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.