Hiatus 2 (Day 207)

When I started this blog, there weren’t many competing priorities in my life. I have since found some really interesting things to dive deep into and with strong reasons why. I’ll share them with you right now.

Communication – As I have worked at my company (and through the lessons I have learned writing this blog), I have developed a philosophy about the best way to run a company. Your vision and plan should first be meticulously thought-out and grounded in reason. Then, they should be championed by management and shared on a regular basis. That way, everyone can repeatedly buy-in and work with focus.

I haven’t seen that done excellently yet. I would often find myself wondering why we are doing something or what the plan is next. And it is up to the decision maker to make that clear. You can’t blame the child if they didn’t understand how the storyteller narrated the book. I want to be a part of that shift. I want to explore my theories in aligning a company. That sounds like a grand and worthwhile goal.

Creation – I want to try my hand in entrepreneurship. I want to explore my ability to find pain points in the market and build solutions that fill them and every aspect of that process in between. My friend and I have a project that has been lagging for a while. I want to get back to it.

These goals truly make me come alive and I can’t wait to explore where they will take me. These goals and strong reasons why make it easy for me to decide to drop this blog. Unfortunately, my blog doesn’t have as strong of a reason to exist and I found myself split with too many commitments.

Perhaps someday I will return, but it will be after I have truly given these goals the ol’ college try. This is goodbye. I am so happy for all the lessons I have learned.

(Note: I don’t want to become a boring fart that is all work and no play. I am not foregoing all fun activities for these two goals. I’ve been doing a lot of other fun things like Toastmasters, boxing, dance, and writing. So to complete this post, that’s why I’m dropping this because that’s a lot of balls in the air 🙂 )

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Day 171 (Start Again)

A few days ago on Reddit, I wrote about two mind-shifts I made while making this blog that allowed me conquer my mental blocks and continue posting here regularly.

There is a third mental shift I had that I wanted to flesh out in greater detail today.

You Can Start Again

When I started this blog, I was on a roll. I posted every day religiously for about 40 days.

Then life went crazy.

Over the next two months, I went to a music festival, I traveled to Japan, I went partying, I tried tons of stuff. And by the end of this fun, but chaotic time, I had lost the habit of posting to my blog. I probably posted 3 times over that time period.

After that span of time, I would wake up every day and make the decision that I would post when I got back from work. And most days would pass without a post to show for it.

This kept on happening until one day, I decided to sit down and reason through what was causing this mental block. I wrote my way through my feelings until I finally found the conclusion: I was trying to continue where I left off.

Here is that post.

I was on such a huge righteous push in the first 30 days that I had started stretching my posts to very high average timers. 20 Minutes A Day had become 1 Hour A Day.

Once again, I was setting the bar too high for myself. I was like the guy who returned to the gym after years away expecting to lift 2 plates just like the old days.

I had grown accustomed to doing nothing for the blog for a month, how could I expect myself to suddenly output so much again right away?

So I reset my goal to only 20 minutes a day and was able to post once again.

Reset

I think this happens all the time in life. People don’t realize that if they’re starting over, they have to reset their expectations too.

Athletes come back from injury expecting to do what they used to do right away and either re-injure themselves or quit because they get impatient.

People fall off their diets and gain back 15 pounds. Now in their minds they have to lose 15 pounds AND the 15 extra pounds they just gained. The bar is even higher than it was before they did anything at all.

That thinking is false. You aren’t more behind because you used to do something and then stopped. You are simply where you are now.

In fact, you are still ahead because now you know exactly what it takes to get back to where you were when you stopped. So go ahead and take those first steps again. Start again.

Time: 23:05

More work in dialogue. Used this tutorial.

 

Day 24

Philosophy Friday: Calm

I looked through some of my old posts today and it was an interesting experience. I wrote about what I felt in real-time and because of that, the writing was so visceral. The same thoughts I was having in my head were on the page, which is as interesting to read as it is terrible to feel in real life.

Today, I feel much more relaxed. I am no longer a stalled engine, grinding its gears trying to get started. I am a humming baby engine, rolling slowly every day and occasionally revving to a higher speed. I am calmer.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have internal doubts and fears. Sometimes when I am talking to a girl, I feel the pressure to impress her with a joke and I am afraid I’ll say something that makes her not like me. Sometimes I’m afraid I will break down in an anxiety-driven fear when speaking up in front of a group. Sometimes, I wonder if I will just curl up into my shell, never to return to the social world again. But I accept these fears and doubts. They are me. I have those feelings and that is simply what it means to be human. That is where I am, I must accept that if I am to continue moving forward.

