Stasis Clock

I read a lot today. My reading began yesterday evening. A familiar book about connecting games and real life. A book about why games are so good at what they do. Before in my past, I spent many hours reading this book when I felt numb. During these years, I was desperate to feel anything. I went through many self-help books, and gamification caught my interest. Was this a way to hack around my struggles? No. It didn't help me in the way I hoped. However the book gave me many ideas to dream about. A way to help people. I read another one of her books as well. That book covered about working through pain and using concepts of games to help heal. I feel motivated to one day design digital worlds to help circumvent trauma and begin the process of dealing with emotions. Skills I hope to obtain and utilize for wholesome endeavors.  The ideas communicated in both books are incredible. It was yesterday that the thought occurred in my brain to read about gamification again. Then I remembere...

“High tide, rain tracks, will stations leave their appointed mid dime?” A voice whispered. A shake washed me down. Mist touching my face. It snapped all the world into focus. Here. A water scape. Gentle bumps on the sea. Me sprawled on a floating rock shaped into one synthetic station. There were train tracks leaving behind a trail. A trail of forgetfulness. Like reality wasn’t real. The water ignored the metal and bronze. It just moved like gentle whales. Barely making any shakes to where I stood up. It was like stairs high up where everything had an cadence. The world far below in the sea bed. Dirt? Rock? Am I real? Dan. I’m Dan. Water painted down further. A single sun lightly kissed every dark place. It sank to find the earth, and I stayed afloat. No clouds just hazy orange, purplish blue. A humid air brushed every hair giving me goose bumps across my shoulders and arms. I hesitantly swallowed. My black dress shoes tapped. Black socks clung to trembling skin. My casual pants follow...

Another round for a short stint. 40 mins today. I took my daily walk, came back and worked in Xcode. This time around: if statements. I have done boolean comparisons thousands of times. What coder hasn’t? Yet, I could probably count on my hands the times I have worked in UI. All my other coding sessions, when I was sick, targeted the command line. My involvement was trying to figure out my @State bugs. And a bit of tuples. I set up a framework project. Had a standard hello world label. A button at the bottom. It switched between three states. When tapped or clicked, the button’s text changes. Or at least that was the idea. Learned more about @State to figure out the problem. Yet the button did not update. In a separate swift file I had a function called “switch_to_unknown()” that changes the string the button depends on for its state. The string was supposed to have variations of calling the user unknown. Until their name is brought back in a complete circular cycle. A little random fu...

First Hand I played the demo ‘first hand’. The demo that comes with the Meta Quest 3. I like how crisp and clear the world is. The concepts in the game are integrated quite well. Graphics are not the complete solution to greater immersion. It is more about concepts. How they are written. Weaved together. Better Graphics increases the amount pixels that can be rendered. Which allows for more activity in the world. However, without good design it will feel the opposite of being immersed in virtual reality. For example take pictures. We have higher resolutions. iPhones for the longest time didn’t have more than 12 mega pixels. A possible answer for this is software needed to be created. With greater detail, the responsibility for good photography goes up. Now software in phone tech will do the heavy lifting for us. So that it as easy as clicking a button and the photo is calibrated to look better by default. It is like digital painting software that can ease the jitter of a line and smoot...

Memory Lane: Many, many headaches... A little update here. I'm finally doing it.  Years ago, before I turned from 19 to 20, I started dreaming about app development. It was when iPhones and Android phones had only been around for a few years. Probably less than or equal to five years in.  I went to the local library and checked out three huge books. That same week, I went on a fishing trip. While my grandparents were driving the motorhome, I sat at the table, with my seatbelt on, reading through one book. A heavy book on HTML5.  I had this huge headache. Never before have I ever attempted to think imperatively or with logic. What was syntax? And why is it that misspellings or capital letters sometimes work in the browser? What are hyperlinks? And why was Javascript needed? Didn't even realize coding was creative as well. That logic needed imagination to go with it. Art running in parallel with the technical. It was too scary to think of anything else. On top of it all, I ...

Growth. It has direction. There is a stimulus. And the records are part of its growth. This code is incomplete. The programming is inefficient, and it is a representation of an idea. So its pseudo code. I am just writing the concept that is swirling in my head. Something I thought of after a walk.  That night, I sat with my phone. Scrolling through picture after picture of tree roots. Tuning in. Looking at the growth. And imagining records being laid down as the root grew. What is the pattern that defines its shape? How can I write this in code? To create tree roots of variety each with their own records? How does a tree have its own identity? What causes every tree to have different network root systems? Many, many questions. The place where beauty is specified by art, and that art is caught by universal design. A universe of variety. Each moment. Each stretch for growth is a defining trait. Something you can recognize even if you dislike trees. Its that profound even if the zen d...