polytropica

i'm alive v2

Oh god why has it been 10 months since my last post

Whatever, it doesn't matter. It turns out a lot happens in 10 months. Honestly, I can barely remember everything that's happened.

what happened

• I actually managed to break my arm last winter by slipping on the snow. I broke my humerus just before my elbow, and they had to do some pretty serious surgery and I had to go through 3 months of physical therapy. I don't quite have full motion back but it's close enough that it doesn't interfere with normal everyday tasks.
• I've now had a girlfriend for 8 months now. We met at a makerspace we both went to at the time (that we are now not regularly going to anymore) and hit it off from there. It is the absolute last thing I expected to happen, but I've never been happier. We've been living together for around 2 months, and it has been really great. She had a decent size home lab and we're working on it together. We have a minecraft server on it, and I'm getting back into playing minecraft again because of her. We also decided to start blogging together. Her blog is at blog.daemo.nz. As of writing, there's only one post on it, so we'll see how it goes.
• The game dev project I was working on collaboratively stalled out in March after I lost motivation to continue working on it. It remains in limbo, and I'm not really sure what I want to do with it. We currently have a solid 5 minutes of gameplay after many months of work. A lot of the systems are worked out, but there's still so much work to do. Making games takes so much effort, it's actually insane.
• I've been a part of the Stone Story: Ascension alpha test. I paid $100 dollars to get my name in the game, and was solidly active in it for around 6 months and submitted a couple of bug fixes.
• I worked on a program that connects to Stone Story RPG via the MindConnect interface to do a bunch of crazy stuff. I managed to RNG manipulate the Uulaa shop lost chest to give infinite ki crystals, manipulate the mushroom shop delta chest to always drop a +15 enchant (1/8000 odds btw), decrypt the save data and read all sorts of things from it, and a bunch more things that I'm probably forgetting. It's currently unreleased, as I've lost interest in working on Stone Story recently.
• Becaaause Orb of Creation released its 1.0 update at the end of June, and I have been obsessed with that instead. I've sunk at least 200 hours into it, and am pushing against the limits of the game. I've crashed it at least 5 different ways, caused integer overflows, broken the UI, and I'm still not the most powerful player in the discord. In my personal opinion, it is one of the best incremental games ever made, why else would I spend 200 hours playing it?

regularly blogging is hard, actually

It turns out that doing anything consistently is pretty hard for me. It doesn't help that I want to do everything myself, which makes everything unnecessarily difficult. I seriously underestimated how much time and effort it takes to do this stuff. Hence, the almost a year break from this site.

Thankfully, my blog hasn't gone anywhere, and I can come back to it any time I want! I'm gonna do it! I'm gonna blog again! You can't stop me! (please don't stop me)

what next?

I had a bunch of ideas about what I wanted to blog about, and I still want to do that. It kinda sucks that these ideas are at least a year old by now, but I'm not going to let that stop me. I feel like my priorities have changed ever since I moved in with my partner: I code a lot less than I did before, and I also get out a lot less since I want to spend all my time with them. I love them a lot, but I can't spend literally all my time with them. I have to do my own things as well.

There's so much I want to talk about, but it takes so much effort to put it into words and get it up on a blog. But I have to try anyways. These ideas aren't going to get themselves on the page.

Time to get to work. Hopefully, we will meet again soon.