Sometimes, one puts honest work into things, and things work out okay, and one’s proud of it.

(Dry run of Games II project presentation went well. Still not excellent, but passable.)

Sometimes, one puts effort into things, it gets rejected, and one feels bitter.

(Pretty much my second time getting the ‘this comment is embarrassing, send it in a pm instead *delete* response on Fimfic from an author.  I don’t like doing that, as I lose track of what I said to who and when, and those posts get auto-purged from the server after an amount of time. On top of giving more excuse to be complained at if I forget. It’s more convenient on my part to leave no comment.  [Some other scenario-specific information is left out as to be forgotten.])

Saw this thingy on dA and wanted a distraction. So I’m filling it out now.

1. Do you go by any nicknames?

Yes, many.

3. What species of pony are you?

My fictional characters are some of everything. H4X is a holopegapony vaguely modeled after Scootaloo. Revel Romp is a young unicorn minor noble. Get Bonus is an Earth Pony colt from Cookie Console.
4. What’s your cutie mark, and how does it describe yourself?
It’s almost always a balloon, ball, bubble, or some other inflatable object. They’re bright, colorful, cheery, versatile in a variety of ways, deceptively durable, airy and hollow, held up by constant pressure, prone to burst into several angular shreds, and can critical weaknesses that break them with ease. They work great when there’s plenty, as if one breaks one can swap it out for one similar very quickly. If lucky, the old one can be fixed.
6. What are some common occupational hazards you come across?
Privacy concerns. Overshared information. Electric shock. Fairly harmless explosions and loud noises. Telling MoM.
7. Do you like Ponyville?
It’s pretty.
8. Have you ever been to the Grand Galloping Gala? If not, have you ever dreamed of going?
wait what am I supposed to be answering this AS a pony
9. Do you have any hobbies aside from your job?
I spend. All day. In front of a computer. The only time I spend away from a computer is when walking to get to another computer. And yes, listening to stuff on a phone is still using a computer.
10. What are your quirks? As in, what makes you unique?
Heck if I know? I do things the way that make sense to me, because they make sense to me, and not just because everyone else is doing it. This sometimes gets me odd looks when I ask questions that ‘seemed obvious to everyone else’. 
11. Can you stand on your forehooves?
Get Bonus and H4X probably could for their relations to MoM. Nopony in the Revel line could, but they would probably try if for the purpose of entertaining friends. And then fall.
12. Can you stand on your head?
Ditto of above.
13. Favorite type of music?
Always dance-y rock-y type energetic stuff that doesn’t sound like randomly selected noise.
14. What’s your favorite food?
Tacos. Tacos or mints. Not sure.
15. Do you have a crush?
I don’t like the courtship game. GB would probably crush on the MoM’s Ministry Mare.
16. Do you have any pets? Name them.
No.
17. Nightmare Moon has escaped from the moon and has come to bring eternal night all over Equestria. What do you do?
“Not my job.” and then go about the day doing what one normally would. But with more glowsticks and flares.
18. Who is your idol?
The line of Revel Romps and the Dalliance family in general idolized Celestia as the idea of perfection. Somehow, that was perverted into a pursuit towards immortality.
20. Favorite flavor?
Spicysaltysweet.
21. What would you find at the end of the rainbow, if a pot of gold doesn’t suit your tastes?
A free house with infinite food and drink and power supply, I guess? That’s what I’d spend the gold on anyway. Most of the other things I want, I kinda already got.
22. Are you gay?
No preference one way or the other and typically limited interest.  Except GB. Bonus prefers fillies and mares.
23. What’s your favorite season?
The first one. It’s more about friends and friendship and dealing with normal everyday living type stuff.

