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.

Are All Headlines With A Question Mark Answered “No”?

Yes.

But actually, it’s sometimes more complicated. Perhaps a better question is “Should you ever use a question as the headline to an article?” The answer is still no.. but it’s more complicated. Such headlines are often associated with fake news, but NPR lists a few guidelines where such a headline may still be useful.

They don’t get to the point until the end of a long page though, so I’ll save you a click:

Using a question in a headline may be acceptable if the answer to the question is not clear, your post provides detailed analysis and explanation, and the headline cannot be easily reworded into a statement.


(Note: All resources are archived using the services linked to on Archives & Sources.)

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.

welcome to the past

I’m assuming you got here by going to the oldest page of posts. This isn’t where this blog actually started, because I imported posts from blogs I ran before this one. If you’d like to see where this iteration of me blogging started, go to world.hello();