Living Better, Digitally and Mood-wise

The following 2 paragraphs are the body of an email I sent to Nate Meyer last Thursday. Nate is a 27-year old video game developer, who advised me to begin implementing Pyxelation, and when I've produced some working code I can get the ball rolling by recruiting programmers, who are mostly students and work for free (Pyxelation will be open source).

Thanks for your valuable feedback in regards to Pyxelation. So far no one else has replied to my post on the Silverlight games forum. I guess it's time for me to roll up my sleeves, download a bunch of development tools, write some kind of Silverlight hello-world program, and learn how to develop games. Then I can proceed to implement Pyxelation.

I suppose that one key milestone would be implementing a multiplayer Silverlight test game composed of rectangular rooms, with 4 doors (one on each wall), in which players pick up or put down objects, wield weapons, search for treasures, avoid monsters, and chat with other players. In 1979 I had a summer job, spending a lot of time playing Adventure and Star Trek on an IBM mainframe. Nowadays I'm not very good at computer games, but I like programming. Onward Pyxelation, and happy coding!

I'm enjoying a depression-free weekend (so far). I feel that I have schizophrenia and depression by the balls. I will experience setbacks in the future, of course. Last Thursday evening I was depressed because no one replied to my Pyxelation post on the Silverlight game developers' forum. But I'm perfectly content with developing Pyxelation as an open source project, and down the road recruiting programmers to help me develop it. Tomorrow I'm going to set up my development tools on my home computer, under Windows XP (not on my Linux partition). I've rarely experienced psychotic breaks in the past few years. I was near-psychotic on the weekend of my Aunt Muriel's memorial in Montreal 2 summers ago. I have the crazy talking and the crazy thoughts, but they're manageable. I have low libido, but I still do it to myself from time to time, and don't care if I don't have a girlfriend. That's even more trouble than owning a car, and I feel so much better since I got rid of my car 4 weeks ago. Both of my jobs are going well. I've been keeping track of my income/expenses in a spreadsheet for 22 weeks now. I can afford to give up my Sound Times job if I need more time to develop Pyxelation (that would free up one day per week, giving me 3 days/week for Pyxelation). I'm promising myself to go for a 30-minute walk this afternoon (I need to exercise more).

Tonight I'm going to call my brother and invite his family over for a dinner of lasagna and salad the following weekend. My friend Constance has stopped visiting me. I visit her once a month to give her 50 dollars. She used to cause trouble when visiting me, and the property manager threatened to apply to a court for a Power of Sale (ejecting me from my condo). Hopefully Constance will never visit me again. I'm almost out of coffee. Time to post this and get some fresh air. I've had a lot less depression for over the past 5 months, except for maybe 3 or 4 weeks in September and October (mostly car-related). I expect that to only get better in the weeks and months ahead. Pyxelation + Financial Well-Being - Car-Ownership = Life's Good. Gotta love those electrons and silicon chips, giving us the Information Age, and providing you this blog and me my livelihood. So, that's it for now, and I'm out the door after posting this.