In light of the increasing instability and uncertainty of my world, and in light of the death of the Coffee Hour series following the loss of the FTP, I will consider maintaining quartlery reports here.
Meta -
Participation in CMBW casting concluded. This marks the end of slightly over a year of actively casting replays and tournaments for the project. Over 80gigs of locally stored recordings of the project, including a 2021 multi-hour discussion of the Hydra project, have been archived.
While contemplations of discontinuing the Epic Seven casting (and henceforth dropping the game entirely) have been stated, it remains the only consistent active project I’ve run to present day. Recently I begun another effort to tackle the growing backlog of casts and have begun to aggressively cull older ones that don’t meet a specific bar of energy or interest. If I drop this my casting as a body will probably be over since it’s the only thing that keeps me going globally. Youtube has seen a number of videos uploaded to it as a result of this activity.
Reclamation projects have seen a return of roughly 1 terabyte of data-servicable storage.
The _VIDEOVORE and _DND directories, 2024-2022 and 2022-2020 encoding directories respectively, have seen a pass in deleting all audio samples, unused content and storage of AXX and CMBW content, as well as removing backups for ER and DKS2 projects.
I moved the WoW directory off of the C (SSD) drive, denoting the WoW Rant 2 series is likely completely abandoned, and the Skyrim install will likely be deleted in the near future entirely.
Another pass on unclaimed/processed recordings was made. I deleted the AXX BDO recordings that were unused in RPR as I do not intend to return to RPR or use them. Anyways, my gpu can do better recordings now, at 1440p, if I ever need more.
I deduced that my system cannot handle streaming and 1440p recording on highly CPU intensive games, but setting OBS to high priority may alleviate this (needs to be tested).
I streamed roughly 20 hours of video content on RTMP.
Finances are in an acceptable spot, not allowing for flexibility. It will be roughly 3-4 years until I fully recover from the GPU and mic expenditures at my current rate of income. However, some unexpected injections have occurred that allowed for more breathing space. As it is, I’ve had to play sugar daddy a few times for HKS since his irl situation is also in the gutter. Everything sort of evens out in the end but I will never be in a situation where I can consider a character commission.
Experiments with Stable Diffusion are underway with better than expected results. I’m targetting D&D content but presumably I could make assets for AXX or other things. An article was written about this but it’s still a fledgeling side hustle for me so I’m not really at a state I can discuss it in-depth yet (and most content I’ve been able to successfully produce is D&D sensitive and can’t be posted yet). I want to discuss the anthro stuff sometime so I might do a production chain to demo that further because basically everyone’s exposure to the subject is total cancer otherwise.
Projects -
I dropped concept script development for three proto-conceptual Starcraft campaigns (AXCMBW, a retelling of the Starcraft story with a PC twist, and a community project).
The UE build was updated to 5.4 development. It doesn’t seem to have fixed any of my problems (yet again). Currently, DragonIK is super unstable with it, so I can only do mapping.
ApexX is officially considered dormant and is deadlocked by the character model and overworld development issues outlined in an earlier article and discussed extensively in the April video. I expect at least another year to pass before I look at the project in any meaningful matter again. It’s probably dead. I might try one last production attempt when (if) ABE is in a stable spot but I’m not hopeful. I have no goals worth pursuing.
I briefly outlined proto-concepts for the caster and shooter game to HKS and subsequently abandoned them. I may return to the former as a concept if I can ever find suitable animations for it. (I probably won’t).
I deduced attempting to learn blender is beyond my abilities, and abandoned the aforementioned plan of prioritizing blender before Unreal Engine.
My current non-D&D priority project is finding a hair mesh to use for Annayus in AXX. This isn’t possible, though, since it seems none exist.
D&D -
A handful of sessions of Starsworn were played. The project’s development is completely dormant at the moment. It’s ok and stable, but if we suddenly saw activity I would panic. Historically the project has been seeing less and less activity with every passing half-year and it’s well past the point anyone besides me would have cut it, but I’ll keep running it until I’m dead.
The ABE project was deployed. Its current content was built within the month of February almost entirely from scratch. This amounts to 19 maps and some dozens of tokens, 300 music tracks and a small amount of ingame content (population, inventory, etc.) The campaign is currently 6 sessions in. My estimated length has extended from 80 minimum to 150 minimum. I don’t doubt ABE will not be finished in my lifetime at my current rate of decay and its current rate of growth.
Further development on ABE has been hobbled extremely heavily by health issues and depression, immediately locking it into the same stress-filled last-minute pipeline that AW had, and the main goal I had for the project was to avoid this exact situation. As a result ABE has become a serious stressor and its pretty much all on me.
Video Content -
I concluded the CMBW/Apex concept video by cancelling it and released it.
I released the kneecapped Apex AI Overview, dubbed Part 1. There is already an addendum to make to it if I make another.
