I've been sitting around with unwritten ideas of what specifically I want to work towards, and I think it's valuable to not only keep it organized and secure but just as an excercise in self-perception. It's good practice for learning how to write and format these types of articles, anyhow.

So to start, I'll make a list of what I have been and want to spend my time working towards:

• Playing the social game and meeting new people.
• Doing schoolwork (of course, I'm a college student).
• Learning and improving my coding skills, even outside the classwork I'm doing. Maybe actually make something in Python, because I'm absolutely not writing anything in Racket (lang) outside of classwork.
• Making sure I do both my jobs, at the moment I work both:
• IT Helpdesk (~6.5hr/week).
• My senior sysadmin job (of which I am paid by upkeep not completion, also I can't believe I'm the senior as a freshman hire lmao).
• Making music, as I purchased Renoise and generally the fact I don't use windows anymore for anything but FL Studio has dramatically dropped my usage of it.
• Listening to more music, be it music I've already heard or more unique things.
• Actually playing and finishing games.

Expanding more on what was listed

To preface this, I absolutely have loved my college experience so far, but that really hasn't been due to the social aspects. It's not that I dislike the people I talk to inherently, but I think I've been doing something wrong in that I haven't been attracting the kind of person who I would want to befriend on a more (platonically) intimate level. To some extent you can only extend yourself so far until the pieces of the puzzle either fall together or you get burnt, and I feel I've done enough that I don't need to deeply concern myself with having people not know my name in classes. In that, I feel I should reduce the amount of mental energy I spend trying to get people to not only remember my name but like me atop that. Not wipe it out completely, but probably recenter my life around the things I listed above that I feel are more important that what can feel like a fruitless uphill battle often.

Schoolwork is a funny topic. I've never used canvas before and I can't say I particularly enjoy how it works for both listing the assignments I have due as well as showing me what's upcoming, particularly because it doesn't auto-clear. I used Schoology during my time in highschool, and while that was flawed in its on ways, I at least figured out how to output the dates to my calendar. It's probably a skill diff, but I haven't bothered to dig in the website and figure out shit like that. Other than that, I feel I've done reasonably well at doing my homework? College so far has been significantly easier than HS, and a lot of that comes down to the work being semi-self paced in how and when you sit down and try and learn things, and that gels with my life better than sitting in different rooms for 7 or so hours doing things with teachers who don't know me well.

I'm really glad I'm spending the time to type this out. If anyone has any criticism of my code, please feel free to send me anything. I learned all my HTML and CSS by coding this site from the late, late night coding session I had on the 23rd. I'm completely and utterly clueless. I think I took a class on writing webpages in middle school? Either way, I know for fact this is infinitely better than whatever I would have put out at the time. This in general is getting me used to git and GitHub, which is wonderful. I like scripting, and I like that webdev tends to have a lot of well written documentation out there, which honestly makes it a shame when people throw whatever random shit they write into an LLM.

I could go on end about both of these fucking jobs, lol. My helpdesk job isn't unbearable in some way or anything, but it's essentially just 6.5 hours a week of me sitting in an uncomfortable chair being super tired and unable to lay down. The other one, my sysadmin one, is unbearable for a different reason. You may have read that I'm the senior and wondered to yourself who the junior is? Well, to get into it, this guy got hired at the same time as me, and is on the same mailing list as I am, yet he still never replies to any of the emails nor makes any effort to communicate with me about actually doing his work. And so now I'm placed in an awkward situation: Do I pester him to help me, or do I keep telling my bosses about it? I've already "blabbed" once, mostly out of annoyance that I'm doing all the debugging and hardware stuff by myself. I have no inherent hard feelings toward the guy, but I want to not be the only person actively working at my job.

Music has been a big struggle for me since May. Around then is when I got fed up with Windows being shitty, and I practically fulltime switched to Linux fulltime, before I formatted my year old install of Arch that I probably did untenable things to as a stupid noob. I've had the outline of an album basically finished but I have not been happy enough with the songs I have planned for it nor anything I make whenever I try and make music again. It's a fucked up cyclical thing, and I was hoping the inherent breaks being on Linux fulltime would have broken that stupor musically but it seems to have not done so for me unfortunately. I'll probably end up writing more about music at some point later.

I've kinda fallen off broadening my musical horions as of late. I mean, I'm still absolutely into my weird autism video game OSTs (much love to you Naotoshi Nishino), but I haven't really found the energy inside me to keep pushing at that stuff. It's probably another victim of my switch from Win to Linux, due to me losing the ability to natively run MusicBee and AIMP (nothing will ever beat the convenience of right clicking on a file and instantly opening it in a nice GUI tag manager that doesn't SUCK). I still love the things I find in music to this day, but I have a lot of other priorities in my life and this has fallen to the wayside as of late.

I love games, and I don't think I'll ever stop thinking that. I just think they're the most interesting medium by far, because they combine everything. Anyways, in about 5~ days, Final Fantasy Tactics's remaster comes out, and I'm so keen to play it. I've had it on my backlog for ages, and the press release that Yasumi Matsuno wrote [source] about it enamored me. I'm super excited to play it. I've also been getting into FFXI these past few months, half of it not even being about the game but just getting it to run really well under Proton with Ashita v4. I also beat Pikmin a week ago after never having played it before, and while it's a super short game, it's just peak for like 9 hours. I was absolutely hooked, like I was while I played some of my favorite games. TODO: Write an another post about my favorite games at some point.

What I drew from this, and what you can too

I think it's in invaluable skill to both have the ability to perceive what you find important on a day-to-day basis, and then atop that to be able to put those thoughts into words. There was a time where I struggled to do an exercise like this, not only due to my weaker writing skills, but also because I fundamentally lacked a level of self-perception which I at this point find fundamental not only in myself but those who I associate with. If you can't sit with yourself and unroll your subconscious you'll tend to unknowingly make mistakes in mental planning that you couldn't have conceived nor predicted. Even if your goalset daily is something as simple as "Get up, shower, brush your teeth, eat, jerk off, sleep" you'll always be in a better place making that deliberate rather than accidental.

(tl:dr: someone who has their shit laid out will always be in a better state to prepare themselves for life than someone who doesn't)