🦠

Another wild year.

The last thing I posted on Dev.to was in October of 2019 where I talked very briefly about some mental struggles I was having the years before. Issues with my job, and then I leave off with a little optimistic note about the next year, and how I will use it to make things I am proud of.

I am not sure if I made a single thing I was proud of in 2020, but that is ok. I survived, and that in it self seems like something I should be proud of. Especially given my mental health in the past. I spent a crazy amount of time drinking in 2020 instead of building shit. I did however make a pretty cool UI for a project in Grand Theft Auto I was working on.

image

It is pretty nice compared to the other Menus you can find out there for RageMP and FiveM. If you are not aware those are multiplayer mods for Grand Theft Auto. RageMP allows you to write JavaScript for custom mods and that UI you are looking at is built with React and Tailwind CSS. I guess I am proud of this, but it sits as a lonely memory in some folder in my computer as I dropped RageMP modding because I don't really see it being a time investment that returns well, both in terms of entertainment and monetarily. I would rather just play games than mod them if I am looking to have fun, and I am not sure if there is any legitimate way to make money off modding GTA. Unless maybe a lot of people want to watch or learn that.

For a certain amount of time in 2020 I was working on a startup with my wife and a friend. My wife in particular got a lot of really cool stuff made for this idea. Unfortunately we all eventually came to agree that this idea was not coming together the way we thought it would. We where hoping to build a corporate teambuilding company where team would work through a role playing activity together powered by AI dungeon. My wife made a bunch of worlds and characters for these events, building out large dictionaries to help drive the story. I plan on publishing most of these documents. I don't know what use they could be to anyone, but maybe just showing the failed attempts in itself is useful.

I want to write a lot more this year. I think I am in a pretty good position to do that. Something a little embarrassing I have come to realize is that part of the reason I couldn't get myself to write as often as I would like was because of how absolutely painfully slow I would type. Thankfully, through the power of public shaming, I was able to improve that. When I was playing some RageMP on stream a viewer (who also happens to be someone I chat with on Twitter from time to time) shit all over my painfully slow typing. This led to me practicing typing daily for a few months and I went from a inconsistent hunt and peck typing speed of between 14-25wpm to a fairly stable 50wpm. I hope to keep improving that, but the difference in how it feels to write now is night and day. I used to literally get bored in between thinking of sentences because they would take me so long to type out that staying focused on what I was writing was in itself a chore. Kind of like when you are developing on a slow machine and every change has a 30-40 second feedback loop.

When your mind wanders it is incredibly difficult to get anything done, and even if you do it is usually pretty shitty. I know that from experience. I have made and written a lot of shit in the past. Sometimes I go back and look at my writing and cringe, but what can you do? I look at my old code and cringe too, many of which I was paid to write and is still being used in production. I am hoping to start using the technonomicon the way it was intended to be used. I want to simply throw words down on the page, as I am doing now, and then I will come back and promote the content I hope to actually keep around. Promoting content can just mean editing it and giving it a real page. However, it could also mean turning it into some interactive 3d animation. It just depends on the type of demands from the content.