I released an April ApexX Discussion video.
I sent popo the year-old roll20 video after finally verifying it. It contains major spoilers for Winter’s Repose, so it can’t be posted yet. (Winter’s Repose is deadlocked/soft cancelled at this point but I’m holding the data in the dark anyways).
I acquired the unclaimed Sonic 2006, Sonic Unleashed and Shadow the Edgehog recordings from Schwa-chan.
I found and recovered what appears to be most if not all of the LLC Mystic Quest recordings from the spinup drive. They need to be processed.
I discovered that Stabbyman 02 absolutely did exist and it has been lost forever, probably due to the file table rollover incident. I likely had it on a backup DVD, but those dvds were thrown out when we moved. As my first major video project, the loss of any part of it is extremely depressing.
I started the following recording projects: Armored Core 6, Banjo Kazooie, Dragon’s Dogma 2. As of this writing, the first is roughly 1/2 finished, the second 3/4, and the third is just a comfort recording not treated at all seriously.
I started work on processing the ABE developer series.
I set up a PiP recording template project for the co-op recordings from last year. It’s unbelievably laggy and unstable in Vegas whom already makes simple projects highly tedious. The projects are dormant as a result. Gonna be honest, I doubt I’ll ever work on these and they are chewing a TON of disk space due to accidental 1440p recordings.
All development series for Apex video productions, excluding the sparse pubdemo AXX builds, were abandoned. Souce recordings for any in-progress content were purged.
I recorded several UE product review videos. These are non-exhaustive filtration recordings in which I consult product demos to determine if they are worth buying. Visceral and fairly short. I’ll post them sometime once I have enough processed.
Hardware -
I acquired a Lauten LS-208 as the first part of my strategy to combat the new environment. It resulted in a notable jump in quality but doesn’t address the reverb or noise nearly as much as I had hoped. The cost was about $400 more than what I had been lead to believe during my initial purchase thanks to Canada’s obsession with raping content producers.
The 7900 XT has passed stability testing.
I haven’t seen a BSOD all year, marking the long-awaited end to the stability problems that have plagued this system since I first built it.
I realized that, either due to the GPU, Lauten or new power supply, the static that plagued my recordings in the last year are also entirely gone.
I’ve performance tested that I can successfully run Sony Vegas, Unreal Engine 5 and Stable Diffusion at once, but this depends greatly on the latter’s current workload AND it makes generation very slow.
I concluded that an acoustic treatment solution will be outside of my budget for the rest of my life. I would need $10,000 USD or more and I’d need more space than what exists in this coffin. Homebrew solutions aren’t viable due to the space requirements. It’s joever.
I’ve been encouraged to purchase a new CPU but the cost is too high to consider at this time. HKS’ in-editor performance for UE is over twice mine despite my more powerful GPU, and 1440p encode times are abysmal. I’ll just have to deal with it.
The loud noises from the case fans have become annoying but I can’t afford replacing them at this time. I may try to get some in summer.
Pricing of a business connection for a server starts at around $200 a month, and I’d probably need to also invest in roughly $600-800 minimum for hardware to build a server. Add in electricity costs and you have the requirements necessary to start a server to host my content myself. This is becoming more and more of a consideration for me. If I had income I would strongly consider this as a priority project. The server would be password-restricted but pubicly accessible. You’d have to contact me for an invite, which would be restricted to your IP. Access would be limited to people I know or names I recognize from CC. Content would include my dev resources in addition to videos. It’s nice to dream, huh?
I’d like to buy more storage before other hardware options. But I’d want a NAS for it. This is expensive. So I’ll probably get neither. Neat.
Physical Health -
Throughout January and February I had repeated complications with eye ulcers, again in my left eye. This may be due to the environment being dryer than normal, and due to the bizarre way I constantly end up with my face half into the pillow. The pain due to the eye ulcers delayed my work on ABE by at least two weeks.
Dental pain has steadily increased. It’s likely I have multiple infections. Bruxism is a lot worse due to the added stress of the traffic noise and neighbors.
Beginning in February I began to experience severely higher than average back pain, starting with my right shoulder and arm and then transitioning to my left mid back and mid and upper spin. The existing spine pain in that area has intensified substantially and has forced me to cancel multiple recordings and delayed my D&D work by close to a month. Basic tasks already rendered difficult by my injured feet have been rendered nearly impossible. The pain persists during rest and aggravates existing sleep problems. The muscle pain has since largely faded and is presumably posture related. The spine pain is likely degenerate discs and will be lifelong and continue to degrade as it has for years. Advil doesn’t influence this pain, so I’m not sure what I can do but deal with it. I blame this awful chair but there’s utterly nothing I can do about it. I’ve tried for countless years.
