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.