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[lazar-codes]

I love that now that I'm back in school, I have the motivation to do everything except for school. Read a book (or 3)? Draw so many pages/illustrations? Learn how to use gouache? Learn how to animate? Continue watching that tv show I've been putting off? Finally finish the video game I really only place once a week? Yes to all. It's like I can't go out and do stuff in public, because I feel like I should be at home doing school-work, but since I'm home I can do all these other things, right...?

[lazar-codes]

It feels really weird to be back in school after a little over a year. What do you mean I have to continue to do schoolwork after coming home? Or that I can't do my weekly extracurricular activities because I have to do schoolwork? Also, why am I so tired when I literally just had 1 class for the day and woke up at 10, when 2 months ago I woke up at 6:30am for 4 days and worked 8.5 hours, yet didn't feel tired then? Anyways, being back at school has been interesting, to say the least

[lazar-codes]

I just want to pop in and say that today marks 1 week of me living in Ireland for school! Classes start tmr, so this is when the real fun begins!

[lazar-codes]

Random Rambles

Note: I originally wrote this on June 17th and just stored it in my drafts to rot, but then I thought I might as well let the world hear me yapping, so here you go! There might be more to come in the near future.

TLDR: I talk about a lot of useless stuff, like my thoughts on productivity and art. Basically; being solely focused on productivity == not good, and art is fun again.

I have random strings of thought going on in my head and so I'm just gonna write and see where it takes me.

Thought 1 - Productivity:

I want to say that I haven't been a productive person these last few months, but that's not true. However, I feel like this "productiveness" that I've been doing isn't what a lot of "productivity-focused" people would consider productive. I've been seeing a lot of posts online about how to become more productive, or maximize the result by minimizing effort, hustle culture, etc... and idk if it's because I'm getting older or what (sure, I'm in my mid-20s, but mentally I'm 84), but to me this is so unbelievably un-maintainable. I get wanting to improve at stuff, but you'll burnout so fast and feel like shit after, I don't know why people go through that. Hell, that's how I felt with programming; it's super exciting to get started on it, but after months of going at it with very little breaks, it's hard to get back into it once you stop because you realize you don't like it as much as you did at the start, and that's fine. It doesn't mean you're a failure, it just means it's time for a break and to try something else. It feels like there's an expectation to have your identity tied to one thing only, but that's not right. Imagine how nice it is being able to do multiple things in different fields. You can switch your focus to work on something completely different while waiting to recharge. Sometimes it's better to take things nice and slow (if time permits, that is), and enjoy the process rather than the product. The problem is that that's not how the world works, and that sucks. At this point in time, it's a struggle to have a work-life balance for most careers, especially with the rise of hustle culture and gig jobs. And so I guess in my own way, I will continue to quietly rebel against that while I can and accept that it's ok not to be 100% "productive" and to spend time doing things I enjoy, even if it doesn't lead me anywhere in the long run. Ok, this is the end of this line of thought.

Thought 2 - Art:

Now, I want to talk a bit about art. I've recently been watching random videos on the art community and its drama, and oh god. Apparently the community in some apps is really bad, and I can't wrap my brain around why that is. For example, I heard that a lot of artists are discouraging and mocking new artists because of their lack of skill with regards to anatomy and style. I can't even comprehend why someone would do that...? At some point in everyone's life they're a beginner at something, and instead of helping them rise and being excited that someone wants to enter this new world, people put them down. It makes absolutely no sense. Before I started doing art for myself, I hated doing it and would only draw for class in elementary school. But after a teacher gave me an "A" in art class, I was so encouraged to continue because someone believed in me and thought I was good, and that feeling helped me enjoy art. And to think that instead of giving new artists these feelings people just shut them down, is so disheartening. How do you form a community if everyone rejects everyone else? I've been doing art for myself for 12 years now and have gone through long periods of no art, followed by some small bursts of inspiration, and the thing that I remember the most fondly is the friends I made and how excited I was for those specific people to see what I've created. And we'd all hype up each others' art, which motivated us to do more art, and it was the best positive feedback loop one could ask for. And now, things seem so separated and divided and discouraging.

