New Normal

I’ve been at my new job for about a week now, and it’s probably too early to make any conclusions from my experience thus far, but I think I like it. It’s basically a lot of administration and paperwork, but because of the nature of it, you’re expected to not make any stupid mistakes and be precise. One might think that puts a lot of pressure on the worker, but actually… it’s quite the opposite.

The company’s motto is essentially “slow and steady”, it’s more important for them that you handle everything properly, than to speed through whatever you need to do. Sure, one has to pay attention to dates and regulations, but there’s no forceful push to finish x thing today. In fact, there’s no overtime. You work your designated hours, clock out and go home. End of story. Hell, you need to even take breaks during the day too, as it’s pretty much the norm to leave your desk and freshen up.

I’m in an open office for the first time in my life, and honestly, it’s not what I thought it’s be. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people bashing this structure and the problems it creates, but thus far I feel like none of those are true for this place. The environment is pretty relaxed, people don’t seem to ever be in a hurry and you can sometimes catch them chatting a few words in-between their tasks. However, mostly this is done briefly, let alone on a whisper level, it never really gets “too loud”. In the case that the noise increases, everyone understands that they need to drag the volume back down, so it’s been pretty quiet. But don’t be mistaken, this comes more from a mutual understanding of not disturbing anyone at their job, rather than an iron fisted rule.

I’m still in my “in training” period, but my co-workers are being very patient with me. It’s not expected of me to work at 100% right away, in fact on average it’s assumed that new recruits will perform on the required level after their trial period is over. Which is about 3 months of time, the soonest anyone has ever completely grasped their role was apparently 1 month, but they were a special case. I’m being told that I’m a fast learner, but honestly I don’t feel like that at all. I’m somewhat frustrated with myself for not being able to understand everything, yet all I get are comforting words from others. It makes me think that I might be suffering from imposter syndrome as I’m also worrying of not being able to perform up to their expectations and being let go.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this in my life, usually I was frustrated with my job itself on some level and didn’t worry about it ending in some way or another. I guess that just shows how different this one is, that I’m getting so attached to it at such an early stage. Funnily enough, I ran into this video about working in the game industry earlier this week, and it couldn’t describe my experience any better. I kept jokingly referring to my past workplaces as being the deeper end of the pool for newbie swimmers, but all they really were was being exploitative and abusive. Sure, I’ve known this for a long time, but what I didn’t know is that those things aren’t normal. I kinda thought that every job is the same, you get used until they burn you out and toss you aside. But I was wrong. I just never had a normal job before and suddenly having one after all these years makes me feel weird and also annoyed. It took me more than a decade to get to work under normal conditions, where you’re not being treated as slave labor.

Heck, I was more surprised by the bad experiences my co-workers had described as being their “bad days”. Compared to whatever I had to deal with in the past, those seemed like a walk in the park for me, in fact I would go as far as call them as “good days”, but they looked liked it was a painful experience for them, so I just shut my mouth. It made me reconsider whatever I thought about the world and also myself. Yes, I am thick skinned and there’s people who are even more so than me, but I probably already belong into the group of extremes. Reflecting back on how many times I’ve been threatened with violence and such, my reactions to these events were anything but normal.

“What do I do if you slit my throat right here and right now? Simple, I bleed to death.”

It became second nature for me to not care about such and let things go at the workplace. Sure, I went home and bitched about it, but ranting for 5 minutes practically loosened me up, so I never gave it much thought besides saying that “people / life just sucks, that’s it”. Well, it was more so frustration and disappointment than anger really. Still, it makes me wonder how much time is needed for my own self to “return to normal” if that is at all possible at this point. Probably not enough, but if I can make any sort of prediction for the future, it’s going to end up with at least my expectations being changed. There’s an old proverb about tasting the good life and never wanting to lower your standards afterwards, and I have a hunch that’s going to happen to me too. If for whatever reason I will switch jobs in a few years, I can’t see myself going down the same path I was once on.

Is that a bad thing? No, but that’s how it should have been to begin with.

Growing Pains

This will probably be the most classical “blog post” thus far and also very short because of reasons explained below.

Roughly two weeks ago I’ve left my job, somehow the same day got a call from a potential job, for which I ended up doing an interview the day after. I thought it went OK, they said they’ll call me, but that hasn’t happened thus far, so it’s safe to assume I’m in the bin. I almost laughed out aloud when I was asked why I’ve been changing jobs “so often”. If 2-3 years and a dash of COVID is considered such, then I’m guilty as charged, but employers expecting people to stay in one place until they retire are probably one of the most clueless entities on this planet.

The week after I got a call from a place that they want to meet me in person. I went into the interview thinking I’ll use it as practice or rather research and forego the atypical politeness I force upon myself. Not surprisingly, being closer to my natural self made the talk go with a lot more ease, HR was pretty chill so I’ve felt pretty good about the whole thing. They’ve told me they’ll be in touch within a week, max two. I said alright, thanked them for the opportunity and shelved it as another one of my failures. Still I filed a note for personal success and decided to go about any opportunity that comes towards me the same way.

To my surprise a couple of hours later my phone rang with an offer from them. Needles to say I accepted, but I’m still baffled at how well this all went. I checked the dates back and after I applied for the job, within 2 days I actually got it. Madness. I’m not sure what exactly I’ve been doing any different, but I do remember tweaking some things at the job portal I was using, ultimately coming the conclusion that your CV does not make a difference, it’s the websites built in profiles system that employers are looking at. For future reference: Good to know.

Otherwise I’ve been doing some gamedev during the weekend and after a 5 hour modeling session, I’ve felt my left hand being numb and filled with pain. Grabbing and lifting things were problematic so I took a break from my PC and just watched Star Trek Voyager, while taking some muscle tension relaxer. It’s better now, but still not great (yet look at me, typing this crap, hah!). Something really does need to happen to me all the time, it’s getting bloody ridiculous.

Backend development

I always struggle about what to post and what not to post in regards to my own work. This seems to be a theme in my life, that I either think something is too important or not worth anything at all. Here I am, having worked a lot in recent weeks on Creepslore and not being able to show it off. Partially it’s an issue with mental blocks, the other is more so about technicalities.

So here I am, hard at work, redoing a lot of things about the game. How do I go updating people about? The answer is that I don’t. My mindset is pretty much that of an idiot, because I really hate oversharing anything on the internet, so I end up not sharing anything of substance at all, even when there should be reason for such to happen. You can see some kids post daily about development progress, with literal no substance behind it, marketing their games while I am sitting in front of my monitor getting angry about it.

Why? Because oversharing annoys me. Because they get a lot of attention for a lot of nothing. Because I can’t do the same. It just doesn’t feel right, while it also makes me think that it spoils the end product if I’m being too open about whatever I’ve been doing. I really need to loose this attitude and open up a bit more, but as of this point I still do not think that I have enough material worth to be shared. Honestly I have struggled couple years back when I first announced this game, and started writing a lot of updates, because it felt like I’m really grasping at straws. So amazingly I went into the opposite direction of not actually talking about it anymore, which is even worse. Again, I’m not sure what to even talk about, I’m quite possibly plagued by being too secretive at this point.

The other problem at hand I have is the sheer “under the hood” development that I have been doing. It’s not interesting at all, aside to people who might be using the same engine with the same struggles that I have, let alone I could be making changes important only for me and not for the potential players. Do I even talk about this? Would anyone even care? I’m practically second guessing myself about this on a daily basis and I honestly cannot do anything about it.

Gamedev ain’t easy, but I find myself getting the life sucked out of me because there’s so much work to do all the time. People who have not worked in this field even as a hobby probably do not understand just how hard it is to force yourself to market your own creations WHILE making them. Hell, even when you’re done it feels like a pain in the ass, as you’ve been spending so much time on the same goddamn thing that I gets super annoying, even if you like what you do.

Honestly, I had plans to write up tutorials about how I do things, but that would require a brand new site, for which I do not have the energy to create. Even when you look at this one, it’s blatantly clear that it’s unfinished, hell the “studio” website is also broken and needs a redesign but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s no wonder a lot of people would rather just pay for a basic template or hosting and get on with it. Doing all this stuff is really tiring.

Detriments of Hyper Focus

I’m a person of extremes. Not in the way of personality or actions, but by simply having two contrasting levels of attention. I’m either completely on point with concentration or floating around in a bubble somewhere in deep space. It’s either or, there’s no transition at all between these two statuses. I could argue it’s ADHD or something, but that would be irrelevant in this case. In short: I’m a person who is in some cases super efficient or completely useless.

Whenever I’m unable to zero in on a task, I will do my utmost best to not even think about it and avoid it like the plague as I get all tingly inside from the fear of incompletion. However, when I’m riding on a high wave I become exceptionally efficient, breezing through whatever I need to do. But there’s always a certain moment when I need to stop and have to force myself to take a step back in order to not become detrimental to the quality of my work.

I’ve noticed from time to time, that even though I am fully enjoying myself with what I do, I’m being held back by the very thing that helps me achieve progressing further in my creative endeavors. Tunnel vision.

Usually whenever someone talks about being able to concentrate on their job / hobby / goals they’re being praised for it, as outsiders only see what’s on the surface. But no one is thinking about any potential burn outs or even about the quality in times like these, as it’s seemingly more important to actually finish something, rather than making it good. Unconsciously, this can also materialize within the creator themselves. And oh boy, does it happen often.

There’s been numerous occasions for me when I’ve fought my way through something, which by the end or simply a short while later I’ve found to be completely subpar or garbage. In cases like these I’ve noted that stepping away from the work actually helps a lot as you can get a wider field of vision by simply not paying any attention to it. I can testament to numerous occasions in which I have come up with things far more interesting while doing unrelated chores, than when I was “in the zone”. Sure, I’m not talking about it in general, but rather the time by which I’ve been already focused on something long enough that it began having the opposite of the intended effect. I could bee thinking that I’m actually taking a few steps forward, but in reality all I’m doing is staggering in place or sliding back down a slope. It’s such an unreal or rather unusual experience still, that it’s harder for me to notice it when it’s actually happening, rather it’s always in hindsight that I’m able to recognize having been a part of it.

For the past week or so, I’ve been finally back on my gamedev journey. It’s been a few weeks (months?) but I jumped back in feeling inspired and becoming productive. Pretty much every day has been spent with development and right now I’m again making progress. The good kind. As with all previous occasions, somehow whenever I come back to it after a brief (or longer) pause, I get a fresh perspective and more concise picture of what I actually want. Which still weirds me out, as I’m technically living and breathing with my work, yet I cannot simply point out why a certain idea makes sense today, but not yesterday. Yet this happens all the time.

In theory, focusing on a project will lead you to a faster and better competition, but the reality is that it’s not been the case for me at all. I do have experience in being able to finish things earlier than intended, but there’s always problems with quality in the end, where I need to spend more time on reworking the things that already exist, instead of taking my sweet time and slowly advancing forward with steady standards. I keep falling for this trap as either inner or outer pressure gets to me on a subconscious level, affecting my mentality and thus everything I do. I don’t think I can ever escape this.

But I am trying, which is something. To be honest it’s not as a grave issue as I make it out to be, after all the single thing that matters to me is creation itself, being able to finish is just the cream of the crop, a bonus in a way.

TLDR: I’ve been doing gamedev and I’ve made good progress, with additional quality of life changes that makes me happy. More exact details to come later. Probably

How to Import Miroslav Philharmonik 1 instruments into Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE

Here’s a tutorial for my fellow confused individuals who might be having trouble with missing instruments after upgrading their VST.

The Problem

The issue at hand is the following: you’ve upgraded either your DAW or your VSTs, and now you cannot fully utilize your possessions. MP1 is a 32 bit plugin, while MP2 CE is 64 bit and is missing a lot of the original content, despite being literally called “Classic Edition”. The former also cannot be handled by the majority of music making software anymore, as they simply dropped support for 32 bit plugins ages ago. You’d think it’s no biggie, you can simply load your patches into the new version of the VST, and all is well? Not quite.

MP1 uses the older Sampletank engine, while MP2’s instruments are based on the newer one, with a different file format. Additionally there’s simply no option in MP2 to even import or load instruments, be it legacy or current. Why? You tell me. But alas, not all is lost, as there’s actually a way to circumvent this, albeit it’s slightly cumbersome.

The Solution

1. Make sure you have Miroslav Philharmonik 2 or CE installed and authorized on your computer. You will need the IK Product Manager for this, don’t forget to also install the sounds, as they are a separate download. Now onto the funky stuff.

2. You need to install Miroslav Philharmonik 1 and also Sampletank 3, which if you were a curious little bugger back in the day, should be in your IK Multimedia account. No, Sampletank 4 will not work, as it’s a different engine at this point and you won’t be able to load any older instrument into it without the help of Sampletank 3. I know, it’s cumbersome I’m not the one who thought this genius idea up.

3. The next step is that both need to be activated using the old IK Authorization Manager. Use your serials and go ahead with this step, again you will find these in your IK Multimedia account.

