News

I have posted a very short glimpse of the Apex X project on that one shitty silicon valley website.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alvH5NbSCns

 

DDL for much larger and more in-depth discussions is still planned for December, provided nothing insane happens between now and then. You know how life is.

I am still fighting. Nearly nine years since all this insanity first began I am still here, still fighting. I've lost everything I cared about along the way. Most of the people I once thought were my friends have turned their backs on me. I've lost what little semblance of a home I thought I had. All projections for a worthwhile outcome have burned to ashes. In the last two months one of the only people I know irl has been effectivelly declared braindead and I nearly died myself. I am at peace.

 

Yet, I am still fighting. I always have always been fighting. I limp a little bit more than yesterday. I drag my feet somewhat more heavily. My breathing is more haggard and my vision is blurrier than I remember. But I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Stubbornness. Some consider it a virtue. Mayhaps it is a curse. This soul is not simply ready to die quite yet.

 

I still stand. Just barely. But I do. 2022 has been brutal. Life continues to throw punch after punch and taking piece after piece with every swing. I laugh. I roll with the punches. I bleed. But I'm still here. Just for a while longer.

 

With AW's completion I've been devoting time to modernizing SS. At the turn of the insane heat in summer I began to push more and more to work on ApexX again instead. I hope to have a public conceptual presentation by the end of the year. Until the last couple days I wasn't sure I'd be around to even do that. I was close to posting what would have been my last Coffee Hour and final good-byes. The house of cards has crumbled and everything is drifting in the sea like chunky vomit flotsam. Somehow, for the moment, we find ourselves afloat using our own, inflatable prostate.

 

I'm tired. I'm exhausted. Mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. My body has well had enough. But still I keep forcing myself forward. I am a creator. It is my nature. I'll die with a sword in my hand. I fear nothing. Not death, not pain. I am awaited in Valhalla. They can wait a little while longer.

 

I'll show you soon. It isn't much. But it's something. I did something. I made a thing. I did things. I released LP's. I worked on my game. I helped a few brothers out. I'm not dead yet. Only death will stop me now. Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow. Who cares? I haven't cared since this time last year. I'm not going to care now. What's done is done. There is no turning back. No walking away. Here I am.

 

24 years. It's been 24 years since I first got into digital content creation. What a long, strange journey it has been. Almost every single person I met along the way has moved on years ago. As far I'm concerned, they simply weren't creators - only drifters. I thought I was a drifter. I lived as a shadow. It is true, in some respects. But really, my heart has always been right where it belonged. It simply couldn't breathe with all this smoke. I know that, now. I see things for what they really are. I've tried to walk away so many times, but I always ended up right where I began, asking those silly questions again. I was simply too afraid to take the steps into the unknown necessary to begin carving the path I needed to begin all those years ago.

 

Well. Here I am, now. Don't expect greatness. Don't ask for success. Just keep walking. Just keep fighting. Nothing else matters.

 

They did not know fear. They were simple creatures. It helps to be simple. I envy it all. I can't be like them. I've tried. Now, I can't be anything. It's close enough. Let's get some work done.

The internally available video roster, including the newly released Doom Eternal and Brood War runs, nears is full completion a year and a half after the landmark decision by Dreamhost to spontanenously walk back over a decade of loyal clientship and feature advertisement. While most secondary content remains to be accounted for, the majority of LP's are available to private viewers today.

 

It has been nearly a year since Smokey died. Just about everything that can go wrong has gone wrong and conditions continue to go downhill. Only the grace of Allah has kept a roof over my head in these last few months and those graces are not eternal. In spite of everything going on I've tried to keep my head level and my eyes on the prize.

 

Autumn Wind, the D&D short adventure/mini campaign began in 2020 while watching Snowball during her final months, was completed a couple weeks ago and concludes at 77 sessions. Starsworn, the five-year campaign that limps along due to increasingly chaotic scheduling conflicts, remains somewhat active, but otherwise I have set down my time with D&D and won't be launching any new projects in the future. The enormous developer series, a two-year journey of autism and pain, is roughly half-way completed with sixteen videos currently being available to internal viewers.

 

For what time remains I will be dedicating my energy to bringing Starsworn up to modern specifications and catching up on the years of inactivity development-side, slowly chiseling some of my more outstanding video projects down a bit, and working on my Unreal 5 project, ApexX.

 

There is absolutely no reason to hold any positive projections regarding anything in the future. It's not like life has ever given a reason for anything besides consignment to madness. But I finished the most important thing I set out to do in these dark times and I hope the players appreciate the efforts to do so.

I don't usually make long news posts anymore because the site's been dysfunctional for a while. But today I will speak about dealing with death.

 

Not even a year ago we were just stuggling. Everything was so dark and miserable. We clung to hope for contentitude and stability for just a while longer. We pulled out of the fire and into the long road. But something was following us, wasn't it? The evil of life, and the cruelty of certainty.

 

Now there is nothing left. The road remains, untreaded, vanishing in the fog. I look behind me and I see nothingness. I look beside me and I see nothingness. I look ahead of me and I see nothingness.

 

These moments, the days of our lives, are held eternal in the last little bit of memory I have of the year. Between August 5th 2020 and July 23rd 2021 the absolute worst and darkest moments of my existence in this world have been lived. Now, as I await the impending finalle of my financial and housing crisis, I wonder if it was really worth it to have tried to live this life. The only thing I can do to try to validate the twenty-two years of digital content creation and near thirty years of analogue content creation is to put one foot in front of the other and seek validation in the most important final battle of them all.

 

Life is hell. Every moment is a moment held in suspense of tragedy or in the wake of tragedy. No longer can you consider such things tragic but merely the momentum of time. Death and suffering are inevitabilities, not happenstance. I am merely pussified by my dependance on others to find value in the day. Now that the others are gone I maybe have a few months left at most before disaster of an unparalleled magnitude strikes. I again ask if it was worth it to walk this path, to choose to try to do what I've tried to do all these years.

