Layer 03: Psyche - July 22, 2023.
Hello everyone! You know, before starting to write this entry I skimmed
over my previous ones, and noticed that I always tend to start each
"blog entry" or whatever you want to call it with "Hello everyone". Up
until now it has been purely coincidental, I never put in deliberate
effort to start them that way but I think I'll make it a standard
practice from now on :D. It makes me wonder just who that "everyone" is
- how many people read these posts as I write them. Are there people I
haven't interacted with that remember my birthday to check this page on
22nd of July? I doubt it but that would be very cool.
Regardless of all that, here I am, celebrating my 22nd, GOLDEN birthday.
Ironically enough, this is probably the worst I've felt on this date so
far. Aside from just not feeling very great mentally, my tinnitus +
hyperacusis combo came back yesterday. For those unaware, tinnitus (in
my case) means hearing constant "ringing" with no external source, and
hyperacusis (again, in my case) means sensitivity to noise, making basic
everyday stuff, such as talking to another person, anything from
unpleasant to downright awful. I've experienced episodes of these
conditions twice before, each time the ringing in my ears was constant,
but this time it seems to be reactive - in complete silence I can barely
hear any ringing, it only appears to increase in volume to "match" other
external sounds, which is pretty chill since that means I get to sleep
fine, at least. "Your body is a temple" they say XD! Quite a solid
temple! Can't even manage to listen to Klangkünstler's divine music at
proper volume without having to deal with/worry about this shit. I'm
assuming listening to music may cause harm to The Temple, which is what
the Bible meant by "taking care of it", among other things. The craziest
part is damage caused by noise is usually irreversible. There is no
"cure" for it, at least. I assume this is because the process of
evolution didn't deem it necessary for these things to have regenerative
capabilities since humans back then didn't have access to good Techno,
which meant less hearing damage, not to mention the questionable amount
of impact minor hearing damage would have on survivability. All in all
this is fucking stupid.
Besides that, as I mentioned above, I've not been feeling great
mentally. I look back fondly on the days when I was a kid, playing World
of Warcraft with friends and listening to Mt Eden. Have you ever thought
about the feeling of "being at home"? I don't mean that literally, it's
just a certain feeling that I can't really put into words exactly. I
associate those kinds of memories, or "states" rather, with that
feeling. The only worry I had back then was the holidays ending, but it
wasn't a big deal since they seemed to last a very long time. It was
just a constant sense of stability and well-being. Don't have that
anymore though. I guess those things just disappear as you grow up, and
all you're left with is a completely unpredictable future, full of
worries and stress. The realization that that feeling of "being at home"
might not come back in any shape or form, leaves me with a feeling I can
only describe as wanting to vomit my soul out. I do realize I sound like
a boomer rambling on about "the good old days", which I assume isn't
normal for someone my age but it is what it is :D. I believe this
feeling led me to develop a need for avoidance towards change, or rather
the need for change. The natural thing to ask in that case would be how
anyone or anything can function within that framework - the way my brain
seems to rationalize these feelings is by believing that by going
through enough drastic changes a given system will converge to a point
where it doesn't need to change anymore. Basically the equivalent of
"refactoring" in programming. So in my mind change is necessary, as long
as it leads to a point where it isn't. That's the most pragmatic
definition I've come up with for the word "perfect". A program whose
only purpose is to print out "Hello World" on the screen is easy to make
perfect by that definition. For systems that are far more complicated,
such as life or "the world" or whatever else, that state of not having
to change would be hard to define, let alone attain, but that's just the
price you pay for having a complex system. Ironically enough these
feelings led me to become more open to change, since every time it
happens there's a slight hope that this might just be the "final" state,
so I welcome it with open arms, but that's never the case nor do they
make the process of change any more pleasant. If anything they make it
more clear how far I've gone from that feeling of being at home I
mentioned earlier. All I can do is just hope that given enough time life
will bring those feelings back one way or another, and never change
again.
Now on to the less depressing parts of our post! Starting with the usual
programming-related part. I didn't work on any super interesting
projects this year, but I still did program a lot. Wrote a simple
disassembler for RISC-V in Haskell, and mostly wrote C, (C-style) C++
and Rust for various small projects, including a small but (mostly)
usable debugger for x86_64 Linux. Writing one from scratch was a lot of
work, even when automating the DWARF info parsing by using a library!
