It's surprising how some experience and time can completely change one's ability to learn. I'm self studying Python right now for the game I want to make; in high school and university I learned C#, but I always had trouble with python. The way it handled for loops was especially confusing. Here's one for example:
cats = ['kitty', 'kitty2']
for cat in cats:
print('I'm a kitty cat')
In my brain, I could never understand where the variable 'cat' came from. It just seemed to appear out of nowhere. In contrast, nowadays it's immediately clear that it's just a placeholder word that refers to the current selection in the array as the program cycles through it - but I just couldn't get my head around that as a teen. It seems absurdly obvious now that I have more grey matter in there, but somehow it just never clicked. It makes me feel more hopeful for the things I still struggle with - maybe in a few years I won't have any trouble at all with something that feels impossible right now.
In other news, I recently read a really depressing essay someone wrote on their neocities. The theme was all about how some people 'shouldn't' make a neocities because they have nothing valuable to say. What an exclusionary, sad outlook on life. They really saw no value in people learning and having fun on neocities, instead deciding that websites had to be useful or interesting based on their own arbitrary opinions. I truly hope nobody who follows my website feels that way, because it's a massively limiting way of seeing the world. Self fulfilment and/or having fun is a reason in and of itself to create!
Okay, I finally did it and split this blog into two pages because it was getting massive. Feels nice to start fresh in a way! Anyhow, life is continuing on as it is wont to do. I made a game recently which you can play here, and I'm getting the itch to make another. This time I'm planning on making it more artistically cohesive so I'm learning how to animate 2d skeletons. Here's an example of one (the gif export option on DragonBones is scuffed as hell, I promise it's actually smooth and loops in reality):
Yesterday I had nothing to do at work so I read most of a book about topophilia. It's a very interesting area of study; a lot of it seems very obvious until you really think about it and realise you're making a bunch of assumptions based on your own experience. For example, the fact that to us the stars are really far away in all directions. But to a medieval person, looking up at the stars would be more like staring directly up at the pitch-black roof of a cathedral. Our concepts of verticality and horizontal thinking are completely different. Isn't that beautiful in a way?