Log 7 - Is it All Going to Waste?

 I'm gonna level with you - I know I haven't posted one of these things in a long while, and it's not from a lack of things to talk about, or being too busy. I've been doing a lot, but not so much that I couldn't have written one of these if I wanted. It's something else, and I don't really know how to describe it. I've been having a hard time lately, doing anything meaningful. Or, maybe better said, I've been having a hard time believing that anything I'm doing is meaningful. I keep doing all this, but what for? It never goes anywhere, most of the time it never even sees the light of day, so to speak. It just sits there. And sure, I can put it out there, but even then...I have no following outside of my few friends. 

I've been feeling...invisible. Like I could just disappear, and nothing would change. The internet doesn't care that I exist. Society doesn't. And even though logically I know otherwise, a lot of the time it feels like my friends and family don't either. It feels like I'm already not in anyone's lives, so if I step out of them...nothing changes. If anything, they'd get a boost from not being weighed down by me - not to say I'm weighing people down a lot, they've made it clear that I'm not, but I'm as sure that it's there as I am sure that I'm alive. Which is to say...only kind of sure. I feel like a ghost, so if I suddenly realized I really was one, I would not be surprised. 

I got a huge new drawing tablet recently, but it doesn't feel like I'll ever be confident enough in my art to just go and post it. I've run into a lot of problems with my music lately. I can't seem to name things anymore, and a lot of the files for my recent music have been broken in one way or another. It's like everything is just falling apart and I keep trying to patch it back together but it falls apart faster than I can patch it. I think I'm in a downward spiral and I've passed its event horizon, the point of no return. Doom is a time in my future, not a place that I can avoid. 

It's always getting worse, it has for approaching four years. It's always felt like I'm right around the corner from breaking, like a branch you know won't make good firewood because no matter how hard you bend it, it just will not snap. You could bend it into a pretzel shape and it just refuses to break. And...some might say that if that's me, then I'm very strong, I can withstand a lot. But I feel like it's more that I'm stubborn, and stupid, that I just refuse to accept reality for what it is and finally snap. What that snap brings doesn't matter because at least it will bring change, but it never happens, I never change, I just sit here, watching my life pass me by, miserable as life ties me into a knot but never snapping so that it can't anymore. 

I'm caught in a present that doesn't care that I'm here, heading into a future that tries to make every day a little bit worse than the last, wishing I could return to a past that is gone and is always getting further away.

That's really all I know to say for now. Maybe I'll give a real update later. 

Log 6 - Pushing Through

     Hi all! It's been an odd couple weeks. I really haven't gotten much done, comparatively, to what I usually would. This is for a couple primary reasons, but also that I just haven't been feeling up to much. It feels like I just have no motivation to do much, so as a result I've mostly just been playing a lot of Minecraft and sleeping a lot. That means that I've expanded my base on Reborn Survival, the Minecraft Java server I usually play on, by quite a lot, and it also means I've caught up on much needed sleep.

    Early on, it was mainly that I went to the Starset Demonstration I'd been anticipating for a very long time and it really didn't go the way I'd hoped. The month wasn't going particularly well before and I was hoping it would save the month for me, but it seems my luck just isn't here this month. My best friend who was going to go with me, wasn't able to. I rushed to maybe find someone else, but no one was able to. So I had an extra ticket I couldn't refund. During the VIP we were far away for the acoustic set, so I couldn't even see them, then we got photos.I told them after the photo that I hoped to get to talk to them later...that never happened. My photo also turned out to be blurry. Later when we made it out to the main area, we hung out for awhile and then the shows started. The first band that played was the loudest that played all night I think, and almost immediately I realized, we forgot earplugs. And it was WAY too loud not to have those. Not wanting to actually literally go deaf, we moved further back, almost as far back as possible with still being able to see the stage. Even there it was annoyingly loud but have to just deal with that, I suppose. Turned out that the sound was also just really poor, I think it was designed for the upper parts of the venue with the seating rather than general admission, because it was far too loud and mixed really weirdly. We were also in prime "being blasted with light" type of area, and as a bit of a photosensitive person that was difficult for me. The bands put on great shows with what they had, but it certainly didn't seem to be ideal. After the show we waited around for a bit to see if we could catch the band then, but by then we were just tired that we left. Plus, the after show signing was only for people who had bought specific merch, most of which I had already had, was too expensive, or just wasn't there when we got to the table, so even though I had stuff for them to sign I never got a chance to get them to do so. I also had a lot to talk to them about this time, which obviously didn't happen. It's a lot to pile onto the next AE, since I'll probably have even more by then, and I already have too much...

    After that, I was kinda deaf for a couple days. Like I said, the venue was way too loud. I didn't feel like doing much even of the things that I could. 

