Evolution

So, what is this blog about?

I was in class the other day. Now, like most classes you’ll find in the University of Toronto (and elsewhere, I presume), it was quite boring. The professor would pace back and forth at the blackboard and talk about CPU pipelining and various data and control hazards. Knowing that all the materials she was talking about were also well documented in both the textbook and the lecture slides, my attention drifted away. Before I knew it, I was browsing up various websites on my blackberry.

And I came back to Misfile. A long time ago, I stumbled across this webcomic, and it was interesting enough to get me hooked. Since then, every few months I would check back at the site to catch up on the latest panels. Unlike other webcomics I visit (which includes PhD Comics and xkcd), Misfile actually has a definite setting, and is practically a story-driven manga-like comic with good characters and plot. I’ve always wondered whether this kind of thing can actually make money, so this time, I looked up the creator, a guy named Chris Hazelton. Within seconds, “Chris Hazelton” was typed into google, and the list of results appeared in front of my eyes.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a recorded interview with this guy that was conducted only a month ago. I was somewhat surprised to find that Chris actually did the webcomic as his full-time job, and that he started after feeling dissatisfied with being a “cog in the machine” while working in the film industry. When asked what advice he would have for a newcomer to the webcomic industry, this is what he said:

Write what you’re passionate about. It will show through. Don’t wait until you think you’re ready, because you’ll never feel ready, and always be aware that the willingness to do hard work consistently is at least as important as real talent. Mix that with a little luck and you’ll have yourself a comic worth reading.

Don’t wait until you think you’re ready – basically, dive straight into your passion, and expect hard work. That seems to be the advice from every self-help post on the internet, and every self-help book I’ve casually browsed at Indigo. But then, I remembered that a while back I actually did list out a list of things I felt passionate about and things that I really, really wanted to do. They included things like:

• Wander around Europe with a backpack
• Make an epic flash anime or write an epic manga
• Create a smartphone app that revolutionalizes the portable music player as we know it
• Start a music ensemble group that performs background music from video games, movies, and anime
• Start a cooking blog that caters to the needs of university students and young professionals

And the list goes on and on; it had more than twenty of these long-term goals and dreams that I would never achieve, and for each I did honestly feel a strong desire to make happen. So then, dive straight into your passion is good advice, but what if you have too many passions?

The answer that I found is that you simply choose one. It doesn’t matter whether this is the greatest passion out of them all, because this choice is not set in stone. However, it is very important that you choose one, because then you can dive in and start doing things, and that first step is where we usually fail to even begin. I believe this can even apply to short-term goals. The goals don’t necessarily have to be lifetime passions, they just have to be something I really, really want to do.

So that’s what this blog is about. This blog is what I will use to record my progress towards the goals I will give myself. The content of this blog will be divided into projects – ones that I have begun, and ones that I have accomplished. These projects will mostly be projects that would improve my abilities and help me achieve something. There will be challenges that I will face when attempting many of these projects, and along the road I will undoubtedly learn some interesting things, so I’ll be sharing those as well.

Now, let’s see what happens.