The lump growing on my spine between my shoulder blades is probably a benign tumor. That’s my best guess from webMD. Normally they aren’t surgically removed but I’ve begun to believe its presence may be aggravating my back pain. I’ll just have to deal with it. It’s not like there’s a difference if I am wrong about what it is or not, but I have no reason to believe it’s lymphoma currently.
After nearly 3/4 of a year, most of the vertigo is gone from the brain tingle incident and I only get mildly nauseated by the elevator. I had an incident yesterday of an extreme bout of vertigo and near-vomit inducing nausea from sitting down but it passed in a few moments of laying down.
After burning the inside of my throat severely with stomach acid from sleep I undertook a regime to refuse drinking coffee within an hour of attempting to sleep. I also keep gaviscon tablets nearby. It has nearly returned once since then but that is all.
In spite of the above, heartburn and acid reflux incidents are still on the rise during day-to-day. My bloodline has a history of random intolerances to food - this could be something similar to the lactose intolerance nonsense I had years ago. Who knows.
Because of the above I begun to reduce the amount of coffee I drink a day from 4-5 pots to 2-3 pots and sometimes less than 1. It hasn’t made an impact yet.
I’ve been able to successfully regulate a lot of coffee intake with water intake and am consistently having at least a bottle of water every day. I keep it low because water is expensive, but I’ll need to hike it up quickly soon because the heat is picking up.
I’ve found I can still walk up and down stairs with a bit of difficulty during good days. My knees seem mostly recovered from the last incidents but its best not to test them extensively. On a good day, and with some beloved Advil, its hypothetical I could attempt a (very slow) walk. I just don’t want to be ravaged by mosquitoes in the process. They’re already out there in hordes, salivating at the opportunity to feast on my soulless aryan flesh. If I survive to winter I might try it.
Pain in my finger joints from arthritis is on the rise despite very low activity. Knee arthritis pain is down. Toe pain is actually gone completely. It took like 5-6 years but its finally f*cking gone. Just don’t ever stub the big toe again because it will re-break very easily like it has before. I wear hard slippers to protect it.
My weight has somehow remained unchanged in the last year, if not begun to drop, despite no longer doing yard work or the regular stair jogs. I will presume this is because I have also dramatically reduced my diet since Smokey died. As lethargy mounts I continue to neglect eating, though I sometimes am dragged into cooking elaborate meals by my grandmother like lasagna. The physical pain makes these exercises a trial since I have to do most of the cooking as it is and there’s not enough room for cooking in an apartment resulting in constant chaos. Also I REALLY hate plastic floors. This is becoming an increasing point of contention because my grandmother refuses to even try to look after herself at all and I’m sick of having to babysit her every hour of the day.
The blood pigments/sweat now occur on my hands and fingers. So basically my entire body other than my face (that I know of) sweats blood now. Being a freak of nature is cool sometimes.
Mental Health -
I now consistently dream of both cats and housing every time I am able to sleep, even the many times I only hit REM for a few minutes. This is a comfort I’ve come to welcome and I have spent more time trying to sleep as a result.
In light of the above, I’ve begun to use my large fan to drown out traffic and neighbors even though it causes significant strain on my ears from the intense reverb. It turns out it still helps me sleep a bit.
I still have mental breaks from seeing pictures or videos of the cats. This isn’t as common from dreams anymore but waking up always makes me sad. Each day needs a warmup period of 4-5 hours and its not just because I am tired.
The intense background noise has mixed with the auditory hallucinations and as a result it’s easier to ignore them, though it’s still unnerving to hear people calling for me at night over top of music. Overall, the hallucinations aren’t a severe issue anymore. Small W, I guess.
I deduced that loneliness in the wake of the deaths of the cats may be just as severely damaging to my psyche as the traffic noise - particularly because they compound one another. However, getting another cat is well beyond realistic regardless of my living environment because of finances and logistics. It’d also be likely to hit my armchair PTSD extremely hard. So, it’s just something I have to deal with.
I would rate my current mental state as a 2/10. I can function for roughly 30-40 minutes a day and the rest is spent in a daze. I’m more stable than I was when we moved here but not by much. My motivation is completely dead and it won’t ever recover in such an environment. I’ve noticed that I both consciously and subconscious seek out any way to avoid any kind of work at all. That usually means relentlessly trying to sleep out hours of the day. I’m alright with that, though. Dreams may be bittersweet but they’re better than reality. I almost managed to pull off a recording string but I slipped into the bucket again very fast. The pain + traffic noise/sleep deprivation is a seriously vicious combo.
Goals -
Stabilize ABE.
Conclude Banjo Kazooie and Armored Core 6.