    And right when I got back into the swing of things...my headphones broke. I started using my speakers, and I realized how impractical that was to do 100% of the time. So I've been using my speakers when I can and wearing broken headphones when I need to. broken in the sense that something about one of the cups' holding mechanisms broke, so now it doesn't sit on the ear at all. I looked into getting it repaired, but it involves getting a quote for the repair, and just declining costs you $30, which tells me the price of repair is near if not higher than just buying a new pair. That's probably what they would have done anyway. There's a DIY solution but it requires soldering which I don't know how to do. My dad does, maybe he can teach me, it's something I want to know how to do for other things as well, but it's not an immediate solution. So I bought a new pair. If I can get the old one fixed, cool, I've got two now. I've still been using the broken pair, as I need to break in the new headphones before I can really use them, which I haven't done since they came in only a couple days ago. 

    I also was having some massive headaches for a bit there, so that definitely didn't help.

    Despite all of this, I have in fact done some things. For one, I released the first single from my next album, the single being Frozen Worlds. It's on basically every music platform. Spotify, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, anywhere you prefer really. I'm going to be posting a YouTube video for it soon, a visualizer type thing that I've been making for a lot of songs. I've completed two songs, and have worked on many more, including a 3 hour long ambient track...not sure how I'm going to handle that. I've been getting more and more extreme time lengths. I've got songs that are only like a minute long, and I've got monstrosities like that, haha. 

    I ought to be able to do a lot more recording now, I've got a mic that I can both use for music and things like streeaming and discord calls because of how I've got things set up! I've had the mic for a bit now but haven't been able to use it because my cable was terrible. I got a better (and shorter) cable and did a bunch of stuff to get OBS and Discord to recognize it but it's working now and I'm very glad! This opens up many opportunities I haven't had in a long time. 

    Honestly I should be able to get a lot more done in general now. I've added quite a lot of tasks and dates to my To-Do, which should make it a lot easier to keep track of things. 

    A couple days ago was particularly productive, really. I did three major things, those being that:
    1) I started the 3 hour long track. That was the day I worked on it most.
    2) I created an image with krita for the first time in awhile, a proper by-hand art, even if it was done by mouse. I've been looking into getting a digital drawing tablet so it doesn't have to be by mouse anymore. This image is, apparently, up to interpretation. I intended it to be a planet being dragged into its red gient sun, falling apart as its consumed. My dad took it to be a protostar just as its starting to do fusion, or perhaps an explosion seen from above. I posted it in a couple discord servers, I got everything from our interpretations to a supernova or a protoplanet. I didn't expect nearly this much variation of interpretation for this, but apparently yeah. 
    3) I wrote a story, based on a writing prompt I found on Reddit. Definitely not my usual style of story and I almost never actually write anything for the prompts I see, I mostly like to see other's responses, but something in this and the music I was listening to when I wrote it really worked together and it ended up being a very long, very interesting story. At least, to myself and those who have read it. 

    Speaking of writing, I've worked on A Sophon's Cosmos a lot lately. Especially when it comes to tags, though I'v worked on a couple pages too. I made a chart to organize how I want tags to be. It's nowhere near finished, it's mostly a map of how tags are right now. Also, because tags get their own pages, I decided I'd make those as well as some others into "glossary" pages, for definitions of terms (since they will always be singular) and there will be other pages which actually have instances of things with those tags. This is a way to get around pages with a tag linking to themselves. It also just helps differentiate the meanings of terms from how they actually are in the setting. For instance the "Faction" page will tell you what a faction is, while "Factions" will talk about the actual factions in ASC. It may seem like a minor difference, and perhaps it is, but it does make things cleaner and generally nicer. 

    That's about all I can think of to mention, which is good because this has been pretty long. Life's been throwing me a lot of curveballs and it's gotten me down, but I've been doing my best to push through. That's all we can do. 

Iris Celestialis, signing off. 

Log 5 - A Mixed Bag | Visuals, Music, Writing

    Hi all! Stuff has been a weird sort of mixed bag lately. I've gotten a lot done, as usual, but I've also been having more issues and generally haven't been feeling well. I got my second covid vaccine a few days ago, so that certainly doesn't help with that either. I've had a massive headache ever since, not entirely sure if it's to do with the vaccine or just a fairly normal neck issue.

    Luckily I was able to get that done after my birthday which was recent! Really wouldn't have liked to have been out of it that day. Really didn't do much anyway but still would've sucked. 

Recently I've been doing a lot of visual stuff. For instance, I've done a couple music videos based on an effects software I got awhile back focused on glitchy visuals, which I really like the style of. Even did a couple of which for Starset songs. I did some visuals for stuff surrounding The Message, so I was glad to be useful in that way. I've kept on working on the ship based on the schematics thing I made, it's slow going because it's pretty complex. I've also been trying to secure my ability to do some more hand-drawn visual stuff since using a mouse for that is terrible by looking for a digital drawing tablet to buy. Because of my vision issues, I'm likely going to need to buy a rather more expensive one and I'm really not liking that, which is why I haven't just gone ahead and bought one yet. I do have one in mind, it's just more expensive than I'd prefer so I've been holding off...

