Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

Do not over-rely on AI. bad choice, bad choice, BAD CHOICE. Case in point: They make stuff up :D :D :D 

Not to be dramatic, but: When I got laid off from DreamWorks, I thought that I had lost everything. I was just going to stay there forever, while building my own creative career on the side. When I was laid off, that plan was ruined. I lost momentum completely. I limped to the finish line of my CS master's. I did not publish any papers. My final project had an error in the physics equations. I got a new job that was not animation and despite my love for coding, I just could not get my heart into it and I wasn't sure why. For a long time, I went through the motions to pay the bills and that was it. I was not consistent at practicing art, 2D or 3D, and my skills were severely lagging behind. I was not able to move to California as planned. I was not submitting to writing group. In fact, the only thing I was really consistent at was exercise.  Finally I woke up. I had to build something non-negotiable via daily automatic practice blocks that were just as important and unskippable ...

CS animation was great, fantastic even, but it wasn't really art school. It was just CS with some tech art courses.  My self study is great but I'm gonna want something more eventually.  That's why I am going to do GabyT, All in for Artists and Marc Brunet's Art School even if people on Reddit say they're a waste of money. I could trust some random who has no art on their profile, or I could trust GabyT. Hmm, why is this actually extremely easy calculus? Self study program first though. Then, the formal stuff. 

What is the summer haze?  First off, if you hate summer you probably don't experience this. However, it is something that I personally notice. It's both beautiful and dangerous.  The heat is intense yet comforting, like a warm blanket. It sends you into a sort of torpor. I've always said I'm basically a lizard. I'm cold-blooded. I can still crank my way through a water park before the crowds get there, but the haze starts to set in after that first hour or so.  The air is filled with cotton, like snow in June or July. The world is green and blue, and the air smells of barbecue and cinnamon and chlorine and sunscreen. People are laughing and talking and splashing. This feeling is strongest at public parks, including the ones at Provo Canyon, water parks, and amusement parks. It is obviously amplified in seasonal places where half the year the air hurts your face.  My brain personally  can easily fall into this half-zoned out, dissociative state where I'm lost in ...

I've been watching RWBY Ice Queendom, and only have one episode left. Mild spoilers here I guess.  I've realized how much I enjoyed the Beacon arc, and how I wish it could've lasted longer.  IQ does get dark or at least intense. It's not a Bluey episode, and it shouldn't be, as much as I love Bluey. I've always related to Weiss the most out of the main 4, especially her song Mirror, Mirror. So the scene with Pyrrha singing it inside of Weiss' dream still haunts me. It was very well executed.  Even so, it then lightens up and gets funny again. Those moments of catharsis are really needed. We're back in Beacon ready to learn more about becoming huntsmen and huntresses, I think (we'll see for sure in the last episode once I watch it). And the music is good, much like the music in actual RWBY.  But as I start to separate my nightly coding block into two different ones, Code and Games/Webcomics, I'm starting to think about my own webcomic that I'm...

Did they let me add it?  No. My advisor sucked. "You have too many credits, sucks to be you." I am so excited for when I make it as an artist because I am going to roast her so badly for blocking me from what I wanted to do.  And then they took it away and instead there was this cringe business bro "Design Thinking" BS. Ew. No.  Visual Arts was too...messy. I'll be honest; I didn't want to take sculpture or ceramics. I wanted the actual hardcore design classes because I knew the professors in that department would push me more. Push us all more. Though my Art 101 class was really good, and I really liked my professor and classmates, I got the sense that being pushed was the exception more than the rule in that department. I just got lucky.  I already took Figure Drawing for Illustrators and both ARTHC World Civ classes for my Civ GE credits. So all I would've had to take was the seminar, drawing, composition, and one more history course. That's only...

 this. 

Okay so confession time: I said it was gateway tapes season and then I haven't done it. Yep. Because I finally came up with an art + writing + code + engineering + music + gaming schedule that works, and obviously I am not going to mess with gym or my runs.  I'm also not quite  sleeping enough, but working on that.  But, during my 15-minute break for meditation and such, I'm starting over to read The Phase by Michael Raduga again, usually while on a walk outdoors (if it's nice) or on my vibration plate (if it's not).  If I'm going to do the gateway tapes, Sunday morning is the only  time, and this can be complicated if I have an early choir rehearsal. I have to basically be in bed by 10, up by 6:30 or 7, and that gives me around 40 minutes for a tape before I have to start getting ready for church.  That means I have to get to bed by 10 instead of 11 though. And I keep getting to bed at 11. Which, in turn, means that all coding must be done before dinner, s...