But I'm not all doom and gloom here today. The reason what I said above is bothering me so much is because I've gotten a sudden burst of art inspiration this year, and even though I don't know what sparked it, I'm riding this wave out as long as I can, and I'm having such a good time! For the past 3 years I've been sketching in pen and hated it, but after spending 3 months doing pencil, I've gone back to pen and have fallen in love with it again. A lot of people say that drawing in pen improves your art because it forces you to think about what lines to draw and helps you draw faster, but I realized that those are the reasons why I wouldn't want to draw in pen. Instead, I've found that pen allows me to commit to my mistakes, and instead of being bummed about the sketch not looking perfect, I'm forced to continue and am encouraged to capture the overall vibe rather than the small, perfect, details. And you know what? I love that! Sure, I'll fill a whole page of ugly sketches, but when I'm flipping through my sketchbook and see those again, I don't think they're ugly at all. They convey an idea, and if I want to expand on it and make it pretty, I know that I can. As for the second point of drawing faster; like I said in Thought 1, I think it's better to take things slow and focus on enjoying the process instead of the result. I think it also stems from going against the productivity mindset and the whole short-attention span thing that we all apparently have, where instead of getting things done right away so you can move onto the next thing, you should just sit and focus on one thing at a time and get completely sucked into it. My last finished art piece took nearly 7 hours, and I might get back to it and change some things, but those 7 hours feel like they went by so fast because I was having so much fun! And I think that's the ultimate thing; are you having fun? Because if not, then why bother? And that can be applied to any hobby. I think that's why I'm not doing any coding projects at the moment, because I'm not having fun and I see it as a chore when it shouldn't be.

Thought 3 - Fanart and TV shows:

Now, a lot of my hobbies go through phases, where at most I'll be into 2 different hobbies at the same time. Luckily, hobby 1 (watching tv shows) is directly motivating hobby 2 (art) and I've got such a good cycle of working in my sketchbook because I'm obsessed with the show I'm watching (Money Heist) and drawing so much fanart. And as a side-note, I've only posted 2 digital pieces of fanart for the show and have refrained from looking up existing fanart (I'm avoiding spoilers like the plague), and I gotta say, it feels super isolating because I'm not sharing any of this with anyone, but it also feels really freeing? Like, I have no idea how other people draw the characters or what they like/dislike about the show. I feel like I'm a kid again without internet, just drawing what I want because I like it and the subject matter, not to just show other people. Sure, I already have a piece that I posted and want people to see, but again, I had so much fun working on it that attention to it is merely an afterthought and not the goal. Not only is that cool, but I'm also enjoying something without knowing what the general population thinks about it, and that's so freeing! There's no bias going into it because I haven't heard anything about it. Man...if you can't tell, I'm having such a good time. It's kinda making me want to abandon social media so that way I can experience a bunch of new stories without knowing anything about it beforehand. It's a shame I'm too addicted to scrolling...

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24/06/2024

I'm not dead, I'm just taking a long break from coding and am working more (apparently being on-call for a retail job is 100% possible and I'm trying not to regret it). This blog may be more active starting in September, but for now I decided I want to actually learn the art fundamentals despite being an artist for 12 years now, and I wanted to show my next piece where I use perspective and I'm posting it here because this counts as learning. I don't think I'll post more art-related studies on this blog; I mainly just wanted to say that I haven't abandoned this blog.

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06/03/2024 || Day 21 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 went to ASL class

🔸 cleaned my room

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So, I was gonna be productive today, but I got an email from a school in Ireland saying that I got accepted in their Human-Computer Interaction Master program, so I couldn't focus on anything today. I still need to think it over and accept, but yeah, that's cool!. That, plus I'm flying to my home-town tmr and I'm a nervous flyer, so my brain has not cooperated with me today.

[lazar-codes]

05/03/2024 || Day 20 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 learned arrays in PHP

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

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Work

5in5weeks - I only covered 1 thing in PHP today, and that was arrays. When watching the video on them, I was thinking that they function more like dictionaries or maps, and had that suspicion confirmed when I went on the official documentation and it said that "An array in PHP is actually an ordered map". Good thing I've worked with maps a lot in my personal projects...

💌 Day 2: What are your three goals with learning PHP?

Honestly, my only goal is to get the basics of PHP down so that I can get familiar with it and maybe work more with it to the point that I'm comfortable enough with adding it to my resume. I'll look at what type of projects I can build using PHP later.

[lazar-codes]

04/03/2024 || Day 19 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 started learning PHP

🔸 started learning Blender

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

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Work

Volunteering - Last week was tiring, but fun! The event that I was volunteering at focused on people with intellectual disabilities, and I was part of the health screening section (though I was merely recording data, not conducting the screening). This event had people from all over Canada too. Because of that I had to brush up my french skills, which I haven't used in nearly 8+ years, so that was a struggle. What was less of a struggle was communicating with ASL!! I had one person who was deaf and when I realized it I was able to sign to him! Mind you, when he signed back I didn't 100% understand him because I was too focused on what I was signing, and I definitely made a few mistakes, but I'm still really happy!