    What I haven't been holding off on buying (or at least I was, but stopped since the last log) is music! I figured I'd buy some of the music I usually listen to for free on YouTube and stuff. One artist (Or record label? seems kind of unclear) seemed to have all (or at least most) their music for free anyway when I looked, so unsurprisingly, I got that. There, however, were many others I did actually buy from. I've tried to put all this new music in my iTunes library and it just doesn't like it. For instance, for some stuff the album cover just, doesn't work. I've had this problem with my own music too. I try to add album artwork and it just refuses to acknowledge I've added any artwork and if I tell it to go fetch the artwork online it gives the wrong one. So, I'm not entirely sure what to do about that.

    Speaking of my own music, I've been working on that recently, I've built the basics of some songs but it seems hard to complete them. I have completed at least one though. I've also come pretty close to finishing my Die for You cover. It's mostly just the vocals and minor tweaks left unless I find I want to add another instrument or something, but that's unlikely. I'm trying to keep it fairly simple and not too busy.
    Making music has just become rather difficult though, as my headphones broke. Sending them back for repair looks like it'll be expensive, and the DIY fix involves stuff I don't know how to do, it's a bit of a predicament. Really bad timing too as I just got a headphone stand for my birthday :-/

    Also my Starset hype has only been growing, they released their new album Horizons on the 22nd, just a few days before my birthday, and I got my CD the day before it, so that was pretty cool! I'm going to be going to a demonstration (their name for their concerts) in a couple days, and I'm going to the associated VIP. Very excited!

    I've also been doing some writing. I wrote a poem, and I also had an idea for an SCP based on a very, very old concept I've had rolling around in my brain inspired by some Starset lyrics. I figure it'd probably work pretty well in an SCP format, so I might try to write it as one. It's a bit too big of an idea for a short story, it'd at least need novella length to really play out of normal prose, but SCP format may allow me to condense a big idea into a smaller amount of actual reading. I've also worked on A Sophon's Cosmos a bit, primarily adding some stuff into the timeline that I still need to flesh out but wanted to at least put in there to remind myself I want it to be a thing, haha. 

    Most of today specifically was spent on Dune. I watched the original movie from 1984 for comparison and then went to the theater (pretty much immediately after) to watch the new one. They are both VERY good, I definitely see where the hype is coming from. I can't really say which I prefer as, although they're based on the same story, they're rather different so they're hard to compare in that way.

    I've been having a lot of headache and eye-related issues, so that's really all I've got, that I can think of anyway. I recently got MS To-Do, and it's been helping me to get things done by making it easier to just look through and see what stuff I want to do, go do it, and check it off the list. I'm still not great at it but I hope that improves. Hope I've got more to report next time! See you all then!

Log 4 - Massive Progress and Ouchy Interruption

    Hi all! This time it appears I've actually gotten close to my every-two-weeks target, hooray! Have I just been incredibly busy? ... Kind of. I was pretty busy, getting things done, and then it all came to a screeching halt. 

    I was quite busy, and then one day, my left eye starts bothering me. This isn't abnormal, especially how it started, fairly minor. Okay, weird, guess I won't be feeling good today, I'll get what I can done. When I woke up the next day, I found out I was not going to be doing anything for a bit. It's not abnormal for me to have a hard time seeing when I first wake up, even having a hard time opening my eyes, but this was different. Worse. My left eye was watering a lot, and it would not stop. It was uncomfortable and I could hardly even open it at all. It was even more light sensitive than I normally am (light is basically a constant annoyance for me due to my lack of an iris). This mix of things made it hard for me to do practically anything. I was able to struggle to look at my computer screen lo9ng enough to put on some music, since listening to stuff is about the only thing I could do. And like that it remained, for two solid days. The first day my parents went on a one day road trip to partake in a hobby they share that I'm not particularly interested in, so I was alone for most of the day. This allowed some peace and quiet in the house, but I was also bored out of my mind, as I couldn't talk to anyone (couldn't look at my phone long enough to type) and most of what I like to do requires sight. So just listening to music and sleeping it was. By the end of the day, my neck was not happy with my laying around and over-sleeping choices. The next day was a little better, I could look at my phone for small periods of time, and I had my parents to talk to. 

    The day after that was taken up by getting dental work done. That obviously was not fun, but I think it distracted me from my eye so much that it gave it time to do whatever it needed to fix itself by a lot, because when I woke up it was bothering me just a bit less than the best point of the previous day, but after I had the dental work done it was quite a bit better, somehow. That was yesterday and it's still bothering me, but not enough to prevent me from doing anything anymore, I'm back to the usual.

    The two days of swimming around in my own thoughts though, it gave me one hell of a kick. Yesterday and today I've been doing a LOT. I was already fairly busy before but I got a kick on top of that.

