The Stratagem’s Archive

Tag: learning

  • Learning to Pick Locks Like In Video Games

    The tools I got to learn my new craft and hobby of Locksport. From Covert Instruments.

    Video Games Opened The Doors For Me—Literally

    I am a curious person — few things have fascinated me enough to actually carry it out IRL and this new venture that I’ll be undergoing were introduced to me from various media.

    From video games, such as: Fallout 4(Bethesda Studios), Assassin’s Creed: Unity(Ubisoft), Dying Light: The Following(Techland and Warner Bros), to an engaging series, like Nevermore by Kate Flynn and Kit Trace(WebToons).

    This new skill that I’ll be diving into head first had been something I only seen on a screen and, now, I’ll get to experience it in real life: lock picking.

    I Am Not a Crook

    “I am not a crook”— Ruby Rose to Weiss Schnee, season 2, episode 1 of RWBY by Rooster Teeth.

    No, I am not pursuing lock picking to start a life of crime. Quite the opposite—I’m taking control of what I don’t know into my own hands. In the games and stories I enjoy immersing myself into, you have different options to progress the story, quest, or overcome obstacles.

    Using brute force causes loud noises, gives away your location, and alerting nearby enemies or NPC’s that someone is up to no good. When you’re starting at level 1, getting swarmed will be the fastest way you end up seeing the, “You Died”, on your screen.

    So, what are our alternatives? The sneaky, quiet way in: finding an opening, slip inside, and leaving without a trace. What happens when you encounter a locked door or can’t blend in, though? That’s where lock picking comes in — the real stealth mechanic.

    For non-gamers, this is typically how gamers progress through the game’s map, uncover loot, or survive without getting into a fight.

    Seeing and Getting the Feel of Things

    Covert Instrument’s clear lock and key. “Real rogue shit happening here.”

    I won’t be picking locks any time soon, but I do want to share how interesting the clear lock is. I’ve always wondered why keys had different grooves — with the clear lock, I can see why.

    The key lifts the pins inside of the lock to the correct height until they align. This is called, “The Shear Line.”

    This is when each pin is raised evenly, you are able to turn the key, and see the lock open. It’s really fascinating when you get to see how complex something as simple as a lock really is.

    The grooves and ridges in the keys aren’t just for show, it’s by design, it’s done with mechanics. And that’s an addictive feeling — getting to uncover the secrets of something hidden in plain sight everyday.

    It grants a little creative leeway when playing a rogue character, at least in my opinion. It takes much skill and knows how to pick a lock fast enough to not get caught and leave without a trace.

    Is This How It’s Like In Real Life?

    This is the ultimate question I’ll be able to answer with learning locksport; whether which one video game was right on the money or making up their own system to engage the players with a new system and environment, than to actually learn to pick locks for reference.

    Turns out, the real way to learn something is to understand how the mechanisms work.

    Where My Journey Could Go

    I am not claiming to be an expert, I am allowing my curiosity to get the best of me. That’s how my brain will be able to get rid of the tension I carry from and at work while indulging in the things I’m curious about.

    I’m just someone who is simply asking, “What if I tried this?” I share the skill I want to learn, how I got introduced to such skill or hobby, I give it a try for X amount of days, then share what I’ve learned at the end of my timeline.

    I’m usually one to use force than patience, so likely learning to be patient with these tools could transfer over to being patient with people. At least, that’s the hope.

    Hey There — Let’s Chat

    I’d like to hear from you. Really.

    • Have you ever been curious about something, but never pursued it? What was it?
    • Were you inspired by media as well, be it video games, books, movies, or other?
    • What’s your equivalent to lock picking — something oddly specific, and a little taboo, that you wanted to understand?

    Drop your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to know what doors you’re thinking about opening next.

    If not, that’s okay. You made it to the end and that means a lot more than you know, and I’d like to say thank you.

    The Stratagem’s Manifesto

    Otherwise, you can find my D&D inspired work or other tings I’m pursuing below. Until next time, I’ll see you all in the archives, another time.

    Quarantine Life: In The Confines of Comfort: Idea #1:

    The Town That Forgot How to Sleep: A D&D Prompt #2 (Seedling):

    Starting From Scratch: Learning to Code After a D in University: (Seedling)

  • Learning About My Name Was A Surprise

    Where did your name come from?

    If you have a name that looks similar to a simple to pronounce name, yet have people struggle to say your name, then it can be a wonder as to what’s wrong with people.

