Hobbies

Program Chatter

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Got into a random conversation with a co-worker today about Adobe products, and how the creative landscape has shifted over the last decade. I remember when Adobe was the king of video editing, but now with so many other options it doesn’t make sense to buy Creative Cloud anymore and their monthly subscription service. He has a subscription and even he was questioning why. I told him the only Adobe tool left in my arsenal is After Effects, and even then I’ll eventually try to learn the compositing side of Blender.

There was once a time when I would go between Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and Audition. Now it’s Krita, Shotcut/KdenLive, Audacity and every once in awhile After Effects. Now if they could implement HDR video editing into one of these Open Source programs that would be metal af.

Where’d The Weekend Go?

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This weekend feels like it left before it truly started. I mostly spent it feeling tired and unwell, but at least there was plenty of Steam Deck to help while waiting for the pain to go away. I decided to continue my replay of Blade Kitten on Steam Deck while I rendered something on Desktop.One of these days I’ll get back to Act 2 and actually finish the game.

Sadly my desktop didn’t get much love for gaming, oh well… Maybe tomorrow night after another animation sesh. 🙂

Campfires and Demons

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I’m hoping to have this done by the end of May, hopefully. This scene was rendered tonight, and a couple renders more it’ll be done!

While my desktop was busy rendering I gave my Steam Deck some attention by picking up where I left off on last night’s Darksiders Adventure. Upgraded the sword and obtained the scythe, then proceeded to hijack an angel’s ride. I switched back over to desktop after the render finished… cloud saves FTW. I left a note to my future self as a reminder of where to continue next time I play. After two nights of grinding this one I’ll move to another game… maybe something slightly less hellish.

The Campfire Must Go On

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Today was mostly a day of animation. It’s been awhile since I last worked on animation for a Skyrim video, and today I made up for it in spades. I’m pretty close to exporting this scene, then I’ll start working on more greenscreen madness… assuming I don’t get drawn into another project, like The Game Of Life? That one did a good job of taking over my animation time. With the amount of animation I put in tonight I’ll probably take a break from it and do something different tomorrow in the form of self care. Maybe some couch time with a good game and tea if the weather is supposed to be as suck as the forecast predicts.

Mastering The Weave

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My digital wizardry skills finally paid off! I have the servers humming along nicely on Arch Linux, and even had time for a bit of Baldurin’ tonight! We fought a winged asshat, and went picking through dead bodies in the darkness after getting a blessing from a cleric. I might have another session with Yutram tomorrow, for the fun of it. I want to do fun, chill things tomorrow. I think after having my head in VM’s the last couple of days I deserve some good fucking off.

Everything’s Archy

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Distro hopping has been successful! I’ll probably have the server up tomorrow, just need to go over networking and firewall permissions. The servers passed testing locally, no missing dependencies. If this is successful I’ll move my GMod VM’s over to Arch Linux as well, but I’ll probably stick to Alma Linux for Quake 3 and webservers. The Valve stuff needs newer dependencies and libraries, which are harder to obtain under RHEL distros.

I’ll get started up on it again tomorrow after getting some rest, if I do it now I’ll probably fuck something up. I can only look at a terminal for so long before going cross-eye’d.

The Pondering Continues

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The TF2 Servers will be down for awhile longer. I’m running into complications with AlmaLinux 9.2 and 8.9. 9.2 lacks a dependency that I need (the 32 bit version of ncurses-compat), and 8.9 is running an older version of glibc than what TF2 requires. I’m seriously contemplating switching from a RHEL based distro to an Arch one as a result. What I don’t get, is why a server that has been upgraded to be 64bit still requires 32bit dependencies for it to even remotely fucking function.

On the bright side: Tomorrow is my Friday, and following that is a week off from work. I’m sure I’ll be able to science something together, even if it means doing a little distro hopping.

Suddenly Updates

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I was once again greeted with a warm sun upon my awakening, and another uneventful work day to pass. I thought I had my after work routine planned out; crash on the couch and play something fun, or maybe even get a little sun with my Steam Deck and maybe break in the new headphones that arrived in the mail. Instead I was greeted with a TF2 server update, and to be honest, I was expecting hiccups.

They upgraded the Linux server and client to run in 64 bit, which itself isn’t a problem. Unfortunately I’m running on an older version of glibc, and upon looking at updates I decided it would be better to just upgrade AlmaLinux all together. So the TF2 servers will probably be down until my weekend starts. In the meantime I’ve spun up a fresh VM with a shinier version of AlmaLinux! It’ll be something for me to tinker with after work tomorrow. At some point I should update my other Linux systems and servers, another day…

Project Update: It’s Coming To Life!

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Operation Game Of Life is going according to plan! It’s looking like it will be at least a two-parter for YouTube. I probably won’t be debuting it this month, sad to say. I’d rather take my time to finish this and Part 2 to show back to back. I’m thinking June at the latest. I have two more SFM things to make for it, and a few things that I can put together in Krita, then it should be completed and ready to can up! Kinda bummed that I probably won’t be putting things out for awhile longer, but maybe these videos can help pad things on YouTube when they finally release.

Flying Air Overlord

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Made two perfect runs tonight in Whisker Squadron Survivor! Even with the cursed choices I had to select during the run I still managed to make it through every zone, twice! Maybe one of these nights I’ll Twitch stream it! I was looking at additional Twitch plugins and I see that it has one for Whisker Squadron Survivor that allows the audience to choose my fate, when prompted of course.

I didn’t have time to do anything adventurous gaming tonight, been continuing my spring cleaning session. This time I cleared the upper part of my desk. I’ll probably clean the rest of the desk tomorrow, it has a lot of surface area to clean. That and reorganizing… I was looking at the collection of software I’ve accumulated over the years, and some of it I see no reason in keeping anymore. Programs like Adobe and older stuff that I have no reason to use anymore, thanks to better and more modern Open Source alternatives. Those will have to wait for another day, much like what remains on what feels like an infinite to-do list. At least I’m never bored tho. 😛