It's one of those days...

I've been doing a bunch of work here and there, just, various things.  I've been putting a LOT of effort into my upcoming ALTTPR site.  It's not quite ready to unveil just yet, but it's certainly getting close.  I recorded a ton of footage for the Armos Knights fight today.  At one point I was debating whether or not to provide all of the videos on the site as .gifs (in addition to, or perhaps instead of) as opposed to .webm videos.  I still actually output lossless gifs and keep them committed for my own safekeeping, but I encode to .webm and only serve those.  While .gifs have their advantage in some places (they autoplay in Discord, which is a little nice), webm is definitely the right choice 100%, for a couple of different reasons.  One is simply that they're way smaller and more efficient.  The second is that browsers can't actually display .gifs at 60FPS =/, it's limited to 50fps, which I didn't actually know until somewhat recently actually.  So WebM works to fix that limitation.

Of course really I should be putting all of this effort into Rhythm Quest -_-, but I'm letting myself pursue this for at least a bit.  On the Rhythm Quest front, I'm doing more stupid work that ideally game engines should just handle for you, but they don't (TM).  Unity's input system is =supposed= to just handle detecting and handling gamepad inputs for you in a generic way so that you don't have to, but unfortunately, it seems that it doesn't always work (OS/driver dependent??).  Of course, the OLD input manager works for these cases, but now you kind of have to handle control bindings yourself, sigh.  Maybe I should have just spent the $35 on a third party solution from the beginning?  Not even sure if that would have all worked out, though...

This is just another in a frighteningly-long list of "things that Unity is supposed to handle" but you end up having to write a whole bunch of logic to special case everything that it doesn't actually do properly.  Audio scheduling, input handling, UI navigation, 2D physics, 2D cameras, font rendering, ... ... ... ...this is why this game has taken 8 years to make so far...sigh.  Never using this engine again, that's for sure.

Anyways, it hasn't felt like I've made a ton of progress on various fronts lately, which I guess is both true and not true.  I got another letter done today, at least, so that's something.  Tomorrow I'll be trying to work on finishing my pixel art drawing for the month, at the very least, but maybe also some more Rhythm Quest work; I think I'll feel pretty unsatisfied if I don't get more done this weekend for RQ.

I did fire up ALTTPR and actually just play through the weekly reddit casual seed for the first time in a long while, so that was fun!

As far as cubing goes, I haven't been doing a lot of timed solves; I've been almost exclusively been focusing on trying to improve my inspection and get used to planning (or at least semi-being-aware-of) my first pair during inspection.  Currently it takes me wayyyy longer than 15 seconds to do so and half the time I either fail my cross or fail my f2l prediction, but at least it doesn't feel super impossible anymore, and that's progress that I'm happy with so far.  Just gotta keep at it, I guess.

I was pretty unhappy last week, but I did some pretty heavy processing and had a good day or two to help me through that.  The cooler weather has also been helping :)  I've been on a little break from cooking, but I feel like in another few days I'll be ready to be back at it.  I've already been watching some cooking videos and feeling inspired by one or two of them.  Sometimes these types of videos just hit right, I guess!

In totally unrelated news, I've diagnosed some weird USB disconnection issues that I've been noticing for a while (usually when cables get jostled around), which is good.  Turns out it was not one, but TWO faulty cables -- one really bad USB-C/A cable that was causing all sorts of havoc, but also the USB mini/A cable that came with my SNES controller adapter disconnects if the connector is jostled around a bunch, which doesn't happen with another short mini usb cable that I have around.  Glad I finally solved that mystery and that it's not something more gnarly like power supply issues or my motherboard acting up.  I was almost certain for a while that the culprit was my Cinnamoroll USB hub (looks cute, but I wouldn't exactly put money on it being super robust), but turns out that was just a red herring and the two cables were it, I think.

Tomorrow's the start of the weekend...let's hope that I can make a good one out of it.

Perspectives

I've mentioned this before.  Sometimes when I am a passenger in a vehicle I feel an emotional chill of sorts.  The feeling of being taken away to a different place.  It feels wrong.  But that never happens when I'm driving my own vehicle.

Change, I think, is the same way.  I feel the ground shift beneath me and my mind can't help but rage against those who would disturb what has always been there.  But in the end I am also contributing to the scars of time, all the same.  Sometimes with intent, but oftentimes it is simply a matter of existence.  We change our worlds, and each others' worlds, not because it is our purpose to change, but simply because it is a byproduct of our continued existence.

You feel that you are staying still, but at this moment you are hurtling through the fabric of space and time at a faster rate than you could even imagine.  Yet in my mind's eye I find that somehow I still cling to the idea that I am the center of the universe.

Would there not be more comfort, to be one of a sea of specks twirling about in the eddies of change?  To think that the experience of life is a shared human condition that we flow through?

Which is the feeling that keeps me here, attached to my own sensibilities?  Fear?  Pride?  Selfishness?

Were there times, when I, too, cast off into the stream of life, wholly unafraid of where I would be taken to in the next moment?

I guess there were a few.