Patron-Exclusive Alpha! + AMA + Updates + Work-Life

(reading time: 9 min)
(can't see GIF above? click here!)

Hi all! Sorry for the lack of updates. I didn't want to bother your inbox until I had something to show. Anyway, feast your eyes and UwU your face, coz here is...

😽 UwU Cam – Patron-Exclusive Alpha Version! 😽
🎥 (works best in Chrome, for now) 🎥

In my last update, I said I'm making "stupid light-hearted shit" to take my mind off things. That is true. But there is a more personal reason for this project: it's a gift to specific friends. I've a few friends who are streamers, furries, or both, and this webcam toy would amuse them & myself greatly.

Last year, I learnt it's most effective to make stuff for specific folks you know rather than an abstract "for the world". That's what I did for Adventures With Anxiety & my gamedev+cogsci microtalk. As Kurt Vonnegut once said:

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

So far, I've only tested UwU Cam in Chrome & Firefox, on my scrawny Asian face. Let me know if it works on other browsers, and other faces!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Speaking of gifts to specific friends: a few friends of mine run a non-profit network of high school students who teach each other how to code, called Hack Club! There's many "learn to code" orgs, but this is the only one I know that's genuinely bottom-up, with true learner autonomy.

Anyway, 2 days ago I did an Ask Me Anything livestream with them, which was loads of fun! Watch me corrupt the minds of the youth:

📺 Nicky Case: Ask Me Anything (80 min) 📺

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

To make up for the gap in updates: here's what's happened since 6 weeks ago! A look into "the creative process", an honest account of my failures, a bit of What's Nicky Learning?, and sneak peeks at future project ideas.

Week of July 13: Springs! 🌷

Added spring physics to UwU Cam! Making the hair and ears bouncy was loads of fun.

(Inspired by this, I sketched out an interactive gamedev tutorial – similar to Sight & Light, my first explorable – called "Add Springs To Everything". It'd show you how to use springs for everything from Disney's 12 Principles of Animation, to network visualization, to water/cloth/ragdoll physics, and more.)

Week of July 20: Virtue Signalling 🙇‍♀️

Got stuck on blink-tracking for UwU cam. For some unholy reason, drawing thousands of pixels to a canvas in JavaScript is fast, but reading a single pixel from the same canvas slows everything down to 10 frames per second. ಠ_ಠ

So instead, this week I mostly spent quality time...

1) With a very close friend (distanced, with masks) who happens to be one of the people I'm making UwU cam for.

2) Deep-diving on "neo-Aristotelian" virtue ethics, which merges ancient virtue ethics with modern psychology. (at least, the psych that actually replicates) As Jonathan Haidt & Craig Joseph put it in their landmark 2004 paper: “We believe that virtue theories are the most psychologically sound approach to morality.”

And indeed it is! Aristotle's "proper function" maps onto "function" from evolutionary biology, "eudaimonia" maps onto "flourishing" from positive psychology, and even the emphasis of learn-from-examples over utilitarianism's/deontology's learn-from-rules is mirrored in modern AI over Good Ol' Fashioned AI.

What's more, virtue ethics seems like the most psychologically sound approach to not just morality, but full well-rounded living. What strikes me about Aristotelian ethics is that it's not strictly "moral" – "wittiness" was one of Aristotle's listed virtues. In fact, since virtue ethics is about balance, it's the only "moral" system where you can be too moral. (An idea I'd never even considered until last month! See the 1982 paper Moral Saints by Susan Wolf, one of the few living philosophers who doesn't write like an alien)

(This week, I also outlined a longform essay-with-Spaced-Repetition-cards about: 1) my childhood fascination with moral philosophy/psychology, 2) why I adopted a modified version of utilitarianism, 3) how utilitarianism was nice in theory but in practice led me to burnout & abusive relationships, 4) why I've now converted to the "new" virtue ethics, and 5) what it means for education, society, and one's life.)

Week of July 27: Digital Signalling 🔊

Prototyped the other "gift for friends" project idea I had: a web app that genderbends your voice! Besides being a cool demo of acoustic math/physics, it's a way for trans/non-binary folks (like yours truly) to "preview" their post-transition voice.

Anyway, turns out doing digital signal processing in JavaScript is insane.

I got it to pitch-shift an audio file without changing its speed, but couldn't figure out how to convincingly shift vocal resonance. In theory it's just EQ but in practice ugh

Anyway, that project was worth a shot. Back to the backburner it goes.

Week of Aug 3: Solutions 🤔

Figured out the solution to the pixel problem. You create a second 1-pixel canvas, draw the first canvas on that, then read from the second canvas. Somehow this is 10x faster than just reading one pixel. ಠ_ಠ

Also: refactored the entire codebase, put in mouth tracking, and added even more springs. 

Spent more quality time with aforementioned close friend.

Week of Aug 10: Spookums 👻

Yeah no excuse for this one. Spent a whole day reading SCP Foundation, a collaborative science-fiction site. Then spent a few days outlining five SCP articles I'd like to write, stories that are a mix of high-concept, horrifying, and heartwarming.

