Controlled Chaos

Good morning. It is currently 10:37am on April 7th, 2025. This assignment is due at 3:04pm. I have to be in my car in approximately twenty (20) United States minutes.

Do you see this? I am incredibly aware of my disability today, Lucas. I am going to need new, previously un-discussed accommodations from OAS somewhere along the lines of "PLEASE, DO NOT EVER MAKE ME TRY TO FATHOM SCALE." When I said I don't know how long an inch is or how much 3/4ths of an object is, I really meant it. My head hurts.

Anyway, look at this:

Do you think that can hold a laptop charger? I sure hope so. I don't own a laptop, so I wouldn't know, but I sure hope all the Laptop Havers of the world can use this to solve their very real laptop-related problems!

I think it's ugly as sin, and I hate it. But goddammit, Freecad is hell software. (It actually isn't as bad as I thought it'd be, but it's still pretty bad.)

Basically, the thought behind it was to have something that could slot onto my desk easily and hold the charger. The plan was to make the charger slot into the top, with a piece above it that could slide over it to hold it in place, but I couldn't figure out how to make a sliding piece, so my new hope is that friction will hold it the rest of the way.

-- Ares, where's the tutorial object?

WE'LL GET TO IT WHEN WE GET TO IT. I made the mistake of doing it on one of the Innovation Hub PCs, and now I'm writing the first half of this journal entry from my own PC with no tutorial object. I assure you, however, it's done, was done in less than 30 minutes, and you will see it soon. Just keep scrolling. You're watching me lose it right now. I'm sleepy. Ask Don about the Vermont nudists.

--INTERMISSION--

What did I even do to Freecad just now?

Half my model window has been eaten. Tasks have moved. I have no idea how I clicked this. Restarting the app fixed it, which is somehow more concerning.

--END OF INTERMISSION--

MORE IMPORTANTLY:

My plan for the third one was to make a screw and bolt - it's simple, effective, and honestly, probably useful to learn anyway. So I did some research into how to make threading, and the answer from most places was either:

Lie about it. Make a fake thread sketch with a sawtooth pattern, rotate it 180 degrees, and pretend that it's real. <- this answer seemed interesting but objectively would not work in the real world.

Fasteners workbench. The Freecad website encouraged this, even. <- this seemed far more interesting and actually useful.

Is this cheating? I say no. It's literally on the Freecad wiki as the main suggestion:

Here's the resulting screw:

After adding it, I changed the diameter (M6 -> M8) and set Thread to true.

Here's the nut:

Same applies with the diameter (M6 -> M8) and Thread to true.

These should be able to twist together with ease and not come apart at any angle unless untwisted.

Alright! Now for the adventurous part. The tutorial object has been finished since the day it was assigned. Unfortunately, I am currently experiencing the wrath of God:

I need to get to the Innovation Hub to get the tutorial object from that PC. But instead, I'm in THIS. Perhaps my inability to drive is a blessing. There is fear in my heart. I don't know what I've done to deserve this. There is a tornado literally directly across the street from my house, and if anything else happens by the time I get home, I'm gonna be real' upset about it.

I am now driving into the tornado. If this is my last post, please give all my belongings to my cat.

--TIME SKIP--

It is now 12:24pm. I am at the Innovation Hub. I lived. Here is the tutorial object in all her tutorial glory.

First of all, Tinkercad, why aren't you mobile-friendly? My lack of a laptop made this unnecessarily difficult. However, I'd say that 4/7 completed in my phone browser is good enough. And I finally got my PC back on Friday night, so we're back!

So, without further ado, here are the creations!

LEVEL 1

A PVC cross-joint, modeled on my phone. Relatively simple, just cylinders. Really nothing to say here.

LEVEL 2

An opened, pink Easter egg! Pretty uneventful also! Sent from my Samsung or whatever.

LEVEL 3

That disk do be floppy, tho. I don't have much to say about this one either, except that I messed it up at one point and somehow made the label a hole, which was pretty funny.

LEVEL 4

THAT GODDAMN SPOON.

This spoon would injure you if you attempted to use it, but I'm okay with that. After I was so rudely "Lord of the Flies"'d by the entirety of my section, maybe they deserve a sharp spoon. I tried to tell them.

Here's my spoon ungrouped so you can see the mess. It was fun, unfortunately. This one was made on a PC. I tried to make it on my phone, but I only got about halfway before it got annoying.

LEVEL 5

The goop flask? I also made this one on my phone. I spent most of the time wishing I could make the liquid reflective in Tinkercad.

LEVEL 6

The bowler hat! I could've done more with this one (i.e. making the brim curve more), but I instead saved all my effort for level 7.

LEVEL 7

AVIATORS! Please gaze upon their glory:

There are several problems with them (the nose pads are not where they should be), but I think they're pretty good for Tinkercad. Here's the ungrouped model:

The nose pads:

The lenses:

The hinges:

THE END

Yes, my submission to the final sound assignment was late and also a nightmare.

I was originally part of the group of people making Lucas × Obie fanfiction. I was recruited to this project immediately. So I waited a few days on this, before hearing back from Mikayla that she had already finished it, so I had to pivot to something else.

I then planned to take sound clips of Lucas and make a song. There was effort into this, including grabbing sound clips from YouTube.

But it turns out it's actually really, really hard to create a Lucas von Hollen Vocaloid. And it's really, really, really hard to tune a Lucas von Hollen Vocaloid in Audacity. I realized this on Sunday evening, and it was very late by this point.

What also occurred on Sunday evening was my friends' and I's D&D session. So I gave up. And I recorded a snippet of the D&D session, put music on it, and submitted it.

I have no idea how to upload an mp3 to Tumblr, so I made it a video.

