#i've tried almost every single program you can get on a computer and i just don't vibe with any of them

[dzpenumbra]

12/20/22

Well hello, robo-followers. This week I got like 6 follows from what are clearly bots. Is this new? I don't know, I've only been here a few months. Fucking obnoxious. It's 2022, almost 2023, major record labels can accurately recognize song patterns with just seconds of audio data... and we can't figure out how to like... not let bots make accounts on websites. I don't want to get too political, I'm just gonna touch on two points here. There's really no justification for a user account to be owned and used by a computer program. Programs are not users, they can't agree to legal contracts, they are not held liable to legal contracts, so I have no clue why this is something that a Turing test is not like... mandatory for... And, my second... and I feel much more important point. It should not under any circumstances be legal for a computer program to threaten legal action against a person or business. I can't stress how strongly I feel about this line in the sand. So... I hope we start to see some changes in the next few years, especially in fields that are reserved for... arts and humanities. Human shit. The things that make our species... human. User accounts are supposed to be reserved for personal use of individuals, and representative of that user's actions, not a few pages of code. Legal action (strikes, reports, claims, etc.) are way too nuanced to be identified, confirmed and acted upon without human verification. I'm tired of multi-billion dollar corporations being lazy about this shit. You have the budget, you have the reach, you have the technology, please set a good example and stop making the users, creators and consumers suffer.

Okay, bitching out of the way, lets get to the good shit. Today was... wait for it... a good day! Holy fuck!

Hold on, I'll be right back, I made cookies. =D

Mmmmmm.

Alright, so today... I decided to try out a time management app. I don't want to get too excited just yet, it's just day one, but I do have to say it helped quite a bit. It's called Owaves, it's a scheduling app but it's like... really visual, and simple. So many scheduling/time management apps I've tried are really text-heavy and look like fucking homework or something. There's something that just subconsciously turns me off and stresses me out with that, especially on days I'm super overwhelmed. But this was really sleek and pretty and simple. So, I just threw some stuff on it while I was in bed. Coffee/cat food/breakfast/shower, plan groceries, get groceries, unpack groceries, yoga, skate, dinner, work, bed. Pretty straight forward. I gave myself wiggle room to get distracted or derailed - which I did on literally every single one - and tried to just have it serve as a... guideline, I guess. Like a sketch for a drawing.

So yeah, got really tunnel-visioned in grocery/meal planning, got a list together, went off to the grocery store like 40 minutes later than I was planning. Car was covered in snow and ice, had to dig it all off with my damn hands. It's not my car, I'm still driving the fucking rental, the dealership hasn't even called me personally back to tell me when the parts are coming in. Its been like... I don't even know, 3 weeks now? Like... I legit feel like I'm getting scammed here. Like, I feel like I should be talking to a lawyer. Anyway... I got the snow off and... my gas light was on. So I got gas, went grocery shopping. It was way more expensive than I was expecting, and it was only like 3 bags of groceries. Seriously. Since when are 3 bags of groceries $250? Like... I'm just one dude, and I don't eat as much as I should. I cook in bulk, I buy stuff on the cheaper side... Ugh. I feel for those of you with big households, I'm really sorry for how hard all of this must be for you.

I went home, unpacked the stuff and immediately did yoga. See, on the way back... I scoped out the rotary park... and it was not shoveled at all. Not even one bit. It was perfect. So I jumped right on the mat, and Max started stalking... and was like... doing what she does when she's getting ready to attack my legs. So... I paused and went and tried to play with her. But she didn't play... it was very confusing. So I went back to yoga, restarted the video and... she did it again! I felt myself getting upset, so I redirected into play again and after a few minutes it actually worked. She played for the first time since we've been here! I'm really happy about that. And now that I look over at her, she's been sleeping on my old jacket, which probably still smells like the old house. She's probably homesick, or confused. It would make sense. She lived there for like... a third of her life? That's a lot, you know. She does seem to really love it here, but I think she's still settling in. But seeing her play, when she has osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism and kidney disease was like... it just made my heart soar. Even if she was just laying on her side and playing.

