Rough-drafted a fic. Drew a thing. Played some games. Learned the procedure for blood-sugar testing with the lancet and test machine.
My mother fell again. While trying to get icecream. Again. But I helped her get back up and it was OK. PnP day tomorrow. DST starts on Sunday.
Normal class day. Awesomenauts Prestige 9. Doodles before bed.
Instead of calling these things ‘Daily’- which they’re not- I’m going to call them Now Saving. Because it’s basically me saving my game before I go to bed. You know. Just in case. But sometimes I forget to save.
PnP day today was Keras’s final day. Session started with the character exploding, and then EVERYONE PASSED OUT the end. (More was supposed to happen, but the GM’s internet was flakey for the whole six hour stretch. So after passing out due to gas, nothing else really happened. I feel kinda bad. Keras’s player didn’t get to do anything in their last day, and whatever happens next will probably be a sad, mourning type thingy that my character will be completely useless for.)
Class: HOLY CRAP I GOT TO USE THE OCULUS RIFT FOR MY FIRST TIME! It was pretty neat, especially with how well the head tracking worked with Minecraft and the Unity demo. However, while I was free to look around, I was not in control of the controller for the games we were trying, and I found that I kept losing my sense of balance constantly while looking around.
GamesII: Cleared up the permissions error. While the BlueHuskyStudios subgroup had me assigned properly, that subgroup did not have access permissions for writing. Now that that’s fixed, I’ll have to push my updates to it. Maybe tonight. I merged the pull request I tried to send earlier just now, so my updates are now in the master. I still don’t 100% get what I’m doing with Github, but some of these tools are incredibly convenient. It’d be nice if we can put Oculus Rift support into The Seas Have Eyes. Next up: Make item pickups work.
SSE: Helped a teammate fix a problem where they were unable to sync with the group version of the project. Most of that discussion can be seen here. He’s made a workable camera, and now it’s on me to make the units do what they should. Just added third team member to the group, so soon he’ll bring in his controller and we should be all set up to play a game. Or. Something.
Stable 45: Did some art to help figure out how I’ll lay out the website. Struggled with it. You can browse them on sta.sh by clicking here. http://sta.sh/29jovs8t9c2?edit=1 Stable 45 at its core is about ponies that love fun. Though I think waaaaay far into overkill with the hexagon tiled floor. Might be nice for a recreation room, but I think I’m either going to use white square tiles for bedrooms and normal floors, or just stick with the setting-standard metal flooring and walls, but compensate with decorative holograms and robots. Infinite supplies. Limited Space. That’s one thing I’ll have to remember for everything I add, though.
Did a doodle. Accidentally walked in on roommate in the bathroom. Washed clothes. Spent 2h wash/dry time responding to FoE:BD. Talked about writing fic and made some plans to write fic. Made plans for Multimedia project. Listened to the new This Platinum Crown chapter (This Day Aria). Started listening to new The Long Winter chapter (Choices). Played Awesomenauts for 4 hours. Listened to some Counter Monkey videos about The Toilet Pizza and all-jedi-or-no-jedi and his experience with LARP. Feel a little guilty about not being more productive. I keep using the ‘don’t feel like’ excuse. But it’s just that, an excuse. I can do more. So why don’t I?
Pumped a few more hours into this vector wallpapery thingy. It’s taking way longer than my usual sketches and doesn’t look tons better? But it looks OK.
Played more Gameloft MLP. Got Github and Google+ Hangouts setup. Tweaked my Google Calendar. Updated weekly report for Games II. Listened to some more PH chapters, but I don’t remember which ones. I think I heard a chunk of FoEPH ch 52 at some point.
Thinking about trying to write a very short fic for the ABCs of FoE project if some of the existing authors keep lagging behind.
When I do make more time for fic, I’ll be making less time for pics or something I guess. And I’m about to go to bed in a bit but I might slap a last-minute doodle online.
0:55 <Retl|Zzz> ohshi I just had the stupidest panic moment
00:55 <Retl|Zzz> Where I was like ‘what day is it’
00:56 <Retl|Zzz> And then I look at my calendar and see it’s Tuesday and then I’m like OHSWEETCELESTIA I DIDN’T GO TO ANY OF MY TUESDAYCLASSES WTF
00:56 <Retl|Zzz> And then I realize ‘oh it’s past midnight’
Artstuffs: Guess who just figured out how to vector stuff?
THIS GUY! Through a bit of bouncing back and forth between GIMP’s path tools and playing around with Inkscape’s Pattern Along Path tools and other node-tweaking whatnot, I now know how to make vectors that look relatively close to the show? But it’s still not spot on. It’s most noticeable if you look at the inner-body tapers. Still. I’m glad to have finally figured out a way to make lineart that doesn’t look super janky and to have an idea of how to make very MLPFiM-esque art. On the other hoof, I do not like how many hours it takes to do. It’s not hard. Just. Time consuming. Someone if I’d make the extra step on to animating this stuff. The answer was: Possibly but it’s really unlikely. Given that this takes me about four times longer than my usual slapping color on a rough sketch on a single image, going from this to animation would be kinda nuts. And I didn’t build these to be flash-animation puppets. I could probably tweak and force them to be such with a lot more node-tweaking but they’re not designed for animation as is. (And trying too hard to MAKE it be a flash animation build is exactly why I kept struggling with vector art for so long.)
Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Reread Progress
40 – Recovery : Scotch is in a bad way… but P-21 gets a bit more fleshing-out, and it’s fun. Mainly, Blackjack finally realizing he’s been addicted due to lifelong exposure to Med-X, and Glory having understandable frustration with even his presence.
[Oops!] I fell asleep for a few chapters. Technically the chapter I mentioned above, I listened to yesterday. But I wasn’t in much of a rambling mood yesterday. And I’m not sure I care enough about this particular arc to go back to review these chapters right NOW.
43 – Lucidity : It’s the Happyhorn Gardens chapter! Both one of my favorite chapters in that it does the most exploration of the potential benefits of future tech in the Fallout Equestria Expanded Universe and one of my favorites in that it really lays down heavy what with the mindscrewery weirdness. I woke up about half-way into this one. Though, as much as I like it, it has a lot of very gruesome and uncomfortable content like rape and child murder. Ultimately though, the good makes the bad worth getting through.
44 – Mares and Stallions : This is another one of those chapters in which we get a glimpse into an alternate universe that could have been in the form of Blackjack’s Littlehorn Massacre Nightmare with her party as young ponies on their way to their new school…
This chapter is also the chapter Stygyus first shows up. And… really this chapter is a great deal about sex and sexuality. It doesn’t linger on it for the purpose of eroticism or ribaldry, but it’s a major theme in this chapter.
45 – Hightower : “Champion in Bed”. Also, Mister Shears first appears. B-Team regroups at Meatlocker and then they go into Hightower.
This is also the chapter where it’s revealed that Psalm murdered the now-grown-up Pokey Pierce and Pinkie Pie… a matter of moments before the bombs fell. So I guess either way they were set to die? But it still only cements my dislike of Psalm. I question why didn’t make me dislike [Spoiler]. By matter of course, it also gives a brief glimpse into both the organization of the Ministry of Morale and of the Ministry of Arcane Sciences right in the final minutes of their relevancy. I’d still like to see a fic that explores what those structures were all like before the war started peaking, but I guess it really might just be on me to write such a thing. After chatting with Kkat in the IRC though, seems like the MoM in particularly had a very very loose structure built around a fairly simple and straightforward mission statement. And that as things became more and more about weeding out insurrection and whatnot instead of making more fun, things became worse and more frantic and harmful.
46 – Casper: Man, Blackjack abuses ghoul mental deterioration a lot. And I feel kinda guilty when she does. But it works! Also
“Well, he’s probably not personally running it, and definitely not the whole M.o.M., but he totally has his hooves all over the law enforcement branch. I don’t think he cares about party reservations, balloon research, or theme parks, after all. But we totally know who assigns our Hearth’s Warming Eve bonuses, and you just don’t go behind Quartz’s back.”
I would be ALL OVER that balloon research. Also this conveniently gives me an excuse to blame someone other than Pinkie herself for things going sour with her her ministry. Yay. Heck, I could split the blame between Twist for passing on drugs and GB for changing at least one branch’s direction… On the other hoof if Twist didn’t do what she had, then the MoM would have been doomed by bomb attack right at the start… So… bittersweet? Eh. I blame GB.
–
Breaking down Project Horizons by Volume, Volume 1 seems to be the most about Security as an entity and our initial A-Team. I like that volume. Volume 2 has the whole Blood and Stars / Hoofington Rises thing going on. Seems to be less about individual level things and more about establishing and hinting at grand-scale plots. The dreams get more interesting and mysteries are getting setup, and it’s kinda cool but daunting. This is also were we start getting a bit more ‘gap-filling’ universe expansion with Blackjack getting involved with Watcher. Volume 3 seems to primary revolve around conspiracies and redefining Fallout: Equestria as a universe by making great use of knowledge of when and where the original story by Kkat- Fallout: Equestria- had left time gaps or explanation gaps and un-shown perspectives. Typically when people talk about PH playing too much with canon or why it’s so vital to FoE as a setting, it’s because of exactly this chunk section. The most obvious example: LittlePip’s memory gap is used right at the first chapter of this volume to give Blackjack and her A-Team an adventure with LittlePip and her team. And it fits. There’s nothing in the original story that would imply these events didn’t happen.
I haven’t recently reread Volumes 4 and volume 5 just started, but 4 seems to be mostly about escalation of power and scale, and Blackjack’s painful journey that shapes her into the so-called Maiden of the Stars. Some of the coolest action parts happen in this volume! Heck, even some parts of just plain genuine fun here and there. But by this point, it’s getting really REALLY hard to keep track of all the characters. And then Volume 5 starts off with an immediate and huge shift from everything we’ve seen before implying a breech of a point of no return. What this volume is meant to be is hard to guess from just the one chapter. But this will probably be the end volume.
