I'm the worst

I mean, not really, but yeah

Frickin A....and I thought this day couldn't get any worse.  Now my ears are shot and I'm no closer to calling myself done that I was before; in fact I'm farther away.  Great.  I hate everybody, especially today, I hate today, wow what a stinky day.

You asked me why and I gave some lame excuse or something.  But it was really just because I was angry at the world.  Still am.

Going off the radar again.  Funny how this has become a practice of mine.  I can just go die in a fire or something.

The current chapter of my life comes to a close, somehow, without even realizing it, and The State I'm In seems to be Lost in Transition.  Heh.  Music for the soul!

What choice did I have?  When the only other option was not to play.  Do you think that would have been a better move?

One of the most important things that I've learned through playing Magic: the Gathering is that there are many times when you can lose even after doing everything right.  Of course it's dangerous if you use that as a crutch, because in reality most times everyone makes mistakes.  But I think it's a very striking thing just conceptually, that even if you play 100% perfectly, there's games, board states, and scenarios where you just lose anyways.  Especially compared to something like a fighting game, or even TGM or whatever, where it feels like you have a sort of "agency" over everything.  There are a lot of people who malign MtG for having this quality (as if it's the only game that does), but it's sort of an important lesson to take to heart.  We're all striving to improve and looking for flaws in our process and in ourselves, but sometimes it's also important to just give ourselves a break and Don't Blame Yourself.  It's a difficult thing to get used to, for some.

Interestingly enough, MtG is also a game where sometimes your only out is to try and win a game that you have no right winning by relying on your opponent misplaying.  Anything can happen, really; that's why it's important not to concede too early (unless you are trying to conceal important information).

I will respect other people's boundaries.  Ok, I can do that.  Maybe the question is whether I can learn to respect my own boundaries as well?  I dunno.

I wonder if I'll stop dancing.  FNW last week was such a downer; I mean...holy crap.  Been a while since I had a dance like that; it made me wonder why the hell I'm even going to these things anyways.  Maybe I don't have a real reason.

Working on the additions to my Journey outfit so that I can wear it as a second-run reddie for vball on Saturday.  Looking pretty awesome so far.  I guess that's one good thing going on.

Rear-ended somebody yesterday morning.  I dunno.  I guess if I had to say, I would say that life is pretty annoying right now.

I don't really care
just a doormat who gets silly angry and I know it

Wonder if I should get color in my hair
I dunno
doesn't really matter i guess

Perhaps we should learn to hold ourselves accountable for our actions and words, not our thoughts and feelings

AoD + VBall

Really looking forward to donning my Journey cosplay again this weekend for AOD!  Should be a fun time; I'm looking forward to seeing AiviSura perform (omg!), getting together with the TGM folks for lots of tetris, and hanging out with my artist/partner-in-crime as she hosts her table at artist's alley, etc.

I don't actually have great photos of my costume at the moment (something that should be fixed!) but here's one from before fanime:

I love love love it!  Was really happy with how it turned out.  This year I also hope to add another "level" of embroidery to the bottom of the cloak, so that it'll look like a "second run" red cloak:

Thankfully this one shouldn't be too bad -- it'll just involve three lines of bias tape all around, and then cutting out and ironing on the little wiggly shapes using more heatnbond (I should probably have enough extra?  But if not I'll have to go buy some more).  Also, bias tape.  So much bias tape.  I'll probably have to go and raid Joann again to get more, hahaha.  So much bias tape...

I'll be wearing it to VBall this year too, with a petticoat underneath.  I'm really looking forward to it!

All these years and I still haven't learned how to say no.  Feh.

Empathy isn't something that you can practice by yourself.

It would probably be better if I could learn to be less critical of others, and less critical of myself :)

Small steps of progress are being made in my relationship with you-know-who (no, not =that= you-know-who).  Today we can rest and know that we tried, and we did the right thing.

So sleepy today...not sure if it was because of the early waking, or because of allergies.  Allergies!  I've been relatively safe for a while but looks like I'm getting hit again.  Beh.

Hang in there, everybody having hard times.



Progress on Zenith Fighter, and actually a bunch of my projects, has been rather slow and/or nonexistent as of late.  Argh...I need to try and do a better job of getting home and doing things that I really want to be doing.  The eternal struggle...

Anyways, for Zenith Fighter I spent a bunch of cycles seeing whether I could do anything about the fact that HaxePunk and associated frameworks have yet to implement per-sprite shader support (just due to the way that the OpenFL/Lime draw pipeline works right now).  I actually went down the proverbial rabbit hole and made an investigation into switching the render mode into Blit/Buffer mode (so, software rendering instead of hardware) and manipulating the pixels of the buffers manually using inlined functions, and it actually worked great......for simple test shaders that for example, set the blue component to 255.  Unfortunately, as you might figure, doing any sort of more complicated operation on every pixel manually (such as hue shifting, etc) ended up killing performance and so I had to scrap that idea completely.

Not all was lost, though!  Even though having realtime shaders is still out of reach (until the framework gets to its next major revision, at least), I realized that it's still fine if I just apply a shader once at image load time, for a one-time shader effect that doesn't need to be updated.  Which is perfect, since I need to do either palette swapping or a hue shift in order to generate the different colors for each player (in case they choose the same character).  So now instead of generating 4 different spritesheets (each with different colors), I can just use one and recolor it at runtime when I load the spritesheet.  Awesome.  Still haven't decided whether I need hitflashes in the game (e.g. turning an entire enemy white when they are hit) or any colorize effects -- I could achieve that by turning the rendering mode to buffer/blit mode, which would give me worse performance but enable me to use the Colorize tint mode (instead of just multiplicative tint).  For now I'm just sticking with hardware rendering.  I guess if all else fails I could do some sort of elaborate workaround where I have a duplicate spritemap that I prepare at load-time with a shader effect that just makes it all white.  *shrug*  Anyways, I don't even know if I want that feature, so it's not worth worrying about.

Next thing I want to work on besides actually using the hue shifting that I implemented is to have some sort of animation for the enemy spawns...some sort of teleport effect or something, and have the enemies fade in instead of just popping into existence.  Then I can probably start thinking about implementing upgrades...



Have a bunch of music stuff I should get to soon.  Wish me luck...

There's nothing like waking up crying at 7:30 in the morning to make you remember what is important in life