A bit less realistic

I've learned a lot in the last few years, most of it coming so gradually I barely noticed. Maybe people like me grow up late, or maybe I just didn't have the incentive before.
Rather than mope around as usual, I'll instead write down some observations.
People are quite useless, but calling it out is useless too. So I should either become better than those I dislike, or shut up about it. Silence is the way to strength.
Most information that is available is half-true. Some mess with it for their own gain, but most is actually just simple stupidity. People say what they want and don't think about whether it might just be them.
In any case, here are my hopefully less stupid observations.
Success is difficult to learn even with help. The best way I've found so far is to just work hard.
Sure, working hard sucks and it's stupid. But so are you if you think you can do without.
The purpose of working hard is not to get shit done, not directly at least. Instead it teaches you the real size of your goals, so you can separate them from dreams.
The difference between a dream and a goal is that whether a dream comes true is a matter of luck and whether a goal comes true is about work. The more you work, the faster your goals come true.
Hence, if you know what success feels like. If you know the feeling of alpha or flow, you come to instinctively dislike the idea of "luck".
Ever worked hard for something and then had someone say you're "talented"? THAT is an insult. I didn't fucking get anything by "talent". If I could rely on such magic, I'd do it all the time, but no, I did the fucking work and got the rewards. Not luck, just work.
Tell me more about how some people are just talented, but you can't achieve anything. All I can hear are lies to cover up the fact that you're lazy. If you believe that talent matters much, that is.
Another reason to work hard is that it makes you optimize. Doing lots of boring stuff is boring, yes. That's the fucking point. If you go through it enough, you'll figure out how to make it less boring.
This is how I can in learn around 50 Japanese words per day every day. This is how I can read novels in a language that people give up before they put in even one fucking day.
Those who optimize forever before actually working are absolutely useless. I refuse to remain such a person.
When writing stories, or really with writing in general, the most important thing is to do it often. Whenever you have written on a particular day, you'll think about it for hours and improve by doing so. On the days you don't write, you don't improve.
Thus the goal for writing is first quantity, not quality. If you can keep going every single day, then the rest is just a matter of finding the right things to practice. The only hard part is practicing every day. Once you do that, success is so easy it's boring. Exactly how it should be.
Nerds like me need sunlight. Ofc we're not gonna get any. Vitamin D is the next best thing. What does it feel to not have enough? Drowsiness.
Ever since I started to take vitamin D, the difference between day and night increased a lot. It became harder to wake up, but once I did wake, I did it thoroughly. No more in-between bullshit. Either awake or not. This is what vitamin D does.
If you haven't done that, try vitamin D supplements for a week. Maybe it helps you. If literally nothing changes, you can quit and you'll know that you're fine in this regard.
Exercise isn't something I understand. Been doing it regularly for a week or two now. At first it sucked a lot. I was dead the next day.
But then I recovered and every next time it sucked less. I can do more push-ups than I can count on my fingers. I no longer want to lie down every time I run for a bit. I'm faster. I don't feel that tiny bit of exhaustion after lifting my heavy backpack anymore.
I guess those things count, but they're not much. Exercise doesn't feel like torture, but it still sucks. It's just that the rest of my life sucks a little less as a result.
A lot of my days are bad. Sometimes I feel like depression isn't something anyone can get over with. It's like alcoholism. You might feel good now, but you know what it's like to feel bad. If you let it, it'll come back and ruin your life. This is how I feel I am.
If I work too hard, I crash and feel bad.
If I work too little, I get tired all the times and lose motivation.
If I sleep too much, I can no longer seem to wake up.
If I sleep too little, my head stops working eventually.
There is no way out of this crap other than some kind of balance.
But with all this pessimism or realism (plot twist: they are the same thing) there is something more to learn. That is, cynicism isn't the entire truth. Yes, stuff sucks. Yes, people are useless and die someday soon. But if that's all you see, then you're missing out.
If you can, learn to have fun. Do something that you love. It might not be something you can do as your life's work, but every little bit counts. This kind of love is where passion comes from. Once you have passion, the rest is just a matter of wanting something enough and the work that results from it.
If I could teach a single thing to a past me, it would be this. It is fine to not be a realist.

