Further Improvement of Learning Method

I recently read an article that highlighted some of the reasons that simply reading something doesn't really lead to the intense type of learning that I pursue. The reality is that for your mind to really learn something it needs to make mistakes and be challenged in a concrete sort of way. This is whats so great about subjects that implement instant feedback. Because of this I've decided to reassess my method for improving. Although reading is important to learning, immediate integration of the concept is more important. Since what I want to be good at is designing games, writing music and writing creative sci-fi stories I have lots of opportunities to explore immediate integration.

I also have a great amount of time to try implementing this technique in the next week which I have off from school. Ill try and implement it sooner rather then later although this will mean my focus will be completely breadth-wise.

My new approach to learning and assimilating techniques/knowledge from these different activities should heavily emphasize some sort of independent integrative techniques. Potentially the most revealing thing is that my main focus should be activities that actually integrate all of these tasks together. Write a short story in sic-fi about some concept/philosophy I've been thinking about. Write a song that goes with the short story. Make a game that incorporates the sci-fi story at least in a very weak way and incorporates the music in a much more obvious way. This way I would be furthering everything I should be all at once. The problem with this method is its hard to know when you should create rather then learn something new.

So the general formula seems to be to loop: Read--> plan bundle-->execute bundle


The bundle here consists of the tri-fecta of activities being writing music, writing code, and writing stories and their interrelated nature(no matter how weak).

This is my recursive plan from now on. I will try and do this as frequently as I can. This will no doubt slow my reading progress map while hopefully pushing my real progress map to its furthest.

Shrooms: its intense

Yesterday I had pretty much the most intense experience in my entire life. I ate some shroom powder with a bunch of my close friends. I had an incredible experience despite being basically overwhelmed. Its really hard to express so I'll do my best to highlight some of the things I remember and noticed. The first thing I'll talk about I suppose is the fact that time was an abstract meaningless construct. I didn't notice time going on at all but rather noticed that when you checked time its value changed. The other thing was that you only thought about time when you re-engeaged with it. So pretty much something you take for granted seemed to not exist. Time is one of the main things that you actually have the feeling of "experiencing" regularly but when I was tripping it was the absence of where time was that made the experience very disorienting.

In the intensest part of my trip I basically started to fell like a completely different entity then my sober self. I also viewed everything differently. The combination of both of these things made my tripping self pretty much become more and more uneasy. I felt myself incrementally become more and more anxious slipping into this maddening feeling of endless confusion.The visuals made it hard to understand things a bit but it was really the thought behind everything that destroyed me. The only way to really describe what the trip made me experience is to explain that I felt that me and my friends were not actually humans at all. We were much more like these little helpless computer programs stuck in "existence". The only way we survived was by staying together and withering the storm of endless loops. It wasn't like my friends were really experiencing the same thing as me at all. It was kind of like we were all in this rift and we would occasionally meet up in the center for a bit, consoling each other that it would be over eventually. Enslaved and trapped in existence.

 Eventually after my mind looped through this process a bunch of times and I finally came to the conclusion that I would rather sleep then continue tripping. I kept coming back to this conclusion. It was like I was in this trance/loop of de-ja vu. Like a while loop thats waiting for something to end the loop. I honestly felt like a computer processor or something. Struggling to answer a question and eventually having my entire brain and rational deconstruct or break upon itself. I felt like a computer that noticed an error in my reality I was in but couldn't actually change anything in it. It was like when a program has an infinite loop in it and realizes its only saving grace is to try and abort, self-destruct, or restart everything. An imperfect and limited consciousness, I felt that I had discovered the limit of my brain, memory, and comprehension and that I really didn't like it. Finding your limits terrifying. I felt the void where the unexplainable was more intense then before. That I was far less free then I thought I was.

I remember thinking about how....how do people learn things. How do we recall things. What makes us different from animals, or computers, or anything. We are programmed a certain way. We can learn...but what is it? How is it even working. How are we able to actually come to conclusions and why. When we make a decision why and how do we make it. Are all the options we have actually predetermined? Are we intelligent? I don't know really anymore. I never really "knew".

It seemed rather deterministic in nature emphasizing the vastly powerful, complex and dynamic world that I and my fellow humans had somehow came to be able to traverse in our own weak and infinitely fragile way. I felt like an artificial intelligence struggling with identity and unable to really reconcile it. Incredibly powerful, scary, and new. The best way to describe it was that I suddenly became part of this system (whatever it was, reality) and that I walked to the edge of everything and realized there isn't something after it. This felt very much like being a program that was either running or terminated. Awareness of what not really knowing anything felt like. I realized I was trapped in this system but that I understood nothing outside the system at all.

I realized that I use my brain everyday to "understand" things but that I don't even know how its working itself. When I eventually started to come back down out of my trip I felt the illusion of time and comprehension start to come back but I knew, that it wasn't for real. Its become even more relevant to me now that humans sustain thoughts and data somehow through time. Even though time doesn't really exist. Is intelligence really just a very elaborate database that sustains references to many different things all at once?

Reading Review

I'm posting an update on my advancement in my reading list. I've been trying to knock out a bunch of reading to get closer to my goal of freedom in winter break. I'm also thinking about adding another book to my list but who knows. The book is still being perused for content.


