I moved in with my grandparents on the fourth. They live in a nice house and they're good cooks. I should be enjoying my time here, and I was at first! It didn't take long for me to burn out from doing nothing again. I haven't been outside too much because I lost my license sometime ago and it's too cold to walk anywhere. I need to minimize driving to minimize my chance of getting arrested for driving without a license, and I can't get another license until I get a job.
Thankfully, that's like, the one thing that's going smoothly. This place that's about a 5 minute drive from where I live had me in for an interview, and I pretty much nailed it. It's gonna be part time until winter ends, but it's still something.
My classes fucking suck. I thought taking 5 online classes that just go over MS Office stuff would be easy, but they want you to use 3 different weird services, and they pretty much don't explain what any of them do or how to sign up. I'm 99% certain that one of them we aren't even supposed to use and it just got left in the class thing by accident. It's a headache to figure out, and that's coming from the guy who's good with computers. I strongly feel as though my professor isn't qualified.
Writing this made me feel a little better. I think I'm going to try and get some work done tonight.

I don't think I'm happy with who I am, and I'm dissatisfied with the way my brain works and how I form opinions and make decisions. This isn't a new development, but now more than ever, bridges are being burnt because of my mistakes.
I want to change who I am but based off past experience I don't know if I can do that. I don't want to go to therapy either; I've had a therapist in the past, and all he did was lecture me on how to talk to angry people. For context it was appropriate given the circumstances, but I still think this is something I should be able to handle on my own. I'm supposed to be able to handle this on my own.

On an unrelated note, I've been sleeping 12 hours per day and it has been bliss.

Wow, it sure has been a hot minute. I've had a couple of other entries that I started but never finished, so this entry is going to be a culmination of them.
It finally snowed 3/4ths of the way through November. I'm always happy when the weather changes but I usually end up getting sick of any season before it ends. Winter especially, because it means I get to experience less sunlight. It's December 4th and I'm starting to miss the sun. Hopefully winter's late start is a sign that it'll end early too, but who's to say.
I got to tour my grandparents house recently. I'm going to be moving in with them on the 19th. Their place is a lot nicer than they'd described on the phone! I'm honestley looking forward to living with them. I panicked and got stressed when I found out that I didn't have my financials in order, but honest to god I'm really not enjoying the art program at my current college. I'm going to be going for a cyber-security degree at the community college I'm transferring to, which sounds way more my speed. Here's hoping things go far more smoothly.
For some time now I've been coming to the realization that part of my low mood is that conversations don't feel real anymore. At the time I came to the conclusion that it was social media and Discord and whatnot, gameifying conversation. Part of what made me come to this conclusion was that I'd recently had conversed on old IRC chatrooms (The where you can't see messages posted prior to logging on) and conversatoin felt real then. Eventually, I realized that it's not the medium of communication that's making it feel unreal, it's the way I use it. It's me. I'm the problem :3
See, rather than sit down and have a conversation with someone online, I'd been using Discord as a way to pass time. Waiting for an elevator? Take out your phone and see if anyone has posted anything. Maybe reply with a quick remark, and then exit the "conversatoin" once you're done waiting. Yeah, no wonder things weren't feeling real. Since having this epiphany I've been able to correct my behavior. Talking to other people feels good again.

The jist of my situation is that I can't afford another semester at the college I'm going to. I have mixed feelings about my classes here anyways. I have two choices, go to an affordable community college and become an IT security person, or live with a relative and work for a while.
My dad tells me that he didn't go to trade school until he was 24, choosing instead to work. Most of my friends, including my sister are doing that. I might've rushed into college with the expectation of a grand future, not actually looking ahead to make sure everything was going to run smoothly.
I haven't updated the website in like a month. I haven't had the motivation to study. That's changing; why, I'd rather not look into, lest I find out, only to lose motivation again. After publishing this article I'm going to change the music and try to fix the indentation dilema. I'm looking to add margins in the future to make everything look cleaner. Someday I'll add a comment section.........

I've been procrastanating on studying programming, just like how I've been procrastanating on everything. It's hard to motivate yourself to do something when nobody's there to witness it or support you.
For those wondering how far I am, I've barely scratched the tip of CSS. Even when I do get familiar with CSS, I don't know how I'm going to make the art for this website.
Well, at this rate by the time I master CSS I'll be out of college with some sort of graphic design degree. Part of me still wishes I went to trade school as that would've been a good chance to increase my physice, and get a job with guaranteed opening. The other part of me thinks I should've persued a programming major since I'm good at math.
It always made more sense to persue a math or programming major, but I wanted to do something more fulfilling. I'm still in my first semester of college so I can change, and probably will; that said, I'm so happy I took my drawing fundamentals class. I've never been able to draw anything well until now. My professor is really encouraging and the textbook we're using is so good. The textbook in question is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
It seems like I've veered off from what the topic originally was. Once a comment section is implemented my rants will be more focused.

