A Bunch of Stuff

As I've been lazy about writing over the past few months or so I'm going to start out what might be a posting bonanza (might not actually be a bonanza) with a summary post.  I've made some convenient bolded headings that are mostly indicitive of the sections so that those reading this can skip stuff they're not interested, which might be the entire post for all I know, but oh well?

New Car Smell

Starting with a follow-up from my previous post, I submitted my order for a Model 3, two years and a day after having made the reservation in the first place.  Delivery is supposed to be in 4-8 weeks, so we'll see what happens!  I got the long-range battery (499km range) and the premium interior, because those are mandatory at the moment, and decided to get the midnight silver paint which was the only optional upgrade I went with.

Nice and NEET

I spent the first couple months of this year, more or less, as a "NEET" which stands for "Not in Employment, Education or Training".  To my knowledge, the acronym is primarily used in Japan, despite being made up of English words, and is used to refer to people who have essentially dropped out of productive society.  Not entirely applicable in my case since I was actually looking for (and eventually found) full time work - I consider those two months to have been a much needed vacation as much as anything else.

So why use the acronym if I don't think it really applied to me?  Partly because I think it makes for a clever section heading, but mostly because it ties into an anime I watched back in the fall as I was facing the prospect of, lets say, a "NEET"-like few months.  The anime was "net-juu no susume" or "Recovery of an MMO Junkie" to use the crunchyroll title.  The series is about a 30 year old woman who decided to quit a highly stressful office job and became an "elite NEET" (in her words) and play MMOs all day - and then stuff happened.  I'm not going to get into any other details here (I may write another post about it) other than to say I absolutely adored the series (one of the highlights of my week while it was airing) and it really resonated with me, and not just because it had some similarity to the situation I found myself in for a couple of months.

Project Progress

One of the main things that I occupied myself with during my NEET-like period was my FR project that I've mentioned in some previous posts.  As I had a lot of time on my hands I pushed forward with it and tried to make as much progress as I could.  And I was at least somewhat successful!  As I was musing in my final post of last year, I decided to start working towards a "demo" of the game's first area.  The first part of this was to work out the plot details of the area.  I started out working on an actual detailed script and got a decent amount written but eventually decided that I would be better served by doing something on the level of a flow chart to get the major points worked out before getting too lost in the fine details (I do that sometimes).  This met with success and I currently have a mostly finished flow chart detailing the first area - there is one small branch that still needs to be finshed but it's not high priority for now because...

Unity

...I have started learning the Unity game engine for the purposes of putting together the eventual demo.  I am currently working on creating a framework that I can use to test out ideas for the combat system.  It's going along fairly well so far though now that I'm working full time again, the majority of the work is getting done on the weekends with a bit of poking at things in the evening.  I may write some more posts about my experience with Unity in the future.

Anywho, that is the summary of things that might be coming to this space in the future.  Please look forward to it!

Freak Out,
-TFitC 

 

Electric Boogaloo

So, I've been unintentionally quiet here of late.  I may possibly get around to writing an actual post in the near future but right now I just wanted to say:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!  It's happening!

*ahem*

Er, what's happening?  Well, almost two years ago I put down a reservation on a Tesla Model 3 shortly after the online reservations opened.  I wrote a post about it, even.  That was on Mar 31, 2016.  It looks like, as of today, almost two years later I can actually go through with the order, if I so choose, which makes my "two years" statement at the end of the linked post almost spot on.  (Though, to be fair, production actually started last summer, it's just taken a while for them to work through the queue.)

I haven't gone through with the order yet.  I'm going to look at things over the weekend and figure out what I'm going to do.

Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Schroedinger's Blog

The Word Smith continues to be on hiatus.  This is due, in part, to some Real Life stuff that happened last month that threw a bunch of stuff out of whack.  As such, the continuation of The Word Smith is delayed and, while I'm hoping to get back to it before too long, the Real Life stuff is, for the moment, ongoing and occupies a (not small) chunk of the time I would normally have used for working on the comic.  So, expect delays, is what I'm saying.

Until such a time as The Word Smith resumes, I may try posting some other things here.  Or I may not.  Treat it like Schroedinger's Cat, if you will.  Or don't.

Until some time in the future,
Freak Out,
-TFitC

The Post Attacks! The Post misses, no damage!

Right.  So.  New page of The Word Smith.  Same Wordy place.  Same Wordy chanel.