    Over the years, people struggled to pronounce and read my name, but it, to me, wasn’t difficult. Some times people forgot that, in English, the ‘s’ and ‘h’ combined creates a, “shhh” sound. When people omitted the ‘h’ in my name and made the ‘s’ longer, I’d think that people needed to go back to Elementary school to learn basic phonics.

    Anywho, back in 8th grade, my English teacher had been the first to read and pronounce my name correctly because it was the exact same pronunciation and spelling as his wife’s name.

    Later that school week, I was introduced to my English teacher’s wife, she was substituting, by my Math teacher and she asked if I was related to someone. I told her I was, she asked if that person was my mom, I told her no, the person she described is my mom’s sister.

    It turned out, when I asked, that my mom had met her sister’s classmate, my 8th grade English teacher’s wife, back in high school. She liked her name that, when I was born as a surprise because my mom didn’t realize she was pregnant, it was the name she gave me.

    I had met the woman who I was named after and it was an interesting experience. It really shows you how much of a small world we live in.

    I write more than about where my namesake came from.

    If you are someone who is curious and enjoys learning new things from the beginning – 0 experience and no prior knowledge – but don’t feel confident in learning, and likes this kind of content, hit subscribe and like to follow my journey into new skills, knowledge, or what I’m pursuing as a beginner.

    Below are blog posts where I share the things I’ve learned from 0 as a complete noob, to still not knowing what I’m doing, but I have a plan to learn by doing. You can check out now and see if I’m learning something you might be curious about!

    I Had No Idea What I Was Doing, But I Still Fixed This Xbox 360 (With No EXP)

    The Autodidact’s Journey: Starting Over With “Coding”: Part 1

    A.I. Was Taking Over My Writing Life — I Had to Pull Myself Back

  • I’m Afraid of Wasting My Potential — So I Learn Everything I Can, While I Can.

    How do you plan your goals?

    An Unstructured Structured System

    My goals undergo a process; it often comes from a place of spontaneity: listing every curiosity and skill down on paper, researching the amount of time and resources I’m able to free up without forfeiting my current lifestyle or neglecting my current obligations, and doing a process of elimination.

    More often than not, my plans are born from a place of mild obsession. I hate feeling small, weak, worthless, useless, and always at the mercy of someone else because of their “position/place of authority.”

    To put it simply, I carry a few questions with me everyday. It scratches the surface of my awareness to the point I’m physically on auto-pilot, but mentally overstimulated and calculating:

    • How Much Time Do I Have Left?
    • How Many More Opportunities Do I Have Left To Explore?
    • How Many of My Curiosities Will I Be Able To Satisfy?
    • Will I Be Proud of My Life If I Stay Where I Currently Am?

    These aren’t the complete list of questions, but they are the most important. I had spent the first 2 decades of my life hiding, playing video games to numb the pain, to hide the fact that I was not gifted with much skill, brains, or strength. I could easily acquire skills and experience quick in video games, unless you’re playing any FromSoft game, but I refused to do the same in real life.

    I decided very recently to change my narrative, and it’s a hit or miss some days. Starting a blog was born from a long wish to write and share when I have no one who would sit and listen in person; I’m learning to code, despite having had an awful experience in university with zero exposure or knowledge prior, to be an opportunity to overcome self-imposed limitations; Allowing my mind to wander and become distracted often leads to adding fuel to my personal fire.

    What Are My Reasons For Planning Things This Way?

    My reasons for planning my goals this way is simple. I’m not striving towards pure freedom, some rules need to remain in place. I’m striving to reduce fear’s hold on me and to expand my options. To use my anger against myself, circumstances, other people that irritates me for something constructive.

    How many of us are living life where our options are limited?

    That is what I want, to expand my options, to release as much anger and rage as I can, one centimeter at a time. The goals I’m striving are for me, for where I want to go, who I want to grow into, and to experience things that I had denied myself and witness and be a part of as many things as I can. True freedom is to have options, instead of having no options and feeling powerless, small, useless,worthless, and a failure.

    These are my goals, my struggles, my process, and my drive. Time is against me, it’s against all of us, and my self imposed deadline is fast approaching. 3 more years, I wonder what I’ll have accomplished by then. Only time will tell, and me!

    For more of my writing and things I’ve been planning, you can check out my other articles below. Thanks!

  • Trite and Vexing Vocabulary

    What is a word you feel that too many people use?

    Many words have been used to the point that hearing it provokes a visceral reaction. I know that I tend to feel myself: tense up, I feel a noticeable thumping hitting the front of my skull, I’m mentally rolling my eyes, and letting out a heavy huff. It’s the only way that I’m able to release the bubbling irritation boiling within me, before returning to emotional numbness, especially when I’m at work.

