Journal

Change of plans

16/03/2021 - So you can only upload certain files to neocities unless you donate. Well I guess I should've expected that. Luckily I already have a short term solution which is using a 3rd party file host and just link it, but, that's only short term, because usually these kind of services often don't last very long and when they do they only keep your files for so long. I might have to ask for a favour to some people I know. Meanwhile I should probably figure out which pomf instance will host my shit for the longest time. In other news I completed exercise #5, meaning it's only one more and then I can move onto the songs and THEN I'll be done with chapter 3.

Wow, you can actually SEE words now

14/03/2021 - All the credit goes to my friend Ivan for suggesting the use of tables to cheat which worked spectacularly. I didn't post yesterday because I was busy weeping in the valley of despair which you can see pictured in the graph below:

I seriously underestimated how hard exercise #4 would be and after hundreds of tries I was starting to lose hope (again), mostly because early in the day I began thinking there might've been something wrong with my playing posture and that it was probably impacting my progress. Fixing posture is not easy, it'd mean unlearning what my muscle memory cemented in for the past 6 weeks and spending a long time getting used to something new AGAIN; the thought of that frightened me, it'd mean throwing weeks of work in the trash, and that's terrible.
Luckily, after butting my head against the same exercise over and over as well as trying a bunch of different hand positions I realised there was actually nothing wrong with what I was doing: I just needed more time and practice. So in the end I managed to complete the thing at the dreaded 130 BPM.

But why 130?

Because I'm retarded and stubborn. At the start of chapter #2 of the book, the instructions said
"You're ready to move onto the next chapter when:
  • you know this
  • you can do that
  • You can play through all the exercises at a speed of AT LEAST 65 beats per minute without hesitation"

"So what the hell is wrong with that?"

That's what you'd think, and the answer is: nothing is wrong with it, the book bears no faults; I do. You see, in order to play following the tempo I used this very neat little tuner+metronome app on my CIA spying device; now among all the cool bells and whistles the app has, it's also got this feature which lets you create a custom beat using the sampled sounds that it provides, so instead of the default "tick, tick, tick, tock" it starts with, I edited it into a basic drum beat with high hats and the snare BUT, long story short, I fucked up the tempo settings and so what was marked as 65 BPM was actually 130 without me knowing. Yes, without me "knowing" because what does a beginner know how fast 65 BPM is supposed to be? The result was that I went through the trouble of completing all of the chapter #2 exercise at twice the required tempo. It wasn't until the mid of chapter #3 that I realised my mistake by listening to another metronome that was set to like 90 BPM and sounded way slower than my "65."
"Still if I managed to complete all of the previous ones at 130, I can surely continue doing it. Besides, a strong foundation will make it easier later on." That was my line of thinking but really I think it's a way to rationalise with the fact it doesn't "feel" right to just do them at their recommended speed now. Basically, despite the frustration, I've resolved to keep doing it, and that's why it takes me so long to finish the more tricky ones like #4. Ok now, that's a huge word vomit I've typed out, that's enough. I'll upload the recordings of exercise #4 and the music sheet of #5 tomorrow. Maybe I should just upload all the previous ones too, man that's a lot of shit.

Now it's RADICAL

12/03/2021 - I was going to redraw the background but that proved too lengthy and boring so I just posterised it and called it a wrap. Honestly, I'm content with it aside from the fact now you can't read shit. I need to find a way to have some kind of backdrop overlaying on top of it so text is still readable, until then, enjoy the fucking eye-sore.

I also should probably start adding some shit to the guitar page, I've been playing guitar for about a month and a half now, I kinda wanted to record my progress but haven't yet. I guess I'll upload the music sheet of the exercise I'm trying to do now, after I'm done with this entry. Guitar's pretty rad. I had one when I was a 15 something years old kid but, at the time, I mostly had it as a toy, and since I had no proper guidance or motivation to do anything myself, it went nowhere. I parked it in its gig bag for a good few years until I moved and it got stolen marking the end of my guitar "career." How exciting.

Recently though another spark lit inside me and so I decided to restart my learning journey, but this time for real. Hmm, maybe I should also start learning Japanese again. It's not actually that hard you know? Maybe I should make another page for that. Maybe.

Loneliness

I'll tell you, doing anything alone is what saps me of all my motivation at least nowadays, maybe it was the same as a kid but I didn't do much besides play video games then. I've started quite a few 'projects' which I gave up on after a couple days, weeks or months and never progressed past the initial random burst of enthusiasm that made me start them in the first place. I've eventually come to the conclusion that it's the lack of company that causes it. When you have someone to do things with everything is more fun and engaging. Well I think that's one of the things that bothers me in particular, it's probably not the same for everyone but I'm sure a few can relate. Either way, this digression was to say: perhaps this site can help. Perhaps by working on it and uploading and sharing material and thoughts about the things I'm doing I can pretend I'm in good company.

First and hopefully not last entry

11/03/2021 - Figure I might as well start uploading some content here since it's the kind that takes less effort. Not sure what I should talk about yet. An introduction? I don't want to give unnecessary personal information out like that. Why I made this perhaps? Archival efforts, sharing stuff that might or might not interest some, and last but not least boredom. Keeping records of my life and experiences and whatnot has always been something I wanted to try but never did due to laziness; right now I'm being invested by one of those productivity waves that I go through every now and then and so here we are.

Maybe I should format these better

But I've never kept a journal let alone a website. Truth to be told, I did take some IT classes back in the day but it's been so long I forgot 99% of the little I had learned at the time. HTML isn't hard though, I'm sure I'll be able to slowly learn to make this more presentable.

Views and plans

I noticed I got 36 views despite the site amounting to a single, near bare page and nothing to show, and that's nothing short of amazing. I wonder who looks at this. Hopefully in the near future I can upload some interesting stuff. I hope this isn't one of those projects I start full of enthusiasm and drop after 2 weeks. Those 36 people who opened my page now surely have high expectations and I can't let them down. No promises though. I wonder if I can add some kind of comment section or way to contact me in the future, but that's a topic for another day, for now I'm just drawing a custom background for the site, it's not done yet, here's a sneak peek:

Anyway, that's it for now, ta-ta.