Winter Vacation

So, slowly, another year starts to wind its way to an end.

I wrote before that my second most favorite holiday is New Years.  That’s because you don’t really have to do anything on New Years to make it a holiday, its just a special day all on its own.  It’s a night to have an excuse to stay up really late, maybe even all night, and participate with the nation all that is a new beginning.

Even the New Years kiss is a sign of expectations of good things to come.  On New Year’s you can imagine how your life is going to be for the next year and how wonderful it’s going to be.  That is, if you can imagine your life as wonderful, otherwise then it just kind of sucks.

With classes over for the fall semester at Front Range, I’ve been hanging out at Starbucks in Old Town all day for the past three days.  This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just my usual routine when I don’t have class or anything like that to busy myself with.

I did enroll in new classes though!  I am taking Spanish Language I, a true language credit class, since I had some success with conversational spanish.  I am also taking Drawing III with the same professor.  This is because for Drawing II and up students they’re all put together in one class, but the class changes each semester between two different focii.  This semester was color, but next semester is going to have a focus on black and white materials.  It’ll be interesting.

Speaking of drawing, I’m hoping to begin work on my badly drawn web comic, My Life As A Furry Comic, soon.  Drawing from my mind is a very intimidating prospect.  I don’t know what’s with it, but when I draw from life I am confident in each piece going where it should, whereas when I imagine something in my mind I can’t see it all at once or at all and then I don’t know what to draw.

So far I have three characters: Kadar, Maus, and Captain.  Kadar is a wunk, so you know who he’s going to be.  I’m hoping to aim for a certain sense of magical realism.  I’ve always been interested in creating pieces or worlds that have a certain magicalness to them, but stay grounded in reality.  I learned later that this is considered magical realism.  It was pioneered by an author Maus likes, but I can’t remember his name.  Kadar changes ages involuntarily.  Sometimes he’s a young child, sometimes he’s a young adult, sometimes an adult, and sometimes an old man.

Captain is a fox, and when she gets really emotional she bursts into flames.  The flames don’t hurt her, but they can hurt others or her surroundings.

Maus is a red lion. I’m not sure what his magical ‘talent’ will be.  Maybe he won’t have one.  That’d actually be kind of funny.

I’ve told Maus that I want to start studying his anime and manga books to get a grasp on drawing things, but he says if I use those I’ll develop bad habits and shoddy technique.  We also have three books on drawing furries, but they are a little advanced.  He says that we have an entire video series on drawing from the mind that we can watch on disc.  They’re computer video files, not standard video discs, but I can stream them to our big screen TV from my Windows/Ubuntu machine.

Tomorrow I’m going to go down, well, up to Handyville to my childhood home for Christmas.  Maus gets the last half of this week off from work, so we’re taking advantage of that.  When I’m up there all my family will be there.  Hurricane, blood brother, their children (Big and Little Gorilla), Ninja, sister-in-law, Cartoys, and Munchkin, Mom and the lumbering giant, and then me and Maus all in one house.  I’m hoping I can actually make it through a normal dinner without getting all riled up in anxiety.  It’s possible that Mom will separate out the dinners again, though I do kind of want to sit with everyone.  I might just take a lorazepam to ‘calm my nerves’.  Oh, my life is horrible.

In other news, my Nurse Practitioner, ‘Mary’ actually signed the order in for a change in my medication.  I am now taking 300 mg of lamotragine every evening (probably not extended release since they can be cut) instead of 400 mg.  Since the medication change I’ve been experiencing problems in my sleep patterns.  Pretty much, I’ve been having trouble staying awake.  My previous nurse practitioner put me on extended release in order to help me stay awake in the mornings, and now since the medication changed I’m back off extended release.  Lo and behold, I’m having trouble staying awake.  Mom has suggested that I take half in the morning and half in the evening.  I’ll have to try that, and put in an order.  ‘Course she’ll ignore my request for another month anyways.

I’m having the usual “how dare I finish a project” problems again.  My furry URL shortening service is mostly up and running.  However, I need to put together some final pieces to it.  These include a secure login system, an integration with the top toolbar between sites that don’t have the same codebase, finalizing the subscription functionality for the premium payments, skinning the interface, and establish landing pages for premium and non-premium members links as well as video embed pages.

Actually, writing it down helps a little bit.  The problem isn’t being overwhelmed.  It’s the same thing I always run into, it’s a morbid lack of motivation.  It’s like, oh this idea was neat, I’ve kind of made it, now it’s kind of boring.  This is the creative hump that separates the amateurs from the professionals, and I’ve yet to climb over it.  I always get to this point, it’s furstrating.

