💬Weekly random discussion & chat thread: W15

I accomplished a handful of things

• Fiance and I told our families that we got engaged
• Improved quite a bit at art
• Finally got pain and anxiety meds
• Moved to a way better location 

Ooo, a thread to satisfy my constant need to overshare, nice!

Week 1: What have you accomplished in 2018?

• Continued working on my art and got decently competent with CSP after years of working mostly on an iPad
• Continued plotting, note taking, character creation, and worlbuilding for my Splatoon comic, Greyscales
• Drew Hana, one of my oldest and most complexly-designed characters, and did a pretty good job with it!
• Called our and completely cut off contact with my abusive father
• Found some new games and franchises I could really deeply invest in and be passionate about
• Started collecting dice and got stuff to make my own
• Went to a bunch of concerts and met my favorite musician
• Survived even when I really didn’t want to or think I could (thanks in part to aforementioned musician :’) )
• Left New England for the first time
• Made plans to move out west to California and start a new life where I can be genuinely happy in 2019

i finally became happy w/ my art style and improved a lot! i'd been going out of my comfort zone and taken commissons!

there's also smthn huge i accomplished (i don't rly wanna publically say for privacy reasons) and it changed my life! i'm so glad i went thru w/ it ;w;

I started college! Albeit twelve years too late but still, progress.

Not too many but some of the important ones are::

          ◎ Writing rather consistently. Not only I wrote a number of English language fictions on TH (major thank you to Caine for the monthly writing prompt thread!), after joining a RP group created by my friend in May, from June onward I also wrote dozen of fictions in Thai. The RP group has a system to 'level up' the characters, with one of the options being drawing/writing something related to the characters' past or their life after joining to plot in RP group. And so I write for three characters almost every month.

           ◎ Participating and winning my first NaNoWriMo. This year I already plan to return, even though I have yet to finish that 2018 novel I won :'D (roughly a half of the entire plot hasn't been written yet even after hitting 50k)

           ◎ Not exactly an accomplishment but last April I bought a new drawing tablet. The old one died on me in late March.

uhhh i guess i tried a lot of new things? musical theater, going to idaho for service stuff, improving w cosplay and character design, and just learning to be a better person jskfkg??? yea

Week 2: What are the things you want to learn, but unable to for certain reasons?

* Either from language, subject, usage of a program/technology, art or writing skills or just whatever. This includes lack of instructors/tutors, overwhelmed by the learning curve, etc.

Driving a car. Whilst I could afford the lessons, I can't afford to buy/run a car on my current wages. 

Being able to drive would make my life a lot easier and make things accessible (being unable to drive especially where I live is severely isolating/limiting), I'm in and out of the country so frequently with work it's not really worth it right now. Especially since I'm looking to make a career out of my job and when I move departments where I'll be out of the country for 6 months at a time. 

I'm gonna ditto driving, but I wasn't interested in it during high school and by the time I was out of college and in my first job, I took lessons and had my parents teach me and I just got so much anxiety out of it. I'd drive with a permit once on the permit then never again.

I really should, and I know I agreed to get my license for groceries and things for when dad has his surgery but Every time I think about being behind the wheel my anxiety rides up so bad. We're currently one car, one driver, two adults, and it's been fine? But if I drive we'll still only have one car and I don't want my anxiety to get me in an accident with the one we have.

--

And also I'm learning some programming to make games? But the engine I started out on, even though it has its own scripting language, assumes you're already highly familiar with another script (python or c++? depending on the tutorial). It's step by step and assumes the student knows what some of these terms mean and how they relate already. "this is just like [x] in python, or [x] in C++)" instead of explaining what it is if it wasn't. Even when I cross-reference "it's like this in some other language" and I keep hitting maze walls.

I'm hoping it'll click one day lmao. But saying "Beginner's Tutorial" is false on anything I can bear to listen to. I get it while they're talking at me, but when I go to toy around by myself I don't even know where to start. I taught myself flash actionscripting a decade ago and it was never this hard. I don't know why I'm struggling now. Heck, I learned ren'py in like three days and made a 20 minute long branching path, multiple ending VN that took previous runs into account. This garbage? I'm so lost.

