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!
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