4. After everything is ready, you will need to open Sampletank 3 and import the legacy instrument. You can do this by clicking on the icon right above the pitch wheel (3 horizontal lines) and clicking “Import legacy instruments” and create a custom name for the incoming instruments. Do note that unless the software is authorized, this option will not be available, for whatever stupid reason. Either way you will need to find the folder in which MP1’s samples are contained. In general this should be:

C:\Program Files (x86)\IK Multimedia\Miroslav Philharmonik\Instruments

1. The last step will take a while, but after it’s finished, you will find that Sampletank 3 now has a section for Imported Instruments. You can now close this application, no need to save anything as the software did that already. You will need to navigate to the Sampletank 3 content folder, which in general is hidden away at:

C:\Users\Public\Documents\IK Multimedia\SampleTank 3\Imported Instruments

Note that this is NOT THE SAME as simply going to your Documents folder!

Copy the contents of this folder to the following location:

C:\Users\Public\Documents\IK Multimedia\SampleTank 3\Instruments\51__Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE

The basic gist of this is that you will need to stay within the Sampletank 3 folder, but you will need to move the contents from imports to MP2’s folder, in order for it to see them.

Now, in a nice world, you would be done at this point. Go open up MP2 and be amazed that you still won’t find the instruments there. There’s one additional step you need to take, and that is:

1. Open up MP2’s settings (top right corner, above the “level” text). You will see “Disk Path” in the preferences, which points to the exact folder we’ve just copied items to. This needs to be refreshed, and the only way to do this, is to first change said path to something other than it is (this will remove all instruments), then change it back, so that MP2 will re-read the folder contents. Meaning you will need to end up with:

C:\Users\Public\Documents\IK Multimedia\SampleTank 3

If you did everything right, then you should now have both the new and old instruments imported. Pretty cool right?

Not really, IK Multimedia should get their shit together and offer converted files for download for anyone owning the original MP1, because this whole fiasco of jumping through hoops and loops literally makes zero sense. Let alone there’s no guarantee that you will be able to activate these software in a year from now, so you better make backups of all your content before IKM decides to completely block you from ever doing this…

Fluctuating Values

Here’s how the classic definition for pricing products goes: You take the costs of resources, development, distribution, marketing, taxes, add them together, then slap on a bit of a percentage for profit. The you sell something, the less it costs you to actually create it, increasing your net gains. However, after a while you need to decrease the retail price, or create sales in order to continuously make money. But what happens after something reaches the end of it’s lifecycle?

While I have briefly touched on this topic before, it was heavily focused on “Collector’s” and their influence on the market. This time, I’d like to examine a different aspect of how used goods are valued: sentimentalism and nostalgia. Let’s take a look at a real example: Typewriters.

Technically, there’s no reason for anyone to use such an antiquated equipment as a typewriter, at the least not the average human being. I can see a writer having a bit of fondness towards this mechanical beast, but the amount of people who would actually care enough about them and have their practicality in mind are seldom. They represent a very tiny group, that could only be described as enthusiasts. But even they would be aware of the fallacy of relying something so old and outdated is inefficient. Yes, you might have some sort of preference for it, but serviceability is a bitch, not to mention the procuring of usable ink ribbons is getting harder by the day. This provides us with three basic problems:

Case 1: The Flooded market

You can find typewriters in every corner of the world, hell you might already know someone who has one of them stacked away in a dust covered box in their attic. Maybe they bought it, it was gifted to them or they simply inherited it from their parents or grandparents. The point is, that there’s quite possibly way too many typewriters per person, and most of them will never be appreciated or used at all. Hence, the availability is so great, it pushes prices down as there’s not enough of a need for so many of such.

Case 2: The Condition

A lot of said typewriters are in horrible shape and need repairs. It might be a small issue that can be easily fixed, but aside from hobbyists, there’s no actual service person out there who can help you in replacing a key or getting it unstuck. The lack of professionals also end up with an increased cost for serviceability, as those who actually do these types of work have to ask for more payment, in order for such to be worth their time at all. Frankly speaking, it’s cheaper to just straight up find a replacement unit altogether. With this in mind the prices for working items increases, precisely because it’s a niche product.

Case 3: Purchase Threshold

What is the maximum amount of money someone is willing to pay for anything? This depends on the person and their needs, but there’s always that one specific number beyond which you simply refuse to spend your hard earned cash. Let’s say you keep buying in ribbons for 5 dollars a piece. Price increases by 1 dollar, you still might buy it. But if it doubles, you will possibly refuse any offers at that range. Yet there are individuals who would pay that and even more, depending on a number of circumstances. Usually this would be the ease of acquisition or the speed at which it can happen. If you need something right now, you’re more likely cough up more dough, than if you can be patient and wait it out until a good deal comes along. Problem is, if there has been an example of something selling for more than it is actually worth, a lot of sellers will think about that price as being the “absolute minimum worth”, which ends up creating a superficial value.

The above three are what usually influence the pricing of used items on the market. But there’s a fourth and fifth element to this, that contribute greatly to any and all values.

Case 4: Evolution and death

As with everything, you have technological upgrades that meant people wanted to upgrade to newer, better products. First came the electronic typewriters with ink cartridges and easier editability, and built in dictionaries. The next step were so called word processors, a more basic form computers that could let you actually save your text in an editable format, and move it between machines, while also changing the method of printing. This was later replaced by home computers and laptops, which eventually killed the need for something as “basic” as a typewriter. You could do more than one thing now on your machine, there was no reason to keep using an outdated equipment. They pretty much lost all their value.

Case 5: Wait, we need to go back!

Years pass and you’re sitting there in front of your computer, connected to the internet. You type away vigorously, until the power goes out, making you lose your progress. You get angry as now you have to start all over from the beginning. But wait, there’s still no electricity, what can you do? If you’ve got a charged laptop, you’re fine but otherwise you’ll be forced to rely on classic pen and paper. Writing by hand? By god, you haven’t done that in years! Not aside from those unusual moments you actually had to use a writing utensil because you didn’t have your phone with you to quickly jot it down into a note taking application. Okay, what now?

Maybe you ignore the whole thing and just wait until you can use your computer again. In which case you might find that your document was corrupted. You spend hours wasted on the internet, trying to find a solution, ultimately to end up watching cat videos, because you’ve got distracted. Time well spent. Well, you try and turn things around by opening your choice of text editor and starting a new. Except you’re now having connection issues, because you’ve been using a free software that requires to be connected to the internet 24/7.

This is when nostalgia hits you and with all your annoyances at the max level, you realize that the simpler life before was also better, because less things could go wrong and you weren’t as easily bombarded with distracting information. Alright, you dig up your old pc that actually has offline software. Except the pc doesn’t work anymore, or you realize you’ve long thrown it out, because modern things couldn’t run on it. You need to buy one from someone. Which is plausible, but you might also remember the problems you’ve just now had, so you’re going to go one step further and downgrade even more: That’s it when you have the bright idea to get a typewriter and get introduced to Case 1: The Flooded Market and you being to realize, you might not be alone with your ideas, forums and communities began to open up in front of you, preaching how going back to simpler tools is the best way to live life while also self assessing the values of things, without anyone really pointing out the one true fact: there’s no one to regulate all this, and if after all those years something was deemed unusable by the majority, even deemed to be recycled, then the opposite happens of a flood: shrunken availability.

Conclusion

As we can see with the above wall of text, there’s a number of things that can happen which can influence a price of a used product. From nostalgia to availability, these elements rely on one another in an interconnected way, ultimately ending up with a complicated market that you cannot legibly maneuver around in. Since second hand goods fall under different regulations, or rather there’s practically none for them, the buyers and sellers themselves determine what rules apply to any purchase, being completely subjective about whether or not something or someone is fair. The major issue here is that more scams and exploitation can happen because of this and a lot of times nothing can be done about this. But that’s off the subject.

Economically one could say that the used market is an interesting study of consumerism and perceived values. But all it really has become is just one giant mess and a pain in the ass. There seems to be always a tipping point for new products in general where the buyers are starting to get less for their money and more restrictions placed on them than before. Some just become too cheaply made, revisions are constant and either pointless or just plain damaging. In cases like these you step back and start to think where it had all gone wrong, and contemplate if going back to a previous model or version would be more beneficial to you or not.

The music industry suffers from this. Automobile industry suffers from this. Household appliances suffer from this. Heck, even a simple shovel had suffered, as it went from a long lasting product, to a cheap plastic / aluminum that is hard to recycle, breaks constantly and isn’t even as efficient as your grandpa’s rusty old one, that had termites eat away at it’s wooden handle for years. Despite it being 40 years old it still works, which is more than you can say about that thing you’ve bought at Walmart / Tesco a month ago, that got bent out of shape, and is now being used as a door-porter.

Hmm, it’d be better if you had a similar one to your grandpa’s. Wonder if anyone’s selling one now? Maybe it’s time to check with google.

Foiled Plans, as per usual

The word “unexpected” usually refers to something that someone would not expect. But what would you call events that are “unexpected”, yet you still count on them to happen? It’s not precognition or anything, it’s not any system of belief, it’s just what it is: Things that shouldn’t occur, yet you know they will.

For a coupe of years now, I have not made any solid plans for life. I have a rough outline that I would like to follow, but there’s always circumstances that prevent me from doing so. This has made me cautious to believe in anything in long form, as my previous experiences have led me to believe that something that could go awry, will indeed do so.

I’m not a pessimist by any means, in fact I would call myself a “realistic optimist”, which I like to define as someone who looks for the better qualities in life, but does not delude themselves into unrealistic situations. An extreme example would be something like contracting a deadly disease, but not dying immediately. I wouldn’t think of such as curable, despite some claiming it all depends on your mentality, which is the biggest horseshit idea ever. But let’s not get off track here. It would be what it is, something that’s there and while I wouldn’t necessarily like it, I’d acknowledge it, and try do move on.

No, before anyone has any bright ideas: I am NOT dying, not any more or faster since birth. I’m just getting kicked in the face by life as per usual. Nothing new here. I had made some plans last year, that lasted for about half a year and now they’re crumbling, with me falling down into the cesspit again. It’s like my second home at this point, I’ve become way too familiar with and getting accustomed to being pushed around and stepped on. I do not enjoy it, it absolutely annoys me, but after calming down all I can do is laugh about such conspiring things.

I’m sure a lot of people out there are experiencing the same or similar things, but it’s become absolutely comical to me, that whenever you try get everything back into order, it never lasts for long. Someone or something creates a cause and effect that changes you from gear 3 down back, enforcing you to stop and park down. I know, I’m not being overly exact here, as that’s not really the point to begin with, but maybe I’m being too cautious and becoming the damn Riddler with this now.

Basically I’m kind of known for saying that life has ups and downs, and it’s in a constant loop of swapping between these two, which seems to be happening again. The irony here being that I’ve called it last year: “I need to step back and only have short term goals in a monthly manner, as you can never be sure with anything”. Which honestly was a good idea in hindsight, as mentally I was already somewhat prepared for any “sudden” triggers, however I was still somewhat caught off guard.

It was only about two weeks ago that I’ve mentioned my job being the definition of “cushy” and oh boy, how the tables have turned. That remark cannot be thought of as true anymore, in fact it has gone to the very extremes of it being the opposite of it. So much so that it is now absolutely not worth it anymore. Too much is expected for so little now, with toxicity levels being at an all time high, coupled with the usual incompetence of the upper management. Honestly I do not understand how every jobs I’ve had thus far has suffered from this exact situation. Like, can’t you think of something new for a change? Why am I running around in circles in different fields of work? It feels like I’m a magnet for these, despite making sure beforehand that what I would get myself into would be normal. Usually they start out like that, but not long after the small cracks start to appear, grow, and eventually bring the ceiling down. I’m literally smiling while typing this, as it’s become so surreal to me that everything has followed the same pattern as per usual. It just feels like some bad soap opera writing.

Well, what now then? To be honest, I know and I also don’t know. The clear answer is that I will change jobs, and continue from where I’ve left off. But that’s not as easy as it sounds, even job hunting has been a pain in the ass for a while, and turns out it’s for the very good reason that job portals and HR agencies deliberately fuck you over for their own gains. Usual profit oriented world, again nothing new. Just that it’s becoming really old at this point. Whatever I had in mind for the next two years is now getting delayed, with not much progress having been made anyway. I’m disappointed that is has come to this again, for the umpteenth time, but oh well. As the Japanese say: “it can’t be helped”.

Wetlands

What is it with rain? Whenever there’s an emotional scene in movies, you’re bound to have water falling from skies. Heck, if it’s a funeral it’s almost guaranteed to happen if the producers had any sort of budget. But there’s no real reason for this to happen, not one that is widely known or is part of some accepted factoid. Yet this always seems to happen. Is there an underlying psychology that would trigger the fountain of the eye to burst and cover your face in waterworks? Does it work in a similar manner to how people with strong empathy start to cry automatically when witnessing someone else open up the floodgates? Truth be told, I have no idea and I cannot even research this at the moment of typing this, simply because I have no internet. What a bummer.

In general, I think weather does have some sort of influence on the mind, but it’s not as clear cut as a math equation. Despite this, somehow it’s become a cliche, that a rainy environment equals sadness. Which is odd, considering rain-forests and rainy seasons exist, and I don’t see people go full on depressed. Not from this at least, especially when they’re already mopey to begin with. However, I did have co-workers who had become quite lethargic during cloudy days, but I think it was mostly because of the lack of light and harder visibility. In fact, it was more of a “bitchy” attitude that took over their persona.

