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Another year has passed and now comes a time for reflection and setting direction. Am I living life congruent with my values? Am I spending time with those I love and being harmonious with my surroundings? Am I content? Peaceful? What changes can be made, what should I keep on doing or do more of? Indeed, I reflect on these things now, but I often do and I have been for years. Still, it's with the season to reflect a little on them now in written form as we forge ahead into 2022.
I took two weeks off for the holidays this year. I'm gracious to work at a company where I get a generous amount of vacation time as well as the flexibility to take unpaid time off. As it turns out, both have been a necessity for me this year as I've struggled with deep-rooted dissatisfaction for both my day-to-day work and my career overall, manifested as a complete disengagement in what I do. This has taken its toll on me psychologically and in regards to my side projects. It's not all bad, of course. One result of this is that I spent barely any time on my computer this holiday, instead affording ample time for family, friends and other projects I never would have dedicated time to. One example of such - I started building a 1:24 scale model car! A hobby with its own frustrations - particularly with regard to learning how to airbrush, but the detail hand painting has been nearly effortless and turned out favourably.
Before the holidays I bought several Udemy courses on programming ARM hardware bare-metal, along with an ARM development board. Unfortunately, I still haven't opened the packaging and I've made no progress on any of the courses. Around this time last year I had also applied for an opening at a German C++ development shop. Due to stresses at that time I abandoned that process just after responding. Well the company reached out again and I felt a great desire to follow through with the application. Unfortunately I also haven't made any progress in that regard _yet_.
I haven't been doing any mobility work or calisthenics training over the holidays. I managed to do all the exercises in my mobility routine on two days near the end; one of those was the full rep/set program and the other was just enough to start feeling good. The calisthenics... well, honestly I've been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume required. Truthfully, I was finding it a little difficult to fit the routine in before the holidays while working. I've been blessed to have a work situation that's allowed me to fit in a set here or there throughout the day so I could complete it. On reflection, I think I did more total volume in previous weeks than what this upcoming week prescribes; but just seeing that there are 8 sets (eight!) creates a mental block that I haven't been able to overcome yet. Maybe I'll just retry with the next days and see if I can call this first day that's been dogging me a wash.
I've also completely neglected meditation practice during the holidays and haven't started back up again, although I have intended to practice several days now and I think about it every day.
One recent development that's held my interest for several weeks now is with regard cars. I've never been interested in cars in my whole life up to this point. This new interest really began when I received my copy of Forza Motorsport 4 and a companion Xbox 360 racing wheel to go with it. I've dabbled with sim racing in the past and owned a racing stand and G27 racing wheel that I used to play Assetto Corsa. That was when we only had one child who was still a newborn; so time was much more plentiful. Unfortunately the place we had at the time was much smaller and a second child came shortly after... So this is me rediscovering sim racing to a large extent, and I sure have taken a liking to it! I've been playing Gran Turismo 2, Gran Turismo PSP, Gran Turismo 4, Gran Turismo 6, Forza Motorsport 4, WRC 4 Vita, F1 2011 on both the 360 and Vita, a little bit of Dirt Rally and I've just today got Assetto Corsa running on my Linux gaming machine properly. This enthusiasm has spread to the Wipeout series of non-sim futuristic racing games, and the sim-like 6DOF shooters Descent, Descent 2 and Overload. Oh yes, 6DOF play with my joystick has been another fun engagement.... Anyway, regarding more realistic racing, I had the joy to talk about F1 racing with some dedicated F1 fans at a Christmas party this season. That discussion sparked an interest in that sport, and somehow led to an interest in Rally racing as well. Meanwhile I picked up a Ferrari 1:24 model kit from the local thrift shop and have been enjoying putting that together. I've been watching several model building and painting videos while doing that. It's been a multi-faceted engagement in autosport, and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. It's been _really_ interesting from another perspective, too. I'm fully cognizant of how bad automobiles are for our lifestyles and our world, but at the same time I am able to witness my enjoyment and engagement of autosport in general.
A much more recent and not-quite-established interest that's occurred is in reading. Of course I've been reading for many years now and continue to do so for fun, but my interests are grander than my practice. I've been watching some videos on Youtube by the creator Leaf by Leaf, who reads upwards of 6 hours a day. He has an incredible collection of books and reads a good 100 per year. I recently watched some videos of his about reading _big_ books. Books like Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest. I've had an interest in reading great literary works for years now, but I haven't made good on that interest yet. I've made fits and starts, but I haven't had the dedication to see it through like I desire to. There's been great advice there - things like accepting the reading as an actual part of your life, treating it in some ways like a relationship. As I write this, I have no less than 3 books on the go and one I've abandoned. Clearly part of my problem is a split focus - something that is perhaps analogous to my approach to my career and work as well; certainly applicable to my programming side projects and abandoned attempts at switching careers. That said, I will try to build up a tolerance. I am just shy of halfway through Robert Jordan's first book in The Wheel of Time series: The Eye of the World. I will finish this and then continue with the next unrelated book on my list: Apollo's Arrow. I also just rediscovered Guitar Zero on my shelf - which I honestly can't recall if I've finished or not. Besides those, I have about 10 sci-fi paperbacks I've picked up from second hand book stores over the past couple of months that I would like to get through. Doing that might be a great warmup for tackling a proper literary treasure like Gravity's Rainbow or something of that calibre.
