New Vlog

I didn't post yesterday because the clock in this room is like 7 minutes behind and it was past midnight so like whatever.

I've possibly told you about this blog before but Dan Wells is watching all of Babylon 5 for the first time and posting about it and I don't know what happened to his old blog but I guess it's gone man and ...? and he's gotten back to it for the first time in months so there's that (because Babylon 5 reasons)

http://discoveringbabylon5.blogspot.com/2019/01/episode-47-epiphanies.html

Brooding on War

I beat StarCraft 1 today, and am now on the Brood War expansion. After this, StarCraft II. But Brood War is a complete game to itself, with as many levels as the first game. It's called an expansion because... reasons, probably.

I'm on the second level, and I've figured out that the zerg are programmed to attack only once you construct a pylon- so I'm just harvesting all the minerals and vespene gas that I can before doing that. Pylons are what allow you to grow your population, so I'm just harvesting all with the four original worker probes that I started the level off with- it's slow going, but I can have the probes chugging away in the background while I watch Girls und Panzer in the foreground. 

It wouldn't be so bad to have the zerg attack or anything of course- but once they do then it's like... you have to be wary of attacks from then on. So this is just a strategy that I'm trying out.

Only the Crunchiest

Alex has a few more days left in his Crunchyroll trial, and so there's still a few days to-- well, okay, first of all, Crunchyroll is a streaming service that has a whole bunch of anime on it-- anime is Japanese cartoons-- Japan is this country in Asia-- dang I'm tired right now.

Even without a subscription you can watch episodes, just not new ones, and there's ads iirc. There's a new season of Mob Pyscho 100 and it is great and new eppies come out on Mondays which means a new episode came out today and it is great and. 

The books I have out weren't due for another couple of days but the library auto-renewed them today, early?, but now there's 0 renews left. I'll get around to those books after this trial thing is over and we can't get fresh anime anymore.

Further Twists in the Library Due Date Saga

Alright so looking at it it turns out that the DVDs WERE due when I thought they were but the library just, automatically renewed them for me. Like, oh dear, the check-out is about to expire, hold on there buddy I got that for ya. Which means that also, looking at it it appears that the library books also really were due when I thought they were, but it auto-renewed those for me as well. There's one more renewal on those books; better get around to actually reading them or whatever.

Further Adventures Brought to You by the Library

Cool so I had some DVDs I thought were due last week that I turned in on Thursday- but it turns out that they were due on Friday so I didn't turn them in late yay.

yeah life is fine how'bout u?

Even More Noteworthy Thing

It's a little early, and also a long ways off relatively, but it's definitely something on my mind, something relevant to today's events. Nothing changes faster than the future, there's nothing definitive and still just a thought, so I'm not sure whether to share... and I've got mixed feelings in other aspects of this too... but...

My brother-in-law won't be living here with us forever; in a few months' time they'll be off to school and stuff, and who knows from there. His work at the optometrist's office will thus leave a job opening, and talking about it today apparently I was brought up as a potential replacement, whether it would be a good fit for me and all.

Alright, let's just go over the mixed feelings. 

• I've never gotten a job through normal off-the-street go-to-a-job-interview processes, but always through nepotism of some form. I've noted this before, not entirely sure what I said about it then, but maybe there was something in there about maybe it's not meant for me to find work experience that way (connections are a huge important part of finding work, though maybe it's been a bit extreme in my case.) If I found a job at say Fox Peak Theatres, I'd probably lean at least some (if not a lot) on my sister as a reference- it would still be me gunning for that job myself.
• Also, with this distance out, and the expense put into it, this anchors me at home for, like, at least another year, this coming just a day after I write a bit about going back to schools somewheres. The only reason I talked about that and was thinking about that, though, is likewise nepotism, or that the subject had come up and tilted my hand.
• Mixed feel no 3: four or five months out still leaves me jobless up till then, and that's an awkward time-frame to gain temporary work for, going to a job knowing you can only be there a few months. Working afternoons/evenings at a movie theater, sort of part-time work that would still allow a day-time job eventually of working at an optometrist? That works.
• Also like I said, mixed feeling over whether to share this or not, because it's just a random tentative thing.