Lots of platform-specific quirks you have to look out for, alongside
managing general performance of the application. Rust was also a very
interesting language, the first couple of days of using it were pure
misery, constantly filled with feelings such as "I JUST want it to let
me get this shit done" - I noticed that my programming style is a lot
messier - I tend to implement a wacky solution at first just to get a
feel for the overall architecture of the part I'm working on, then
refactoring and refining it, but that kind of approach sometimes
appeared to be locked away in Rust with it's compiler-enforced rules for
safety. As time went on though I rarely found myself in such situations,
I guess it's just a matter of getting accustomed to the language, and
not having anxiety about random segmentation faults is pretty cool.
I also discovered
Casey Muratori's channel
which has been extremely helpful. I remember when I first started
programming I used to have a thought along the lines of "I'll keep it
simple for now and THEN perhaps the time will come when thing XYZ (OOP
being the easiest example) that I don't understand why anyone would want
to do will start to magically make sense". Needless to say that time
never came. Looking back on it now even the thought itself is
nonsensical, since simplicity IS what I should be striving for. Casey's
channel was eye-opening in that regard, seeing someone 44 times more
experienced and smarter than me have this approach of pure pragmatism in
regards to programming was very reassuring. It's kind of sad that this
seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the field, but it is
what it is. With these new approaches/ideas I'll very likely end up
rewriting some of my older projects (again), which will be very
interesting!
You might have also noticed I made some changes to the website's overall
design this year, I found that I didn't really "resonate" with the old
one's "intro" part anymore, it felt too shitposty. The new one is
arguably even more shitposty but I still like it more :D. It's basically
a collection of random cool images I had saved on my PC over the last
year, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - it's bright, happy and
colorful :D!
Aside from that I've been doing the usual, playing League of Legends
(hit a new peak of 450 LP this season (EUW)), watching shows (Time
Machine Blues was fucking awesome, past me would have been very happy
with it), and stuff like that.
I also noticed in my previous entry that the me a year ago apparently
felt that "adding a post required way more effort than it should have".
I still have no idea what he meant by that. It is basically as easy as
it can be for a pure HTML/CSS website. I think I made some changes to
the website to make it a bit easier but forgot about it/did it after
writing that post maybe? I have no idea. At least compared to last year
the weather was pretty chill on my birthday, constantly sunny and all
that good stuff, which is good.
I'd prefer to avoid making comments such as these as much as possible so
as to not sound like a YouTuber going "YOOOOOOOO what the FUCK is up
YouTube!! Thank you SO MUCH for six point nine TRILLION Subscribers!
Means a lot to me!" - but I noticed that this page passed 200k views
last year which is pretty wild, I still have no idea where people keep
finding it. Regardless, if you're a new person finding this page,
welcome!!!
I think that's all I wanted to say for now! Hopefully future me will
look back on some parts of this post and think "it's not that deep
brother". We shall see next year :D.
Layer 02: Gloom - July 22, 2022.
Hello everyone! Been a while since I last posted an update, I was a bit
impatient with my 2021 post so it came a bit too early, mostly because I
was very excited to talk about the PSX port project. This time I waited
properly for my 21st birthday :D. You know, this idea of writing a
yearly diary has been helpful, there were times at which I would
randomly remember it and write down some thoughts that I found to be
important, or worth mentioning. It strangely keeps me "grounded", I
guess. It's currently 1:12AM and raining, so I thought I'd put a fitting
background :D It's constantly been very sunny recently, today being the
exception with a gloomy, white sky for the entire day, which is ironic,
since I'm probably one of the only 3 people on planet earth to make a
comment about the weather not as some form of a filler/icebreaker, but
as a genuine comment, since a clear (clouds are fine as long as they're
not gray and don't have a rainy vibe to them), blue, sunny sky makes me feel very
nice.
The past year has been pretty cool in terms of programming project
related stuff - zerno, elliot and I got to work on reverse-engineering
the bootleg game, which is something that Buns requested way back when I
first made lainland. I got to write a decently-sized project in C for
the first time, which was very pleasant. It's one of those languages for
me where the way you do things makes sense - the general paradigm and
architecture of a project written in it. There were a couple of things
that I didn't particularly enjoy about it, header files being a good
example, but still. It's also the first language where I had to deal
with UB, some of the bugs I saw would have probably taken me weeks to
figure out on my own without the help of Valgrind (absolute godsend of a
program). Overall it was a great learning experience.
Aside from that, I also got to write some other minor
projects/scripts/etc in other languages, biggest one being in Java.
