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16 Jun 2023

Hell

Alright, I'm writing this while listening to Autechre so that should give me the motivation to write better. So I'm sure it's relatively obvious that I do, indeed, go to school. I'm sure it's also relatively obvious that it is summer. Indeed, for me, school is over for the next couple of months, so I've taken this opportunity to try new things. Things that I have never done before, or that I have given up on before it could be fully realized. I genuinely think it's fucking with me because the amount of external stimuli demanding my attention is constantly overwhelming and I swear it's going to give me an anxiety attack one way or another.

Two or three weeks ago I decided to set out and make my own Minecraft mod. It wouldn't be anything too crazy, I'd just put shit together as a test and call it a day. Indeed, weeks later, 90% of the class names start with "Test" and the mod is called "Firstminecraft", because every time I'm making a Hello World in a language or testing out some area of program I always name it "first[language]". My first ever Java program was called firstjava. My first ever Go program was called firstgo. So I'm sure you can tell how shitty my mod is if its name is basically a placeholder. Nonetheless, it is in a good state at the moment. I will say that I've had a lot of fun creating it. There's no download, yet... I don't feel comfortable putting it out right now, but I'm sure you wouldn't really care. Who the hell reads this shit anyway? What the hell are you doing here?

As I was creating my mod (in Fabric, by the way) I started to gain a weird fascination with the way Minecraft lays out its entity data. It's really just JSON but for some reason it hooked me as soon as I found out about it. I think I always have these obsessions with data-driven objects because of the prospect that I can change the values to whatever I want and fuck with it however I'd like; fortunately, NBT was no different. I decided to take it upon myself to make an NBT editor, a sort of UI for cobbling together entities without having to touch a single curly bracket. I decided that trying to do it with vanilla JavaScript, something I was completely enamored with, would probably be futile. So I chose a framework. The only framework I enjoyed working with, because I find the JavaScript ecosystem to be so horrid, convoluted, and so much of a trashfest that I avoid any part of it as much as possible, was Svelte. I knew a bit of it but it took some re-learning to get myself going. Eventually I was "good" at it again so I began writing the program, using Bootstrap (sveltestrap) for UI. It's important to know that I was still sick during this so everything I'm did while working on it was out of pure laziness. I can't believe I actually wrote the shit I was about to write.

Two days later and it's in an "okay" state and it's up on GitHub. I've backed away from it, for now, as I usually do, but it's one of the few things I've made that I consider to actually be reasonably complete. I can see myself using it for a practical purpose, maybe.

Some time later my interest with NeonMob was rekindled— If you don't know what that is, it's basically virtual trading cards made by other people. I've been collecting some stuff on there and at some point I gained the inspiration to try making my own deck. Because you can do that. But I had to think about it for a while, and I still am pondering it, because... what am I good at? No, seriously, what's something that I can sit down and do that has some form of merit behind it, that is at least passable in quality, that people can look at and go "wow, that's cool!" / "it's alright, i guess"? What is the one talent I have that could give me the ability to create something like this? Okay, theki, you're a good programmer. Right? Probably not, but you could probably fuck around with images or similar in OpenGL, write a shader or some shit. Okay, that sounds like a good idea, and I actually did that once, but the concept and process of shader writing still confuses me to no fucking end. You're giving me all these pixels and I have to do... math?! I could try, maybe? But I'd probably just get overwhelmed and give up, right? Okay, what about something else, like pixel sorting? That sounds fun. Okay, well, I don't feel like writing my own software for that because I know it'd be slow as hell. Let's use, umm, another piece of software... like Pixel Sortium. Okay, well this works, but first of all, it's not enough to just sort pixels and call it a day, and also, hasn't this been done, like, a million times before? skych was one of the first packs I ever opened and I know damn well whoever was behind that has already done this 10x better than I could ever do.

Aw, hell, man, it's like I look at what people are making on this website and it's shit that I feel like I could have done. There's a deck that's just a series of, like, 16x16 images of a monochrome pixel dude smiling in various styles. No offense, but that's minimal effort. Am I really overthinking this? Now I'm wondering what it would look like if I experimented with cellular automata. I could make some batshit rules and mess with the colors or perhaps combine it with a shader to make something that looks really, really pretty. But how the hell would I do that? The last time I tried anything cellular automata-related it was incredibly poorly optimized and I never touched it again after finishing it. I just don't feel confident in myself. I need something that's quick to make, that I can maybe mess with a few parameters for, click a button, and have my card in, like, 2000x2000 resolution or something. That's what I want, because anything requiring manual effort like actually drawing is going to take a toll on my brain.

Maybe I'm pushing myself. That's something I'm used to doing a lot of the time. And I really do think I'm overthinking this. Part of me is just excited that I get to share stuff I've made with other people like this, in such a cool god damn way, but now that I have the drive to do something with it I don't know what I can do. I don't know what I'm capable of. Maybe I just need a few moments.

I really just need a spark of creativity and I'm sure it'll get me going. I don't want to be dodgy about this. I want to create something, for real this time.

Written on Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0400