    The few words or phrases that tends to get a rise from me, in the sense that I want to drop kick whoever is talking, are:

    • Can you go do X? (Either I’m already or about to do it, or the person asking bypasses more than half a dozen people standing around just to ask me? That’s infuriating.)
    • Have you seen so-so? (I’m not getting paid to babysit young adults, no. Go bother the people who’s supposed to be training the new hires.)
    • [S/he’s] not doing anything! (Have you EVER noticed you’re doing the same thing? It’s irritating, nothings going to change, just do your job and leave. Still working on taking my own advice too.)
    • I want to go home already. (Me too, but we have to finish sorting the freight, then we can leave. But that’s wishful thinking on good days.)

    These are other words and phrases I can’t think of at the top of my head, though it does make me want to drop kick people, but it also depends on how it’s being said.

    Think of it like this; we all have our preferences and it will differ from the people we know and don’t know, right? However, have you ever heard one person speaking and their voice is pleasant, soothing, and makes you want to listen more intently? Okay, keep that in mind.

    Now, imagine the most irritating, nail scratching, metal grinding metal, and obnoxious sounding person you can muster and saying the words you absolutely despise and are repeating it over and over again until you start to think your ears are bleeding. That makes those overly used words even more difficult to tolerate.

    There’s nothing that can be done about it, sadly, it’s another lingo, and the best I can do for myself is to tune everything out and do what I have to do. No matter how angry, bitter, and resentful I feel, no matter how much I want to drop kick people, I just have to exist and let go.

    For more posts like this, I have a few recommendation below, and I’ll see you over in the next ones!

    Where Peace Radiates From Most?

    My Life Through An Alternate Lens

    The Little Things Make Me Happy

  • The Autodidact’s Journey: Introducing the “Starting Over” Series

    What Will This Series Be About?

    Welcome, Co-conspirators, the Stratagem’s Archives are now open for perusing. Today I will be starting a series called, “Starting Over.” To put it simply, let me ask a single question.

    “What skills or hobbies did you want to learn, but stopped MOSTLY because of an awful experience?”

    That is essentially what “Starting Over” is going to be about; returning to pick up the skills and hobbies I gave up on and didn’t pursue for years. All thanks to the experiences I had that convinced me I wasn’t smart enough to learn, or that, because I had no prior knowledge or experience or skill, I shouldn’t have pursued those skills or hobbies in the first place.

    As you already know, “The Stratagem’s Archive,” is a place where I document my interests, thought experiments, what I’m learning, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve tried so far. Despite not having credentials, formal education or a mentor, or prior skill and knowledge, I didn’t want the obvious to prevent me from trying again.

    Fear, criticism, boredom, lack of money and time and energy, and every other obstacle under the sun already dictates majority of our lives.

    As a lifelong learner, a person, and an Autodidact, I am choosing to say, “No More”, and start my journey with picking up the things I gave up on because I “failed to learn it the first time.” (HEAVY AIR QUOTES).

    Anyways, each “Starting Over” installment will be different and broken up into parts:

    • My previous experiences and what made me stop.
    • The resources I’ve chosen to get back into learning.
    • And what I’ve learned and made so far to showcase here on the blog.

    I am extremely excited to begin this project; I had stood in my own way for a long time, believed people who knew better tell me to give up, but I only have this one life.

    • When will I ever get the chance to do anything ever again if I keep letting myself waste time with sulking and wishing?
    • When will any of us finally decide that NOW, choosing to try again, to start again, will be the only time we have now?

    Whether we are “Starting Over” or trying something new for the first time, we get to decide to:

    • shift our perspectives and psychology.
    • adjust our relationships with success and failure with learning and ourselves.
    • be proactive with our learning anyways.

    That is the beauty, and challenge, of being a lifelong learner and a fellow autodidact, polymath, renaissance person, and everything in-between. I have a similar post down below that you could check out, and I’ll see you in the first installment. Thank you.

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    Fixing An Xbox 360 Error Code E68 As a Complete Noob:

  • How I Reworked Old Art After a Long Break From Drawing

    Back From a Long Creative Hiatus:

    Welcome, Co-conspirators, the Stratagem’s Archives are now open for perusing. Today, I will be shifting the topics over to creative outlets and will be presenting a remastering of old sketches.

    Not only will I be remastering a sketch and presenting them here, but I will also create a new sketch of the same source material that will include: shading, coloring, and perspective, using traditional methods. I will be using printer paper, a mechanical pencil with 0.5mm lead, and Crayola colored pencils.