5in5weeks - Ok, @izicodes made a challenge 2 years ago to spend 5 weeks learning 5 programming languages, and I thought that was a super good idea and that it would help with my burnout. (link to the project can be found here). Now, I'm gonna be taking weekends off (and I'm out of town for the next few days later this week), so I won't be doing this daily, but I'm gonna try my best not to take random days off. That being said, I'm starting this off with PHP! I covered some basics today by watching a youtube playlist, and I probably won't get through all 100+ videos in a week, but my aim with this challenge is to get the basics done and create something simple. After this challenge, I'll delve deeper into the languages that I like.

💌 Day 1: What are you most looking forward in learning PHP?

I had to use PHP for a class about 2 years ago and I asked my friend to help me (because I had no idea what was going on and it wasn't taught in class), and he basically did the work. Now, I keep on seeing PHP as a requirement for job applications, so I decided to finally get started on learning it. I actually applied for a job half a year ago and they emailed me asking if I knew PHP, and having to say no made me feel like garbage. So...time to change that.

Art - I've been wanting to delve into 3D art for a while now. 3 years ago I looked up the classic donut tutorial for Blender, but that's it. Now I'm gonna do the same thing, but this time progress past the tutorial and actually make things on the regular with it. Hopefully I will be as obsessed with it as I was when I was first learning how to draw, and just pump out as much as I can (quality doesn't matter at the starting point). There's just so much to the interface for Blender that you need to learn...it's overwhelming and intimidating.

[lazar-codes]

5 programming languages in 5 weeks | #5in5weeks Coding Challenge 💻

Hiya hiya! I wanted to create a challenge for myself but thought why not share it with other people! I decided I should dip into learning a bit of the programming languages I wanted to learn but always said “I’ll learn them later!” Later might never come with how busy I have become these days, so learning just the beginner stuff will suffice for now! And that is what the challenge is!

The challenge itself does not only have to focus on programming languages (I only said 5 programming languages for the people who are really new to programming or only know 1 or 2 languages) but the challenge can include frameworks and libraries.

Example programming languages:

☀ Java

☀ JavaScript

☀ C / C++ / C#

☀ PHP

☀ Ruby

☀ Python

☀ GO

☀ Pick 5 programming languages you want to use for this challenge - bonus points if you never worked with the language in the past

☀ Learn the basics of each language e.g. syntax, what environment to work in, learn how to print, basic maths, etc

☀ Learn each language for 7 days - it does not need to be 7 days in a row (those who are extremely busy) but bonus points if you do 7 days, 5 weeks consecutively

☀ Use the hashtag #5in5weeks or #5in5WeeksCodingChallenge - to track your progress for your blog and for others to see on Tumblr (or anywhere really)

☀ OPTIONAL: you can include pictures on your posts

☀ OPTIONAL: on the 7th day of each language, build a simple, basic project! You can share it on your post, if you wanted

In the posts, you can talk about what you learnt about the language. If you wanted, you could include the resources you used to help you learn. Talk about what you found easy to understand and what was hard to get the grasp off! But to be honest, you can talk about anything!

If you choose to include the mini project at the end of the week, you can talk about the project, again including the ups and downs!

These prompts are completely optional! But I will definitely be using them~!

💌 Day 1: What are you most looking forward in learning [insert prog. language]?

💌 Day 2: What are your three goals with learning [insert prog. language]?

💌 Day 3: How do you print “Welcome to Earth!” in [insert prog. language]?

💌 Day 4: What has been easy so far from learning [insert prog. language]?

💌 Day 5: What has been difficult so far from learning [insert prog. language]?

💌 Day 6: Favourite topic so far from learning [insert prog. language]?

💌 Day 7: Will you continue learning [insert prog. language] after this challenge? Why?/Why not?

I really hope I can complete this challenge! I really want to try some languages I have been scared of continuing or trying, e.g. C++...

Again, this challenge is more for me to track my progress but anyone else can join!

That's all and have a happy day programming! ♡

[lazar-codes]

28/02/2024 || Day 18 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 went to ASL class

🔸 worked on responsiveness for Frontend Mentor project

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Work

ASL - Some of my classmates have said that I've gotten really good at reading fingerspelling...all of my practice is finally paying off! It feels good.

Frontend Mentor - I started working on the responsiveness of this project and am mad at myself for not doing this at the start of the project...

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27/02/2024 || Day 17 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 worked on final results functionality for Frontend Mentor project

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

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Work

Even though I'm not working much this week, I picked up some volunteering shifts for an event being held in my city this week, so it'll be a slow week in terms of programming. Yesterday was set-up day and today my body hurts from that (and my work shifts involving lifting heavy boxes too).