    I suppose the first thing to mention is that I created a really cool image awhile back. It's based on my favorite of the Transmissions images done by Starset, the Da Vinci astronaut triangle design. I put together some cool effects I've learned in Blender to make a rather cool sci-fi image. In the PC game/software Galimulattor, entire empires/civilizations can seemingly disappear after reaching a high enough tech level, this is called transcendence. I've always interpreted this transcendence to be some kind of ascension into a higher dimension or plane of existence or something, and the Da Vinci astronaut image I made seems to really get across what I think that transcendence is like, and just makes for a really cool image.
    I want to see if I can get it printed in some form and have Starset sign it, then I'll hang it up on my wall. But my dad also had a rather good idea, that being that I could also get some made for the members of Starset and give them to them. I see them in the VIPs pretty much every time I see them in concert, so that shouldn't be too hard. These VIPs as they've always been done are apparently coming to an end soon, but as sad as it makes me, it's understandable and isn't really much of an issue since they're doing entire shows now that are basically an expanded version of the VIPs.
    This coming VIP is going to be rather busy for me, haha. I guess it's making up for last time when I didn't really know what to do or say because I was just super happy to see them again after so long.

    Around the same time as I did the image, a friend from the fan project The Message worked with me to produce a banner style logo, since I was in need of something of that type. In particular it was for something that I'd helped them with, I didn't really help much so didn't see a reason for being credited but figured it couldn't hurt, since I did need something of that sort in general, so we designed one. I still need to put together a square style logo since sometimes there are situations where a square form factor is more ideal, but I do have an idea for that, just haven't worked on it yet. Perhaps that'll be one of the next things I do.

    Speaking of logo/icon changes, I fixed up my discord server some to make the look of it more personalized for anyone who joins, and organized the channels more. I also added a server icon and matching image. Anyone interested in joining the server can do so by going here.

    Speaking of organizing things, that's one thing that I did today specifically, I've organized all my music videos into one folder. All the ones I could find anyway, due to using different organization methods and the way different programs work I've got stuff scattered all over that I probably won't think of for a rather long time haha. This is to prevent any more of that! I make a music video? I put it in the folder! I'm probably going to make a YouTube Uploads folder and stuff too. More organization is always better.
    I also found out how intuitively windows shortcuts work, so I've been starting to use those instead of unnecessarily copying files. I guess that's probably one of the big reasons they exist in the first place, but for some reason I had never thought to use them that way until recently. 

    Also, on the topic of music videos, I'm in a position where I can start making a lot of good-enough ones. Not the super cinematic sorts of things I'd like to do, but better than just having the album/song cover on screen and...that's it. So today I've actually made a couple music videos. That feels good. I also already had a couple, but I'm glad I'm already starting on this. I have a lot of songs I need to make music videos of some form for. 

    That includes stuff that is coming soon. I know I've kind of been in "music is coming soon!" mode for quite awhile, but now it's genuinely very true and I'm very excited about it! I found a way around the language problem I was having. Namely by changing the language of a lyricless album to something else. Obviously that causes a disconnect with song titles but...I mean, it's a weird solution for a weird problem, there's really no other way that I could find. And trust me, I tried.
    So over the next couple months I'm going to be releasing singles for the new album. I've got all of the "song covers" (like album covers but for songs) completed, everything is now ready. The last thing I need to do before I can stop working on the album and files and stuff is to get stuff set up on SoundCloud, and then it's all promoting the new material from there on!

    I am of course still working on new material though. I recently finished up my 100th unnamed song on my computer under the unnamed song scheme (which means it's not a perfect measure because I mess up sometimes and sometimes I later name songs that I had also saved as an unnamed song) and I wanted people to help decide the title of the song. I came up with 5 options and presented them on Twitter, and I've shared that thread around. 
    I've only gotten two votes, and neither were from twitter, so that's rather awkward. I'm not entirely sure what I did wrong. But I don't have to name this song immediately anyway, it's so far out in the future that I have plenty of time to gather feedback.

    I've done more art things as well. Obviously there's been the song covers and the Da Vinci astronaut image and icons and stuff, but I also went back a bit into my Blender save history and applied my modern knowledge to it, including a lot of compositing, and made an image of, basically, a supernova. It's rather stylized whereas I usually go for realistic but it just looks really, really cool. Plus I did come up with a couple ideas about the "inaccuracies" of it, that makes it at least more reasonable, at least to me.
    I also made a couple of nebulae in Blender. I never really know when to actually render these as you have to finish out the render, but because they require tons of samples, it makes it rather hard to render them in one go.
    On the other hand, animations can be stopped fairly easily as long as you keep track of where you need to start again. Thus I've been having an easier time with that dyson sphere animation I mentioned last time. Yes, it's still running...It's 6000 frames. Aka 100 seconds of footage. But it's getting close.
    I've also been doing some AI art experiments. I've found a couple new AIs to add to my image generation arsenal, and I'm already getting interesting results, some quite good, so I'm hoping they'll help form a coherent AI image workflow of some type. Not them specifically but the slowly growing box of AI tools I have at my disposal. 

