Category: Uncategorized

The Good

I have much to be happy about in life in general. I published my recent book: “Chandler’s Honesty” which explains more about my life than anything I have ever written or said in my videos. I also have a new computer and it is far faster than any machine I have ever had. My excellent friend in England bought it for me so that I can play Minecraft with him in good quality and other modern games. I also hope to use it to start recording my video podcasts that I do usually once a week.

The Bad

I am back at work now but even after two months since my injury my right knee is still hurting. I am very afraid of losing my job if I can’t make quota at work. But more than that I want to avoid reinjuring myself. I may have to get another job and this is possibly the worst time in history to be switching jobs because of this Covid-19 nonsense. I don’t want to have to change jobs but I know I don’t have the knees I had when I started this job 2019. Shelving is a real knee killer and I understand why so many people quit this job. But I don’t give up easily and I will work smarter rather than harder.

The Pretty

Although things are sometimes bad and I am in a financial mess, I believe I have important work to do with my writing and podcasts. I am trying to promote my books as much as possible and record podcasts with important people so that I am making the best use of my time however much or little there is. And at least I am recovering with my knee injury and I feel generally very good and healthy. Even more so since the lack of testosterone in my system has made me feel emotionally calmer even though I still have times of stress about my job. I am happy about everything else except my financial situation but I am hopeful because I have been in worse situations than this but found a way to make life better.

I recently did a livestream with many guests. It was one of our best so far and I have made it available on multiple platforms.

https://rumble.com/vdnsan-sunday-podcast-272021.html
https://www.facebook.com/1190355304/videos/10224186657672730/
https://youtu.be/qHl_EmmhqlI
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OwxWVnjddVJQ
https://www.bitchute.com/video/PvrJdPrceAtJ

The secret of how videos like this are possible is because I recently discovered a new livestreaming service. Streamyard allows me to have shows that are streamed live and people can comment on them while they are being streamed and recorded. It’s now the fastest way to get a message out in video form and I am slowly learning how to use it.

https://streamyard.com/

At this time I am concerned about free speech and I do not like that posts are being deleted because they don’t agree with the political views of social media platforms. You may have heard about what happened to force Parler to be shut down. I want to give people a way to speak who may be unable to otherwise. If you have an unpopular opinion and are shut down when you try to write or speak about it, let me know and maybe you can be a future guest on my show that I normally plan to be doing on Sunday nights when I am home.

This post is sort of unusual for me because I’ve never been one who cared very much at all about the physical appearance of my own body or the bodies of others very much. But this is what I am thinking about right now. I have noticed that I am generally more pleased with my appearance since my orchiectomy.

When I took this picture, the intention that night wasn’t to take a selfie. I was just testing my Android phone to try to record a Minecraft video by placing it in front of my new monitor.

However when I had the phone camera facing me I was so pleased with how I looked that I took this picture anyway. I haven’t always been happy with how I look and gender dysphoria has been the main reason. But I do like what I see now much more than I used to. I’m not sure how much of it is because I look different or because how I feel about myself has changed somehow. But I really do feel pretty.

It could be actual changes in how I look or just hormones messing with my mind but it’s a good thing. Also, I do seem to have boobs growing and I know it’s not just my imagination because my mom and doctor mentioned it first before I said anything to them. The lack of testosterone has probably resulted in the start of breast development which is not uncommon. It seems my natural estrogen is pretty high even though I am not on HRT. My doctor says my hormone levels are healthy at this point so I have nothing to worry about at least for now.

I do find something mysterious though. When my doctor was feeling my chest and exclaimed: “You have boobs girl!”, I felt a sudden rush of happiness. I’m not sure why though. Never really did care much about boobs in my life but I guess evidence of physical changes or at least the fact that I’m starting to look less like a male is a happy experience for me and just feels right somehow. But for me, the most attractive and important part of anyone is their face. So I just feel like saying:

I am beautiful! No matter what they say! And so are you, whoever you are reading my post!

