Blog Moved!

Yeah, today as promised I finally started working on the games again, I started writing down the story introduction/prologue I came up with the other day.

I will now drop this blogspot, or more specifically move it to here.

As I've been talking about, from now on the blogspot will be reserved for video game related content only; I will not be going off topic as much as before, If you want to read more about life and less about game development, my deviantart journals are where I will dump all that stuff now.

I have acheived my goal and therefore will keep pursuing art alongside game development; in one month I went above and far beyond the level I had planned to reach in art over that amount of time. Give me 2 or 3 years and I might become an actually good artist :3

This is the last entry of this blog, but I will not delete it in case anyone wants to read the archives later.

Delays; Waiting for monday!

Seems it's taking me longer than planned to draw my first serious piece, no wonder though (i'm doing a lot of things for the first time. Background included.)

But as promised, it's time for me to fit this game project back into my schedule, I decided to split my days down a bit more so as to not get burned out on things.

Monday: Art (3h min) Game (1h min)
Tuesday: Game (3h min) Art (1h min)
Wednesday: Read (Book or Ebook) (150 pages min) Game & Art  (1h min each)
Thursday: Art (3h min) Game (1h min)
Friday: Game (3h min) Art (1h min)
Saturday: Make some of those planned youtube videos (3h work or 1 video)
Sunday: Play a new video game you have never played before (1h min) and relax the rest of the day.

This gives me at least 9 hours of game development and 9 hours of art per week.

That's "At least", when I'm done with art on monday I may jump into game development for 4 hours instead of one or keep doing art for the rest of the day after I do that 1h of game development (who knows)

This creates a fairly balanced schedule for me, I'm putting work in at least 4 hours per day except weekends. (Saturday is 3h, and Sunday is technically 1h; playing a new game for 1h each week counts towards the designer job)

Giving me a total of at least 24 hours of work per week. And if I feel I can increase this, I will increase this, but I have a tendency to overtask myself and expect too much, so I'm keeping it low for starters.

But this is just what I'm bound to do, this is my "at least", bare minimum, I will always, every week exceed 24 hours of work related to art and gaming unless something comes up that keeps me out of it for a few days.

Also, bear in mind that when I reach a certain skill level (which will probably take a couple of months) in art, the two will become closely tied together, so Art will essentially tie into game development (concept art and whatnot)

So then, I'm wrapping this art stuff up tomorrow (that's friday) and then I'm taking the chill on the rest of the weekend, I'll make one video, or at least put 3 hours of work into one on saturday (come on it's fun) but I won't put more than 3h into it so I can relax for the rest of the day. I've really been pushing myself over this last month, even if I didn't work as hard as planned, my mind has been resisting all my efforts and I had to fight back with the little willpower I have that isn't already being wasted on something else.

I'll be posting more info on how I'm going to change around and balance my blogs (that is journals in DA and blog posts in here) later on, tomorrow, weekend or monday I'll determine it.

So then, now I'm finally about to start rolling in the game development area again, was this month worth it? we'll find out tomorrow (or should, assuming I finish this piece of mine) if it wasn't worth it, I guess I'll drop art out of my schedule; but I doubt this is going to happen.

Deadline!

Deadline! but it's too early to celebrate, I needed to draw one piece (no pun intended) and actually finish it after all this practice. And seeing as today is kind of busy over here... I may not make it in one day. We shall see (if not today I will finish up tomorrow)

When I've finished this one picture, I will (as promised) get back to working on this project :3 picking up where I left off, but I will probably end up dividing my time pretty evenly between art practicing and working on this game if I succeed enough on the art side. But if I did succeed then like I just said, I am going to mix and match, probably split down the days, monday for art, tuesday for game, wednesday for reading (books), thursday for game and friday for art then saturday for videos and sunday is freedom (on sunday I will play video games and watch movies or anime all day, instead of just one hour, but I am obligated to play a game I haven't before for 1 hour)

But before any of this, workouts.

Oh come on my arm is too cold D: I can't do pullups properly unless I warm it up first god fucking damnit. And i've only got an hour to do this. I tried treating it with hot water as an experiment, but it wasn't enough >_<

Well, fuck pullups, i'm gonna just do te squats then, I can do the pullups when I get home. Also I need some serious cleanup in this blog, I can't keep using it for just everything, I think the DA journal system is more convenient for that. So maybe I can switch this one to full-time game dev related stuffs :3

Squats: 90

I should aim for 90 squats right? I did 80 last right?

If I think 90 will be as fatal as the 80 I did 2 weeks ago I should end it at 80 today as well, but I need to progress past 80. So instead of this thought I should instead think not to go for a whole 100 even if I've got 90. Yup I pulled a questionable 90

And I can taste some blood all right.

Pullups: 15

Nice! I'm on a roll with the pullups now, I did a 15 in 1 go, next time I'll do 20 and then so on :3

Thats it for this entry, but tomorrow expect to see a proper entry for once.

2 Days

2 Days till deadline, I thought I wouldn't post anything here till my exercises tomorrow. But I've actually been thinking about something in relation to Amodos this whole time. Something that's really hard to get down.

I want to create some pretty hardcore dark themes in Amodos, but I've also got a weak spot for stunningly beautiful, and the thing is that the two aren't exactly compatible.

You can see Skyrim, all the people that live there are dark, gloomy, serious types while the world itself is beautiful, there are no "happy go lucky" people, not really, they managed to mix dark and beautiful, but they don't have a lot of bright.

Now in a 3D game it's easier (as it is less noticable) to go from a dark scene to a bright one quite seamlessly, but in a visual novel when backgrounds are represented with images it is a LOT harder.

A rule of thumb is not to throw it all at a time unless the story dictates it (for example like when exiting a cave, but in that case the atmosphere doesn't really change all that much after the cave has been exited, you must have been outside of the cave for a while before you can really say you're out)

Basically you want to transition, between dark and light, between colorful and dull, between serious and happy go lucky, even between death and life. If you want to include both.

Dumping a player from the disturbing remains of a corpse flooded battlefield straighti nto a crowded lively city would have a very strange effect, you cannot dictate what the player feels in that case, one player might have played too much of call of duty and is used to seeing corpse littered battlefields and doesn't bat an eye (hehe although I'll try to think of something to make these types flinch)

Or someone might not play too much video games or movies and thinks its really sad to see all these people dead, now dump them straight into a happy environment; as a writer, you're going to have to know what the player is feeling if you just JUMP from dark to bright all in one shot. You need to be able to justify it and you need to somehow make it feel right to the player, and this is just not as easy as transitioning over time from dark to bright.

If you're dumped from that battlefield into the ever so lively town, it will just feel weird how cheerful all these people are after so many people have died. So you instead walk through the corpse littered battlefield gradually seeing less and less corpses and more and more survivors. Maybe you end up in a conversation with a unit captain or a commander, the general even and he's all gloomy but the battle was won, and the casualties didn't sacrifice themselves in vain. Then from there you maybe take a horse carriage to that lively town, and enjoy a little scenery on the way while thinking about what you've just gone through, then you finally enter through the gates, you're in the outer edges of the town where things aren't so lively, and you may consciously avoid going to the center of town if you so please, but you're now in that lively town, still feeling a bit down perhaps, but it's going to feel a lot more natural than if you'd just fast travel to the center of town from the battlefield.

This is why I hate fast travel systems traditionally. The one and only game that did fast travel right was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Where you had to go with Stilt Striders or Boats everywhere. You didn't just open up a map and "poof"

You could also get teleportation magic to teleport to specific places. But that was something that was so hard to get that it didn't break the immersion.

So the problem here is that Cestaria is a very beautiful place, but humans are very hideous creatures (don't even try to deny that) however it will depend very much on which human city you're in what you will see, there may be a good mayor or king ruling over one city, but a cruel one in the next, one city may have slaves working their asses off on every corner and another may have slaves living quite comfortably (like in Star Wars; Anakin and his mother didn't have it so bad.)

But the problem, like I said is that Cestaria itself is wonderfully beautiful. How do I transition from a beauty that really livens you up into a city where you'll find shit and filth flowing around the corner of every street and you're seeing slaves being driven with kicks, slaps and whips.

I can do that. I can do this, but up till now my thought process was to try to have one main theme for all npcs, they'd all have a max range of "lively" and no limit to "dark" basically, but I think that is the wrong approach for what I want to do. I want the humans to represent humans, all the good and ugly parts. Humans for example will often be opposed to LGBT. (What I mean here is actually LGBF, F for Futa but I'll use T)

The undeads will be sort of inspired by the formerly oppressed Jews, the stereotype of them anyways, they'll be really nice people, but everyone around them is torturing and killing them or making them work as slaves. They don't care much about LGBT.

The demons will be chaotically unpredictable, one demon may be lively and actually quite nice, the next will probably be wicked, evil and full of deception, and the third might just outright try to kill you or enslave you. They don't give a single fuck about LGBT.

The Garax will be the "orc" of this game so to speak, they're the least civilized but most straightforward race, meaning there's a lot of jungle law there. Theres one boss Garax in each village or town, they all hate what they hate, tolerate what they tolerate, they live by their own rules and tend not to give two shits about others. Everyone kind of fears them, but they're not necessarily evil, just the majority of them is. They tend to not even know what LGBT is. Everything is too simple for them, and Garax living in magdolon will not even have heard about same gender sex. Garax outside of it may have varying opinions of it. But they don't actually think much about relationships at all, they tend to live relatively free from one another.

The Fel'Du are going to be the happy go lucky bunch, most of them are nice, they absolutely love LGBT (so expect a lot of lesbians in Kalhiri, Fel'Du or other races, it's the safest haven for people who like their own gender, heaven for these people even) that's pretty much all there is to them. The rest of their culture is that they're going to be based off either hebrews or egyptians since they live in a desert.

The Faeries are going to be a pretty serious and dark bunch, they don't fool around and can usually fuck you up. They don't care much about LGBT either.

Sikruf are all for L (tentacle race lol) but not so much for G, they don't mind T(F) though. they're pretty similar to humans in many ways, but slightly less evil in general. They're more nice to the other major races but they tend to enslave merfolk.

