Focus

08 Dec 2024

I saw a YouTube video earlier this week that made the claim that people today have lost the ability to focus for extended periods of time compared to people from a hundred or so years ago. I have no idea if any of that is true, but I can say from my own perspective that I have been struggling lately with staying with habits and hobbies. From weight loss to fitness to reading, it’s just been very difficult dialing in and keeping the rhythm and momentum going. I am hoping that long form journaling can at least help with this problem, that is if I can keep that habit too.

Speaking of which, I noticed that my one Traveller’s Notebook that I purchased was not getting much use any more. I bought a pocket sized notebook and that has mostly taken over all my to-do lists and fleeting thoughts that need to be written down. For the last few days I have tried making longer, paragraph style entries in it to see if that does any good with the intention that they can be revised and migrated into these blog posts when enough of them have been accumulated.

Path of Exile 2 has been an absolute triumph of a game. I was never grabbed by the first game, but I am thoroughly obsessed by the second one. I think it’s due to not being locked into skill tree decisions. It’s a lot less punishing to experiment and try new skill nodes to see if they make much of a difference in your build. Also, phenomenal job by the developers in releasing a mostly stable game on launch. Aside from the first 2-3 hours of server and database maintenance I have had an incredibly smooth experience on Linux and that was not expected. Especially after how poorly Stalker 2 performed on my system.

Also with that, I think I am at the end of my run for the Advent of Code this year. It’s been a lot of fun and I have really been pushed in my limited knowledge of Zig, but I need to get back to game development and Path of Exile 2 is consuming my midnight oil. It’s really made me think this year on variable mutability and heap versus stack allocation in a way that Rust never did. I think with Rust I was more preoccupied with making the compiler happy than I was with thinking about what I was actually doing.

Finished another chapter of Date Oriented Design and I am continue to be intrigued by it. So far the book is making some pretty strong claims and I can now see a lot of the advantages of functional programming techniques that I had previously written off as elitist intellectualism. Still, I won’t be completely sold until I can actually see concrete examples of these claims and put them to use. It’s easy to sell something, but much harder to demonstrate and see what trade offs it has to offer.