Anyway my fingertip under my nail is a bit tender from where it swelled up a little after petting those animals yesterday, so I don't want to write anymore.

Totally Random! Lulz (plus some genuinely noteworthy stuff)

I got to pet a cat today. Anda a dog. And there was one point where I was petting the cat with one hand AT THE SAME TIME AS I was petting the dog with the other. 

The technology available to us to be able to have like a grajillion tabs open at once, that's just fantabulous.

So anyway I'm looking into going back to school, like specifically film school? I have no money, but I'm also not in debt either, so no better time to become such! Dad informs me that UVU is supposed to have a good program, and I already love those guys, so...???

I wish that I had this energy in my videos, the same energy that I have in my head and am exhibiting now, bouncing from one topic to another. It's high up on my list of, ideal vision of what my videos look like.

Wednesday Jan 23

I'm not 100% sure why, but today felt really productive for some reason. I didn't spend all my time doing any one thing, but sort of spread my activities out over doing many things. I even played Starcraft for the first time this week, but only maybe half an hour of it. Also, prioritized. Didn't shunt my scripture study off till bedtime, but did it when I woke up so that that could be a part of my day. I'm also going to bed relatively early, instead of staying up all night procrastinating sleep!

My phone's probably in my room somewhere. I last thought it was in some pocket, then I went to bed, so, probably in my room somewhere.

Earth 51914

Today I've been doing a bunch of research on weird comic book trivia for no real reason other than to know it- going through a complete list of every designated reality in the Marvel multiverse; there are a lot but most of them only get passing mentions, and there's been a lot of media over the years wherein to make such mentions. You know those old Hostess snack cakes ads where Super Heroes fight criminals by tempting them with the delicious goodness of Hostess snack cakes? Spider-Man is dead in that reality, oh snap.

I'd been going to write more, but, man this is depressing; it really would have been nice to have been able to do more with my day.

I've Been to the Mountaintop

I just want to do God's will. And he has allowed me to go to the top of the mountain. And I have looked over.

And I have seen the promised.

(On) Arbitrary Conversations in my Head

Alright so I had a bunch of thoughts today that I didn't write down, random conversation snippets that came about as conversations because my thoughts were interrupted in the middle of the thing- were those worth writing down? Thinking about the appropriateness of neckbeards, noticing someone: "neckbeards are okay if-- who is that??" which leaves the other person desperately curious with a question of their own, "when are neckbeards ever okay?!" 

On fiddlers. The answer is on fiddlers. By the way.

And these conversations are fun, but so easy to generate they make themselves. And frankly super arbitrary. Is that thus still worth recording? 

There are also thoughts that play out so easily in my head because I go over the ground so frequently, need to express them out loud some time ever, which I can even whisper with great success but am not sure if I'd be able to replicate fully out loud and with a recording device noting my words. That seems a lot of work; do I even need to make note of them if they're so easily thought? Would a place to express them come organically, or would it be easier if they were written out to find places to put them?

So yeah just some more thinks about thoughts.

Not Enough Writing on Not Writing Enough

There's a lot that I don't blog here because I can write about it somewhere else, but then I don't write about it somewhere else either. There's a paradox there where the more locations I have to write down observations, the fewer observations I write down- probably also impacting my YouTubing.

Expect a new video next week I guess.

Although I Didn't Start Thinking in Portals, Tetris Effect Seeps into Reality

More and more frequently I'm thinking of reality in terms of video game graphics and mechanics- like, I only got a couple of hours of sleep last night and so my framerate is super low right now, that's how I think of it, I'm tired and my ping is super high. Playing League with a faulty connection, the game assets coming at you in non-real time and you just guessing the move you want to make based on old information but then the game flashes back to the reality of the situation and you weren't where you thought and you were attacking an enemy who wasn't really there and maybe you're dead but don't realize it, doing that then going back to the real world, time never works quite the same way after that, it's weird  that you can know of your own circumstances with certainty and it doesn't feel certain and at any moment you could actually be five minutes in the past.