Shif (Sikruf ancestor race which is nearly extinct) also still live, and I was thinking about converting Sikruf and Shif from squid-race to jellyfish-race :3 I also thought about the design a bit, the shif will hardly be recognizable as a human, they will have a human-like torso and face (the head will actually not be so much human on them) whereas the sikruf willl have a human torso and head, but tentacular legs and arms, similar to mermaids in fairy tales they can convert their legs and arms to human ones when they're on land.

That covers all the major races and a sort of high level personality description for them (I didn't go into various things though like laws, attitude towards slaves, etc. Kalhiri's government will turn anti-slavery in the first game, much thanks to our protagonist.)

But as you can see, these are VERY different cultures I'm aiming for, some fairy tale like level of awesome and ideal, others dark and gloomy like our very own. I need to fit them all together in a world which I want to look beautiful for the most part, but like... Kalhiri is a desert, how beautiful can you make a desert? or the mountains of Jokland? Then there's the matter of Necembel, one side is Tainted and the other is quite literally Dead. Both will be pretty damn dark.

So different landscape tones and atmospheres as well as different atmospheres depending on where you are and who you are talking to.

The really hard part is making some hardcore dark things happen in these lively places like Kalhiri. That is going to prove challenging but after this month of thinking quite a bit about this I feel like I'm coming ever closer to a solution.

It's just that I need to balance things, by this I don't mean balance the player to npcs, I need to balance the story elements and the characters. A lot more complicated than just balancing numbers >_<

Today I also gave armor designs a little thought.

Light Armor: Fabric based + (on more expensive sets) plates where needed
Medium Armor: Chain based or Layered light plate armor (expensive)
Heavy Armor: Plate + Chain (cheaper) or Plate + Layered(more expensive)

There we also have a nice price balance

Light = Cheapest (Fabric based) and (Fabric + Plates) <- these types of sets will be the cheapest types of armor

Medium: Chainmail is slightly more expensive than the cheap light armor, Layered + Chain is expensive

Heavy: Plate + Chain is cheaper than Layered + Chain, Fully Layered Plate armor is the most expensive armor type in the game.

Fabric and Fabric + Plates will be the most mobile armor.

Chainmail + Layered & Chained will be fairly mobile as well but just heavy.

Plate armor (+ chain layer underneath) will offer reduced mobility but a lot of armor for a reasonable price

Full Layered Plate armor will offer much more mobility than just plate armor and the same mount of protection but is heavier and the most expensive type of armor in the game.

Sound about right? I think this is cool. But I need to put some consideration into this, historically chainmail was sometimes more expensive than plate armor, and chainmail also feels heavier since it's weight is all on the shoulders rather than distributed between bodyparts as plate is usually attached to individual bodyparts.

I think I should keep chainmail cheaper, but I may want to keep chain armor as heavy rather than including it as medium. Alternatively I could re-design the chain armor so it doesn't rest all its weight on the shoulders for a balance. I think that may be what I should aim for instead :3

Waiting for the 26th

It's just around the corner! That day, and boy I have been thinking real hard about how I want to proceed after that day comes.

90° Pushups: 70
Knee Tucks: 120

Lets see I did 60 and 120 last time... so...

70 and 140 :3

It was a kind of funky 70, we'll see how much it'll hurt.

Wow the knee tucks were a lot harder than last time, I only made it to 120 again.

Guess thats the non-art related highlights of today, well maybe with the exception of a few family problems.

Cya on the 25th again :3

Waiting for the 26th

5 days, it's not enough time for all the ground I'm aiming to cover in that time (the bean, re-learn the mannequin, learn to draw clothing (i'm not so scared about the clothing part) learn basic shading and learn to color.

I've been progressing slower than I can, for better or worse, but on the 26th I'm thinking I'll start to divide my time somehow.

3 hours per day or more for art (priority one)
2-3 hours per day or more for game development (priority two) the rest is free

Sundays will be video game day where I shall do nothing but play video games. How does that sound?

Well, I'll decide it in 5 days.

But I'm not gonna skip my workouts today!

Headstand: 80s or more
Bridge thing: 70 (Could have done more I think but, this was enough I think it was more than last time)
Crow Stand: 30?

Crow stand is really the challenge of this day, and my wrists hate this day btw.

I'm gonna aim for 30 or 40 seconds.

I think I did 30 but I'm not 100% sure. It takes like 99% of my brain to maintain balance so I can't really count.

Thats it for today I guess

Waiting for the 26th

I'm not progressing as fast as I intended on the art scene, this is not because I can't, its because I get distracted into social networking and whatnot too easily. I need to fix that but I guess I'm partially afraid of doing so because I'd get a lot more Isolated than I already am... (and I already am very isolated)

But, hell day!

Squats: 80
Pullups: 2x10 (like 30 second pause)

I should aim for 90 squats and 30 pullups. Lets see how this goes. I stopped doing regular bar hangs a while ago, the callus still remains because I use the bar weekly for exercises and my skin tolerates it much better now.

I did 5 pullups for warmup, I might wanna revert to wall pullups for warmup while I'm still getting used to this shit.

I did a regular 10 squats for squat warmups.

Now listening to a skyrim/morrowind mashup... I'll do the real pullups. :3

I couldn't do 30 in one set, but I'll try 3x10

I barely pulled 2x10, can I make the 3rd?

No way. Couldn't do one more if my life depended on it.

Now on fitting gory lyric viking metal, I'll do squats. The squats are almost that brutal I must admit.

Just for today I took it easy on the damned squats.. I doubted my ability to reach 90 but I pulled a fairly perfect 80 instead. Last time I did this my muscles quite literally died. They probably needed an extra week to catch up, that's ok. I could also start increasing it in 5s instead of 10s if the same happens again.

Even if I didn't go beyond my limit on the squats this still seems to have packed quite the punch, and in the pullups case I've analyzed it as a joint issue, my joints can't keep up with the muscles (joint recovery hurts even more than muscle recovery too, and joints will ache right after the exercise unlike muscles that will only ache for a while after the exercise then stop aching until a day or two from the exercise.

As I said recently, I changed my deadline from 24th to 26th after taking 2 days rest from art practicing. I've pretty much got down a lot of basics when it comes to drawing human figures, if I go all out I suspect I can surpass a lot of amateurs that have been drawing aimlessly for years (kids usually)

We'll see on the 26th I guess.

Waiting for the 26th

Well, I decided to extend the deadline by 2 days, seeing as I burnt myself out and decided to take yesterday and today as a break.

So then, as I was about to take a shower I remembered my exercises; I skipped the friday exercise 2 weeks ago and forgot the last one >_< bad bad.

90° Pushups: 60
Knee Tucks: 120

Goals are 60 pushups and 110 knee tucks. Time to die.

I (very) barely pulled off 60 pushups, I should take it slow next monday maybe and just hang around at 60 for one more week, my muscles are having a rough time keeping up.

Well, these last 30 or so reps of the knee tucks were kinda ugly. So I may stop at 120 next week too. But well

We'll see what I've got.

Thats it for today, the time when I get back to working on this game of mine is just around the corner( a bit more than a week)

waiting for 24th

Squats: 80
Pullups: 15

I aim for 80 squats, I think I did 70 last time. as for pullups I'd like to get 40 in there.

My pecs are going to die from these pullups lol, they're so sore after the pushups.

Damn pullups aren't easy D:

Ah.. the pain.. the legs... ouch.

Damnit, these squats are fucking extreme, that's beginner level? seriously?

I had to do leg stretches before I got to the pullups (well, i should actually be starting with the pullups)

:O I could only do 15: I did 20 last time, whats up? (Well last time I did 2x10 I think with an interval between, this time I did 3x5 with only a few seconds between.

Thats it for today I guess.

24/25th february

I've fallen out of these logs temporarily (as I'm focusing really hard on art and so am writing in daily journals on DeviantART.) The only thing I'll keep writing in here until I get back to working on my games will be the exercises and the weekly game. I've btw missed that weekly game 2 weeks in a row, but exercises mustn't be skipped. They're important.

On the 24th or 25th i'll be rescheduling myself probably dividing time between art, game development and free time. So until then this will be relatively empty.

90° Pushup: 50
Knee Tuck: 100

Lets see, I should aim for at least 50 pushups and 100 knee tucks I think. I got like 30 pushups last time i think and 90 knee tucks right?

I knew I had 50 in me ^_^ it was kinda brutal though; normally this would've been only 40. I had to use pillows on the surface of my sofa so as to not hurt my palms, this however has a negative effect on my wrist. I'll have to stretch it.

My entire arm is on fire... my pecs too :O

The 100 knee tucks were even moreso brutal.. it started to be painful as fuck at only 50 D:

(well, I AM intentionally overexerting myself; because I can afford to since I don't actually need to use my muscles for anything. This may not exactly be efficient training method, but for me it's the most efficient way, since my muscles need like an entire week to recover every single time, at least 3 days but at most an entire 8. Normally following this program I would've stopped knee tucks at 90 and pushups at 40. But I went that extra 10 becasue I can afford to lose my muscles for a week which pretty much goes against the entire principle behind the book I'm following, which is training effciently but not overexerting yourself so your muscles are at full power the next day after practice, and can even be reused plenty throughout the day after the exercises.)

Thats it for this entry.

Forgot another one

Forgot another day, but thats ok. There wasn't anything to say. But today at least I've got exercises.

And sleep deprivation from hell.

I think I'm skipping the exercises tonight, I'm just... too tired. :(

Missed out a day

V_V my sleeping cycle got fukt, so I forgot what was today and what was tomorrow for a day, but i'm back!

Bettered not forget about my exercises today, because I'm going to get kinda lost in art. For real this time. Linux is lubed up and ready for my epic drawing skills (*Cough*) and there's only one computer that remains.

My laptop which I actually use for mobility. It already has Linux on it, but I want to reinstall it regardless. I want to set up Razor-Qt on it. That way I'll have different window managers on all of my computers which I think will be pretty cool.

I don't really need conky on my desktop, I can monitor CPU, MEM and CPU-Temp all on my keyboard, swap usage too (which will probably never be used since I have 24Gb of memory)

The only things I can't monitor on my keyboard which i'd like are

"Inbound & Outbound connections"
"Most memory/CPU consuming processes"
"HDD Temp"
"Nvidia Temp"
"Network UP/DOWN usage"

ok that's a few things I guess.