Short post today because stuff, not that I am really given to long, drawn-out posts these days.  If The Word Smith continues on its current every other week schedule I may try to do something different here on the off-weeks.  No promises.

It seems rather windy out today.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Blargglesplorgglenarf

It seems like the Word Smith's sparse and/or erratic update schedule will be continuing for the foreseeable future  (note:  I do not claim to be able to foresee the future.)  This is due to a paper submission deadline coming up in a little over a couple of months so I may need to sacrifice some comic time for actual work work time.  Shock!  I know.

The past few days have also been a tad work-heavy as I was crunching for a presentation this morning - just a lab-specific thing, nothing particularly special, but treating it as a personal deadline, nonetheless.  Went reasonably well:  well enough that I will consider my goals to have been met.  However, the crunching left me feeling a bit, well blarg, so I spent this afternoon working on a sprite animation that has nothing whatsoever to do with work.  And here it is:

(Because the internet doesn't have enough animated gifs.)

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Return of the Freak

Hello Word Smith fans, or Word Smith tolerators, or just random people who got here by accident and are all like "what's all this then?"  (flee, flee before it's too late!)  You may have noticed and perhaps even cared (even if just a little) that there hasn't been an update in a while.  I guess I've kind of fallen off the update wagon after the One Acts ended and my down time has been somewhat longer than I anticipated with not even an interlude in the interim (bad Freak!)  Whelp, to rectify this, Episode 6 will be starting next week, come hell or high water.  Indeed, the title page is almost finished, though it's been almost finished for a couple of weeks now.

Updates will from now on also be Thursday mornings (assuming all goes well) rather than Tuesday mornings as previously.  I figure that my Thursday mornings are usually unproductive so might as well use that time for posting the weekly blog/comic thing.

And becuase it's what I do, here's a page from the sketch book:

Yes, I'm back, and what better way to celebrate than with... hands.

Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Engarde!

Right.  So, it's an interlude week this week for the Word Smith with things resuming next week, most likely.

And here is the sketchbook version of the interlude (though you should totally check out the finished version as well because colour!)

It also occurs to me that I never did post the styles I was attempting to emulate for my "chameleon" post so here they are should anyone actually care (left-to-right, top-to-bottom):
Power Puff Girls
Peanuts
Yoshitaka Amano (Final Fantasy concept artist)
Rurouni Kenshin (specifically modelled after Misao - one of the two that were rather iffy)
Vision of Escaflowne (nose probably needed to be more pointy)
Studio Ghibli (another one that was kind of iffy)
Scott Pilgrim
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Garfield

And, that's all for this week.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Stuff I Want to Do

I guess I'm one of those people who never seems to have enough time to do everything that they want to do, though I'll freely admit that I don't always make as good use of my time as I should (or could). It also doesn't help that I'm constantly coming up with new things to work on and never actually finish many of my projects, so things end up kind of piling up. (I am referring to personal projects here, not school or work related things.)

With less than a week until FASS is over for another year, I expect to be having at least a bit of extra spare time to do stuff in, so in an attempt to focus my efforts on a small number of projects I thought I'd try blogging about them. Not that I really expect this to make me get stuff done, but at least it'll give me something to write about (and my small number of readers something to read about) other than the usually complaining about TAing and marking and stuff.

Anyway, on to the stuff! (In no particular order.)

QRT

My current programming project which I blogged about in my previous post. There's not really anything to say about it at this point beyond what I've already said about it so I'll just say that I plan to continue working on it.

Writing

I do like to write and I sometimes think that I'd like to try my hand at writing a novel - not that I really care if it were to get published or not, but I'd like to at least write one! I missed NaNoWriMo due to being embroiled in FASS edits, so I'm planning on picking a month (likely March) for my own personal NaNoWriMo. We'll see how that goes. Though I'm going to continue beyond just one month if necessary.

Comic

I'd also like to try my hand at making my own comic. This is something which will also be a useful experience for my research. I've got some ideas for a short 3-5 page test comic which I will probably get started on shortly after FASS finishes. I plan to document the process so there's bound to be more posts on this topic in particular on my blog. I also want to get back into the habit of drawing more so this will give me a nice focused outlet for that.


Those are the main projects I'm planning on focusing on, in addition to my PhD research, of course. Expect to see posts on these in the future, depending on progress.

Freak Out
-TFitC