Oh wait you mean like the four seasons? Uh, I dunno. Spring? Winter maybe? I don’t like the heat of the summer, and I have little fondness for Halloween.
24. Who are your friends?
Probably more than I even realize.
25. Now who’s your BEST friend?
Hard to say. They come and go. Life is short.
26. What made your cutie mark appear?
Explosions and sexually provocative imagery.
27. You find a dead pony in your room, and the police have your house surrounded. What do you do?
Unlock the door. Stay still. No sudden movements. Explain to the best of my ability when asked.
28. LOOK, IT’S PRINCESS CELESTIA.
hot
29. Gotchya~
oh
31. Were you born in Ponyville?
No. Don’t think I’ve ever made a character that was, come to think.
32. What kind of family do you have?
Wide sprawling untrackable ones for my characters. Because through a certain lens, it feels like my family is that. And my ‘family’ that I recognize is a much much smaller set of four or five faces I know and trust. The rest are only one step up above strangers in my book.
33. Are you scared of anything?
Plenty. Like the results of publicly stating one’s fears to a not-entirely-well-meaning audience.
34. You see a parasprite on the edge of the road while you’re walking into town. What do you do?
Aw, cute.
35. There’s an ursa major behind you.
How does it fit in the room? Is it a plushie?
36. Gotchya again~
So no plushie?
37. Your favorite color of all time is…
Bright and shiny.  That’s a color, right?
38. You ask a pony for directions. However, all she does is gasp loudly and gallop off at full speed. What do you do?
Ask someone else. Alternatively, Google it. Alternatively, try to find it on my own. Most likely, I’d ask at least 2 other people if they’re nearby.
39. A random stallion (if you’re a girl)/mare (if you’re a guy) strides up to you, tells you you’re cute, and asks about your day plans. What do you do?
I go into the details about what I have planned for the day with such specificity that they realize I made no plans to include an additional person at any point, and continue about my day. Unless they just keep showing up where I’m going anyway. Might say hi. Usually  won’t remember them in 5 minutes.
40. You take another look at them and decide that they’re kinda cute. NOW what do you do?
Kinda forced, huh? Still, same as above. Cute or not, I have no intention of playing the courtship game. I have other plans.
41. Roller coasters are…
Fun, usually.
42. You’re standing in a patch of poison joke. What do you do?
Scowl, shout a lot, flail, complain, go to find a distraction.
43. You wake up the next day and find that the poison joke has taken effect. What’s your symptom?
Every computer I touch starts displaying absolute gibberish or shutting down when in proximity. They immediately resume functioning as normal when I stop trying to use it. And no balloon within 20 miles is able to stay inflated.
44. Can you speak two or more languages?
I know less than a phrase book’s worth of Spanish and Japanese. I can ask “where is the bathroom” in both languages and say at least one form of sorry in both languages. (sumimasen, otearai wa doko desu ka | Lo siento pero donde esta’ el ban~o )

Revel as a character would know more. Probably French or the pony equivalent. Speakin’ in Fancy?
45. You bought a new outfit from Rarity’s boutique recently. She told you it really suits you, but it’s very delicate and not machine – washable. While wearing the outfit, a bully knocks you over into the mud. What do you do?
Take it to Rarity or Twilight. 

REGULAR PONY PORTION
SKIP THIS PORTION OF THE QUIZ IF YOU ARE NOT A REGULAR PONY
Maybe I’m just interpreting this wrong, but calling an Earth Pony a “Regular” pony seems hella demeaning.
1. So, you’re a regular pony. How’s life, hon?
uh huh
2. Are you jealous of the unicorns for being able to do magic?
Everything. Especially kinky funtime. But we have machines for that.
3. Are you jealous of pegasuses for being able to fly?
We have machines for that too.
4. Erm… That was probably unecessary…
Yes, these questions were kinda unnecessary weren’t they?
5. So, what’s your opinion on being a regular pony?
Earth ponies are so called because the Earth aspect is important to their nature. Perhaps not in a fashion greatly expanded upon, but it’s clear that tending to other lives and caring for food and doing physical labor are things their magic are attuned with, not just a fallback. Also, their innovations can be used by all, not just themselves.