After the session, I uploaded a recording of the entire session to my Google Drive, relinquished my computer to the people I live with, and went to bed. This was a 4½-hour recording that came out to about 5.4 GB. It was uploaded to my Drive so I could edit it down away from my house, because I had no way to continue working at my house.

I couldn't download the file to my phone, so I took a screen recording of a piece of it, pulled the audio out of it on my phone, and then slightly edited it on my phone while eating lunch before literally sprinting to my next class.

I was going to attempt to edit it further, mainly to increase my volume and add some sounds into the silent parts, but I couldn't do this from class. I tried to do it with a broken pair of headphones, CapCut, and a dream, but it didn’t work out.

When our professor apologized to us at the start of this unit, I laughed. It was funny then.

I am no longer laughing.

Allow me to say with the utmost confidence that MIT App Inventor is the worst website I have ever used. But after not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN different occurrences of the website randomly deleting most or all of my work, I have an app. It exists. I am not proud of it, but my God it's real.

What does the app do? Nothing useful. It shows a list of characters from a game I enjoy quite a bit - Limbus Company -, and allows you click on each of them and view their name, position, signature quote, and promotional art. Except you can really only see 5 of the 12, because after 5, I couldn't convince myself to continue.

Over the last 3 days, I have learned of problems that I didn't know existed. Here are a few of them:

the Limbus Company website exclusively allows you download files as .webp types, for some reason

my phone's security really, really does not like to install random APK files that I send to it.

somehow block coding is more complicated that just writing normal code

I may be stupider than the elementary school children they make use this website.

So, without further ado, allow me to present to you my incredible app: uhoh.

This is uhoh. It's possible that I could've thought of a better name, but I didn't want to be sued by the small Korean studio that developed this game. (This is a lie, they will never hear about this.)

The home screen of the app looks like this atrocity:

We will be ignoring how atrocious the UI is. This home screen displays a list of the other screens that exist in the app, which are titled the names of the five (5) Limbus Company Sinners (their in-game title) that I made pages for. I did not create this list, the blocks did:

The top section of blocks initializes a global list variable called "Sinners" that stores the name of each Screen I created. The bottom section of blocks says that when a list item is selected, the current screen will close and be replaced with the screen associated with the selected list item.

"Why not just create a list using the Designer?" That method presents a runtime error! Because the name of the Screen isn't the name of the Screen, from what I can tell, it's the address of the Screen, and making the list using the Screen blocks saves the actual address, rather than the names. This took me over a day of finicking to figure out, for some reason.

"Why not just use buttons?" Because I chose a list to start with, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to make the list work somehow. And you know what? IT WORKS. When you click on the list item that says "YiSang," you are taken to the YiSang screen:

Look at it, in all its horrifically ugly glory. To this day, I have no idea what the taxidermied genius is. "Taxidermied" isn't even a word. I took this directly from the website.

In news, for something that was less complicated but still more complicated than necessary, the back button works.

The back button takes you back to Screen1. And while we're on this subject, it's time for me to complain that YOU CANNOT RENAME SCREENS IN MIT APP INVENTOR. IT'S JUST NOT A FEATURE. When you search how to rename a screen, the actual, genuine advice they give you is to make a new screen with the new name, copy everything over, and then use that. This method presents SO MANY NEW PROBLEMS!

Midway through working on this - specifically, when I was switching from using the Designer list option to the Blocks-generated list and realized the screen names had to be very readable because they would be what was displayed to the user -, for reasons I still don't understand, I just became unable to copy and paste at all. So I got to remake two pages from scratch. This wasn't difficult, but it was incredibly annoying. But that was the overall feeling of this entire unit, I think.

After I finally finished remaking the last Screen - Faust -, when I switched to the Blocks page, it had, for some random reason, generated seemingly infinite "if-then" Blocks, all separate from each other, all empty, just everywhere, all over my screen, which had to be deleted individually - this was distressing in ways I cannot explain.

Here's the page for my favorite character. I have a sticker of her on my PC that is currently staring at me.

I can not believe I'm using Tumblr of all websites for a class at a real-life university that I pay thousands of dollars to every few months.

Hello!! I'm Ares, I use he/him pronouns, and I'm a 19-year-old second-year Junior. I'm majoring in computer programming & applications, but if you have no idea what that is, you can just think of me as a computer science major who can't do basic math and call it a day.

Outside of classes, I am a computer technology intern at the Innovation Hub and the Creative Chair for DevLUp @ FSU, and I'm an active member of the 2099 Comic Book Club, the Pride Student Union, Seminole Innovators, the Disabled Student Union, and the ASLC Film Committee. That is to say, I do a lot of things all of the time, and I am very tired.

Before I discuss my interests and successes, let me make sure you don't set the bar too high and discuss one of my failures. To briefly call back to my earlier "joke" about not being able to do basic math, I failed Calculus 2 three separate times at three separate colleges, which I think is honestly impressive. For this reason, I switched majors from meteorology to computer programming & applications, because meteorology required me to actually pass Calculus 2, and that clearly was not happening.

But! Within one semester, I remembered that I like computers so much more than I like most other things. So now, I've returned to the state I was in in high school: an autistic man who sits at his computer for several hours at a time until people want to call wellness checks on him. Except this time, instead of playing video games until I develop permanent nerve damage (oops), I spend my time making video games! My current game development project is a survival role-playing game with a working title of Mundane Mundane, which is a thinly-veiled metaphor for being transgender in modern society. I've helped with a few others for game jams, but I've only been properly developing games for about a year, so I don't have much to show for it at all!

I'm done yapping, here's my cat:

His name is Jazzy, and I love him more than life itself. I hope you love him too.

Goodbye and good luck.