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Past Midnight - Confession 51

2015.03.22 23:45:55
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header It's past midnight and I'm not feeling all to happy with myself. So, what better time than this to write a confession. After all, this was initially supposed to be another daily thing so it won't matter if it is more on the short side of things than usual.

First off, the reason why I'm not feeling all to dandy right at this point in time is not specifically related to much of anything. It is a general and expected reaction that I go into whenever I feel like I haven't been doing enough the past (few) days. As described in many an entry before, it puts me in a mood of melancholy. It's not bad to be in this state, but it just changes how I act, so this entry will reflect that.

Now as for actually interesting things, I will be attending the European Lisp Symposium this year and I'll also be giving two lightning talks there, one about qTools and the other about Radiance. I'm mostly going because I can afford it easily enough and because I'm always interested in meeting people that I enjoy talking to online. This year quite a few will be attending that I like to speak to on the Freenode #lisp channel a lot, not to mention that there will be a bunch of really interesting talks that I look forward to hearing. I'm sure I'll write more about it once the event is actually getting close, which will be on the 20th of April.

inlineOtherwise, the usual kind of things are going on, and there really hasn't been much of a change. I'm still struggling with art and having a hard time getting properly motivated for things. University is much of the same story, though this semester is looking brighter than the other ones have, but still not by far as fantastic as everyone else has ever described it to me.

I've been slacking off a lot on my writing projects. There's a Story Time entry that Chris and I have been meaning to write for over a solid month now, but it just never got anywhere. I'm not entirely sure why I got stuck on this, perhaps a combination of lack of inspiration and general lack of interest in the series as of right now. Otherwise, I also meant to do a lot more drawings and entries in the Memoirs series, but that hasn't really happened because… I don't really know. As usual, I'm a complete trainwreck when it comes to organising my life.

Otherwise in coding things I've been working on minor stuff, correcting bugs there, improving things over here, etc. I mostly want to put some more work into Markless to get that closer to finishing, and really get Radiance to absolutely 100% definitely work out of the box for when people after ELS no doubt will at least try to install it. The last thing I want is for the first impression to be that it can't even run with default settings. If anything I want people to hate me for having constructed a monstrosity of software, but certainly not for having made it hard to set up. I'm not saying either of these cases will actually happen, I'm just saying which one I would prefer.

Regarding my ‘social life’, for a lack of a more fancy term, it seems to me like I'm not talking to people on Stevenchan as much as I used to. This may very well be a misconception on my part, but I would certainly love to talk more often again. I also wouldn't mind meeting up with people in real life again more often, but it seems like everyone I still know is just way too busy with their university life to spare some time for silly old me over here. I also wouldn't mind a new addition to our little club of weird people, but I doubt that will ever happen given that neither I nor Stevenchan are exactly magnets of attention. Probably closer to deflectors, actually, but that's a topic of the past already.

I also haven't been reading much over the past weeks, though I have been meaning to pick up more books again. I still have to continue on in Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, and there are a bunch of Philip Marlowe books I want to read. Reading will however still have the lowest priority for me right now, so catching up on this will probably have to wait for a while until I feel more comfortable with my schedule again.

inlineSpeaking of uncomfortable, another thing that's been bugging me a lot lately is that I've pretty much dropped studying Japanese again. I'm struggling to pick it up too, mostly because I can't get back into my routine of half an hour a day that I had working really well before the big crash happened that I talked about in the last entry. I suppose a rather large detractor from that is that I still feel like I know absolutely nothing of the language, I can't translate anything whatsoever that people on twitter or anywhere else write, nor do I feel like I remembered much of consequence from the Pimsleur courses, despite being proven wrong when I do actually repeat the episodes. Then, there's always the constant factor of shame being induced by the fact that Japanese has the unfortunate circumstance of being associated with a group of really embarrassing people, that I do not at all want to be associated with even remotely. This seems like a really stupid thing and it probably is, but the effect is here regardless. Then of course, a last and definite reason that keeps me away from properly studying the language again is the fear of Kanji. The overwhelming amount that I need to learn again until I can even begin to hope to decipher the simplest of sentences is quite discouraging. Regardless of all this, I just need to force myself through, as always. There is no easy way out.

That paragraph became scary long, and it's almost 1 Am over here, so I suppose it would be best if I closed this entry off right about at this point. This is probably a lot more rambling than I usually write, but I just had to get myself to do something in a short time-span so that I wouldn't feel like I completely wasted my entire week-end. I sincerely hope you're having a better time than I am, and I also hope you won't be worried about me, because I don't think that what I'm going through is bad at all, I just imagine other people would think it to be pretty awful, so I won't wish it on them.

Anyway, good night.

Written by shinmera