And there's no saves in real life, no do overs. Though maybe we should actually act like there are. Maybe we should treat life in the experimental way that we do in games, like you just saved five seconds ago and now want to try something stupid, see if you can survive a frontal attack instead of sneaking around their defenses, it doesn't matter it's not like this is the real playthrough, you're just having fun. We need such boldness in our lives, such honesty.

But anyway yeah I've been playing so much Starcraft that I'm coming down with carpal tunnel and need to take a break. 

Duolingo Streak

Phew, just got my Duolingo for the day in, in the nick of time. I've been keeping it up for 79 days as of today, not missing a day since I started. I'm taking French and Russian: I've had French classes in High School but never really learned the conjugations; during college I did some Russian on Mango but can no longer remember my password for that. Almost plum forgot to do it for the day, but something somebody said on TV triggered a French word in my head, reminding me in time.

Musings on the Acquisition of Narrative Originality

Dan Olson's latest Twitch stream plays Vivendi's The Hobbit, which only a week or so ago I was searching around the web for let's plays of to refresh myself on how the lockpicking minigame went. I found what I was looking for, but there's a surprising dearth of material on the subject. So.

Thinking again about what makes stories original/creative, not in the worldbuilding or anything but in the tales themselves, the ideas they have and how they apply them (that's what reminded me to check in on Foldable Human, the reason he plays bad tie-in games, the unique quality that comes from nobody caring about the finished product.) Still no expert, it's a quest I doubt I'l ever reach the end of, but it seems to me right now: 

Super twisty plots could mean nothing; the only way to get the twists to mean something, when so much of the status quo is constantly being undone, is if the characters are placed in morally compromising situations/forced to choose in moral dilemmas. What they want being put at odds with what they need, is of course one way. 

The reason stories affect us (I think) is as reflections of our own lives, and sometimes, we flash back to those situations the characters are in, wondering what we would do.

Also what's the deal with EXPOSITION I'm trying to study the subject and seriously don't know. As setup for such story moments? But in a sense the story is the exposition itself, so...

The Killers - Land of the Free

Definitely their most political work to date. Getting a strong Jackson Browne Lives in the Balance-era vibe from it. And directed by Spike Lee, who knew. Thought it was worth sharing.

Slippery Slope

Season 3 of Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events has apparently arrived, and I'm most of the way through, and it's the best of the three seasons I think. More dramatic, more funny, better visual effects. I've been meaning to rewatch Pirates 5 also on Netflix, to see if it's like as bad as I remember it or whatever, but Solo is on Netflix now and I love that movie, and it's a much better use of my time, but Piiiraaates... and what's the best use of my time, not just good or better? Probably not Netflix. 

I haven't arted any art in what feels like months. 

There's a lot that I want to change this year. 

Laptop Oofs

Oof. Adobe needs OS X 10.12 or later to run, like I've said, and I'm on OS X 10.10 like I've said, and the current version is 10.14 like I've said, and it's a free upgrade compatible with 10.8 or later like I've said... 2 gigs of memory, that works; 18.5 gigs of storage space, that works... but checking into it, doing a deep dive: hitting the little apple in the upper left corner, the first on the dropdown is "about this Mac..." this MacBook Air is from 2009, and it needs to be from 2012 or later according to the support website.

Oof.

2009!? That can't be right. I mean, I guess it can, but... Airs have been around for that long? 

January 23 2008. How about that.

Also I was expecting a DVD drive, but there's not one here. That's fine... I guess... The Amazon listing mentioned something about an optical drive. But whatever. If I wanted power, I could have went for an old Pro or an old not-Air; this is fine and I've somehow been genuinely calm about all of these disappointments.

Maybe it's still possible to get it to X 10.12, I mean, I don't need 10.14 or anything, just 10.12 but I'm going to have to do a deep dive as only the latest OS version is featured on the App Store...

In the meantime, iMovie is free I guess... FinalCutPro is $300, but that's cheaper than the Adobe suit in the long run...

Actually clicking on iMovie in the App Store, it needs 10.13 or later to run. double oof.

League works on this computer though at least. So there's that.

(The Creative Cloud App on Windows allows you to download and use old versions of the apps; I've been looking into that...)

Spot of Good News

Turns out those books I thought were due a couple of days ago are actually not due until the end of the month. 