These days, I see those feelings for what they really are. They are my internal voice holding myself to unrealistic expectations. For a long time in my life, I had held myself to the standards of others and that was the root of my fears and doubts.

I had to be as funny as the funny guy at the party. I had to be as good-looking as the good-looking guy on TV. I had to be as confident as the confident people I see at work. I had to be as eloquent as that well-spoken guy who talked before me in the introduction circle. I had to be as smart as smart people I meet at school. I had to have enough friends to talk to that popular girl. But all of that is false.

If I have any other expectation of myself beyond a little better than who I am today, I am being unrealistic. I am where I am. How can I possibly cross the chasm from me to who I want to be today? That is frankly impossible. I can only hope to put in my day of work today. If I put in my day, I win. That is the only expectation I should have. And God, it makes life so much simpler. I can take pride in the fact that I did my work today. With each day I return here, I get a little closer to where I want to be.

After I drop expectations born of other people, I can start to think about where I want to be and work towards it without any thoughts like “I should be here” or “how come you can’t do this?” Those are lies. I’m being impatient. I can only change one day at a time.

Time: 25:04

Git Commit

Learned:

• How to spawn shot objects using an input
• How to destroy shots after they leave the game area

Diary:

I am sick, so I prioritized sleep over getting this is by the deadline. Here’s to health.

Game development with Unity is a lot of fun. Try it out!

 

P.S. WordPress ate my other reflective post. I am pretty irked 😡

Brainstorm (Day 18)

Post idea:

I want to write a post about how to reach the strongest solution to a problem. The strongest solution to a problem isn’t in any one person’s head. If a person attempts to solve a problem on his own, he has used only the information he has been able to gather in his head. If he shares the problem with others and everyone communicates their input on the problem at hand, they can pool their knowledge to come up with a much more nuanced solution. One that better reflects the world we live in.

No matter how knowledgeable a single person is, he only has his perspective, experience, and mindset. When many people look at a problem, the necessary questions needed to shape the best solution are much more likely to be asked. The channels for sharing this knowledge must absolutely be wide open for this process to work. No person should feel afraid to speak up during the critique, no person should feel like any question is a “stupid question” and no one person’s opinion should have greater weight than any other.

Now to write what I just wrote in an accessible way 🙂 Stay tuned.

Starting stopwatch…

• Time
  • 25 minutes, 15 seconds
• No Git Commit
• Learned
  • Downloaded and installed Unity for Mac
  • Did some planning. My PC is due for a replacement, so I did some research on what replacement to get using this 20 minutes. I settled on getting a cheap, reliable gaming laptop (Dell Inspiron 7200), upgrading the RAM and disk space, and then going for a desktop at a later date when this laptop is no longer useful.

Values Drive Expectations (Day 13)

In Day 6, I wrote about how it was only after I dropped the unrealistic expectation of being a good writer that I was able to write freely and click “publish” so you could read that post. (Thank you for reading it. I love you, have my babies. I have 3 minutes before I need to get on that plane ;)) Dropping the expectation that I had to write a good blog post was all I needed to make that post. I had to accept that if I am a bad writer, that’s okay, I would be fine. I’m still James, I’m still a valued person.

Let’s revisit what I was feeling before I dropped that expectation. I was terrified of writing a bad post. My mind was telling me, “I have to write a really good post this time.” I probably set the bar to what I wrote in Day 5. It had to be even better than that post. Or else I wasn’t “progressing”. Or else I wasn’t good enough.

I was able to relax when I realized that was false. I had been writing for 5 days. I’m not a writer, I’m a wannabe. And I’m going to stay a non-writer until one day I realize, “Wow, I write a lot. I am a person who writes.” At that point, these fears won’t really play into my decision-making. Just as you have no inner fears when you lift your fork to your mouth when you eat. You are simply a person who knows how to use a fork.

(You weren’t always, but you were free to learn because you weren’t expected to know how yet. I remember when I was around 10 years old, I would refuse to use chopsticks. I didn’t know how and everyone else did. And I felt stupid because I didn’t know how and everyone else did. It was safer to use a fork. I eventually learned how to use the chopsticks, but I complained the whole time and hated the process.)

When I dropped the expectation of being a good writer and viewed myself as a newbie trying something out for the first time, I was finally able to post. This is an experiment. I’m a kid playing with Lego blocks. I wonder what those blocks will become? That’s pretty cool, huh?

