I’m tired

I’m tired of hearing I have potential.

Not least because it’s always potential I have to achieve somewhere/one else.

I hate being smart. That “compliment” edges out a million different things I’d rather be.

  • kind
  • funny
  • dependable
  • interesting
  • approachable
  • honest
  • cheerful
  • empathetic

I wonder if I don’t qualify as any of those. Maybe it’s not an edge-out.

Maybe I should stick to being a barista.

I’ve spent 2 years burning myself out to prove some old disappointments wrong. And I don’t have anything to show for it.

I can’t take any of my job-prospect projects further than the shoddy proof-of-concept stage, because I wrap up too much of myself in them once the burst of excitement wears off.

As a result, all of my public code is, well, shoddy. I think I’ve put off polishing this blog code for 3 years now. I can only get things done when I’m not thinking about them, otherwise I tangle myself into anxious knots.

Thinking about listing them is already making me feel bad, but I might as well finish something for once.

  • Streaming PJAX/page transitions library (overdrive.js)

  • Real-time accessible contrast checking on live sites (Contrast-O-Vision)

  • A script to make rock-solid <path> fallbacks under the original invisible <text>s for SVG text rendering consistency without sacrificing semantics or accessibility (svg-mummify-text)

  • A script that modifies webfont files to bring text-decoration-skip to all browsers (Funderline)

  • SSML parser+implementation / polyfill (2004-called.js)

  • Finishing this blog design

  • Guttersnipe

  • Mortropolis

I barely remember now, but this career was already me giving up things I wanted to do.

So maybe giving up on it is where I should have been all along.

I have about 2½ months stuck here until my lease is up.


ADD-Like Behaviors in Average People vs. People with ADD

BehaviorAverage personPerson with ADD*
Loses keys (they’re gone)Once a year, at most4 or 5 times a year
Forgets important appointments2 to 3 times a yearAt least monthly
Blurts out remarks that distress othersOnce a month at mostAt least weekly
Constantly moving about; can’t sit stillNot a problemIf person with ADD is hyperactive, a problem much of the time
Periods of attentivenessAn hour or twoA few minutes or, if very interested in task, 3–4 hours
Can think of creative ideasSeveral a weekConstantly has ideas; it’s sorting them out that’s the problem
Late for work or other appointmentRarelyFrequently
Agrees to do 3 things in same timeframeRarelyFrequently. Tries to do them all. Sometimes succeeds!
Loses important papers like checksRarelyUp to once a month

* Person with ADD who has not developed accomodations to solve problems and/or is not taking ADD medications.


I can’t memorize things.

I don’t mean that metaphorically. When diagnosing my ADHD, I scored 30th percentile recalling unrelated sentences. The bad 30%. Drunk people do better.

I’ve successfully memorized a mere handful of things, and I can sum them all up right here:

  • My birthdate (but not how many years old I am)
  • My address for ≈20 years, and my current one
  • 4 phone numbers, 2 of which are nigh-identical
  • My dad’s, brother’s, and sister’s birthdays

I know theirs because I think of my sibling’s birthdays as relative to mine, and dad’s is a day away from a holiday.

I still can’t remember mom’s. I know. I remember the month, and when it approaches, I look it up.

In my first relationship, I forced myself to retain our anniversary and her birthday. Because if I didn’t, that information would no longer be relevant, if you get my drift. It was really hard. Strong emotions are my one lifehack for this, but they need to be industrial-strength.

And I’m pretty sure I remembered the anniversary only because it was October 3rd, and I had just seen Mean Girls.

So how do you remember anything then

Immersion helps. I can’t remember anyone’s name until I’ve heard them called ten times by others.

When that won’t work, there’s only one thing I can do: understand it. If I learn how new information relates to a system as a whole, I’m good to go.

That’s why I blow hard at names, addresses, and dates — most of the time, they’re arbitrary.

This also means I learn differently. I understand for most folks, memorization is the easiest solution. But for me, I have to dive in and really grok what even the arbitrary bits are. A lot of coding terms are literal jokes (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and GNU’s Not Unix, for example), but learning those stories makes them stick.