“This is such a non-weather.”

“Man, today feels disgusting.”

“Fucking can’t see jack shit.”

Now this has always bugged me a bit, as I personally had no qualms about rain as long as it wasn’t a literal typhoon, force feeding you rainwater as you tried to cross the road, holding onto your drenched bag that had more or less doubled in weight from soaking it up too much. In fact, I enjoy rain in a casual manner.

I have vivid memories of when I was a child, sitting in a classroom, enjoying the grayish, sometimes even full on dark environment that the so called “bad weather” had brought with itself. I also remember the teacher getting mad at me for not paying attention in class and throwing chalk in my general direction, most of which I’ve managed to dodge, worsening the situation. Good times.

But that’s the thing: I have always enjoyed cloudy weather, as much if not more than when the sun shone brightly, burning out my retinas, peeling off my skin as if I was some sort of heavily spiced grilled chicken. This is apparently weird though, as the average Joe is pretty much appalled when thinking of rain and praising it. Let alone, calling it calming. Yet to me it’s just that: something which relaxes me and gives me peace.

It’s also something very inspiring: Recently we’ve had the typical snotty spring weather and it not only reminded me of an old story I wrote, but also gave me an idea for another one. It’d be cool to say that I’ve actually started working on it, but I don’t count having a title productive enough. I’m simply just not there. Well, give it one more week I’ll have something short.

Or not. You never know with me.

Brain Drain

It’s been a month since I’ve decided to put my mind at ease and try to live my life as if I am retired. My expectations have been relatively met, while in some ways they’ve yet to bring in any results. I do feel calmer, but I’m not at the desired point of relaxed attitude as of today. I didn’t think I would get there within a short time frame, but I am making progress: I’m becoming more and more aware of when I have the choice to act or react, instead of just relying on pure instinct and reflex. While this ended up being a good thing and in a way mentally refreshing, it also ended up going overboard (go figure).

Just like the day I am writing this, I feel like I have zero motivation to do anything at all. Actually no, that’s worded badly, as I DO FEEL the motivation to create, but I simply do not feel like starting or continuing anything I had planned. Normally everyone would scream “burnout”, but having known what that state of mind is like, I can assure at least myself that it is not that. It’s something wildly different, which the average person would probably label as: Laziness.

Yup, somehow I’ve become the living embodiment of a couch potato and I’m not really happy about it. I haven’t really been able to touch any of my hobbies lately, the most I’ve accomplished is continuing watching the original Star Trek from time to time, having finished the series over the weekend. But that’s not exactly a “task” more so just part of my entertainment. Albeit I have to also admit that I haven’t really felt like watching anything in these past weeks (I generally tend to go through an episode of something or half a movie every night before sleeping), which kind of started to irk me.

Sure, I don’t necessarily NEED to do any of this, but I have become accustomed to such as part of a daily ritual to unwind from both work and life. Although I’ll have to add that my current job is the very definition of “cushy”, so if anything I think I have subconsciously become extremely contempt with my current situation, even if there’s drawbacks to it.

During the day, I have a quite a bit of downtime and have utilized these moments to do whatever at my workplace (perks of being unsupervised), but effectively my personal activities have almost stopped this past month, making me accomplish barely anything. I focus on the task at hand, finish it, then stare into the void until the next one comes along. If I was planning on living on as a mindless droid, this would be considered great, but I have more aspirations than that. I need to get back on track and continue my writings and developing games, but my mind simply refuses to do anything unless I start poking it with a stick.

However, through all this, by some mere coincidence I have started tackling Python again. I’ve put studying the language on the back-burner last year, as I had become stuck and annoyed at the available resources being absolutely horse-shit garbage. Any book that was recommended or that I could find, was as horrendously structured and edited, so much so that I’ve been having flashbacks to my much hated school days. Dry and boring material, with no real explanations or care put behind the information that it’s trying to deliver. Let alone information I wanted not only wasn’t available in any of the material, I struggled to even google the answers, as I had no idea how to properly formulate my questions. I can’t remember who was it that said it, but the most important aspect of studying has always been about asking the proper questions, which I admittedly failed at in regards of programming, as I lacked the proper terms and definitions to begin with. When you start to learn something new to you, if you do not have the necessary basic knowledge made available to you, you’ll struggle to progress by yourself.

So I was in a bit of a pitfall, being unable to climb out as I simply couldn’t thematically define what I wanted to know. That is: In layman’s terms I could, but the important keywords were always missing from my searches, thus ending up with me uselessly browsing the internet, getting further away from where I wanted to be. A friend of mine had asked me how I was doing in my endeavors, and I could only express my frustrations to him about this goddamn labyrinth I was stuck in, with seemingly no way out.

On a fateful day, about a week ago, one of my coworkers requested a leave of absence, so our schedules got shuffled around a bit. I ended up working together with someone I generally only converse through the phone and only about work. We hit if off quite well and after the usual small talk, somehow got talking about programming. We both have an interest in it, albeit with different languages, so we compared notes on what the best way for each would be to study. Turns out he had paid for an online course, done by a company which was rumored to be going under. After hearing the name I realized I’ve briefly seen mentions of it on Reddit, so we hit up the net, and ended up finding out that multiple companies are closing down. Absolutely great.

Lot of users were putting in their two cents about why this was happening: apparently there’s too many coders and not enough jobs available at the moment, and since said companies couldn’t guarantee jobs anymore (that was their whole shtick: you do the course, they get you a job), people stopped paying for their services. Okay, so what now?

Well, turns out, at the very bottom of the comments, there was someone with the answer to both of our problems: Harvard. Apparently the university had made quite a few of their courses available online for the price of $0. Unless you want to receive an official certificate, signed by the dean, then you’d have to pay a bit of money, but otherwise you can study a lot of subjects for completely free.

Now this all sounds dandy and all, but isn’t Harvard supposed to be one of the tougher schools out there? Even if it’s purely an online course, surely it wouldn’t be easy to get through it, right? Wrong.

As doubtful as I was, I registered for the python introductory course, started watching the recorded classes and my mind was blown: I understood everything. Within the first 3 videos, I’ve managed to get PAST the point at which I was last year, finding out the information I had been lacking. HOW?

The simple answer is: the course thus far was done very well, with an easy to understand teacher, who actually kept building up your knowledge bit by bit, always relying on previously shown concepts.

The complicated answer is: I was right, the books that were recommended suck donkey dick. I’m not as stupid as I had assumed, and it’s not that I’m incapable of learning programming at this age, I just had the wrong “teachers” all along. Fucking hell, why didn’t anyone recommend me doing Harvard courses before? Why were all the people online telling everyone to study the crappy books which should have been only used to start a fire on a cold winter night? What is wrong with you lot?

The way I’m seeing things now though, I’ll be able to write basic programs within a couple of months. Nothing extravagant, but definitely usable applications for automation or misc tasks. Okay, I sill don’t think I’m going to do anything creative for a while, but having python by my side would end up speeding development time of my games for sure. Let alone I’ll be able to re-purpose this skill into other areas of life as well, so it’s a win-win situation really. I have a hunch that after all this, I’ll be able to get back to creating again.

Small Towns are Better

Whenever you ask someone where they want to live, the usual answer is a bustling city filled with shops and good opportunities. Everything is at hand, you don’t need to travel far and getting around via public transport is easy. This sounds very nice, but I’ve honestly never truly shared this sentiment.

Big cities have their uses, but frankly, if it weren’t for the lack of jobs outside of these locations, I’m fairly certain a lot more people would move outwards to less populated areas. While I too have grown up in one of said “Big Cities”, it was still in an area that was somewhat removed from all the action, essentially making it seem like you were living in a satellite town. Sure you had the same facilities available to you as like a capital, but it was less crowded and you could actually find some greener areas nearby.

In a way some would call it a perfect mix, but you still had to deal with annoying problems, such as a heavily condensed living space, loud environment and a generally distant public. Let alone problematic folk who were loitering around day at night, making you question the sanity of the average person. Especially yours, considering you were “fine” being close neighbors to some, even accepting the fact that from time to time, they were beating the heating pipes all night long with a wrench and screaming like madmen, eventually setting themselves on fire somehow. Multiple times.

Yeah, no thanks, I’ve had enough of that.

When I was young, I had the opportunity to visit friends, family and acquaintances living in the outskirts and it’s literally a completely different world out there. People are more relaxed, not chasing after time all the time, easier to talk to and in general more friendly. We’re talking clichés here, but honestly, walking around on a dirt road, meeting a random elderly couple can easily lead to some chit-chat, where as you try to do that at the main road of a city, most of the time people will either ignore you, or ask you if you’re mental for trying to talk to strangers. Somehow City Slickers are more self absorbed and harder to get along with, it’s very hard to get to know them at all, even if you try. Yet you can practically strike up a conversation with anyone in a village, because they’re more welcoming, and well, in a way live a calmer life.

Part of it is their mentality, but also because of their surroundings. Connections are more easily formed in smaller groups and in places where no one is hurrying towards their own demise. There’s less value to collectible assets and more towards nature, while still appreciating and caring about what one has. Yes, there’s problems, it’s not as if I’m thinking about such with rose tinted glasses, but I’d much rather deal with the one’s that come up in a village than in a city.

I’m fairly aware that I’m also somewhat idolizing a lifestyle, but I don’t think anyone can blame me for wanting to have a more chill environment to live in. Truth be told, I’m at a point where city life just annoys me, and in a way I even find it repulsive. It’s weird how “country life” is looked down upon, yet it’s better for your health in more than one way, and the toxicity of a city is “perfectly normal”.

Media used to also have this problem or normalizing such, but lately I’ve noticed an increase of more laid back material becoming available. It’s probably because more and more people are coming to appreciate the “Slow Life” aspect of living, realizing there’s absolutely no point in rushing things. The “Simple Life” movement is also somewhat part of this, focusing on a barebones, albeit not neglectful way of life. Both of these are easier followed in an environment that actually endorses this type of thinking, which leads to some longing for and eventually moving to the countryside.

Imagine going on a hike in the nearby forest on your day off. As you listen to the singing birds, you dip your feet into the flowing river, enjoying the tickling sensation between your toes. A lone deer walks by, stopping only briefly to quench it’s thirst. The gently blowing wind caresses your cheeks as the sun moves closer to the west. You have not a single care in the world. You’re perfectly relaxed. You doze off.

Now image the same, but in a city. You can’t, as your thoughts are being filled the endless amount of noise, coming from the bus stop, the people stuck in traffic, the screaming homeless arguing with junkies. You go home instead, shutting doors and windows, closing your blinds, hoping you can get away from it all. But you can’t. The guy across the floor is beating his wife with a rolling pin, while their child screams for the police. You start getting a headache, take some painkillers, lie down on your sofa, and fall asleep to the approaching sirens. A few hours in, you wake up covered in sweat, hearing the smoke alarm go off. Big commotion outside, there’s a fire, but you’re too tired to care. You try and go back to sleep. You don’t care what happens anymore, you just want some peace and quiet. But you’ll never get it. Not in a million years. You’ll never be truly rested. Why? Because you live in a city. And the city never sleeps.

2024 - The Death of The Artist

I can’t exactly remember the first time I started being “creative” or simply creating for the joy of it, but I’m certain it was somewhere around kindergarten, probably drawing horrific splurges of color onto a sheet of paper with crayon. I wasn’t a very good artist, but as the years passed by, you could notice a significant increase in quality in my work. Somewhere around fourth grade I’ve managed to win two prizes at an art contest by the local library. I was beginning to feel good about my work a couple of years later, having made comics and small “corner animations” into books, being able to easily draw famous cartoon characters. I wasn’t ever any good with life drawings, but I didn’t have much interest in them either. As long as I could sketch up a familiar character I was pretty content about my skills.

In eight grade I went to a summer course over at an animation studio where I learned about animation, ending up with about a minute long short film. We did everything the pseudo old school style: draw on paper with pencils, do a line pass with markers (paint would have been a pain), then we scanned them into a computer with a custom software and still camera, ultimately putting out the end product on a VHS tape.

But that’s about where that story ends. My interests changed and even though I’ve made some flash animations, I could never truly get down how to use a screen-less drawing tablet. Not being able to see my hands felt weird, and even though I got better, eventually I gave up to focus on other things.

One skill in the trash.

Slightly before this time I’ve started having an interest in writing and wrote my first chapter of a science fiction story, publishing it on Deviantart. I deleted it the following day when I’ve re-read it, as I was embarrassed at how bad it was. Still, I continued writing on and off from that point on, eventually raising the quality of my work and finally understanding everything I had to about this new form of expression. But it took me roughly 10 years to get to a point where I was finally getting proper results, and about 6 more to reach a place where I became confident about the craft. I continued onwards, honing my skills, trying to get a better grasp on my own abilities, but till this day, I’m still evolving and trying to get better. I’m never done with learning or practicing, it’s simply a thing I’ve gotten used to doing. Which brings me to my point:

In order to achieve results in something, you need to put in a lot of time.