Why?

Now that I look back, I realize that there are deeper reasons for my unrealistic expectation. Now, I can ask the question, “Why?”

First of all, why does my post have to be any good at all? Why do I care so much? Does the 3rd grader care if his story about the tiger and the wooly mammoth is any good? No. He just thought it’d be cool to write a story about the tiger and the wooly mammoth and how they went to the jungle and the wooly mammoth stubbed his toe. Now that story is completely organic. Do you see any desire to “write a good story” there? No. And that’s what makes it awesome.

Inevitably, if a person’s goal is to “write something good” as opposed to “write”, his effort shows in his work. He ignores all of those crazy, creative ideas in his head and instead thinks, “What do people want to read? What will make me look smart? No, that idea won’t work because I’ve never seen anyone write about that before. I need to live up to the expectations of college-educated readers. I want to look like I know what I’m talking about.”

(I just had this thought that I should write about crab-people. That will never come to a person who is caught up in the outcome of his writing. Jakarta, Jamaica, Jordan, Hey Ya! Case-in-point, I write because I want to write. I rest my case. Cheers, guvna.)

Writing doesn’t have to be smart. It doesn’t have to be anything. I could talk all country-like, ya dig? as long as I wrote what I wanted to say. That’s it. Just like that 3rd grader. Is his story good or bad? Does it matter?

Self-worth

There is another “Why?” question. Why am I setting this expectation of myself?

Let’s tease apart this expectation. What is the expectation? The expectation is that I should write a good blog post. Why? Because I have written “good” stuff before. Why does it matter if it is good or bad? Because if I write good stuff, I succeeded. And if I write bad stuff, I failed. Why? Because I have attached my self-worth to whether I write good blog posts.

I held the value that it is good to be good at writing. And it is bad to be bad at writing. Is this a real value? No. Let’s go back to that 3rd grader writing that story. Did he fail because he didn’t split his story into chapters and his story didn’t have a beginning, middle, and end? No. His story was just a story he wanted to write. No goals attached. He wrote it for himself and no one else and again, that’s what makes it awesome.

I want to write. Period. As soon as I attach something to the end of that sentence, my intentions are no longer pure. If I want to write “to make millions of dollars”, I am writing the way I think others want me to write. My mind would think, “What other book made millions of dollars? Harry Potter did! Hmm… Larry Boulder and the Order Of The Blade…Chapter 1.”

This line of thought makes me think of this concept of people who try too hard. The “try-hards” of the world. What does it mean to be a “try-hard”? Well let me think back to when I played League of Legends. I hated losing. And in retrospect, the reason why was because I thought losing meant I wasn’t good enough. That is the key. I thought winning meant that I was good enough, and losing meant that I wasn’t good enough. Is this a real value? No.

Losing is part of the process of playing the game. No NBA team has ever had an undefeated season. To get better, you must lose. But to a try-hard, you value winners. And you despise losers. And the higher you value winning, the harder it becomes to play the next game because you may lose. Some people can’t take this pressure and quit entirely. These try-hards have chosen a completely artificial value to live by. Here’s something else, they are also completely misunderstood by those who do not hold that value. The “non-try-hards” are the people that say things like, “It’s just a game. I just play to have fun.” Those people have not tied their self-worth to winning the game.

Perspective

I keep looking around and seeing all these values people apply to their lives. Some people value themselves based on their education. Depending on where their standard falls on the spectrum and whether they attained their goal, they draw either pride or shame from it. One person thinks a college education is “good enough”. He went to college and looks down on the high school graduates. He may also think people with PhDs are so much better than him and maybe he feels a little inferior.

Another person sets the bar at college education and couldn’t cut it. He’s the guy who claims “I could’ve done it if I had the right teacher” or “I had to work a job while I was there, you had it easy”. He views college grads like deities and despises people like himself. Yet another person set the bar at high school and went to college. He tells himself, “Wow, I really achieved something here.” He views high school graduates as equals and college graduates as rock stars.

I observed all of this and thought to myself, “So, is college education a real value?” Well, it is as far as it gives you something real you want. Like a job (hopefully)… but beyond that, should we be valuing people based on it? No, a high school graduate and a Ph.D. have the same value in reality. The bar you set is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t actually exist.

