a couple of pages, then apply it widely. A/B testing is not something that's special to paid search, for instance. It ought to be applied to your content efforts, it ought to be used to any sort of coding changes you do on a website. Test initially, then use universally, and then you stopped facing issues.

Why Seo Explained are So Popular

There's still some obstacles however general I do not think SEO is hard. Hey guys! This is Damon Gochneaur with Aspiro Digital Agency. I wish to talk about "Why is SEO so hard?" I believe the something that no one talks about, that we should, is that there's no right way.

There's likewise no curriculum, there's no Google training, there's no Google certification, and we also do not have any Google representatives for SEO, or Bing representatives for that matter. So, from an interaction perspective, from a, how the entire entire paradigm is established it's a really difficult location to do service.

How to Learn About Is Seo Really Complex? in Your Spare Time

The important things that we do today really rarely are going to affect modification tomorrow, next week, or perhaps even this month. If we develop links, if we make changes to our website, it usually is going to take weeks, months, even a quarter, or several months to see that investment return itself.

youtube

Excellent. Bad. Indifferent. We get something to determine, something to hold ourselves responsible to, and something to ultimately repeat and reason from. And then, I think the 3rd most tough part or the important things that makes SEO so challenging, at least for me, is the misunderstanding around what SEO really is.

The killer guide to How Tough Is The Seo Learning Curve?

The entire understanding of what we do Nimbus Marketing as good SEOs is, to some degree I believe, is completely lost in the majority of people. So, no ideal method to do it, takes bit longer than other channels, a lot longer, and after that the majority of people just completely misinterpret it. That supplies a situation where makes it a little more difficult than others.

What makes SEO so hard? That's actually simple, simple answer: it's Google! Google makes it really hard. Aside from that, possibly a much better response or a different response would be that things that people inform you you must do don't constantly work and vice versa. And, so the reason SEO can be difficult is because you have to check things out yourself.

All About What Is Seo And Why Do I Need It? in 45 seconds

There's simply so numerous different variables The bottom line is that SEO is a whole lot more than simply optimizing your page titles and composing good material. You're going to encounter things that are going to be unanticipated and will get you in trouble with your clients or will give you a nice big dip in the incorrect direction as far as search engine result go.

It takes working with many different websites of lots of various genres, various sizes to actually get a concept of what works and what does not and you spend sufficient time doing those things and you're going to discover that a great deal of the info out there is false information. Hi! I'm John Leo Weber, Digital Marketing Manager at Geek Powered Studios in Austin, Texas.

So, 3 to 5 years ago you could get a task, an entry level position in the SEO industry and it wasn't hard. At that time, if you would, to get just sort of a fundamental SEO task your primary jobs would be link structure, which was probably mainly article and directory link building.

And, depending on how, or where you fell on the scale of white hat to black hat, article spinning. And, then, a bit of on-page optimization. Putting keywords into title tags and h1s, h2s, h3s. Now, today, if you were to use those exact same methods not only would you not get the exact same results in SEO, you would in fact, possibly, get a Google penalty.

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ahistoricalramblings · 5 years ago

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Coding is Hard

November 8, 2020

I’m sorry for this in advance if you know literally anything about coding.

I know I said that this week I would talk photography… but I’m not going to. I swear, it’ll come next week AND the week after that. Today I wanted to talk about coding. To be specific, I’ll be talking about coding in HTML, something I would’ve guessed would be pretty easy. It’s not. Like at all. Like this is so difficult.

Some context, perhaps? For HIS9808, we have a final independent project in which we explore some form of digital history and report back about our experiences. Because I hate myself, I chose to code.

I decided to try and make an interactive website for William Morris pieces. For the project, I’m only doing Strawberry Thief but, if I can manage to make it work, I might add some more over time.

William Morris, Strawberry Thief source

So the basic idea that I pulled from my brain with literally no understanding of how coding works is this: the viewer clicks on a certain part of the image or some button along the side and the piece animates and a window pops up on the side and displays some information about the piece or Morris. Did that make sense?

My small non-coding brain figured this would be difficult but not impossible. I have now spent probably 25 hours working on just the coding. And I have almost nothing to show for it. Almost nothing because I do have new some knowledge and a navigation bar.

An aside: I’m animating the image to move when the user clicks and that has actually brought me much joy. Unlike the coding, all the problems that arise are solvable with the brain I currently have. I would put some of the animations into this post but I want them to be saved for when they are in the actual website.

The first thing I did was watch about ten YouTube videos. Then I called my brother. My brother is the smartest person I know (and I can say that because I know for a fact, he won’t read this). He went to Queen’s for Apple Math engineering and he now works coding (in python, I think) for a contracting company. So, I called him for a little tutorial if you will. He’s never coded in html so it was basically him showing me the program I should use (visual studio code) and how to use GitHub to store the code I’ve written incase anything goes terribly wrong and I want to restore to an earlier version. But it definitely helped me understand how to go about coding (which is to say: you google just about everything).

Here’s what I’ve learned so far (beyond that I should’ve respected computer science majors more in undergrad): websites are actually made up of three different coding languages—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you need to create a folder where your images, video, and other external content are sourced from (believe it or not, this took me a whole day to understand), and that coding is hard (given, I know).

Let’s talk about the three languages first. So, from what I’ve understood from the seemingly hundreds of YouTube videos I’ve watched, html is the structure—the words, the format; css is the style—the colour, the positioning; and JavaScript is the interactivity—the movement when you click. At first, I was trying to do all three languages in one coding file (which is possible) but that created a monster file in which I could find not a thing, so I’ve separated them. Now I have a bunch of different test files, most of which do one of the things I want (display the image, have a sidebar, play an animation when clicked, etc) and none do more than one thing.

A side note about the image issue. Basically, when you code all your code is stored in a file folder on your computer and everything you source in a line like <img src=”_________”> needs to be in the file folder. This is so basic that nobody online thought to mention it. You can imagine how stupid (but also deeply frustrated) I felt when I realized this.

I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, as they say. So I’m also looking around at different programs designed to make augmented reality and other alternatives. But I am really hoping that the html will come through. Because I’m coding from scratch, I get a lot more control over the entire project and in an ideal world, that would mean it should have an all around better outcome. But alas, I will search out the other options for science.

This is all to say: coding is way harder than I thought it would be. I get it—this project is supposed to be an experimentation of what digital public history can look like and trust me, I have been experimenting. But the perfectionist in me would really like this project to be nice at the end of this as well as be a learning experience. So I will continue to spend absurd amounts of time trying to learn coding.

I’m going to end this off my plugging last week’s post on genocide and word choice because I am very passionate about it. I swear, next week we talk all things photography.

Until then, stay savvy.

#digital public history #history #HIS9808

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charlotte-codes · 6 years ago

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This, Charlotte, is the internet ...

It was September 30th: day one, week one.

I cycled across Bristol that Monday morning with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I am not a seasoned city cyclist, so crossing the leviathan of roadworks at rush-hour was my first test.

Arriving at the DevelopMe offices unscathed, I quickly found my seat. Although we’d all met the week before at a social event organised by DevelopMe (a brilliant idea because I was less nervous having already met some of my fellow classmates) the room was very quiet and you could feel the tension of 12 career-changers psyching themselves up for what was ahead.

Our teacher for the week was Keir, whose enthusiasm and sense of humour made us all feel relaxed and at home very quickly.

We started with a brief introduction to the internet.

Now, I knew that the internet was not contained in a small black box à la the IT Crowd, but I had never really considered its complexity: a global network of computers that can communicate with one another at sub-second speeds is something that takes a while to get your head around.

Although the fundamentals of the internet are fairly easy to digest, thinking about it too much at this point in my understanding is like thinking about the expanding universe - enough to make my brain explode and ooze out of my ears. So, we’re gonna leave that one for another day.

In the meantime, let’s talk about HTML and CSS, our topics for the first fortnight. This post will be an overview of what we learnt, I’ll get into the details in separate posts later on.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

The phrase that has stuck in my mind from our first week at bootcamp is ‘Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation’ - which sounds suspiciously like a general life lesson, or an advert for a skincare range. For our purposes, it’s a way of making sure that every user can access the fundamental parts of your website no matter what browser they use or how slow their internet connection.

The first few days concentrated on writing HTML, which contains the important ‘content’ of the webpage. CSS is used to make it look good and also deals with accessibility. We’ll get into Javascript later, but that allows user interactivity. All three together constitute Front End development. My beginners understanding of this is that a Front End specialist works on the client-side stuff you see and interact with - whilst a Back End specialist works on the server-side stuff you don’t. A Full Stack developer does both.

In terms of HTML, you can split your code up like a human body: at the top is a <head> tag wherein you store all the metadata. Just like a human head, you can’t see what’s going on in there on the webpage itself, but it contains important behind-the-scenes information. The part of the page you see online is the <body> and you can dress this up however you want using CSS.

