The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Work

May the storm bring forth the stupid

last night there was Thunder and Lightning while I was sleeping, it woke me in the middle of the night and gave me a weird dream I’ll have to divulge in a particular circle at some point. But on another note I think some of that stormy weather brought out the weird folk. I had to deal with a guy who claimed to be a homeless businessman who wanted to launch a new type of business where people could learn anything for free, ANYTHING! I won’t go into the full story because talking to him was like dealing with a man with 23 snakes in his mouth, and I’ve been called in to work on my day off tomorrow and I need sleep. But felt the need to write something up to get the annoyance out of my system. I’m sure if you catch up with me at some point I can give you the details on the whole score. I had to laugh that he didn’t know me at all and wanted me to design him a website… that day, for an entire $10 an hour… I actually make more than that now. He was also suspicious of me because I stayed mostly quiet while he spoke. He was unsure if I even knew what encryption was.

Oh well, I’ll save the rest of the story for another time.

Technology

Vulkan 1.0 arrives.

This will be good news on the Linux front (and for a bunch of people overall). Vulkan 1.0 released today!

Khronos’ aim with Vulkan is implementing a low-level API that is simpler and more efficient than its predecessor. The company says that “simple drivers allow for low-overhead efficiency and cross vendor consistency,” and that there is “layered architecture so validation and debug layers can be loaded only when needed.” Another benefit over OpenGL is Vulkan’s ability for multiple threads / cores to handle graphics work.

The Talos Principle has already called dibs as the first game to have implemented Vulkan support.

WBpMvLa

I think Vulkan is the kick in the pants needed to start off a proper competition between Linux and Windows, because unfortunately OpenGL as it stands is not up to par with Direct X. And I want to see Linux succeed as a gaming Operating System. Once things start to move I might have to open up Talos Principle under both OS’s and see how well things handle.

Site Related2

Some Blog Changes

With the help of my friends I recolored the website. It’s a new year and rather than get a new theme right now I’d rather stick with this one and give it a new color scheme. Another change that I did was make it so no one can comment on threads older than 31 days. If you have anything you want to say, say it in a thread within 31 days.

All in an Overlord's day1

This site just became a bit more random

If you go to the top of the blog you’ll notice a page called “Random Page”. Clicking it will show random pages, kinda like what people do on Wikipedia when they’re bored, high, or bored and high. I’ve been reading old old old posts I did a long time ago. Wow, I’ve changed quite a bit.Sometimes it’s interesting to look on your past and see how you’ve changed, what you’ve become, what you used to be like. I really didn’t know the difference between Categories and Tags back in the early days. I guess at some point I should probably go through random posts and see if I need to properly categorize and tag them.

On another note I’ve been building a new website for my brother. He turned 21 yesterday and as part of a couple things I gave him for his birthday, I agreed to help him setup a website and delve into posting random things and stuff. We took care of most of it, I’m letting him handle the decorating.

Technology

The Malware Museum

This is your computer, this is your computer on drugs.
This is your computer on drugs.

Want to look at some old viruses for nostalgia sake? There is a Malware Museum with neutered old MSDOS viruses that run in DOSBox within your browser, or you can download them as keepsakes if you have DOSBox installed on your system. Some of them are pretty trippy like LSD.COM, or weird like this virus featuring some old guy walking across the DOS screen. There’s even an interactive one that gives you the option to play one armed bandit to save your data, heh.

I remember a few of the ones on that page, but by the time I saw any of them they were gutted and turned into joke viruses. These truly are some fine examples of early trolling in the 80’s and 90’s.

Animation / Gaming

There is a video on the way… eventually.

I decided to be productive-ish and work on a video I’ve been meaning to finish (I also made homemade mac n cheese, it was gooood). I’m still not close to being done, maybe 1/4th of the way if anything. But I want this to be more than just a “lets play”. I said earlier this month that I wanted to add character representations of myself (and others if available) into my future projects instead of just doing straight recordings. To whet some appetites I did take make a couple pics to share.

ProjectOsiris

I have a little more of “myself” to animate, but I have over half of THAT portion done. Then it’s onto Yutram and DG who will be easy in the sense that they have limbs to operate but no face. Which compliments my character who is all eye and no body, but that’ll change for a couple seconds later into the video. I experimented with cloaking and particles to make a magical transformation scene.

ProjectOsiris2

As clearly detailed by that picture, I’m morphing from one ball into two balls. Actually once the video is done you’ll be able to see what model those two balls belong to… Heh, don’t worry. It’s not like that at all. I mean c’mon, this isn’t RedTube.