What I noticed is even if you are “successful”, you are still driven by these values. You use them to judge others positively or negatively. Think about that the next time you look at a homeless person in disgust. Put yourself in their shoes. If you flip the roles around and think you are a failure if you are homeless, that means you hold the value that your self-worth depends on whether you have a place to live or not. Did the homeless guy fail? I don’t think so. He gets food every day, he gets sleep. He is just as much a human as any of us are.

Starting stopwatch…
Git Commit
Time: 20 minutes, 32 seconds
Learned:
-Stared at the code for a long time and pulled it apart thread by thread. Grueling 😛

P.S. It’s a “longie”, but a goodie 🙂 I loved writing this post. Someone told me that the progression of my blog looks a little like I am slowly going insane. I take that as a compliment. I slowly stopped caring what others thought of me, and started writing for myself. I am that 3rd grader. And that’s awesome.

Epilogue (The Tragedy of Mammoth And Tiger)

The wooly mammoth stubbed his toe. It broke in three places, but unfortunately, the fracture wasn’t caught in time. The tiger kept nagging him to go to the doctor to check on it, but he was too prideful and kept insisting that the toe was “just fine”. The toe got gangrenous and the infection spread everywhere until they finally took him to the mammoth hospital. The zebra doctor had grave news. They had to amputate.

The tiger was besides herself in anger at the world. “Why did it have to be Mr. Mammoth!? Why couldn’t it have been me? Oh, cruel, cruel world.” But the world didn’t answer. It wasn’t cruel. It simply didn’t answer. Fin. (My heart…)

Praise can be debilitating (Day 9)

Someone told me today that they really liked my writing style. I want to let you know this isn’t my “writing style”. This is my thoughts directly onto the page. And writing something unfiltered like this is absolutely terrifying. But also gratifying. First, I felt naked, then I felt open. I love everyone.

I can’t write about League of Legends today because I’ve been wrestling with something else. I am past the self-doubt phase. I look at my past posts and am more-or-less in agreement with them. If no one else thinks it’s true, that’s fine. I think it’s truth and hopefully, you do too. The new fear that I’ve been wrestling with is this. “How can I keep this up? How do I keep writing good stuff every day? What if I just write something really shitty today?” I don’t really know the answer, let’s walk through my thoughts and see if I reach one by the end of the post.

I went out to dinner with my team today and it was excellent. We had a really great time, everyone was so open and it was probably one of the most fun times I’ve had in my life. The new thing I experienced was direct praise for my blog. People were bringing it up and telling me, “You inspired me to do (something)!” “You are a really good writer, James!”, “Wow, this blog is really cool!”, “I look forward to seeing your game some day!” I was happy to hear that, but after a while I couldn’t help but think, “I hope I don’t let those people down.”

I sit here tonight with nagging fears that I might not write something as “good” as the things I wrote in the past. This isn’t really an uncommon occurrence. That’s the first thing that is calming me right now. History is riddled with “one-hit wonders” who collapse under the expectations of their newfound fame and praise. I imagine Eminem was thinking exactly the same thing after he released “The Real Slim Shady” to raving success. He was probably besides himself sitting at that desk, pen in hand, thinking, “What if the well dries up? What if I’m not actually that good?”

I realize now those questions aren’t the right questions to ask.They are the symptom of this recurring theme I keep coming back to. Unrealistic expectations. Praise can be debilitating if you internalize it. If you take it and tell yourself to hold yourself to higher standards, you have just raised the bar past what you can comfortably climb. You need to realize that you haven’t made that jump yet. You are at step three, or in my case Day 10. You are still new, even though the outcomes say otherwise. You are still new, you are still learning.

Sudden extreme success has that effect on people where they begin to believe they are their success. “I won the World Series of Poker, I must be the greatest poker player ever. Hey girl, want to talk to the best poker player ever?” And then that person never enters another poker tournament again. He is paralyzed by this newly-formed, artificial expectation of himself. He will forever be in fear of not living up to that standard and therefore avoid doing that activity ever again.

This is exactly what happens to so many students once they start to reach a point where they can’t coast anymore. I was that student. I was pretty damn smart as a kid, but at some point in life, smart doesn’t cut it. I couldn’t take it since I had built my self-image on being smart. Building your self-image on being smart really hurts you everywhere in your life. You start not speaking up in fear of saying something wrong because if you say something wrong, you can’t possibly be smart. You start not trying things because it’s supposed to come easy to you and you can’t do it wrong the first time. No, I am not smart. I make mistakes and I am learning, like everyone else.

