EPTSo... when did I last post... Ah. April. That seems like so many years ago. That was around the time the Hungry Days began. The months of off and on starvation because lolpoverty. Then, at the height of the crisis, my Grandmother watched youtube videos about tarot cards and horoscope and thought it was a good time to evict her husband so I could pay for both our rents at once with my already non-existent pocket change.
Oh don't even get me started on the whole religion and superstition crap. The more I am forced to endure this bible belt bullshit the more likely I am to off myself with the broad side of a table. It is maddening that people can be so delusional. Yes, the end of the world is in fucking September. Just like December 2012. Please. Stop asking me to make e-mails for free tarot card readings. I'm not touching the panda again.
I fear, though, that starvation, craziness and debt were the least troubling things of the last months. Humans are tough as shit. It takes more than a mangled knee, a partially mangled lung, and weeks of no food to bring a cis white male down. This got pretty close, though! Wait. Do you count as cis if you've never so much as held eye contct with someone before?
I did have a huge blog written up about this whole thing, but you see, here in the mystical land of 1950's Canada, underground powerlines are commonly blown over by a mild breeze, and the resulting drought in hamsters turning wheels meant I lost the post data. Sorry.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/mxowacDl.jpg)
Human contact is an unnecessary thing. So long as you have a stupidly fluffy cat, you can pretty much live like a moleman. Source: I'm a moleman. Well, I was a moleman before I found a cat on the street, and I'd be a moleman no matter what choice was offered to me, were a choice ever offered. However, last year I had to go outside more than the previous 15 years combined, and all due to the cat. 2014 ended in me losing my life savings, my home, and nearly my last shred of humanity. 2015 has served to test me just as much.
So, the
The cat's eye got a fucking melting ulcer.
What's a melting ulcer, demiamerican blogger?
Well, a melting ulcer is when bacteria in your eye eats your goddamn cornea. A melting ulcer can destroy an eye in a single day. A single day. I was balls to the wall against this proxy cheese for two and a half weeks not counting all the other crap I was trying to get control of before we hit the danger zone.
At the tail end of two years of nonstop bullshit starting with the whole pneumonia fiasco I was once again thrust into a month-long hyper-stressful emotional breakdown circus in which I got basically no sleep at all because of strict drug management. At the end of the month the infection is finally dying off and the cat looks like it will, once again, manage to just barely escape with its life. Don't tell the cat all of this because it's having the fucking time of its life between the box with a blanket I forged for it and all the attention it has been getting. So much damn purring and kneading. You wouldn't think the world was ending amidst all that, but it kind of was.
It's 1am, the 30th of August. In 2:15 hours I put in two antibiotics with a 15 minute drift between them and then finally pass out for the few hours of peace I will get until the next rotation. During the hours of this day I have been thinking long and hard, like the captain's log, figuring out what the fuck is even worth living for. Yes, I know, it's a question I've struggled with for a long time. But really, if the cat eventually goes under, which it will because age etc, I've actually got nothing left to live for whatsoever. I've often questioned how I want to go. Well, I'd love to just shoot myself. But this is Canada, and we're still a few revolutions off inventing firearms. What about a train? I think there's a mystical train-like object that passes through this overcrowded village, but I don't think it goes fast enough to guarantee fatality. Overdose on various drugs? Reliable mayhaps, but liver failure seems a terrible way to go. Oh, and you can't call it reliable, because I tried that a few times already, and I'm still here. Damnit. How about falling from a tall building? We have nothing taller than an outhouse.
Okay, offing oneself can actually be a pretty rough ordeal, and maybe I'd rather avoid it. But life has its dead-ends and so does evolution. I'm at both. Living is more miserable than not at this stage, but I still have a cat to hand antibiotics to, so I may as well waste time in style. What do I have to do? ... Oh. Right. I'm me.
28 and a half years old and I've actually got not a single inspiring thing to tell you other than "when your youth tells you living to the age of 20+ is going to be shit and only misery awaits onwards, listen to yourself". Mental disabilities are a curse in a society that refuses to acknowledge their existence, much less attempt to do anything about them. Of course we've been down this road before in these blogs, so I digress.
With Retribution dead in the water I had two more gambles to play in the passing year.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EqGArwhl.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IdoQGJIl.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IxXXBaGl.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/M862IsNl.png)
Apex F in a nutshell: I'm prepared and capable of redoing literally every single sound, model, texture, and particle effect in SC2 on top of adding all my new stuff. I already know how to do it and I already have it all accounted for. I have all of my data editor stuff accounted for and a lot of systems are functional and prototyped. Oh. The computer AI I rely on to make actual B&D missions performs like balls because the natives are incredibly badly optimized per Blizzard tradition. Um. I can't play my own maps with 2 players outside of 14fps on a friggin i7 920, and systems twice as powerful don't fare any better. Time to tap out. Shucks.
