It's been about a month or more since I started the Handmade series. It's by far the thing that's stretched my abilities the furthest. It's pushing me to take things slower, understand them, and do them right. To be candid, most of the time I'm stuck on making things work. It doesn't help either to showcase my inabilities live on Twitch. Yet it's the entire reason I started streaming: to stretch my abilities and to get better. The streaming helps maintain consistency. I've been quite tempted to just quit streaming altogether because it "feels" like I'm not making any progress. At the same time, as much as I can entertain the thought, I physically just can't let myself quit. It's a flaw or a strength depending on how you look at it. From past experience, I know that it won't always be this way and I won't always suck as hard as I am right now. It's just a pain in the arse to convince my mind of it. So after an hour of procrastination, I just have to bite the bullet and get to it. I've been a bit inconsistent lately, and that certainly does not help. I find that the more days I show up to stream, the faster I make progress. Every time I take even a day off, I lose context and have to stumble around a bit to find my footing. Every additional day increases that exponentially. It's something I've got to work at. The wild thing is, if I show up often, I enjoy the stream a lot more too.
As I'm writing this, I just realized I need to do the thing I was avoiding and use a 2D array to write the image to X11. Then just have a helper that converts it to a 1D array just before I write the image to X11. It will make my life a lot easier in the long run. It's a lot of copying, but computers are quite good at arrays. If it becomes a problem, I can look into it later. Currently, I'm able to software render the screen at a consistent 30FPS while running OBS. Which is pretty good. So performance is not the biggest concern at the moment. I tried 60FPS, but it maxes out at around 50FPS. Like I said, it's a problem for later.
The conclusion is: do something a little bit but do it consistently, it makes a huge difference. I know this but still need reminding now and again. Onwards. It's a minor setback on a long road to mastery. Overall I've dropped the ball a bit. Even my writing is gone down to once a week. They all seem to be adding up. How you do one thing seems to be how you do everything. Come on Seagin, get your shit together.