Currently, I'm rewriting the codebase for the PSX port, it's been a
funny and humbling experience, it's filled with things and decisions
that do not make any sense to me, to the point where I'm surprised I was
even able to complete the project, even though it's only been a year or
so since I wrote it. It makes me think whether I'll look back on my
current work in another year and feel the same way about it, and if so,
how long this will last D:
I have also switched to using Vim (specifically Neovim) as opposed to
VSCode (web stuff)/Emacs (for everything else), except for Lisp-related
things, I think Emacs is clearly superior in that regard. VSCode was
VERY clunky for larger projects for some reason, the Vim emulation was
not great, frequently buggy and in general slower. I've found that those
minor inconveniences add up to cause stress fairly quickly. Of course,
for Java/Kotlin and such I still use JetBrains software, which I don't
have any issues with, it's great.
This year I also shut down lainland. I don't think I'll go into the
reasoning behind it here, since I've already made an announcement on the
server. I am very proud of how it turned out to be overall, it was a
pleasure working on different projects, playing SuperTuxKart and hanging
out in voice chat. It also served as a central "hub" for international
lain-related stuff for the majority of its existence. I do have some
regrets, feeling like I wasn't good enough to keep it in proper shape,
but I hope that someone who's better than me at maintaining a community
will create an even larger, more successful one in the future :D
I have also quit smoking! I don't even remember how long it's been but
I'd assume it to be around 4-5 months by now. It's been fairly
difficult, I still get nostalgic sometimes about having a cigarette,
especially at times like these when it's chill and silent. BUT! I'm on
the no-smoke grindset and I don't plan on stopping, that habit has
caused me way more harm than good, even though I was fortunately young
enough to not notice any negative effects directly impacting my health.
Other than that, life has been pretty colorless. Days just seem to melt
together, lacking of short-term things to look forward to, which is the
exact opposite of how I felt a couple years ago, it's not how I had
imagined life to be like at this age. Feeling this way is probably one
of the main reasons I enjoyed watching "The Tatami Galaxy" so much, if
you haven't seen it, I suggest giving it a shot. The sequel for it is
coming out in a couple of months, the image for this post is the "cover"
art for it, I hope it will be at least nearly as good as the first one
:D
I think that's about it for now! I will sit down sometime in the future
and clean up this mess of a website because it is completely
unmaintainable in its current form, even adding this post requires way
more effort than it should.
Layer 01: Gratitude - June 27, 2021.
Hello everyone! It is time for another update. During the past year or
so I've decided what to do with the website - I'll turn into a yearly
diary of sorts, where each new update will be a new Layer. A wise man
once told me that we make such websites as a desperate attempt to make
something last longer than ourselves, and I think I agree with that.
Maybe some random person in the future will enjoy reading through this.
Maybe it'll be my children (which I don't plan on having (very awkward
if you're my future kid reading this)), or my friends children. Fuck
knows - either way, this should be fun.
Before we dive into what happened recently let's quickly skim over minor
technical details. I have developed a deep hatred towards writing
HTML/CSS, there's a good chance the codebase for this website will turn
back into being a horrible mess, I'll likely inline every stylesheet and
do just enough so that it works on a basic level. I'll also change the
font to be a bit more readable.
With that out of the way, here it goes:
2020-2021 have been fun. Loads of fun. I got to work on the PSX SEL game
port, which'll definitely be one of the most satisfying projects I'll
develop during my lifetime. While this website started out as just
simply a huge shitpost meme thing on SS, the paragraph "Lain community
related thoughts and shit" were my genuine feelings, although a bit
exaggerated. Because of this, during the initial development of the game
port, I had very little expectations as to how much help I would
receive, only expecting a couple people, if any, to be interested. The
initial tweet blew up, the discord server got hundreds of members (1k+
as of writing this) and I found tons of talented people willing to help
with the development of the game. It far exceeded my expectations, and I
couldn't be more grateful to all the people who contributed. I doubt I
would have been able to fully go through with the project without you
guys.
Despite the PSX port being mostly done, I still have more SEL-related
projects I'd like to work on, ranging from requests from friends to
stuff I'd like to create/revive.
I'll also soon be turning 20, which feels weird to think about. As a kid
I always used to think that people at that age were already on the verge
of dying, having experienced most of what life had to offer. But here I
am, not noticing much of a difference from those times to the present,
excluding changes to my interests.