Really, building your self-image on anything external makes you a slave to that external thing. Your self-worth is now tied to whether you have that external thing or not. If you base your self-worth on how much money you make, you will be unhappy if you don’t make that much. And even then, you will view everyone else on this hierarchy of how much they make. “Oh man, that guy is a millionaire, he’s so much better than me.” That’s false. He is exactly as good as he was before he had that money. If you base your worth on how many friends you have, your self-worth depends on whether or not you have friends. You are a slave to friends. If you reject that and accept that you have worth even if you have no money and no friends, you are no longer beholden to those things. I had to accept that I might not be a good writer. I might not write a good post today. If I accept that, I can post with a clear conscience.

So no, I am not a good writer. I am James, the awkward, fallible developer who thought it would be cool to write what I think every day for the past 10 days. It’s been 10 days. I can’t possibly be a writer. I refuse to internalize that praise. I give myself permission to write a shitty post and try again tomorrow.

Please subscribe, share and like so I can share my realizations with more people like you 🙂

Starting stopwatch…
Time: 29 minutes, 49 seconds
Git Commit
Learned:
-I am commenting up all the source code I wrote over the past few days
-Revisited RequireJS
-Finished commenting up main, still wrapping head around rest

To be honest, it has been hard to focus on this while I write these candid blog posts. Productivity will increase when my mind is settled.

[P.S. This has been amazing writing my way through these mental blocks with you and I think it’s really unique. I feel like people who do radically new things go through exactly these thoughts, but they only talk about them after the thoughts are a memory. That’s when they start saying things like, “Take it one day at a time” or “Don’t let it get to your head”. That isn’t a mindset, that’s a trite saying. It doesn’t tell the whole story. I hope I have succeeded in walking you through how I settled my internal fears as they arose and maybe helped you settle yours.]

My mind is racing (Day 8)

There was a time today where I was dreading writing this post. I just wanted to write the 20 minute diary and be done with it. The last post took a lot out of me emotionally. My mind was racing, my mood was like a sine wave, up and down. Sometimes I was sure I was posting something good, other times I was wondering if I should edit it and make it less radical. I stayed up late into the night wondering how people would react to my thoughts. I was sitting there rattling off IMs to my friend talking about how this is the most open I have ever been and how it is extremely uncomfortable.

But I put some thought into it and realized I had to write about this. If I am to demonstrate exactly what it’s like to start something completely new, I have to show the highs and the lows. I would be doing a disservice to you (and future me) if I left out the negative emotions and pretended we all just slowly walk to where we end up and never are unsure of ourselves or in a panic over something we’ve set into motion. The future person would read this part during his panic attack and think to himself, “Man, what is wrong with me? This isn’t supposed to happen.” It’s supposed to happen. You will feel lost.

I would like to thank all of the extremely supportive people in the office and in my social circles. Each supportive word has given me the courage to keep coming back here. I would even like to thank my resident troll (check my past comment threads for a taste). His reactions really helped get my mind going and helped me process my thoughts so I can better understand what I really think.

There are two realizations that helped settled my mind in the end.

One, I don’t know what I am doing. This is a journey with no map. I am doing something I have never done before, and really something no one I know has ever done before. It’s an experiment and experiments sometimes fail. That’s completely fine. I am content that I tried. More content than I have ever been.

Two, this nourishes people. Truly. Man…people feel these things every day and just pretend they don’t. I realized that because once I wrote this stuff here, people started opening up to me everywhere. We all just look around thinking no one else feels this so everyone just keeps it to themselves and the cycle continues. I want to shine a light on that.

Starting stopwatch…
Time: 35 minutes, 28 seconds
Git Commit
Learned:
-Finished Tutorial #4!
-The game looks and feels like Tetris! Play here
-You can press space to drop the piece
-Next, I’m gonna comment for every single line of code until I understand the reason behind it all.
-I need to look into having a working prototype link for each commit of the game so you guys can see how the game came together as well… (and so my past post links still work)

Okay, next time I’m really going to write about League of Legends… if I don’t have another realization.

Side-note: The really interesting thing about blogs is when you put up something uncomfortable, it stays up there forever, and works at you every time you remember it’s there until finally, you come to terms with the fact that you wanted to write that post and you can rest.

