Waves of Code

I swam with that open water group again last night. We went to a different area of Lake Travis, "Hippie Hollow", because it has a longer swim area than the place we went to last week. This site also happens to permit public nudity, so that was a little... awkward. It wasn't too bad though; there were only a couple naked guys hanging around and they weren't swinging their dicks around in the air or anything. ;) Anyway, it was really windy yesterday so the water was choppy as hell. My form completely fell apart because I wasn't used to this type of swimming and I started freaking out because when I'd come up for air, sometimes I'd just get a big wave in my face instead. I eventually reverted to my old "panic style" of swimming, which involves keeping my head above the water at all costs while doing free style. It was fun fighting for my life while trying to get a workout in though. :) All together I swam about 1200 meters last night (3/4s of a mile).

I don't know what happened, but on Sunday I started writing some code and for the first time in months, programming felt fun to me again. So fun in fact, that I am having trouble stopping myself and its somewhat getting in the way of my training. I added two new features to the video engine, loading menu skins from multi images and adding support for allowing multiple menu skins to be used at once. Since yesterday I've been performing major surgery on the battle code (it needed it... badly). Basically I'm wrapping up the GUI display and update code for a couple menu windows into their own classes, which makes the primary battle class much smaller and easier to understand. I'm really happy that I enjoy coding again, because I had honestly been forcing myself to program for the last couple of months to get our release out for Allacrost. We had a meeting over the weekend and decided on a small number of features that we would add to the game and then make a new release. We're trying to make our release cycle shorter while still introducing enough new features and content to make each release significantly improved over the last. We've been trying to recruit a lot of new people to the programming team to help speed up development efforts, but so far we haven't received very many applications (compared to what we are used to anyway), which is honestly somewhat disappointing. I don't know if we chose a bad time of the year or if our game looks too "finished" now in the eyes of someone who takes a glance at it.

My dreams are consistently vivid and somewhat exhausting these days. I'm actually starting to wish for nights were I don't dream, because sometimes I wake up after having fought in some war, or had some other major traumatic life event I had to struggle through. Even though physically those things didn't happen, they feel real to my mind, and the psychological stress I experience when I'm asleep often leaves me feeling burnt out by the time I wake up. Who knew sleeping could make me so exhausted? :) Seriously though, its becoming quite a bother. Once I find a new job and get on health insurance again, I might consider talking with a psychologist or someone else about this if it becomes a bigger problem. Speaking of jobs, I need to begin seriously looking for one now that our latest release is finished (I told myself and others that I wouldn't get a job until after that happened). I was going to start looking last week, but I was wrapped up with the aftermath of our release so I put it off to this week, but now I have my head wrapped in code and I can't stop (plus I kind of need to get this battle code commit out the door ASAP, because no one else can work on the battle code while I'm working on these large changes). Anyway, time to get back to the code =D

New Year

I had a concurrent nightmare about grad school my first two nights of the new year. In this dream, I suddenly discovered that I didn't meet the course requirements to graduate just yet, so I had to take 3 more classes, which I was pretty depressed about in the dream. One class was some crazy mathematics class on differential vector calculus or some esoteric topic like that, another was digital signal processing, and the last was some neuroscience class. Why these specific courses were required by my degree, I have no idea. When I woke up both mornings it took me well over 10 minutes to realize what I had just experienced was a dream, and that I am truly and absolutely finished with grad school. But you know what? I still don't feel like I'm 100% done, because I have no document or status that says "yes, you graduated". They don't mail degrees out for another week or two! Seriously, what school can you graduate from but still not know for weeks after if you really graduated or not?

Luckily I didn't have that nightmare three nights in a row. Last night I had a series of some very strange and very interesting dreams. I don't recall them very well, but in one of them I was at some track and three girls came up and started singing to me in unison while holding giant beer mugs in each hand. The song they sang told me that they wanted me to go to Louisiana with them so that they could take a picture of me and strawberry lemonade (why we had to go to Louisiana to do this, I had no idea). Then after they finished their song, they pored the contents of their mugs on my bare feet, which became covered in red, yellow, and purple yogurt. Yes, that's right. I have dreams about girls singing to me about strawberry lemonade while poring yogurt on my feet. No, its not some sick fetish that I've been hiding.

I've started working on Allacrost hard-core again, which feels really good. I did some work cleaning up the scripting engine, then I started working on the new map mode design, I've been mopping up the sloppy mess that we call our video engine, and I've been writing more of the story as well. I'm well enough now that I can do a decent job with these things, but my mind still is foggy so its more difficult for me than it should be. The map code I'm exciting to do a complete re-design of, because the old code was getting awfully messy. The biggest changes I'm doing to it right now are adding in support for free-range movement to replace our old tile-movement. Basically what this means is: you can walk more freely rather than being forced to walk only from tile to tile. It's a little tougher to code than tile-based movement, but it will be worth it. The video engine is pissing me off though. The code in there is just so messy and it doesn't follow the code standard very well at all. The data types used don't make sense half the time (using floats to represent the number of pixels, for instance) and its just generally frustrating. The video engine works and works well, to be sure, but when it comes time to modify it or add new features, it can be a nightmare.