    I had taught myself years prior using references, watching YouTube videos (AKA Mark Crilley), video games, animation, and books. Although, I have always been highly critical of my work, I am willing to share my progress and the steps I’ll be taking to improve my current skills.

    The sketches that I will be showcasing here can be considered fan art for a text based reading game called, “The Samurai of Hyuga” from Choice of Games LLC’s second app, “Hosted Games LLC” by Devon Connell.

    Text Based Game Inspiration

    The characters below are the potential romantic love interest(s), friend, enemy, or ex-lover of the player character. It depends on how you, the player, interact with the story and which kinds of relationships you want to pursue with the characters.

    They each have their role in the story and, at the time of this writing, “The Samurai of Hyuga” has 5 books. I’m waiting to see how the story progresses, however, this is how I envisioned the following characters to look like.

    Momoko Hayami and Junko Uesugi have confirmed sketches provided by the author and the artist that works on their projects. But my sketches were before those official concept arts were released.

    From Right to Left: The Doctor, Momoko Hayami; The Ronin, Junko Uesugi; The Kunoichi, Toshie. Drawn on 12/23/2017

    The following project will be using The Ronin, Junko Uesugi, as my reference. The picture above is Junko being introduced in the ending of Book 1 and in the beginning of Book 2. I do have another sketch of her, made three years later, with how I had imagined she’d appear in book 4.

    There is a blank space to the left because I was going to include a background years prior. But I gave up on that because I liked how Junko came out here. I didn’t want to ruin this drawing by doing something I believed I was going to mess up on. However, for this coming project, that is going to change.

    Several New Artistic Challenge to Undertake!

    So, with these new artistic challenges, I’ll be showing my step-by-step process in creating a new “Junko Uesugi” with a dynamic poses, adding a background, including color, and shading. The first thing I will show will be the pose itself and how the baseline will be starting out.

    The “skeletal” base for Junko Uesugi from “The Samurai of Hyuga”: 7/29/25

    I’ve never used to use a baseline to draw before, but it felt appropriate here. I wanted to challenge myself, and challenged I was when starting this out. In the past, using shapes and lines to map out the body, proportions, and angles was strange and I thought that it wasn’t necessary.

    You could probably tell that I didn’t properly learn art, but learned from watching anime, cartoons, and playing video games.

    I’ve been searching on YouTube for tips and advice that could help me with improving drawing dynamic poses and came across “YTartschool” that mentions to use asymmetry because symmetry is what will throw everything off.

    “JustinArts” mentioned to use myself as a reference by taking pictures, which I’ve done in the past, though I hope I’ll be able to personally capture, not only the pose, the right emotion I want to create.

    Hopefully, as I add more details, I’ll be able to figure out how to focus on depth and perspective. I’m so used to using a more forward facing profile that I struggled to get a side front profile. I’ve usually started from the head and neck down, but I started from the hips and shoulders, then worked my way upwards.

    Adding details to the “skeleton”: 7/29/25

    So much of this process is new to me: the pose, the body placements, just figuring out the proportions is difficult for me because I’m just used to jumping into things and going from there. If you were to look at my previous above examples, you could see that they’re all static, stiff, and lacks dynamism.

    I’m seeing that this draft looks good so far, but I am doing my best to not jinx myself or criticize before I can get the details in.

    More details to Junko Uesugi: 7/29/25

    Okay, this came out better than I thought, but I’m getting nervous the more I work on this project. Besides anatomy, perspective, profiles, and everything else needed to make good to great art, I didn’t teach myself to learn clothing, fabrics, and how they crease or flow.

    I could have used my own gauze to see how it would look wrapped around a person live, or used a blanket for the pants, but I went with an easier option. I just drew lines and made sure it follows the curves of the body, so I have another project to pursue next time!

    In Conclusion

    After not having drawn anything for what felt like years, I have grown pleasantly surprised with how this project came out.

    Most likely I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I can’t learn or see my mistakes if I don’t make things and see where needs work.

    So, I’ll be making part 2 and post it at a later date. Very likely I’ll make a few copies of this sketch so that, when I work on the backgrounds, shading, and color, I have backups to use in case I can’t undo my mistakes like digital art can.

    If you’ve been away from your creative and artistic outlet, then let me know in the comments below; what got you back into the activity, what did you make recently, and what your thoughts were from such a long hiatus?

    Thank you for taking the time to look over my progress and reading my process. The archives will now be closing and I’ll see you in part 2!

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