Downtime and relaxation
We explore Australia
My family and I have been traveling the world for some nine months now, and are coming back in another short three, so we find ourselves looking toward home. When traveling the world, we get to see an enormous amount of amazing stuff: temples, mountains, castles, forts, ruins, etc. But, even as a tourist for a week or two, you can still feel burnt out at the end of the day. After you see your fill of amazing sights for the day, you go home and chill for a minute or two. Although nobody likes to hear it, the overwhelmed feeling gets worse as you stay abroad longer. At this point, we spend almost a week between temples, castles or the like. In the meantime, we try to do school, play Magic the Gathering with cards from Greece, play games, watch TV, but mostly wander and go to the beach and pool. We can walk when it’s not too hot out, swim when it is. Mom does a ton of yoga, Dad is learning to train AI. Joe is working with digital art, and I tend to just code.
Some of Joe’s art.
At home, before we left for our trip, I could make and use LARP weapons, play with a collection of Magic cards, and torture my brother with D&D. I could read for hours, rereading, skimming, and ignoring everything, then I could go play LARP with Joe for as long as I wanted. Some things that seem so routine that they don’t need mentioning, like school, tend to take up much more time than you think. Having half a weekend every day is actually not better than school. School might be boring, but it beats doing the same three things all the time. School consists of about seven hours of learning many different topics, and spending time with friends.
Joe reading my birthday graphic novel, Nimona.
There are so many things that I got to do with my friends that I just cannot do now. Playing Magic at lunch, LARP afterschool, LARP camps, after school LARP leagues, mostly LARP. Role playing games around the blacktop, bribing each other with today's lunch. Now I have to barter for twenty minutes to convince Joe to play ten minutes of LARP or Magic. I don't have the materials or space to make just about anything, but we do have computers. I took this online coding course before we left called Juni Learning, and the teachers there have taught me Python Turtle (an amazingly simple and slow graphics tool) through Pygame (a fun and fast tool for simple video games). They let the creator make images, videos, games, anything with moving pictures, really.
Using pygame to make a player controlled image leap over lava.
Currently, I’m working on a platformer project on Mu Editor, in Pygame Zero, called Topple. The idea of the game is that an alien, and his interstellar navigation AI P.I.L.O.T. have been separated from their spaceship on some very Earth-like planet, and they need to get back before it’s too late. The code makes use of an interesting image for a pillaring mechanic, to help the team over walls that are a bit too tall. This game is really the only thing that I can work on, during downtime between beach visits. Despite this, I’ve found that I can be happy by coding, then swimming, hiking, sightseeing, and exploring.
The alien from Topple, using a pillaring block to reach the platform.