I've always been unable to stay still. Although not hyperactive, I might seem so, as my mind is constantly looking for something to do. This boredom appears to be quite different from that of other people though. Generally when people feel bored they solve it by finding a way to idle away the time. Watching TV, browsing facebook, etc. I can do those things if I want to, but generally that's just not enough. I need stimulation and those things are not fundamentally anything that requires my attention. Whether I watch a show or not, the results will be the same and I can get the gist of things without expending my full attention. Thus the rest of my mind still wanders, causing distress unless I can guide it.
This instinct to always keep going is one of the my strongest motivators. I know there is always something more, so I feel like whenever I stay still I'm falling back. That simply taking a break is detrimental, unless that break is necessary to keep going later on. Idle time by itself is worthless to me.
I don't always have this level of motivation though. Despite my best efforts, there are still times when I do nothing of value. As much as I dislike those times, I still act like that occasionally. Mostly it's due to sleep deprivation or other kinds of fatigue.
Recently I've found a very fulfilling activity - writing. While I've written blogs and schoolwork for years, it was always inconsistent and based on external factors. Although I've liked to write, it took a special kind of motivation to do. I needed to be inspired or have an external goal, both of which are not reliable.
At one point this inability to control my creativity started to bother me. I knew that I'm skilled enough to always write the way I did at my best times. That with even a little effort, I could up my standards.
What remained was finding motivation to do so. As I was in pretty bad depression at the time, all my motivations were about doing things that are less horrible. During depression it was extremely harmful for me to simply idle away, as that always caused a storm of uncontrollable thoughts. Thus, I exercised, programmed and did many other things that were not particularly enjoyable, mostly because they were less awful than doing nothing. I didn't realize it at the time, but my motivation for programming was not inherent.
As I recovered from depression, it puzzled me how I have become so useless. That I can't consistently do even the things I did while depressed, despite being mentally stronger now.
I thought about this often and eventually found ways to control my attention ore. To create inspiration where there once was none. To return to writing stories that I thought I would never complete.
Right now I have a story that is 29 pages long. It's the longest piece of structured writing I've ever written and what made it happen was mostly my stubbornness. That I returned to the story that I was unmotivated to keep writing. I thought about the story frequently until I realized what needs to happen next. This process has happened several times, thus reaching the current pagecount.
What's especially thrilling is that the increase in quantity did not decrease quality. In fact, I have learned to write conversations and descriptions better now, with less stuttering and clumsy sentences.
Then again, despite the progress, I haven't yet regained all that I've lost. The way I write now is less emotional and more intellectual. Despite the substance of the story not changing, I haven't found ways to express it the ways I sometimes rarely did in the past. While my quality in the past was very random, the peaks were also higher.
I can only keep going and hope I'll get better. Because I will.
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Monday, March 27, 2017
EU4 modding and green Africa
Recently I discovered that a couple thousands years BC, Africa was green. Instead of the Sahara there was a huge savannah and the lake of Chad was orders of magnitude larger. I discovered this because I disliked how in EU4 around half of Africa can not be traversed in any way, with most of this area being the Sahara desert.
However, when I found out just how livable Africa used to be, I wanted to make a more grand mod than just adding the wastelands as usable provinces. I wanted to make a mod that would take place in the range between 7000 BC up until 1900 AD, because after 1900 there are aircraft and EU4 can not simulate them.
Thus, I needed to mod the map. It turns out that modding the map requires changing lots of different layers. There are 4 files for the actual looks, one for map textures(which affect gameplay), 1 for how the land is split into provinces, 1 for which lands are water or not and how high mountains are, etc.
The most problematic of those all are the 4 for actual looks, because I'm not very good at drawing on a computer. At that point I gave up.
But yesterday I figured "I may have this weakness, but that doesn't mean I should just accept it."
So what I did was that I opened one of the maps up in gimp and copied the most used colors with color select. Then I tried adding an island next to France and called it Xeaune, which is essentially like Xon, but written like in French. Everything is longer in French.
As I tried the results in the game I noticed no major problems. I had used the wrong map texture, but that was easy to fix. Just a few days before I had given up on the idea of modding the map, but at this point I decided I should make an entirely new one. Modding the existing map on the same quality level is still out of reach for me, but in order to learn I just have to practice. Thus, now I want to make a new map with entirely new geography, cultures and balance. One thing that I'm sure of is that I want to add more islands than in the real world. Sea powers like England were actually quite weak historically. The only reason they were so powerful is that trade practically had to be done by sea. If only ground transport wasn't so thoroughly bad, sea powers would have been much weaker.