I’ve somewhat discarded a skill that I’ve been honing since early childhood, in order to do something else. In both cases, I’ve spent years on training myself, upgrading my knowledge whenever I could.

Of course, that means nothing to the average person.

All they want is easy entertainment, no matter the cost on the side of the labor.

And this became very prevalent with the advancement of AI.

I keep bumping into threads, conversations and posts about users arguing with others, whether or not the usage of AI is ethical or not, and more often than not I see people talk down to artists, berating them. Even expressing their disdain towards not, and openly declaring that they simply want “good stuff”, no matter in which conditions they were created. It doesn’t matter that a computer program is being used to literally copy the work of someone else, who has spent YEARS on learning something, as long as the end product is enjoyable. As someone put it “artists need to grow balls and shut up”.

Honestly, it’s becoming very irking that people think this is the same as someone studying another persons work and simulating it. That also could have it’s own set of problems, but in this case we’re not talking about anything living, simply something that converts information into data and abuses it. If it weren’t for the actual artists, said AI would never even have a chance of creating anything to begin with. Let alone, people are more complex than a couple of one’s and zero’s, you cannot simply emulate the nuances that come from someone’s ideas and life experiences. You can get close, but a machine could never reach a complete understanding of anything creative, simply because it relies on facts, instead of feelings and hunches.

But as stated above: the average person simply does not care. All they want is their shiny new things, even with subpar quality, if it can be had at the speed at which you can buy a burger at a fast food restaurant, that’s good enough for them. AI has been continuously crawling it’s way into every part of our lives, and honestly it’s here to stay. People who write, draw, or simply create things cannot do anything about it, and there’s not a single big entity that would take the side of those who cost more than essentially an electrical bill.

Ethics? What are those? Not important in the grand scheme of things.

Saturday Afternoon Entertainment

There’s something indistinctively different about episodic TV series. Instead of relying on cliffhangers and an outstretched plotline that lasts for seasons, they start and end a story within a shorter timeframe than the average runtime of a movie. You don’t have the unnerving feeling at every episode that you will get nowhere, rather everything is resolved within that 30-50 minute runtime dedicated to it.

I used to think somewhat negatively about these types of series, not without reason I might add, as they could have their own set of problems, however if done well, they can withstand not only the passage of time but also some undeserved criticism. Maybe it’s about me getting older, changing tastes or whatever other influence but lately I’ve been more receptive to these types of shows, and more appreciative towards them.

Generally I tend to watch movies at night from bed before sleeping, either fully committing to finishing it, or turning it off after a while. But lately I’ve been watching the original Star Trek and I feel like it’s much more fitting for such a thing. On average I get through a full episode, circa 45 minutes and I’m on my way to slumber land afterwards. Pretty much perfect for that odd hour when you’re trying to get ready for some shuteye.

I wasn’t ever a Trekkie, far from it, but I’ve come to enjoy the endearing nature of the series. Let alone most of the episodes are just people talking, there’s no constant action or anything that might cause sensory overload. Similarly tension is either split or divided into smaller sections, there’s a certain lightheartedness to the show despite the deaths of background characters, yet still being an overall fit on how things progress.

It’s somewhat amazing how the show stood the test of time, despite there being some very obvious trademarks of the era it was produced is. Sure, there’s only a handful of story types that are being done, but I guess we can chalk that problem up to TV in general for the time, and the comparatively lower budgets that shows had back then.

Anyway, something came over me during the weekend and told me I need to sit down, pop in an episode and watch it during the day. It felt much more fitting than watching it at night and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it reminded me a bit of my childhood where you had the early morning cartoon blocks, but I’ve honestly felt liberated. I was in no hurry anywhere, nothing explicitly important to do, I was just laying there enjoying the on screen shenanigans of the characters.

This got me thinking: maybe, just maybe unwinding your mind and body during your work days isn’t as effective as your day off. The lack of “musts” and time constraints could very well enhance any experience and let the brain fully focus on other things. I doubt this is anything biological, but more so a learned trait. There’s no need to care about anything significant, unless you have things to do of course, hence why you’d be more receptive to singular events happening around you.

I could argue this could happen even after a work day, but I find myself feeling utterly different psychologically on a non work day, than vice versa. There’s the sense of “stand by and be ready for anything” that’s completely missing from me when I know I have an empty day. I’m much more calmer and in a way more prepared than when I need to be prepared. It’s such an odd feeling, especially when you consider people try to consume as many things as possible, all once nowadays. I remember laughing out loud on seeing some Tik Toks where there screen is split into two or more sections, with different things happening at the same time. It’s funny, but also depressing as I do not think these are helping people at all, rather they’re just a byproduct of the notion of wanting to consume more and more, with attention deficit issues. Generationally we’re changing or being changed and molded into someone who’s thoughts are always on constant overload.

This, I do not like. But I remember doing similar things, albeit not very often. There was a moment last week where I was watching a movie and thought to myself that I should be putting on some music for the background. This completely baffled me, as there’s no way I could intentionally focus on both the soundtrack and some other song playing in the background. Let alone it was an utterly pointless suggestion to begin with. Maybe it was this confusing experience that led me to watching Star Trek over the weekend, I can’t tell. But harkening back to where I started this post, I’m absolutely certain now that my ability to focus has been suffering.

Thinking more and more about it, I find myself remembering old shows like Knight Rider, Columbo and such where you have a singular episode hold your attention, fulfill it’s promises and let your hand go afterwards. It doesn’t trap you in any sort of psychological tension of you not knowing the outcome of a story. Which is the thing, humans by design hate or rather fear the unknown, so I think this might be something that affects our unconsciousness. I feel much more liberated watching these types of shows than serials, where everything is outstretched and constantly pulsating in the back of your head, taking up a good chunk of your thoughts.

I’m very aware that we’re in the information age, being constantly bombarded by whatever crap, but I honestly think the “simpler times” were indeed much better and in a way made us more focused and productive. The fact that in a way that entertainment has such a coincidental or deliberate affect is worrisome to me. I’d like to suggest to anyone to try and take a few steps back from what they’re doing on their day off and watch a TV show that wraps up all it’s events in a singular episode. I can guarantee, it will make you feel different.

Physical Media Archeology

Originally I’ve wanted to talk about something else this week, but eh, enough negativity and bitching. I can do that anytime (and will inevitably happen anyway).

I’ve been fascinated with flea markets ever since I was a little kid. I’m not going to tell you there’s something magical about reusing someone else’s trash, and getting it to someone who appreciates it, as that’s just too sappy. Okay, it’s kind of the truth that it’s a great thing in a way, but I would never admit to that publicly. Personally I find the best point of these marketplaces the atmosphere and the collective sense of adventure that the visitors have. It’s quite possibly the closest you can get to treasure hunting and actually getting something valuable or even sentimental out of a trip.

Every time you make appear at one of these places, there’s always a sense of familiarity to it, yet also an excitement of what might be there that day. Sure, you can run into the same bunch of sellers from time to time, but overall you never really know what to expect. Some days might be boring, other’s might be like hitting a jackpot at a casino.

You could find the component you’re missing to your electronics. A perfectly good pickaxe you’d need on the weekend for some work around the house. Cheap clothes, books, toys, that tiny little trinket you remember having as a kid, which you ultimately left at the bus station on the way home, never to be seen again. Or porn. Lots of porn. Especially on VHS. Hell, you can get surgical instruments in case you ever… well I’m not sure why you’d want any of that, but you can find the utmost random things you’d never believe to exist in close vicinity. Honestly, there’s nothing more rewarding than going around, digging through piles of second hand goods, only to grab onto something you need or have always wanted.

I used to go game hunting as a child, after all it was the single place you could actually afford to buy legitimate videogames with your allowance. Hell, one of my fondest memories is buying a stack of unopened PC magazines, with a bunch of bundled CDs, filled with demos and full versions of games and software. It took me weeks to check out all of them and I still have them stacked away till this day. Occasionally I get a couple of discs out and install something wacky I end up using or enjoying for a few hours. Truly a great purchase.

However, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve actually had that as a motivation for going. At it’s core I just like waltzing around, calling it a “health walk”. Good for both the mind and the body, and it’s either cheap or doesn’t cost you anything. Really depends on what you see on the day of. The other main reason I visit is to get my hands on movies. I swear by DVDs and I will die on this hill. To me it’s the best format one can get their hands on. Sure, you could argue about streaming and whatever, but there’s just a different feel to popping in a disc and watching it from bed. Tape Heads can probably relate, let alone there’s a lot of movies you really cannot find online in any form of legal way, which is quite sad. Not to mention all the one’s that were once available but later removed at the whim of the publisher. I much prefer actually having what I own in my room, even if it eventually ends up dying because of disc rot (touch wood).

There’s also another aspect: socialization. When interests collide and you get to have a random conversation about Starship Troopers with a stranger while digging through a bunch of garbage it kind of brings back the feeling of the good old times, when people were actually more connected and willing to chat with one another about their shared hobby. You might never see the person in question ever again, but that brief moment where you end up exchanging tips about which seller has the better items and prices, while also getting technical advice is irreplaceable to me.

Go to a flea market. Dig through some dirt, spend a couple of dollars and get that crappy Batman figure made of hard rubber that you’ve missed out on twenty years ago.

Or be like me and grab the last copy of Basic Instinct two seconds before the other guy does.

Sorry fellow movie enthusiast, I was the luckier one this time. Hope you ended up finding the Sharon Stone movies you were looking for.

Pseudo Retirement of The Mind

I’ve always found it funny, how life is. The first quarter of it, you’re learning and adapting to an environment you know nothing about. In the second and third, you work for your own survival, your home, maybe even a family. Ultimately in the fourth quarter you retire and take it easy, finally getting some well deserved rest. That is, if you’ve managed to achieve all the former.

Quite frankly speaking, I think it will be extremely hard for people to retire from it all in the coming generations. I personally don’t think I will reach the age for it, or on the off chance that I will, my pension will be so laughably low that I would still need to keep working until the day I die. Pretty sure that’s waiting for all of us though.

So thus the question stands: How do you live your life?

I know of people who live extremely frugally, counting pennies, trying to scrape by in hopes of suffering now, with things possibly getting better later. Then there’s the opposite, those who live like there’s no tomorrow, enjoying every bit of time they spend on earth. No savings, no plans to own a home or anything for that matter. Of course there’s are both the extremes, but they do exist and not many live in a balanced way.

Even amongst my co-workers, it’s a constant debacle on how they see themselves in the future, despite some of them being only a few years away from retirement. Some are better off than others, they don’t have loans, own property, while other’s not so much and even have loans. But there’s one common element I’ve noticed: They’re extremely lax.

Thing is, one of the core points of my culture is simply “not giving a damn” attitude, but that’s not really true for everything and differs on a case by case basis on what it entails. Hell, I’m probably less “caring” in a way than the average person, but you still see me bitch about whatever from time to time.

However, my colleagues seem to take this to new heights. Sure, they get annoyed by whatever, but otherwise they’re as uncaring as a college kid high on weed. It reminds me of how I was once, during some extreme stress laden work times. But for me that was a survival reaction, for them it’s a natural state.

So this kept me thinking: Was I better off mentally back then, or not? There’s not a clear answer to this, as in some ways I was, but I also wasn’t. I did have times of joy, but I was nail bitingly focused on being as calm as possible. I could care less of getting run over by a car, getting mugged, shanked… the list goes on. Frankly I don’t think it was a bad decision to go down that way, but in hindsight I have problems with the execution of it. If only that was by choice, from a natural progression instead…

Which brings me finally to the point of this post: Achieving an early retirement.

Of course, I’m not talking about a financial status here, more so about my mentality towards life. I’ve been caught up with rushing too many things, always under the watchful eyes of the ticking clock. I have retained some of the qualities from the above mentioned time, but I wish to have more of it. I’d like to have the same level of laxness as the seniors at work.

I know I know, I’m nowhere near retirement. But frankly, do I need to be? I don’t think so. Now, I’m not saying I’ll become a useless couch potato, far from it. I will continue living as I had in the past half year, but with the addition of simply claiming this era of my life as part of my retirement years. Honestly, just the thought of calling even the upcoming days as part of said retirement is making me glow from excitement. Yes I need to work, yes I have loans to pay off still, but that doesn’t mean my focus should be directed towards any of those things. It’s such a simple thing really, one might say I’m just fooling myself, but really that’s fine as well. As long as I get to enjoy more and more days, it’s going to be all right.

I’m not going to change a single thing about the way I do things, I won’t change any of my plans. I will simply travel forward in time mentally, and take up the mentality that of a retired old man. This will ultimately eliminate most of the pressure weighting on my back and allow me to live more freely and happily. Maybe this doesn’t make much sense, maybe it’s a horribly misplaced idea, but I want to go through with it. I’m positive I will enjoy everything much more deeply than before. Heck, I remember I stopped wearing a wristwatch for this exact same reason as a teenager, as I did not want to be hounded by the passage of time. Just that the circumstances and my comprehension were slightly different.

This time around though, I can make it work. There’s nothing really holding me back from doing so, except for my own damned self. So from today and onwards, I claim to be Mentally Retired. (Boy that sounds too close to a pejorative expression, lmao)

Senility and forgetfulness

It’s been a constant joke through out the years between friends that we have Alzheimer, as seemingly basic information is being forgotten within short periods of time. One could argue that is is a byproduct of our current environment: the internet.

