I’ve done jack-shit this month, but such is life and that’s OK.

Things were not clicking and that fantastic high from doing something that is genuinely fun was slowly dissipating. I accepted my fate and didn’t force it. Instead I’ve watched countless reels, YouTube videos, explored new music, and even found myself staring at clouds through my window. I’m not gloomy, rather the opposite.

Since I’ve been, and probably still am, procrastinating; I don’t have much fun to show. So let’s take this opportunity to appreciate what other people are up to instead.

Youtube

Even if I might not dare to admit it, my most visited site is probably YouTube. It’s the first ocean of content I find myself in when my mind is drifting. There is however so much useful content on there nowadays that it might not even be fair to call it procrastination. Here are some of the things that I have watched recently.

Pewdiepie

PewDiePie’s training his own AI: The PewDiePie tech arc has been incredible to follow. A year ago he built his first PC and now he has his monster of an AI computer almost burning his house down. It’s a very inspiring story on perseverance and embracing failure. I definitely recognize his obsession as it’s the same thing I went through when first starting. You had no clue what you were doing but you get nowhere if you give up.

Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow on Wookash Podcast: Wookash Podcast has a lot of great guests and this one I liked a lot. They discuss technical details of Jonathan Blow’s new game and the Jai programming language. There are plenty of Jonathan Blow’s rants out there but this provides some of these directly linked to the game he is currently developing.

Gorillaz

Gorillaz - The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God: Gorillaz recently released a new album together with an amazing animated short film! It apparently took 18 months to complete and it’s very much a love letter to the craftsmanship of older animated films. Very refreshing to see in the era of AI.

Kamikaze_Shortbus

Kamikaze_Shortbus: More on the art side but insane humor in combination with cool insights. I re-watched this video which provides another perspective on what I have dealt with the last couple of months, color and lighting. She also hosted an art contest recently where she and friends went through and gave constructive criticism to all contributors and now I feel a sudden urge to start drawing.

Gamedev

The algorithm knows me too well so of course my feeds are full of gamedev news. If you can’t progress yourself, be amazed at the progress of others.

Teardown multiplayer

Teardown multiplayer: Teardown is what inspired me to dig this deep into voxels and I’ve done my best to gather all knowledge about its inner workings. This makes me appreciate how complicated something like multiplayer can be to implement, but they did it! This write-up by Dennis Gustafsson was an amazing read.

Texel splatting

Texel Splatting: This work has started showing up in my feeds and it’s really cool. Stable 3D pixel art! I’ve never thought about this problem before but this was a thought-through approach for another interesting way of rendering.

tangytd

Tangy TD: Twitch streamer cakez77 released his game after working on it on stream for years. I have followed him on-and-off and it’s very cool to see him finally release the game.

Reading

Exhalation

I’m not great at reading books but I finally started reading Ted Chiang’s Exhalation (with included stories). I picked it up with the intent of reading it during Christmas, but then I got stuck with FRA puzzles or something. I read Stories of your life and others a long time ago and really enjoyed it. He presents cool ideas with a human touch and the fact that it holds short stories makes it easier for a scatterbrain like me.

And finally some other note-worthy reads:

  • Library of Short Stories: Found this on hackernews and it’s like fate is mocking me. Now I just need to find time reading.
  • Determinism: Been doing some reading on game physics and this is a very interesting topic. You would expect same code and same data to yield the same result but there is more to it. I fear a major screw-up in my future if I attempt this myself, but that hasn’t stopped me before.
  • Nobody gets promoted for simplicity: It’s sad because it’s true. This is something I fight daily at work and there were some good lessons in there. Complexity bad.
  • Optimization ladder: Another topic that frequently comes up at work. This talks about how to make Python go wroom.

What now?

The month might have felt a bit unproductive but I haven’t been bored. I attribute the cloud watching to the slow and steady return of daylight. Can’t say the same about the reels though, but I can tell you that I now know a lot about beavers.

The benefit of these hobby projects of mine is that the only value I see in them is having fun (and maybe learn something). Taking a break is basically free and the alternative is burning out on something I don’t even value. With that said, back to it!