However, even in EU4 sea powers are in fact weak if they don't colonize. In order to make England actually able to fight on the mainland I needed to make a lot of changes. Some of those were for fixing silly imbalances in the base game, but some are also just overpowered. For instance, I made it so that if your sea power is higher than someone else's, you can easily declare war. This is a major imbalance and the only reason it doesn't break the game is that those who get the most use out of it are simply weak anyway.
But yeah, I'm going to make an entire new world. Maybe.
However, when I found out just how livable Africa used to be, I wanted to make a more grand mod than just adding the wastelands as usable provinces. I wanted to make a mod that would take place in the range between 7000 BC up until 1900 AD, because after 1900 there are aircraft and EU4 can not simulate them.
Thus, I needed to mod the map. It turns out that modding the map requires changing lots of different layers. There are 4 files for the actual looks, one for map textures(which affect gameplay), 1 for how the land is split into provinces, 1 for which lands are water or not and how high mountains are, etc.
The most problematic of those all are the 4 for actual looks, because I'm not very good at drawing on a computer. At that point I gave up.
But yesterday I figured "I may have this weakness, but that doesn't mean I should just accept it."
So what I did was that I opened one of the maps up in gimp and copied the most used colors with color select. Then I tried adding an island next to France and called it Xeaune, which is essentially like Xon, but written like in French. Everything is longer in French.
As I tried the results in the game I noticed no major problems. I had used the wrong map texture, but that was easy to fix. Just a few days before I had given up on the idea of modding the map, but at this point I decided I should make an entirely new one. Modding the existing map on the same quality level is still out of reach for me, but in order to learn I just have to practice. Thus, now I want to make a new map with entirely new geography, cultures and balance. One thing that I'm sure of is that I want to add more islands than in the real world. Sea powers like England were actually quite weak historically. The only reason they were so powerful is that trade practically had to be done by sea. If only ground transport wasn't so thoroughly bad, sea powers would have been much weaker.
However, even in EU4 sea powers are in fact weak if they don't colonize. In order to make England actually able to fight on the mainland I needed to make a lot of changes. Some of those were for fixing silly imbalances in the base game, but some are also just overpowered. For instance, I made it so that if your sea power is higher than someone else's, you can easily declare war. This is a major imbalance and the only reason it doesn't break the game is that those who get the most use out of it are simply weak anyway.
But yeah, I'm going to make an entire new world. Maybe.
Monday, March 6, 2017
Emotional Epiphany
Yesterday I had an emotional epiphany of sorts. I was reading a book called "Flow - the psychology of optimal experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Essentially it talks about how fun works on a psychological level. The core idea of the book is a concept called Flow, which is a state of mind where you are engaged in what you do, exactly according to your ability.
When he talked about what people find happiness in he also mentioned getting a calypso. At this point I got a strong image of diving around a laguna in a warm climate. I closed the book and focused on this idea to better understand it.
When I did so I remembered that I had actually liked those things - tropical water life and deep-sea diving. Although I had never encountered either of them firsthand they were nonetheless fascinating for me a couple years ago. It's amazing how much I've forgot.
It happened between 6th and 7th grade. By the time I joined 7th I realized that I've lost a lot of my memories. I quickly understood that the memories are still there, I just can't access them because the way I think has changed. Over time I reclaimed some memories, but most are still gone.
Later on I've thought about this further and know what was special about those memories that I lost and why I was able to reclaim some. The way my mind changed was that I lost most of my ability to remember emotions. I feel normal, but when I try to think about how I felt at a specific time I just can't. Then again, this doesn't stop me from reminding myself how I looked at things. The logical, episodic part is still there. This is why I was able to regain some memories - I had mentally described my feelings at some points in life and thus I was able to access those descriptions.
The change itself was something I didn't feel happen. It was probably a result of domestic violence and the ensuing depression that I didn't notice until years later.
Since I didn't feel it happen, I also didn't realize for a while that anything was wrong. How could I?
It took me years to finally get it that the depth of my emotion is also lower. I don't find joy in most of the things I used to find it in.
I used to make plasticine figures and draw spaceships. Of course I can still do those things. I can even do them much better than I used to despite the lack of practice that I had for years. However, they no longer have as much relation to my inner fantasy as they used to. They no longer give me motivation to keep doing stuff. Yet, I see their flaws more clearly. I can attempt to draw something and then give up because the techniques I know are not good enough. When I was little I simply didn't care about those things. I was unable to see most flaws in what I made and as such, I was happy with it. They were only pieces to support my inner narrative, not art on their own. Is it a problem that a chess piece doesn't look like an actual soldier? Not really. Do anime characters look photo-realistic? No.