    Last but by far not least, I'm gonna start learning to code again. I had stopped because I wanted to stay at about the same level as my friend who is also learning, but he's been busy with other things. But with his permission I'm going to go ahead and learn at whatever pace I can, and if I end up way ahead of him that just means that I can help him if/when he has trouble with things. I had planned to start again several days ago but it's hard to learn to code when you can't see...so I'm only now getting back to the point where I can do that. 

    I've gotten a lot done. This feels good, I hope I can keep at it. Thank you for tuning in!

Log 3 - Music, Story Things, Delays

 Hiya! Once again I have the urge to say that it's been longer than I intended. But at this point, I think the reason for this is that, at least for now, an update every other week is a good pace for these posts. It gives me some time to actually get things done to talk about, rather than trying to put together literally everything I've done (even the boring stuff) and talk about it in an interesting way. That said, actual finished items have been more sparse than usual lately because of my continued efforts to get my room set up. Thus, I may make it once a week once I get my momentum back, possibly even more often if I really get into a grove of things and can get even more momentum than I had before. That is, of course, only speculation. 

One thing that I did recently was something directly related to this blog - I finally started on the links page. I can't yet point it out as I'm not done, it's turned out to be more of a hassle figuring out what I want to link to and how I want to format it, but it's got quite a lot of the important stuff on it already. I plan for it to basically be a hub of all my content. A "Interested in X? Go here!:" style thing. I may even have a section for useful links I've found to things that are not of mine. Maybe I could even set up another page for that, rather than having it in the same one. Talking about the possibilities of what I can work on actually really helps in coming up with new ones!

As for my new room stuff, I still have yet to entirely finish the revamp but it's slowly getting there. The new bed is set up and I've slept on it a few nights now, it's working out pretty well despite being smaller than I'm used to. I'm still in the process of putting all the stuff I had on my furniture back in place, of course rearranging to account for changes in how I want to do things. I think ultimately, once all things are in working order, it'll be really nice. I know the aesthetic will be great, tons of lights and the decorations and items I've been gathering for many years. A mix of styles, which I'm sure some people would say would make it appear confused, but it'll work for me. I've also been looking for more decorations, since the rearrangement actually opened up quite a bit of space. Not to say I want to fill up all the extra space, but it does give the opportunity to add things.

I've continued to do various things in Blender, such as a black hole I made recently. I continued working on the schematic based ship I mentioned last time, rendered a map of a planet in the A Sophon's Cosmos universe, and I've continued to try to find a way to create maps based on custom voronoi noise, but it's starting to appear to be impossible without a great deal of coding knowledge on my part, which I do not yet have. I seems like a lot of my problems can only be solved by "learn to code and do it yourself". Luckily I am, in fact learning to code...slowly. So perhaps it will be a doable solution sometime hopefully soon. I also began the process to rendering the animation I made of the 'dyson frame' being built. Not sure how long it will take, but I set it up where I can have it render while I sleep. That said, I've also been letting it run while I'm awake too, since it doesn't seem to bother my computer much to multitask...but I have it going mostly at night.

I've been continuing to explore new music, new music for me at least. A lot of this stuff has been around for years, but I never knew. YouTube has always been great for this. It learns what you like and then suggests adjacent things for you to check out. So this has turned into a frayed mess of youtube algorithm rabbit holes and more and more niche music and music I would never have expected to exist, not even to mention to have ever found, myself. Youtube got so confused as to suggest space ambient and melodic death metal right next to each other in the recommendations bar, that was rather weird haha. But it turns out...somehow a mix of those DOES actually exist, I ended up going through enough recommendeds that I found something that I thought "Hm, thius actually does somehow sound like ambient metal"...looked it up, and that's not what it's usually called, but the band I was listening to that made me think this was one of the examples of such music...So not only did I find this thing, but I basically called the genre before I even knew it was an actual thing, just based on the sound...apparently I'm getting much better at identifying genres than I thought I'd ever be. This has been a rather weird experience, but I'm glad I'm going through it. I'm sure one day I'll look back at today and think that this was a musical golden age for me; discovering tons of pretty niche things, lots of familiar bands coming out with new material, getting ready to release my own new material, it's all around a good time right now for me. I've also been buying some familiar music as I figure it's time I at least trying to help support these people that I've appreciated for awhile, while also getting my hands on my own copy of the material I liked so much. I wish more of the things I was interested in came in at least CD form, I'd love vinyl but I understand that still, as much of a resurgence as it's had, most people don't even care to have physical media storage at all, not even to speak of an 'old' form of such. But CDs? A lot of this, I can't even find those. I know you're probably not supposed to, but I may just burn my own CDs at this point. If I can't buy them properly anyway it's kind of my only choice if I want physical versions of stuff. I'd do the same for vinyl but the ability to make those isn't nearly as ubiquitous as burning CDs. I really want to grow my collection. I'm just kinda...one of those people, I guess.

