I rewrote my checkerboard demo for the Pico-8 Fantasy Console. This program is amazing. It is probably the closest thing to QBasic which I used to use. However it uses a slightly modified form of Lua that also has graphics commands. In a way it is a lot like using Love2D but I am still quite new to using Pico-8. One of the most notable features is that it has built in ability to record video to a gif file.

Pico-8 is almost like a mini DOS or Linux distribution except that all the programs are written in Lua. It comes with a full manual explaining the features which is available as a text file and also a page on the official website here:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html

I do think that Pico-8 would be a great tool to teach people computer programming for the first time. It would allow learning Lua but also allowing a new person to start with graphics programming.

I have a theory about Valentine’s Day. No one really knows what to do with that day because hardly any one has a spouse or a date that they’re not mad at most of the time but they know that if they don’t pretend to love them at Valentine’s Day that person will be even more mad and stuff candy hearts down their throat until they choke. They also feel the pressure to spend hundreds of dollars on fresh flowers so that they will not be smashed over the head with the large vase that was positioned in plain view as a hint. There are naked babies with bow and arrows decorating every building. Anything you order from a restaurant is heart-shaped. If you are single, people look at you at parties as though you poked your head out of a casket at your own funeral. You see lips kissing and then realize it is just a decoration on a glass window or door. Where is the rest of the person? One must try not to think about what this holiday must have been about when the first mushy person tried to celebrate it. Why did it become traditional to give chocolate candies to the woman you just fought with because you insulted her about being overweight? Who started the tradition of checking couple’s memories about what kind of sausage they had for breakfast the morning before they first met? I don’t know about you, but Valentine’s Day strikes me as a very mysterious holiday. The only one that seems more useless is Groundhog Day!

My font library now works completely and is a separate github repository.

https://github.com/chastitywhiterose/Chaste-Font

My latest update includes a function which can draw scaled fonts which allows for the blocky retro font characters no matter how big they are.

I have used this font library in my games Chaste Tris and Chaste Puyo but I finally separated the code from those games into a small demo that shows that I can draw my fonts at any size now.

I could also add more fonts if I find particularly good ones but for now the one with the characters typically seen in DOS,QBASIC,and certain modes of FreeBASIC is one of my favorites.

The font is nothing more than an image file containing all the characters. I wrote my own functions for using it because I want to port it to other libraries such as SDL if I ever am using them for a project. But currently it is implemented using Raylib which is good enough for almost anything.

Below is a screenshot of my demo showing different sizes of text. The first 5 are fonts directly drawn from the different sizes of the same font which are loaded from different files. They are the originals which were all made in GIMP. The lower ones are scaled versions of the smallest font which scale perfectly.

Because I have the ability to scale fonts with Raylib, I probably don’t need to have multiple size images of the same font, but for historical and possible performance benefits, I am always going to keep the images and the code that loads them in my games because they work and there is no reason to change what works just because something new comes along.

And my games are about appreciation for the older technology anyway. Not all programming libraries support drawing scaled images anyway and there is most likely a performance penalty even if it is hard to notice on the fast machines of today.

I just want to say that currently I am feeling good. I’m very happy with what I am capable of in the Floral Department and with my computer programming. I have a lot of talent and can often work around my limitations with my strengths.

I don’t know what my future holds and I honestly don’t even expect to live long because my chances of being able to get full time employment are slim to none unless something majorly changes. But I do have a ton of ideas that may improve my situation.

I want to get trained to the point where I can be a Floral Designer. This might help me at Hy-Vee greatly.

But at the same time I also have insane computer skills. I am now making my own video games for fun and I’ve self published so many books on Amazon and Smashwords for myself and my mom. I could definitely keep working on these technology things I’m good at whenever I have the time. Maybe even go to some tech school for training in some specific task computer related for some kind of job that I would excel at.

But it’s actually far more likely that I could run a business of helping others who are computer illiterate publish their own books.

And with my experience in game programming with the C programming language I might even get some money from people who enjoy my games and want to support my work. I have already made two games which are clones of Tetris and Puyo Puyo. Plus there was the game BBM box adventures that I never finished.
I could probably teach other people some basic programming who want to get started since I have 21 years of experience with programming and finally broke the glass ceiling when I discovered Raylib lets me compile games for Linux and Windows flawlessly on my computer with a dual boot system.

And a final note must be made that all of my greatest achievements happened in my 30s. It took a long time to heal from tons of trauma that made me depressed and suicidal. But now I’m just too talented, beautiful, and funny to die now. Now I want to live.

This post will be sort of different because I decided to only share it on my blog and not post to social media except perhaps the link. I do not want people commenting unless they have actually read or listened to what I said before making assumptions. This is an extremely difficult thing to talk about because there are many wrong ideas about Asexuality spreading on the internet. Because of this the term has become almost meaningless. I shall explain this in detail.

The wikipedia page states that “Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity.”

I am Asexual but…

I do not currently wish to identify as Asexual because there are tons of people calling themselves asexual, meaning that they lack sexual attraction and/or are not interested in sex, yet at the same time they will mention that they regularly have sex to please their partners or even become prostitutes for the money. This means of course that they are participating in something that they don’t actually want to do but do to please others or just to survive. Since they are living a dishonest lifestyle by doing that which they say they don’t want to do, they may has well just admit they are allowing themselves to be raped. As such, Asexuality has become a term associated with justifying rape. Doing something because you are afraid your partner will leave you is not consensual. Doing something for money is not either because money does not create consent. I personally have never had sex nor do I want to, but I am pretty sure that no one should force you to do anything you don’t want to do, even playing Tetris! I feel bad for people who do this but I also think they have ruined the meaning of Asexuality. As such, I identify as a celibate, which is a word that at least retains its meaning as someone who does not have sex, usually for personal or religious reasons, regardless of their actual sexual orientation.

A second reason I do not identify as asexual is because I am actually still unsure of my sexual orientation. I may very much still fit the part of the definition of asexuality as “low or absent interest in or desire”. In fact I would say my desires or fleeting thoughts are very very very low, but not absent. I feel things I can’t explain, I do things I can’t explain, and I even have dreams that I can’t explain. I also know that feelings or desires can change and that a person like me can still be committed to my lifelong Vow of Chastity regardless of what I might feel like at the time.

A third reason that asexual might not be a good term for me and others is that there is no longer a universal agreement about what is considered sexual activity. When I was a teenager and first learned about sex from Christian books and/or whatever the perverted pastor was preaching, I understood it to be penis in vagina sex. I thought that was THE definition and at the time was also being taught that it was God’s will for people to do this only in the context of marriage. But these days, people are doing anal, oral, or other forms of things that they are calling sex. Some would even consider kissing to be a sexual act, although I personally don’t think it is sexual, only very gross.

A fourth reason to drop the term asexual is because it makes very little sense for a transgender person to identify as other labels because being transgender by itself is hard for society to understand. Although I would say that a gender transition is likely to turn you celibate because removing genitals can definitely alter hormone levels and obviously makes certain forms of sex impossible. But the actual feelings or lack thereof, whether they are considered straight, gay, bisexual, or asexual, are not in the genitals themselves but rather in the brain or perhaps even the soul.

A final note is that nothing I said here should be taken as an attack on anyone who uses the term asexual to describe themselves. However, I find myself distancing myself more and more from the label Asexual just as I dropped the label of Christian years ago because the word itself has become associated with things I do not support. I believe in only using words that honestly communicate what I really mean to say.