Those things don't need to be exactly right, because what matters is not their execution, but the idea. The same applied to my creations in the past, but since I've lost sight of the narrative I've started to focus more on the external part that doesn't truly matter. It's surely easier to present, but that doesn't motivate me.
My standards for myself have risen, but in effect it only ruins the fun instead of making me work harder.
When I thought about diving I saw again for a short time my inner narrative. I saw meaning. It made me wonder what the hell I had been doing all this time. Why I hadn't done anything about this interest of mine if it can give me so much pleasure just by accidentally thinking about it. As a result, I have felt good today.
Thinking about the details of how to achieve this dream has kept me busy and I love to work on this. Of course it's only a matter of time until I relapse into numbness, but while this emotion lasts I want to treasure it.
Looking back at what I wrote today I can see that I'm talking about something emotional. This is unusual for me, as I am usually stuck in thinking with purely logic. The numbness makes me so.
This has objectively great relevance to me, because it shows that what L had given me is something I can also produce myself. The way she motivated me and made me more emotional is not only an aspect of her, but also of me. Knowing this is reassuring, as it proves that my happiness is not about what happens outside, but how I handle it inside.
When he talked about what people find happiness in he also mentioned getting a calypso. At this point I got a strong image of diving around a laguna in a warm climate. I closed the book and focused on this idea to better understand it.
When I did so I remembered that I had actually liked those things - tropical water life and deep-sea diving. Although I had never encountered either of them firsthand they were nonetheless fascinating for me a couple years ago. It's amazing how much I've forgot.
It happened between 6th and 7th grade. By the time I joined 7th I realized that I've lost a lot of my memories. I quickly understood that the memories are still there, I just can't access them because the way I think has changed. Over time I reclaimed some memories, but most are still gone.
Later on I've thought about this further and know what was special about those memories that I lost and why I was able to reclaim some. The way my mind changed was that I lost most of my ability to remember emotions. I feel normal, but when I try to think about how I felt at a specific time I just can't. Then again, this doesn't stop me from reminding myself how I looked at things. The logical, episodic part is still there. This is why I was able to regain some memories - I had mentally described my feelings at some points in life and thus I was able to access those descriptions.
The change itself was something I didn't feel happen. It was probably a result of domestic violence and the ensuing depression that I didn't notice until years later.
Since I didn't feel it happen, I also didn't realize for a while that anything was wrong. How could I?
It took me years to finally get it that the depth of my emotion is also lower. I don't find joy in most of the things I used to find it in.
I used to make plasticine figures and draw spaceships. Of course I can still do those things. I can even do them much better than I used to despite the lack of practice that I had for years. However, they no longer have as much relation to my inner fantasy as they used to. They no longer give me motivation to keep doing stuff. Yet, I see their flaws more clearly. I can attempt to draw something and then give up because the techniques I know are not good enough. When I was little I simply didn't care about those things. I was unable to see most flaws in what I made and as such, I was happy with it. They were only pieces to support my inner narrative, not art on their own. Is it a problem that a chess piece doesn't look like an actual soldier? Not really. Do anime characters look photo-realistic? No.
Those things don't need to be exactly right, because what matters is not their execution, but the idea. The same applied to my creations in the past, but since I've lost sight of the narrative I've started to focus more on the external part that doesn't truly matter. It's surely easier to present, but that doesn't motivate me.
My standards for myself have risen, but in effect it only ruins the fun instead of making me work harder.
When I thought about diving I saw again for a short time my inner narrative. I saw meaning. It made me wonder what the hell I had been doing all this time. Why I hadn't done anything about this interest of mine if it can give me so much pleasure just by accidentally thinking about it. As a result, I have felt good today.
Thinking about the details of how to achieve this dream has kept me busy and I love to work on this. Of course it's only a matter of time until I relapse into numbness, but while this emotion lasts I want to treasure it.
Looking back at what I wrote today I can see that I'm talking about something emotional. This is unusual for me, as I am usually stuck in thinking with purely logic. The numbness makes me so.
This has objectively great relevance to me, because it shows that what L had given me is something I can also produce myself. The way she motivated me and made me more emotional is not only an aspect of her, but also of me. Knowing this is reassuring, as it proves that my happiness is not about what happens outside, but how I handle it inside.