We’re being bombarded by a non-stop stream of information, both useful and useless that blitz through our minds without ever leaving a deep impression. The word “consumer” has never been as fitting as it is now, only it’s method and literal contents have changed.

So many complain about spending too much time on social media and video sharing platforms, where they just endlessly scroll downwards with seemingly no end, reading or watching things they generally have absolutely no interest in. The brain just cannot keep up with the amount of data it’s being fed, pretty much most of what’s coming in is going into the garbage bin almost instantly. Our memory is limited, and was already being selective enough before the “digital information age”. I personally think we just tire ourselves out a lot faster with absolutely pointless things and have no leftover energy to deal with anything else.

But is that all?

Somehow there’s more and more things that my friends group have talked about, yet there’s always someone, sometimes even multiple parties who absolutely do not remember having conversation topics, or having talked to one another. I can’t just chalk this up to the internet.

Maybe it’s some underlying illness?

As much as we joke about having mental defects, and mental issues being ever so more common nowadays, looking up what can cause what problem does not provide a positive outcome. Sure, self diagnosis has always been frowned upon (even I myself do not think highly of it), but when there’s some very specific signs that tie into a specific problem, you start thinking. After all, having 44 symptoms of an illness should warrant for some worry.

I’m fully aware that at my core I am very surface level with things that do not interest me, but even those which I have an affinity or passion towards to seem to be affected. Not necessarily in terms of Alzheimer, but a bit of ADHD sprinkled with some mild Autism could be lingering about. So what now?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I don’t have much interest in finding out whether or not I have any disease, if it’s there, it’s there. These aren’t things that can be “cured” in a sense, unless of course you believe the nonsense that “ADHD is a children’s illness that kids will grow out of”.

Not my words, it’s from a TV report.

And that’s not the only problem here. If let’s say you have mental issues that need to be treated, you not only have to deal with medication that isn’t covered by the very minimal tax break that you get for being a diagnosed person, you’ll also have to face the negative effects this comes with.

Namely being deemed unfit for most work.

Not officially that is, but the common work place will treat you as a liability who cannot be hired, even if you have everything under control, you will be labelled as someone who cannot hold any responsibility, let alone take care of themselves.

It’s a shit show.

Even if I have some sort of problem, I wish not to have it known as everything is fine as is, the “minor” inconveniences are honestly not that big of a deal as of this point. But just thinking of the possibility that if I were to legitimately have some hard hitting issues, I would be completely and utterly fucked in life. Coolbeans.

The Dream Game Epidemic

I’m probably the single most “annoyable” entity on the planet when it comes to absolutely mundane stuff. I do not get angry, I do not throw a tantrum, I don’t punch babies in the face, but I do feel instantly tired and the need to let out a big sigh to compensate for the disappointment I’m experiencing.

There’s been a surge of “game developer” youtubers in recent years, trying to milk their audience and strike it big. They push pointless update videos out as part of the grind, talking about literal nothing most of the time, capitalizing on that sweet watch time. It makes you start thinking: so when are these people actually working on their games? Aren’t these developers?

The answer to that is no, they are youtubers. Their main job is making videos, not making their games.

But that wouldn’t really be an issue, right? After all their games use ready made assets, plugins and in general are of low quality with little to no effort put into them.

Well, it really depends on how you view it.

These people are trying to sell the “idea” that they’re hardworking, honest individuals deserving support for their struggles. However, most of the time they are anything but the above, purely manipulating a naïve audience. A lot of times they even start with “I’ve quit my day job to work on my dream game”. Okay, should I be cheering now or later?

Hint: I’m not going to.

What that sentence tries to imply is that our “dev” is taking a huge gamble, even at a financial loss to strive and work towards fulfilling their dreams. He has his life savings to loose, he needs to be treated as an underdog for the next couple of years, until he succeeds.

Except, if you can quit your job, stay at home and do whatever for the next couple of years, you’re nothing more than a privileged little liar. No normal person, especially not a young twenty-something can have enough saved up in their bank account to be able to afford to not work. There’s been also cases of their spouses taking a “hit” and “allowing” them to follow their “dreams” as they are very supportive and loving partners.

Bullshit. Tell me: do you really think that the average person’s income can support even a single person, let alone two?

Of course not, not in this day and age. You’d have to have an insanely good job, or “brought funds and assets” to be able to do that. If you already own a house or an apartment, sure it’s plausible that a single income or your reserves can support you, but you had to get to that point somehow, and under normal circumstances that’s quite frankly impossible.

I cannot congratulate these people, nor cannot feel any excitement over their projects when their whole shtick is built upon either lies or pure ignorance on their part.

Let alone here’s the biggest problem: their games.

On average the “dream game” of these individuals are nearly always simplistic clones of whatever’s currently popular:

• My Dream Crafting Survival Sandbox Game
• My Dream Souls Like Game
• My Dream Multiplayer Streamer Bait Game
• My Dream clone of insert currently bestselling title

They’re pretty much always creatively bankrupt people, chasing either fame, recognition or an increase in their wealth. Their motivations are as weak as their will to actually produce something unique and interesting.

You can also instantly spot these people whenever their show their surroundings: always pristine clean, with the latest tech and gadgets, in a perfectly lit environment that looks like it has never been lived in, being prepared for an Ikea catalog photoshoot. It’s an unrealistically sterile environment, devoid of any personality and sign of life.

It’s not their development station, it’s a shooting set.

I honestly can’t stand these fake people and honestly it’s been getting worse. This whole ideology of “succeeding with your dreams” has spread to other outlets:

• Building my Dream House
• Starting my Dream Business
• Creating my Dream Gaming Room

I think what got me was when one of those room makeover videos showed up in my feed, with the thumbnail proudly announcing that they’ve spent a 5 figure sum (dollars) to “upgrade” their “mancave”. Honestly, it’s really just people flaunting their wealth, lot of times even forgetting to edit out the labor they’ve hired to actually create their “dreams” while also claiming it was honest work they did themselves.

Really now? That’s where we’re at? Maybe I should come up with a new dream myself.

My dream is a world where these people are told to fuck off and they disappear from the limelight.

Collectors can go to hell

I’m sure most people are familiar with the concept where an adult strives to make up for lost experiences from their childhood. You didn’t get to travel as a kid? You hop on a plane and go abroad! You didn’t get to eat snacks? You’re eating a bag of crisps for lunch, while also regretting your decision and wondering why your younger self didn’t crave any actual sustenance. Either way you’re definitely doing some things as a grown up that you never had the chance for as a child.

Of course there’s multiple categories and layers to this, but in general I think it’s safe to say that we’re just trying to live or in some cases relive our past. Which I think is great, you get to enjoy things that you couldn’t, or learn more about yourself in the process of “unexpectedly” not liking said things at all.

I distinctively remember wanting to become a fully independent creature as soon as possible, pretty much because I wanted to live my life as I deemed fit and I promised myself that I too, will get out the backlog and fly through it as much as possible when given the possibility. But here I am in turmoil, getting angrier and growing constantly more disappointed by every passing year, simply because I can’t.

Why? Because of those damn collectors.

Be it scalpers, rich idiots, or simple hoarders, there’s a select group of people who seem to enjoy sitting on items with no real value, increasing demand and hiking prices into ridiculous territory. This in itself is a problem, but the bigger issue at hand is that they do NOT actually use any of these things. There’s thousands of game collectors on Youtube alone, who keep showcasing their insane game rooms, with an endless amount of games, which I can guarantee you won’t ever get used. They flaunt their wealth and obsession, while simultaneously pissing people off, who just want to have a good time, but can’t because of them.

Are you a patient gamer, waiting for a game’s price to drop, so you can finally afford to buy it? Well if you wait too long, the price will start climbing back up, because it’s going to be out of print, and some asshole in California wants to create his retirement fund by sitting on all available copies, with 200 dollars a piece. Amazing.

I do not understand how we got here, aside from a good chunk of people being greedy assholes, loving to pull a power play on a sunny Thursday afternoon. But in away I also blame publishers for being morons and not getting with the times, re-releasing their IPs for a fraction of their original price on modern platforms as a digital download. I do not really like being tied to digital only content, but if something is available at convenience for an adequate pricing, I do not mind opening up my wallet for it. But too many things are not available at all for one reason or another, and the only way you could be experiencing them would be either through sheer luck, perseverance, unbalanced trade of goods or piracy, most of which I do not wish to get myself involved with.

I’m not kidding when I tell you: there’s games I had to wait literally 20+ years to be able to enjoy them, because some moron thought that the limited amount of copies it sold, would mean that it’s instantly a “collectors item”, needing a 3000% price increase, despite said game never selling enough even at a 5 dollar price tag. Absolutely flawless logic.

This alone would be already enough to make me go mad, but the fact that there’s people who do not care about the prices simply buy a 300 dollar game from the 90’s as “they cannot wait for a better deal”. These push the idea of superficial worth even further, by making it seem the average person is willing to pay that much for a piece of plastic containing some data.

And this isn’t even exclusive to games, movies suffer from the exact same thing. For some reason DVDs in general have been skyrocketing in worth, because apparently people are getting fed up with the limitations of streaming services, their prices and catalogs, a notion which is being further promoted by scalpers, as they hope to make quick and easy bucks off of others.

Well to this I say: Go fuck yourself.

I’m not buying any of your overpriced crap, and no one else should. You lot should stick to hoarding all the useless, rotting garbage in your mansions, ultimately having to throw it away and lose money. You’re not any better than all those CEO’s and company management which people constantly bitch about. You’re the same as them. Fuck off.

Black Mesa is not a good game

I’ve been involved with Half Life and related games since about 2002 when I bought the HL: Generation pack. I thoroughly enjoyed the mods and even helped out with a couple of them back in the day. I’m not exactly a person who’s fully conscious of the lore however, that’s one thing I’ve never paid any attention to with it. Still I am aware of the basics at least, so I’m not completely out of the loop.

Some years ago a small group decided to remake the original Half Life, which eventually ended up being released as a retail game in the steam store. Players were excited about it, giving rave reviews about how it upgraded the content and even elevated it to a higher level. I didn’t care much about it at the time, but recently I’ve had curiosity fool me into buying Black Mesa during the winter sale and oh boy, I was indeed fooled.

Black Mesa took Half Life and made it inherently worse, than it ever was.

Let’s start off by saying that design wise, the environments have been pointlessly expanded into corridors and pathways that lead to nowhere and do not add any extra worth to it at all. I’m an avid explorer, yet the more I played the less I wanted to walk around and discover, simply because there was no real reason to do so, or I was prohibited from entering areas that looked interesting enough. Navigation is painful, especially at the latter levels where you have no idea where to go, as your pathways are seemingly blocked by invisible walls and you’re barely being lead around with the exception of a very few light sources at very few moments. Hell, in some cases when there were forks in a road, I was contemplating on which way to go, then ending up with a level change, wherein I could not backtrack anymore. This annoyed me, as at first I was curious on what would have happened if I went the other way, so I reloaded a previous save game only to realize there was absolutely no reason for the other path to even exist, as I was not rewarded by anything at all.

This all becomes more and more frustrating later on, when you’re running low on health, and no medkits or healing stations are available anywhere, as you’re thrust into multiple escape sequences with 12 HP, where you simply cannot do anything but run around like a madman, hoping to find the correct path. Scripted sequences add more confusion when there’s no indication of it happening, so you waste your ammunition on a monster, that you’re not supposed to defeat. Heck, there’s an average enemy that turns out to be a full length level chase, where you are incapable of killing said enemy and are basically forced to run around like a moron, hoping that yet another sequence will be triggered, that opens up a previously blocked area.

What’s more, you can get punched in the face, sent flying outside the map, somehow between two blocks of clippings, being unable to do anything but killing yourself and reloading a save. There’s countless bad decisions that undermine the whole game, like jump puzzles being easily beaten through cheating as the developers forgot there’s a physics engine where you can simply stack boxes or barrels, skipping parts that are supposed to be challenging in a way. At other times enemies spawn right behind you from a room you just cleared out, because of some embarrassing choice that level designer had made.

A lot of things are padded to the extreme where they become really tedious and boring or simply dropping in quality. The start of XEN is the only promising part which ends up becoming not only rehashed half way, but very lazy. You get some very nice alien environment for a brief moment, after which you’re thrust back in time to HL1 era box maps reminiscent of Gunman Chronicles. Which wouldn’t be an issue if this was not a game that supposedly tried to aim to bring a 90’s game into the new era.

Then there’s combat, which a lot of the times is just you running around in panic, trying to take cover from an AI that’s using pin point accuracy, so much so that you get shot through doors and walls, not noticing where you’ve been killed from, except for rare instances where grunts guns poke through a closed door. But this is also an issue with aliens, as creatures like the Bullsquid spams it’s toxic, neon colored acid spit at you from 3 miles away, hitting you accurately in the head, not stopping until you pumped enough shotgun shells in it’s face. But while you’re trying to avoid the bombarding attacks, you find yourself running into a group of leeches, as their tongues are somehow extremely hard to spot in certain conditions.