Within the body you’ll probably have a <header>, a <main> and a <footer>, which are fairly self-explanatory ways to break up a page. A lot of this stuff comes from traditional methods in printing, so if you imagine your page layout a bit like a newspaper, then considering how to split it up seems logical: for instance, you’ll probably further divide your page up into articles, sections and asides.

Within these sections you’ll have tags for various elements like paragraphs <p>, images <img/>, links <a>, headings <h1>, <h2>, buttons <button> and so on: again, it’s all wonderfully logical. Here’s some I wrote earlier - this is just part of the <header> on my home page:

The above example is also styled and for the majority of the first fortnight of bootcamp we got to grips with CSS.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS is a little trickier, mainly because there are SO MANY THINGS and you have to think about accessibility and responsiveness (i.e how a screen-reader will understand your code and what it will look like on desktop and mobile devices - this requires the use of @media queries, which I’ve grown to really like because it is SO satisfying when they work properly).

Potentially one of the biggest challenges I found in CSS was positioning things evenly. When you start fiddling about with margins and padding, and forgetting what you’ve fiddled with, you start seeing issues arising on the page: maybe it’s an <h2> that just won’t align with the image underneath; or maybe it’s a <nav> bar that is squishing all the menu items too close together, and pushing them all a little off-centre.

Now, I’m mildly neurotic when it comes to visuals. I’m trained in visual analysis and I’ve spent the best part of the last decade explaining the composition of paintings and other images - why they have a central focal point, or why they don’t etc. etc. Positioning stuff correctly and with meaning is important to me.

So I became particularly enamoured with flexbox and CSS grid (and not just because I enjoyed playing Flexbox Froggy and Grid Garden). These do a large percentage of the positioning legwork for you and I found myself using them a lot for the project work that we did in the second week.

Some excellent resources for these can be found here:

https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/

Week 2: More CSS and SASS

In week 2 we worked on a sample project.

The brief was to practice our HTML and CSS skills by building a pretend portfolio site for a commercial photographer. Our teacher this week was Ruth, who was also super cool and put us all at ease instantly.

The project consisted of a home page with a grid of featured photos and a nav that turned into a burger menu when reduced to a small screen. We also had to create a gallery page, a blog page (and a sample page for one blog post) and a contact page (to practice HTML forms).

One of the main focuses of week 2 was using SASS to organise our code so that we didn’t have to repeat ourselves throughout the site.

At first I didn’t get on with SASS (it felt complicated). But being a fan of flexboxes, I spent some time creating a mixin that I was particularly proud of so that I didn’t have to create new flexboxes all the time (a mixin is like a function that can be reused by passing values into the variables - in this case, $justify, $align and $flexDirection):

Turns out SASS is super useful.

And being a bit of a neat freak, I enjoyed putting all my code into separate files and tidying everything up.

I was pretty proud of my site by the end of the week:

home page ... big screen

two sample posts on the blog page ...

Every Friday, we have an individual review with one of the course organisers so that we can discuss how we are getting on. Both weeks I mentioned that I was tired, but in a good way! I was getting great feedback from my teachers too.

So far, so good.

Downtime

Learning new information day after day is super tiring and it’s important to have a break at the weekends.

So I’ve been kind to myself and made sure I get out into nature on Saturdays and Sundays and away from my desk. The temptation just to work through is there all the time - I love what I’m doing, so it doesn’t feel like work and I have to drag myself away from it in the evenings and at weekends. This can only be a good thing though, right?!

The entire cohort are so friendly and everyone gets on really well. A few of us finished the first fortnight with a celebratory drink at Bocabar.

Next week ... Javascript ... bring it on!

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diaryofalilshawty-blog · 5 years ago

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03.27.20

It’s about 3:20 AM right now. I took a break from trying to figure Javascript, what a headache. I knew coding was going to be hard, but I didn’t think I would feel so stupid. Nevertheless, I will keep trying to understand it. I honestly just wanted to pause, and write about how proud I am about myself, about things I’ve learned. I can feel my vibrations and energy growing.

Covid-19 has become a global crisis, and I am trying to view this as somewhat of a positive experience. Now that there’s a bit more time to stop an think, I’ve tried to get creative with myself. I’ve picked up new hobbies, old ones, I’ve dedicated time to bettering my education, instead of staying stuck, all while making money. One of my favorite quotes: “DON’T JUST EXIST, LIVE!” With a busy schedule, I appreciate my time with people more. Rather then living a routine on lock down, I get to think of new things I can do each day.