Ideal placement for conky would be between my bottom taskbars on each side of the pager.

In/Out connections & Network Up/Down meters on the left side, Nvidia Temp and the highest Mem & Cpu usage programs to the right of it.

So; Exercise Time: (Before I get Tired)

Squats: 70
Pullups: 10x2 + 5

Lets see i did 60 squats last time. I'm aiming for 80 this time but if I can't take more than 70, I can't.

As for pullups, I'm aiming for a full 30, dunno how likely I am to fail though since I haven't done any pullups for like... ever?

Yeah, only 10 again :(

But, I can do more sets even if i can't do more reps right?

Ouch.. 70 squats... ouch... it hurt. it hurt at 30, it was torture on 70.

Ok, after all these squats I ain't moving an inch out of this chair for a while.

Oh Right

I nearly forgot; Exercises and a game to play

Lets see, game choice... Amnesia: Machine for Pigs!

Yes

And exercises... lets see what was it again...

Half Pushups: 30
Knee-Tucks: 100

By half pushups which is what i'm noobshly calling them I mean that i'm basically doing pushups from a 90° angle instead of off a wall or floor. It's the middle step between wall and floor pushup.

And knee tucks is what i remembered the knee raises are called.

It could've done more pushups if it wasn't for the uncomfortable surface i was doing them on, my hands kinda hurt from it.

Lets see, I did 80 knee tucks last time, so lets do 100 now and break my legs...

Allrigh,t started to hurt at 60, started to be painful at 70, got brutal at 80 and got gory at 90, but I made the 100 somehow, even if i didn't keep my form perfect all the way through (every  one that failed I redid again so i technically did more than 100, i just did 100 good ones and like 5 bad ones)

Good news: I decided to set up a Linux + Windows dual boot, like right now. I managed to make the tablet work, and all my artist software is cross platform making linux almost completely viable for working on it (the only thing that's missing is Articy: Draft, but I may be able to VM it in.)

Dualboot is set up and linux is mostly ready for my awesomeness. But what about Mandus? I think I'm too tired to play Amnesia by now :(

Lost in art

I got lost in art, and so i forgot to play a game today. Otherwise nothing to say here for today.

I will play a game tomorrow instead, not because i feel it's an obligation but because i want to.

Nothing

It's saturday, I went to japanfest and got interrupted in all my work when a friend asked me to come over for a while, which ended up being until 3 AM and now my sleeping cycle is fukt again.

Other than that i really got nothing :(

Oh but i do have something, today i started seriously considering just having a dual boot setup. As much as i may dislike the idea of needing to restart my computer to access windows to play my games; I actually think it's Ideal.

You know how people say that you should keep your work environment separate from your play environment (for example it's generally a good idea for writers to not write at the same place as they play computer games)

I think it would actually work to my advantage to be working from inside of Linux.

So i'm seriously considering that, but no decision made yet.

Other than that i really got nothing >_<

Krita

Crow Stand: 23s (i think)
Headstand: 60s (i had an inconvenient pose)
Shoulder Bridges: 40 (nice)
Bar Hang: 20 (yeah, only 20)

I found out the other day that drawing on paper is something any retard and his children could do, drawing on a tablet is something that would make any retard and his children cry from their pathetic, failed attempts.

When i was drawing on paper, it took me 3 days to make something that looked half decent. 3 Days from 0 to half decent.

I've had this tablet in front of me for 3 days with my mouse unplugged, and the best i've got is only just a little bit better than the portrait i tried to draw on my first day on drawing on paper. And the only reason it even looks that good is because i scanend in a sketch from day 3 of drawing on paper so i wouldn't have to draw the face as an original.

Sucks? yeah, good thing i started this soon. I hear it takes users on average 2 weeks to get used to a tablet, i've only had it for 3 days and i'm getting somewhere, but nowhere near as good as on paper. Luckily, there are tutorials. I found some cool dude, the art director of the sintel project... and he helped me out a lot by pointing me at a program named Krita.

It solves my need for cross platform software. And what's even better? he made a tutorial both  for digital painting for beginners AND how to use krita all in one package.

This tutorial is something i'm following right about now. Of course though the tutorials focus is to teach Krita, the digital painting part is very little explained (i.e. expects you know how to draw already, which is fine because i kind of do)

I watched Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 today (or finished it today to be more precise)

And i cried my eyes out... :'(

I haven't cried like that since i was 11. (I used to be a crybaby, no one would believe it if i told them now since i'm a hardass by now, but inside i'm really a crybaby, and i'm not afraid to admit it either. I'll also cry when i get hurt and this isn't a mental thing, it's physical, my bodily reaction to excessive pain is crying. I start crying automatically even if i can handle the physical pain. As for the mental part, i don't hold back when i need to cry over something mental. At around 12 i stopped crying completely, and at 16 it became a problem because i couldn't cry anymore, so i sniffed out sad anime series to watch and deliberately tried to force out some tears on sad parts. It took like a year but i finally got em flowing again, it feels so good to be able to cry over sad stuff again! it makes me feel so much more alive! like screaming when you play horror games!)


Thats it for today, i'm just doing art art art. Every day i'm learning a lot about art but that said, over the last 3 days (ever since i got my tablet) i have not drawn much at all because drawing on a tablet is brutally hard and it was only just today that i realised why drawing with a tablet is so much more subconsciously intimidating than drawing on paper. It's because theres so much more stuff you need to do and remember to do when drawing digitally, like selecting from your collection of 500,000 brushes, using the layer system right, selecting the right brush, selecting the right brush, selecting the right color and brush, coloring, shading, coloring, shading.

When drawing digitally you have to color things. The only exceptions i've seen is manga. Everything else, if it's not colored it's usually scanned. There are ways to make your digital drawing look like it was done on paper (with brushes that mimic pencil lines) but it's harder than simply drawing the much higher quality digital art you see littered over porn sites ;)

New Gmail Account

Since i changed the potential company name from AGS or Amodos Game Studios to Cestarian Games (CG, CG is a short for many things already though, in particular computer grapichs)

The original Gmail account grew obsolete.

With this i also made my own new internet nick, Cestarian. I gave this account access to add entries to this blog so i wont have to log in to the old account anymore.

I also made a new youtube account for it. I am using this name to detach myself from my old internet nickname which i've had since i was a child (needless to say such an old nickname means i've done some stupid things with it)

Bar Hang: 80s

I have a status update on using both linux and windows on my desktop

I gave up on it. The only way to do it is to have two computers and a KVM switch...

Wait... isn't that a viable option for me already? O_o

I just need the damned switch.

I also have a development update for the amodos project, while i'm giving digital art a try, i'm halting the project for the first month as I focus on learning to create art.

Development shall be resumed (at latest) 24th february. At earliest in two days. (24th feb will be the 1 month finish line where I must make a decision to keep pursuing art, or give up on the dream of becoming an artist)

I will keep making blog posts like this though, but they'll be empty compared to the usual since i discuss art related stuff in my DA journals.

Wednesday!

Pullups: 11
Squats: 60

On  pullups my muscles gave up before my skin (that's a first) and squats.... pain... fuck 60 was hard, but now i'm very close to the level i was at, i think i 9quit at 90 like several months ago, give me 3 weeks to catch up to that tops. Water... water... please... water!!

I've learned that there are two kinds of failures or "stopping points" on exercises. The most common one is over-exertion, which is where your muscle has been torn to pieces so much that it can't do more reps (or it gets increasingly painful with every one until your muscle just enters hibernation mode which will last for a while) this type usually means that the longer you keep it up (i.e. if you keep it up to the point where you really really can't do any more reps and you get to hibernation mode) the longer your muscles will need to recover (they're sore while they need to recover)

However theres another type which i'm sure many people have noticed where the muscles start to tremble or wobble uncontrollably, i don't know what causes this one but my guess is that this one is on the joints. The joints or the muscles themselves aren't used to getting the kind of pressure you're giving them, in a gym this can sometimes mean too much weight, but in bodyweight this really means that your muscle or joint is just super weak and needs to be trained. The only way to overcome this one is to keep your form as right as you possibly can during these exercises until you can control them.

It was the latter type where i failed on the pullups, my muscles and skin could have handled more, but my form was getting all messed up and i had little control over my limbs. It's basically what i'd like to call "instability" if you just keep going you're eventually going to crash, and when dealing with jacknife pullups when i'm a meter or more off the floor, "crash" could translate to broken hip or fractured spine unless my glutes can absorb the damage (which they can't at this point btw, not enough squats!)

A factor that also plays in is that i have concrete floor which is an exceptional weapon for breaking bones compared to wooden floors or carpets.

I was getting ahead of myself in thinking i could just double the things i do per week in this short amount of time, it MUST be done gradually, i must keep this up for 1 or two months before i start adding more things in to my schedule. But well, i really should add cleaning my room in regardless, i mean nevermind my room but i need to keep my desk clean, it's my workspace and the centerpiece of my heart. (Everything i do that's of any importance to me, i do sitting at this desk)

But well, nothing more to say right now, i may later today test out seamless mode in virtualbox (before i give up on it which is possibly going to be the end result, i really may end up needing to use Cygwin.

Good News: MyPaint 1.1 has been ported to Cygwin, meaning i can get better use out of MyPaint through Cygwin than on windows (if cygwin works well with tablet that is)

Well, not much happened today, it was confusing. But at least i did my exercises, i really need to pick up amodos again, maybe when i get some skill in art i can draw rough (by rough i mean ugly) concepts for some races and monsters, as well as items.

Tablet!

I bought a drawing tablet, drawing on a tablet is worlds apart from drawing on paper in difficulty, it's like seriously hard. A lot of people buy a tablet but give up on day one because it's just not easy.

But since it's my nature to sniff out the best way to achieve goals as fast as possible, that is the most efficient training methods i've found my solution!

Unplug the mothafuckin mouse!

That's right. Until i master this tablet i am going to stop using my mouse completely, I am going to be playing games on this tablet until i get the precision i'm missing, and as i write this... i already have my mouse unplugged.