Cowardly Beasts

There are beasts in me that poke when I’m not looking. Yet when I try to find them they have long gone away. Monsters that disturb my inner peace and try bring me down in guilt over things both done and undone. What is the nature of those beasts? Why do they bother me so, if they can’t even stand up before me?
I feel it is me. That I don’t really like to know my wrongs and weaknesses, but hide it through a layer of objectivity. Yet I so much yearn to know. How can such conflicting realms exist within a person? Is it perhaps that a man’s soul is not only divisible, but rather even impossible to unify into a single piece? I can not know whether that is true.
Just earlier I felt a lack in me. That if I had been a philosopher, always engrossed in their internal world, I would have come through the difficulties I've had with more constitution. I felt a deep pang of regret.
Yet when I went to look for that regret so I could ask it questions, I did not find it any more. It's a mere beast in me that pokes holes into my shell. Then again it is also me. What purpose could a person have in poking holes in one's own fortitude?
Perhaps it is fear that should I not consider those things, I would be hurt once more, this time more badly. Then again, I feel little innocence at this point anyway, so what exactly is there to lose?
Would I become a worse person if I knew those things? A more cynical me, that seeks to profit at others' expense? Or perhaps that is already who I am, but simply can't come to terms with the facts?
I can not deny being weak and sinful. As with any person, I am not perfect and perhaps never was. If that is the case though, then in addition to repenting and learning to be better, I must also accept that maybe there isn't a better past that I could escape to. That maybe if I returned to the places I was, I would see them different and no longer take part in the magic that I saw when I was there last.
Perhaps it is nature itself that brings me down like this, embodied by mere instinct that deems me as one lacking in worth?
My knowledge of nature does not support such a hypothesis. More than anything, nature is a matter of both consequence and opportunity. One that is not dead can always still do something, such is the law of the world.

Rain of inspiration

Inspiration is a fickle thing. If we were to picture is as lemon juice my brain(the lemon) usually doesn't produce more than a couple drops, no matter how hard you squeeze it.
Yet, at times I am struck by a greater deity called Inspiration. It's like the meta-ruler of all inspiration, having command over it.
When it happens I feel like the lemon has been slammed by a baseball bat, discharging a liter of lemon juice at once.  Then it's put into a blender to emit several more gallons, after which a rocket brings the lemon to space, only to have it fall down again, causing a storm of lemon juice on impact and having the sky rain lemon juice globally for several weeks. It's like a gore-fest of juicy lemon goodness.
This is how I feel about inspiration.

Happiness and (enjoyable) sadness

Today was a very good day. I got up very easily and was at full force the whole day. But it's only natural to me that I am not always "happy". I felt good the entire day and I still do, but I also feel sad right now. It's strange how I can enjoy some kinds of sadness, but I see what I have to see and do what I have to do. I'm filling my role and that's fulfilling in any circumstance.
As is with any good thing, there was no reason for me to be happy and there is no reason for me to be sad. Sure, I could find excuses. I could claim that I was happy because I was awake and didn't have any sleep deprivation, but that doesn't really capture the point. I'm not happy because bad things are missing, but rather because I get to focus on the good things. Lack of evil is neutrality, not goodness. It takes more than that.
But really the main reason why I have enjoyed the whole day so far is that I don't have any reasons. Usually I am always so intellectual, but today those things just don't matter and that's the best way it could be. It's not even one of those depressive episodes that make me numb. I can feel everything.
I can feel that with days like this it is only a matter of me doing or not doing. That whatever I choose to do, I will progress in and if I choose not to do anything, that's fine too. It's relaxing.
Objectively, it will not last.
Subjectively, I don't care if it does.
What matters is the here and now. All I can do and all I ever have to do is my best. I can't always be optimal. I can't rule the world or perfectly control myself, but that just means I'm human. It means I have something to improve at. Something to do. Perfection is the least enjoyable state of existence, if it comes at the cost of consistently sacrificing all resources you have. Sometimes being leisurely is good, sometimes not. Life is relative.
So what if my current best is not the physical limit of my capabilities. At least it's more consistent.
It isn't possible for a person to keep sacrificing themselves, after all. What you overdo one day, you lose to numbness the other. There are limits to what we can do and that's fine, because it means we don't always have to try our hardest. Doing your best is not the same as doing your most, neither should it be.
Funny how I'm not really used to feeling like this. I have this strange haze where everything amuses me, even sadness. I feel this so rarely that I haven't actually developed it into full-blown happiness. I can't even begin to describe it, because I'm so used to thinking in terms of intellectual values. Pessimistic values, that is, since my intellect has been so bogged down in negative things.
Happiness is not about thinking of things the way they are. It's not about objectivity. It's about not thinking at all. Subjectivity is simply better for happiness than being objective ever could be.

Strengthening my motivations

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.

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.

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.