What's Been Going On: June 2021

Hey! It's been a while. Things are still up in the air for me, unfortunately.

Over a month ago, my computer broke down. The drive that Windows was installed on suddenly couldn't be read by my machine. I bought a replacement drive, but I haven't put it in yet. I don't really like reinstalling Windows; it takes ages to get everything back in order. With everything else going on in my life, I just haven't had the energy to deal with it, especially if it turns out to be something else. 

I have enough money saved up that I could almost just rebuild the entire computer (even considering I never got the covid stimulus I'm owed), but I still don't know how much of that money is spoken for with regards to what I might owe for rent assistance with my Mom, because the housing association still hasn't talked to us. They went radio silent with us when the pandemic started. We're supposed to be able to send emails or call them, but that has never worked -- we'd have to talk to someone in person. They closed their offices because of covid19, so we haven't been able to talk to anyone.

If that HDD is toast, it's not going to be devastating, but it will be a greater-than-zero loss. I kept my music collection on the same drive as Windows, so we're talking 20 years worth of songs. Most of those can be reacquired pretty easily, but there will be small little things that will be lost forever. Thankfully, by pure coincidence, I exported a list of (almost) every song I had just a few months ago and uploaded it to Google Docs, so I have picture of what I had in order to rebuild it all. Though it is a little worrying it only says 2600 tracks, when I know I had 5000+ on an old MP3 player. But this playlist probably doesn't have emulated music like SPCs or VGMs. It's just MP3s.

What's worrying is the archival material that will be lost. Windows was on there, but beyond Windows, the other partition was mostly old websites, old games, and old images. It's purely my fault if that stuff gets lost; I was even talking with someone about backup options a few months ago and I knew it was something I needed to look in to, but just wasn't in a good position to digest at the time. 

Other lost material will be the most recent version of Bubsy, all of my Vegas presets, most of my FL Studio presets, things like that. Thankfully, recent builds of things are mostly in good hands. When the renovation was coming up, I took precautions to backup a handful of current projects to the cloud. Obviously not a full-drive backup, but whatever was most important to me at the end of February is safe. So while I lost the most recent version of Bubsy I was working on in April of 2021, I still have a snapshot of the game from February 2021. Also, things like OverBite are safe, as is Draconian, Space King, etc. 

It's just the extremely new and extremely old stuff that is going to be lost forever. I had a backup of my Photobucket on that drive, which had tons of old artwork. The raw HTML files for older websites were probably on that drive. Old fan game projects. And so on.

The "good" news is that drive isn't (or at least wasn't last I checked) completely dead yet. I got it to power on once by swapping to a different SATA connection on the motherboard where everything seemed fine for about an hour before it caused Windows to BSOD before disappearing again. I have a USB HDD enclosure for SATA drives, so if it's just the old drive that's busted and not something else deeper in the PC, I might be able to plug it in to the USB enclosure and try to pull files off of it until it dies. A friend of mine apparently had something extremely similar happen to him last year, and he said once he got the drive in a USB enclosure it actually worked totally fine for quite a while. 

So that means some of those files could still be rescued! Maybe even all of them. I still haven't unpacked my room all the way so I have to find what box my USB enclosures are in, which I was in the process of doing when my Mom was checked in to the hospital.

The doctors say it's a problem with her sciatica. That's a nerve that runs from your lower back, through your thigh, down to your knee and calf. She's in an extreme amount of pain and can barely walk. She's also allergic to aspirin, which is typically used for inflammation like this, so she's been double miserable. Tylenol works, but not quite as well. They gave her one prescription of steroids, and when those stopped working, they gave her the same prescription but stronger. She just finished those today and is still in a sorry state. So I've been helping as much as she'll let me, and worrying about her all hours of the day. 

I came real close to sitting down and recording a podcast for you all, but I just couldn't find the time or energy to do it, and on top of that, I am now writing this post from my cousin's -- I'm pet sitting for her again while she visits her brother in another state, so I'm not even at home right now. (For the record, my Mom came with me this time, so I can keep an eye on her and help even while I'm pet sitting).

