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January 16, 2022 12:23 AM

If anything happens I love you

During the holidays I watched several mostly terrible movies (that I considered adding links for in this blog post, but I don't think that's worth it). For the most part, my mom picked out the movies, but as we were endlessly scrolling through Netflix, one title caught my eye.

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If Anything Happens I Love You is an animated short that follows two grieving parents. I was initially drawn in by the art style, and I appreciate the use of music and (lack of) dialogue. I was reading the Wikipedia page for this film and it included a quote from one of the writers:

From the very beginning it was always going to be an animated film. We just thought a live-action version of this would be way too intense. We thought animation was the perfect gateway to have these deep conversations about loss and grief.

I'm positive there is no way I would have picked to watch this movie if it weren't for the art, so I'm glad they went with this approach, and I'm glad I watched it.

December 31, 2021 2:19 PM

2021

I thought 2020 threw my system out of whack. I had high highs and low lows, but looking back at it, 2020 was pretty chill. Sure, the pandemic started, but at least it forced me to stay home. I didn't have to think about it. I traveled less, and I spent a lot of time with my sister.

2021 was a lot. I had even higher highs and lower lows. I've been so emotional and stressed out this year that it affected my sleep. And I had never had trouble with sleep before. Sleep was something I could count on. But then I had three weeks of barely any sleep, and months of waking up without an alarm. I used to think that being able to wake up without an alarm was a thing to strive for. Now, it's a little comforting to hear it.

But the sleep issues were only the beginning. I got promoted to a managerial position, and then several months later demoted myself. My dad suddenly experienced a lot of pain, and it changed the course of his life, taking up more of my time and headspace than I could have ever anticipated. But I also got to know a really wonderful person by going on lots of walks and eating lots of ice cream. I've learned and fumbled a lot throughout all of this, and I'm still learning and fumbling and flailing.

Sometimes it feels like all of my time is taken up by working, doing chores, running errands, and helping others, and I barely have any time for any of my own projects. But somehow I'm still able to get a few things done for myself. I beat Elite Beat Agents. I finally managed to do a 10 mile run. I learned some Android mobile app programming, and I made an app for my food blog. And every once in a while I make updates to this site.

I usually make New Year's resolutions, but I'm not quite sure I need something to focus on right now. Maybe I'll keep working on the mobile app. Maybe this year I'll finally get back to Programming Pearls or learning Teochew. Maybe I'll get strong enough to do a push up. We'll see.

I'm happy with the past year, and I'm looking forward to the year to come.

December 30, 2021 5:07 PM

I want to make a mobile app: 4

I think this finally does enough

November 22, 2021 11:17 PM

I want to make a mobile app: 3

I have hit a breakthrough. I have successfully cobbled together some code that will display an image picker, and when you select an image, it will resize it, display it, and save the resized copy to my photo gallery.

Sure, I did a bunch of copy pasting code, and I'm calling methods that are apparently deprecated, but I'll take care of that later.

My app does something now. This is starting to get exciting.

November 19, 2021 4:38 PM

I want to make a mobile app: 2

The best thing about this Android app development stuff is that I can open up Android Studio, have the code for an app right in front of me, plug in my Pixel to my laptop, hit a 'Run app' button, and BAM, the app is downloaded onto my phone. That's amazing. I don't have to jump through any hoops to get something custom-built on this phone.

The development itself? Well, I'm not really a fan of Android Studio or the Kotlin programming language. There are too many things going on in this IDE, and I feel like my single laptop monitor is not sufficient to look at the project structure, different source code files, and visual layouts. And it's even worse when I'm trying to follow a tutorial, splitting my screen to have the tutorial in a web browser on the left and Android studio on the right.

I can get through one section of the tutorial done in one sitting before I get too sleepy. I don't know man, I just don't like learning about new programming languages or technologies.

So, I'm trying to just create an app that will open up the photo gallery and let me choose a photo to do something with. I've found guides online for doing exactly that. At least I think I have. I've tried to follow two tutorials so far, and I've gotten too confused, so I went back to "Android Basics in Kotlin". Maybe the third photo gallery tutorial will make sense to me.