The first was Apex F, a Starcraft 2 campaign. As it turns out the AI is just as hardcode-heavy and inefficient in sc2 as it is in the rest of their games. When a standard 8 FFA AI game brings you to 0fps as the first waves deploy it's time to tap out faster than discovering that manner pylon just closed in all 6 of your scvs. Oh sure, over the last five years we managed to squeeze some functionality out of all that mess, but the performance is all in the natives and it's only worsened since release. The one project I had full confidence in doing literally everything else but the AI the good and proper way. 5 years time devoted to research and every single person has told me to stay the fuck away from blizzard games. Listen to peer pressure. G_G
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/UTkMGgxl.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/JyVoNdpl.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/oL8CXO5l.png)
Apex H in a nutshell: Yeah, um, I can port and remaster all this crap, and I can model static meshes. But uh... all the important stuff? The characters, the animations... yeah. I'm a talentless dumbshit. This kind of project actually needs an artist. I'm not an artist. Sorry. It's impossible.
Apex H, a project originating as an ARPG in Unreal 4. I posted some experimental shots of my research earlier in the year. DOA. I can't learn blueprints. Tried to switch to a machinima project. Whoops! Matinee is still Unreal 3 era and doesn't even support animation blueprints, which are necessary for my multi-skeleton-component ports to play nice with each other. Given that I can't rig or animate, anything past the absolute basics is impossible. DOA, too. You'd think a guy whose been modeling since 2002 has something to show for it. Sorry! I'm just dumb. Also no one in the entire Unreal community has even attempted half the shit I was attempting, so it's not like they were answering my pleas for guidance. Either that or they sensed my incompetence from a parsec away. Please don't suggest SFM. Valve formats are dumb as hell and I'd have to learn Hammer on top of it all. With Unreal I at least knew I could do intermediate materials and any particle effect I wanted, so I had a strong foundation. Source can't even do the stuff I was doing in unreal as it is. Really, I'm better off just not worrying about something that requires an animator to do in the first place. Which is everything. Game over, man.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/XJlD6Uvl.jpg)
When I set down Brood War in 2009 I had spent a decade mastering that game. The only thing I did not know was ASM. I had reached the limit of what I could achieve towards what I wanted to achieve in the game's limits. I thought I was ready to move on. Six years later and I can tell you I wasn't ready to move on. I was ready to die along with my legacy. Every step onwards has been only backwards. My biggest regret is trying to do anything more and wasting so much energy and so much emotion. I simply am not capable. I know that now.
That's the end of the show, I'm afraid. The world has passed me by and my 16 year old "skills" just won't handle a project in anything worth devoting my attention to. I am done with the whole project thing. Done with "life" and "trying to make something happen". I'm done with "bringing my dreams to life" and I'm very much done with "the fight". Done and done. Retribution was my last hurrah and we all know what happens when you place your biggest bet on someone else doing something. Yeah. Can't be too booty bothered by how it all turned out.
But hey, at least I did some voice acting practice. Because practice makes perfect in a world where your voice makes projects magically happen. Right?
http://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/apex-rna-practice-b
http://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/iskatumesk-2014-demo
Well it might have but it seems like no one was actually interested in taking up my offers to do some stuff for them a few months ago. I guess it's probably for the best, because a few months ago I didn't think I would be swimming Satan's back alley in a two-piece comprised of lead and hidden fun stuff. I guess the engravings they make about this adventure will be all worth it in a few decades. In all seriousness I am giving up voice acting. It's over, dude. It's all over.
I'm going to focus on my video projects for my niche audience and just give everything else up. It's really not worth the effort of worrying about being able to make stuff in your head come to life when you can't. Yeah, it drives you mad. Yeah, you can't turn the switch off. But living with that frustration is a lot more ideal than living with the incessant disappointment and powerlessness of being brain damaged. The lesson at the end of the day is really quite simple - No, you can't do it just because you want to.
That's it for my little bi-monthly update. I'm tired, pissed off, and really not that pleased with how every day seems to hand me a new pile of waste to try to force into my belly. Swallowing Fate's refuse is really getting to be quite tiring, even for one as enduring as me. Everyone has their limits. I wonder if I'll get to 2016 at the rate we're going. I'm due for the third round of pneumonia. Come at me, Fate. Do your worst. I really am prepared.
/e
I will admit it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out where the edit button was so I could fix the https links that don't hyperlink some some mysterious reason.