Related to another big issue is all the "best" youtube tutorials have super heavy accents that I struggle to follow along so much that I have to listen to each step 2-3 times before I can do it myself. And none of these videos have closed captioning.

things i wanna learn... i rly wanna do a university course on marine biology or animal biology in general but i'm so bad at sciences to the point where i sucked at home economics bc it had a lot of science aspects in it 😅 (weirdly enough?)

I want to learn 3D modeling but I feel like I have a lot of other things to learn that would be of more immediate use to me. I want to take some art classes and delve into anatomy studies again. Learn more about designing backgrounds/environments etc. My excuses include trying to juggle work while trying to stay healthy mentally and feeling to overwhelmed by that stuff to worry about learning lol. I want to go to therapy but I keep putting it off with tons of excuses.

• Video editing: I know few basics of it, but that's it. I have Sony Vegas, Adobe After Effects + Premiere Pro and Aviutl but learning most of these programs overwhelms me, I could only survive Sony Vegas because of the more straightforward interface.
• Animation: Well, my siblings took animation and graphic design course, but I doubt they'll have patience to teach the amateur me who wants to learn one for a hobby. I never get to learn it because lack of tools or self-taught friendly tutorials sfsfsfafa
• Composing or creating music(?): Again, mostly for hobby and I like imagining random music I could come up with spontaneously, but I don't think someone with 0 knowledge of instruments could do that without a proper class, hahah. At best I could do is using FLStudio to mix Vocaloid/UTAU covers.
• Translating: ....Mostly JP->ENG because I consume a lot of medias in that language with barely any English contents....but my slow self learner is reaching nowhere near fluent to translate things confidently without worrying about spreading mistranslations lol (at best I could translate simple sentences...)
• Writing: I took literature course and still think I'm bad at it
• Creating webcomics: Ah yes, the thing I want to try the most but lack the skills or knowledge in it despite I tried to look up every possible guides for it, and I'm still not ready. H e l p

• Game programming and web/CSS developing: As mentioned in other posts, self-teaching on gamedev'ing is hard unless you have prior knowledge or basics on it.... Also as much as I heard webdev and coding is Suffering I'm quite interested it it?? It's just I don't know where to start and this is one of those things where I obviously can't survive learning alone. _{I was this close to getting a webdev course but then my college fucked up. At best my course only teach us to use premade web builder like Wix, but that's it.}
• Driving: Or at least ride a motorcycle or even a bike....but the main issues are mostly because I'm unable to afford one and my mother doesn't have that much time to look after me in "dangerous" things like this. Also I have anxiety and easily panic so driving just sounds intimidating to me but I also need it for convenience and my mom works full time and can only fetch me from dorm during weekend orz

Pepperly Oh this is my mood with tyrano and I have 0 experience with any programming language whatsoever and even the tutorials assume you know what the heck you're doing and obviously I don't have a clue. 

Week 2: What are the things you want to learn, but unable to for certain reasons?

I really want to learn how to play a flute (the Western concert kind) and piano but I can't actually afford any of the instruments let alone teaching, and I know I don't have enough self control to practice anything except maybe piano on my own since I at least know how it works. I remember as a kid pestering my parents to let me learn some instrument too but alas we couldn't afford it and now at this age is really hard to form routines the same way you do as a kid :( 

I also want to continue studying Japanese but I can't stand the teacher she stresses me out and is a little rude and just generally doesn't contribute to me learning in any positive way + I was bullied in my previous class for looking like this lol so I don't feel good about going back. But also I have 0 self control to practice on my own either  

I would LOVE to learn drawing and photography! But having barely any free time at all, then I just.... cannot....

I'd also love to learn German, but, for some reason, my brain is allergic to that language. I've been studying german at school since I'm 5 but I still can't say more than two sentences (that translate into "I don't understand" and "I don't speak german").