A promise to myself

Today there are some people I need to say sorry to. But sorry alone doesn’t cut it. There needs to be a future where I don’t have to keep saying sorry because I don’t have all these problems. So in addition to sorry I need to be able to sit down and speak about how to make this not happen all the time in the future.

That’s the harder part. It’s easy to say sorry. It’s easy to show remorse and hope for forgiveness. It’s harder to change behavior. I read that humans evolved the behavior of showing our sadness to each other (crying, facial expressions etc) in order to encourage our friends and family to feel bad and want to help us. When we do something bad, and then show that we’re remorseful about the bad thing we did, the person we hurt will see our sadness and instinctively have some feelings of forgiveness towards us, even if we don’t deserve it and will just hurt them again. I’m not just talking about me here, I’ve seen this phenomenon everywhere, it’s taught about in Psychology as part of the cycle of abuse. Showing sadness is the easiest way to gain forgiveness, but it isn’t going to break the cycle.

So being remorseful is easy, changing is hard but necessary.

I need to get more discipline about reading

I have a job that requires me to read. A lot. But sometimes I don’t really put my mind into what I’m reading. It’s not that easy to read long, dry, descriptions about other people’s work, but it’s necessary, and I need to get better at it. I’m writing this instead of another post on The American Challenge because I’ve sat for the past few days with my eyes glazed over as I look at (but don’t read) the same sentences multiple times, and it’s got to change so I want to vocalize my promise that I will make it change. I will get more disciplined about reading.

Quick one today

its hard admitting that I failed and it’s hard to go back to the places where I failed but I still gotta keep pushing on. When I started a new job a few months ago I had dreams in my head of what my life would be like. When I lost that new job of course all those came crashing down. But what else can I do but try again? I’ll keep trying until I succeed, I promise.

I want to learn to code, but it’s hard to learn on my own

I’ve described before how I want to make video games.  I’m a self taught coder in a few “academic” languages like R and Matlab and a little Java, but I’ve never worked on anything with graphics so I don’t even know how to start coding for video games.  Over the past year I’ve on-again-off-again tried to get into programming with Unity and I just can’t force myself to stick with it.  I’ll go in, make a block, make a room, and then tap out for weeks or months at a time, it’s just so hard to learn when I don’t have someone to learn from.  I don’t like video tutorials either, I work best with written tutorials, but those seem to be a dying art so I can’t find any.  I was wondering if anyone else had tried to self-teach themselves Unity and knew of any good tutorials for it?  Especially for something very simple and if at all possible turn based.  I don’t think I want to make the next Minecraft, but just having an outlet for my creativity would be nice.