I will not lie, I miss having female influences around me, when it was me and the gals. Seems like all my friends are cuffed up now, and it is leaving a lot of time for myself. I can’t look at it in a bad way. I just need to embrace the fact that it’s new territory for me, not feel lonely, but rather focused. All this hard work will pay off.

With the world being on pause, there’s not so much noise from my daily life. This includes the judgement of others, having a need to stay updated in social media, daily life things that keep me distracted. In this time of quarantine, I feel like I have learned so much about the person I want to me. My perspective of things is slowly broadening. I love it. I love this feeling of slow personal growth inside me. I should accept who I was before even if I was not always the best person. No one on this earth, none of my friends know or understand the place that I came from, how I grew up, and the different obstacles I had to overcome to become who I am today. I am completely fine with that. At the end of the day, things like that should not matter to my real friends. Instead, what matters is the person I am today, my willingness to grow. I do not show a lot of my emotional scars for a reason. Those scars they have perish just enough, that I don’t notice it. There is probably only one person on this earth who has an idea of the abundant changes and elevation that this past year has done for me. The pain, loneliness, anguish, heartache, frustration, panic, ignorance, betrayal, naive-ness, feeling of being completely lost, feeling of not belonging, all that I have been through. That person is Phillip.

As I was saying though... having alone time, being single while everyone is taken, it has been quite a nice time. This pandemic has got me thinking, reflecting, and making goals for myself. I remember when I had curfew, and Dad wouldn’t let me go out, I had picked up crafting, the art of making things. Those things were small little projects, and accomplishments for me. My little wins, when I was losing to life. These past weeks, I’ve picked up hobbies I use to do, and I am trying my hand at new hobbies... even though I am super amateur. For instance, I realized I have a camera sitting there, so I decided to pick it up, make use of it. I started hot yoga like what last month or so, and I cannot just give it up. I may not be able to do it every day, but I remember how good it felt doing it, so why give it up? Yah feel. People have asked me before what are my hobbies, besides AGC, gym, the basic stuff... and NGL for a moment I had to think about it. That’s not a question I don’t want to have an answer to. So here goes me trying to find new hobbies, discovering new things I love to do, and making a list for the things I want done.

For the first time in life, I know where I want to go without regards to who is in my life, what if they leave. For the first time in life, I think I am learning to fall in love with myself. I’m slowly loving the person I am becoming, and I will love the person I am meant to be. My center of attention is my family, my career, my education, ME. I don’t feel the need to please people anymore, I just want to please myself. I mean besides the patients I do work with. WHICH since we are on the topic of- working at a hospital, I kind of love it. Not necessarily my job since it can be slow sometimes due to working at a small private hospital. I don’t save lives, but it doesn’t stop me from helping others in small or big ways. When you think of hospitals, it has a negative connotation. I know what it feels like to be sitting in the chair next to your loved one in the hospital, hoping they get better, that they survive and win the fight too often. The feeling of grief sitting next to Mom when she was hooked up onto a much of machines with tubes sticking in and out of her. With that being said, I don’t take care of patients like nurses do, but the time I do spend with patients, I make sure to leave them with a smile. There are difficult patients, angry, sad, scared... you name it, but for some reason, I can resonate with them. I come in with a smile, I distract them through the temporary pain, give them some kind of emotional reassurance for them to feel safe. The patients like me, and to have made that small moment or short time in a place like that is a definite win for me. That is probably the favorite part of my job, yahknow besides preventing injuries. It has even inspired me to get a degree in the medical field, after I become a Full Stack Developer.

Never in a million years would I have thought, I’d be in programming. It is not easy 100%. To think and have a logic of a computer, not something I have... at least I am learning though. It is making me smarter, think outside the box, take things slowly, think of the steps to get something done. The fact that I have so much dedication to this, pat on the fucken back. 5 more months to go man.

I am so proud of the shit hole I pulled myself out of. I wish it didn’t have to take what it did, but I am getting out of it... Here are some of the things I have learned these past few months

-have your own opinion

-you can care and feel the emotions of someone else you care about, but that does not mean they should be yours

-give everyone a fair chance, but keep your guard up

-give yourself love, because it start by you loving yourself

-embrace yourself, reflect on yourself, because they add into your vibrations

-Don’t put others before you, because they won’t always do the same for you

-Only do what others would for you

-not everyone is going to want to be treated the same way you want to be treated

-PROGRAMMING IS HARD

-happy self is happy life

-having a Mentee is not easy

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heywannalearn · 6 years ago

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[1-5/100]

This week has been busy!

