Am I approaching playing the wrong way?

The computer is a great teacher.  It can tell you what it is thinking, what you are doing wrong, and variations of openings that are unusual but good, to name a few things.

Computers have a couple of issues -- they do not tone down well.  They either are a genius or a moron, with little to no in-between.  If you are not losing to it every game, its probably not going to help you much apart from the book openings.  They also play weird openings, some of them flawed, if you set them to random opening mode.   If you force it to play a line you are reviewing, you can get more from it.

Computer is good when you analyze and it can show you if specific sacrifice is good or not, but even is not sound, a human may blunder.. Or when you play specific possition. For example a piece up defending endgame. Some good unballanced variation so you can practice attacking or defending with material up. That's why here computer medium-hard-impossible often sac a piece for 3 pawns or so and positions are very crazy. But you should play humans if you can join a local club. Computer can show you, but can't explain you why a move is good or bad. Also computers don't blunder away unless is very weak which will be pointless. So play humans by all means.

If there's anything good to say about playing against a strong computer, I suppose it would be that even beginners will easily be able to adopt the mindset of expecting the best move from the opponent. E.g. it's a mistake to play bad moves and hope for tricks... but when it works (against a human) that's positive reinforcement to try tricks again in the future.

But the downsides vs strong computers are many. Some have already been mentioned. Another is you'll never get a chance to win a won game... finishing off an opponent can be very hard. They tend to become desperate and look hard for resources while you tend to become complacent. Humans know what's difficult for other humans to deal with, computers don't.

Also, losing over and over may result in adopting a somewhat passive style, where you just try to survive. Even in slow positional play, activity is essential, so this would be a bad habit.

But yeah, most of all don't be afraid of looking dumb. All GMs started as terrible beginners  Every decent player has lost thousands of games and made just about every kind of mistake possible at one point or another.

Again! Thank you all for the help. I really do appreciate it!

I do not think computers are good teachers.

if they are strong they only reinforce the idea that all ideas fail, and undermine your confidence in playing sacrifices and strong threats.

if they are set lower, they play bizarre moves- moves that are patently and obviously wrong.

Either way, if you want to progress you have to bring Meaning and planning into your chess.  and learn to take advantage of mistakes (big or small) of your opponent.

a strong computer makes no mistakes and undermines this basic education.  Seeing "meaning" in chess is a big reason why studying endgames are such a good idea.  Endgames are usually decided by seeing the meaning of the positions of various peices.

Your problem is you think getting good at chess is seeing every single move and its consequence.  that may be how a strong computer plays chess - but its doesn't work for People and isn't how strong chess players become strong.

I strongly agree MrD's last bit of advice.  Playing a Computer excessively Does make you passive- and this will not make you strong.

Instead, be bold and play people (too).  it will be good for you and your game.

Would everyone suggest I jump into live games, or should I start out with correspondence instead? 

What seems like a better route to take? 

LIVE is better.

if you not used to a routine of getting to chess every other day- you'll probably just end up timing out of a lot of games.

besides... you want to Play live games and Study what happened.

Let me ask you this...when youre playing the chess engine and you have a position that is +.4 do you understand what that means?  If you dont then playing an engine isnt helping you.

Playing live opponents does have its own help, and it's not useful to not want to look stupid. Let me reassure you by saying that nobody will simply browse your games and laugh at your mistakes. Unless you are a titled master playing in famous tournaments, all of your blunders are yours and yours alone to see and everyone else's to forget in an endless sea of blunders.

But my favorite part of playing computer opponents is for time control. 30|0 is the longest and pretty much the only time control I play here. But in a computer game I can do 45|45, 90|30, or even just make moves throughout the day. This helps my improvement a lot more than 30|0 games. 

In a perfect world, I would get 90|30 time control games against opponents with a varied rating range. But with the world I have, computers can help remedy the curriculum holes I have with live chess.

Id be happy to play you at 1 day/move if you want and go over it as we play or after or whatever.  Im only average, though, so don't expect GM level feedback :)

The biggest benefit to playing humans is that you can have a real conversation after to go over the game. Computers offer analysis, but it's not very insightful in my opinion. I think live play allows you to be more creative and experiment. Whenever I play the computer I get very technical and safe.