    Out of all the new music stuff, I'm of course most excited about my favorite band, Starset. They're releasing a new album soon, very soon to my birthday, in fact. And I'll definitely be mentioning that to them, as I'll be getting to talk to them at the pre-show VIP. I always do, and it's always great. And at this point, I've talked to them enough that I feel I can really consider them friends. And the feeling that that gives me is something I cannot describe. I've been into them since about a year into their big journey - they were around for a bit before that as well, just very obscure and with only a couple songs released. Such as the good ol' classic, "My Demons".  But ever since I looked into them and the story behind the band, I've been very into them. So it's an incredible experience to be able to say that on some level, we're friends...that means a hell of a lot to me, and is something that I cherish and just makes me even more appreciative of them. Because almost no bands are like that. A lot of time it's not necessarily by choice, a lot of time there are just too many fans to possibly get familiar with, sometimes it's a prestige thing from the labels or whatever, fans aren't even 'allowed' 'around' them, so the best that fans can get is official interviews. And a lot of bands that can get that personal with fans are those that are rather unknown, so while very cool to be able to interact with them, you don't have many other fans to share the experience with or enjoy the music with, etc. so ultimately it doesn't feel quite as powerful. But Starset falls between, getting fairly popular these days but they still interact with fans. And they enjoy doing so, so that probably isn't changing anytime soon. Even if the amount of fans they have grows to the point that the current system doesn't work anymore, I doubt they'd just quit. So...hopefully there will be many more times I get to see them, in addition to the many times I have before.
    And speaking of getting to interact with other fans, I recently found a splinter group of the Starset Society known as the Sattelite. I joined and will be aiding in working to decipher our knowledge of the future and the current events of the Starset Society in order to help produce the Message, a new perspective on the events of Starset. It is a fan project, but we will be seeing if perhaps Starset themselves approve of the project, which would be very cool and very helpful in many ways.
    In the process of joining the project, a couple of neat things happened. For one, apparently the leader of the project and I have quite a few coincidentally similar things about us. It would be fairly normal if there were just a few of these, but there have been so many at this point that I'm starting to wonder if something truly strange is going on, haha. Also, the group has Minecraft server/realm places, which I also joined. That's been pretty fun, though weirdly enough I've kind of become a creeper magnet? I don't know how the hell that works but I've been blown up many more times than other people for the same amount of playtime, and not just because I'm bad at combat or something. Just the sheer amount of creepers in general has just been much higher for me for some reason? It's been very strange. The project leader and I are both going to the same demonstration and are also both going to the VIP there, the chances of that aren't super low but it is cool, and on top of everything else it is a little weird. We're both going with someone very important to us. There are many other things, but I don't want to say too much about them without their permission. 
    But on that last point, I'm going with someone very important to me, and we've been getting closer for awhile, Starset being part of that. So there's something that I thought I'd do. I've been meaning to do a Starset cover for a long time. I do my best music in an ambient style or genre. And so...I'm going to be doing a Starset cover in that style, something that you can fall asleep to. Not necessarily a lullaby cover in the typical sense, the way they've been done before, but just a soft, sweet version of a song for someone who's very special to me. I may do this for other people as well, if it goes well, but that's no guarantee. This has already turned out to be harder than I initially expected...but I am going to do my best. I can't wait to see what I'm able to make, even if it's not particularly good. I'm trying something new here, and I like that. It's a sign that I'm getting at least less afraid of failures, which is a major hurdle I've been running up against for awhile. I'm glad I'm working on this, and I hope it'll be a good song to fall asleep to.

Beyond that, I have been doing a bit of music stuff. Haven't really finished anything though, so I can't really say much about it other than that I have WIPs. I'm still working towards getting my third album out. When it comes to the language issue I ran into, I think I probably will just end up making the title normal where I have to. The only other thing I can figure is to try different characters but chances are if it's not working for these, it literally will not work for anything that isn't 'normal english letters'...I don't like this. I wish I knew of a way around this.

I've also been looking into doing Galimulator timelapses again, but there are some issues I've been having there too that I want to fix before I really start trying to do that again. I've also been trying to think of some new map ideas.

So, for awhile, I still was having trouble with the warp speed formula thing. But then I did a particular mix of things, and it worked. It finally worked!....and then when I was working on something else my computer did something or other and my only solution was to restart. I'm sure you can guess...the equation was gone. So, back to the drawing board. Now I've made my way back to something that may work, and I may just declare it canon and move on. I'm tired of messing with it and it's holding up a lot of stuff I want to work on. And honestly? It doesn't have to be perfect. Chances are I'm going to add a lot of randomness to the dates of things so you can't literally plot out the same curve I'm using...because technological advancement does not work that way.