Books:(here is an update on my reading list)

Essential Guide to Flash Games: 420 --> 320
AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation: 440 --> 340
AdvancED Game Design with Flash: 740 --> 700
Game Design AS3: 40 --> 0
Game Design Workshop: 450 -->320
ActionScript 3.0 animation: 50 --> 0

total pages = 1950--> 1600 pages left
total pages actually read = 2290 - 1600 = 610 completed

Note that this list also ignores the reading which I did before I started the challenge which was a lot also. (That would change the numbers considerably)

I've realized that my method of updating my reading progress is pretty confusing granted that I'm updating based on how many pages are left to read vs how many pages have been read from the main total. Basically The difference between the number 2290 and the current number is the amount of pages actually read.

Update

The last couple days I've been working on programming more and more independently. I mentioned last post that I would construct a task/test for myself so I think I'll shed some light on that now. The assignment I created for myself is really pretty open ended(the main reason for this is I'm still not trying to make a specific game, but rather integrate techniques/structures and programming practices to apply the tricks I've been learning). Pretty much the main point of it is to create a "game" which has multiple levels where each level exhibits different things I've learned how to do. This project is well under way and I've set up what seems to be a fairly functional framework for multiple levels and system states. The next challenge becomes trying to create complex and interesting environments in each of these levels. For me each of these levels is pretty much a great place to show some of the things I've learned how to do already/reuse code I've already written. Understand though, that reusing a lot of this code is not as easy as just copying and pasting classes in folders. This is mostly because as programs get larger and more complicated their structure actually changes a lot. This makes smaller applications tricky to integrate into larger things. In as3 having access to the stage is particularly strange when your program has many more levels then just a simple application/main class with simple support classes also. Anyways, I've been progressing well enough that I thought I should post here. I wish I was writing more music now but I'm really trying to make huge steps towards video game programming. Hopefully by this winter break I actually will be able to post a song and then mass produce a bunch more. Everyone knows that the best way to learn anything is through continuously doing it many times. Emphasis on the quantity over quality aspect here. This is exactly why I want to get back into writing music as soon as possible.
PS. I'm continuing my reading as well(its starting to take me into some really interesting directions).
I'm also going to get a whole lot of practices creating images/graphics for my game which I'm already anticipating with childlike glee!

Moving Onto Some More Complex Things

I'm entering the next stage to my own custom built education curriculum. This one should bring me much further along into game design, programming, and game programming specifically. Along the way I hope to get better at asset creation. I've been monitoring my improvement in programming but I haven't explicitly tested it yet at all which is why I may try and create some sort of bench mark test for myself to complete. The problem is that this benchmark will not replace the curriculum but rather move parallel to it. Its purpose is to aid in my assessment of myself. So basically, my job in the next few days is to complete the transition to the two new books and create a programming/video game exercise that will put everything I've learned to a test. To do this I'm going to have compile a list of everything I know how to do so I can create the best test for myself. I'll update this post later tonight with an accurate list of the objectives I'll have to cover and hopefully a specific assignment generation.

How to improve your programming skills

Programming, viewed completely,  is a system of interrelated comprehensions sustained together used to construct variable programs.  Many different things must be understood at the same time to program freely and powerfully. The first of these things is the idea that the language you program in has its own syntax and rules. Unlike written languages however these rules are not just grammatical in nature, the rules are a hybrid of mathematical and grammatical principles. Without having a firm grasp on the grammatical rules and linear progression of program execution your code will resemble a kid tinkering with toys. This concept of being able to do something without actually knowing why and how everything works allows for many many misconceptions and bad habits to be formed. This is partly whats so dangerous about programming. One of the hardest things to actually understand is how large complex problems are solved through combinations of many small solutions. It becomes even more difficult when you want to solve a problem generally thus making the solution more dynamic and less rigid. Making something more and more dynamic usually means understanding the literal relationships between things even more intimately also. Its incredible how subtly things are layered in the world. This makes coding for simulation of things in the world equally fragile and subtle.

Coding too me is made up of several different skills:
1. Understanding all of the tools your using to code (the better you understand your tools the better you'll use them)
2. Understanding the systems your coding specifically for (if you can't understand the thing your coding to being with your pretty much screwed)
3. Integrating these two comprehensions together
4. SImply put you must identify the problem and or goals of the program, visualize a solution, and then construct a solution. The more and more complex a problem becomes the harder and harder each of those steps becomes. Understand that this method barely changes but rather recursively builds upon itself.


Books:(here is an update on my reading list)

Essential Guide to Flash Games: 450 --> 420
AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation: 440
AdvancED Game Design with Flash: 740
Game Design AS3: 40
Game Design Workshop: 450 -->350
ActionScript 3.0 animation: 50 --> 0

total pages = 2140 --> 1950

Music One Big Puzzle?

So I'm reading this book about game design and I came across this section that talks about puzzles. After reading this section about puzzles I realized a lot about my favorite things in life. They are puzzles! Basically I love puzzles and I sort of try to think of everything in terms puzzles. Most of my life I've been rearranging the problems around me into different puzzles. This is why I love listening and writing music soo much. I see music as a puzzling creative process that requires a well incorporated combination of many different things. These things are inherently linked to uncovering underlying processes and laws that govern music. Despite music's inherent subjectivity I still enjoy seeing what sort of things I can create and how! The only problem with me is that I assume depth to be in everything which leads to me over thinking some problems. Hopefully my partner will post some more about music!
Edit:
I was wrong depth pervades all of reality.