I went back to yoga, the feline queen permitted me to do so, and it was really nice. The same routine again, and I'm getting a feel for it. And again, it's crazy how much my hips and neck open up with it. I think my back is going to take more work to get the rust out of the hinges, but slow progress is still progress.

I smoothed out the bottom of my board, tuned it up, that's my new routine thing for snowskating now. I have no idea why I never did it in the past. The bottom is like... some kind of thick plastic coating, so if you skate over rocks, gravel, or dig a bit too deep and hit pavement or whatever, it will scratch and leave grooves in the bottom of the board which kill your speed. I mean that, there's really no feeling quite like riding a brand new off-the-line snowskate, that kind of speed is like... enjoy it, because you're never gonna feel it again! XD But cutting the grooves out and sanding the bottom with 100, 400 and 1500 grit pads really help a lot. Obviously it's not perfect, but it makes a big difference.

I hit up the park. The snow was about... 3-4 inches deep? Soft powder with a very thin crust on it. Very good conditions. Unfortunately, prepping the snow was pretty necessary, and that eats up a lot of your muscle endurance when you're skating alone. It's decent warm-up, but... ugh. So I did a little flatground to warm-up and headed over to the 2-set. I was determined to land the shuvit down the stairs today. I ollied it a few times no problem. But my shuvs kept going wide. I was just like... not catching them right. You really have to have your landing straight with snowskates, there's a lot that can make you just stop right in your tracks. I tried a dozen times, shifting my back foot position, trying to focus on front foot catch, trying to focus on watching the board mid-air. I got really close over and over but... nothing. And then it hit me... a realization I had last time. I need to practice landing at speed.

As I walked up to the top of the hill, I was musing on how just riding and ollieing at speed is like... some of the most useful practice you can do all-around for snowskating. For real. You get really comfortable on your board, used to "carving"... let's just say "board-handling", when and how to push, learning what conditions you can carry speed in and what you can't, and what you need to do to carry it. But the ollies really make the difference. Not just learning the different ollie position for snowskating, with your toes right at the very edge of the tail, but landing. Because landing on a snowskate can feel like jumping onto an ice skating rink in shoes sometimes. The more you get used to that feeling, the easier it is to stick... well... every goddamn trick period. Ollie is a bit easier because the board comes with you, but... the landing is the same low-friction slip-fest as landing any other trick.

So, I bombed the hill and found a good natural kicker right before the benches where I had been skating flatground, about half-way down the hill. It was a decent hill, I could carry speed well enough, it even had some sections where I could pump so I didn't have to kick as much. And I started just bombing down and seeing how far I could ollie. The biggest one was about 6 feet. It was so much fun. I really enjoyed it. So, after I got that ollie down, I went back over to the 2-set, ollied it like it was a crack in a sidewalk and did a few shuvit tries and... landed it. Yep. It's like... a baby trick, on a baby stairset, but... I had tried that trick like 25 times this week, at least. Riding away was just... such a good feeling. I was beaming walking back to get a drink of water. Then I bomb-dropped the 4-set, and that wasn't bad at all. It's gonna take a bit for me to get brave enough to ollie that, but I think it should happen this year. That'll be the biggest stairset I've ollied... ever. On anything. And there's a 6-set at the park too, if I start to get really fucking brave, and it's steeper too, so less to clear, but the catch there is... the landing is about 25 feet and then it's right into traffic, so if my board shoots out... no bueno.

Oh, then I landed a moving kickflip. First one of the year. Didn't carry a lot of speed, but still cool. And then on my way out I tried a big spin and actually got really close. Like I stuck it but underrotated and had to sorta powerslide to cheat it a bit, but that was a personal NBD. I've done fakie big spin before, but not regular. I think big spins might actually be easier than 3 shuvs, at least on a snowskate. I'm gonna keep trying them, I just.. once again... need to practice landing. And for that one, I need to practice landing switch, which is a whole other can of worms.