Saturday, February 18, 2017
A really fun computer virus that I killed
What a fun thing. Recently I got a computer virus that managed to screw up an amazing amount of things at the same time. They don't really cause me any harm, so for me it's just fun to learn how to kill them off.
It's now the second virus in my collection.
I added a readme for it...
Triggers multiple harmful effects.
Effects noticed:
*Changes home page and search engine in firefox/chrome.
*Installs a mail.ru plugin for firefox/chrome along with some others. Some leave shortcuts on the desktop.
*Installs GPLyra, which is kinda like a bitcoin miner. This uses 30% of CPU according to google.
*Runs some russian-named processes, one which restarts killed processes and one which takes 99% CPU.
*Schedules several tasks. One of them runs every hour.
The fact that it changed the home page was actually destructive initially. However, both on firefox and chrome I actually have ways to restore sessions. I originally started caring about recovery when I lost all my tabs in firefox twice. Now it's just a standard routine for me to make sure I have ways to get back tabs that somehow disappear, so the damage from losing my tabs was literally only the time it took to make a few clicks.
It's now the second virus in my collection.
I added a readme for it...
Triggers multiple harmful effects.
Effects noticed:
*Changes home page and search engine in firefox/chrome.
*Installs a mail.ru plugin for firefox/chrome along with some others. Some leave shortcuts on the desktop.
*Installs GPLyra, which is kinda like a bitcoin miner. This uses 30% of CPU according to google.
*Runs some russian-named processes, one which restarts killed processes and one which takes 99% CPU.
*Schedules several tasks. One of them runs every hour.
The fact that it changed the home page was actually destructive initially. However, both on firefox and chrome I actually have ways to restore sessions. I originally started caring about recovery when I lost all my tabs in firefox twice. Now it's just a standard routine for me to make sure I have ways to get back tabs that somehow disappear, so the damage from losing my tabs was literally only the time it took to make a few clicks.
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
How I came to be the way I am
As I was looking at old pictures today I realized something about my emotional life. The story is as follows: I saw a really good picture of myself and wanted to show it to a specific person. The thing is, this specific person is no longer in my life and when I thought about it I realized that no such people were in my life anymore. There are at least 2 unarguably important people that I've lost and they were the basis for my emotional life when it was healthy. Neither of those was actually my girlfriend, as strange as it may seem.
Why the picture affected me so is that on this picture I was smiling. Knowing myself, I immediately concluded that someone had told me to smile. This kind of emotional support is something that I currently don't have and as such it's a major factor in what I've become.
One other thing I noticed was that my hair on this picture is very different from what it's usually like. I don't like asymmetry, but in this case it worked really well. I remember how people treated me at the time. It felt unusually good to have this much positive attention.
As a result I now realize what gives L her emotional strength. She cares a lot about how she appears to people and thus also gets lots of emotional support. This may as well be how she has managed to be so energetic and thus the reason for how I was effectively more intelligent when talking to her.
It certainly seems easy right now.
Also, I have kept up the anime routine. Yesterday I watched the entire Deadman Wonderland. Although it was gruesome it nonetheless gave me something. I feel like this emotional enlightenment that I feel right now is a result of the calmness that anime has given me. If I continue like this I might actually get over depression.
Why the picture affected me so is that on this picture I was smiling. Knowing myself, I immediately concluded that someone had told me to smile. This kind of emotional support is something that I currently don't have and as such it's a major factor in what I've become.
As a result I now realize what gives L her emotional strength. She cares a lot about how she appears to people and thus also gets lots of emotional support. This may as well be how she has managed to be so energetic and thus the reason for how I was effectively more intelligent when talking to her.
It certainly seems easy right now.
Also, I have kept up the anime routine. Yesterday I watched the entire Deadman Wonderland. Although it was gruesome it nonetheless gave me something. I feel like this emotional enlightenment that I feel right now is a result of the calmness that anime has given me. If I continue like this I might actually get over depression.
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
On some fictional science
When I look at my google drive something stands out to me: a folder called "Capital Ships". There's just something about this name that makes me envision huge behemoths duking it out. Not just ships, but the best ships of each fleet. The kind that cost dozens of times as much as most others. The kind that can singlehandedly decide how a battle between fleets turns out. It's not really hard for me to picture this kind of power.
Visions like this are, for me, glimpses to the past. I don't really have the kind of imagination that I did when I was small, so having some of it break through to me is unusual. I still think about science fiction in my own way, but nowadays it's more about the technologies involved and sometimes the kinds of creatures that might exist. My visions have become less mighty and more mundane.
