I’m reaching a point in my current project where I’m not entirely sure where to go next. I don’t want to get too specific or anything but I’m trying to extract and image a protein and so far it hasn’t been working. It’s led me to ask the question: what do I do when I don’t know what to do? So far I don’t have an answer for this one, the obvious answer is to “try something else” but that’s vague and isn’t an action plan, try what else. There are a near infinite number of “elses” that I could try to do and no reason to believe any of them would fix my problem. I’ve considered trying to approach the problem from a different angle: why do I think the protein is there to begin with and can I prove that? But nothing is without cost, I could do a big experiment to prove what I already suspected to be the case (the protein is there) without solving my underlying problem (I’m not able to extract and image it). Doing an experiment where the upside is a major setback and the downside is to remain stuck in a rut isn’t appealing.

So I’m still very busy with this project and that’s my excuse for not having a good post today 🙂

There’s someone I love who really needs help but doesn’t want it. There’s an old saying about removing the log in your own eye before criticizing the speck in someone else’s eye. But at the same time, if someone just doesn’t see their problem, isn’t if your duty to try to help them? I can’t fix everything about myself, especially not all at once, but I can at least try to help someone fix themselves while also trying to fix myself. I don’t know what to do though, it’s hard to see someone not get the help they need especially if you love them, but it can destroy a relationship to try to help someone who doesn’t want it. I really hope I can help

So no real post today as instead of writing for my blog I stayed up super late goofing off. This isn’t some deep meditation on the modern world but it really is too easy to get trapped in a spiral these days, there’s more words on the internet than any one man could read in a lifetime. So even while I find myself pointlessly scrolling through social media, I mostly end up just rereading the same things I already know, written by a different person. And when it’s not that it’s reading things I don’t really care about and will forget in a week. The breaking news cycle is the hardest to break out of, recently there’s been a lot of news about Ukraine liberating more and more of their territory, I find myself scrolling through news like an addict looking for any new information even though I know nothing happens in minutes or hours.

So yeah I need to stop.

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 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.

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’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.