Speaking of spotting: You need to have your flashlight almost constantly turned on, as the levels are badly lit and nearly always hard to see. Biggest joke in this regard being, that if you dare try to pump up the brightness, the game becomes darker. Why? Because SOMEHOW the person responsible for the UI managed to REVERSE the controls, so the less bright you change your settings to, the more you get of it. Excuse me, how in the hell did you manage to fuck this up? It’s a base setting of the source engine, you’d have to deep dive into the code and flip it for this to happen. This couldn’t have been a simple accident.

Then there’s the fact that the new music does not fit at all for the game, and gets triggered by random ass events, making it very obvious what had caused it. It’s also extremely loud, even if you tinker with the volume settings and has no easing in when played. Sounds are either recycled or used from the general series sound FX packs, while what seems to be custom just feels off for one reason or another.

The final boss is also as tedious as much as it’s ridiculous, that could be described with the old meme of: “How much FX do you want? All of it.” I’m more amazed that the engine could handle the onslaught of particles and whatnot during the final battle, but I’m not at all impressed by the fight itself. You just run around, trying to survive, waiting for a turn to attack. Anything but fun.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with the end product. Everyone kept hyping it up through out the years and claiming how much better this version of Half Life is, but in truth it felt like your typical mod or fangame with bad choices ruining even the better ideas and creating a lackluster or frustrating experience. I played the game through while streaming it to friends and we were all baffled at how the general public perceived this bug ridden, mostly badly designed, over-padded of a game.

It’s simply not good enough, the most it deserves is a 3/10.

A Year in Review

A Year in Review

I don’t think I’ve ever done a review of my life, so why not start now? Except I have no idea where to begin with, as I honestly do not remember much of anything from the first half. I have a vague idea, but at this point I could just be making up whatever so I’ll try to tackle this in a more overall manner:

Health

The most glaring thing has been catching COVID for the second time, which surprisingly was a walk in the park compared to the first time. Took me a bit more than a week to get it out of my system. I’d say this was a win, albeit I wouldn’t consider myself to be any more or less healthy than I was before in the previous year. I guess stagnation is good in a way, but it could be much better. I do not do ‘new year promises’ as I find them to be pointless, but I do generally plan to live more healthily and this just coincides with a change in the calendar.

Mental Health

I’m not a fan of talking about my own mental health, despite it being seen as something positive. I’m that oddball guy who just handles everything by himself. I do not have a therapist and don’t plan on ever getting one. However I can attest to the fact that despite being “headstrong” I have felt a change for the better in this area. I’m generally dealing with less stress, which is always good and have a better outlook on life. Although I have to also admit that my views in this regard have always been rather “uncommon” as I’m a very matter-of-fact type of guy about it. It is what it is and that’s that, be it garbage or slightly better that’s what you have to deal with. One thing that I do aspire to do is to get less annoyed and mad by things. I don’t know if I’m doing it right though, or I’m simply less likely to stumble upon anger sparking events, but I know they’re out there.

Life in General

I think my life got better for a number of reasons:

• getting a better job
• finally being able to move
• being more productive

Creative Stuff

Now this is where it’s at. Especially the second part of the year has been filled with lots of progress, then again I have started or continued a dozen projects in the past 12 months. I would be a bit happier if I could have gotten more done, but I have achieved certain goals and completed projects that have been on the back burner for a while, so personally I’m quite content with where I am at the moment. CREEPSLORE, a game that I have started to work on 5 years ago is finally evolving into it’s final form and I’m very proud of where it’s ending up (still need to update the damn art and steam pages for it eeeeh). Internet Detective Club needs more work, and there’s a bunch of other unannounced projects in the backlog, but slow and steady wins the race I guess.

Writing wise I have also rewritten or adapted a few things and even released them. To be fair though no one has read any of them, but that’s fine. Eventually people will discover them and enjoy them. I’m not worried about them getting “buried” so to say. I’m done with the whole “instant gratification” bullshit. I’m done with one thing, then I move onto another. That’s it. Sure, it’d be cool if people enjoyed my stuff, but whatever. I’m mostly doing things for myself, so even if I become an unknown author who’s work isn’t being read, I’m OK with that. I’m certain that after I’ve released a few games I’ll get at least a small audience who will be interested in my past portfolio. If not, be it. Don’t care honestly, I’m not going to beg and spam these things over and over again.

I am Not Rich

Sadly I have not achieved enlightenment in regards to finances or win the lottery (which I don’t even play) so nothing changed here. I do have exciting plans, but first I have to become loan free. I doubt I will ever attain a huge wealth but I do want financial stability and the ability to do whatever I wish (which honestly is not a lot or anything exceptionally amazing). Then again I also do not aim to be “filthy rich”. What’s the point of having money you can’t ever spend or buying luxury mansions with sports cars? You tell me, I legit do not care. My so called “Dream House” would be a kitchen, single bedroom, a study, a bathroom and a toilet with an external garage or something serving as a workshop or tinkering area. Slap onto that a bit of space for storage (partial pantry) and I’m good. Anything more than this is just a pain in the ass to upkeep with pointless and unused square meters.

The Future

Pretty much the easiest thing to say is that I just do what I did this year. No major changes apart from releasing more stuff and being more healthy. But these are kind of given already. Honestly there’s nothing I can think of that would be super exceptional which I would want to do. Well, maybe visiting Japan once, however I don’t think that will happen anytime soon and I kind of want to learn the language first at least on a basic level. I tried once, but didn’t have enough time for it, right now I’m also involved with too many things and would just lead to me frying my brain. Once I’ve completed half of my projects though, I’ll get to that.

Hah, so I do have some extra goals it seems.

Whatever, if someone actually reads this “blogthing”: Thanks, you’re probably the single person amongst the many bots that add to the sites visiting statistics, lol.

The Mysticism of Winter

When the evil Witch appears

There’s something magical about a snow covered town and forest. I’m not speaking purely in terms of ‘wow’ factor, but rather of the overall fantastical feeling it provides. Somehow it’s easier for me to believe in movies, games and books with fantasy elements which take place in the cold season than in like summer.

I’m not sure why, but if I look at older media I can immediately name you a couple of examples where I’m absolutely definite that with the absence of snow, my suspension of disbelief would have been at a lower level.

In Batman Returns, which is filled with weirdo characters, like Catwoman who claims to have 9 lives and indeed seems to survive falling out of a window and getting electrocuted.

John Carpenters The Thing, where an alien monster imitates dogs and humans. Yes, it’s a science fiction movie, but it’s more fantastical in nature, considering what’s actually happening on and off screen.

The Gremlins, with little evil creatures that wreck havoc around town and multiply by contact with water.

Skyrim, a game filled with magic and dragons.

Silent Hill, a game with terrible creatures.

But we can also name others where there’s no blatant fantasy elements, like the Syberia series, or plain and simply any game that has a winter section / town. Somehow, the appearance of white fluffy snow adds not just a visual but a psychological layer on top of everything. To me, Harry Potter is more believable or rather fitting when the characters are walking around in winter than in summer. I’m not sure why, but that’s just how it feels to me.

Yet I can also tell you one thing: this isn’t a ‘learned behavior’, in a sense I think this is something more primal, coming from waaaay back through human evolution. I can’t shake the feeling that somehow my instincts are getting pushed and pulled. Maybe it’s the remnants of survival during harsh seasons. Maybe it’s about the possible dangers, the unknown and uncertainty of a complete whiteout that triggers this feeling of ‘anything can happen’. Somehow, I can believe more in a black cat talking in the snowy Alps than in Fiji.

Then again I may be just a dumb person filled with too many delusions and daydreams.

Pre-Christmas Shenanigans

Quick re-cap in bullet points

• Managed to beat down covid, quite fast this time: It only took a bit more than a week compared to the 1,5 months I had it first. A bit ridiculous to see a ‘big boss battle’ end up on the same level as a ‘random encounter’. Still, it was annoying as hell. Onto other stuff.

• I promised myself I wouldn’t buy anything past like the 6th of December, as I know just how bad delivery times can be. Well, I managed to completely ignore my own advice, and now I have packages in whatever limbo, fighting for their survival. Coolbeans. That’s what I get for finding things actually on a discount and not on the bullshit ‘markup’ scam that a lot of stores tend to do nowadays.

• Did some gamedev, working on Creepslore. I’m quite happy as I’ve managed to solve some un-ending problems I’ve been having with dialog boxes and the images contained in them, but figured out a blatantly simple way of handling it. Lot less painful than what I originally planned. Although now I’m also mad, because the game engine I’m using still sucks donkey dick when it comes to documentation, and half the forum posts I can find through google aren’t helping either. Now I have issues with sound, but I think I’m just going to circumvent this problem by doing things differently. I still don’t get why it’s so damn hard to do basic things like ‘continue this damn fucking sound while the scene switches to another one’. The supposed overcomplicated solution that’s recommended does not work and I cannot tell if it’s the engine crapping on itself or what, but it’s pissing me off. I can’t wait ‘till my friend finishes his custom game engine, I’ll switch over in a heartbeat. I’ve been losing too many braincells dealing with this crap.

• I feel mentally drained, not in the ‘burnout’ way, simply just in the ‘I want to be a couch potato’ form. I think this is obvious to anyone reading this garbage of a post. I missed a week of work and my sleep schedule has gone astray. I’m lucky I don’t need too much sleep, otherwise I’d be honestly fucked. Sick days do this to me all the time, I hope I can get back to the groove easily. To be fair, Christmas is literally right around the corner, so I’ll get a bit of a proper holiday after being involuntarily bedridden.

Progress Prevention Theory

I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in ghosts, curses or anything of the sort. Some say the universe has a way of course correcting itself, but I personally don’t think it’s an entity with a mind of it’s own.

Yet, from time to time I reach certain points in life where it makes me think otherwise.

When you feel like things are progressing forward at a steady pace, suddenly it all goes awry. It’s sudden, but never immediate.

You fix everything around the house, within a couple of months something’s bound to break.

You start to pay off your loans, you soon lose your job.

They tell you your grandma’s fine, the next day she dies.

There’s just something extremely weird going on in how the world works, that could potentially make one go full on paranoid and create conspiracy theories on why life likes to constantly kick them in the groin. Good thing I’m not one of these people, albeit there’s been moments when I was beginning to doubt the amount of coincidences piling up onto one another. But I think all in all there’s one key difference between the average person and those that are successful: money.

See, if you’re born into wealth, all your problems are taken care of from the get go, or rather they never materialize to begin with. You don’t worry about bills, time or any major issue that pops up. You just throw a couple of dollars at it, and it’ll solve itself. Or someone will do it for you. Either way you won’t have to worry about the majority of sudden unexpected events appearing in front of you.

It all starts to make more sense when you see how everyone else is chasing wealth around you, as it seems to be the key to a problem free life. Either that or rich people don’t bother mentioning their issues, because whenever they do, we all get angry at them for bitching about mundane stuff.

Of course, anyone who doesn’t have money will also act like a sore loser and keep making up excuses on how wealth doesn’t make you happy. I call bullshit on that. I believe there’s a certain level at which having some is better than none, and anyone else claiming otherwise is just living in denial. Now, I don’t want to be filthy rich, as I see no point in the matter. However I do wish I wouldn’t have any loans nor job worries, as it would allow me to be able to work on things I deem important at any given time.

But that’s privilege, and I don’t have any of that. Never did. There’s one thing I do have though:

Covid.

Fuck me and progress I guess.

Effort never equals success

Making things is hard

My friends group is primarily made up from creative people, hacking away at something all the time. Some work on the same thing for literal years, with no end in sight, while others juggle projects jumping back and forth between them. I’ve seen them redo the exact same idea two dozen times, constantly optimizing and upgrading whatever they can. But the sad reality is that probably none of us will ever reach the audience we hope for.

The primary field said group works in is games, and honestly it pains me to see good ideas go to waste because of how not just the industry is, but rather the players in general. If I go to steam or itch right now, I can more than likely dig up quite a few quality games on both platforms, that obviously deserve recognition, yet they don’t get any. Why? Because streamer bait garbage is simply more popular.

This isn’t a new thought I have, but something I’ve been getting more and more disappointed about with every passing year: You can work your whole life on a single project and no one will care, yet a random meme of a bad game has more potential to make it’s creator a millionaire, than you getting a single sale in your lifetime.

Partially I blame streamers and whatnot for this phenomenon, but I think more fault lies in the consumers. Sure, we have market saturation, but people seem to think less and less for themselves and simply regurgitate the opinion of either the hive mind or some recognizable face they see on the internet. This existed beforehand with celebrities, but I think it’s been worse ever since the whole parasocial relationships hit the world wide web with content creators.

I can probably point to social media being at fault as well, as a thousand more problems, but somehow I’m seeing the pure mentality of people being completely different nowadays. They do not look for products that are of quality, rather something that you can laugh at, joke about, meme it. Countless games are made deliberately horrible, just so that people jump on the bandwagon of pointing fingers at something, laughing then moving onto whatever else there is a week later.