Rambling and Other Stuffs:
I played lotsa videogames. Probably about 3 hours of Awesomenauts between today and yesterday. And I keep fitting in a few minutes of the MLP Gameloft game here and there, so I’ve probably played at least an hour of that total. The MLP game is kind of a dirty cash grab, but it’s not as brutal about it as some Piano apps I’ve seen or even compared to the same core team’s LPS game. It’s super cute and has a reasonable atmosphere though, so I keep coming back.
I was gonna ramble more about that, but then I ran out of steam. All you need to know is that Apple Bloom, Cheerilee, and Twilight Sparkle are all working on a carrot farm and Big McIntosh is cranking out lemons every three minutes.
Played Awesomenauts. Tried to color this thing which is gonna be an alt to http://retl.tumblr.com/day/2013/11/01 when I get done. Or combined with it.
First time walking around on a snowed-over landscape. It was far trickier and slipperier than it looks. Doesn’t feel as cold… at first. But it gets really unpleasant after > 2 minutes in the stuff. I probably should have took photos.
Played PnP today. Get Bonus punched a Boss Mantis with a paper on his hoof. The paper exploded into confetti. +500exp.
Started reading Fallout: Equestria – Taking Life by the Horns. I recommend it.
Had Beef Jerky again for my first time in a good while. It was tasty. Also have a sizable pack of ramen noodles for tomorrow and incase things ever freeze over again.
Noticed that an “RKEngine” was mentioned in the Gameloft MLP games’s credits. Far as I can tell the RKEngine was created for a game called Roketz which was abandoned. The portions of the engine which were created were wrapped over by other developers and used as a part of the core that makes the MLP game (and the LPS game) run. I don’t have the knowhow to unofficially port the game to Windows or Linux, or even parse the files for the game’s models and animations. (And I thought The MLP game was using some particularlly dirty freemium tactics to con players into feeling like they needed to pay to play the game, but LPS is much more blunt about it right out of the gate. SPEND YOUR BLING TO BUILD [product placement] SPEND YOUR BLING TO PUT A [product placement] IN YOUR [product placement]. BLOWDRY YOUR PET BY SPENDING BLING no we’re not going to confirm if you meant to spend bling you tapped it you clearly meant to spend it.) The MLP game is not a great game, but it is an OK one. Having a windows port would be nice, but I suspect the decision to keep it just on moble is specifically to make their freemium structure harder to circumvent. It’d be nice if it had a flat-fee alternate version though.
Bed.
Drew this thing on request. Saw my second in-person snowfall. Played a lot of Gameloft MLP. Read Fallout: Equestria – Better Days Chapter 13 “Hasty Actions”.
Drew a little new stuff. Scanned a few days-old stuff. Uploaded a bunch.
Read a bunch of chapters of Fallout Equestria: Duck and Cover.
Got in contact with the Team Leader for the SSE project and worked on stuff side-by-side for about an hour and a half. Still no team for GP2 project… Submitted Weekly Report 01.
Had a bad dream this morning. Had an unstable mood and shed some tears a few hours later in the day. Concluded that I’m a little stressed out, and not particularly used to the experience of being stressed out.
New phone should be arriving tomorrow. Admitted guilty that I pretty much begged $200 to get a device that can finally run Gameloft’s money-grab of a MLPFiM ‘game’. There’s a lot of other reasons I had been wanting to upgrade for a while too, but without the means to reliably pay phone service, the benefits are more akin to upgrading game consoles.
Kinda sorta wanted to do a 20 minute writing exercise. Never got around to it, and want to go to bed soon. Did talk to Kkat briefly about how the MoM became what it did in the FoE Universe. Turns out the primary operating directives are even simpler than the silly ones I had imagined, which makes the whole structure of it sound… chaotic, yet straightforward.
—
Earlier someone asked me ‘how are you doing?’
So-so. I’ve got tears in my eyes, and I’m not sure why. Had a weird kind of not-fun dream this morning. Also just ended up realizing that if my belongings got raided or taken for legal reasons or something, I’m not completely sure what I’d do. Most likely try to get more paper and pencil and draw more smut to make up for smut lost. Which was kind of an alarming/worrying thought.
[2:30:47 PM] Retl: At the same time, kinda happy because episode put lotsa fun thoughts in my head, and one of the fics I read is pretty much adding a new character based on my work, based on another character that I already liked. So it’s like. A cake of excuses for me to really really like this character.
[2:31:42 PM] Retl: Uploading a bunch of scanned pics and whatnot. Gotta hop on a bus in about 75m[2:40:53 PM] Retl: The dream I had was kinda simple though. In it, my dad moved into a new, smaller place and invited me over. I was trying to play a PnP thing but couldn’t get in because my niece was on the phone? (she wasn’t there, and I don’t know why that stopped the net from working) and I took some kind of small single-use packet thingy which worked like a miniature laundry machine without asking permission. And was upset both about not asking permission, and about missing game.
okay bored now this is the part where I dump images.
Wrote a huge fimfic blog post. Not sure it was worth the 5 hours it took. Sleepy.