But all-in-all, that was a really good session and I'm really glad I went. Super glad I did yoga first, I would've been a wreck if I didn't.

Chinese leftovers for dinner, cookies for dessert. Spent the rest of the night eating (I eat really slowly, I'm noticing it's a pretty big problem with my schedule) and watching videos on wire-wrapped jewelry and stuff. I want to take that small quartz piece I worked on the other day and put it on a ring, I think that would be sick. I'm just not sure how. I really struggle to visualize these wire pieces, it's weird. I can visualize mandala stuff easy (when I do), zentangle style I tend to just... do without thinking, and the realism stuff I usually use reference. Trying to come up with a custom wire design feels similar to like... you know those metal puzzles you get at hobby shops or whatever? Where you have to like get a ring off of a bent metal shape or like, figure out how to untangle two entwined metal shapes the right way? I feel like I'm making one of those. And my brain just starts shooting sparks sometimes. So, my counter to that has been to look for inspiration, and just put my own detail work on it, my own embellishments. I found some cool designs that I'll probably come back to tomorrow or something. I didn't actually get anything hands-on done today, but that's okay, research is still work. I did find a video on pricing jewelry, which was really helpful, and definitely applies to my other artwork as well.

Hell, since I'm on it, let's go into this weird thought. So... people seem to think when they're paying for artwork that they're just like... helping the artist recoup the cost of supplies. People I've talked to, at least. They really don't do the math on like... labor... skilled labor, that is... And my work, well... it varies. So let's touch on the two topics one at a time so I don't forget because I 100% will.

Supplies - Since college... well... actually since before that, if I'm being honest... I have been making art on pretty much fucking everything. Mostly cardboard, but also scraps of wood, sheets of lined paper, whatever the fuck I was either close to at the time or called to me. A lot of my art evolved into this concept of beautifying things that were destined to sit around and collect dust... or fated to be thrown in a landfill. But it wasn't really a conscious thought so much, it was just... "Oh, I want to do this piece and... that piece of wood over there, I could see it on that." Or the reverse, when I stumble across a piece of cardboard or something and go "oh, I could see a cool abstract design right here, etc. etc." I strayed from using traditional art supplies so much that in drawing class, I made my own paint pens with shoe polish applicators and acrylic paint so I could use the same paint I was using for painting class. Don't get me wrong, I still bought paint, I still bought Micron pens, I still bought Prismacolor pencils. There's no real substitute for that. And once I found the combination of Bristol paper and Micron pens, and Prismacolor pencils... *chef's kiss*. That's a lovely place to draw. So what I'm kinda saying is... my supply cost has never been that high at all. Sometimes, especially with like... carving found pieces of wood or shaping found stone... the supply cost is like... fractions of pennies, or nothing at all. It's almost not even worth calculating.

Labor - That leads into this tricky bitch. I tend to work slow. I always have, I always will, it's just what I do. It's my speed. Let's use my profile picture piece for example. That one, at the point of the picture, was over 40 hours in. I had it documented, I streamed the entire process of drawing it. So... say a friend really wants that piece. And they think my skills are worth the wage of a $20/hour job. Which is literally a McDonald's wage right now. So... hi, self-worth, let's try $25 so I don't feel like the past 15 years were a waste of time. It's a start. So $25 x 40 = $1000. Not including materials... and, as we said, that's a tricky one because like... how do you charge for one sheet of paper and fractions of pencils? How do you even do the math on that? Welp, Strathmore says their sheets of Bristol are about $0.50 each. Let's assume the pencils are around the same, so let's make that an even dollar. Double that shit so I can recoup my losses. Wow, we're adding 2 dollars, woohoo! $1002. Now we're at wholesale prices. So, I'm supposed to double that again for my friend. That's my sales price, even to friends. $2004. And then, if market value should be higher because, you know... it feels like it should be valued higher... then I can adjust that accordingly.