Other than that the past year or so has been rather uneventful -
university, programming and overall studying related stuff,
occassionally hanging out and also the pandemic, from which the part
that annoyed me the most by far were the masks - not being able to smoke
freely while outside was very stressful.
A small note:
While I wanted to apply as little changes to old parts of the website as
possible, I've decided to get rid of INI/SS related stuff from it. It's
been a decent while, almost a year, since I've been a part of it. It was
not anything major, just an overall disagreement as to where the
community was heading. Despite all of that, I'll always look back fondly
on the memories I've made there, it really was fun while it lasted.
Thanks for everything brothers!1
I think that's all I wanted to say for now. Editing this document now,
I've noticed that just this Layer entry seems to have taken up a lot of
screen space, I can't imagine what having over 40 of them or something
would look like, I might have to come up with an alternative. Though
having a single very long page sounds appealing in it's own way
aswell... we'll see.
Update 22 July, 2020.
Hello everyone! Long time no see. It's been a while since I've made this
site, close to 2 years. I was planning to just leave the site be the way
it was, but considering the amount of attention it got after fauux and
Blackwings followed me, I thought I should make an update. Also, today's
my birthday, I've turned 19, so I thought it'd fit well to post
something now.
>Why no updates?
First of all let's get this out of the way.
My interests have changed. I just didn't enjoy writing static webpages
anymore. I still program, arguably more than ever, but writing pure
HTML/CSS/JS burned me out.
I still do front-end webdev, but mostly using React.
>What's changed?
Well, considering I somehow gathered up the motivation to update the
site, just writing a 100 line long paragraph wouldn't have been enough.
I updated the code for all of the site, because it was atrociously bad.
I've seen lots of people use my site as a template for their personal
own, and I just felt bad having people use the abomination that the code
my 17 year old self cobbled together was.
>What do you do now?
Nowadays I mostly work on dumb personal side-projects some of which you
can check out on my GitHub.
Programming language-wise, I mostly interest myself in the
Lisp family (primarily Scheme and Racket), TypeScript, Python for
Machine Learning, Data gathering/analysis, etc. and currently have a
growing interest in functional programming. Basically, any language that
isn't strictly Object-Oriented like C# or Java I usually find awesome.
Other than that, I'm also "passionate" about ganoo linucs.
For
anyone curious - my setup:
Distro: Arch
WM: Xmonad/i3
Terminal Emu: urxvt
Shell: zsh
>Where may I find you?
Considering some people have had trouble contacting me in the past due
to my past Discord tag being outdated, I thought I might aswell put some
contact info here aswell.
My social accounts:
Discord @
λd 0h f0r f0r#0191
Twitter
If you want to talk to me about anything, by all means feel free to dm
me right away. im lonly.
>The future of this webpage?
I plan to just leave it be. I'll for sure post more updates in the
upcoming years, but nothing too major will change.
And no, I'm not going to update the title each year from
"the ramblings of a 17 year old fanatic" to
"the ramblings of a ${my current age} fanatic."
Not going to happen. I was 17 when I designed this page, so it'll stay
that way :^)
Serial Experiments Lain
Some questions you may have for me I guess
Who the fuck are you?
I go by the nickname "ad044", "antidepressant044" or simply "ad". Most active over at Apollo but I do visit every Lain-themed site/imageboard/whatever regularly.
How old are you?
I am 17 years of age.
Where are you from?
I originally come from a different depressant which is not "Life". I'm on a mission to warn you b0is about the dangers of Adspace.
What purpose does this site have?
None.
I've had an interest toward Lain and the fanbase around her for a while
now. For the past couple months it's developed into more of an
obsession.
This obsession comes with the urge to create something so fucking good
that it would unite every separated Lain fandom into one big community
where people could collaborate and create Lain-related stuff. Currently
the situation is quite shit. You want to be a part of re:wire? Join
their telegram, discord server, whatever. You want to be on
Arisuchan/Lainchan, etc? Go post there. You want to worship some 17 year
old schizophrenics fantasy that uses Lain as a mascot? Go to SS. You
want to go against that 17 year old schizo? Go to Apollo. Most of these
communities have personal relationships with each other, drama,
friendship, you name it. It's difficult to acquire/give/manipulate
information and ideas between some of these communities since they're so
separated. Therefore collaborating for potentially good Lain projects
becomes tougher than it should. I want to create a service that unites
every Lain fan into one.
I look at Lain religiously. She gives me motivation to do anything, be
it study, code, breathe, what the fuck ever. I want to do her justice.