UNICORN PORTION
SKIP THIS PORTION OF THE QUIZ IF YOU ARE NOT A UNICORN

1. So, you can do magic, right?
All of my ponycorns know at least TK.
2. What spells do you know?
this is bait
3. Are you jealous of the pesasuses for being able to fly?
There’s spell for that. And a machine for that when spells don’t work.
4. If there was a spell you wish you could pull off, what is it?

The Learn Any Given Spell spell.
5. What is your biggest success involving magic?
That one time that thing exploded.

PEGASUS PORTION
SKIP THIS PORTION OF THE QUIZ IF YOU ARE NOT A PEGASUS

1. Yay, you can fly, yay.
That’s not a question.
2. Do you air (no pun intended) from Cloudsdale, or were you born on the ground?

That pun was clearly intended.  Confetti was a Cloudsdale born pegasus who moved to Ponyville to hang out with a pony they liked.
3. Can you do any special tricks in the air?
None that other pegasi can’t learn. Unless you mean the whole cutie mark catalog and blank flank cutie mark prediction services. Those are bundled with the software and not for trade.

WARNING: This software is not for exchanging photos of filly and colt butts. Performing anyway…

4. Are you jealous of the unicorns for being able to do magic?

Pegasi make computers out of clouds. Not much reason to envy a unicorn.

5. Have you seen a sonic rainboom?

Arbitrary.

Cafeteria was serving different food for the holiday. I didn’t want what they had. Ate it anyway. Body didn’t like it about 7 hours later.Drew stuff this weekend. Forgot to scan it. Might scan it after posting.Thinking about paying a few $ to commission a color pic of a [specific, not-mine] little filly pony character. Planning to keep price < $7.  Should buy food instead.

Through a string of unlikely timed events, I ended up getting a chance to preview a story I like and give feedback on it.

But it accidentally pressed some of my FFuel buttons and then I ended up drawing smutty pictures of a character from that preview. Which I technically can share- it wouldn’t be immediately obvious what I had scene- but probably shouldn’t, because I’d be doing it due to foreknowledge. So uh. Stuff.

Meant to do coding stuff today, but writing up the feedback took a good 3 hours going paragraph by paragraph through a TtS file that would have been only apprx 40m long listened straight through. And then drawing the saucy pictures was another 2 hours of doodling on paper because apparently I forgot how to draw fillies.  And I spent some time chatting on IRC while eating and watching Youtube… And now it’s bed time. And by ‘bed” I mean “I’m going to play Brave Frontier until I run out of energy”.

I felt kinda awkward doing the feedback thing at first. I know I’m not the best representative of the target audience the story was aimed at. My tastes are quirky and fringe for their niche and I value a good laugh far more than a well rendered plot. But after I made absolutely sure the writer was aware of my skewed tastes, I had fun. Kept most of my comments between a pair of text files. Might share them in the future. And that future would be at least a week out from the story being made public.

OF COURSE. Now this means I am ‘spoiled’ and I can’t play the speculation game anymore until it’s done, because I have the foreknowledge. And I don’t want to ruin things for others.

Also went to class and ate and stuff. Had Spicy Italian Subway sub on jack bread for dinner. Was tasty.

Woke up. Played Brave Frontier. Ate not-taco. Went to class. Fixed a bug. Went to next class. Fixed other bug.  Last class canceled.  Ate a taco. Came home for PnP on time for a change. PnP Canceled. Played Awesomenauts. Sleeping early. G’Night.

Did little yesterday. Same today. 1) Class. 2) Played hours of Brave Frontier (Screencap below). 3) Added cyan indicator to SSE project. Added AoE manager for Resonators. Added pair of Monobehaviors to handle objects that entire that AoE. They currently only half-work. That’s after 4 hours of weak attentionspan. Disappointing, but progress. Interest rising in writing fiction.

The trick is watching what I eat. It’ll make/break a day.

Thanks for the input, Tumblr. :3 I’ll continue on as usual, then!

The Equestrianauts episode of Bob’s Burgers was fairly nice. Felt pretty homely and believable. And heck, between that episode and a previous one where an older guy confesses his particular kink to his wife, this show seems to have a lot of my quirks pegged.