Summary
2024 was predicted to be the worst year yet. It has started slowly and with a very methodical knife in my back, and it’s currently on course to at least be as bad as 2023. I feel like I’m limping along, bleeding out in an empty, foggy street. Most days I can barely move at all; getting coffee is proving to be more and more difficult. In spite of this I managed to make some headway on pet projects. The most current concern is keeping up with ABE. My most prized project, AXX, is probably dead, though I have a few ideas I want to try on it if I can ever find assets that work for them.
Reaffirming that intense fan noise kills some of the sleep problems is interesting but doesn’t help me a lot because the ear pain and likely hearing damage from it is not much better. However, once I can turn on the AC its fan will serve the same purpose but its a bit quieter. If the room wasn’t so small and echoey my existing fan would likely be left on 24/7.
All in all, the first quarter has gone a lot better than expected. Leaving CMBW was disappointing, and my most important ambitions are all dead or near-dead, but none of this was unforeseeable and amounts to the ebb and flow of life’s weakening embers. That I was able to produce more casted video alone is worthy enough for backpatting, but there’s good possibility one or more recording projects may be concluded in the coming months.
Physically, I’m holding together better than expected. The back pain, heart pain and general fatigue are ramping up quickly and I feel like acid reflux has been a more prominent issue in my life than I realize after someone told me the intense nausea I feel when waking up is probably related. Horrible burning sensations across my upper spine and chest on increasing occassion are also probably related. Again, WebMB is quick to point to long-term damage that can be caused by acid, but it hardly matters what you choose to self-diagnose with when nothing can be done about it. Anti-acids like tums and gaviscon both have zero effect on this pain, by the way.
I’m expecting a heart attack at any point and I may have already had minor ones I’m not aware of because I likely couldn’t tell them apart from how I feel normally.
I’ve written out my very short will; I want to be buried with my cats away from people, HKS will inherit anything he wants and the rest should be liquidated and returned to him as currency. What he does with my content from thereon is entirely up to him.
These are the best days of the rest of my life. May as well accept them for what they are.
Quarterly Contemplation
Having an active imagination is a curse. Being able to see things without even trying, it’s a stigma. My dreams have tactile sensations. I can feel the cats rubbing across my legs with their fluffy tails, back and forth, back and forth. Smokey burying his head into my calf as he aggressively begs for food. I can feel it, right now. His hair is coarser than hers. It’s easier to comb as a result. I can feel their weight when I hold them, I can feel the fluff between my fingers, I can hear the purrs and meows. I can explore the many halls and rooms of a fantastical home fit to be on Trudeau’s less diverse knockoff of Epstein’s island.
If I wasn’t capable of these things maybe I would be a happier person. I would surely be a simpler person. Simplicity is something you only come to respect when your own mind becomes your prison. Just as I cannot accept my own inabilities because I can see the spark of indignation take life in my mind I cannot accept they are gone because they take life every time I close my eyes. I can never let go of what has happened because it happens again and again with every sunrise. Perhaps, in this matter, they are immortal, as I am for but the brief moment I continue to exist. Yet, in this acknowledgement do I find comfort, for they’ll always be there, waiting for me in Valhalla, and only when I die will their memory die. I can rest assured that I will never forget them. And so long as I hold them within my heart then they, too, are immortal.
Am I really alive? No. I’m a shadow. Shadows do not live. Another way to see it is that an idea means nothing without actuation. I, too, do not exist, I’m an idea without a spark that gives identity. Nebulous though I may be, I hold their memories. In other words, those memories are the substance that atomize my own. Without them I am nothing. Without me they are nothing. A spark cannot existing without first a flame to bring it life. So to say, I once lived, many years ago.
The sun sets and rises. I am timeless. My body ages but my awareness does not. Time’s passage is only felt as a distancing, a separating of threads. My once luxurious golden hair gradually pales and turns white. I move more slowly. I process more slowly. Under my eyes are the black rings, the brand that signifies the cost of this endurance. But I am me. So long as these tired gears continue to turn, I am me.
Don’t you see? A star burns, a flame burns, all things burn to emit light. They release kinetic energy until they move no longer, burn no longer. This light is my denial of their absence. What the eyes cannot see the mind conjures. I am my own God. I choose a world which betrays the injustice of that one around me. If I am ever to be free, it would be to never awake from that illusion, and be aware it is an illusion no longer. And then, when my light fades, so will the illusion, and there I’ll stand, once again somewhere I can be content. Yes. They are waiting for me, and I am waiting for them. Where memories, dreams and awareness melt into oblivion.
That is why I am not afraid, why I cannot be afraid, and why I should not be afraid. What can be there possibly be to afraid of? Don’t think of it as imagination. Just don’t think. They’re here, you’re here, accept this moment, and dwell upon it for as long as you can. Nothing else matters.
You can regret your failures as a creator. But there’s nothing to regret that the journey is now over. You did all you could ever have done. Anything beyond this point is just a noise in the waves you won’t ever be conscious enough to remember anyways.
This concludes my quarterly report.