I am going to do something crazy

I'm gonna play LoL with this tablet. I got lucky in aram and drew sona. 8/5/15, best score on my team :O maybe tablet aint so crazy for gaming if you get used to it (which i am not by any means yet)

Allright, i found some nice software for my artistic adventures.

I aimed for cross platform software from the start since i know i'll want to work on linux.

Here's what i found

Editor:  Gimp (Instead of Photoshop. Gimp can't really compete directly with photoshop, but for most people it's good enough)
Painter: MyPaint (It's compared to Corel Painter and SAI which are both excellent programs.)

There, i said it. Digital art on linux is viable even if adobe has their heads up their mac-fag ass. And even if it wasn't, it's completely viable to do digital art on a windows virtual machine from inside linux, the only 2 things i know about that you can't do from a VM (or well you can, but it's not easy to set it up) is gaming and 3D Rendering (for 3d modeler work, since you generally wan't a powerful GPU designed for that, like the quadro series, to do that kind of work).


Here's something fun that happened: My art business goals collided with my goals on here, to get linux and windows working together in harmony, and so, now moreso than before i need to solve this problem i've got about making these 2 learn to love each other.

So i guess it all comes down to a Virtual Machine. Well, what do i have 24GB of RAM for anyways? (Oh that's right, VIRTUAL MACHINES) how about those 8 logical corse (oh right, VIRTUAL MACHINES!) yes, my computer is secretly designed for this sh*t, what the hell am i waiting for.


I learned something cool today, i watched e1s2 of ika musume today, and she said something about "dumb invaders" in a movie, which made me think back to code geass where every battle is a match of wits between the protagonist and a selected antagonist. Everyone's playing chess, the antagonists are intelligent, but get outsmarted by the protagonist in the end.

So now i know that if i ever write a story where you have to fight against a faction or go to war, now i know that i have to look at it from both sides, i have to become a strategist for both teams, see what they would be seeing and make decisions for them. This way i can make things a lot more interesting. For example there won't be "and then all of a sudden army attacks you" but "because enemy spy discovered your location a military unit was dispatched to get rid of you"

and it would be possible to trace it back further "spy infiltrated base by disguising himself as a soldier" and even further "spy was dispatched as a part of the base strategy that this faction always uses (which you either do or do not know about when the war starts)"

I think i could make an amazing turn-based strategy game, and to tell the truth i kind of want to. I was thinking about it the other day that i wanted to create a detailed, epic turn-based combat system both for fighting 1v1 or army v army. I had some epic idea about it but i can't remember what exactly it was... Oh yeah that's right, i wanted to just create turn based grand strategy, something like princess maker but isn't hardcoded (i.e. slightly procedural storyline, so you have to and have the resources to predict the outcome of events and they don't just creep up on you like in long live the queen.)

Yeah, i was watching kingdom and i thought "i want to do that" (be a general, or a unit/lance leader).

That would be hard to make though, but i think that i actually am going to make it when i get that far. It's just that dungeon crawling RPG is first in line.

Also, this whole art business i'm doing, it may seem like a waste of time from the perspective of someone else than me, but it really isn't. If i can draw at a level i think is decent quality, I can forget about hiring concept artists and draw my own concept art.  Sure, I could also be a lead artist, but while art is fun, i need to be lead designer and writer, being lead artist on top of that is too much, but i would probably not just let the art department be run by itself, i would be a concept artist (not lead though, i'd just draw the things i don't feel like entrusting to others) and in the early days of my game development career i can draw the art for my own games, which may take a bit longer time, but in the long run saves me tons of resources (money mostly) and it'll be nice to be able to switch actively between art, writing and design. That way there'll be tons of fun variation in my work, and i enjoy doing all of these things. (It's the programming part that bores me, why? because it is boring. Programming is very much comparable to math in how boring it is because it is essentially the same thing at it's core... it's just a bunch of numbers mixed together in the right way to create the right result)

That's it for today, but i am in the process of setting up arch linux on a virtualbox machine, so maybe i can end this linux business today or tomorrow. It all depends on how well i make it run.

Revival

Slept for 7 hours, certainly beats 2!!

Now, i want to keep drawing 'n all, but i think i should finish up this linux business...

Step 1: laptop Learn how to use Cygwin/X or Xming
Step 2: Fix Skype & Chromium on the laptop (FUCK YOU LIBPULSE!!!)
Step 3: If i failed with both Cygwin/X and Xming, then start drawing again but set up a virtual machine while at it.

I realized when i woke up that i want to create tutorials.

I'll create a new youtube channel and then start pumping them out... later (give me a month)

It'll go

1: Learning 2 art + Gimp
2: Linux

In nr. 1 I would teach all the greatest tips and tricks I learned about drawing in a month of research and experimentation, in Linux, I would create an introduction video, then make a tutorial about setting up Arch-Linux and Gentoo and finally showcase the various software available. (Window Managers, VoIP, Graphical Editors, IM, Conky, Office Packs, etc)

Maybe i could use my "good deeds" days on doing that.

Now what about my project? well, i've spent 2 full days drawing so i have 2 full days for finishing up the linux business (extended deadline ftw!)

When linux business is finished, i will go back to developing amodos and will actively switch between that, and drawing until i can eventually implement drawing into my design work (hopefully 4 months)

Well well, i ogt ahead of myself and fixed the Libpulse issue i was having on my laptop, turns out that libpulse gets confused and goes FUBAR when a non-libpulse application is using a specific alsa device (rather than being set to use the "Default" alsa device) and this caused 2 problems, one being skype sometimes crashing when a sound is played and another being that there was no sound to be heard. I'm guessing libpulse was falling back to my S/PDIF or whatever part of my soundcard which has nothing plugged into it and probably was causing errors or something like that (it didn't have any dummy output to fallback to)

Well, that's a relief, although it still leaves me with a small problem that if i use skype for VoIP i will need to use the laptops internal mic rather than my USB one since i have to configure teamspea kt o use the USB one. That's no problem though, i generally don't VoIP with skype (it's a rare occurance)

Now my linux laptop is finally stable & working again! woo! i was getting worried back there that i might have to start using windows again (oh the horror!)

Argh why is cygwin/x not well documented for beginners usage. I know it was designed for the linux users who want linux functionality in windows, which is usually advanced linux users, the thing has no "installation to complete setup guide" (i guess arch doesn't either) it just has "installation" and "command line options" command line options which by the way fail when i try to use them.

Fuck cygwin/x, i'm going to go draw D: i'm too tired for your shit right now cygwin!

It's stick-figure time!!

Customizing linux is so fucking fun, that is reason enough to use it, however when it crashes, burns or fails to execute things correctly you'll want the world to burn. And that's a "when" not "if". You don't use linux without running into problems like that (unless you use a bloated distro like ubuntu maybe, but that is not fun since it's not designed for being customized to it's users preferences, it's framework themed like apple's junk)

Exercise time! I nearly forgot.

Lets see, i'm aiming at 150 wall pushups to get a rank-up in the pushups, as for knee raises i'm aiming at 70 or 80 to get back to the pace i was in when i quit a year ago. Functional strength seems to fade slower than gym trained strength, and not only fade slower but also return a lot faster. This is probably because we're genetically designed for these types of workouts, we're not designed for gym workouts.

I may be aimang at fast progression from wall pushups, but i'm by no means going to rush it. If i can't do 150 i will just do 180 next week before i progress to another type of pushup.

Wall Pushups: 150
Knee Raises: 80


I did it! things to really hard around 50, started to hurt around 80, got really painful at 100, got hardcore at 120 and turned into a gorefest at 130, but i lived and i still had 10-20 left in me, but 150 was my goal and i am proud to have gone from 90 to 150, that's +60 in one week! that's a brutal progression and would have been impossible if i hadn't done this before (my body knows the exercise well)

Now the tough knee raises... ah... my shoulders hurt... that's good, training my shoulders is extremely important since my only physical weakness is the weakened shoulder joint (that's been dislocated several times) Will i make it to 80?

I made it to 80, it was an epic gory battle. Blood and guts all over the place! (i can only lift my foot about 4Cm off the floor)

My pushups and knee raises are closing in on the level i was once at with rapid speed, now it's just the squats and bridges i worry about, well bridges are hardly a matter to worry about... but well.. water!

Too bad i wanted to one last bar hang today before giving my palms a rest tomorrow, mostly because i'll need them on wednesday. But when i'm only barely able to raise my arms i'm much less able to hang on them.

Oh, i got one in now.

Bar hang: 70s (sweet!)

I could've hung even longer (my hands aren't hurting so badly at all), now i'm definitely set for doing pullups on wednesday (or my palms are anyways)

My art skills are improving at a retardedly rapid speed. In only 3 days I've managed to go from total 0% skill to being able to draw original poses (i.e. not rely on tutorials to draw them)

Of course, things like perspective and changing the angle of objects is something I still haven't grasped, stuff that just simply takes time. But i'm sniffing out every single trick in the book to go from zero artist to hero artist in a month, and i'm doing so well that i changed my mind about holding back on buying a tablet, i'm buying one right now!

Anyways, that's it for today, i sadly didn't get Cygwin/X working but at least i fixed my laptop's shit.

Tomorrow i gues si'm gonna take one last shot at Cygwin/X before i give up on this badly documented piece of poop and go with virtual machine. (God damned junk, how come it's so hard to start the motherfucker in fullscreen?)

Bai Bai!

Edit: I don't know what, but something in my windows is messing with my GPU  it's fan always goes crazy, it's like it's working like mad when i'm not even watching a video. I may end up going with a dualboot setup because of this issue after all.

Edit 2: I believe i found the culprit of this grief, i thought something just had to be off, and i noticed i had some "Divx Manager" running in the processes, checking msconfig it's set to run on startup too. I don't recall installing such a thing (My malware sense is tingling) i disabled it. And seems like the world suddenly became a better place, i'll use malwarebytes on the fucker rather than deleting it normally.