I check my website everytime I make an update to make sure it runs smoothly. Despite that, it was just now that I realized that my paragraphs weren't indented. As a side effect of fixing that, all posts that fit within one line are now indented. I'm definetley going to fix that in the future, but not now.
I'm not sure how or if I'm even able to have certain parts of an otherwise indented paragraph not be indented, such as the PS above. At some point, having to go and update all of my previous entries is going to get taxing.
I should probably take that as a sign to post less and work more.

When people say that gaming is dying, I think they're talking about gaming culture. I think the slow death of gaming culture isn't about gamers being divided; not by political differences, or even the move from forums to social media. I think it's several things working together.
First, there's the death of the physical game. Most people don't go out to buy videogames anymore. The experience of going out, waiting with strangers outside of a store for a big release, talking with other patrons and employees about games, and simply getting to go to a store that caters to gamers is gone. To be fair gamestop, which is the only big game store in the U.S., has gone completley downhill; I still think that the rise of digital media is to blame.
Second, we have the downfall of AAA games. It's so hard to get excited for big games anymore because when they launch they're never in a great state. You have to wait anywhere from a month to several years for a game to be actually worth playing. Gone are the days of a unbelievably huge portion of gamers getting hyped up for a game, all getting it on launch day, playing through it at the same time, discussing the game, forming a community, ect. When a games issues finally get fixed, the hype for the game has likely signifacantly died down. People who would've played the game, and even people who bought the game no longer have it fresh on their minds. It certainly doesn't help that most AAA games aren't good anymore.
There's a reason Elden Ring was such a huge deal when it launched.

Even during the lockdown, Elden Ring stood out as one of this generation's greats. It brought people together and showed how gaming culture isn't dead, it just doesn't have anything to work with. Indie games are phenomenal, but they'll never scratch the itch that AAA games do, and as of writing, they don't have universal appeal as of writing.
There was a third point I was going to make but I forgot what it was, and frankly I think these are reasons enough. I wish I had a comment section so I could discuss this with other people, but I haven't had time to work on the website lately. Hopefully in the future I can get that up and running.

The recent shutdown of Romhacking.net has devistated me. For years, rhdn has been the keystone to oldschool game modding. The 20 years of romhacks are a sight to behold, the forum was filled with some of the smartest people out there, and the sites layout was perfect; I hate dropdown menus. Unfortunatley, all good things must come to an end. RHDN is going read-only. This is bad for the health of the independant gaming community, that is to say, the community of gamers not satisfied with eating whatever crappy mushy platforms large corporations want us to use.
With how much AI bots have ruined other websites, Discord seems to be the primary place for communities to engage, and that's by design. An instant messager does not become a keystone for communities naturally. Discord, in the past 5 or so years, has been pushing hard to make itself the lifeblood of communities. The introduction of community servers, stricter rules, and username update were all done to make Discord less of an instant messanger you use to talk to your buddies and more of a social media platform.
It shouldn't be this way. Communities should be self-sufficient. We shouldn't need big tech to provide our platforms for discussion. Alas, the world will never be free from big corpos. If you try to tell the average person that instead of using a single app to engage with a community that they have to go to a website, see a bunch of ads, and possibly even donate, all to use a non-uniform UI, they will call you a weirdo. This is just the way that it is - for all communities except the ones for geeks.
Parts of the gaming community have clung on to forums, and it's not hard to see why. Sites like Reddit are essentially popularity contests (and cesspools, and echochambers), and Discord is essentially quarantined from lurkers and search engines. The people passionate enough to know every detail about a game, know everything there is to know about a series, ect, are the kinds of people who can stomach using a forum that takes 10 seconds longer to load than the common social media platform. The average joe migrating to social media has left forums with users who are passionate about keeping an independant discussion space. The closure of RHDN wasn't caused by the enshitification of the internet. The owner just didn't have it in them to keep running it.
There's reason to be hopefull for the future of online communities. Every day I see more and more youth complain about how sterile everything has become. With enough time, I think forums can make a comeback.
In the meantime, I'm going to work to help that become a reality. I paused learning Javascript due to not having motivation to improve anything in my life - the closure of RHDN has made me realize that unless people like me and you step up to keep the internet independant, things are only going to get worse. The internet was designed so that smaller, independant websites could exist. It was not invented for corporations to rule it.
I've already left every big Discord server I'm in. The only two that I still actively use are smaller ones. Once I fully learn Javascript, I want to turn this site into a discussion space for things I'm interested in. Until then, you can find me on these forums: