Hello. As many who know me are aware, I like cooking weird or very simple things. Examples include: a 3 ingredient cookie, a no bake lemon pie, and Ramen Lasagna (A group favorite in my D&D group). So, when my dad sent me a video with an odd recipe, and I realized I had all the ingredients for it, I HAD to try it! The first attempt… did not go well. But I realized what I did wrong and tried again. Here are those two experiences.

But First, The Recipe

Before I get into what I did, both good and bad, what is this recipe I am trying? Well, I don’t have a written version I can just put here. That’s because what I was given was a video of a woman making this thing. So I will describe what was presented to me.

Step 1 was simple: Stab a hot dog with a bunch of pasta in a line. When done the pasta should look like a fence sticking out of the hot dog with a bunch of small gaps.

Step 2 is predictable: Boil the pasta and hot dog. Not much to say about this now… but I will get back to this.

Step 3 is where things get fun: Lay out the hot dog and pasta then apply tomato sauce onto the pasta. Then apply cheese, the video appears to use shredded parmesan.

Step 4: Roll up the hot dog in the pasta with the sauce and cheese on the inside. Then wrap a tortilla around the hot dog like a burrito.

Step 5: Fry the burrito on each side until crispy. And finally enjoy.

The First Attempt

For my first attempt I only used things we already had around the house. This meant a few ingredients were a bit… off. Starting with my hot dog, my family does not buy “Stadium sized” hot dogs, we buy polish sausages and use them as hot dogs. So I am starting with something oversized for the recipe. For my pasta, what I had easily available was Angle Hair pasta… so now I have an over sized and an undersized item. Great.

Before anything else I heat up my hot dog in the microwave. While the boiling might cook it, I won’t be moving it in the water, so I don’t want to rely on that alone. Next I begin stabbing my hot dog with the pasta and I notice two things. Fist is that it is taking A LOT of pasta to get across this hot dog (see oversized hot dog and undersized pasta). Second is that my hot dog is too large for my tortilla. Solution? Don’t use the entire hot dog. I stop placing pasta about an inch short of the end and move the entire thing to a pan with water and begin heating it.

This is also where I remembered I was going to take pictures of the process. And where I made my first real mistake. I set the stove to high and walked away as it began to heat up. After losing track of time I rushed back into the kitchen and saw the pasta waving in the boiling water. Having not made very much pasta, I believed it was done… I was very wrong. After putting the hot dog and pasta on a cutting board, the pasta quickly dried out, hardened, and snapped at the hot dog base. Leaving me with a perforated hot dog and undercooked pasta.

Thankfully, this undercooked pasta was easily resolved by simply boiling it more. But, I now could not roll the pasta and hot dog into a nice roll up with the sauce and cheese inside. So I applied the sauce and cheese to the tortilla instead. Then placed the hot dog with the pasta loosely around it into the tortilla and wrapped it all up.

Now to the frying. I drained the water from my pan, put down some vegetable oil and started cooking it. And the tortilla being too small comes back up here. As you can see in the photo it started unwrapping.

With everything else going wrong and this a the end I started treating it more like a quesadilla than a burrito. I got it crisp “enough” and but my losses before everything started spilling out.

Initial Thoughts

After my cavalcade of mess ups, how was the finished product? Interesting. Not like anything else I have had before and good enough for me to try again. But with a few thought out changes this time.

Firstly, a different pasta. Something with more volume. Secondly, bigger tortilla, so I could use the entire hot dog and get a good wrap around it.

For the cooking process… Well I will get to that.

The Second Attempt

Today I tried again and I won’t be going into as much detail as I did before, except where things are different.

So, this time I started boiling the water as I was stabbing the hot dog with spaghetti. I also set a timer for how long the spaghetti was supposed to take to be done. This solved most of my initial problems.

The spaghetti did not need nearly as much to get across the hot dog. Boiling before placing meant I didn’t have as much of a chance to get distracted. And the timer meant I wouldn’t pull it out so early this time… more on that in a bit.

With the spaghetti cooked, removed, and not broken, I got to apply the sauce and cheese as was intended. Then I rolled it up and put it in the, much larger, torotilla.

Frying up the tortilla went super easy this time. The tortilla only tried to fall apart once and was easily fixed.

The finished product looked good and tasted fairly good… with one small problem.

Final Thoughts

I have been alluding to one problem with today’s attempt. So enough beating around the bush: what was it? I didn’t boil the spaghetti long enough. The timer was set for the 10 minutes the box suggested, but took it out with 2 minutes on the timer. I figured this was much less than the box expected to be cooked in a way that should cook it a little faster. But I was wrong.

Turns out I got the spaghetti to about the point of Al Dente… Maybe? At least as I understand it. Which is to say, the core of the pasta was a bit hard. This put a bit of a damper on the final taste. But I still enjoyed the final product.

So, what would I do differently if I did this again? Simple: Skip the pasta. I would make a burrito with a hot dog (polish sausage) as it’s core. This will make cooking it simpler and let me add more flavors more easily.

This was an enjoyable experiment that led me to a final recipe I will likely enjoy several times in the future.

Hello, it’s been a while since I posted here. Sorry about that. So, what have I been up to? To sum things up: My game is in closed testing for an eventual Google Play Store release! Just need a few more testers and a little bit of time (plus one or two very minor updates) and I will have a game I made by myself available for sale. I am both excited and terrified at the same time.

However, not everything has been an easy path here. And I have a recent tale of one such bump in the road to tell.

What Happened

While I was in the process of moving my game through the testing phases, Google sent out a notification: “Your game’s billing library must be updated to version 7.0.0 or higher by X date”.

My thoughts were simple “This shouldn’t be difficult. Probably just a simple update and I’m done.” And it should have been, but I am getting ahead of myself.

What Went Wrong

Everything was going smoothly. Opened the project, found where I needed to do the update. Finished the update… and got errors that I needed to update my code…

Turns out I updated from the In App Purchasing (IAP) version 4 to 5, which came with a change in how it is coded. All of my IAP code was suddenly worthless. Arguably worse than useless as it was in the way of whatever the new way of doing things was.

Upon realizing all this I tried to learn how to use the new version… and go so frustrated I yelled at the top of my voice and started to get a headache. And all of this was just being exacerbated by a deadline.

What Did I do

In short: I panicked. And I don’t operate well when I panic. I ran away from the problem and worked on other things. But eventually, I needed to get back to it. And after a pep talk with my dad I did.

But I decided to try and play it smart this time. I realized that Google just wanted the Billing Library updated, not the IAP version. So I started searching around about that. Maybe I would be able to return to the version where my coding still worked. It was worth a shot at least. And it turned out I was right! There was a version of IAP 4 that supported Billing Library 7. Now I just needed to figure out if I could rewind the update I did.

Looking it up online I found a method that I won’t bore you with, but involved a few preliminary steps such as backing up the project… just in case. That done, there were a few more steps I was “supposed” to follow. But I impulsively decided to just delete IAP version 5. I then realized I might be able to reinstall the older version 4, and sure enough I could! So I did that, checked a part of the code to make sure things looked good. And made a new build for Google.

Last Few Things

So I uploaded the new build to Google, and everything looked like it was going fine. Until two days latter when google told me I needed to update to billing library 7 again. But this problem was much easier to solve. I realized my Internal Testing version had not been updated in a long time. So updating that to the latest build and the next day Google told me I was in the clear.

One final word is to thank two creators who’s videos helped me in this endeavor:
YTCodeMaster who’s short pointed me in the right direction. Short
And New Popular Games who’s video showed me what version I was looking for and how to check that it all worked out. Video

Recently, a friend of mine passed away. Within that friend group, if you had asked any of us who would likely die first everyone would have said him (even him). But even so, it still came as a shock. Just out of nowhere, someone I saw almost weekly is just gone. Forever. The remainder of the group got together for our normal weekly gathering and had a remembrance for him. But I was struck by the difference in how I reacted to the news compared to everyone else. So I thought I would write about that.

Not The First Time

This is not the first time I have lost someone close to me. Over the years I have lost all of my grandparents, some of them rather suddenly. But… I didn’t feel the lose very strongly. Part of me knew, they were gone, I would never see them again, and I should be sad. But I didn’t cry, I wasn’t sad, I just carried on with life. I don’t know why that is how I reacted, but it is. Did I disassociate from the problem? Maybe. That is how I would describe how I felt at the time.

In addition to losing grandparents I have also lost several pets. The first was my dog. We got her when she was just a puppy and I was still in early grade school. I grew up with that dog. And then, one day, just before we were set to go on vacation for a weekend, something happened. We were in the garage and she yelped in pain. When we got to her seconds latter, her back legs no longer worked. As best we can tell our 13+ year old dog had a stroke or aneurism or something that lost her the ability to move her back legs. One stay at the Vet latter and a confirmation that she would not get better… and we had her put to sleep.

I do not remember much around this time, I remember choosing not to go back and watch her going to sleep for the last time. I am told I cried over the loss. Typing this out I can feel the tears threatening to come out, so I believe it. All this to say, I know I can be affected by loss, but for some reason I am not a lot of the time.

This Time

This time, it was just a normal day. Was in the middle of something when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. But when I finished up and looked again I realized who the call was from and called them back. Upon getting the news of our friend’s death my immediate response was a short stunned silence, then a “Oh. FUCK.”

I was sent reeling for a little bit, but then my mind shifted a bit. Rather than the grief one might expect, my mind started going over how schedules might change. What to do with certain character interactions in our ongoing game. Just all these analytical angles of the situation. Honestly it got to the point where I was starting to wonder if something was wrong with me.

Then we had our remembrance gathering. Most of the other people were very emotional or had emotional stories of hearing the news. And I just… didn’t. Guess I was the rock. For a while I wondered if something was wrong with my response. But writing all this out has helped me get through some things. And how much I got choked up upon starting this… Nothing “wrong” with me. I just process my grief in an atypical way.

There is a local event for developers to bring their games and get people to play test them. I have attended this event several times before, not as a developer but just to try and be part of the community. Just one problem, I am very introverted and not good at integrating into new groups.

As such when I went to these events I would do my best to try and play the games, socialize, and generally be present in the event. But I would often either stick to one place where I felt “safe” or just leave. I just felt awkward and out of place. After a few attempts I largely stopped attending these events. I wasn’t getting much out of them, and I don’t think the people who brought their games were getting much from me either.

Then COVID happened and the events understandably stopped. But just recently the events started back up again. And now I had something to show, something I needed playtested. So I resolved to attend, full of dread for my introverted self, 3 hours in a room full of strangers wanting to talk to me…

And then I was at the event. People were playing my game (and enjoying it more than I expected, even as they failed). I was taking some notes on things to change. And then I looked at the time. Two of the three hours had already passed… and I was having fun. A simple change in perspective/goal/role had turned something I dreaded into an enjoyable and useful experience.

This doesn’t mean I am suddenly an extrovert. Or that there is anything wrong about being an introvert. But it does mean I have discovered another part of my comfort zone. I may actually be looking forward to the next of these events.

I am an introvert. Most of the time this means I am content to keep my own company. But it does not mean I am “allergic” to large gatherings or the such. Just that I can find them draining, if still fun. Why do I bring this up? In conversations I have two “modes”. The first the conversation centers on something I am passionate about and I can talk near endlessly. In my more common mode I will quietly listen and try to speak up when I have something to say. Key word: try.

At a family gathering over the Thanksgiving holiday, I got into a conversation with a relative. They were asking me about a topic relating to my game. And they would ask me a question, before going into details about the question with their own assumptions. I would try to answer the underlying question they at first asked… but whenever I did they would just talk over me as if I hadn’t said anything. Eventually, it felt like they were trying to tell me what they assumed the answer was and/or why my answer was stupid rather than have a conversation. Around the 4th time it happened I just got up and left the room. “Because apparently I’m not allowed to be part of the conversation.”

To be fair to my relative, other people had joined the conversation and I had been quiet for a while. But to be frank, I don’t care about being fair to them after the 4th time in less than an hour. In my opinion the problem seemed to arise from a severe difference in conversation style. Because I am content to listen to a conversation until I have something relevant to contribute he seemed to think I had nothing to say. So when I did have something to say, he just ran over me.

People say not to get angry. But what they usually mean is “don’t lash out”. Because after I got angry, and let everyone know I was upset (and why), I got an apology and he stopped talking over me. So it is okay to be quiet, just don’t be a door mat that everyone walks over.

There is something I have always “known” but only recently began to truly appreciate. That is: when making a game get feedback from an outside source whenever practical. The reason for this is simple: as the creator, you aren’t going to see things as clearly as someone outside of the project. And I had always “known” that, but only in my last project have I really lived it.

I have frequently been trying to get playtest feedback from people. But it was always in limited amounts. And the feedback I got didn’t have much in the way of substantive changes to make to the overall experience. But just recently I got my game in front of a slightly larger group than normal and got some feedback that made lots of sense. Things that I hadn’t been thinking about, but when I gave them 3 seconds of thought made perfect sense.

The feedback you get from people outside your project helps give you a new perspective. In my case I am applying the feedback I got pretty directly. But in many cases feedback can serve to force you to ask a critical question: Why did they have that response? By reflecting upon that question you can find issues that you have been blinded to by your familiarity with the project. These problems might not even have any direct relation to the thing the feedback was about. But changes elsewhere could have cascading effects that eventually change what was complained about.

Overall, feedback isn’t about “You need to change thing X because Y” but about seeing things from a new perspective. That way you can pull back and take in the whole thing, rather than getting lost in the weeds.