Oh rofl, i googled malwarebytes and

Recent posts

Fans of Justin Bieber cry out in support of the #FreeBieber movement and scammers are finding a prime opportunity to make some cash. Read more at ... 25 Jan 2014

Hahaha! That's just hilarious! What the fuck is FreeBieber anyways? sounds like a typical name for open source software "Open Source Bieber Movement" lets open him up and mail his insides around the globe to all the fans who want him. For free! (No srsly, wat? And since when does bieber actually have fans?)

So fucking many malwares... 13.

Some of them must've been old (located on my storage drive)

And one of the detected ones was the divx.exe i talked about earlier (i knew it)

There was some stolen data, trojans and backdoor agents, How the FUCK did that get on my computer in 5 days? i haven't even been downloading junk, hot damn windows is a vulnerable piece of shit, it's like a japanese schoolgirl in the vicinity of a tentacle monster and a tridick futanari demoness(angelblade, woo!)...

These were just active malware and the most common folders (like windows or appdata folders) for malware to be stored, this wasn't even a full system scan, i wonder what full system scan will find, but malwarebytes is kinda slow at scanning, so i'll have to give it probably a few hours for that.

One thing i love about it is that it tells you what stuff it finds, but it allows you to selectively remove the ones you don't know are false positives (like the majority of software cracks)

I'm guessing this divx trash was stealing my GPU power to use for some major calculations, i'm assuming it was being used either for bitcoin mining or cracking an encrypted device (i.e. there's no way that thing was made and in use by some amateur, and i was an excellent target since i had a 670 card)

The mistake he made however was that he used up 100% of the card's processing power leaving me nothing for watching videos, if he had left it at 60-70% i probably wouldn't have noticed anything, but well i did let it slide for 3 days (that thing showed up when i started drawing it would seem, but how....)

Anyways, thank god for malwarebytes, the software is so good that even skilled hackers use this shit (i know, because i know a handful and they all recommend this software)

I was keen on abandoning antivirus software, but it seems windows is too vulnerable for that, so instead of doing that I'll just run this one full scan with malwarebytes, then see if i can't schedule malwarebytes to run a quick scan daily to pick up on any disease i might've been infected with every other day.

Windows is so weak, this is one of the reasons i prefer to use linux, even if you can get a virus for linux, then unlike Mac and Windows you actually need to be either dumb or careless for said virus to do any real harm to your system. And the very worst viruses that can mess up your entire OS (like rootkits) simply don't exist for linux, or if they do they wont work unless you've got sudo with no password set up or have your user in some funky administrator groups which a user should not be in.

Windows' UAC is a half decent placeholder for Sudo, but it can never be as good as actually needing a password to install stuff. I prefer Sudo or just Su over UAC simply because using that means that i can simply get temporary administrator access to perform administrative tasks (like installing stuff) but as soon as i close that terminal, the administrative access is gone but i can still run all this software without being asked if i really want to do so (Why else would i have installed it windows?)

But UAC beats nothing, however sadly i need to have it disabled for some of my games to work. This fact proved fatal to me using UAC. Ever. (Unless i'm not playing games)

Nothing to say

I slept 2 hours, then i got back to working on art, art, but i need to play a game. However i'm super tired, so something easy...

Closure.

Started @: 16:10
Stopped @: 17:06

:O i didn't play for a full hour, but close enough!

I loved this game, it reminded me a lot of Oddworld, it's a 2d side scrolling puzzle platformer.

Thats it for today, my journal entries on deviantart track what i'm doing as an artist, but right now i really need sleep.

I guess a bit of a speech maybe.

I am a monster. When I was born instead of taking the life of my mother, I condemned her to eternal suffering, and what for? a nagging, whining, annoying and worst of all evil child which she eventually grew to hate.

Since kindergarten the people around me viewed me as a monster, by the time i was 12 adults started to fear me as a monster. I am a monster, but at the age of 14 I finally learned deception, I learned to hide my monstrosity, but this didn't feel very good, so at age 18 i learned to hide it in plain sight, i advertise it. If i talk about it so loudly how bad can it be right?

But ever since the early days i always wanted to be a specific kind of monster, another kind of monster. I am a born, natural sexual predator but luckily I have chained myself down enough to limit the damage of that to only a certain few people while i was growing up. But i always wanted to be another kind of monster, i hated my sexual and so human desires with a passion, and still do. What i wanted to become was a beautiful monster, and on the inside i have successfully become exactly that. But on the outside i'm still the ugly monster i always used to be, i'm finally starting to work towards becoming the monster i always wanted to be, but i've only got 10 years to succeed. However, I know that i can and will do in 10 years what i couldn't in the past 20, I will consume and absorb this pathetic wretched monster I used to be in order to craft out a new, better monster. A monster that people won't fear for it's aggressive nature, but envy for its strengths and it's freedom.

I will become my own god, in 10 years there won't be anything about myself to fix, and very few things to improve. I will be the closest thing to perfect humankind has ever known, and if i just so happen to have financial success i will throw everything i've got at assisting the next generation of humans to surpass the current, pathetic and wretched generation of humans, I will nudge them into the right direction to surpass the godlike me. I will show them how to surpass not just the current generation of humans, but also the current generation of monsters.

Ah, I like writing stuff like that, i meant every word, you don't have to believe it, it doesn't have to hold meaning to you, but that little piece of text very nicely explains my current mental state.

All Nighter

Decided to turn today into an all nighter, well i only have to stay up for 7-8 more hours, and i have 3 monsters to turn to if things get ugly.

I had eggs and bacon with coffee for lunch, it felt so... "'MURICA!!!!"

Just saying.

Ironically, even if eggs and bacon is commonly believed to be one of the reasons americans grow fat, the eggs & bacon are technically not to blame, nevermind the eggs that are pretty much just healthy in general, 1 egg a day is a pretty good idea no matter what your diet is like, 2 may be overkill sometimes though, bacon is pretty much just fat, but the thing is if these 'muricans would stick to eating this fatty food, and drop all their carbohydrates, they'd be losing weight instead of gaining it, and yet they avoid fat (except for the eggs and bacon) and the problem is that mixing both carbs and fat is bound to make you fat, whereas eating no fat (only carbs) doesn't make you fatter, eating mostly carbs and a little fat does make you fatter for every little bit of fat you eat.

Some people are resistant to belly growth by nature no matter what their diet is, but not all are so lucky. The theory is that we burn what we eat the most of, we store what we eat least of. Eating less fat means storing more of it as reserve for when you really need it. Working out can empty these reserves since fat is pretty much muscle fuel, but the source of the problem is that people just aren't eating enough of it. Obesity grew after people started avoiding fat (not before) for a (recent) historical reference.

Coincidentally my workout plan of calisthenics is also based on history, history that mankind overall got weaker when gyms became "THE WAY" to work out.

These 2 "plans" that support themselves with proof, proven by history itself are the 2 most reliable things I've found when it comes to strength training and fat burning.

Also of course the fact that bigger, stronger muscles burn more fat (even while idle) is a given, so strengthening myself + eating mostly fat food = light-speed burning.

I was never obese, now i'm not really fat anymore, but i decided long ago that i set a rule not to ever drop below 80kg unless i was working out. Now i'm "working out", so who knows if i'll be down to 60 or 70 in just 2 months hehe.

Why do i talk so much about this bullshit? sounds like i'm one of those crossfit maniacs (they don't talk about anything else than crossfit)

I guess it's mostly to keep myself pepped up while i'm doing this.

None of the logs lately have had anything to do with the game's development, sadly. Not directly.

But one great thing is that i am a person as growing, i'm improving... Sure, i was always awesome (thumbup) but it was as if i had hit a roof, like... a human couldn't hold more awesome in one body and mind and soul than i already had unless they relied on luck, luck which i do not have. That was of course bullshit and i knew it, i knew my subconsciousness was limiting me, but the fetters have been loosened, and i'm finding ways to further improve myself, to become more, better, better in every way. I've pretty much mastered mental strength, i think it's impossible to permanently break my mind (impossible but i'm not suggesting someone could try, the most effective way to do it would be to give me everything i ever wanted then take it all away when i least expect it. But another more efficient way would be to cause mental damage through physical actions, like skinning me alive, or locking me in a box where there's no space for me to physically rest.)

Today i chanced upon a rather unique bug, my ´ key always does ´´. This is troublesome because i need that key to do comma'd letters (as i call them) like the icelandic ´´i (see what i mean? that should've been an i with a , instead of .)

I want to try something funny now, yesterday i drew some portrait, sure, nothing super pretty but like i said good for a first attempt. I want to try drawing that with mouse in the computer, see how it turns out.

I was thinking, i should organize my days a bit better, since i figured out my cheat of scheduling things per day rather than per hour.

So.

What are the things i'd like to do....
Art, Gaming, Workout, Cleaning My Room, Shaving, Meditating, Maths

Art: Every Single Day
Relaxing (Games and Anime and stuff): Any Day
Working on Amodos: Any Day (Preferably Every Day)

Monday: Workout + Shave
Tuesday: Learn Japanese + Good Deed (Placeholder)
Wednesday: Workout + Math
Thursday: Learn Japanese + Good Deed (Placeholder)
Friday: Workout + Meditate
Saturday: Learn Japanese + Good Deed (Placeholder)
Sunday: Play a new game + Clean Room

Maybe i'm pressing my luck, but if i find that i'm failing, the secondary tasks are the ones i can skip.

Maths you say? what's wrong with wanting to be good at math?!

That said, I'll need to find study material online for it. Why would i do this? cus it's one of the courses at school that i feel would make my life easier if i knew more about it. For example, it's essential if i want to do graphical programming, and being good at logic is crucial for being a good programmer.

Maths is also essentially puzzle solving, which strengthens my mind, and i take any opportunity i get to make my monster of a mind even stronger than it already is.

Lets see... what should i do on the japanese study days?

A good deed? yeah, as a placeholder since i don't have anything i need to do that i can think off off the top of my head, it will be used for a good deed until i find something better. I'll use it as a placeholder, but of course i'll have to commit a solid good deed all of these days, this usually involves helping somebody out. Like that guide i created for Wizardry 8, or more precisely, making wizardry 8 work, it's helped a lot of folks out in the long run :)

This program shall start next sunday. Anything that isn't the "takes as long as it takes" type will require at least 1 hour (i.e., learning japanese & playing a new game) I should print this.

