News

Currently public ApexX content.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alvH5NbSCns&list=PLEWU20hah9z_8cYzjJTzH88zUd339cmQJ

 

That's right, I'm manually editing a xml file to post news because all of Gameproc's admin system is completely hosed. I haven't been able to get in contact with Lavarinth for a long time and I don't know nearly enough to fix anything myself.

 

Let's have a girl talk.

 

At the end of 2019, things got super mega ultra giga bad. It was the beginning of the three-year (ofc it's three) peak of the ten years of hell that have obliterated my miserable existence up to this point. Most of you are following my internal content and those of you that aren't probably moved on since the hosting incident back then. For those of you still clinging to the hope that one day things might turn out for the better, I'm here to cave in your hopes and dreams.

 

First of all, let's discuss hosting. The reality is, DDL hasn't been a mainstream shtick since they pulled wool over everyone's eyes and window lickers sold their rights to cLoUd StOrAgE and other goofy memes. Coupled with the biblical disaster that has been "social media" and the landscape for file storage is not particularly encouraging. Websites like Archive.org are politically charged and you waive a lot of rights associating with them. Like any respectable content producer I'd rather have direct control over every single thing I create, how it's accessed, where it's accessed, and in what manner it's accessed. For example, I'm strictly opposed to downsampling, converting, comments and upvotes, viewcounts, etc. What I had on GP prior to 2019 is what I want to go back to. No compromises.

 

As the cost of file storage continues to plummit laughably low the whole situation only becomes more and more comical. But, I digress. If you want my content there's places you can get it easily. You just need to know me well. Shrimple as. An online solution is not likely to happen unless someone I know gets their own shard.

 

I still cling to the futile belief myself that, one day, we'll be able to bring this site to life again. But, chances are if I do that in the short term (e.g. if it ever gets fixed), it will become a small landing zone for ApexX and that's it. If you checked that youtube channel I linked above you'll see all it contains is some phone game vomit and the AXX videos. That's all it will ever have.

 

As far as internal releases go, suffice to say my productivity in the last three years has been terminal. I got to doing a lot of things I needed to do - finishing the BW run, showing how bad the Doom reboots are, and even snagging Stray before things hit absolute barrel bottom in the third quarter of last year. But a lot of projects are perpetually stagnant and probably won't ever improve.

 

After narrowly avoiding a double death incident, walking ancient seniors through the overblown meme that is Covid, last year topped us off with yet another eviction. That's right, I've been displaced twice in less than ten years and three times in 17 years and that's not even approaching how bad things were before then where we were forced to move every few months for almost all of my early life. Suffice to say, due to the insane leap in the cost of living in this country on top of the general inflation in the West, my full-time nurse responsibility coupled with a mounting list of injuries, the thought of having to relocate yet again was not a particularly joyous one. I'll spare you the melodrama and sum it up as what it is: life-ending. We had to throw out virtually every single thing we owned, including most of our clothes, food and furniture, just to squeeze into the tiniest apartment possible - the ONLY apartment even heard back from in over three and a half months. The cost is not any cheaper than the house; we aren't saving any money, and along the way I added another extremely substantial injury to my right foot that nearly immobilizes me completely.

 

To summarize as concisely as possible, 2023 has kicked off to be a complete, utter fucking disaster even by the margins set forth by the last ten years. It tops off non-stop death, misery, loss and heartache with total devastation to finances, physical and mental grounding, and environmental stability. I'm not even going to try to tackle the concept of casting or working in this environment - I spent an hour-long Coffee Hour going over just that recently. Suffice to say, I get maybe 1-2 hours of sleep a day due to anxiety. Claustrophobia, noise, and people are all major contributors to extreme panic attacks I've had to fight all of my life, and these days are spent mostly laying in bed freaking the absolute fuck out because I can't stop my mind and heart from racing uncontrollably.

 

Like I detailed in the aforementioned Coffee Hour, I never wanted to start every statement with some stupid rant about how everything is shit and life is shit and I sure wish things would not be shit for a change. But it's not like I've been handed anything else to work with. From the attacks on my person and sabatoge of my projects in 2017 to the limitless minor grievances like every single interaction with various landlords or financial institutions, there seriously hasn't been a single month in the last ten years that hasn't had something monumentally stupid going on.

 

I still want to make content. I want to work in Unreal and I hope one day I can do general casting again. But, man, literally every single fucking thing is out to stop me from doing that.

 

I went to the effort to try to get a post out just to tell you I'm still here. I may not be for very long at the rate I'm going, but for now, I'm still fighting for that silly, idyllic future where I can make dumb videos and laugh at bad companies again.

"provided nothing insane happens between now and then"

 

lol

 

lmao

"It was a nightmare. I kept thinking I'm about to wake up and it will all be over and it was just a dream."

It isn't a dream. Life is a joke. It's supposed to be funny. So, why aren't we laughing?

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.