Expectations, continued (Day 7)

So if you read yesterday’s post and I successfully performed inception on your mind and you’re thinking, “Huh, I think I’ll try not having expectations when I try things today and see what happens.” Awesome, man. That’s so cool that I wiggled my fingers on the keyboard and put this page on WordPress for you to find. You read my article and my words reached your brain where they changed how you view the world a little bit. That’s quite simply miraculous. (PSYCHIC POWERS >:O)

Keep in mind that these realizations are new to me too (like, a few days new) and that means I’ll keep realizing a little more as I explore them a little bit. I wanted to flesh out something else I realized about expectations.

Expectations can go meta. Today, I decided to talk to a stranger in line waiting for food. It was going well, we were talking about whatever I wanted (and really, that’s all conversation is), but I had this faint thought in my mind. “What if I run out of stuff to say?” That’s an expectation that I should be good at talking. I realized that and got scared. I thought I wasn’t supposed to have expectations? Then, I realized that fear was another expectation. The expectation that I shouldn’t have expectations.

You have to keep in mind that even changing that mindset takes time. You’re not used to it, so don’t worry if you still feel expectations. Expect it. You will mess up. Take it one trial at a time and you’ll eventually get there. (Lol, the mind is a chaotic, spaghetti thing. Insert Jackie Chan meme here.)

There’s more stuff about this I’d like to go through, but it’s not really along the same vein, so I’ll leave it for another day.

Starting stopwatch…
Time: 23 minutes, 3 seconds
Git Commit
Learned:
-You can now move the pieces 🙂
-Lines are cleared
-The lines number is displayed
–View the prototype here

I will come back to expectations later, but I wanted to shift to something a little lighter next in the series, What I learned playing League of Legends. I literally spent years playing that game… you bet I learned something from it.

Some inspiration (Day 6)

I wasn’t really feeling like writing a philosophical thing today, but I started writing and realized it was coming easier than I thought.

The main idea I want to put across is this: Expectations kill creativity.

I know I’m not Gaben. I know I’m not Shakespeare. And knowing that is the only way I could possibly even write to this blog in the first place.

If I looked at this and told myself, “Okay, today I need to write an award-winning blog post and create the next Megaman.” Yo, I’d be where I was 6 days ago when you, dear reader, didn’t even know I had these ideas and these dreams.

I had to be honest with myself. I have 6 days of experience under my belt. I know nothing. I’m going to mess up. That’s where I am, but who knows where I’ll be at day 100? Day 1000? Day 10000? (Does that make sense mathematically?)

This became a lot easier when I came to terms with reality. I realized this mindset can apply to the rest of my life too. I am socially awkward, I am out of shape, I’m not the best developer, I’m not the best at basketball. I will mess up. But I get better every day I try.

Update: A better way to put it would be this: unrealistic expectations kill your willingness to try.

I’ll write an even-more-hashed-out version of this post sometime in the future. Stay tuned.

It hasn’t even been a week, and I already love writing in this blog.

Starting stopwatch…
Time: 49 minutes, 35 seconds
Git Commit 1 2 (figuring out how to use GitHub pages)
Learned:
-Finished Tutorial #3!
-The tutorial is getting really complex, so debugging at this stage was pretty rough. Yes, I got stuck multiple times almost literally copy-pasting from a tutorial.
-Yo. The block moves. I made a quick little website so you can see it here. (eventually, when GitHub Pages decides to bring my site to life.)

Cutting it close, it’s 11:33 PM, but I made it another day. ‘Till next time, friends.

Low point (Day 5)

So tired today. It just so happened that I played basketball three days in a row this weekend. Didn’t really plan that, but I’m glad I did. I just want to lay down and sleep and watch some NA LCS (CLG!). But the beauty of this blog is the ONLY expectation is that I work on learning game dev for 20 minutes. I don’t even have to write a good blog post. I can write garbage! Trump 2016! Did you know frogs have two legs? Blah, blah, blah…

Update: After a nap and some food, I felt energized to continue this. Gotta submit before midnight so I get dat +1 today. Thanks for reading, guys.

Starting stopwatch…
Time: 44 minutes, 13 seconds
Git Commit
Learned:
-Started Tutorial #3
-How to use a grid of booleans to define Tetris block shapes
-Logic behind building the game board, but still very shaky
-More debugging experience
-I know I’m going to have to go over the code I wrote to understand what is going on after I’m done with this tutorial
-That people will actually read this (including you, it’s lunchtime)
-That people are overall nice and supportive 🙂

P.S. I absolutely loved writing about my stream-of-consciousness realizations the past few posts, but I don’t think I can sustain it at the current pace. I’ll figure out some way to space those out and let you know. Teaser: the next one is going to be called “You are where you are”.