Frontend Mentor - So...I think I finished the functionality for this project today...? I'm convinced this it the ugliest code I've ever written, but hey, it works! And it's a small enough project that it's not the end of the world. There was a lot of internal debating on whether or not I wanted hard-code certain parts or ensure that it'll be scale-able/is dynamic, but again, because it is a smaller project I didn't feel too bad to hard-code some aspects. And for the rest of the week, I'm gonna suffer while making this responsive.

Art - I gotta say, my hard work at sketching horses for many pages last year has paid off, because I've been re-watching Bojack Horseman and I can draw him in my style without him looking weird. Hooray! I also got some more graphic novels from the library, so hopefully my art inspiration and art motivation will continue, because I'm having a lot of fun doing art again. It's a shame there are no good artist spaces online to share it.

[lazar-codes]

22/02/2024 || Day 16 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 added ASL words from class to flashcard program

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

🔸 finished drawing of my BG3 character

🔸 go to local board game cafe for Magic the Gathering night

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I decided to take today kinda easy so I didn't work on my Frontend Mentor project (mostly because I'll be working for the next few days and I wanted a day off today). Instead, I decided to be productive in the artsy way and finished my drawing that I started yesterday, and I'm super happy with it! I also decided to treat myself today and go to the bookstore before heading to Magic, and got myself another graphic novel and a non-fiction book by an author I like! I couldn't find the first book in the series for the graphic novel, but I figured I might as well grab the sequel since I'm there. I noticed that I got super inspired with the other graphic novel that I bought (which I think can be seen a bit in my art now), so I want to continue to find books I can buy and look at for inspiration! It feels super good to want to draw again.

[lazar-codes]

21/02/2024 || Day 15 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 worked on add-on functionality for Frontend Mentor project

🔸 went to ASL class

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

🔸 started (and nearly finished) drawing of my BG3 character

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Work

Frontend Mentor - Today I was trying to figure out how I wanted to tackle the optional add-ons for this project, and came to another roundabout way of doing so. Because these are optional, I'm storing the addons as their own property within my user property, and recording if the user selected (or de-selected) that one. I do this by waiting for a change in the checkbox status. If it's checked, then I add it to an array variable keeping track of the selected addon(s). Then, on any type of change (either in checkbox or when changing from monthly to yearly payment), I call a function that will check to see if the current values in my user.addon properties match with the correct expected values. If not, then I replace the current value with the correct value. To do that, I iterate over my addonServices object that contains the data I'll pull, and see if each property in that object is found in my array of addons the user selected. If it is (meaning, the user has selected that addon), it'll fill the appropriate user.addon property with the value depending on whether the payment is monthly or yearly. Again, I used the same code to gain access to object properties dynamically. And hey, it works! Anytime I add or remove an addon, it gets added or removed from the array, or anytime I change the payment frequency, then that update function is called. Now I can start to work on showing that with the HTML...tmr.

[lazar-codes]

16/02/2024 || Day 14 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerspelling

🔸 worked on switching the payment amount based on payment frequency (i.e. monthly to yearly, vice versa) and started code for dynamically outputting the results for Frontend Mentor project

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

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Work

Frontend Mentor - I started to tackle the big things today in a very distracted manner. The first thing that I needed to do was to figure out how to access object properties dynamically, so that way I don't need to have a million if-else statements and hard-code the values. So I created a user object that will contain all the appropriate info for the user that I can then display at the end (in step 4), and a payment plan object that'll contain the name of the plan, and the monthly and yearly rate. This way, when filling out the user info for the plan, I can use my local variables to find the info in the payment plan object and "copy" it to the user's info. It was a pain in the butt to do and I still don't understand it, but hey, the code works! Essentially, I created a variable that was a template literal containing the specific field I want, but making it be a template literal allowed me to have the variable change and not be hard-coded. Then, the code goes to the correct object property and I can assign that value to my user object's appropriate property.

Now with this janky code working, I can start to wrap up the functionality of this project!

[lazar-codes]

15/02/2024 || Day 13 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 added words from yesterday's ASL class to my flashcard program

🔸 worked on button functionality and user input functionality for Frontend Mentor project

🔸 sketched a page in my sketchbook

🔸 finished current book!

🔸 go to local board game cafe for Magic the Gathering night

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Work

Frontend Mentor - So, I didn't do the thing I said I was going to do. I ended up working on the functionality for user input and started on error checking and error notification for invalid user input. I didn't even finish that, but that's ok...here's the code for checking for a user's name, email, and phone number (I have yet to add the proper code to check for a valid phone number)

This function gets called when the user is at Step 1 and hits the "Next Step" button. If all the information is valid, the user will then move onto step 2, but if not, the user will remain at step 1.