As I mentioned above when talking about my enjoyment of autosport lately - I've started model building! I have a Revell kit for a Ferrari F50 Barchetta. I would say the build quality is mediocre here. I'm very curious how the Tamiya or Aoshima kits compare. Certainly the require some amount of massaging the parts before assembly, but I'm very curious to see the difference in terms of overall build quality. My specific complaints are that some parts are quite brittle and break easily, there are two places on the car exterior that have pit holes in them that I don't *think* I created myself, and some parts came twisted so that gluing them together required more glue and holding than I anticipated. Now, some of this may just be me making mistakes and not realizing it, or due to the package being abandoned at the thrift store in whatever manner it was that resulted in the box becoming somewhat warped; however, the parts looked pristine in the packaging after I opened it, so who knows?
I have really enjoyed the results of hand-painting the model, although I did find some frustration there as well. Painting parts separately then gluing them together often results in paint rubbing off as a result of holding the parts together while the glue sets; and the glue itself chemically reacts with the plastic and paint causing some repainting to be necessary.
Setting decals has been very straightforward and pleasurable so far with the use of decalset and a Q-tip; and doing finishing touches after assembly or on parts not requiring glue has been a joy. One thing that has *not* been a joy is air brushing. Oh my! Airbrushing! It looks so straight forward, but so far my experience has been incredibly painful. Huge mess, big cleanup and prepwork, many passes required to get a decent coating; really easy to get the paint too heavy so it goops and drips. And this is with proper sanding prep beforehand, I swear it! I did some tests where I just used a brush and did the final coat by hand, and the results of that have far exceeded any of my attempts at airbrushing so far. I don't know if all the videos I've watched just omit the vast majority of passes required to do the painting or are otherwise misleading or what - but I have had very little success on this one aspect. It's unfortunate, too, because this will be the most visible part of the car. One thing I can investigate is using acrylic paints instead of enamel, and using a top/gravity-feed gun instead of a suction feed one. I honestly don't think the latter will make any difference to the resulting paint job; but the paint might. Perhaps a primer was a hard requirement here, although I have seen enough advice indicating otherwise to result in the current situation.
As a result of this frustration with airbrushing, I have developed a very strong interest in Gunpla. Gunpla do not require paintaing *at all*, although detailed hand painting is common enough and benefits the final product. Add to this that gunpla are typically highly articulated and even transform! Very interesting for sure!
I have a history of doing this thing with side projects where I dive deep into the weeds and weight A vs. B according to whatever criteria and spend a great deal of mental energy doing this until I decide on something. At that point I need a break before actually partaking on a particular project, of course, since I've now expended so much effort. Then when I'm ready to embark on a project I do the same thing again... I managed a reprieve from this for a while where I concentrated exclusively on C for personal projects. I think this time was beneficial and I learned a lot about C and I think I became a good C developer as a result, but I get antsy of course and eventually stumbled onto Zig. More recently I decided on C++, and of course I am now re-evaluating again since I'm writing this.
Something that is interesting about this endless negotiation is the conflict of why I'm programming in the first place. Some decisions (like C++) are driven by applicability to industry, so I can remain gainfully employed. Others (like C) are more for personal interest. Overall I am much more sympathetic to the latter type, and I think any endeavour engaged upon for intrinsic interest and value will far outlast that motivated by external motivators. However, I think those lines are not always so clearly drawn and there's an argument to be made for allowing external motivators to guide intrinsic passion. Anyway, I digress. It's an interesting conflict that has caused me a lot of strife.
One project that's come up fairly recently is UXN. I believe I've written about it at some point already. The idea isn't new - it's a virtual machine. Something that is unique about UXN is that it is programmed in a forth-like assembly language. It's also aimed somewhere in-between a virtual machine like the JVM and a fantasy console like TIC-80. The goals of the project are in the direction of the 100 year computer or other analogous concepts like permacomputing. Instead of having to port a program for every architecture, you just port UXN. This is an obvious trait of every VM, of course, but the other restrictions of UXN speak more directly to this goal: 64KB of RAM, 4 colors, etc.
I've previously read about Uxntal, the programming language for UXN and I've tried to understand the general operation of the thing. Unfortunately I didn't make very much progress. Recently I started looking again after being inspired by some TIC-80 work I've come across and I found the specification for Varvara - the machine companion to uxn that provides the input/output and everything else actually useful about a vm core. I think I had found this previously, but maybe the documentation wasn't where it is now. I'm not sure. Some of the parts seem familiar, but when I came across it today it made my comprehension of the whol uxn/uxntal/varvara system much more complete. I feel like I could actually write CLI utilities with it. I'd like to explore writing games as well. I feel like the color limitations might be too strict for myself, but I have a lot more investigation to do there.I don't know if there are things like VBlanks or HBlanks; when it's possible to swap palettes, etc. At the very least I am engaging with it again and it could at least provide me with inspiration for building my own vm system aimed similarly between the JVM and TIC-80; although perhaps with more graphical programmability than what UXN provides. I don't know! I will dig.
Well, that's all! Thanks again for reading. I hope to make this a much more common practice that hopefully bleeds into creative writing. I have more poetry to write, too. Nevertheless, thank you for reading this and helping me keep motivated to continue. And happy New Year to you!
Published on January 04, 2022