I really don't want to just leave this place to rot, forever, even if it
feels sometimes like I don't have anything to say. Finals week was hell,
and I skipped another public speaking class, but it's done, now --- I did,
I think, mostly alright with my grades, but I'm out of money, jobless and
insomniac, trying to sort myself out into some semblance of baseline human
productivity so I can make enough to go back.
Probably not to the same school. I'm tired of it there, and have no
friends on campus to miss anyway. It'll be good to find somewhere with a
better selection of courses, too: the only philosophy classes ever
offered at my community college are about ethics, namely the least
interesting kind of philosophy, at least to me.
In programming news ... I started rewriting from scratch an old
WhiteboardFox-style art program of mine, called "wormboard." Still in C,
but taking a slightly different approach. I'll probably rewrite it again,
though some things are definitely an improvement over the first version
--- a dynamically expanding quatree instead of a weird k-d tree grid
system, and SDL3 instead of GLFW; SDL3 actually has a pen pressure API
now, and file save/open dialogs, both a godsend for art programs like
this.
I've also been trying out Rust again. It's definitely *interesting*, and
having stuck with the borrow checker frustration for on small, simple
problems, I can say the Rust standard library's emphasis on composing
iterators is really nice to work with, letting you operate on vectors in
almost a functional way, but without having to do all the memory moves and
allocations that tends to involve.
That said, I really really hate how difficult it is to just ... factor out
common functionality into another function, when it comes to mutable data.
It's so extremely common, in programming, to have a set of functions that
act on the same mutable data structure; but in Rust you can't easily
define one in terms of another, because there can only be one mutable
reference to the same bit of memory, even when the scope of one reference
is entirely contained within another, when, as far as I know, no error
could *possibly* result from allowing it.
I think a post or two ago I talked about not wanting to make this into a
tech blog. Well, that's still true. It'd be good to maybe post creative
writing here eventually, if I produce any --- I used to, what feels like
years ago, but it's been ... a *while*, since I had anything resembling a
regular schedule for writing. Haven't even been staying on top of more
visual art lately, save impulsive doodles, small things, nothing nearing
the bigger projects I used to pump out.