I'm going to say this out loud (in text), it feels weird talking about this. But here's the rub, and probably the reason it feels weird to talk about it. I WAS NEVER TAUGHT THIS. No one has really even had a discussion with me about this! I learned this shit literally tonight, from a handmade jewelry artist in Canada on YouTube. I did 3 years as an art major, I worked as an artist's assistant with an internationally renown artist and I was never actually taught how to value and sell my own art. I am 30 fucking 6. I have been doing art professionally for 15 years. And I don't know how to price my shit. And I'm worried people will rip me off. Because literally everyone I have done work for has ripped me off and taken advantage of my compulsive generosity, humility and self-sacrifice. So... maybe that's the reason I don't have a successful, flourishing career? XD Ya think?!

So yeah, if you're an art educator, please go to your department head or whatever and sit them down and insist that they teach art students how to value and price their own work. At least to get a ballpark. At very least what I covered here. And please stress that there aren't rules to this shit, that you can go high as the sky if people want to pay that - and if someone wants to pay that much in appreciation of art, there should be no negative feelings around that.

So yeah, I guess I'm saying this because I remember people watching me make this owl piece on Twitch and they just... didn't really seem to value the training and skill that went into it? They thought I was just doing it as a hobby or something? Which is really fucking strange, and kinda hurts, you know? Maybe they didn't access enough brain cells to even get that far in their train of thought. But I'm just gonna level... I don't think a single person that went "wow, that's amazing!" when they dropped by my stream would be willing to pay full price. Even if they knew how many hours went into it. I doubt they'd be willing to pay half-price. And that's the kind of feeling and vibe that sends artists who like... enjoy food and shelter and all that... into this frantic mode of like... "what else can I do?" "What different can I do?" "What outside of my natural inspiration and creative drive can I do to accommodate to cheap people who buy bargain bin knockoff shit from factories in China?" "Can I scan this and sell a cheap print version for a fraction of the cost?" "Can I get them to subscribe to Patreon for $5/month and have my piece gather dust for 2 years?" "How can I sell out and still maintain my artistic integrity?"

Ugh, this is what happens when I get into the sales and business side of... my business. I fucking hate it. I'm not made for this shit. Give me a piece of wood and I'll carve cool shit in it for 6 hours. Give me a raw stone and I'll sand it down into a beautiful faceted centerpiece. Give me inspiration and I'll spin you gold from hay. But I cannot say this enough times. I'm so fucking tired of saying it. I. Am. Not. A. Salesman. This shit straight up stresses me out.

Aaaaaand I actually managed to lose my own interest! *standing ovation* Well done, me! Enough of that economic sales and marketing garbage, good lord. I just want to make cool shit. I really really hope that someday I'm lucky enough to have someone knowledgeable in my life - a partner, an assistant, a mentor, whatever - who enjoys that kind of stuff, who I trust, who can take over so I can just focus on creating. That and marketing are the missing pieces that would make me flourish.

Anywho, wasn't planning to get into this shit, thus is the nature of stream of consciousness. Today was a good day, lot of accomplishments, and I don't want to get bogged down by this whole "hermit can't sell his art because he still gets super overwhelmed around people" thing. Don't wanna lose sight of what today was about. Pushing outside of my comfort zone and finding great accomplishments and rewards for doing so. And cookies. =D

[jet-bradley]

🔥 tron, naturally

this is hard because I've posted a lot of unpopular tron opinions before, but i think my biggest all-of-tron unpopular opinion is that when push comes to shove, i genuinely believe TRON 2.0 feels more like a sequel to the original movie than TRON legacy

this isn't about just plot, or aesthetics... the original TRON had a really whimsical feel to it. both of the sequels have a little bit of a darker tone to the story, but at least 2.0 tries to be fun? people make it out to be this really grimdark story because lora is dead, but playing through the game, it really does feel like you're on an adventure inside of a computer and you get to make friends with a bunch of programs.