As a result, when learning something big, I have an extended, frustrating period of incompetentence and hopelessness, then suddenly it all clicks and it’s second nature. This has its ups and downs. Pro: second-nature knowledge is a powerful asset. Con: but sometimes it’s knowledge about, oh, some real-life examples:

  • Minecraft engine quirks
  • Obsolete HTML elements and attributes
  • Weird animal facts
  • Homestar Runner

Golbat’s Colosseum animations are a beautiful thing to behold.


Down the Rabbit Hole of Huge Power

Huge Power is a notoriously busted Pokémon Ability — it doubles the entire Attack Stat, which is a stratospheric power boost. Diggersby and Azumarill go up ≥3 tiers by having it.

Azumarill destroying some off-camera unfortunate, doubtlessly with its Huge Power.

It doesn’t make much sense, though. I initially wrote it off as something given to Azumarill to make it unterrible (and then Azumarill kept getting buffed). But there is a next-level pun and story behind Huge Power.

Dajare is a Japanese wordplay tradition kind of like a pun and homophone rolled together. And it is everywhere; Japan, as it turns out, is infested with dad jokes.

And boy is this ever a dad joke.

Huge Power’s Japanese name is strictly translated as “Muscleman”. That’s all Bulbapedia explains, because Bulbapedia and nuance are mutually exclusive. But if you paste the characters into a more sophisticated translator, you get two results:

() — Noun

  1. muscleman; strong man

() — Noun

  1. fortifying mochi; mochi that improves one’s strength
  2. mochi received from one’s parents after giving birth
  3. mochi given to a toddler on its first birthday

It’s one of them Dajares. But what does mochi have to do with anything?

We speak of “the man in the moon” in the West, but Japanese mythology considers the patterns on the moon’s visible face to instead be a rabbit making rice cake — that is, mochi.

Semitransparent overlay on the moon, indicating the general shape of a rabbit in front of a pot or something.

And who gets Huge Power?

Azumarill, Diggersby, and Mega Mawile.

Azumarill, the Aqua Rabbit Pokémon; Diggersby, a bunny with big beefy arms for ears; and Mega Mawile, which looks rabbitish with the second giant alligator mouth coming out of the back of its head.

I told you this pun was next-level.


Cat.


Old Minecraft ideas, from way back when—I’m thinking 2011. I used to be more into it more than was healthy; it’s what I did when dropping out of UMaine, to think about something other than how useless I was.

Originally they were just pencil and marker, so I inked them on a whim.

You can probably see this predates bats, golems, villagers/Testificates, and even Endermen, hence my take on the concepts.

The goblin villagers were based off of an old, old post from the original Minecraft development blog, which neither Tumblr nor Google can find, sadly. The yeti, worm, and shark were just some one-off ideas for monsters within various kinds of terrain; the yeti lived only around snow, the worm could “dig” (phase) through dirt blocks, and you can probably imagine where the shark showed up.

The two I like the most are the Smoker and the golems. The Smoker was supposed to be an equally-annoying relative of Creepers, where it would seek out and devour wooden blocks. The golems how I envisioned what ended up being Iron Golems—I vastly prefer these!



On Patreon

I’ve heard a few complaints about Patreon, where people say it looks like a shill/cashgrab/desperate ploy. Worse than having ads, even.

I suspect that’s a psychological issue. Maybe it does seem worse to some people. But as someone who messes around with web development, my humble opinion is that NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE THAN ADS.

  • Ads track you as hard as they can in barely-legal (or worse) ways. Block cookies? Have an ad-blocker? Doesn’t matter. There’s a million different ways of spying on you. Notice Apple’s is built into the operating system.
  • Ads load who knows what, whenever they feel like it. Ever been to Wikia? It will make your browser cry with piles of Flash, GIFs, and poorly-coded JavaScript, hammering your computer trying to figure out who you are and what you’d like to buy. All of which, by definition, is not what readers go to a site for.
  • The only people ads make money for are really big sites (and the ad brokers, but you knew that). So for the little people who would even bother with a Patreon, ads wouldn’t help anyway. And if you use an ad-blocker to mitigate the first two issues, then the creators make even less money.

TL;DR: ads invade privacy, make websites slower and crashier, and then don’t even work on top of all that.

So if the alternative is small creators linking to their Patreon in text, or even with, god forbid, one whole image, GOOD.