I was also thinking of how to store some data, and thought of using a JSON file. However, Typescript is making it super annoying to import and read a JSON file, so in frustration I've given up and just gonna make my code inefficient.

[lazar-codes]

14/02/2024 || Day 12 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 practised ASL fingerselling

🔸 went to ASL class

🔸 worked on button functionality for Frontend Mentor project

🔸 started planning new illustration

🔸 read current book

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Turns out that when I pick up extra shifts at work, I don't do anything productive when I get home -- including program. I feel like I haven't done any consistent programming since November, tbh. Hopefully I can find it in me to get back on it, but I'm definitely feeling the programming burnout.

Work

ASL class - I just want to say that today we learned about conjunctions after it was introduced to us 2 weeks ago, and dear lord will I need to sit down and practice it a bunch. I'm excited though!

Frontend Mentor - I decided that I want to wrap this project up ASAP, so of course I did only the minimum today. I got the button functionality all working, where they'll appear and disappear at appropriate times. The next thing that I'll do tmr will be to dynamically fill out the information required in the Summary step, which is depending on the user's selections throughout the form.

Art

Much like with programming, I've been putting off sketching, but this time only for the past 2 weeks. I swear, I was at a sketching high in January, where I filled a page almost every day. Especially at the end of January, because I had finished re-playing The Last of Us Part 2 and was a sketching machine filled with inspiration. But then it disappeared once I made a finished digital illustration of one of my fanart ideas. So, to combat the stagnation I feel, I did the unspeakable and picked up a pen and went in directly without pencil lines. Apparently I can't go 2 months without using pen, despite swearing it off since I used it for nearly 4 years straight. And what do you know? I had fun sketching today. I gotta say though, the best thing about drawing in pen is that the sketches really pop out of the page because they're so bold.

Also, I spent last night looking for some graphic novels I might be interested in, but a lot of ones aimed at adults have art styles and don't really vibe with me, so I started looking at kids' graphic novels and found one whose style I fell in love with! I know nothing about the plot, but I'm really hoping that the art itself can inspire me! Plus, it's a nice little Valentine's Day present to myself.

[lazar-codes]

01/02/2024 || Day 11 (dop)

TLDR:

🔸 added last class' ASL words to my program

🔸 worked on toggle for Frontend Mentor project

🔸 started and finished an illustration for fanart

🔸 started and nearly finished editing and rendering my recording of my illustration

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I can't believe I'm sick again. I've gotten sick for 3 out of the past 4 months, and I'm annoyed. Luckily this is the mildest illness compared to the other 2, but it's still not fun. All my symptoms have been spread out, so the past 3 days I've had one runny nostril, yesterday I was completely exhausted, this morning I lost my voice, and now the other nostril's runny.

Work

Frontend Mentor - I've been slowly chipping away at this project but now I gotta get my butt into gear because I wanted to finish this in January, and it's now February and I still have a lot left to do. Today I worked on the implementation of the toggle between the "monthly" and "yearly" plans, and I got it to work by changing the display to either the "monthly" or "yearly" cost to be either "none" or "block". This is basically what the HTML looks like, and below's the functionality for the toggle.

Basically, I get all the elements that have the term "plan_cost" as their class name and for each element, depending on what the toggle is on (i.e. monthly or yearly) I change their display property. I can fix the code to make it not repetitive, but for now it's fine. I've been doing this project using TypeScript and some of my errors are a little confusing, but Google is a good resource.

Anyways, here's what I have so far. It ain't much, but it's honest work;

Art

Ok, I'm gonna do a bit of a ramble here. I've been replaying The Last of Us Part 2 throughout all of January and I finished it last week. It's still an emotionally heavy game, but it did the trick and motivated me to want to draw some fanart. I've been sketching random stuff in my sketchbook almost every day (not lately now that I'm sick but whatever), but there's one idea that I had that I kept on coming back to, and today I had enough energy to sit down, open up Photoshop, and just draw it. And oh man, that felt really good! I haven't drawn in Photoshop in a while because I've been forcing myself to use Procreate, but it's just not the same. I feel like PS allows me to draw with more control of my lines and details and such, and my image just looks sharper than on Procreate. So I actually managed to pump out a piece that looks pretty much how I imagined it would look, and I didn't get frustrated like I would on Procreate. I also recorded my process and was working on making it a speedpaint, but nearly 4 hours of raw footage was rough on my PC and it's already super late at night, so I'll finish up that process tmr. I love making speedpaints and watching them afterwards. At least that'll count for my days of productivity tmr.