Speaking of story things, I added a new short story to A Sophon's Cosmos. It's called Emancipation Day, and tells the story of humanity's bittersweet departure from Earth. The name doesn't have anything to do with the real life thing with the same name, but has similar reasoning for why it's called that. In this case it's the freeing of humanity from the 'limitations' of living here on Earth far in the future when it actually really sucks to live here compared to out in the colonies. I also did a bit of wiki tags organization, and made a bit of a system for them so when I add new ones I know generally how to organize them. The system definitely will not be perfect but it should work long enough until I get a sense of what specifically doesn't work about it, so I can design a better system. This is all mainly so that as I add more things the tags don't end up as an incomprehensible mess...which they probably will anyway, but it's like the heat death of the universe. Generally unavoidable, but you can take measures to extend your time before it happens, and that's what I'm doing. 

Anyway, this blog post has taken WAY too long to write. mainly out of a mixture of being busy, with both things I've written about here and things I'd prefer not to, and just not being up to the task due to even just my outline being fairly long. But the longer I wait, the more there is to put on here, so I had to get it done. Really I meant to finish this on the 28th of September in order to solidify the every-other-week schedule, but for the part of that particular day I was even awake to do it, I was just not up to the task. So here we are...third of October. 

That's all for now, be sure to check in next time for more. Iris Celestialis, signing off.

Log 2 - New Work Area

 Hi all! It's been awhile, longer than I had intended on going before another update, but I got both very busy and very exhausted for awhile. 

What I primarily was busy with was relocating my computer setup. It's been in a distant room and for a long time I've wanted to move it into my room. I live with my parents so it's preferable for many reasons to have my stuff in my own room, but until this point it's all been in a general office space room, but due to some unique requirements I have, it made the situation less ideal for everyone involved. We finally got around to the monumental task of rearranging my room to accommodate my desk. It required a lot of moving furniture, and I'm even having to downsize my bed a bit, but makes things 1000x more convenient and ideal for everyone. That is most of why I've been busy and exhausted. I also got to put up some cool LED lights on my ceiling, so that's pretty cool. I still haven't set my room back up entirely, but once I do I think it'll be pretty cool, despite all the sacrifices I had to make to make it happen. 

With all the work that required, I really haven't done as much as I otherwise would have, but I feel like what I've managed isn't something to sneeze at either. For one, I finished that warp speed animation, and even found a specific use for it. I further worked on it and made it into a music video for a song that...unfortunately won't be coming out for quite awhile. Not because I don't want to, but because I have so much else to release in front of it. The pandemic really threw my already tentative plans spinning off a cliff. But I think I'm slowly getting back on track.

For one, I think I finally have an album cover for my third album that I'm proud of. This is also something I've done since the last update. The old cover I made...I just didn't feel like it had enough...substance? Oomph? I'm not sure, but I wanted to get a better cover before releasing the album, and I think that is achieved. All that's left really is to complete the other thing I wanted to do for this album - give each song it's own image. Some are fairly "basic" (more like cartoony) while others have much more substance. I only have a few more of these covers to do, and I have a particular date in mind for releasing the album that's far enough in the future that I'll definitely be able to get everything sorted and some singles out before then. The only issue really is a language issue I ran into. A song title I have uses weird characters, which my distributor does NOT like. So I'm not entirely sure what to do about that, but the worst case is that I just use normal characters for that distribution and use the weird ones everywhere else that I can. Not ideal but better than nothing I guess.

I also produced a pretty good setup for a new Blender render, specifically one that's a nebula, I just haven't actually gone and rendered it yet because it requires an insane amount of samples so it's going to take awhile. I also designed an animation of a "dyson frame" (like a partial dyson shell/sphere) being built, which I really like. Still haven't rendered it yet either, but I will probably be doing that soon. 

I also tried again on the whole "FTL speed formula" thing from last time, with a different approach, but still nothing good. I may just have to make shit up, which is not ideal since I like to have logical reasons for things, but there doesn't seem to be a good way of going about this in that way. I need something in between an equation that levels off at some point and one that gets really big at big values. Like some kind of really, really muffled exponentially growth or something. I don't know, it's weird. Maybe I'm overthinking it. That's probably what it is, but real life is pretty complicated about this kind of stuff (technological advancement) so I tend to see simple solutions as good approximations at best.

With the same software I used to finish up the warp speed animation, I stumbled across an interesting thing. It's basically a photo or video glitching software, and if you tune things right you can turn some images into constantly changing patterns that, if you pause recordings at the right time, appear like schematics of spaceships. Or at least vaguely enough like them to construct some from the madness. And that is precisely what I have done. I already grabbed one and started building it in Blender. I'm still feeling out how I want to go about it so it's slow and exhausting but I'm slowly seeing a pretty cool looking thing come together. So this may actually turn out to be a really, really good way of designing spaceships, which is something I've long had issues with. My brain is just way too wired for practicality, so anything that doesn't server a particular function, I just never think of. So my spaceship designs end up pretty boring usually. But with this, I'm able to basically procedurally generate the baser format of the ship and filter the rest through my brain, which gets rid of the problem I have with thinking of shapes. All I have to do is extrapolate a basic shape into what I think would look coolest. So this may open up a whole new thing for me. 

