Pushing Through

For starters I'd like to comment on the insanity that is dating sites and related. The past few days I have been experimenting somewhat with the former and come to the conclusion that it is mostly a rip-off in a financial sense, perpetrated by those preying on the money from those desperate enough for friendship or a relationship. One site even thought it was alright to force people to pay nearly 90 Euro a year for the privilege of being able to message and chat with others. Others merely nickel and dime one to death by charging for every little thing. The central theme appears to be that of spending lots of money on something which shouldn't have to cost anything at all. To say that I'm feeling disgusted at this situation would be somewhat of an understatement.

Would I like to get more friends? You bet. Would I like to experience a real relationship? Naturally, for all the benefits it could offer to my psyche in dealing with my self-image, PTSD and everything. Would I spend lots of cash on it? No way in Hell. I'd rather conquer my self-loathing and lack of self-esteem and put up more videos on YouTube or such. That seems a lot more beneficial and is more likely to garner me the kind of attention I desire.

Moving on, the past few weeks have been eerily or maybe comfortably regular. Working from 9 AM until 5 PM during the week, no work during the weekend. I'm finding it much easier to focus on what is necessary and separate work and off-time in the process. I have worked my way through some more 3D modelling lessons in 3DS Max and am feeling much more confident in my modelling and texturing skills at this point. I have finished all models for the first level of ECD and the wait is just on for some last bits before we can start putting real levels together for this game.

The past few days I have spent on debugging the Lilium simulator, Milestone 1 (M1). I have finished debugging most of it and am just working out some last bugs in the virtual machine code. Pro-tip: when using vectors use index-based access instead of iterators. It'll make your life a lot less complex. (X_x)

The next version, M2, will feature an actual VHDL compiler, extended VM instruction set, optimized VM and more goodies. It may actually be useful by then :) I'll have to see when Pieter's workplace will consider it worthy of taking a look at. For now they're really supportive already by allowing me to obtain the VHDL standards via them, which would have cost me a lot of cash if obtained via the IEEE store. I still think it's silly that standards documents could be that hard to obtain, but it's their right, I guess.

Thursday is going to be an interesting day, not so much because of the dentist appointment, but more because of the visit I'm receiving afterwards. A few weeks ago I got a message from a student at the art academy in Utrecht who is doing her final project on intersexuality and after finding my site would like to talk with me about it. Hence she's dropping by for a few hours on Thursday. While I'm not 100% sure about the details of her project, I nevertheless am sure it'll benefit my cause of making intersexuality more well-known.

Finally, I may have mentioned before that the skin on the left side of my face has been really sensitive and painful, combined with flashes of headache. I am still having this issue, which hasn't subsided for weeks now. Pieter has been urging me to pay a visit to the GP in case it isn't caused by stress, but I really fail to see the point of relying on the medical system for anything more complex than a cold at this point.


Maya