Longevity seems to have lost all it’s meaning and power, unless it’s combined with dark patterns and the exploitation of humanities addictive behaviorisms. Long gone are the times where people looked at something objectively by themselves, and didn’t form an opinion based on a post on twitter or reddit. Yes, we had reviewers, we still do, but they’re not trusted that much anymore, let alone I wouldn’t trust most of them myself either, purely because of their bias. But the same thing goes for ‘influencers’ or whatever else.

What matters are the jokes that a streamer or youtuber can make on a video, which will make a piece of garbage seem like the golden goose everyone’s been waiting for. This is why a lot of indie games go unnoticed, and why some quick, deliberately bad and broken games make millions in a single month after their release, ultimately rewarding hack frauds for their bullshittery.

Yeah, ‘vote with your wallet’ is always mentioned in discussions like these, but that’s the biggest cop out ever. You can’t change the thinking of people who had been literally molded through years to become a certain way. They will never care, nor is there enough of a possibility for them to change their ways in the future.

You likely won’t be a runaway success

I honestly don’t care for the fact that crap sells, that has always been the case. The problem is that general quality and expectations keep going down because of this. And I’m not talking here about purely as a hobbyist myself, but also as a consumer. I have a hard ass time finding games or entertainment that reach a certain threshold of quality that I would expect from them. Devs and whatnot are discouraged by the simple fact that ‘babies first unity asset flip’ is much more acknowledged and hailed as the next coming of Jesus than a passion project of someone with great and original ideas. So why would they even bother then?

That’s pretty much the point.

If you want to make easy money, you won’t bother with quality.

If you want to make something of quality, you won’t think of the money.

It took me a lot of time to swallow this pill a couple of years ago, and I honestly do not expect to make a single cent out of anything I do as a hobby. I have a day job, I get by with unrelated work and I’m fine with that. I wouldn’t want to make games for a living or anything of the sort. I would have to either sell out or live in constant stress, neither of which I’m fond of. I can only recommend this mindset to others:

Only bother creating things that you enjoy. If you end up making money with: cool, but don’t let that be your no.1 expectation. You shouldn’t be wasting your free time on something you do not enjoy or think of it as your gateway to success. Call this a ‘losers’ mindset’ or whatever, it’s fine either way. Just don’t put unnecessary strain on yourself because of others.

The Text Editor Problem

I have a confession to make: I’m a text editor / word processor addict. Or something of the sort. I can’t tell you when it all started, but it’s been going on for a while and I’m unable to escape. You might think this is a joke, but let me be clear:

Altogether I have 21 different text editors / word processors installed through out on various equipment. And this number doesn’t include the standard ones that are installed with any OS.

For whatever reason I’m always on the search for the ‘next best thing’ so I’m constantly trying out whatever I find, and I do end up using most of them. Which sounds odd as hell, but I really do cycle through these software for various reasons. Some are better suited to writing screenplays, others are for note taking, lore keeping (worldbuilding), planning, quick and dirty rough drafts, longer form editing, code editing, etc. To sum it all up: they all have different quirks, with varying uses.

I admit, I don’t REALLY need ALL of it, but more than half of that number I can justify. However I’m pretty darn certain that this is not normal and it’s some weirdo mental tick that I simply controls my life in a small way. I wouldn’t call it unhealthy, but there’s definitely some parts of me that kind of worry about being some sort of ‘e-hoarder’. Well I guess no problems until I run out of space, but I literally cannot think of NOT using different software.

I swear, I don’t need an intervention guys, the fact that I just bought a copy of M$ Office 2019 a couple of days ago because it was 77% off during a sale is not grounds to call the grammar police on me.

Jokes aside, I actually do need it for some of it’s editing features and the ability to open modern word documents on my computer without being forced to constantly upload them to google drive. I don’t know about you, but that last part was already a pretty big fucking thing for me as people are incapable of saving files in old .doc formats and expect everyone to have a modern copy of some word processor. Well, now I’m finally part of the damn gang yo, until Microsoft decides to can the whole format again and fuck me over.

And before you ask: yes, I DID remove the shortcuts to google docs. Fuck dealing with file conversions all the damn time.

Don't succumb to burnout

I will not succumb to mental burnout

I’ve been kind of slow this week, so decided to use this opportunity to simply wind down, and not care about anything. The past like 10 days have been very intense in terms of writing, essentially me being in ‘crunch mode’ to finish a project. I did manage to meet my own deadline, but was very close to a burnout because of it. Hence when I started doing things again, it became apparent that I’m on the verge of a complete mental block, so I decided to take a week off. Now I’m watching a lot of random shit and just playing games. Already feel refreshed after the first day.

However this reminded me of the standard questions that aspiring writers ask already established authors:

How many words per day you aim for? What can I do to see through the things that I’ve started? How do I get any better? Etc.

Now the problem is, that almost always the answers for these questions do not account for the fact that a human being is not a mindless droid with a quick reset button. Whenever we reach a point of ‘I’ve had enough’, our brain simply stops working in overtime and essentially boots up in ‘safe mode’, with minimal functions. Creativity isn’t among the those that is needed for ‘survival’ so it instantly gets sent to the trash, to lessen the burden on the body.

But famous and successful people never mention this, so all you end up with is ‘do the thing you aim to do everyday, without skipping, so you fall into a schedule, where you’re forced to create.’

Biggest bullshit answer ever.

When you’re hyper focused on something, you can achieve great results in a short amount of time, but that doesn’t mean that it will be an endless pool of progress. It’s similar to using a car. You have a set amount of gas to burn, you can take it slowly so you can take a longer trip, or go at maximum speed reaching your destination earlier, but without the fuel to continue or ability turn back.

You need a refill, the same way an empty gas tank does.

Now, I’m not a neuro-scientist or anyone doing research in the field of brain activity, but I think anyone at this point can tell you that doing something constantly will not bring the exact results you hope for. Not only do you need a rest, but also time to step back, away enough for you to be able to view things through an objective lens.

Writing is great, if you can keep on doing it daily: awesome! But it’s literally impossible to deal with the exact same thing every day without breaks, or keep up the quality. And if that’s not up to par, there’s no real reason for you force it. Why waste time on something that will be inevitably discarded? What was the point of it? Just so you can say that you haven’t skipped a single day? Cool, now you’re adding even more work days afterwards to correct your mistake.

It’s so goddamn stupid.

All you need is moderation, and the push to be able to go back to a project after a break. It’s that simple. Worrying about ‘not being able to finish’ is quite frankly utterly pointless. It just increases your own stress and affects your health.

If you want to complete the thing you’ve been working on, you simply NEED to escape into a different environment for a while. This also prevents burning out, allowing yourself to do usable work in the weeks after. What sounds better?

Taking a week off vs wasting 4 weeks of ‘maybe ok work’ on a project?

I think the answer is clear.

Take time off whenever you can and feel like it. You’re in no rush.

I'm now on Amazon

I finally have an Amazon page!

Surprisingly this was a lot easier to do than getting a Steam page, and releasing my short stories on the website went very smoothly. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before, but now I’m glad I did. Gives more motivation to actually finish whatever I have on the backlog. The beauty of it all is that you can choose what region your work should be released in, so mine are everywhere. Soon I shall take over the world and turn into an angry purple tentacle with tiny little arms.

Aside from getting this done, I’ve been actually working on multiple things, all related to writing. I’ve been converting a short film screenplay into a short story with pretty good success, I managed to get through about half of it. It’s still going to need a rewrite afterwards though, as I realized It would work much better in present tense, rather than past. I somewhat also feel like I’m a bit better when it comes to the former, despite thinking all my life that past tense is the defacto way to write a novel. I think I might end up using it more in the future.

I’ve been also working on something new that I just got the idea for, and within two days completed half of it as well. All this seems like good progress (which in a way it is), but I’ve been also a bit lazy rewatching Lost. I don’t know, maybe I’ve found a good balance between writing and doing whatever else? Not sure, but if I can actually get shit done while doing whatever else I want inbetween, that’s a win for me.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a vicious spider to hunt down who has left a love mark on me last night.

Bloody Cocktail - Short story released

Bloody Cocktail is out! You can read it here

Synopsis: Murder is not an easy job. Sometimes you need to clean up and deal with unforeseen consequences.

Published another short story, this time it’s a bit of a surreal one. I have no idea what I was thinking when I originally wrote it, but I distinctively remember sending it to the university magazine. Now, said magazine actually folded shortly after and so I’m not sure if I’m responsible for it’s demise or not. I’d like to think I was, sounds better than a lack of sales.

Getting your life in order

Getting your work life in order

There’s three types of working people: Specimen A, B & C

Specimen A is someone who works a single job in their life, never having known anything other than their field of specialty.

Specimen B on the other hand switches jobs like there’s no tomorrow, having worked as a gas station attendee to a land mine collector in Burma. Why Burma? I have no idea, it came subconsciously. I don’t even know if there’s any old minefield around in the country, but I thought it sounded funnier. I’m too lazy to open up google and fact check, those 14 seconds would cost me a years of sanity that I cannot compensate with my ignorance. Okay, not even my ignorance wants to, we’re both lazy. I blame it Wednesday, I just have to. Someone else needs to take the blame other than me for once, so it’s going to be this random ass week of the day. Monday has been already depressed for years because of Jim Davis, poor fella needs a break. But we’re not here to talk about him.

It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Specimen C! Specimen C are a weird bunch, we don’t fully commit to anything, but we also don’t stray too far into things. We’ve had more than one job, but not more than a handful. What I’m trying to say is, that we work in a single field for a couple of years, then as if we’ve contracted some sort of disease, we change to a completely different one, never looking back at it. Maybe we’re traumatized, could be that it’s just a form of inner disgust we feel by continuing the same profession at a different company. I can’t tell you the reason, but it’s like we’re always on the run, trying to get away from our past experiences.

Hell, maybe we just get bored of having done something once. I’m not sure why, but there’s no amount of money that could make me even consider continuing a craft that I’ve left behind. My brain instantly goes into denial mode, painting capital ‘NO’ onto an imaginary canvas. It’s definitely a mental thing.

I’m currently on my 6th deck of playing cards, having potentially found one that could stick with me for a very long while. After years of mostly getting my ass kicked by jobs where I was forced to act like everything was alright and smile with the brightest grin on my face, I can say that I’m finally able to be myself at the work place, without having a single moment of untruth persona. It’s honestly extremely ridiculous that it took me almost half of my life to get to a point where this is possible, let alone feel like I could potentially be happy.

No more rushes. No more 12+ hour shifts. No more 2 hour travels just to be able to work. No more ‘solve the problem yourself’. No more jumping around with schedules. No late changes, deceptions, barrage of idiots you cannot rid yourself. But finally someplace decent.

And I’m only saying decent, as that’s what it is. It’s not great, but not bad either, certainly better than a lot. Sure, there’s problems (where isn’t one?), the pay isn’t exceptional, but the work itself is nice, the atmosphere is great, and I’m finally rid of ever having to work on a weekend or a holiday. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Not what I imagined, but definitely better than what I had in mind. In fact, I count myself lucky I ever landed this gig, as I was having trouble finding work a couple of months prior.

However, there’s one key thing that could elevate it’s status: the lack of stress. My previous jobs, as stated before, were quite a handful, filled with anxiety. So much so that they did a number on me, and affected my health, despite me having always claimed that I can handle a large amount of stress. Well, even if I think I can, my stomach can’t. As embarrassing as it is, there came a long period in my life where I couldn’t just simply leave the house. If I knew I had to leave, I knew I had to visit the bathroom. Multiple times. Whenever I went outside, I’ve made plans for potential toilet stops “just in case” I had to go. And I always had to, no exceptions. In movies it’s always funny when some idiot has stomach cramps, and tries to find a location where he can relieve himself, but believe me, dealing with that on a daily basis and being said idiot is anything but fun.

At first I chalked it up as part of traveling and having motion sickness or the sort. But it happened way too frequent for that, even during times of lull, where I was at the same location for multiple hours. It wasn’t until much later, that someone pointed it out to me, that there’s a different underlying issue at hand. Irritable bowel syndrome, or as the wiki article also refers to it: “disorder of gut-brain interaction”, which frankly is a much more meaningful name.

IBS is the literal form of shitting yourself because you worry too much. You might think you don’t, you might think you have a handle on the situation, but nope, you can’t trick your own body. You have crap that you need to sort out, both figuratively and literally.

It doesn’t take a Mensa level genius to connect a change in bodily function to a change in work environment, when they both started at around the same time. Yet, it took me years and some talks to realize that this could be the potential reason for my own problems. But even then, I couldn’t do anything about it for a long while, especially in today’s world, where they give out stress and anxiety hand in hand, every time you turn on the TV, connect to the internet, go outside or simply talk to people.

Then I’ve got this job and because of some magical pixie dust called ‘stress free zone’ it all stopped. It was so sudden that I immediately thought something was wrong with me, after all: I had been living with this issue for a multitude of years as the norm. And you’re telling it’s gone, just like that?

Yes, “just like that”. It’s such an odd thing to even type down, but it really was that “simple”. Get a job that doesn’t treat you like utter shit, and you won’t overproduce it. Who would have thought?

So here I am now, being able to go wherever and whenever. Time to make the best of it.

