Miscellaneous Idea Storage
Real-time interaction has been too much for me, and I miss forums, so I made one at https://forum.tangentfox.com/. You should check it out. I’ve temporarily allowed posting without a login to try to get people talking.
Since I recently decided I’ll “cross-promote” videos when I have blog posts that are otherwise meh, here’s what happened when I first tried KSP 2:
I started blogging on April 10th, 2010 on WordPress.com. I made posts roughly every 2 days until November 11, 2012. They weren’t good. At some point, I was mature enough to realize this and hid them all from public viewing. I’ve built a couple websites that are also gone, they had their own blogs. I used Twitter before a fascist killed it, and use Bluesky now.
This blog was hosted on a DigitalOcean server until a few weeks ago. I was naive enough when they gave me 2 years of free usage to think it would continue being a good deal, and then was too busy to cancel for years. They got their money, I regret it some, but now I’m running on my own hardware.
I have varying quality standards, and keep not posting because I haven’t made anything specifically for this blog. I overcorrect back and forth between caring too much or too little. Recently, I’ve been caring too much, and so I haven’t been sharing things I should’ve shared. I don’t think I’ll fix that problem, but I have an idea on how to reduce it. I’m going to set up a Lemmy instance I set up a forum, so that it’s easier to communicate with me about things I make/share, as well as rate them. Over time, I should have a better idea what goes well, and what are mistakes.
I probably shouldn’t just make an aspirational post without something to show, but I don’t care so much right now, I care that I say I’m not dead, things are getting better for me, and I have plans.
Edited 2025-04-07: Lemmy proved to be too difficult to get working, so I have a simple forum in its place.
Sometimes life rhymes in weird ways. It’s a small world.
Approximately 14 years ago, I discovered the game Elite, and open-source reimplementation called Oolite. I was hooked conceptually (because I sucked at the game, I never played it for that much time before giving up again).
I spent a lot of time looking at all the mods for it, and in that search, I stumbled across a promo video for one of the mods that featured really nice music:
So good that every few years I come back to it and play that video again. Somehow I never looked at the channel itself, just that one video, until tonight, where I discover that not only did they make the music used in that video, but they’ve made a good amount of music over all these years. They’ve a Bandcamp and a SoundCloud.
And then I noticed they make mods for a game called Trainz, which I stumbled across in a bargain bin years before I played Oolite. I didn’t get much chance to play it, but I always wanted to. This same person has just been involved with two random relatively obscure games I enjoyed and I kept coming back to this one video and not seeing these other spurious connections.
There’s no deep plot or special meaning here. I’m just tickled to discover these random connections and hope others enjoy their music too.
Learning is a long and complex process, and usually involves asking far more questions than getting answers. Sometimes, having notes can shortcut the most difficult parts of learning (like reading a thick and detailed book). Of course, shortcuts come with downsides, like inaccuracy.
I’ve been publishing some of my notes in their raw form instead of trying to make a “perfect product” out of them, but these are not easy to find due to how they’ve been published, and I am disorganized.
I’ve thought of this blog as a place for well-thought-out posts only, but that basically means I don’t publish anything, and the exceptions rarely meet my own required quality. I think I can solve a lot of my issues here by being willing to post thoughts that haven’t been fully designed, like this mess (but legible and formatted based on the source of each thought):
Each of these posts will be prefixed by a quote to indicate that their contents aren’t made of fleshed out thoughts:
This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief thoughts based on few sources, and have not been checked for accuracy or usefulness.
(Previously, this post was titled “Reading, Absorbing Ideas, Distillation” because I was trying to be clever with an acronym for these posts. That was stupid and confusing, which invalidates the intent of this. That’s also why the URL for this post is stupid and doesn’t match the title anymore. Cool URLs don’t change.)
I’m stealing Nicole van der Hoeven’s idea: Post your messy in-progress notes in public.
If you can spare a few dollars, it would go a long way to helping me survive: PayPayl.me/Guard13007
Update: It’s now November 8th, 2024 and my partner has had temporary employment for a couple weeks. This danger is still present, but not as immediate as it was. The immediate threat is the lack of savings due to living for 1.5 years without income, but a threat I care far more about is the current risk of increase suicide due to despair over the USA falling to fascism. As a result, I am unstickying this post in favor of another far more important post.
I will survive this, but it’s critical to help others survive it too.
Thank you to those who have helped! We have only been able to afford food due to assistance from others for the past few months.