The Mind Of OverlordTomala

Sunday Evening Open Thread

Did a small bit of clean up today, mainly brushing the floor and some pick up. It inspired me to also clean off my desk, at least to make room to charge the laptop. 😛 I drained half the battery playing DMC5, not bad for about 45 mins of gameplay!

Proton Powered Yakuza

Speaking of gameplay, that was pretty much how I decompressed for the rest of the day. Under Linux I played a bit of AMID EVIL, then I experimented with Yakuza Kiwami. I’m happy to report that Yakuza didn’t crash once, and it also had no problem pulling up my Windows save from the cloud. In fact, from what I’ve gathered so far, the performance was pretty much on par with Windows. I’ll need to analyze it further, and see if Yakuza 0 works properly now. 😛

The last bit of the evening was spent in Borderlands 3, ending my week long vacation away from Windows just so I could slay some creeps with a good buddy and one final London Fog Latte. It’s gonna be fun trying to nod off tonight…

My Wacom Works Out Of The Box Under Linux!

I got that creative itch recently to revisit drawing, and I also wanted to see how easy it was to get it running under Manjaro. So today I killed two birds with one stone, and surprisingly it’s quite a lot easier to setup compared to Windows. The drivers were installed by default, and it was practically working right from the get go! The only “difficult” thing I really had to do was configure it to run on one monitor with an easy shell script:

Now I can shitscribble to my hearts content! I played around under Krita for a bit, just doing different doodles and playing with different brush settings. I’m waaaay out of practice, my drawing hand is kinda shaky, and it gets tired after about an hour. I really need to build up my drawing muscles again. 😛 I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing, but the time was never there. That’s the problem with having too many hobbies, but hey! you’re never bored.

Have Some More Science

Got more animation done tonight. It feels like I’m breezing through this fairly quickly. I’m almost done with the rough stage . Once I finish that I can begin on smoothing things out. Probably get around to that sometime next week. I’ve got other plans this weekend that may or may not involve photos of the reality kind.

Go Long!

On Monday I picked out the map, on Tuesday I selected the models, got them posed, and for the last couple of days I’ve been working on animation. Since there won’t be any animation during the main video, I figured I could at least tag something strange onto the end for those who stuck around long enough. I’m hoping to finish this sometime by mid next month.

Portable Shamrock Oats!

Happy St Patrick’s Day! I had to work, and I wanted to have a special breakfast on the go that’s semi-festive. I was toying with the idea of a shamrock shake themed yogurt parfait, and I think I achieved it! The mint extract when used with some honey and vanilla yogurt makes a good match. Of course, there was also some treasure that awaited me inside:

I added a small layer of marshmallow creme and added a cherry on top. It tasted just like a real shamrock shake, but without the third degree burns to my throat! If you want to make your own this is what I did:

Take a yogurt container, or a jar and add the following ingredients:

  • One Scoop of Oatmeal
  • Greek Vanilla Yogurt
  • Milk
  • Mint or Peppermint Extract (only a drop or two)
  • Honey
  • Green Food Colouring (or Japanese Matcha if you want colour and a little added health boost)
  • Chia Seeds (not to be confused with Cha-Cha-Cha-Chia! Seeds)
  • Marshmallow Creme
  • A Cherry
  • Cashew Butter Granola

Add the oatmeal, then mix in the yogurt, milk, mint, honey , food colouring (or matcha) and chia seeds. Stir until well combined and taste until desired sweetness is achieved. Top with a thin layer of marshmallow creme and a cherry, refrigerate overnight and enjoy the next morning. Keep in mind, that if you do add the cherry on and leave in the jar overnight it will eventually sink into the yogurt. I didn’t care, it was like finding buried treasure. 😛 For added crunch and some added sweetness you can use cashew butter granola. It was one of the more decadent ones, but even with all the added sugar from the honey and marshmallow cream this was still healthier than going to McDonalds. :v

It also makes your breath minty fresh! I’m going to remember this one for next year if I’m working through the holiday again.

Portal 2 Project In Progress!

It was a fun trip down memory lane going through this little adventure! I had completely forgotten about the time we did a co-op get together in Portal 2’s single player campaign! I’ve chopped it up right where I want it to be, and I’m probably not going to be adding much to the video in terms of animation. It’s one of those cases where the video footage already tells a good enough story on its own, but that said… I could always tie something on at the end. 😛

With the video editing out of the way I’ll begin building my stage sometime tomorrow. Compared to my last video this project should be a walk in the park.

We Have Our Winner (rv2)

Well, we had our three way duel in space, and the winner is Portal 2! Bayonetta came in 2nd, and Borderlands 2 got 3rd. Tomorrow I’ll begin cutting up Portal 2 footage in Shotcut. I haven’t put out a Portal 2 video in awhile, and it’ll be interesting to revisit some old fun we had. My imagination is already going into overtime trying to figure other things out, like scene staging.

Get On The Ball!

After a week of playing Capcom games at work I wanted to take a break with something different, and an indie puzzle sounded like a nice change of pace from hackin’ and slashin’ or painting my enemies to death  Nope, instead I drug a giant ball around solving puzzles in a tomb.

First up; if you ever decided to get this game I highly recommend using this guide to tweak your resolution and framerate. By default The Ball only goes up to 1080p and has a framerate cap at 62FPS, not very appealing on my monitor. Fortunately the fix is as simple as doing a small tweak to an ini file or two. It also runs peachy via proton.

The Ball is a first person puzzle game where you solve puzzles with the aid of a hammer gun and a giant ball you can carry around wit h said hammer gun. I’m currently three levels in, and the puzzles so far have been pretty easy to solve. It does get more challenging when you approach the undead, and the only weapon you have is your ball which is only as good as your control of it.

Being this is an indie game from 2010 it’s age is showing in the graphics, but for the time period it came from it was considered fabu graphics, even by UE1 standards. :v I remember hearing about it a long time ago, when I stumbled across a video someone did about their Portal chamber update and mentally noted that I had to check it out someday. Tonight was that night, and I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.