Now, for drawing in paint or something... with mouse.

Damn, looking at this pic again makes it look about as terrible as the faces in Morrowind... On the bright side that's a triple A game marveled for it's beautiful graphics in it's own time i guess.... But the faces were hideous as fuck though. Here mousey mousey mousey.

Like i thought, it's hardly even recognizable hehe, drawing with mouse gets kinda brutally hard though after a little while.

I run into some problems too, using mouse has some pretty severe limitations i don't know how to work around.How the hell am i supposed to draw the eyebrows.. the eyes look pretty badass though.

Drawing the nose like i did on the paper is pretty damn near impossibru! so i'll use another nose type.

Well looking at this image, i said it looked terrible, but it was really mostly the lips and the nose that look terrible...

I can't draw them any better with mouse, but well. Lets see how this turns out, hair is the last piece of the puzzle now.

The thing i can't do with mouse is i can't... "scratch", i.e. can't really make tons and tons of "light" lines, this is what i used to do eyebrows before.

Hmm for a mouse drawn image it aint bad, actually i think it oculd be better than the first one, but it also took a lot longer to draw than the first one.

You know what, i guess i am going to sleep before dinner after all, it's unlike usual not because of mental exhaustion, but moreso because of physical exhaustion (my muscles are kinda sore and begging for recuperation time) brb!

Bar Hang: 50s

Ouch!
That hurt.

Massive improvement over 30s, but ow my hands went numb D:

You know, i think if i can hang on that bar for 2 minutes or more, that will be something to boast about!

I in fact think i can already boast about being resourceful, knowing that it hurts my hands to do even a horizontal (or whatever, when i lay down on the floor then pull myself up to a table) pullup, i just figured if i hang from a bar every day my skin will adapt to the pressure.

I'm so smart :D

Now that i have a Deviant Art account, i will be writing anything about art on there instead of here to avoid cluttring this up with (even more) pointless stuff (than already is here).

Bar hang: 50s

hurt again!
But not as much.

still, if i can hang for 50 seconds i guess next time it's time for pullups my skin wont be going to give up as easily as usual.

Who would've thought i could train it this fast?

Most of today has been spent on art. I'm improvingat light-speed. But i still need to properly grasp angling things to make them look 3d. By things i mean characters, i'm focusing 100% on characters. When i'm good with them the really hard stuff (environments) is next.

My hands have blisters... Ah, that's what you call it not callus or whatever... Blisters. The type that toughens your skin when they fade and generally spawn when you're doing difficult stuff with your hands. The area just below your fingers turns white, kind of thing. No wait, you do call it callus :I but it looks like blisters... it are blisters.

LOL!

I only just started drawing yesterday and i'm already doing gore!

It came to me so naturally... i didn't want to draw the arm... so i turned it to bone... and then added blood... and what do you know.

I'm a bad... bad... person, the world is better off without my art i'm sure... but i can't help it if i want to be an artist. But why did i mangle the arm of my first successful character? Why would i do that?

I should draw another character, this time a specific one. How about... Priscilla from dark souls!

Bah enough of this here, seems i'm not doing much more work on linux today, but this artist work is quite fun, and if i become good in my set deadline then it will be of use too (as in, i'll be able to draw art for my own game)

My sketches are already looking half decent, but sketches are only sketches, i'm going to buy a tablet ASAP and that motherfucker won't be cheap (the plan was to wait with buying a tablet until one month from now when i had decided if i was good enough or not, but... this is just so fucking fun! and easy! And i'm confident that in a month i'll have reached the level i planned to have by then. I'm more confident today than i was yesterday!

I Wish i was an artist

I realized something today, i want to be an artist, i want to be able to draw things, and i want to be able to do it well.

Kind of late to start now, but who knows if i've got some talent for it. And so, after this linux funny business of mine hits it's deadline (Sunday) i shall start trying to draw.

I should give myself a deadline of 1 month for attempting to do so, and dedicate some time to it every single day.

One month from the time i start trying, i shall review my progress, my first and latest picture then i will go all out on one picture and see if this is something i can pursue.

I can design, but i want to create. If it just so happens that i will be able to draw then i won't need to worry about hiring an artist, won't need to worry about BUT still might in the end since it would heavily reduce development time to have an artist working with me. I must be the writer and lead designer after all, but well, we'll see.

To be honest a part of me is thinking "it's late to start trying to draw now, you should have started when you were 10" but another part is thinking "you can do this now, you'll just have to learn fast"

Which is why i decided i'll try, but on a 1 month deadline. I realize 1 month is a ridiculously short amount of time for something like this, but it's all the time i can give it unless it truly becomes a hobby. If i have some decent success with drawing, then i'll reward myself with a tablet and learn 2 Gimp. (I know how to use photoshop already and that shit was tough to learn. Gimp is even tougher to learn but i will have to learn to use it regardless, mostly because it's free, whereas if i'd want to professionally use photoshop i'd have to pay a huge chunk of cash for licensing it)

Fucking laptop is failing again, damnit linux, why don't you just shut up and obey already?!

Now today when i started it up, skype crashed on startup, i fixed that with some libpulse thing'mjug magic trick but after doing that the sound in skype went FUBAR (doesn't work at all) and chromium won't launch.

But i don't have time to deal with it now, now is time for PC...

Although i think, i think just maybe i should drop this linux business for today and try my hand at drawing, extend the linux business deadline to Monday instead.

Yes, that's what i will do! (Gotta do it while i feel like it)

I start with tutorials

My friend who i consider a skilled artist (he wants to be a tattoo artist) suggested drawing lots of triangles and linking them together, when i said "but that way you can't draw people" he replied "add cylinders too".

1 This one was kinda hard to follow cus of the accent.
It had a good point, "Trust in yourself and don't be afraid of making mistakes while you draw", this one has become second nature to me in every single thing i do, which is why i don't hesitate to do this. She seems to be drawing to impress her family and friends, my goals are not as shallow. PORN! (jk :D)

2 <- bound to take a while... yeah, i gave up on it.. too much text.

Now i learned i have to focus on

Learning to draw in 2.5D (i.e. 3D), both distances, and shapes, this can be done with drawing different geometry.
Organize/Sketch what i intend to draw roughly before i actually draw it.
Lighting & Shadows
Determine my art style (Easy to tell what i like, but i have high standards so this'll be tough)
Start by drawing portraits.

Lets see, my first image today shall be a monster portrait, where's my monster list! Dryad... yeah, i'll start by drawing a female dryad portrait.. For some reason i think that's easier than human.

Catch: I don't have any artist pencils...
Solution: Find a standard academic wooden pencil for substitute.

Pencil: Check
Sharpener: Check
Eraser: Check
Paper: Check

Lets try this.

Oh yeah, hanging in this bar isn't enough, i need to start counting... goal is 2 minutes.

Bar Hang: 20s

Ok, i decided what i'll do.

I'll pick a really really nice portrit by an artist i like (maybe hector enrique or shadman, i like tony taka but his style doesn't suit my personality) then i practice like mad on one facial attribute at a time... Eyes, Mouth, Nose,Hair, etc.... And eventually try to make my own portrait in a similar style.

Just who is this genius composer of the soundtrack in Non Non Biyori? this is amazing!

Anyways,  i found a tutorial for drawing anime character faces, starting with the eyes, and i drew that, then i looked at the eyes of the characters in non non biyori and turns out they're drawn in the same style. However, this is not the style that i want to have, i want to have wider, sharper eyes (in general). That one is way too generic. However from that tutorial i should pick up on how to shape faces. get to that later. First hector's eyes.

I notice he rarely draws characters that look straight at you (they usually have their face angled, looking slightly to the side, might be one of the reasons his pictures look so great..

I decided to find 3 pictures.

1 2 3

Lets see, i love most things about his art style, but his eyes aren't exactly sharper, lets look at shadman.

1 2 3

Lets see out of these 6...

2 by elsevilla
1 & 2 by shadman

seem to suit the style i have in mind, problem thought that shadman really even more rarely than elsevilla points the eyes directly out of the image, but that'll just be good practice. so i'll practice all 3 of these.

Allright, mimicking these, the one i liked best was elsevilla's one (see? my judgement wasrather off that shadman's style was for me, i do know through his art though that me and him have a lot in common)

And out of the 3, Raven's eye was most successful, Korra's least.

I learned a lot from this, Especially shadman's work, i notice that he relies very heavily on colors over outlines when detailing the eyes (he avoids drawing lines whenever he can  i believe) and he uses lighting and shading to make the eyes appear lifelike.

However not only do i like elsevilla's eyes the most, i also found it the easiest to draw, so i'll try to draw his other ones now.

starting with 1

From drawing one, i realized the same thing about elsevilla's eyes, however he doesn't avoid drawing lines so much, instead he has a lot more shading in his pictures than shadman. I think what makes his art so good is probably the combination of shading and coloring really really well. Vibrant colors and dark shades.

Went pretty decently, now 3

With 3 i decided to take it to another level, i drew both eyes instead of just one, but the second eye i drew more as a copy of my own drawn eye rather than a copy of the original, surely it was nowhere near as good, but... it still works. I'll stick with this one, i quite like it, next up is mouth i guess. Once i've rested my neck.

Bar hang: 30s (ouchie)

The thing that i know is that it must become natural for me, i need to be able to draw an eye practically by instinct. So i need to have sort of a pattern.

However, i notice that artists while they do have certain rules they work within, boundaries... they don't usually stick to just one style for each body part, for example, they sometimes draw fat people and sometimes skinny, the eyes don't always have the same shape, only "roughly" the same shape. Something to worry about later.

I think i'm going about this the right way, instead of following a tutorial made by some medicore artist, i should try to mimick the art style of an artist i actually like, then once i'm good at it modify it to what i want my art to be like.

I've gotta start somewhere, but it's within my nature to start at "hard", that's why i started with Gentoo when trying to learn linux, then ended up with arch cus gentoo was a bit too hard. (Not too hard, too unstable unless it's in the hands of an expert that is) Jumping in the deepest pool i can find to learn to swim, so there's no saving me if i sink.