Though it does have a good bit of that awkwardness in there, but hey. It’s a thing. Tina was good fun though.

Tumblr followers: I can disable the posting of these WordPress blogs to Tumblr. Do you want me to disable them or continue as usual?

Today I: Worked on a video explaining how I usually go about an average college day. (If you wanted to watch it for whatever reason, it is here. ) My first time using my Plantronics Gamecom headset mic for recording audio, and it’s both a big step up from any mic I’ve used before, and a bit of a worrying shift for me in terms of sensitivity. Heck, the thing even picks up my mouseclicks and breathing fairly well. Weirds me out.

The imagery for the video is slapped-together snapshot photos from when I’m out and about and brief videos when I remembered “Oh right I have a video assignment in like a week, I should record what I’m doing”. I ordered the videos in Pitivi video editor… then realized I didn’t have transition effects that I wanted without installing another package. So then I renamed all the photos and videos based on my outline in Pitivi, and then copied it to my Windows partition, rebooted, and recreated the timeline with Windows Movie Maker. Then I recorded the audio with Audacity stepping through how I usually get through a day with the goal of walking through it in such a fashion to at least roughly match my image outline. I did a little bit of editing to remove some easy background noise and a number of ‘um’s (I still missed plenty, apparently). CaptainHoers gave me some tips on how to knock down volume or clip out microphone bumps so that it’s less jarring, so I tried it a few times.  Put that edited audio with the video and used audiosettings to give ‘music’ full emphasis and none of the in-video audio. Rendered that to mp4 and did a handful of conversions before posting it to to the assignment dropbox and Youtube.

Didn’t get Carb Sick today. But I still had the grits. Maybe this time it was the size of the portion that helped? I made a point of leaving the cafeteria immediately after I finished my first plate.

No drawing was done. No coding was done. Spent a little more time flailing around at the IRC chat than I intended to. Probably gonna go ahead and post Blow Ups over to dA after I finish writing this post. Maybe to fimfic as well. Not sure yet.

Sleepy.

Awesomenauts Patch 2.3 came out with the new character Penny. So I’ve been playing that for the past three or four hours.

Other: Made progress in robotics attempting to create a robot that can solve a maze and replay the solution. turns out we were working on the assumption that memory was persistant after reboot, but after running the debug tool a few times we found that we couldn’t retain the information on the path traveled after turning it off and on, so now we have a pushbutton to kick the robot into replay mode without powering down.

Memory limitations are the roughest bit of the bot though. We seem to be hitting the limit on our array of bytes at about 22 entries. We’re using bytes instead of  of words because we can check distance traveled for a good 5-10 seconds before we hit an overflow, which is much less than the approx 40 seconds we’re getting from a word without cutting the array length to 11. Which is important, since the array length corresponds to the number of turns we can make until the robot ‘gives up’.

Also, I finally managed to complete SimSE with a passing score of 92, and submitted the newest worksheet to the team member who’s handling that. Friday’s work should be split between SSE project Resonance, and G2 proje- oh wait no I take that back. I have a micro-project in Digital Multimedia that needs to get done first.

Oh. And revised my resume. Again. Got a third confirmation that yes, I should in-fact be revising my resume, and the advice  getting is more for the sake of readibility, not to make THE PERFECT OMFG RESUME INSTAJOB. Still not liking the feel or thought of this whole jobhunting thing, but it’s a thing that’s going to happen. I’ll worry about it when I get there.

And I had Wirepony do editing for Blow Ups, which I linked yesterday, and then I wrote an additional few paragraphs near the ending. That’ll be going up on Stable 45 soonish (Tomorrow, maybe?)

HEARTBLEED EXPLOIT IS A THING THAT HAPPENED. Check to see if sites you use have been affected, if they have been, check if they’ve updated. If they have updated to a version not affected by the exploit, change your password.

That is. You probably should if you value the account. I realize that’s not always an easy thing to commit to.