Wooo.

Thoughts on Occupational Freedom

I passed my driver's license test two days ago, and like nothing's changed except for the fact that I haven't driven since then. I'm technically legally allowed to go drive places on my own, but there are never any cars at home and I don't have anywhere to drive anyway. I only seem to get anything productive done with my free time being limited; with my entire days open, as a deliberate choice, I'm taking in inputs a lot but saving all my outputs for when I won't be able to input as much, filtering it through some creative munching till then. This is my rationale, but it still feels like I'm accomplishing very little, and why would I ever change my habits; if I had a job I'd probably spend my downtime doing what I already do now, but I don't have any impetus to change. It's weird.

Meant to Drive to the Library Today

It's the tenth which means that I have books due today and I'd meant to renew them but forgot- libraries have websites, nowadays, only it turns out I've got no idea what my password is, so I'm trying desperately before midnight to enter in every password I've ever had but it only allows you to make five guesses at a time before locking you out for five minutes, and also the website does this weird thing where it does a soft reset every 30 seconds or so, so that your cursor jumps back to being in the username field instead of the password field. So, fun.

I'm Barely Dead

You know how I took the driver's test last month but failed and so we rescheduled it for today? And thus, you know how I took the driver's test today? And you know how you need at least an 80 to succeed? That's the score I got. And so...

It feels weird how non-weird this feels. Like I said, having a license is like death, because I've never done it before?

From here we can go in all sorts of directions. I still need gobs of practice, but I can legally do that on my own by now. But maybe, now that I can drive: jobs? And then money? And then as part of that: that camera lens, baby! I never explained why I want it so badly, but I got that laptop for Christmas instead, which (as spectacular and perfect as such a lens would be) is probably more necessary.

D.a?

The laptop arrived- D.a I think we'll call it, though I could still put it up to vote. I got confused during setup, and now system language is in French, and there are three user accounts having set up on it. English remains system manual of two of these user accounts. 3.1's hard drive is attached using External HDD Enclosure (which Instruction Manual style of English I'm writing with currently) (there's only one USB port) and it looked like I'd be able to use that the volume of 3.1 as the boot sector during startup-- in essentially having 3.1 on D.a, as of its OS. Restarting with this preference selected, nothing however happened, so I'm not sure if it really would work to do such necromancy. 

(Around) Exactly One Month Ago

I'm not entirely positive, but I'm pretty darn sure it was one month ago when I last saw my phone anywhere. Been trying to retrace my steps and thinking where I might have lost it- it was in my pocket, and then I woke up and looked for it and it wasn't in my pocket, but I figured okay it's just in a different pocket, and the phone's battery had run out by the time I realized it must have been lost lost.

So thinking about all the things that happened exactly a month ago. The seventh of december was quite an eventful day.

• mom's b-day
• smash bros ultimate came out; played a lot of that
• also the day the avengers trailer came out, maybe that's important

Not that I'm positive that it was the seventh that I misplaced it. For sure I had my phone on wednesday the fifth, because I didn't Instagram that day though definitely should have. (I haven't Instagrammed in over a whole month, but it's definitely not the longest stretch it's been, so that's alright.) I may also have had it on the eighth, which is the day I recorded my SpongeBob YouTube video. There was a lot of going back and forth, getting a lot of takes; I woke up early that day, spent a lot of time in the living room recording...

So yeah there are a lot of options, but I've been pretty thorough in my investigating them. It has been a month of searching. And I really don't know.

EDIT: It was actually the sixth that I recorded the SpongeBob thing; 18 years to the day after the Christmas special premiered. I thought it had premiered on the eighth when it had actually been the sixth, and so though I did record on the correct date, in my head that date was the 8th.

Another thing I misplaced is, I lost Kerrigan this evening playing Starcraft- not lost as in she died (the mission would have ended immediately had that happened); I just literally misplaced her. Our base was under attack and I needed to get her out of there, and I clicked her away to someplace, and... misplaced her. But that's fine, right, that I can't find her, because it's not as though I need to do anything with her after exterminating the Protoss-- what's that? I do need to do something with her at the end of the mission? Well nuts. 