I like to think that the limits of my learning from a source, is the capabilities of said source. Learning from the weak won't make me strong, learning from the strong will  be a lot tougher but more worthwhile.

I also know that learning by seeing is not exactly a good way to learn, but it seems like the only option when learning to draw (all tutorials just make me draw images that have already been drawn, so why draw shit when i can try to draw quality, like elsevilla's stuff?)

Anyways, mouth, same images, lets see.

Shadman's 1
Elsevilla's 2 and 3

Why? they actually draw the lips. And not in a super weird position.

I'll start with Korra...

As i kind of expected, doesn't work out, it's too simple, it requires the rest of the face to be identified as a mouth, largely because the lips are very minimalistic (only the lower lip is drawn, lips aren't shadman's style) but also because the teeth don't have any lines.

Elsevilla's star wars chick worked out pretty decently, but it relies heavily on colors which i'm not using just yet. And so, finally  the amazon...
I actually slightly modified this one myself, but it looks pretty decent. So, nose...

Nose looks good on all the pics. I'll take Korra and the amazon for it though

Korra's nose looked pretty decent, the amazon's nose takes a whole lot more skill to make but also looks fairly decent.

The last remaining two pieces of the puzzle are ears and hair. I think i'll start with what i've already learned though and try to sketch a face.

It was reasonably successful for a firs tt ry, and i haven't done hair yet. Let's see, hair i'll take from elsevilla's 2.

As i expected, hair is tough  to copy, you can't exacytl copy it line for line, only the outlines.

And i have sketched a face, nothing like a Driad as originally intended, but a face no less. I forgot the ears though.

Pretty? no

Good? no

Decent? yes.

Excellent considering it's the first thing i've drawn for like... years. Stickmen not included.

OH, that's right

I forgot shading. But that's not something i can do just yet.

Before i call it a good day for trying to learn to draw, i think i should try to draw a portrait without any assistance, i.e. the only help i'll have is the tmental images i've got from drawing what i have up till now. So, dryad or something? i'll try. If i have any success on this whim of mine of trying to draw in the deadline i've set, i'll probably scan in and upload my progress online for all to see. How far i came in a month. If i'm dissatisfied though, i won't. So pray i succeed. Well (it actually seems like i will, judging by my progress already in one day, we shall see)

Eyes done.. Pretty successful.

Nose done... better than before maybe.

Mouth done... Lips successful, rest not so much... i'll redraw this part...

Lips are barely half decent, thep roblem is teeth.

Hrmpfh, that'll do for now. So, hair and ears...

I called drawing only 1 ear, turned out ok i guess.

Overall, obvious amateur work, now to make some lines so i can call it a dryad...

There, dryad :)

It's definitely nothing pretty, in fact this is fucking creepy, but for my first attempt at original work, it wasn't so bad. Now, i'm putting art on hold until linux is finished. i bettered hurry up and finish linux, because this was kinda fun. When my 1 mont hdeadline of practicing art (in which time i will also be working on the game btw, artwork will just be between the lines kind of thing) i will draw this same dryad again. then compare the two, if i can see any remarkable difference and decide to pursue this i'll scan them and upload them to somewhere nice, maybe i'll make a deviantart page or something, after that i will buy myself a nice tablet and start drawing in my PC. If i reach that point, i'll give myself 3 months deadline to decide whether i can realistically be skilled enough to draw the artwork for my own VN and be satisfied with the art or not. If i fail, that'll be the end of my artist career unless it turns into a hobby like i said earlier.

I should try that triangle thing...

Oh right... i got so caught up in art i nearly forgot my workouts.

Headstand 80s (1m, 20s) <- wow, i didn't lose much of my capabilities in doing this one....
Short Bridges: 150 (<- wow, i lost 0 out of these, last time i did them i did 150 too, or 3x50 in 1 go)
Crow Stand: 30s (thought i didn't even make 20 last time O_o, this one is kind of sick btw, balancing...)

So what, the guy is doing crow stands and headstands now?! that looks fucking retarded! i can't imagine that doing anything much! (<- right?)

Well, i agree, they look completely retarded... But they're a build up for handstands, which are then in turn a build up for handstand pushups.

"Handstand pushups? are those even real? i thought that only existed in anime!" yes, me too... until this workout program told me it's the stuff for noobs... Which is what motivated me so much, i thought "wow, if i can do even just 10 handstand pushups, i'll be pretty satisfied with my bodily strength... this guide says i can do a lot more brutal stuff than that so lets go!"

The major difficult stepping stone towards handstands is the crow stand, it's a difficult act of balancing yourself with your hands as the only bodypart touching the surface, a slight failure and you'll crash face first into the floor.

My progression standard for going from crow stands to "Wall Handstand" is 1 minute stable crow stand.

Then from Wall Handstand to Half Wall Handstand Pushup is 2 minutes handstand.

I supposedly need 2 minutes of headstand to progress to crow stand, but i decided since they're so different (one of them is meant to balance your body with your hands alone on the ground, the other is meant to adapt your body to being upside down) i decided to just do both of them simultaneously, and i will keep doing headstands until i get to wall handstands. Why? they're convenient as they strengthen my neck and scalp, and strengthening my neck is particularly useful for headbanging without getting a sore neck for 4 days afterwards. Last metal festival i went to  which was last summer, not long after i had been doing these exercises i was that one guy on the way back home that didn't have a sore neck.

Headstands is why, it's a shame really that i'm so good for headbanging but i rarely go out at all. But "When" i do go out, it's usually for a metal concert ^_^


Now, i hit the progression standard on short bridges, which is 3x50 (on the easier exercises though, i buff things up a bit and combine them all into 1 large set instead of 3 sets) so tomorrow i'll go back to Straight Bridges, which i never progressed beyond yet.

Next monday i hope to progres through wall pushups again  doing a 1x150 so i can hurry back to where i had progressed with pushups before.

One thing that's unique about this training program is that unlike most others that either focus on beefing up OR focus on losing fat, this program is about training yourself to get maximum "functional" strength in as short a time as possible, it's meant to make you superman in a year or two, with as little effort as possible. (2 exercises per day 3 days a week? takes under an hour each of these 3 days man... and the exercises are so light that i usually don't break enough sweat to need to shower afterwards, however... my muscles feel it a lot more than any gym workout.)

It focuses on mastering your own body, doing this will make you capable of stuff bodybuilders can only dream of. No matter how many weights you lift you ain't gonna do handstand pushups... This is because lifting weights focuses on manipulating objects outside of your own body, the human race actually used to be stronger, in general and on average BEFORE the gym craze, think about that a bit :)

I've tried all kinds of workouts, this one is the only one that ever suited me because
1: low time consumption
2: i can do it at home (although i had to get myself a pullup bar)
3: it's brutally efficient (you get toned like a beast in just a month or two, if you don't have fat to hide it that is)
4: It's focus is the same as mine when i do workouts, i don't do workouts to look good, but to gain functional strength. That is strength that i can actually use to be superior to others in any physically straining situation.

I also hear, although just from the book with the program, but i hear that doing these workouts also translates to being stronger at the gym (i.e. manipulating objects outside of your own body) and that most people who are good at bodyweight training (calisthenics) will usually be able to pwn regular gym-goers if it comes to a competition of who can lift heavier weights.

I'll have to put that to the test a year from now or so

Now i'm drifting so far off topic from development and what i was doing...

But that's ok, i've decided that this is to be my personal blog, rather than an actual hands on development blog, i shall create another one later dedicated solely to Amodos Universe game development later. When the time is right and i've announced something.

I decided I'd be better off making a deviantart page early. If I'm aiming to learn fast then that's definitely the place to ask for help. Google didn't do a particularly good job. My drawing is done for today, but i'll do more of it tomorrow. I think i changed my mind about waiting with it till this linux business is over, yeah, i'll start now. it's not like i need to dedicate entire days to this stuff (like linux >_<)

But well, here's my quite empty profile...

Oh i just realized, I can learn a lot from shadman's speedpainting videos, it seems what he does is that he starts by drawing a sketch, then imports it to photoshop and draws on top of it.

Looking at his first speedpainting vid and his latest, the quality of his art has gone up ridiculously much, and he is drawing top quality retarded fast. I mean 3 hours for that? serious? Give me 3 days and i won't be able to draw anything half as good.

I'd like to draw in a style not so different from his actually, being able to learn from him (even if not very well, since i only get a split second to see him do like a couple of minutes work) is priceless.

However it's not like i can reach his level in a year, or 4 months. I can maybe draw something similar to his stuff, but he's got shading (guess the name comes from somewhere huh) and a lot of details that i'm not gonna learn to make in just a few months, hell, i need to work hard on making my art look like it's 3D.

Bar hang: 30s

Oof, by now my skin is really starting to show some callus(?) or just tear. I'll consider giving it rest tomorrow.

Lets see, i'm aiming for becoming a semi-decent character artist in a month. At least this good.

Then if that succeeds, 3 months from them i want to be as good as jadenkaiba if that succeeds i'm switching my focus to environment, drawing backgrounds.

I should note that hector enrique (elsevilla) uses corel painter, while most artists use photoshop.

My traditional art style which will be sort of anime/manga-like is all good and fine, but in the end i think i'd really like to be able to do some badass CG like this eventually.

I'm rushing a lot, i know, it might be considered unrealistic by many, and i will find out i guess. I realized that there simply are no good artist tutorials, the best i can get is learn how to make a mediocre looking object (body, face, tree, chair...) then turn it into my own technique and style with time as i modify it to look better, or what i think is better.

That's it for today i guess.

Nyan Passu!

Even if i didn't finish zettai bouei leviathan yet, i decided to start watching Non Non Biyori today. I watched the first episode, and it's ridiculously cute, truly a perfect world. But what i really caught on was the amazing soundtrack, except for the opening and ending every single track in there sounds... nostalgic... It's like i've heard them before, every last one of them.

Something that others usually  would call heartwarming, but for me it's... uncomfortable, because i can't place in my head where i've heard these before, but these are usually really good song so i want to know "A: Where i heard it before" and "B: The story behind the song (if there is one, usually it can be found in the lyrics themselves)"

But this soundtrack is absolutely magnificent, i was truly amazed by it.