I am not going to write any of them.

Week of Aug 17: Getting My Shit Together 💩

This week I finally finished up the alpha version of UwU Cam, did the AMA with the Hack Club students, and wrote the post you're reading now!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

So that's the past! Here's what's next:

By end-of-August: Furry/anime character customization for UwU Cam, Piccrew-style.

By mid-September: Beta version of UwU Cam is out – first to you, then the public.

From mid-to-end of September: I need to move out of Montréal by the end of year, and since it's now safe enough in Canada for internal travel, I'll be travelling to confirm which city I'll move to. Of course, I'll take precautions like staying alone in hotels, avoiding indoor crowds, and not licking doorknobs.

October: Publish UwU Cam! With 10% probability: I might also finish a barebones version of Voice Gender Trainer 5000, which ugh I originally promised would be out in February.

November 2020 to April 2021: With 90% probability: I will be pausing this Patreon – no pledges collected – and taking a sabbatical for 6 months.

During this time I'll:

1) move cities

2) build new relationships in my new city, while rebuilding old relationships I've let slip during the pandemic

3) learn new skills/ideas, without the pressure of feeling I'm just soaking up your money without creating output

4) figure out a more sustainable, well-rounded way to live.

Y'know, something I keep hearing about "work-life balance" is "of course you gotta take care of yourself, that way you can be energized to do more good for the world!"

But imagine this: a car salesman wants to take a week off to spend time with his daughter, and his boss encourages him, "of course you need to spend time with the kids, that way you can be energized to sell more cars!"

The problem in both cases is someone treating themselves as tools, means to an external ends. Sure, "everyone knows" you shouldn't chase external ends like money and fame. But I'm only now realizing "external ends" also includes "making the world a better place" and "being remembered".

A healthy thing I do once a month is imagine I'm dead. It's my funeral. Someone's giving my eulogy. I imagine them saying, "Nicky spent their life helping people understand the world, each other, and themselves. Their art and work will be remembered for generations."

This thought fucking sickens me.

It's as if my eulogy was "Nicky sold the most cars, bought the most yachts, ate the most caviar". That's not a human life. A full human life isn't just production and consumption. The worst part is whenever I imagine my own eulogy, it's always "someone" giving it – I actually can't imagine anyone I specifically know giving my eulogy decades from now.

In the hundreds of articles you've seen about "work-life balance", have you ever seen someone complain they've got too much life?

In a past behind-the-scenes update I mentioned I deleted the entire codebase for our COVID-19 project 3 weeks before launch, and it felt like a cathartic, noble thing to do. A patron asked why I would think that was noble. I forgot to reply, but the answer's simple: it felt like throwing a pack of cigarettes into the trash, pouring the alcohol down the drain, deleting Twitter off the phone. I was sticking it to my longest, unhealthiest compulsion, "doing things for the world".

(Hell, I doubt there's even a strong correlation between "things intended to help the world" and "things that actually helped the world". In the early 20th century, the two most popular ideas amongst Western intellectuals on "how to better humanity" were eugenics and communism. Meanwhile, an invention estimated to have saved 1 billion lives was the toilet.)

There's other sayings on work-life balance: "Put on your oxygen mask before helping others", "Don't set yourself on fire to keep others warm". But those both imply that as long as I'm not literally dying I should give my all to others, like The Giving Tree, who was reduced to a stump. (P.S: read the alternate ending)

For a decade plus, my "contribution to the world" has been in the driving seat of my life, with myself & my relationships taking a backseat. Or the trunk seat. I need to finally – finally – put myself in the driving seat, people I love in the passenger seat, and projects of worth in the backseat. SCP Foundation binge-reading gets trunk seat.

So, that's a zillion words to explain:

1) My switch in projects from "help the world" to "gifts for friends & self, with positive externalities"

2) My interest in modern virtue ethics, a moral code that actually runs on human hardware. In contrast to my previous utilitarianism, which dictates that if I really believe all humans are of equal moral worth, the balance between "things I do for humanity" and "things I do for myself" should be 7.8 billion to one.

3) Why I'll be pausing the Patreon & taking this long sabbatical, to find a routine for a fuller human life.

Don't worry, I'll still be making art. Art's been a cultural near-universal since the dawn of humans, so I'm sure it's a necessary ingredient for a full human life. But it can't be the only ingredient, or even main ingredient. The recipe calls too for friendship, love, hedonism, pain, struggle, challenge, good days, bad days, cuddles, fistfights, sunrises, sunsets. Just a big ol' gumbo stew.

What I want the person giving my eulogy to say is "Nicky was a fantastic friend and I'm glad we shared life with each other."

. . .

Can you tell I haven't been hugged since March?

Anyway, let me know what you think of UwU Cam, my AMA, or my rambling thoughts! Thank you – over and over again – for supporting my growth as an artist, a learner, and as a full human being.

💖,
~ Nicky Case