I’m primarily focused on three things over the next 100 days:

1. Writing - I would like to finish a manuscript over the next two months. 2. French - I’m actively working on improving my French with more reading, vocabulary, and speaking/listening practice. 3. Programming - I’m working with someone I met online to learn web development. I’m interested in full-stack to explore more remote job opportunities. Right now, I’m focusing on MySQL and Javascript.

all of this is while keeping up with my freelance work, which I do at my own pace depending on when I need money and how motivated I am.

Progress this week:

Writing: Finished a freelance assignment. Edited one chapter. Will work on adding to draft. French: Read a page every day of new French from two books. I also started doing a class on Coursera for B1. My goal is B2 by the end of the year. Programming: Read through two chapters of my Javascript book. I also began a Coursera class (Javascript, jQuery, JSON) and worked through the first unit. I need to finish the assignment for it, although it won’t be graded since it’s a free class. Did a few practice exercises from my book. Updated my Github with these files.

Random Thoughts + Considerations:

Perfectionism: I have trouble with not wanting to do a deep dive on every subject that I encounter. If I look up a word, it takes a lot to not be tempted to look at the entire history of the word. On the other side, this keeps me from starting simple tasks or doing “small” tasks because I feel that I need to do something BIG for it to count. Going to work on doing everyday changes.

Learning languages + programming: Learning French (because I now live here) and computer programming at the same time is fascinating. There’s a logic to every language, foreign or computer. I’m particularly fascinated by SYNTAX right now!

Age + Structure: I feel so old at 26, but honestly, I struggled a lot with depression when I was at university. I could never seem to focus. As I’ve gotten older, it’s easier for me to direct my attention to things. Somehow, even though I know that I’m not in “university” mode, it’s fun to be a self-learning student. I don’t miss the cramming sessions for things I didn’t care about during college, but I do miss working with other people to stay motivated and feeling as if I had the structure I needed to care about with homework deadlines. I think structure is important for learning, so I hope I can figure out a way to set that up for myself.

Good luck to any other students who are currently teaching themselves a subject from a source outside of a university class! And to those in class too! May your week be bountiful.

#100daysofproductivity #studyblr #studyspo #langblr #frenchblr #computer science #programming #javascript #self learning #motivation

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erenblogs1 · 5 years ago

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Halsey released her 3rd studio album Manic on the 17th of January. I fell in love with her and her music since the debut Badlands. Halsey is not a common pop artist; she has always been creative and inspiring on her musical journey. For Manic I had mixed feelings and wasn’t actually aware of what to expect. Therefore, I really wanted to review her new body of work and share my thoughts with you. And I know most of you love her music as well.

Let’s start with the singles of the album. Without Me was not meant to be her lead single in the first place but after an unexpected fascinating commercial success, her team must have changed their mind. Without Me is her first #1 solo hit single in the US. Since I was obsessed with this song, I even reviewed it last year. Here you go – Single Review – check it out! Also confusing was that Nightmare, which is a great dark rebellious track, was supposed to be the lead single, but was taken out from the album later on. Halsey explained this decision with the tweet: “I sat down to make a dark mean album and found nothing but calm, introspective, acceptance in my heart”. I was sad about it because I love Nightmare and I think it still would have been a great contrast to the rest of the songs. Halsey then released Graveyard last September as a foretaste of her upcoming album. Now she was singing about being in love with the wrong person and even following them to the graveyard. She wasn’t mad anymore but the track was still upbeat and the chorus dynamic. I must say I couldn’t connect with this single as much as I did with her earlier releases. Halsey continued to bombard us with other singles.

She released clementine at the end of September on her 25th birthday. On this introspective track, sounding childish and fabulous, Halsey imagines her ideal world and talks to a nonexistent lover. Even though she claims that she doesn’t need anyone, she knows that she needs someone. We got the same lyrical content on I HATE EVERYBODY, which makes Halsey kind of repetitive on the record. I don’t think that clementine was single-worthy. It didn’t achieve any commercial success, just like her following single Finally // beautiful stranger. I actually really liked this slow acoustic love song with a calming melody and story-telling lyrics. Halsey wrote it about her ex-boyfriend Yungblud, whom she dated last year. You should be sad, is definitely the masterpiece of the album, it was released one week before the record with a scandalous music video, in which Halsey rides a horse naked. She exactly knew that this would be her last chance to get back commercial attention. However, I think everyone loves this country-influenced pop song with a mad Halsey singing about heartbreak again.

