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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3mo ago (text post)   725 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 17, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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My 10k training is getting pretty tough, and I might need to skip a run or two from some lower shin pain. I think I’m improving but still have a ways to go to get my pace to 9-minute miles for the race.

Japanese is a blast but very challenging as well. I’m wrapping some of the major grammar points for my proficiency test in December. The main focus now is “elevating others” and “lowering yourself” correctly.

What’s fascinating to me about this is to do it correctly you have to know who the subject is. And since subjects are often implied by context in Japanese, you have to be correctly tracking quite a bit more than simpler “change I ate an apple to I didn’t eat an apple.”

I’m still playing piano but have decided between the race and the test I have to dial music theory back a bit until December. Still enjoying playing songs though.

If you have stress fractures you need time to heal, and possibly a physician.

In the case of normal shin splints though, have you tried incorporating tibia raises? I have never gotten shin splints after I added a few sets a couple of times a week. You can use a dumbell and a bench if your gym doesn't have a machine for them, which is like 99.9% of gyms. Just sit on the bench and extend your legs like a leg extension, holding the dumbell in your feet. Then lower and extend your feet. It can help to sit further back then you would for a leg extention, and to incline the seat by a notch.

You can also do them against a wall, but I don't feel like that is as effective.

Appreciate the suggestions. I’m not sure what it was but today I feel fine. I’ve gotten pains before at the top of my tibia near my knee but that’s been ok. This was weird in that it was soreness lower down by my ankle. I ran 4 miles last night though and today it’s perfectly fine.

I've been trying to write a painfully sincere litRPG.

"Trying" because I keep getting a few chapters in, realizing something big needs to be changed in order to ensure the story's foundation is good, and then procrastinating the edits for months before I get back into it. Writing and continuously revising is a whole lot more fun than going back to old chapters and rewriting them.

Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing, which is really suboptimal. If I felt I had a real chance at making it big as an author I'd quit my job and work at a warehouse or something while I wrote, but fiction is such an incredibly packed field already that I think that would be an enormous mistake.

I'm five chapters in right now on my fourth try and just realized some more major edits have to be made, so I guess it might be another few months before my fifth try gets started. Pressing forward isn't really an option because the revisions will change things substantially--I've tried pressing forward without editing before and the constant references to unwritten material which will be inserted before what I am writing just make it too difficult to keep moving forward. The solution is just to keep at it but man, it's hard with my day job in the way.

Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing

This is hard. The best move I've got is to brute-force my sleep schedule to be awake at 5 or so, addy up (back when I had access), and use those crack-energy disinhibited hours while there are no distractions from the world to get some work done.

Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing, which is really suboptimal. If I felt I had a real chance at making it big as an author I'd quit my job and work at a warehouse or something while I wrote, but fiction is such an incredibly packed field already that I think that would be an enormous mistake.

I often experience the same, and supposedly so do many established writers who indeed work deliberately simple day jobs to keep their head free for writing. A friend of mine who somewhat recently started writing books while working as a software dev also told me that the only way he could get anything done was by getting up several hours early, writing, and then going to work.

If you're looking for an alpha reader, give me a shout - at this point my litRPG addiction seems terminal, so I might as well stop resisting. Are you aiming for the Eastern/cultivation style or more of a gamelit approach?

Thanks, I might take you up on that. The story will be more gamelit.

Just once, I'd like to see a protagonist with a game overlay try to clip through a corner by repeatedly crouch jumping.

What do you mean by "painfully sincere"?

I like stories where the protagonist suffers and tries to help/save weaker people. Maybe it's a bit grandiose to call it "painfully sincere" but I want to write a story about the strong sacrificing everything to protect the weak, with little to no irony or self-awareness involved.

I wrote an extension that adds sounds to a otherwise soundless multiplayer game. 2 (or 3?) people use it.

Getting users is awesome, way to go!

Like I expected, I was way too busy with life to get anything done last week.

@Southkraut, hopefully your project is fairing better?

I actually did get to spend some time on it, but I spent it all on wondering whether I even want to use Unreal.

The Editor is cumbersome, and right now I'm not sure of the degree to which it's possible to circumvent it. And more fundamentally, C++ code takes longer to write than C# code, isn't as nice to work with in my opinion, and I wince a little every time I need to maintain a header file in addition to the implementation file. I can write C++ code sure enough, and have done so for several years professionally, but for a hobby project I find that my lack of enjoyment in working with it relative to the ease with which I can crank out C# code is actually a motivational hindrance.

So I spent far too many hours trying to find arguments for and against using Unreal over Godot over Unity over making my own engine, and the same for C++ VS C#. All of which was slightly entertaining, minimally productive, and has left me much in the same spot that I started out in.

Maybe those are just teething issues. Maybe the Unreal Editor can be handled more elegantly, and perhaps more can be done in pure code than I see right now, and there are probably macros and Unreal-specific data types that make Unreal C++ code easier to write. If one only knows how. I wish Zorba (or another experienced Unreal dev) would weigh in on this and point out some good starter resources for devs who may be experienced in general but are so-far ignorant about Unreal Quality Of Life features.

As said I also considered going back to Unity, where I have a large code-base to return to but the general shoddiness of the engine and its delirious development in recent years warn me off, and Godot, which was enjoyable to work with but hell to set up for C# and double-precision coordinates, and has a very political userbase besides.

So no, no development done, which feels like a lot of wasted time to me. When if not now? But I also don't want to waste my time on a framework that will end up frustrating me one way or another. Indecision. A plague.

If you switch back to Godot or Unity, I might be able to chime in with something constructive. Unreal is the one engine I didn't touch at all over the years. A political userbase is annoying, but Godot is on the MIT license, it's not like they can yoink it away from you (I don't remember the details of the Unity drama, but that seems to be an advantage over it, at least).

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