Anyway! That's the state of things that are messing up my ability to get work done. But it's not all bad, I guess, as I still ended up publishing Gut Check: Sonic Central (continuing something I started at TSSZ) and another article revisiting my feelings about Sonic Mania (something that, judging by the notes, people don't actually want to read, lol).

I also tried running a Google Ad for my Jurassic Park Video, in the hopes of jump starting it with more views. It wasn't really worth it. I chronicled a lot of the process on Twitter, and it's kind of too complex to go in to detail in just a single paragraph. You give Google a budget on how much you want to spend on ads, but how much they actually spend depends on who is bidding on ad space that day, which means I said I wanted to spend $32 and will actually be paying them closer to $44 in order to run sidebar ads on Youtube over E3 weekend. Some 40,000 people saw my ad but only a few hundred actually clicked on it.

Funnily enough, of the people who clicked on the ad, most watched the video all the way to the end, which tells me it's a problem with either the title or the thumbnail. People like the video once they see it, it's just a problem of getting your foot in the door, you know? Anyway, for the amount of money I make on Youtube and Patreon, I consider that a pretty expensive experiment and it was mostly a failure. I'd like to try again with a different thumbnail, but I shouldn't go throwing money around like that. I mean, that's more than half of a Patreon paycheck right there.

The other good news is that I think I finally had a breakthrough on my Sonic-Forces-but-not-really video. As you know, I've been struggling with what to do about this for a while -- it's too far out to just do a straight Sonic Forces video review, so it's become more of an essay about things Sonic Forces does and where they came from. Part of the concept was adapted from an old idea I was thinking of submitting to Waypoint back when they first opened up article submissions, but it's the sort of thing where it's easy to go in a zillion different directions, which has always lead me to a dead end where it felt like I became too unfocused.

Generally when I have a script idea, I just write it. If it's a game review, I might take notes while I play, but usually I just write the whole script in one go almost as sort of a stream of consciousness, which I consider the "first draft." Then I'll sit on it for a few days, come back to it with fresher eyes, re-write parts that I think sound rough, expand on things I think need lengthened, etc. After a week or two weeks (or three, or...) of sanding down the edges and polishing it up, the script will be considered "finished." I couldn't really do this with the Sonic Forces essay, because I'd get 30 or 40% written, take a step back, and have no idea where I was going. I was rambling my way down various rabbit holes with zero picture on how the structure of what I was saying. Every time I'd back up and try again, a different dead end.

So I tried to back way up -- instead of writing the script, I figured I'd break it down in to a simplified "cliffnotes" version of the script. I got further there -- probably closer to 60 or 70%, because it was easier to get an overhead view of what the video looked like in the big picture. But I still ran in to a dead end and realized I had no idea how to tie everything together for the ending. I knew where I was trying to go, but I didn't know how to get there. 

What finally helped was to pull out a second time. The "cliffnotes" script was still 3 or 4 pages long, which for a simple list of bulletpoints is huge. So I simplified even more. I broke the video all the way down in to a list of chapter titles with a simple description of what each chapter contains. Viewed from this far away, suddenly the whole thing came in to focus. It gave me nice, neat little containers to put all of my thoughts in to, and I finally figured out how to get to the ending I want.

That was basically only a day or two before I left to come pet sitting, so I haven't had much time or energy to fill out those chapters properly yet, but it's basically just a case of writing it all now that I know what to write. 

After the video is finally done and out, I'm curious how I want to distribute this. I think it'd be interesting to see all these fragments and the process it took for me to finally get to the end result. They run the gamut of fairly large (1200+ words) to really small (less than a page of text) so I dunno if I should just post each revision individually, or maybe just pack them all in to a PDF at the end of the day. We've got time to figure that out.

May all of this be the start of a trend of good news, because I'm really starting to need it. See you when I see you!