Psycho Durka – a project for tracking dark, distressing events.

 

In September, I started working with Visual Basic and brought an old idea to life: a simple program for making entries—short notes—centered around a specific theme: the Psycho Durka. It’s designed for recording particularly heavy or traumatic episodes. It features a stylized black-and-red interface.

It serves as a self-analysis journal—a list of bad events, logged by date with a brief title or just a couple of lines describing what happened. This is important for self-reflection and for putting distance between yourself and the event over time. You look back and see: "On such-and-such date, *this* happened." It had a bad, perhaps even disastrous, impact—a negative effect with lasting consequences. Like a wave that gradually fades—a sine wave pattern. A month goes by; you look back and realize it was really hard a month ago—a heavy blow. But now, a month later, you’ve almost forgotten. The effect lingers, but things have improved. After all, what else could you expect? A sense of depression, perhaps? That was the mindset when I first conceived the idea. I had been busy with other projects, but now—in September—it’s a fresh start for me. Another attempt, you could say.

I’ve already had some practice as part of my learning process. I created a local demo version first, then took that demo and refined it into a finished program ready for release. It has a black-and-red look and functions as a list—essentially just a text file containing entries. You can write anything you want, but the suggested theme is the Psycho Durka—logging negative experiences to track your state of mind, gain temporal distance, and try to maintain a sense of normalcy.

When launched, the program opens the text file where all the data is stored, and there are several buttons at the top. That’s how the controls work. The first button is "Exit"—the most important one. Then there are options to read or write. You can open a file containing existing entries or write a new event to a file. And then there’s "Mood"—or "Settings," really. It’s just a stylistic choice; "Mood" is just a label for the configuration options.

"Read" simply means opening a file—specifically, a text file containing these kinds of entries. "Write" opens a dedicated window with various settings for adding a new event. Here’s where the actual entry goes. The format is simple: the first text field is for the date. It fills in automatically, but you can manually enter whatever you like. Below that is the main text field for the entry itself—a description, an event title, or whatever else you want.

There are also some other settings—nothing critical, but they make the program look a bit more substantial. As a Visual Basic enthusiast, I couldn't resist adding them while practicing. I’m learning Visual Basic, so I’m putting into practice what I’ve picked up—throwing in radio buttons, creating menus, making it look like an Office-style application. That’s how I handle the settings.

Then there’s the question of *where* to write the data. There are a few options. You can write to the current file—the one that’s open right now and appears when the program starts. Or, when you close the "Add Entry" window, it writes to that same visible text file. Alternatively, you can write to a default file—a standard, pre-set file. Or you can specify a custom path—wherever you like. If the file doesn't exist, the program creates it; just type a filename, and a new file is made. If you specify an existing file, it appends the data to it. You simply specify the file path, and the program either creates the file or appends to it if it’s already there.

There’s also a setting for *how* to write the data. It records the date and the content itself, but how should they be separated? You can write the date... Then a tab character, followed by the content. Or perhaps a date. Then a line break, with the content starting on the next line.

These are the settings—preferences, really. Here, you can choose the language: Russian or English. You also configure startup behavior: which file to open and the default separator to use. This affects the options available when adding a new entry. You can customize it to your liking; the program will then operate according to those initial settings.

It’s a small program—a compact software tool I decided to develop.

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