i also think "it's a FPS which doesnt fit in with TRON" is a valid argument. i first want to point out that the game pretty heavily encourages you to use the disc and not the guns. i've done sniper-only playthroughs before and they're definitely fun, but the disc provides a couple of advantages over the guns. 1) almost every weapon in the game, including the guns, requires you to expend energy to use it... energy is a little like ammo but you also use it to download keys to different parts of the map, lore info, and other things that progress the gameplay. the base disc weapon does NOT. you can ALWAYS use your disc even if you're completely out of ammo. 2) the disc has more or less limitless range, just like the sniper, and it has a bigger hitbox. it just moves slower than the bullets. so for moving enemies you might try the sniper but if youre having trouble aiming at a static enemy you can use the disc and have a better chance of hitting them. 3) with the disc, you can PARRY OTHER DISCS... meaning even with the shorter-range pellet gun, you are way more vulnerable with a gun or other weird tron-weapon than you are with any disc weapon.

so the game really does try to encourage you to play with your disc like in the original. but even if it doesn't, all the weapons in 2.0 feel like they fit in with the TRON universe. even MORE than the guns in TRON Legacy & Uprising.

and lastly... i lied, it is a little bit about the aesthetics. i know the in-lore explanation as to why the grid looks so different is that it's a completely isolated computer system. but 2.0 has a lot of the same comforting "this is candy to look at" color schemes that the original does, while still making it feel more high-tech than the 1982 film. because it is! it is INSANE that in just 21 years, we went from the best supercomputers in the business not being able to render a SINGLE FRAME of the original at once, to a HOME PC BEING ABLE TO RENDER TRON 2.0. but that's another rant.

this is all to say: legacy is a neat continuation of TRON (1982 film) plotwise i guess, but TRON 2.0 feels like it's immersing you in the world of the original in a way that legacy just... doesn't.

[anettrolikova]

A day in my life really depends on what's happening. That said, usually I have themes. For instance, I have a priority list, and I have decision logs that chronicle all the things I am trying to figure out.

I end up trying to insert themes into my days. Like today, for instance, I have a meeting with my small team to begin the week; I reserved my afternoon for product reviews—what we call “greenpathing exercises”—where, oddly, I'm trying to discern how everyone is thinking about the main things we're working on. I do this because oftentimes I feel as though I am the connective tissue combining operations, finance, and more formal business functions with the product itself. This connection helps me to make good decisions.

A lot of this is almost automatic by just having a good color coding system, which is really fun

I made two decisions: one, I'm going to try to learn as much about business as possible. But, if business is very different from software architecture, I'm going to be no good no matter what I do. And so, I ran an experiment to treat engineering principles, software architecture, complex system design, and company building as the same thing. Effectively, we looked for the business equivalent of just turning off servers to see if the system has resiliency. For instance, we used to ask people to use their mouse on their non-dominant hand for a day. We introduced these little nudges to ensure that people didn’t become complacent.

I believe that the job we all have in life is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and then share it. I just don’t know what else there is. This is the bedrock of my belief system.

When I get close to any field, I think about how far I want to go. I'm probably further along with programming. I don’t know if I want to get from 90 to 91% in programming when, with the same amount of work, I could figure out the first 60 to 70% of UX or even something like drawing. There’s a recent book about this called Range, which I really like. The book pushes in this direction and explores this topic a bit more than I do. But I just found myself nodding throughout reading it, because it turns out that very often—really, every field has fundamental wisdom that you discover when you're learning and talking to the people who have mastered it. I find that going wide and learning the best lessons from the people who have dedicated their entire lives to a certain pursuit gets you really, really close to mastery.

people show up with a mastery of certain instruments. Someone ends up being the jazz director and the rest of the band follows

I've always gravitated towards competing against myself in most things.

I really love failing. I feel so good when I do something, and it just doesn't work; especially if I get the feedback about why it didn't work. That gives me a project to work at to improve. And so maybe that's sort of interesting regarding losses.

the major reason why video games are valuable is because of this concept of transfer learning. For instance, people who are good at chess understand when it's time to perform tactics, and when it's time to focus on positional development. Not just in chess, but also in life.