I've already gone through several music ideas. I think I've got another solid song now, but I don't yet have a name for it. 

The Minecraft server I usually play on is revamping the gamemode I usually play on, so before that started I got quite a lot of screenshots of my baseon there and stuff. Supposedly the map will stay the same, so only the server mods and stuff will change, but I seem to have really, really bad luck when it comes to Minecraft. Every time the server has changed something major has gone wrong and stuff was lost. I also tend to have insanely bad luck in singleplayer for whatever reason, like thinking that I'm barely gonna make it back home after mining and then a creeper just drops out of nowhere and blows me up, and it just so happens I have no way of finding where I died. That's just an example to get the point across, that didn't actually happen to me recently or anything, but that's the kind of thing the game likes to torture me with haha. Due to the stuff on the server being down, I've been playing more of the experimental snapshot, and I've actually got a pretty good underground base going, I really like how different it is to how I usually do bases.

Anyway, that is all I can think of that I've been up to, so see you next time for more happenings!

Log 1 - Setting Up

    Hi! So, this is going to be my first entry on here, so I really don't know how I'm going to be formatting this, and I apologize if it's rather rambly. That said, let's get into what's been going on lately!

    Of course, for one, I've been setting up this very blog. Figuring out the general format, putting together the About page, trying to start things off well if I can. Considering I've never done anything like this before and I don't tend to read blogs myself, it's very unclear to me how to go about doing this, but I'm going to keep trying until I find something that works, and I'm hoping that by not just following the usual format I'll stumble on something unique. That's one of the things I've been trying to do lately, just try things and see if I can make it work. It's hard, because I'm not particularly good at coming up with "random" ideas to try out, but I'm good at expanding on an idea once I have one. But the idea is, if I can come up with enough, some things will stick around.

    Anyway, today's been kind of weird. It was mostly a mix of just kind of floating around, not doing anything particularly interesting. I did a couple things in Blender for instance, but they weren't particularly good. There's something else I know I need to work on in Blender, I just haven't gotten the spark to actually go and do it. But perhaps that's what I'll do after I type this up. It's this warp-speed type of animation, I really like how it looks. I don't think it's particularly accurate or anything, but it looks cool, and often that's all that really matters. I strive for some semblance of realism but when your premise is going faster than light in the first place, something completely impossible under currently known physics (except by mechanisms we don't seem to see existing due to other physics) you might as well throw in some artistic license to make it look cooler.

    What I was working on today, was much less substantial. I got an idea on how I could make a city (something I've tried numerous times) and it didn't work out too well, the smog and clouds ended up being the best things about the image. So I went on to try another idea I had, to map a 2D image sequence to the third dimension to get a volumetric texture, in particular for making a visual of the Milky Way I've wanted to make for awhile. Turns out that doesn't exactly work. I ended up bringing the trash bins up from the street while I was trying to figure out how I could make it work, if at all. I come back in, and my computer is completely shut off. Not like it was shut down, it has lights that stay on even when it's not booted up. But those were off, so it was a power issue of some kind. 

    For some background, I've had a couple issues like this before. The first time resulted in some kind of bug with how my GPU monitoring software interacted with, presumably, a windows update, and caused almost everything that I opened on the computer to crash immediately. This obviously made my computer basically unusable, and it remained so for quite awhile before someone thought up a different way of getting at the problem, which ended up solving it. But that took a long time, so needless to say, ever since, on the occasion my computer does some kind of unexpected shutdown I freak out. So it was today.

    Turns out the extension cord I use to plug in my computer to an outlet in a distant room (that's a whole can of worms) had actually been two cords that came unplugged from each other. So it ended up not being a big deal, and is possibly a solution to my other problems too, but that's just speculation. So I freaked out, found out that stuff was fine, and continued about my day. Reminded me again that I really need to set up a backup system. 

    After that, I decided to start working on some music, since I hadn't for a bit. So I started making some sounds and ended up with a synthesizery ambient track that I actually quite like. It really conveys the wonder of exploring space as an interstellar civilization. I named it "Uncharted Stars, Lonely At Peace".

Even earlier I tried to create a formula for how fast civilizations in my setting A Sophon's Cosmos could travel at different times. It didn't really work out that well, because I couldn't get the numbers right on my own and the only website I found that could help required money to do the things I wanted. And I don't exactly have money to spare, so it was a no from me. 

I also worked on a giant wall I'm building in Minecraft, replenished my furnaces supplies of lava buckets for smelting, and did some space battles in Everspace. 

And that's about all I can think to mention for now. Have a good day/night and be sure to check back in later for more shenanigans :-) This one's been light, as I'm still working things out, but I'll be getting more specific as time goes on.