 

I hold nothing but contempt and regret for wasting my life trying to mod games. It has been an utter, absolute waste of time and I have nothing to show for it all. I don't regret my time with videos, be it in the 90s or in the last 10 years, but it is something I should have been able to be more consistent with. Knowing what I am, who I am, I suppose it was too much to ask for results of any worthwhile scale.

 

It's Christmas time. In the past, the cold helped me calm down, focus, and at least try to detox from a year. Now it is just as miserable as every other day of the year. A constant reminder of what has been lost.

 

I'll keep hammering the idiot button. It's all I know how to do. Until the day I die, I'll keep fighting for that dream lost in the fog. It's all I know how to do. When the sun sets on my time in this world, I'll not feel regret. I'll not feel fear. For, even though all of my personal ventures were failures, the most important thing I did set out to do was accomplished. I protected them until the end. I gave them happiness, love and life. Without me, they would never have survived so long, nor in such care.

 

My long watch is over, and winter has come. I do not fear the future, even knowing times are going to at the very least become even more difficult, as unimaginable as it may be. I don't have to worry about their future. Whatever happens to me, I have no reason to give a shit. I'll just try to focus on being productive with what I have left. That's what I want to do. That's all I know how to do.

 

I cannot change who I am. I cannot cool the fires or the hate or the anger or reflect more meaningfully on my time spent in this honk honk world. To do so is to become lost in that fog. I have things I want to finish. But I can't ask myself to finish them. I can't ask myself to make progress in them. All I can do is just keep moving forward. One step at a time. That's what life is. Every day is a challenge. Every day you are tested. Every quality of your person is put on trial. Every filament of your physical and mental abilities is pushed to its limit. Not even dreams are reprieve from the screaming and the tears. Nay. They, too, are a hell, and one you cannot even try to drown.

 

2020 changed me, and 2021 changed me again. I knew to ask myself to endure life without the lights of my life was to ask myself to walk a dark path. I'm not quite ready to fall just yet. I've let go, but I'm still looking ahead. I'm asking myself when does the fog turn to smoke. I'm asking myself how much longer until the weight becomes just a little bit heavier. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tonight. Maybe I've already lost all sense of sight and feeling. It's hard to say.

 

Betrayal, death and homesickness. What an utter clusterfuck it has all been. Everywhere I look it's just the same old shit with a different bowtie. I tried to live the good life. Look at the now. Don't worry about what could, should, or would be. It's not an easy way to live. You need to be made of stern stuff. I'm not. 2017 hit me so hard my head is still spinning. I haven't even had the chance to grieve for July, yet. I may never. I don't have time to process it all. I'm still asking how the fuck this could even happen. I'm still reeling from August. I picked up their urns last night and my hands felt pain race through them. Did my body know what my mind hasn't accepted yet? Is it me jumping to correlation because arthritis is so bad these days? It made me think a long time about what this year represents to me, other than death. A change of mindset, perhaps.

 

I only want one thing in the world. Only a single thing. I can't ask for the things normal people have. I can't ask for the things I couldn't get in 20 years. But I can ask for one single thing that will give me peace of mind.

 

I want be buried with my cats when I die. That is my sole will and final testament.

The Focusrite Scarlett Solo 2nd gen I've been using shorted its headphone jacks yesterday morning. The connection was always tenuous to the point just touching it generated weird static. So, it shorted instead this time. Now the mic is also producing more static than normal. The Scarlett was a very costly investment at the time and it has given me nothing but problems across two entirely separate systems and hardware. I won't be buying from Focusrite again. Both the software and the hardware are junk, apparently. I'm back to feeding my headphones into those ~16-18 year old Klipsch speakers into the temperamental Creative card HKS handed down to me to get away from that atrocious Xonar d2. There's a lingering concern the old speakers and dubious ports on the sound card could fry my replacement headphones wibod got for me a couple years back.

 

This has put me on the pedestal of forcing myself to determine if I want to just get a DAC or get a bigger interface that still supports XLR in the event I want to pursue casting after the Scarlett inevitably shorts the XLR port too.

 

This occurs after I had pretty much already made my decision on what I wanted to do post-July, however.

 

I want to continue casting.

 

Therefore I'm going to try a M-Audio AIR 196/6 and hope I duck dated reports of driver issues. Failing that, I'll try something else. I'll keep fiddling until I get something that is reliable. Apparently that's a very difficult challenge in the interface business - everything has some kind of freak problems or compatability issues that creep up. It's a real wild west in production hardware.

 

IRL is the worst it has ever been. But I'll keep fighting until I'm dead in the drain.

It has been a day over two months since my boy died in my arms. I have nothing noteworthy to report other than that I finally re-instated the articles section.

 

Every month the private video hosting gets ever slightly more complete, but a suitable, comfy public solution does not appear to exist.

 

Times are extremely testing and the future is looking pretty grimdark. I hope I can at least finish BW this winter.

https://mega.nz/file/cgoCBbrb#oZBFtC4DHmmUh20q5ZLUJDqanfHUVG2wAccxoN02qqY

 

Shortly after recording this Coffee Hour I was informed we're going to be losing most of our income.

It is with a heavy heart that I report that Smokey has passed away as of 7:30 this morning. He had been given a clean bill of health and a promising outlook for many years to come from all tests and exams incuding the emergency ones that sent him back home on Saturday.

 

He fought as hard as he could, but in the end the worst case scenario always takes hold. The traumatic experience will be engrained into my brain for the rest of my days. My little boy did not deserve to die.

 

The shock, the agony, the devastation comes just shy of a year since the loss of Snowball.