I really don't want to just leave this place to rot, forever, even if it feels sometimes like I don't have anything to say. Finals week was hell, and I skipped another public speaking class, but it's done, now — I did, I think, mostly alright with my grades, but I'm out of money, jobless and insomniac, trying to sort myself out into some semblance of baseline human productivity so I can make enough to go back.
Probably not to the same school. I'm tired of it there, and have no friends on campus to miss anyway. It'll be good to find somewhere with a better selection of courses, too: the only philosophy classes ever offered at my community college are about ethics, namely the least interesting kind of philosophy, at least to me.
In programming news ... I started rewriting from scratch an old WhiteboardFox-style art program of mine, called “wormboard.” Still in C, but taking a slightly different approach. I'll probably rewrite it again, though some things are definitely an improvement over the first version — a dynamically expanding quatree instead of a weird k-d tree grid system, and SDL3 instead of GLFW; SDL3 actually has a pen pressure API now, and file save/open dialogs, both a godsend for art programs like this.
I've also been trying out Rust again. It's definitely _interesting_, and having stuck with the borrow checker frustration for on small, simple problems, I can say the Rust standard library's emphasis on composing iterators is really nice to work with, letting you operate on vectors in almost a functional way, but without having to do all the memory moves and allocations that tends to involve.
That said, I really really hate how difficult it is to just ... factor out common functionality into another function, when it comes to mutable data. It's so extremely common, in programming, to have a set of functions that act on the same mutable data structure; but in Rust you can't easily define one in terms of another, because there can only be one mutable reference to the same bit of memory, even when the scope of one reference is entirely contained within another, when, as far as I know, no error could _possibly_ result from allowing it.
I think a post or two ago I talked about not wanting to make this into a tech blog. Well, that's still true. It'd be good to maybe post creative writing here eventually, if I produce any — I used to, what feels like years ago, but it's been ... a _while_, since I had anything resembling a regular schedule for writing. Haven't even been staying on top of more visual art lately, save impulsive doodles, small things, nothing nearing the bigger projects I used to pump out.
See ya next year.