Besides the singles, Manic has so much more to offer with sixteen tracks in total. Ashley the intro track, named after her real name, is a poetic introspective start with dark and serious lyrics. Halsey worked with the famous producers Cashmere Cat and benny blanco on this one, but the track is rather focused on the lyrical content than its production. All these facts also count for Forever … (is a long time), which also sounds similar to clementine. These two tracks are too experimental to be seen as pop songs, they’re rather written like interludes. If you know me, I hate interludes or short tracks on albums in general. In my opinion, they’re just unfinished songs and function as placeholders. Manic counts even three of them. Let’s take a look. Dominic’s Interlude isn’t interesting at all and sonically pleasant for me. So, I allow myself to continue with the next one. Ok, take a deep breath cause this one is crazy! Alani’s Interlude is the part of the album, where Halsey embraces her bisexuality, just look at these lyrics: “Your pussy is a wonderland and I could be a better man. And my girl, she always wore a skirt in the classroom, eatin’ my dessert in the bathroom”. Yeah, I was shocked too. Alanis’ vocals during the chorus just sound awful, to be honest. SUGA’s Interlude is sonically more pleasant but we can’t understand SUGA’s verses anyways unless you speak Korean. I believe that this interlude was a collaboration just to achieve more commercial success since BTS and K-Pop have become more popular and due to the fact that it was also released as a promotional single before the album.

If you want to dance to a track on this album, then 3am is your crazy upbeat rock n roll anthem. Halsey wrote it about the lonely moments you have. When you return from a night out with your friends but still feel lonely deep inside. And you desperately look for someone to talk to just to keep yourself far from your own thoughts. I think it’s relatable to everyone. This new era of social media is really toxic to our social lives. If there wasn’t a You should be sad on this album, 3am would have been my masterpiece of this record. The rather dark and furious killing boys represents Halsey’s attitude after a breakup. For the title, she was inspired by the horror movie Jennifer’s Body (2009, starring Meghan Fox), well represented in the intro. I must say I don’t like the melody and the production of this track. It doesn’t sound new, since the way she sings no more and anymore will remember you of the track More. These two songs together can cause a more-poisoning. However, just to say it once again her single Nightmare would’ve been great next to killing boys. Speaking of More, you can definitely recognize Cashmere Cat’s typical futuristic production in it. But this story-telling track has so much more to express on a personal level. Halsey admitted that this one was the hardest to write since she opens up about her endometriosis and miscarriages. This lullaby-like track is dedicated to her unborn child, whom she just wants more. It’s a touching must-listen for Halsey fans.

If you’re looking for an exquisite production you have to listen to Still Learning, which Halsey co-wrote with Ed Sheeran and Louis Bell. Sonically a masterpiece and regarding the lyrics it’s a self-love anthem. In my opinion, Halsey is one of the most confident artists out there. Therefore, I was shocked when I listened to this track for the first time. I couldn’t believe that she’s still learning to love herself. She also described self-love in an interview as a journey and not as a destination. I hope that she’s going to release this one as a single. The poetic outro track 929, named after Halsey’s birthday (29th of September), is probably the most honest song on Manic. Halsey said that the freestyled lyrics are confessional about her family and fans. She especially references topics like her life before and after becoming famous and even picks up her relationship with G-Eazy. What I love about this track is the smooth guitar-riff. Halsey proofs that not much of production is needed to have an inspiring track. It’s a great way to end the album since Halsey mentions everything that inspired her to write this record.

When I streamed Manic for the first time I wasn’t impressed right away, but I must say that most of the non-singles grew on me later on. Just like Selena did onRare, Halsey also worked with Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother, on a track. Finneas co-produced Lose You To Love Me for Selena and I HATE EVERYBODY for Halsey. After he produced the most-selling album of 2019, he must be getting a lot of requests to work with major artists. I’m sure that I’ll see his name more often.

Manic is probably Halsey’s most personal album so far and I can’t wait to see her live on the European leg of her Manic World Tour this spring. Her stage presence and performances are always fascinating.

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Let me introduce you MANIC! Halsey: Honest and Personal on Manic – Album Review Halsey released her 3rd studio album Manic on the 17th of January. I fell in love with her and her music since the debut…

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