I have found it really, really useful to be able to reason about a relationship without getting egos involved too much. I can have a conversation with someone saying, “Hey, you made a commitment to ship this thing, and you did. That's awesome. That's a super big charge on the trust battery, but you’re actually late for every meeting. Even though that's relatively minor—like it decreases 0.1% on your battery—you should fix that.”

It plays a role like that. That said, it's not useful to talk about trust as a binary thing. People are quick to say, “You don't trust me!” And it's actually more, “Well, no, I trust you to a certain level, but you would like more trust; you want trust at a completely different level.”

if your cell phone is 80% charged, you're not worried about finding a charger. But when your phone in your pocket goes into low battery mode, you're thinking about your phone a lot. What people want to do in a company is get to the 80% or 100% level in the area that they run. You gain full autonomy this way. It’s a process that cannot be given to people by title or something like that.

The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it's almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world.

Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren't dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.

It's infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don't trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.

We are building hopefully amazing software for absolutely amazing people, like people who are unbelievably brave and really adaptable. Society tries to talk people out of this, like no one wants other people to be successful building companies. Silicon Valley might have gotten to a level of enlightenment where company building is actually encouraged, but the rest of the world isn’t like this.

The learning curve of being a great executive is a lot less like learning the guitar, and a lot more like skydiving. It’s the kind of thing you should not do without an instructor. A coach is probably one of the highest returns on investment anyone can do with their attention. An hour spent with a coach has a 10x, 50x, 100x potential return on time spent.

Our strategy was to hire as many high potential people as we could and have them get to their potential much faster than they actually imagined was possible. Personal growth has no real speed limit. It's more dependent on how often a student is ready, and that often depends on the environment and the norms of a culture around the student. For instance, how often is the teacher appearing when the student is ready? If you can line this up at a fairly high hit rate, then people can go through nearly ten years of career development within a single calendar year. I know the 10x thing is overplayed now, but I have absolutely seen it.

Hey, the reason why you've got this job is not because of everything you know, but because you seem like the kind of person who can figure it out when you need to know something.” That's very basic but also very liberating.

One thing that really makes it work is that we are just extremely different. Almost the only overlap we have is in how much we care about the mission of this company. Outside of that, his skill set is extremely different; his input is extremely different; his life experience is very different. It's very intuitive for us when to go with one of our ideas because this is what a relationship with a 100% trust battery looks like.

I had the source code for Linux, I signed up for the Linux kernel mailing list, and I listened to how they talked about computer architecture. I then spent all my time trying to figure out what these terms meant.

The meaningful thing about this story is that it points at a fallacy. The other important thing is it implies that people in groups end up really cancelling each other's good parts and exposing one another's downsides.

why are technical founders overperforming the market right now? I don't actually think it's because they're technical. I think it's because of a very specific childhood experience that a lot of the people running technology companies have had. Most of us grew up in a world which we knew would change significantly because it was really badly designed given what we knew about the potential coming soon. And this potential coming soon was the march of computers and digitalization. I think that a lot of us, including myself, have leveraged this insight into significant enterprise value.

Norman gave permission to really hate the door instead of hating yourself when you push it instead of pulling it. That is not your fault. No human has ever been at fault for pushing instead of pulling. That has always been the fault of the people who designed the door.

People who learn how to think about how to do things in their environment better, and to understand that the objects in their everyday life have not been designed or created by people who are smarter than they are—they are the people who will become entrepreneurs.

[novakstiel]

hehe i had offhandedly mentioned wanting an ipad to my mom and dad and it didn’t even cross my mind asking them to buy me one but yesterday they were both suddenly like “oh your birthday’s this month?? about that ipad.....” and i mean they’re divorced and do not talk so they both had that idea on their own, so i guess i’m gonna get an ipad hehe