Ugh, man, I like never update this thing.
I know that one reason for this issue is that I'm scared that my tone will waver and be inconsistent here. I mean, I've blogged consistently on more personal diary-esque ones ever since high school, so I'm certainly no stranger to blogging, but here the association with some industry makes the stakes and expectations higher. Since this is a blog that is linked to my work, and therefore kind of a professional thingy, there's a level of formality and distance I feel is expected and required. This should be treated like one of those update post blogs, where you reassure your reader base about consistent progress or announce some hiatus thanks to real life stuff, or maybe treated as one of those editorial-esque soundboard blogs for my thoughts on stuff happening in the industry. This is no place for emotional outpourings or disordered ramblings, or heaven forbid the interjection of petty personal drama.
There is also the fact that, unlike my obscure personal blogs, this blog is linked to my portfolio website. If I ever finish my game, it will also be linked to that as well. It is bound to have a stray pair of eyes chance upon it, quite possibly an important pair of eyes, skimming and formulating an idea of the potential professional I am from the text presented. Shouldn't I then keep the tone consistent to help with the generation of this persona? Shouldn't I be assuming a professional no-nonsense tone that relays relevant information on the project as efficiently and curtly as possible? Shouldn't I present myself in the best light possible, in the visage of that great, passionate, motivated and on-top-of-things sociable developer? I know though that this consistent, reliable and noteworthy persona that hem such portfolio blogs is one that I cannot sincerely lay claim to.
I am a flawed human being with a lot of room for improvement. I am driven by anxiety, highly emotional and impulsive. I waver between productive and destructive states. I am still green and immature, frequently forgetful of the divide between what I presume and what actually is. I like waxing pseudo-philosophical and pondering and speculating, to the detriment of productivity. I am also highly flaky and a perfectionist marching to a markedly different beat. Those who really know me know how unreliable I can be. To those that do not know me, I no longer feel like posturing to be polished and responsible, of bearing the persistent anxiety of uglier colors peeping out.
I am tired and sorry of feeling like I am lying all the time, especially when those who know this uglier side already are bound to come across this faux facade. I am, simply put, flawed, and it is my selfish hopes that by embedding the values I've disregarded for so long into something I revolve my life around, personal projects, that I will come to incorporate those traits into my own life and redeem myself as a human being. I wish to take these values into account and show my respect for the people around me properly. But this is not an effortless endeavor for me, and I do not feel like pretending it will be.
I do not feel like story-fying or glossifying this project with promises of a steady stream of inspired, productive update posts, of wondrous revelations and dashing triumphs over setbacks, of great innovation or even of completion. The least I can attempt to do is aspire for transparency. I want to record more earnestly and truthfully the mental journey I've been going through to generate the story at its current place. I want to be able to look back and see how the messy naive real me scrambled about. I want to catch and share the moments when something inspired me, when something clicked and an underdeveloped aspect of my project suddenly came into focus. I want to be able to jot all of this down here without regards of how out of place, ADD or unrelated it may seem.
I want to be able to look back and see where I veered off. See the places where real life caught up with me and kept me unable to do anything for a while, or the places where I sat stagnant with nothing really going anywhere. I want to see the places where my weaker points of ignorance, bias and misinformation led to painful stupid moments and the ways those moments humble and inform me. I want to present a preservation of the full process I engaged in, and I feel I owe this to whoever stumbles upon this thing of mine.
All that being said, I want to say that, at this point in time, I am nearing the end of my first semester as a transfer student at NEU. I was dumb, and I was right: four classes was too much for the current me, especially with lab on top of that. I am really happy that I am nevertheless able to consistently and reliably help my brother with his coding hw. Like, really happy. Regardless of how this semester turns out, I will look back fondly on the ways I helped my brother catch onto for-loops and structs and all the lots of many bugs.
It is dumb, but I keep on veering off and thinking about stuff for this project when attempting to do my classwork. My mountainload of classwork. All it takes is a little glint of potential material, some little seed in my reading or project that could lead to some new idea for the game, and I find myself lost on a crazy tangent. It's ironic (and ridiculous) that a game on self-control is itself being a major source of temptation. I want to write more frequently here (I have plenty of stuff to talk about), but until the semester ends, I need to control myself and shelf actual work on the project for now. I look forward to December 4, when the time to engage and the muse of winter are mine to claim again.
