polytropica

i'm alive!

Now that I finally have a shiny new blog, it's time to write something! Wait, how long has it been? 16 MONTHS?! What the heck happened?

Basically, I'm just bad at doing things. If you don't want to listen to me explain my life story for the next 10 minutes, too bad you're already here you hAvE tO rEaD iT nOw

the part where i talk about how i haven't updated in 16 months

My original plan after making my first post was to set up a backend that would be able to interact with the database I've been using to do CRUD (create, remove, update, delete) operations on blog posts, but the scope overwhelmed me and I dropped the project for roughly a year. Since then, I quit my job and honestly had to do a lot of self-improvement to get to the point where I can actually work on things again.

I have been stuck in a depression tar pit for most of my 20's at this point, and honestly I still am depressed but it can't stop me anymore. I'm pretty sure I'm AuDHD, and it manifests as not being able to start difficult tasks and being constantly starved for stimulation. It is fed by what I jokingly call the YouTube demon, which is a black hole for most of my time and energy. It is so much easier to watch YouTube all day than to actually try and make things, which is why I haven't worked on this for over a year. Usually only the structure of school or work could break me away from it, but for the first time in my life I actually managed to create my own structure and crawl out of the tar pit, which means I get to make things!

I figure I should share what I've been doing in case anyone else is struggling like I am, so here's what worked for me (no promises it works for you):

• My new therapist has been a massive influence on me. Our sessions mostly involve a lot of body doubling and strategizing around the things I want to do, and it's been very successful. They're responsible for a lot of my positive habits, and I'm very thankful for them.
• Obsidian. It's a note-taking app for organizing your thoughts, and it's actually the best thing ever. It works the way I want it to, it has tons of features, and it's not shoved full of ads and garbage. If it doesn't work, I can usually code it to work the way I want it to. It's been invaluable in tracking my schedule and keeping up with the things I want to do with my life. It's free to use and fully featured for use locally, and you can pay to sync vaults across devices for $4/mo, which I ended up doing since I like the offering so much.
• Meetup is something my therapist suggested I use to try and find people that align with my interests, and it's been hugely successful in my eyes. Most of the coding on this website gets done at a local code meetup around 30 minutes from where I live, and it's nice to be surrounded by other coders. I will say that it is really hard to find people that are like me, even with shared interests, so I have just been brute-forcing social gatherings for the chance that I might find some that I like, and it has been largely successful. I think even going to a bad meetup where you didn't have an amazing time is still so much better for you than staying inside and feeling lonely, and this is largely validated by the past couple days where I didn't go to any meetups and promptly got nothing done.
• A physical calendar. I hang one up in my room and write stuff I want to do that day on it, and when I do those things I put a little star sticker by it. This is unironically the best thing that has ever happened to me, these stupid star stickers are the best motivator ever. I think that being able to look at my calendar and see all the tasks I've accomplished is part of that, as I do really struggle with acknowledging my victories.

Another thing I want to say is that it doesn't get better right away. I have been gradually ramping up my productivity over several months, and I still have off-days where I get nothing done. It is very much OK to start small, and I think you kind of have to if you want to have any hope of getting better. To me at least, it is all about acknowledging the small wins you make day over day, and trying to keep that running as long as possible. Even now, after months of work, I am not some sort of reformed non-stop productivity machine, as that is not a real thing you can be. It is all about picking yourself back up again, being kind to your past self, and trying as hard as you can to be better.

the splitting of domains

Astute readers may have noticed that I changed domains. This site used to be called "hexlab" at hex-lab.net, and while I really like that domain, "hexlab" is already a name that multiple people are using. Since I'm not interested in fighting all these people for search results, I moved to polytropica.xyz. Not only is it way more unique, it just sounds cooler.

Even more astute readers may also have noticed I no longer have my resume on this site. I moved it to a different portfolio site which I will not link here because I am not interested in doxxing myself. I slowly realized that if I wanted to have actual anonymity with what I wanted to say on this site, I kinda needed to separate it from my actual legal name, hence the splitting of the website into personal and professional. It was laziness and a lack of foresight on my part that I put them together in the first place, but they should be pretty darn separate at this point. Here's hoping someone doesn't have it out for me hard enough that they can link the two back together again.

I've already set up a redirect from the old site to this new site, so it's just a matter of waiting for search engines to realize I've changed, which I have no control over. I'll keep the old domain for the rest of the year that I bought out and then I'll let the lease expire.

Now that the actual website split is done, I am free to do whatever I want, which is probably actual blog posts. About stuff. What stuff?

STUFF.

• I'm probably going to talk about why you should make a blog, and why I decided to bother making one in the first place. I have thoughts I need to put to the page, so that is almost certainly the next post.
• The two video games that have most occupied my attention are vivid/stasis and Stone Story RPG, the latter of which I got quite good at, and I plan on writing some posts about those.
• I've actually found and fixed a couple of bugs in games and done some security related stuff, so I might write about it.
• I also have a bunch of K-12 math floating around in my head from doing a lot of math tutoring, as I have feelings about the way some mathematics is taught in the US.
• I attend semi-regular board game meetups and I have some thoughts about some board games that I want to put down to page. Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Quacks of Quedlinburg are the two games I'm thinking about the most right now, but I might think of some others along the way.
• I'm working on a cooperative incremental game with one of my friends in Godot, but it is not in a state to present to anyone yet as there is a lot of work left to do on it. Progress is slow and steady, and my friend has at least a decade of software engineering experience over me, so it has been very educational as well. Do not expect news on this for at least a month. If you're smart enough you can probably find the repo, but I'm not linking it here.

How often do I plan on posting? I am going to conservatively aim for once every 2 weeks. It is more than enough time to write something up, and not too much stress that I might fail somehow. If I post faster than that, great! Otherwise, too bad.

it's never too late

It may have taken me 16 months to get to this point, but I am actually finally here, and that means a lot to me. A lot of things have changed in my life, and I don't think this will just fizzle out like it did 16 months ago. I am very excited to finally be putting the things I want out into the world.

If for some reason you've also been putting something off for 16 months, maybe you can start that back up again. I can't say that I know what it is, but it (probably) can't hurt you and it (might) not be too late. I think it's really easy to let old projects rot, but if I could change that then you probably can too.