For a long time now I have been afraid of learning new things. That might sound silly, but hear me out, I only recently really figured out the source of the fear. For a long time I blamed my reluctance to learn new things on my ADHD. Just a lack of ability to focus making it hard. And while that is partly true I recently figured out another part of the problem. As the title suggests what I am afraid of is being overwhelmed by complexity.

When learning a new thing I am afraid it is going to be too complex or involve things I just don’t understand. Just a nice fun mixture of “the fear of the unknown” and a large dose of “fear of failure”. So, what do I do? Delay, distract, and do anything else. I know this isn’t what I should do, and am trying to get better about it. But recently I have started to realize just how unfounded these fears are.

I think what really planted the seed of these fears is two fold. First is a longstanding fear of failure. Not too unusual, and something I have been at least somewhat aware of all my life. Gaming is both were I became aware of this fear, and a space I can fail safely to try and get over it. The second seed is a bit more unusual. That is when I tried looking up how to do various technical things in my programming education, it would seem that the articles I found would assume I new various things that I simply did not know. My most common response to these types of “help articles” was “If I knew that part I wouldn’t be here asking for help!”. And so I slowly associated looking for help with being made to feel stupid and incompetent.

But, throughout my time learning things I would occasionally run into a weird thing. I would be doing something and someone would take notice and praise my ability to do/understand that thing. But I would be confused. Because to me that thing wasn’t praiseworthy… it was easy. And it has taken me years to realize those praises weren’t empty platitudes, that I actually do have some talents. And nothing has underlined this more than when I pushed through to learn some new things recently. Rather than being overwhelmed or confused as I expected it was all so simple and easy to understand.

I am not completely over my fears yet. I still have a ways to go. But I can see the path forward. And who knows? Just as these new things may be simpler than I fear, the path forward may be shorter than I think.

Early this week My long used laptop charger developed a fault. It still functioned, but part of the wire was frayed revealing the layer under the rubber coating. Not like it was sparking, but not something I wanted to take risks with either. So until I could get a new charger my work laptop couldn’t really be used as normal. So what to do with the day? Clean my keyboard.

I have a pair of mechanical keyboards for my two computers, and I had never cleaned them. I new the idea of how to clean them: remove keys, clean underneath, clean individual keys, replace keys. Fairly simple. But… I had no idea how to remove the keys safely. Then I got a special tool specifically for the job and it was off to the races.

Spent most of the morning cleaning my “work keyboard”. First removing the keys (carefully keeping them in order), then scrubbing under where they were. So much dirt, oil, and other detritus had accumulated that it took some work to get most of it out. Next up was blasting it all with a can of compressed air. As a side note, I’m not sure if I will ever get used to how cold compressed air cans get when in use. With the board itself (mostly) clean I moved onto the keys themselves. Nothing fancy for these, wipe them down with a wet cloth, then dry them with a dry cloth. Got the dirt rings off them and made them shiny again. Only took a few seconds per key, but that adds up for a full keyboard. Just put on a podcast and let the Zen of repetitive action take over.

While I was dealing with the keyboards a thought kept popping up in the back of my head. Near the end of dealing with the second keyboard I decided to check on that thought. And sure enough I was right. Turns out I had a spare charger that had been sitting in a box for several years. So now I have two clean keyboards and a charger in good condition. What happened to the old charger you may ask? Toothpick as a splint to keep that part from bending and some electric tape to keep it secure and safe. Not a pretty solution, but it works as a “new” backup charger.

With everything done, I replaced the keys and had a clean keyboard for the first time in… too long. The difference is like night and day.

So my game is approaching the point of being done. That is to say, while there is always something that can be worked on, it is feature complete and working. I just have a few more features to iron out, mostly quality of life improvements for the player. So, what’s next? Getting it into the hands of players (and hopefully monetizing the thing).

The problem is that actually getting an app on to an app store is a long and annoying process. At first I thought it would be simple: make a profile, submit app, get approval (after inevitable edits), app in store. Simple and straightforward right? Wrong. Even just a cursory glance at the actual process showed me it would be much more complicated than that. Lots of steps to secure the project, steps to make the submission secure, steps to make sure the app isn’t malicious. Add onto that an almost $100 cost to have the honor of being able to submit apps for Apple’s consideration.

At first all of this was paralyzingly overwhelming. Where do I even begin? What does any of this mean? What is going on? But then I calmed down enough to remember the simple fix to being overwhelmed: take it one step at a time. In this case I am aiming for both IOS and Android distribution, so just focus on one for now. Make sure I understand each step before moving on to the next. And try not to get sidetracked and add more to my plate.

Of course, when looking up tutorials on how to do this I found a tutorial on adding ads to Unity games. Something I need in order to monetize the game… Will this ever end?