However, through the mundane I have been able to understand my created world better. What are those huge balls of energy that I saw in Star Sonata? In that game they call them pulse guns. At one point I realized though, that my pulse guns are less like the orbs of shock from Star Sonata and more like balls of fiery plasma. Thus, I decided at one point that I should codify their technology.
The way my pulse guns work is that a ball of super-heated plasma is enclosed in a magnetic or gravitic field. This field is then propelled somehow toward the target. Some really advanced guns of this kind can also change their projectiles' direction while in flight.
What's notable about this technology is that while we are used to having fields remain around the machine that created them, these fields do not. Although they may be created the normal way, they actually use the extreme energy of plasma to keep themselves going. The mechanism for it is somewhat similar to how a balloon keeps shape when filled with water - it's the pressure of the water pushing outwards that keeps the water from dispersing. Plasma works the same way here.
Later on I realized that this technology could really be used for many things. Although hot plasma is not easy to come by, some versions of this technology don't need it.
A huge advantage of being able to control fields like this is that you don't need to propel matter in order to create thrust. Thus, the same technology can be used in a different way as engines for ships. With a relatively small device you can gravitize(as a parallel to magnetizing) entire ships. Energy cost is relative to mass of the ship, but that's not a fundamental problem, as that applies with most kinds of propulsion.
Due to not needing any reaction mass this propulsion method has huge efficiency gains over chemical thrusters. The efficiency gains mostly apply for longer-distance travel, but that isn't really rare in the days when humans know of hundreds of habitable planets.
Visions like this are, for me, glimpses to the past. I don't really have the kind of imagination that I did when I was small, so having some of it break through to me is unusual. I still think about science fiction in my own way, but nowadays it's more about the technologies involved and sometimes the kinds of creatures that might exist. My visions have become less mighty and more mundane.
However, through the mundane I have been able to understand my created world better. What are those huge balls of energy that I saw in Star Sonata? In that game they call them pulse guns. At one point I realized though, that my pulse guns are less like the orbs of shock from Star Sonata and more like balls of fiery plasma. Thus, I decided at one point that I should codify their technology.
The way my pulse guns work is that a ball of super-heated plasma is enclosed in a magnetic or gravitic field. This field is then propelled somehow toward the target. Some really advanced guns of this kind can also change their projectiles' direction while in flight.
What's notable about this technology is that while we are used to having fields remain around the machine that created them, these fields do not. Although they may be created the normal way, they actually use the extreme energy of plasma to keep themselves going. The mechanism for it is somewhat similar to how a balloon keeps shape when filled with water - it's the pressure of the water pushing outwards that keeps the water from dispersing. Plasma works the same way here.
Later on I realized that this technology could really be used for many things. Although hot plasma is not easy to come by, some versions of this technology don't need it.
A huge advantage of being able to control fields like this is that you don't need to propel matter in order to create thrust. Thus, the same technology can be used in a different way as engines for ships. With a relatively small device you can gravitize(as a parallel to magnetizing) entire ships. Energy cost is relative to mass of the ship, but that's not a fundamental problem, as that applies with most kinds of propulsion.
Due to not needing any reaction mass this propulsion method has huge efficiency gains over chemical thrusters. The efficiency gains mostly apply for longer-distance travel, but that isn't really rare in the days when humans know of hundreds of habitable planets.
Friday, February 3, 2017
Happiness is oblivion
The way I think varies wildly based on how I feel. It's related to a trait of mine I call the "Mosaic Mind", which I won't bother with elaborating right now.
One notable difference is that when I feel bad in the longer term(read: depression) I start to look at things very logically. It feels like it's objective, but it's not because it actually disregards the emotional aspects.
However, when I feel well I don't even think about all those problems that I supposedly have. Today is one of those days. It makes me feel that all I really need to do is just forget, instead of desperately trying to figure out a plan. Maybe the bad times are really just a result of overthinking things and I would be better off caring less.
It certainly took a lot of anime to reach this point though. :)
One notable difference is that when I feel bad in the longer term(read: depression) I start to look at things very logically. It feels like it's objective, but it's not because it actually disregards the emotional aspects.
However, when I feel well I don't even think about all those problems that I supposedly have. Today is one of those days. It makes me feel that all I really need to do is just forget, instead of desperately trying to figure out a plan. Maybe the bad times are really just a result of overthinking things and I would be better off caring less.
It certainly took a lot of anime to reach this point though. :)
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