Because the knowledge of OpenGL I have so far comes from a variety of sources. I should be keeping track of all the best places to get the information I frequently reference whenever I learn things or need to look up a function. So this post will serve as a reminder of some of my learning sources in my journey.

The specifications for various versions can be found here.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/index_gl.php

The reference that I use the most frequently for my legacy OpenGL programming. Something about the layout is pleasing to me.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL-Refpages/gl2.1/

Another great reference that shows several different versions. Perfect for looking up a function and seeing which versions support it.
http://docs.gl/

The lazyfoo tutorials were how I personally got my very first start in OpenGL. However it took me a long time because I converted the examples into pure ansi C89 instead of the original C++. Most people wouldn’t do this.
http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/OpenGL/index.php

Although I have had great success in using OpenGL for some animations I’ve published on YouTube, Rumble, and other social media, I do find that the subject of OpenGL is weirdly intimidating for new people trying to learn about it. It’s the burden of choice of which libraries to use for creating the context(glfw vs. freeglut) or for loading modern extensions (glad vs. glew), or whether to use legacy vs. more modern core versions.

There are so many different types of programmers who each have their own opinion on how things should be done as well and the people who make decisions on specifications and different support in GPUs or Operating systems that perhaps using OpenGL for graphics is not ever going to be as simple as using a different library(SDL, Allegro, SFML, Raylib) or even a different programming language which has graphics built into its standard library(Freebasic,Java,etc.).

Basically programming(especially graphics) is not as easy as I thought it was when I first started at 14 years old. But at the same time the challenge is precisely why I love it so much. If it was something anybody could do, it would not be as great of an accomplishment. I know a bit but I also know how much there is that I don’t know. But the journey has made me smarter. Perhaps someday I will even write a programming book or at least a tutorial that I make available online.

Making software in this modern age makes a real world difference. The software is just as important as the hardware it runs on when you consider that the internet and the information available to people makes a real world difference in who lives or dies. Therefore even basic knowledge I have attained such as managing my websites and my journey into exploring open source software has enabled me to know enough to publish my books and also my mom’s books. The software that powers book publishing as well as what we are able to find online is the only hope we have for improvement in this world because it allows information to travel to people faster than ever before.

Also I want to give a big thumbs up to my friend Poffo Ortiz who is a very powerful Vegan activist and author of several of his own books. I am at this time at page 130 of his book: “The Portal of Adamastos”. I haven’t finished it yet but this book is really interesting! You can find this book and others linked to from his site here:

https://poffoman13.wixsite.com/morndaybooks

And last but not least, do not forget about my recently published book: “Chandler’s Honesty”
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08T4DGJL1
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1064601

I do believe I have talked about more topics in one post than ever before. I leave you now with one final piece of advice:

Be excellent to each other
and
PARTY ON, DUDES!

I have been in the process of learning modern OpenGL and I was finally able to get a full working example. However the means I did so was complicated. I had to copy paste examples from two entirely different tutorials and mash them together for the purposes of what I wanted. One tutorial used SFML for context creation but set up the Vertex Buffer Object, Vertex Array Object, and shaders for a 2D drawing. The other tutorial used GLFW and glad for setting up the context but then was using 3D coordinates and did not have examples of shaders that I understood. I merged the two tutorial examples into one and the result was about 150 lines of code to draw a triangle.

So far all my work has not enabled me to do anything new that I couldn’t do with legacy OpenGL but the way this was set up with glad was so that only the modern functions are loaded and all the deprecated functions like glbegin/end cannot be used. I’m learning the modern way but so far it seems like the modern way is stupid compared to the old legacy way. But at the same time there is supposed to be some performance benefit from what I read. I have two free youtube tutorials I can follow as well as the opengl course on linkedin.

But one really weird thing is that compiling things still requires the weirdest set of flags and each opengl tutorial uses different libraries for context creation and extension loading. So I’m having a hard time making sense of much, but I can brag that I wasted 12 hours of my life drawing a triangle! This is why I am glad computer programming is something I do for fun and not my paid job.

I took screenshots of the entire program!