Learning in Progress

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):

Illegible notes based on Equality by Darrin M. McMahon.

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.)

Notetaking in Public

I’m stealing Nicole van der Hoeven’s idea: Post your messy in-progress notes in public.

I’m in danger of becoming homeless

If you can spare a few dollars, it would go a long way to helping me survive: PayPayl.me/Guard13007

Update: It’s now October 2nd, 2024 and my partner has temporary employment. This danger is still present, but not as immediate as it was. The primary danger at this point is the lack of savings due to living for 1.5 years without income combined with being severely behind on housing payments.


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.

Dead URLs

https://soundcloud.com/prozak-morris/evolution-of-the-hip-hop-beat doesn’t exist anymore.

I have a very rare piece of music. It doesn’t exist in any form you can access online. It’s a mixtape of Hip Hop beats spanning from 1975 to 2011. I found it shortly after it was published on SoundCloud. It’s always been special to me, but I never thought about the possibility of it disappearing. I only downloaded the audio because I enjoyed it and wanted to have it in my music collection.

In a way, I’m happy because I still have this relic. In another way, I’m really sad. There was a long and detailed description of what each piece of music in this track is from, and what it represents about the history of Hip Hop. It’s lost forever. Prozak Morris still has a SoundCloud, a Bandcamp, a YouTube.. or at least there are still publicly facing pages there.. but this one track and its associated detail is gone.

Normally, when I run into something like this, I am able to quickly find what I was missing on the Internet Archive. I did find when it was originally published, including access to comments people made on the track shortly after it was released.. but the page where it was posted (and that lengthy description was written) was never archived.

I was.. a bit desperate to find if it still exists, so I looked for other archives. To be fair, I didn’t check under every stone, but I really don’t think it does exist anymore. And I stumbled across another level of pain in the search: Google killed its archives. Used to be, you could browse archived versions or cached versions of websites that Google had indexed, and at one point in time, this page was definitely there.. but it has either long since been deleted.. or was deleted NINE DAYS AGO.

It’s possible this wouldn’t have been lost forever if I searched for it NINE DAYS AGO. Because I absolutely save everything I care about now. And when I remember something I knew about, I go looking for it.

Anything not saved will be lost.

Nintendo Wii Remote Settings “Quit Game” Message

I was going to stop typing there, with a reference to Nintendo which is always more appropriate than one might expect.. but I remembered the phrase wrong, as “Everything that is not saved will be lost.” Apparently, the entire internet remembers the phrase wrong too, as it is quoted everywhere as “Everything not saved will be lost.”

It is also referenced as an in-game quit message when it was part of the Wii Remote Settings. Additionally, a band released an album with a similar name, so now search results for the phrase only refer to that band and album. (Fortunately search suggestions still reference that it has something to do with Nintendo.. or I’d still be a bit lost on its origin.)

Kind of ironic that the origin of such a well-known phrase is almost lost itself.

And.. I only found a single image of the original message. Everything else is incorrect references.

My Dad Died

This post is not entirely freeform, but it mostly is.. it follows real events nearly directly.. some parts are written immediately after they happened, some days later.

Either way.. it is incredibly personal and probably not worth much to anyone else.. but I have to express myself.


I just got a new phone, and my contacts didn’t sync, so I have to fix them manually. There’s one contact I don’t have to fix, a phone number that is meaningless, an address that doesn’t go anywhere for me, a birthday that’s .. well, I can’t give him presents anymore. There’s a hole in my heart where my dad used to be.

For me, death seems to come at me in waves. My first reaction is denial, mild shock and pain, or focused entirely on the practical: Where’s my dad’s dog, Wally? Then, the pain becomes severe. After some crying (sometimes mixed with more denial), I seem fine for a while, before a reminder sets the cycle off again.

I had a dream with my dad in it recently. As I write this, I don’t remember it at all, but I do remember feeling a mix of pain and comfort from it. Pain at the reality, comfort in.. well I’m not quite sure how to say it, but it offers some closure.

Standing in his house, it hits me again. I needed a rag to dust something off, and since I didn’t immediately know where one was, I decided to use one of his socks. He wasn’t around to be annoyed by it after all. I realized that there was probably the last pair of clothes he wore and took off when everything was fine just sitting in the laundry hamper. He was so preoccupied with making sure laundry was done that he almost never did a full load of laundry, so a hamper having more than a handful of clothes would be an oddity. There was exactly one set of clothes – except for jeans. The shirt was on top, and was one I’d given him a few years ago.

It was the last thing he wore when things were normal. Whatever he wore the next day was taken off in an ER. He had a stroke. It was small enough that he wasn’t even unaware of what was going on, he gathered a few things while waiting for the ambulance and called his best friend to come meet him to take the keys to his place and take care of Wally for him.

There was also his electric razor, plugged in to charge, because he’d need it in the next few days.. until he didn’t.

In the hospital, he was recovering well. He was set to go to his friend’s place for a week to get him back on his feet before returning home. Early in the morning on the day before this, he had another stroke, this one unrecoverable. Effectively, my dad died right then, but without immediate contact or direction about his wishes in this circumstance, a surgery was performed, and he was placed in ICU on life support.

When his friend found out, he arranged for them to cut life support during the next NASCAR race, as my dad was a big fan, and this seemed the most fitting way to say goodbye. They put it on the TV in his room, pulled the plug, and ten minutes later, his heart stopped.

I wasn’t anywhere near this, but it was the right decision. See, I’ve been having a long standing issue with T-Mobile. Because of their unreliability, I didn’t learn of any of this until it was all over, two weeks after it was over, through a partner being called by a sheriff who couldn’t call me directly despite having my number.

I’m sad I couldn’t have been there, or helped, but other than that, this was one of best ways I could imagine my dad’s death. While it certainly sucks to spend your last two weeks in a hospital room, he had his best friend visiting and was on the path to recovery. There was no indication of his demise, there was no suffering. It was a scary moment, and he getting back to normal life. The second stroke came with such veracity and suddenness that he did not suffer.


Most stories end with death. This one doesn’t, but what happened next is still too painful for me to express.

I don’t have a biological family anymore.

world.hello();

Not sure how to introduce this blog or myself, but here goes:

I go by Tangent, or Rose, and I’m a programmer with interests in video game design, web services, motorcycles, the furry fandom, and probably a bunch of other stuff. This blog is where I will be sharing ideas, mostly of the variety that have not been turned into a successful project. I am starting it to declutter my notes and various books of ideas that I cannot continue, but I am sure there will be more to write about.

In addition to my primary goal of sharing ideas related to video game design, web services, and any other area of programming, I sometimes write short stories or attempt to write novels. These will be shared here as well.

That’s it for now, hopefully you find something of note or worth from reading things here in the future.