I think of working on the site specifically and I go, nyyeeaaahhh I don’t feel like it.  I kind of look at it and go, ugh I don’t want to do that.  It’s that “working on it at home” thing again.  I can’t picture doing it at home, but I don’t want to do it at Starbucks, so I’m kind of stuck and need a good kick in the pants.  I think this can be a valuable site, I just have to freakin’ make it!

As well, SimpleQuest has run into a bit of a content snag.  I need to get some farm and town tile sets, but unfortunately the cool farm and town stuff I was able to find is for VX not MV.  They also cost about $30, eek!  In fact, the download for VX includes functionality for making your own whole farming/town/social/mining simulation game which is why it’s more expensive.  I told Maus this, but, in the end he’s not the best person to rely on graphics for because now he has a job.  This drastically reduces his ability to sit down and make graphics for me.

I thought it would be kind of cool to make a Simple Quest farming simulator.  In fact, that could actually be a better first release than the RPG, but if I used the DLC it’d only work on Windows machines (being VX).  I’d have to sit down and convert the programming in the VX package to MV.  I do know JavaScript, but I don’t know if I’m willing and wanting to do that at this time.

Speaking of HTML5 compatible games, Maus and I found this cool tool called TyranoBuilder.  It’s based on TyranoScript, a MIT licensed programming engine for making HTML5 KAG compatible visual novels/games.  I’m really intrigued by it, and I want to see what it can do in terms of browser integration and JavaScript, but I’m having trouble understanding how it integrates with browser JavaScript.  Allegedly, you can have any JavaScript and HTML elements along with the game, taking full advantage of the browser, but I don’t quite understand how they interact.  The nice thing I discovered today is that it can run on OS X, which is great because that’s my most comfortable development machine.  RPG Maker MV only runs on my Windows 10 laptop at the moment (partially because of compatibility, partially because of license).  It doesn’t run on OS X which slows down my development. My laptop is much better suited to posting on this blog and programming sites on the go then for building games.

It’s a little frustrating sometimes when I look at the programs that don’t exist yet that I could potentially make a product and fill that gap and make money.  But, they’re large and complex and it’s not that I get overwhelmed… I just kind of go, meh.  I’m a lazy bastard! It’s always been one of my vices, to just kind of get intimidated by everything and go meh.  When in reality, if I took advantage of the ideas in my head, I could be so much farther in life.

And then I go and complain that other people are better than me.

They’re not better, they just have way more discipline than me.

Maybe if I was a psychopath, I’d get things done better.  I wouldn’t dwell in that space in between, I wouldn’t dwell on the past.  I’d be more goal oriented, and work towards actually doing something, cause otherwise I’d be bored.

But alas, and fortunately, I’m not a psychopath.

photo credit: Portable Screening Devices (0955) via photopin (license)

Asher Wolfstein

I'm a wunk (half-wolf half-skunk) anthromorph from the future that's stuck here in the past. Throughout my travels, I've learned that being true to yourself is one of the most important things you can do. On my blog I write about my life, interests, projects, observations, struggles, and whatever catches my fancy, otherwise I write reference/educational material on How To Program Anything and open-source software at Press Accept Software. Sometimes I make computer games. My projects are generally concerned with websites, computer science, linguistics, video game design/programming, and (animal/furry) costuming (fursuits). I study Japanese (日本語), read technical books, manga, self-help, cookbooks, and just about anything else, cook, make, and play games for fun. You can sometimes find me virtually on Second Life as kadar.talbot where I head up Falcraft Square, the premiere Cybercadia sim housing, among other things, Original Pursuits LLC's virtual office.

私は未来から来たワンク(半狼、半スカンク)の擬人化体で、ここに過去から立ち往生しています。 旅を通して、私は自分自身に忠実であることが最も重要なことの一つであることを学びました。 私のブログでは、自分の人生、興味、プロジェクト、観察、苦労など、気になったことを何でも書きます。それ以外の場合は、参考/教育資料やオープンソース ソフトウェアを書きます。 時々コンピューターゲームを作ります。 私のプロジェクトは通常、ウェブサイト、コンピューター サイエンス、言語学、ビデオ ゲームのデザイン/プログラミング、および (動物/毛皮の) 衣装に関係しています。 日本語を勉強したり、専門書、マンガ、自己啓発本、料理本などを読んだり、料理したり、作ったり、ゲームをしたりして楽しんでいます。 Second Life 上では、kadar.talbot として仮想的に私を見つけることができます。そこでは、ファルクラフト スクエア、プレミア サイバーカディア シム ハウジング、とりわけ Original Pursuits LLC の仮想オフィスを率いています。

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