(She was where I thought she might have been, in one of our Overlords. Must have clicked her into one in my panic. I figured as much, but finding the exact Overlord was a bit of a chore.)

Blizzards Lead to Slippery Slopes, Who Knew

Just, like, practicing driving a few days ago, Wednesday or Thursday, and parked outside the school while Dad grabbed something from the inside (come to think of it, not driving at the time, in the truck we'd driven to town in to pick up the car which was parked at DQ while Alex worked and anyway) sitting there suddenly feeling like playing Starcraft for no real reason, just a random jonesing to play this game I'd never played before in my life. I'd played Age of Empires and Empire Earth before, maybe a few more, and I've been researching a lot of RTSs lately for some reason, tracing the evolution of the genre and how it birthed other genres after it and deepdiving into the gamechangers that are woefully obscure anymore*, and I don't know how I got on this path but it's a fascinating one.

Starcrafts I and II being free-to-play now, to tie in with some remastered editions and stuff... And Kaellen saw that Starcraft was on Battlenet when it was open and asked if I played it; I might have forgotten about it if not for that. But I remembered, and I've gotten into it. Hard.

So yeah I've been investing a lot of my time lately cranking through the campaign modes both games; I'm on Zerg level three of the first one, playing a campaign through all three major races, and there's the Brood War expansion I need to play through before I reach even the second one.

And then maybe after that I've really been meaning to get into Heroes of the Storm, because its take on the MOBA genre is just mindbending, the things they do with it from what I've seen...

Most Certainly Not Life Lessons from Starcraft

I am just terrible at Starcraft and well I guess I'm learning from my mistakes but it's quite the investment to do so. Rolling with punches and getting back into it again even if that means going all the way back to the beginning and doing it all over again (and are we doing this, I thought we weren't doing this, my "life lessons from Starcraft" thing was going to be a different thing, switching the topic then.) I want to go write in my private journal now actually so see you later.

Timing of Ideation

My head is so full of ideas right now. Right now the priority is just to get them out, and then sort them later: all ideas seem like excellent ones if they remain in your head; those possessed of an idea are many, but you only hear of the lucky ones whose ideas were as good as they suspected. Best to be possessed of no single idea at all, give your ideas life by releasing them, allow new ones to grow inside you instead, and sorting out their respective qualities under the later tutelage of perspective. 

It's a tricky balancing act, timing its leavening, the point between your idea being nebulous and still full of potential, and your idea beginning to slip away like a dream. Record too soon, and you squash the idea of the unwritten potentials that would have grown in rumination. Record too late, and too many of its precious rose petals have fallen away into the steam. This may be a life skill just as important as the creativity itself, but I'm no expert on this idea, having only just discovered it myself.

Anyway the idea is about Starcraft and how they have schools in South Korea specifically teaching people how to play at high levels and that's so wild, are there classes on the history of the metagame, can you major in playing Protoss but minor in playing Zerg? Do they have intramural sports teams or do they just play Starcraft against each other some more but as sports this time? A good player can execute 200-300 commands in a minute. That's 5 a second. I can't even blink that fast (I mean that's hyperbole but you get the picture.) It may seem silly and trivial but it's people doing things at mind-bendingly high levels of skill, exactly what sports is meant to celebrate. And it's humbling to think about.

No ideas or anything connected to that, at least not of the creative type, but there might be a seed there, though the nature of these things is that there's no way of telling if our how it will germinate.

(Another thing about writing these down so early, sharing things like this at least, is that I don't know what I'm going to make a video about this week but just eliminated that as a candidate because it's no longer inside me begging to get out. I could still do a video on it, use those ideas and expend on them, but it's just one seed inside that apple.)

Construct Additional Pylons, I Guess?

The new microwave went kaput for no reason (government surveillance...!?) so Mom fiddled with the breakers and the microwave is de-kaput but the breakerage shut the computer off and when it turned back on it underwent automatic update and it's in the boat again in which it had been before the system reboot, which is ): but it still works and stuff. The D: is that I was halfway through a campaign game of Starcraft and had to restart because the computer shut down. I paused it while away, and wasn't around at the time of the shutdown because I was out practicing my driving.

