Soul Reviews

Forward And Backward And Put One Foot Forward

2024 New Year Resolutions 🦥

So, how are those New Year's Resolutions coming along? Losing weight? Learning that language? Picking up that hobby you've always thought was cool? Probably not, four out of five of the people reading this have likely given up on their Resolution1 or just plum forgotten it entirely. Not me though, I have a secret technique.

This year, I'm making Birthday Resolutions instead.

Call it a cop out, but I have tactical reasons. My birthday is in mid-February, right after most people have given up on their goals, so I get boosted by ecstasy of being in the top 20th percentile of Resolution Players by default! The date is also just right before Ash Wednesday, which marks the start of Lent, a period of the year we Christians use for fasting, abstinence, and reflection. Personally, I go pretty ascetic during this time, and forgo the following: video games, Youtube videos, music, sweet foods, alcohol, and using the Internet for anything not strictly professional. This has the twin benefit of giving me back a ton of my free time and causing me to be incredibly bored, which is good because when you're bored you tend to make things! Case in point: last year during Lent I made a small card game2, it's not winning any game of the year awards and lacks loads of polish, but I learned about fifty lessons from that 'failure' and I don't think I could have done half that work if I had the option of blaring Phonk in my ears or playing an auto-battler.

The point being, I've got about fifty days ahead of me to get a rock solid start on my goals.

The Big One: Publish a Commercial Game 🕹

Last year I wanted to create a full-on game release that I could publish to Steam. My thought was that I would either make a 2.0 of "You Must Play" or do game jams until I found a real hit idea and run with that. Sadly, I fell into a professional slump, became a little depressed, and fell off the horse when it came to my game making activities. One might say giving up temporary on a goal to 'heal' is okay, but I disagree, I believe what hurts me more then anything is the feeling of dread I get when I realize it's been a month and I have nothing to show for it but a paycheck.

So, 2024's gonna be the year I release something complete. I don't care if it's a hit3, but this item is getting off my bucket list before I see the Earth make one more rotation around the sun.

If you go back and read my old blogs, you'll notice this isn't the first game dev commitment I've made:

From my first mini jam entry all the way back in 2022

For 2022, my goal is to release a commercial game.

To my aborted Cave Game project I was going to do for last Halloween

The game plan now is to release weekly development logs until I release the finished product this Halloween.

I didn't have a real plan to complete either, forgot the commitment or procrastinated, and time continues to pass on by.

In order to prevent such an awful outcome from happening again, I'm making the following pledge: for every day I do not make progress on this goal in some measurable form, I'll donate $100 to the charity Autism Speaks and, if I do not publish a commercial game by this time next year, I'm donating an additional $5000. This approach may seem unorthodox and a bit sadistic, but like I said, without working on something significant I get feelings of dread so I'll gladly use my frugal compulsions to push me to do more Godly work. As for the choice of charity, without getting into specifics, I don't believe Autism Speaks will effectively use my money to help those on the spectrum, but just as well, I don't believe they'll do anything really villainous with my donation either. This is important since, if I picked a cause I believe in, like a local food kitchen, I wouldn't feel so compelled because my sloth would literally be feeding people, on the other hand, I couldn't live with myself donating to a political cause.4

Today's progress was setting up a "build ghost" material.

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Get To, and Maintain 150 lbs 📉

I've hit my New Year's weight goal twice in the past: 170 lbs in 2022 and 160 lbs in 2023. Needless to say, I got fat again come winter and rose to 180 lbs both times. If you think this a healthy fluctuation, let me assure you as the one living in this body that it's definitely not.

The real challenge with weight loss isn't losing the weight, it's keeping the weight off and having the change be permenant. I can diet, fast, exercise more, forgo food delivery until I hit my number, but maybe a month after I've made my goal I'll be well on my way back to being about ten pounds overweight, but not more because I run like a fiend and don't drink soda.

It's snacking if I'm being honest. Bags of chips, freshly baked bread, bacon in the fridge, entire frozen pizzas, whatever it is, if it's in my kitchen and "snackable" it'll be gone within the day. My only real solution to this conundrum has been to just keep these things out of my life entirely with a blanket 'no' and while 'fleeing temptation' is a good strategy, I think I'm avoiding some psychological truth of my behavior that needs to be torn out like shoddy plumbing before it's too late.5

Like every weight loss guru and health expert, I don't have all the answers here, so my best bet is to just be judicious about record keeping, weighing myself daily and tracking everything I eat, in part so I can make sure to lose weight in a healthy fashion and also to make sure I have good, sustainable habits for keeping the weight off. Because one thing Is constant when I start gaining the weight back: the record keeping stops right about the same time.

Exceed 10,000 Notes in my Notes Database 🗒

If one thing went well for me in 2023 I can say It was note-taking:

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This is a map of my Org-Roam note database6, circa January 2023, or as it's generally known: a "Zettelkasten"7. Basically, it's a knowledge database that follows these patterns:

And that's it! Those simple principles, combined with a fancy text-editor plugin, were enough to free me from the curse of "Should I write this down? And where?" because the answer is always "yes" and "in the damn notes database"

Let me provide an example, taken from the front page for the Redis database: 9

Redis, The open-source, in-memory data store used by millions of developers as a cache, vector database, document database, streaming engine, and message broker.

Most database, frameworks, languages, and other software products have some word salad like this, and while you might be able to understand 20% of it, most of these terms will escape you on the first pass. So, I create a note, call it "Redis", write up my own summary of that description, link all the terms that are already notes, and create new notes for all the terms I've never heard before. I don't need to go in and fill in those cards right this second, far from it, I could leave them blank until the end of time if I don't need to know what a "vector database" is, but what if I link to the term again, and again, until 20 cards are pointing at it? Then it's probably some information I might want to know!

Aggregating knowledge like this takes a huge weight off your shoulders since, as it turns out, it's impossible to understand everything the second you come into contact, especially with technical and mathematical subjects, and I believe this has lead me to discard partial knowledge that would've been useful later and caused me to spend hours pulling at threads because I'm a "depth-first" kind of person.

There's much more to say about note taking, executable code blocks, back link searches, embedding database deployments to demonstrate actual queries, tags 🏷, but I'll leave those for another article. Suffice to say, I have about 1,700 notes right now and my goal is to raise that number to at least10,000 before the year is out.

Onwards and Upwards 🫠

My hope for 2024, in a phrase, is to be "The year I started to take things seriously". The start of that is actually having a goal I want to achieve, a plan to get after it, and some sort of consequence if I fail. In the coming weeks of lent I'll work earnestly toward these things and, come Easter, reflect back on it in an update to checkpoint my progress. Setting a goal and starting a project is just the first step after all and I'm interested in seeing what comes after compulsion to work or self-imposed financial devastation.

Getting in shape and having my own Akashic Record sounds pretty sick as well.

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