Tired of having that label. 1. I am a theme park enthusiast. Imagine putting together a Disney adult with some NERD who can talk your ear off about stats while going up the lift hill of Steel Vengeance.  2. I am from 2010s DeviantArt. You know the type. Not the weird stuff that's prominent on there now. Instead, I just like creative pursuits: art/writing/music mixed with a technical edge: coding and cyber/IT. Just picture a digital artist who also writes novels, games, coded their own online portfolio, and maybe is in a symphonic band. There is nothing groundbreaking about this.  Lots of people do it.  3. I do hybrid athletics. Legitimately just working out. Everyone should be doing this.  Easy. 

Many people think I'm odd But I talk with no one and I walk alone  ... I try to smile a lot but I'm always fronting But I do love a ghost and at least that's something... I hate that you leave when the lights come on And if I had it my way, the fucking sun would be gone  - ICP

It's not the freaking covid vaccine. This is why I am disappointed in the lockdown skeptic community. I will always be against lockdowns. I will never be against vaccines.  It's also not "chemtrails". Seriously? People actually unironically believe that? 😂  This is like flat earthers. Legit thought they were all trolling until my aunt in Texas apparently became one. Excuse me? Blame gym culture.  Blame the MPMD crowd who calls people "small" and "victim weight" and says "abs on a skinny guy are like big boobs on a fat chick, they don't count" (gross, gross, gross, I hated that I even typed that). Blame the NOJ crowd who thinks that any halfway decent physique is impossible without injecting hormones into your caboose. Embarrassing.  Choo choo, mfers. 

If you are using an OFFLINE area, and you  1) update an attribute rule in Pro, and  2) restart your service, and 3) SYNC that offline area,  It will pick up the newly updated attribute rules live. You don't have to download a new area if you don't want to.  There. That's a thing you know now. 

I do have "just-right" OCD though, so this could be a symptom.  But I keep thinking about what I did in undergrad:  Major: CS Animation Minors: Math, Creative Writing What I wish I had done:  Major: CS Animation, but the modern version which has more actual art courses based on the catalog Second Major: Mechanical Engineering Minors: Math, Creative Writing, Cybersecurity Would've minored in Design too if BYU hadn't nuked it out of orbit and if my advisor had actually been nice and reasonable to those of us who actually want to work hard OR also minored in physics if I couldn't double I'm not sure why I spin on this when undergrad is DONE. I am now mentally in my OWN school, doing it right this time. My own curriculum is BUILT and in-progress. So, it shouldn't bother me, and yet, it does.  What I also wish I had done:  Taken that Universal Creative internship  The regret for that  was almost erased by DreamWorks because TDs technically could be assigned...

Exactly how I feel on the matter. Brandon and Monika Zagrobelna are the two artists who capture my view on it perfectly. This one is a very encouraging video and I'd 100% recommend watching if you're worried about genAI.  I like using genAI as a chatbot and assistant, like a pair programmer, and that's it. I will never have it generate art or writing for me. Code, only as an assistant or if I'm at work. This video explains why. 

IDK, I didn't go for a few years, but for some reason I am feeling the pull to go again. I can't really explain why, but I think I'll resume going annually.  Pasted my loose schedule, which may or may not actually work. I suspect that the freebies table will be mostly empty (if it's even still a thing) by the time I get there after my long run.  I am planning to get my badge at around 10 or 10:30 AM.  I am gonna get lunch or even drive home to practice music from 12-1 I am going to be Super Social TM and by Super Social, I mean I am going to be buried in my laptop and iPad the entire time because I have the social skills of a dead jellyfish on the beach.  I remember being SO CONFUSED when I went my first year to "game development" and "writing for games" panels and there was not a single video game in sight. All board games and TTRPG. Big "wait, what?" moment. Welp, I'm not going to any of those most likely. See below: 2026 February Sat...

So tired of tech nerds being defined in 2026 as like...LinkedIn bros obsessed with company status, prestige, interviews, and overworking to prove themselves. I call this norovirus of the soul, because it makes me want to puke my guts out and have excruciatingly painful explosive diarrhea at the same time.  Tech bros used to be either bespectacled math nerds or gamer-weeb hybrids talking about compiler optimizations and dependency injection.  There's obviously still the latter, but the former crowd are annoyingly loud. LinkedIn, r/csMajors, r/cscareerquestions, pretty much all of those need to be avoided like the plague. I need to keep drilling until I find actually serious discussion and increase my own skills until I can hang with that crowd. I'm even getting kinda grossed out by my own GitHub bio because it feels somewhat performative, but then again, it's not like I am like "achieved all 12 OKRs this quarter and increased throughput by 87% - " 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮  ...

21 hours awake. 1 waiting for rope drop. 16 in the parks. 1 after close. No naps, no breaks. Straight up.  5 am wakeup and core. 5:30 am run. 6:30 breakfast. 6:40 off to the park. 7 security. 8, rope drop Space. Park Hopper with LL, at DLR and DCA. 24 rides (1 repeat, so really 25) and 1 parade completed on a Saturday. 7 snacks/meals. 3 souvenirs.  I normally cannot do this. But at Disney, I can. And I love it.  Immersed in a world of magic, stories, and romance. I never want it to end. My cousin bailed at 8-9 pm or so. I kept on trucking until the bitter end.  I'll get 5 hours max sleep tonight. Sucks, but that's why they invented white monsters. And yes, SX basically took SP in a chokehold, dunked it underwater and held it there, and said not today, Satan.  LROTN was a front row ride on Space. My feet hurt, I'm beyond exhausted, and I'm utterly at peace with the world. Not for long. But for right now.  Wake up, dead boy.  Enter Adventureland.  -...

No else-if statements Find call is ordered backwards (legit wasted half the day on debugging when I was just accidentally reversing Find calls)  FeatureSetByName  forces you to hardcode strings , yet it doesn't even fail until you try to actually call the rule . Like it passes evaluation.  This language is a bastardization of computer science. Maybe I'm breaking my rule of "I love all things code", but again, I still enjoy the work I do in Arcade. I just think the language itself was poorly designed. 

ok, back to work 

Here's a cultural thing I have been thinking about.  I love roller coasters. I also love Disney. But, they appear to be two totally separate communities. Here's why I notice this:  Disney adults (for lack of a better term) enjoy theming, immersive experiences, hardcore brand loyalty, food. They will do things like runDisney even if they are not runners, because they have to do everything that is Disney. Many are also animated film lovers. There is a subset that will also go to Universal or maybe Dollywood. Some may describe it as "cheating on Disney". Talk about Cedar Point and watch their eyes glaze over. If they show up at Six Flags at all (unlikely), they will be too scared to do most of the rides.  Roller coaster enthusiasts will count credits, travel across the country or even the world, understand science and physics and engineering (in some cases, like the IAAPA crowd) or just be there primarily for the social aspect but still be quite well-read about parks and...

Turns out, keeping a theme park blog up to date with trip reports is actually pretty exhausting. I can do it, but I have to do the reports RIGHT AWAY, not piecewise. I haven't been, so I'm almost a year behind -- and probably will just fast forward to modern days.  But there's so much more to do with it. I want to write park guides. I want to discuss engineering, science, history, art. 

I have realized something:  sometimes computer graphics gets skipped when low on time  sometimes game dev does too this is no longer going to happen. today I at least opened up the pages in addition to this, sometimes internet gets skipped and I don't play around with music production  enough, but the latter is fine to wait a little bit longer as I solidify my practice habits I'm doing Disney and Knott's starting tomorrow anyway so...gonna be thrown off 

cozy cone mac and cheese  adorable snowman  dole whip  chicken tendies, be they crispy or from wendy's mickey pretzel (so you can be the childless tramp who takes the last one)  gotta get some pizza or maybe a hot dog  spicy mac: firetown mac and cheese bites at troubadour tavern churro, of course jack jack cookies  I've also heard that there are some good valentine's day exclusives and some good snacks in the star wars area Hmm also I need to figure out if I'm doing LTUE...

Usually they're like super old timey and grainy for some reason? Yeah not mine 

well, cyber + job apps. They aren't working when I do them during work breaks. all it does is fry my brain. I don't know what to do yet, but I will figure it out. Almost every second of my day is optimized, so I will have to get extremely, extremely creative. But if I can resolve this, I will be able to do the full, restorative breaks that Steve Pavlina talks about. DRAFT: Any overlaps you see in time will be multitasks.  4:15 AM - 4:55 AM Engineering 4:45 AM - 6:00 AM Lift  6:00 AM - 7:15 AM Run 7:15 AM - 8 AM Prep for Work 10:45 AM Duolingo and YNAB Break 8 AM - 12 PM Work 12 PM - 1 PM Lunch + 40 Minutes Music (produce or study theory as you do long tones) 1 PM - 4 PM Work 4 PM - 5:15 PM Art 5:15 PM - 5:45 PM Dinner with pokemon, vibration plate, remote job app 5:45 PM - 6:05 PM Cleaning and Reading 6:05 PM - 6:45 PM Writing 6:45 PM - 7 PM Meditation/Break 7 PM - 8:15 PM Code Block, loosely: 7 PM - 7:15 PM Cybersecurity 7:15 PM - 7:35 PM Computer Science Core 7:35 PM - 8:00 ...

One thing about running 8 miles a day in the winter: when doing pure treadmill days, you can watch a whole movie. But usually older movies, since they're shorter.  I love this movie. Also, I know the sequel is unpopular but I love it too. Ready for the next full treadmill 8-miler. Bonus: I'm not tempted to push too hard on easy days, and I barely even notice that I'm running.