I'm going dark for the weekend. As in, I won't be interacting with the internet much (if at all) to eliminate most (if not all) my personal dependencies on people as well as general neediness that's a bit of an issue. I'll be back monday. Until then, stay gold.

This is just some thoughts I want to share. I got a huge problem with impulsively announce decisions and finding out how much time it consumes doing the task, and it all comes falling flat on my face.

I need to stop doing this, I can do any project I desire, I just cannot from here on out announce anything until I'm done or close to done. It's the only way to keep enjoying what I do and not end up incredibly miserable.

I'm being serious, I can't get anything done with how impulsively I decide on and then announce my projects.

You might be wondering, didn't I say I was done with programming? Well, LaTeX is not a programming language, it's a markup language for creation of documents formatted very verbosely as the creator wanted it to be. It's very different from using a graphical word processor like word. Take this for example:

\documentclass{article} % Starts an article
\usepackage{amsmath} % Imports amsmath
\title{\LaTeX} % Title

\begin{document} % Begins a document
  \maketitle
  \LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for
  the \TeX{} typesetting program. It offers
  programmable desktop publishing features and
  extensive facilities for automating most
  aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing,
  including numbering and cross-referencing,
  tables and figures, page layout,
  bibliographies, and much more. \LaTeX{} was
  originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport
  and has become the dominant method for using
  \TeX; few people write in plain \TeX{} anymore.
  The current version is \LaTeXe.

  % This is a comment, not shown in final output.
  % The following shows typesetting power of LaTeX:
  \begin{align}
    E_0 &= mc^2 \\
    E &= \frac{mc^2}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
  \end{align} 
\end{document}

It creates:

Anyways, I'm doing this because natron, a free libre (open source) compositor that's just like nuke, could use a nice e-book about how to effectively use it. It's going to take a while, but I know I can do it.

I feel this needs to exist, because the docs aren't very verbose and the YouTube videos available I don't think is enough.

Yesterday, you may have heard I wanted to or rather was thinking of, making an arcade game in flash 8.

Well, doing it by myself isn't going to work out. I rather be good at a single thing than try (and fail) balancing out both the computer programming and the art direction together.

I'm completely open to the flash 8 idea, but I simply won't do the programming. I'll leave that to someone else. I'm happy because I can focus exclusively on the art and be good at one thing than terrible at two.

Some might be able to somehow dish out doing multiple things at once, I sure can't, and I've pretended for too long that I can.

Nothing huge, just a small (but fun and challenging) arcade game. Get my feet wet. I do wonder if I could push flash AS2 to its limits like how AS3 was used for the bullet hell games @matt-likes-swords made.

Why flash 8? Nostalgia and huge contempt for adobe (I'm going to stick to my principles with this one) makes me want to use the 20 year old program.

I doubt I'll revolutionize anything, but I'll have fun and hopefully you will too if (and that's if) I make anything.

For like 2 days, I've been casually slapping together a perl script to do ANSI artwork. At first I thought to just embed the ANSI directly in the file. Then per @s3c's suggestion to automate it, I realized it needed work. So instead of getting messy with the sigil '$' character (Such as $A$B$C which was my original intention), just regex substitute each character from an external file. I've updated it just now to allow comments. So if you like ANSI artwork, this might be cool to check out. It's very simple in design, nothing impressive, but gets the job done. It turns this:

# This is a comment. Everything beyond it including the pound sign is ignored.

222222333333333
1555555#6789ABCDEF

FFFFFE#1235677444444444
# Notice how this is not shown.
ABCDEFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF1111#4444444

into this:

Note that blank lines are also printed as well. I don't consider this to be an issue honestly. I thought this was a good learning experience from it all. The link is here.

ASCII and its expanded form, ANSI, is the coolest thing ever. Artwork using just regular keyboard characters has been around for as long as ASCII has even existed (which was around as far back as the early 60s, in the late 60s Lyndon B. Johnson mandated that all government computers MUST support ASCII). I finished this just minutes ago in a text editor:

         #### /-|
       /\####/  |
      |  \##/   /    /\/\/\/|
       \       |     ---------    
        \      |    /         \          *
         \     |  /   [@] [@]  \        *-*
         |     | |            /         *-*
         |     | |      U    |          *-*
         |     |  \---------/           *-*
         |     \  /         \         *******
          \     \/           \        {8***
           \                 \         8888}
            \                 ---------8888}
             \                         8888}
              \               ---------8888}
               ++++++++++++++/          ***
               |      /\     |
               |     /  |    |
               |     \  |    |
               |      | |    |
               |      | |     \
               |      | |      |
               |      | |       \__
               |      | |          \
               |      |  \          \
          _-----       \  |          \
         -             |  |           \
        -              |  |            |
        ----------------  |____________|

Coolest thing about ASCII is that you can do it in any text editor. What about ANSI? It started popping up in late 80s because it has a larger array of characters and can do even something similar to pixel art with colouring. Late 80s bulletin boards used ANSI for pornographic distribution because of its very low amount of bandwidth requirements compared to downloading a data image like a jpeg or png. There exists to this day, a subculture around ASCII and ANSI art, who knows, I might make my own the future with regards to animations.

Just remembered I had a neocities page.

https://xeiavica.neocities.org/

Until I get a dedicated domain, this will suffice as a personal website.

My plans for 2025 are to get my priorities straightened out. I'm cutting out any desire to do game dev or programming because despite I find it to be cool, it's really just a manic delusion I can do that and balance everything else out. So that previous Tahoma2D/OpenToonz pack? Really just a manic delusion at its core.

Going to put art and animation my top priority. I can't wait to see what I make. As for writing, it's a secondary thing.

One of my favorite things is toying with technology, most commonly taping together shell scripts to do what I wish for it to do. My favorite would have to be a lesser known one called ksh93. It's better than bash, it like zsh has floating points and it has what no other shell has is compound variable. It's very similar in execution to C structs or pascal records where you can group a string or variable or even a function to a single name and use "." notation to avoid a million different names.

Here's an example from a really old unix related website that still works in the community fork of ksh93:

$ typeset -C var=(elone=10 eltwo=20 eltree="Billy Bob")

$ print -r "$var"
(
    elone=10
    eltwo=20
    eltree="Billy Bob"
)

$ print "${var.elone}"
10

Note that this won't work in bash, it doesn't even have floating points in it. But ksh93 is very cool, it's not as complex as awk or perl or python, but I find it to be really cool. Every unix system needs a shell of some kind, be it fish or zsh or even bash. So it's not dependency demanding like say setting up perl or python or ruby. Either way, it's pretty cool.