My driver's test is one week from today. Dad's been forcing me to go out practicing driving in town with him every day so far this year. It's working; I'm learning a lot and getting more confident and stuff. Picking up quickly. (But am still being forced? What does this say of my work ethic, quick study but even things I enjoy I need extrinsic motivation? Idk just a rando thought.)

((Those are the only two things I've done today, Starcraft and driving. Not sure if that proves any points or whatever.))

Blog v. Video Hits

Alright so so far this year I've got a little over three hundred views, on this blog. 300 views in two days. Is there a way I can leverage this into YouTube views? Not from what I've seen, no. There is a very small click through rate on the videos I host, seeing as I see, both sides of the coin, the blog hits and the YouTube hits. The rate is basically zero. If there were any video hits from this blog, I know not of them.

This blog doesn't get that many hits, but it's still far more than my YouTube channel gets. (I've taken on, thinking about the channel in terms of a business. Though if I ever make money off of it, it will be years from now.) I almost have as many hits on this blog just over the past couple of days, that I've had over the entire length of my channel. It takes a while to build things up, of course; it's possible for my to be as prolific YouTubing as I am blogging, but that's not happening.

I could just make high-quality, engaging content, to up my viewer base (and/or to increase views embedded from blog,) but... I mean, I'm not planning not to, or anything, and I think my stuff is, decently, good... 

like I said, to justify the video format, what I've got to say needs to be more visuals-oriented. Requires planning. But the way my head works is like, if I write down the idea, then that "counts" already as being out in the world, even if nobody's going to see it. It's not that I lose motivation, but that I lose the urgency. Videos can't be urgent, they need to be planned. This blog is urgent, I do it every day. Maybe the editing is urgent, since it takes so long and I get it in so late, with the idea of getting in a video by the end of the week. But editing shouldn't feel like an urgent process.

(I don't know...?)

computer issues non-update

desktop: So the computer is, well there's this process and, well first off we got it working again, but the thing that you shouldn't click, got clicked, and reset the reset, so that we were back to the baseline, only, this time the system reset stops responding before it gets even one percent of the way through. Would go into detail if I remembered what anything was called.

Tl;dr nothing's changed, though something had it's back to the way it was.

Laptop: yep it's super dead. Trying to detach one board a from the other but the screw head was stripped, I could remove it by twisting but the connection between the two boards was delicate.

New laptop: Keanu Reeves????

Don't a know when a that's a gonna come.

1/2/19 UPDATE: desktop: now that I've it up in front of me: there's a popup that says sihost.exe - System Warning: Unknown Hard Error. That's what I was talking about. The only option out of it is to click OK. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you click OK. OK is death. We had the desktop working again and Kaellen clicked OK and we were in the same boat again with the desktop just not being there. I thought with the desktop up and rebooted, maybe it would be acceptable to click OK on that warning, but nope. Nope. Nope.

The reason the system reboot didn't work, the reason it froze at 1%, is because the system was already rebooted I guess? Because, I tried it this morning, (alright I just restarted the computer last night and gave up after I couldn't log in, but trying to log in this morning I remembered that you need to attempt a login first to this second useraccount that Kaellen tried making; (that useraccount is fake and you can't log into it, but you need to try to log into it and fail before you can successfully log into the main account: and then logging in should work)) logging in thus this morning and lo!: the desktop is up and working, though it took a few minutes for the taskbar to start working, and the start bar doesn't work if you try to click on it or hit the windows button.

laptop: the hard drive from 3.1 should be usable as an external drive on the new laptop coming. Ordering a, port converter thing from Amazon this morning.

new laptop: trying to learn the arrival date, looking on Amazon, order history, there's nothing there. What the-? It's under canceled orders for some reason. I figured it's because there was that other one from the other seller, which I accidentally added to the cart but might as well spring for the slightly-more-expensive-but-in-better-condition one, which we took out of the cart and that somehow counted as cancelling the order for the other one?, but that doesn't make sense; checking the confirmation email account it turns out the order really was cancelled... but only this morning. So ??? quite mysterious, quite mysterious. Ordered a different order of the same laptop, in the same order as the hard drive disk thing. Fingers crossed that this one doesn't cancel itself.