Cold Meat Party - Short story released

Cold Meat Party is out! You can read it here

Synopsis: Not every party is the same. They come in all sizes and shapes, with endings that might not be what you want. Mike doesn’t know this. He doesn’t expect anything. Oh what a surprise he’s in for!

Published a short story online, took about… a few years or so, but hey! It’s finally out in the wild! I did some last checks on it, and had to familiarize myself with wattpad as I’ve never used the site before, but it was less painful than I imagined. This is the short I briefly hinted at in a previous blog, it was the first ‘proper’ story I’ve ever written.

I need to tackle the rest of the stuff I’m aiming to release, already began correcting thing here and there, and started converting an old script of mine into a novella, which I plan on releasing periodically. I kind of wanted to work on Internet Detective Club, but forgot that I also need to release these first. Oh well, I’ll get there eventually. I kind of didn’t realize I have so many things lying around that need to be shared. I wish I had more time, or just better time management in general.

Documents from a writer's desk

It’s been about 17 years since I’ve started writing with the intent to publish. I had spurts of moments before where I’d take a school task and abuse it so that I could have people listen to whatever idiotic story I wrote. Those times were fun, however I wouldn’t ever call the things that I produced back then anything but simple time wasters. They weren’t exactly well written, and I struggled a lot with making them read well.

The first short story I ever wrote, survived about 24 hours on DeviantArt before ultimately getting deleted by me. I got cold feet, but looking back, whatever I wrote still lingers in my mind as being ‘absolute horrid’. I think I can say it with confidence that it was in the best interest of all of us that it got wiped off the face of the earth.

I kept trying my hand at writing stories, but I just couldn’t get it right, I had no style, no voice and as such whatever I came up with felt like utter garbage. So I did the next best thing and started writing screenplays. This surprisingly led me back to the same path a couple of years later, when through random chance, I ended up studying abroad. During this time, I had a great teacher who didn’t push her own agenda onto me, and let me thrive, instead leading me towards the path of self discovery.

“I’m not going to tell you how or what to write, I’m just going to tell if you a story makes sense or not.”

I think she said something among those lines. The gist of it was, that you didn’t need to conform to anything (especially not towards ‘The Hero’s Journey), as long as your audience understood the core concepts of your work. Anyone who takes a glance at your creation, should be able to get whatever you’re trying to say, even if takes them some time to figure that out for themselves.

This and the time spent with said teacher has left a deep impression on me and forever changed the way I tackle anything in life. I still remember handing in a script for review, which she said that she didn’t like, because the events were too dark for her, but she understood where I was coming from. She gave me some advice on how to touch it up, but also remarked that I should be the one making the final decision, since it was my story. Needles to say, I’ve never met a single person in life aside her who was not only honest about my work, provided actual useful advice, yet gave me the leeway to end up with whatever I wanted to.

This might not seem much, but it is an extremely uplifting thing to happen that can trigger an explosion of creative freedom in oneself. I cannot stress how important her words, or rather her whole attitude was towards students. Having only ever heard rejections and instructions that had to be followed down to the tiniest detail, this was a complete shock to my system. But in a good way of course.

We were provided with a number of writing prompts that were to help us express ourselves more. I’ve recently re-read the the very first one we did, and was surprised at how well it flows. There were only a couple of grammatical mistakes I had to correct and about a sentence or two that had to be slapped in for added details. This will be available soon, here.

I continued looking through my folders, and while I did not find everything from this era, I did stumble upon the third one I wrote.

It was garbage.

I can tell I had a vague idea on what I wanted, but the execution was very bland and boring. In fact, I don’t think it’s something that’s remotely usable at all. Even with a rewrite, I would have to scrap most of the contents, which frankly isn’t worth it. But that just shows that despite me suddenly attaining a set of magical wings of prose does not instantly equal perfection upon everything.

Some things you make are great, but other’s are just as bad as your first attempts. You can lose motivation, suffer from burnout or simply not feel whatever you need to feel at a given moment and so thing don’t work out in the end. It happens, there’s no need to worry about it. The only thing that changes with the passing years is your own judgement, so you can spot problems a lot faster and deal with them a lot easier than before.

Still, none of this can happen if you don’t start somewhere. If you want to write, write. If you want to paint, paint. Thinking about the things you want to do won’t get you anywhere. I think there used to be a saying that in order for a person to succeed, they need to fail first. This sounds awful, but it’s the truth.

HOW TO INSTALL WORDPERFECT 7 FOR WINDOWS 95 ON WINDOWS XP (NON NT VERSION)

A guide for the weird ones

Preface

WordPerfect 7 is a magnificent word processor that is unfortunately plagued by some minor release issues. Said problem being that it comes in a multitude of versions, which don’t seem to always work past Windows 95. That is, almost.

While the WPDOS website details which one of these is capable of running under select operating systems, it isn’t exactly a known resource for people outside the WP community. As luck would have it, I too have ended up purchasing the exact wrong one some time ago, and came to realize this only when the installer failed on me. However, me being a hard-headed idiot, I refused to believe I’ve wasted money, and tried every trick I could think of to ease my burning regret. Miraculously enough, I’ve managed to find a solution.

The Data

Because of the nature of the problem, I feel the need to divulge the following information in case someone comes after me with an ax:

OS used: Windows XP Service Pack 2 (32 bit)Hardware: Dell Latitude D505 Laptop, WordPerfect version: 7.0.1.9 from the WordPerfect Suite For Windows 95 CD

I’m not going to give you any guarantees that this will work on your system, but it’s definitely worth a try if you’re out of options, or simply don’t want to use a Virtual Machine to emulate older Windows.

The Solution & Misc Instructions

Firstly, after inserting the CD you will need to navigate to the setup.exe, right click on properties and change compatibility mode to Windows 95. Run & Install, then navigate to the destination folder.

You will notice that there will be quite a lot of files missing, as not all of them made it over to your drive. Fix this by copying the contents of Corel/Office7 from the CD here, allowing Windows to overwrite them. Now, you will need to change the compatibility mode for WordPerfect 7 (WPWIN.exe) under C:/Corel/Office7/WPWin7/ (default install location) to use Windows NT as anything else will just instantly crash it.

While this will allow you to fully use the software, it comes with 2 cumbersome issues:

The Open and Save (as) dialogues will crash the software.

However, the good news is that you can work around this simply by opening existing files via Left Click & Right Click + Open with WordPerfect 7, and save with the Floppy Icon or the keyboard shortcuts of CTRL + S without any hitch. I do recommend putting these files into C:/Myfiles as a precaution though, while making sure that the WP7 file settings point to this direction as the default save folder (aka don’t change it, as it should be that).

You can simply reuse copies of the sample files that come with the software and rename them in Windows, but I’ve also attached an empty 6.1 document just in case.

Download the empty WordPerfect file

Notes

Obviously, this isn’t the optimal solution, as you should seek out the version that works on Windows NT based systems in the first place, but sometimes that will be an impossible mission. As far as I can tell, the reason why the software crashes is because the save / open dialogues are using a custom shell (Quickfinder) instead of the Windows one. If by chance there’s a way to change this (later versions apparently have settings for this in the preferences, but not here) I think the problem would be fully solved.

HOW TO CHANGE THE LANGUAGE IN OLDER VERSIONS OF PHOTOSHOP

What Adobe doesn’t tell you

Good old reliable.

Note: Skip to the bottom if you only want the ‘How’ and not the ‘Why’.

Preface

I hate software as a service, it makes no sense to keep paying for something continuously when you can outright buy it. Anyone who claims that a subscription model is a good thing is not thinking straight, it’s not consumer friendly at all. Thankfully though, we have a lot of open source replacements to ‘industry standard’ software nowadays, or cheaper alternatives that provide perpetual licensing options.

In the case of Photoshop, there’s an abundance of these, some suck (I’m looking at you GIMP) while some work fantastically (Affinity). But you’re still going to end up having to get used to their own workflow, as there can never be a 1:1 exact replica of it. So what do you do? In my case I simply never upgraded and kept using older versions of Photoshop in combination with one of those alternatives. The Problem

A big issue with said older versions of Photoshop (or any other Adobe product for that matter) is the fact that they’re all tied to a single language, so if you would like to change it, you simply can’t and you’re stuck with whatever you have. In my example: one of the copies I own is in German (which isn’t a big deal as I speak the language), but it still annoys me because I’m just used to having English based interfaces.

However, there is a solution.

The Fix

Now that I’ve got that lengthy introduction out of the way, let’s get to the actual part of the tutorial, that will quite possibly be shorter than the above rambling, just like an overbearing youtube intro that takes 30 minutes to get to the important part (I’m sorry, lol).

What you’ll need:

Photoshop in a non-English language

The Trial / Try Out of the exact same version of said Photoshop in English

• Install your Try Out of Photoshop

• Install your full version of Photoshop in a different folder

• Go to main folder of the full version, and search for a .dat file and rename it / delete it

Great, the most complicated part is over and your software should be reset to English. HOWEVER! Your plugins, filters and whatnot will be missing because the software will be looking for the file names in English, which you do not yet have.

• Navigate to the main folder of the Try Out version, copy all the subfolders with their contents as they are (don’t copy the .exe and other .dlls or anything else outside / next to them) into the main folder of your Full version of Photoshop.

Boom, you’ve fully changed the language ‘back’ to English. That’s pretty much it.

Additional Notes

After you got things done, if you want to uninstall the Try Out version, but take note that it will brick the installation of the full version, so you’ll have to reinstall that again. The easiest way to skip this issue is to either simply delete the Try Out folder as is, without using the uninstaller, or making a copy of the Try Out folder and removing the original installation before you install the full version between step 1 and 2.

Where to find older versions of the Photoshop Try Outs?

• The most obvious answer is: On the CD’s of other old Adobe products, eg: Premiere.

• The most common solution: Old gaming magazine CD’s. They pretty much always had a Trial for Photoshop, and it’s guaranteed you’ll find some of them laying around your household. If not, people are always throwing them away, so they’re easy to find.

It's alive! Sort of...

Finally managed to launch the site, even if in an extremely barebones fashion. I’ve yet to understand how Jekyll even works, but I’m hopeful. Albeit quite a bit disappointed that I had to scramble information from around the web itself, as the official documentation wasn’t enough for me. I thought I had slightly more brain power, turns out I’m even stupider than expected.

Somehow I can’t get themes to work at all, I kind of thought it would be a simple replacement job, but even after running amok with a text editor, I can’t even view my site on the local machine. I think I’m going to end up cross referencing other themes, and somehow get mine up to the standards I wish for it to have. Not sure how long this will take, but you can expect smaller changes then and now.

One thing to note: Neocities has a tutorial page where they mention and link to Jekyll, which I thought could be easily used in a simple drag and drop fashion. Well, I couldn’t upload the provided files for a custom theme, as certain file types are blocked for non supporters.

I thought, well what the heck, pricing wise it’s not the best deal out there, but I don’t mind supporting the site (considering there’s no intrusive ads and whatnot) so I went ahead and became a supporter. I promptly went to upload my files afterwards, and two of them got still blocked. Not exactly sure why, but a bit later I also found out that you simply can’t just use Jekyll as is, you need to convert your markdown files to html with it. And guess what? That also removes the blocked file types, as you don’t need them for the live site…

I feel very dumb.

INT. OFFICE - DAY

The crummy little heater has seen better days, but it was still chugging along just fine. It’s white frame was decorated by brown burn marks as a direct result from the cheap paint-job it had received out of the factory. I felt a slight shudder, so I leaned over to it, and cranked up the temperature. It happily responded with it’s usual drunk gargling. Finally I had some warmth.

It’s been a while since I’ve tried blogging. No, not ‘micro blogging’ which is barely enough to point attention towards yourself, but rather a proper, long form discourse.

I can’t tell you which attempt I’m on, but this will be my final dash towards keeping a digital diary of sorts. But I have promised myself that I will maintain this, and not remove any of it’s contents, even if I end up eventually abandoning it (like I’ve did so in the past).

Although let me be clear: My main issue has always been with the platform itself than anything. All the old blogging sites have either died, or have become some useless garbage. Newer one’s seem to barely exist, or ended up being run by spam-bots (I’m looking at you, Medium!).

I figured, I’ll attempt it this time the old fashion way, and simply go for something self hosted. I can’t justify a site that’s on it’s own server at this point, so I’ll try using Neocities, and see how it goes.

It’s quite possible that I’ll just slap some very minimalist Jekyll or Hugo theme on the site for now, and update it as I go along. Or something like that. But I better start somewhere, otherwise I won’t get anywhere. Well, to be honest I’ve been already been wasting time ever-since I started browsing for the right design a couple of days ago… Very productive.

However, I’m fully aware that I won’t get anywhere again, unless I put my foot down, so I need to create some rules that I need to abide by. These will be:

• Post at least once every week, no matter what
• Do not aim to write anything of high literacy value (do I even have the skills for that in the first place?)
• Be leisure about the content, typo’s and whatnot are fine, as well as swearing (Oh fuck yeah!)
• Do not try to please anyone but yourself
• Ramble away about whatever topic you want to, no constraints

There’s probably quite a bit more that I could set in stone, but I think I’ll manage with just this. I’ll move two tutorials to the site later, so there would be some actual useful material around.

With that said: Let the blogging being! (for the umpteenth time)