Well one of my resolution's for the new year is to stop using my blog as an ad-hoc "emo Tyler diary", so I'll just say that I'm feeling much better after two weeks at home, but still have a ways to go. :)

Respite for the Soul

Unfortunately, recovering from the past two years is sure taking its time. After I turned in my thesis, I felt a periodic relief over that weekend. However, the next ten or so days felt continually stressful to me, even though there was almost nothing significant for me to stress myself over. I continually sought ways to escape from the intense fear and worry that I suffered day after day, usually though a combination of sleeping, running, video games, and watching anime. But perhaps the best medicine I have discovered is that of companionship. Simply going out, socializing with friends, and enjoying a more normal existence has done wonders for quelling my anxiety. A week ago while I was still in Austin I was hanging out with friends for the entire day, going to a brunch party, shopping, watching a movie at a friend's house, watching another movie at the Alamo.....I honestly can not remember the last time that I spent the entire day out of my house and with other people. I've decided that I'm going to make an effort to get out with friends more (once a day when possible).

I drove back to Phoenix from Austin on the 20th with a friend from high school (who is now a grad student at UT). We left at about 8:30AM Austin time and arrived at midnight Phoenix time, so it was about 14.5 hours to travel just over 1,000 miles. It was long, but it was surprisingly relaxing compared to taking a shorter 2 hour flight. Its nice being home, but its really cold here compared to what it was like when I left Austin. It doesn't help that my mom insists on not turning on the heat in the house (she claims that she can't afford it). I've made a lot of good progress in reducing my stress in the past five days, but I still have a long way to go. What frustrates me most of all is that I finally have loads of time to work on Allacrost, but I don't have a proper state of mind to work on it. Its really sad to admit, but my abilities in writing, reading, programming, drawing, and hell, everything are incredibly lower than what I am normally capable of.

Which brings me to my next point: I think graduate school did made me worse in more ways than it has made me better. I've been analyzing this over and over in the back of my head over the past couple of weeks. First, the good things. After finishing graduate school, I can now state with confidence that I am more intelligent than I was before. That is really the only solid positive I can find. Now as for the negative, in my current state I am now: less creative, less articulate, more selfish (I had to become selfish to survive, even though I hate being selfish), less empathetic, less emotional (emotions are good things: you should treasure them if you have them), more anxious, less ambitious, less motivated, more cynical, and the list just goes on. Basically: I think that I've become more intelligent at the expense of every other aspect about who I am becoming worsened. If I had the opportunity to take my degree and somehow trade it in to get back all of the things that I have lost, I would do so without a second thought. Isn't that sad? Isn't that really, really sad? This whole experience has almost driven me to reconsider practicing as an engineer and seek another field of interest. Hell, what am I talking about? That already happened a year ago when I applied to the damn school of neuroscience! Looking back at my actions then, I can clearly see that a significant portion of what motivated to do that back then was because I was seeking an escape from my present. I'm still very interested in the subject mind you, just not to the degree where I would actively pursue an education in the field.

On a more random topic, I'd like to discuss my dreaming as of late. In the past week, and especially since I've come back home, my dreaming has become unbelievably more deep with each passing night. What do I mean by deep? I mean that the world constructed by my subconcious is ever more real and tangible. Every time that I wake up, it takes me about 10-15 minutes to reconstruct the experience that is reality. I have to re-realize who I truly am, and accept that all of the experiences I have had were nothing more than fragments of a virtual world that I unknowingly constructed around myself. Suprisingly, I'm sleeping about a normal 8 hours of sleep a night. But every time I wake up I feel like I've been in a coma for weeks. Even more perplexing to me is that even though these dreams are nearly more real than they have ever been, I can't remember much when I wake up. I do know that each dream I've had in the past week has had me centered around a different major conflict. The memories I have of the past week of dreams are few and scattered, but I remember in one there was a princess, and in another I had given up engineering to become an actor (which I was talented at, in the dream at least). Perhaps I should make it a habit to record my dreams when I wake up so that I can actively recall the events that transpired. I do not dislike these dreams. Oh no, I much prefer living in my various dream worlds than in the real world presently. Sometimes I ponder to myself that if I could, would I opt to sleep for the rest of my life, with the conscious decision that I was living in my dreams? Or would the guilt of completely neglecting the going ons of the outside world overwhelm me? I have been unable to find my answer.