Oh, there are a few details to iron out in regards to my laptop after all.

1: System loading screen (Bootsplash)
2: Customize grub to look more cool (the boot manager, basically when i select an OS to boot into)
3: Make openbox detect my Print Screen button (atm i can't use it with openbox' keybinds system, maybe a third party software can do this)
4: Is there a fourth?

I'm seeing some decent benefits of having conky

1: I can see how long i've been awake (since it urn on the laptop first thing in the morning then turn it off when i go to sleep,it's constantly on inbetween)
2: I can see the programs that are hogging too much resources for their own good.
3: i can monitor my CPU Temp, i know something is wrong if it goes above 60° (70 is high, i think 100 or 120 is critical)
4: i can monitor the HDD Temp, just for luls. If yo8u're wondering it usually sticks around human body temperature (38° or so)
5: I can see my network usage, and all inbound and outbound connections, like i said before if i see ANY inbound connection i know somethings up, meaning the laptop is slightly harder to hack than before.

What i did on my TS3 server host machine was that i used iptables (fireawall) to block any and all incoming and outgoing connections, except the one on the TS3 server, that port is occupied by the TS3 server so the only way to hack it is to hack the server :P (I couldn't even SSH it if i wanted to with this firewall)

As a nice bonus, it's locked so the only way to access the computer is to either know or brute-force the password. Extreme security for a server anybody who really wants to is allowed to access right? oh yeah and the channels are encrypted too :D

Of course, getting a bootsplash (plymouth) i run into problems first thing. Damnit all, it won't show up!

I gave up on it, i'm just gonna go with splashy next and if that fails, fbsplash... hrmpfh, splashy didn't even build, i'm counting on you gentoo!

It's an outdated package but what the heck.

...

Oh great, i can't install a dependency for it called miscsplashutils.... that's great, it really is outdated huh, i guess splashy is my only option...

Lets see, i failed to build the latest splashy...

Ok well, i'm skipping this troublesome part for now and jumping to grub, i couldn't find a theme or a splash image i was satisfied with, so i just made one *cough* (by make i mean copied the work of two artists into one image and saved it after a little bit of basic photoshopping *cough*)

Allright, you know what... Bootsplash can suck it's own ass and the print screen button can go rot in hell.

It must be about time to switch focus to my main PC. (Laptop was just a side project, i'm amazed it was a successful one too!)

But now i'm sleepy and i should go to sleep. What i want to do on windows is to run X and Explorer together (I.e. i get all the X Server and linux functionality + all the windows functionality in one package) i think i'll be able to do it. It sounds like it's possible if i go about it the right way.

Finishing up the laptop

List, list, list...

Configure alsa till i'm satisfied with the speaker's output. (Get the beats audio speaker working...)
OpenBox key-bindings
Configure tint2 a bit (or find a better taskbar, maybe the LXDE one...)
Install some pointless eyecandy stuff (like conky... Ok, not pointless! this laptop has a history of overheating)
More pointless eyecandy like cursors
Configure & install fonts
Install a login manager (more pointless eyecandy, logging in and typing startx is easy enough...)
Configure the touchpad (fucking hate palm clicks)
And finally:
Find an alternative to my dictionary program (this could turn out to be difficult, if i can't find one i'll set up a windows XP virtual machine just for this purpose, which means i could just as well set up skype 6 on that)
...
...
Wine could run it? :O It must be able to run it! that thing is windows 98 kind of old! i must try! (chances are the dictionary will run better in wine than it does on windows 7! lol)

Oh i just figured out that my laptop actually has 4.1 speaker setup :O that's what beats-audio is.

Linux only detects 2/5 speakers on my laptop :O the weakest 2 in fact. This is not acceptable.

So basically beats audio is 2.0 wired to 4.1...

Why the retardedness? why not just have a 4.1 setup? that would've been SO MUCH easier T_T

Yesterday i watched "La vie 'd'Adéle"  or "Blue is the warmest color" i had heard good things about that movie, but that.... that was just slow-paced pornography. Decent for porn, but shit for a movie. One unique factor of it though is that it's super realistic, the protagonist goes through a lot of places where you'll be able to relate, for example the movie starts by her very realistically missing a bus.

I dislike the protagonist, i rarely dislike female protagonists but this one i do dislike, and it seems that this was intentionally done (that is... some ridiculously stupid things she does) what annoys me the most about her though is not the stupid things she does, but her indecisiveness about her own sexuality. I guess that's what bisexual means huh... So i hate bisexual people in general for being indecisive? so be it!

Anyways knowing that it's a 4.1 setup makes things a lot easier for me to troubleshoot, now i just simply check if the speakers next to me are working or not by placing my ear next to them (a lot easier than flipping the blasted thing over and checking the subwoofer)...

Oh, i got the subwoofer working with hdajackretask, but not the other 2 speakers :/

I think i got the other 2 speakers working too.

I in the end didn't have to configure alsa at all, just some hdajackretask. The flaw is that 2 out of my 4 speakers are set to a lower volume than the rest :/ but oh well, i can live with it, at least the sound is pretty nice.

The most important Keybind configuration is here, i downloaded volumeicon and it allowed me to est a keybind for mute, increase and decrease volume which saves me the trouble of doing it directly in openbox :D
The only other keybind i think i'll need is changing workspaces with the pager and the media keys (play/pause/fwd/backward)

Getting rid of the palm clicks was super easy.

I installed the microsoft fonts, or a good handful of them anyways (i used an AUR package for it called ttf-win7-fonts or something like that) now i just need to configure the font rendering a bit ...

Oh look the dictionary installed :O

And it offers me all the functionality that windows 7 does, except that what would usually crash it just hangs it instead. Interesting.

By now, all the programs i wanted to run run on my linux system. Technically...

That's pretty good.

Right, i have to do exercises today. what was it again.. squat and pullup? oh... wednesdays are the hardest shit....

Until my palms can handle holding up my bodyweight for an extended duration (the skin on them anyways) i aint gonna do many pullups i guess. I like to do a few leg raises while i hang. I was honestly surprised by how easy it is to do a few leg raises (must be all these knee raises that made it so easy) My palms tire out before my muscles do for doing said leg raises. (That said, monday is leg raise day, just that i'm not far enough in the "10 steps" (that's easiest to hardest exercise) to be doing them. I just do them to do something while i hang hehe)

I seem to be close to the finish line with this laptop. I've set the keybinds for pause/play/prev/next music playback (although i haven't transferred any music onto the drive just yet, my music library is quite massive you see... 200gb or so. To transfer it to the laptop i'd ideally remove the hard drive and plug it into my own PC, however since the storage drive is ext4 file system i would preferably need to have the linux OS on my laptop, there are 2 workarounds, one being using the NTFS partition of the laptop to transfer the files in 3 runs, another being doing it over LAN.)

So lets see, what remains is...

OpenBox key-bindings
Install some pointless eyecandy stuff (like conky... Ok, not pointless! this laptop has a history of overheating)
More pointless eyecandy like cursors
Install a login manager

there, The only kebinds i think i need to configure in openbox is Win+1-4 for the workspaces, and i'll be set...

Yeah that took 1 minute to do, now... the rest of the stuff is just pointless eyecandy type of stuff.

Oh right the word for login manager is display manager (told you it didn't make sense)

Allright i've got Qingy and Slim...

I'm gonna go ahead and call Qingy trash,. Slim is "OK" maybe i'll find something shinier...

SDDM is cool.
LightDM looks decent (it's the old ubuntu thing)
Entrance is cool (but experimental =( )
MDM looks perfect, i'll try that one.

Problem: all of them are AUR except LightDM, ah well.

I'll start with MDM. I installed it, it was so easy to install i kinda didn't believe it, and it supports animated HTML themes :O i can do that... oh wait i can't draw, dammit, well i guess i'll just use that guys theme then. (But at least i can code my own if i want to using art by others :D)

Now the problem with this bastard here is that i can't seem to find out how to set the startup programs (for example, i have several programs like my composite manager i must start when i log in to openbox if i don't just want to get a blank screen). This is taking a while, thats why i saved it for late (and conky for last)

Solved: i simply configure openbox's startup programs (duh!) silly me.

And then of course i run into problems. (Linux shut up and obey me already!)

And of course since i'm a genius i already knew how to solve it. The problem was that i lost my sound, the solution was to give my user direct hardware access to my sound devices by adding him to the audio group. Good as new. I'm satisfied with this for now.

Final Step: Conky.

Once i tackle that (which i btw never have before) i can finally say that my laptop has successfully been set up with linux, and for the first time i've got nothing more i feel the need to do with it/install on it...
Allright, i'm fairly satisfied with my Conky now, one minor issue, but lets see i'd like to monitor where inbound network connections are coming from... Nvm, i just wante to disable them altogether with UFW, i shouldn't have any inbound connections on this laptop since i'm not torrenting on it. so now i just let it show me if it ever gets an inbound connection, and if it does i'll know something is up.

I notice that the TS3client CPU usage is absurd onl inux , it's using 15-30% of my dual core CPU, that's just a lot. Must be a pretty bad bug.

Anyways, i've now got conky, but just before i could leave this laptop be and call it complete, an annoying one shows up. Turns out my openbox doesn't detect my print-screen button input, that is problematic if i want to take screenshots.

Anyways, it's getting late (or well, actually early but my sleeping cycle is fukd) and i should do my exercises while i still have the mental strength. for them. Lets see, i've got roughly 3 days to wrap up my desktop now. That's actually pretty short, it took like 3 days to set this stupid laptop up.

Jacknife Squats: 40 (<- These get pretty brutal for beginners, the first time i did these i literally couldn't stand afterwards, or well, i could stand but not walk, i fell over on my way out of the shower afterwards :/ )
Jacknife Pullups: 10 (<- i'm skipping the table pullup thing because it's too hard :O jakcnifes are actually easier)

I could've pulled 50 or 60 jacknife squats, but i decided it's not good to exhaust myself when i'm returning to a workout routine, my muscles will get even more sore than they normally would.

On the pullups it was the skin of my palms that gave up before my muscles did :( but 10 isn't so bad for a firstie.

Anyways, that's it for today :)