Degrade

So, ok. My car is finally fixed. My brother's a real champ, doing farther than he has to. Which makes me somewhat owing.

My dad's always instilled something in me. Be a not a lender nor borrower. Not because he said it or believes it, but because he's the opposite. Always doing a favor for a favor. Bartering abilities.

He's in sales, so I guess it works out. People helping him out later in return for buying a bunch of cases of ass-wine, which helps out the numbers.

I shudder to think what I'm going to have to owe my brother.

In other news, not much to say. I've been napping at certain parts of the day. I know I shouldn't, but I am. Oh well. They say when the mind is resting is when it has inspiration. I'm trying to learn a 3D modeller so I can get some stuff done in my 3D engine. Or, more appropriately, figure out what things my engine will need to do.

Pro companies will build and design a 3D engine (or license one) and that will be what they use for EVERYTHING. I need one. Sure, the Quake engines are all available with GPL, but, sheesh, I don't want to be forever bound by GPL. They can get away with it because by the time they GPL the source they've already MADE their money. I want a chance, too.

Besides, high polycounts and beautiful effects aren't exactly paramount to me. I want beautiful pixels. Simple shades, some focus effects, color and alpha tricks... just razor sharp fps as opposed to super detail.

Nevermind, though. I guess I'll have to keep hacking away at it and see what happens.

Still no real paying work though. I have to admit now I'm getting a bit depressed. Blarg.

T-T-T-T-T-T-T-Tentacle Breaker!

My it's been a while. If you still read this, give me a howdy ho.

...

HEY, are you calling me a HO?!

...

Why yes. The unemployment job de jur is whore. I havn't been advertising. If I had been I'd probably be rolling in it now. After all, having a series of 25 extra muscles along something that shouldn't have muscles around it makes things rather intersting.

I'm kidding of course. But for some reason I've been contemplating the physics of hentai tentacles. To have the kind of dexterity required there would have to be a HELL of a lot of tendons and muscles and interlocking chains of cartilage and it would be hard to keep them all straight because the physics involved would tend a tentacle to get smaller the farther away from the point of origin is and...

... oh, wait, just like a natural tentacle. N-eeeeeeee-vermind.

Anywho, the additional bad news of the day is that my car's belt broke. I knew I needed one, I just wanted it to stretch until I got a new job. No such luck! Bro tells me it shouldn't be that expensive. That's good at least. But I still need to figure out a way to get it done all the while survivng the moral stone-throwing that is my parent's being home for the weekend. Looks like I'm trapped here. It doesn't get me off the hook for anything until Monday since I can always use their car. It also means I won't get gas money for it. And Monday I'm sure I'll be assigned lots of shit to do. My official job on Monday is the "watch the garage door repairman and make sure he doesn't steal anything" job. And I thought I wanted to go to a Job Fair. Feh.

I definitely can't survive thrown out on the streets so I guess I gotta do what I gotta do.

Coinage

iPod Nano + iPod Mini =

The new Nanos!

I call them: Nani. XD

No, I'm not impressed. I didn't like how the Mini looked, so the Nani's aren't really that attractive to me. Anodized aluminum is cool, but the colors are too bright to show off any industrialness to it.

Even though mine is entombed in a case, I still think it looks better.

Oh well. I'm not in the market to buy one anyway.

Latest Hassle at Home due to Unemployment: My weight. Sheesh. If it's not one thing it's another. I spend time combing through employment sites and reading up on companies and stuff AND spending time learning things I want to learn that might be useful later in my career. I don't really have the drive to spend two hours of my day sweating under the insane Florida sun.

Bah.

Laurels?

Just so you don't think I'm just sitting on my laurels 'round here. ^_^

Considering I don't remember any of my matrix math or linear algebra. You really DON'T need it for everyday life... unless you're going to work with computer graphics in any extent. Then, yah, you sorta kinda need it. Really.

It doesn't help that OpenGL is pretty finicky. As mentioned before, it's really tough to use any of the extended features. I found something to do multisampling and antialiasing but, alas, I'm missing headers and things for getting it to work. I did force antialiasing and multisampling through the driver settings and it looks AMAZING. But, if I can't summon it at will then what's the point? With that I'm considering moving back to DirectX. I mean, OpenGL is nice and all, and it is "technically" portable between platforms. But the thing is unless it relies exclusively on GLUT (which, for all practical purposes, it cannot) then you're still having to port the details of the code to other platforms ANYWAY. Besides, currently it reads textures with GDI+: very very not portable.

The question is how much of the code can I reuse? Maybe 80%. The remaining 20%? All code rendering the stuff in 3D. Yikes. We'll see how it goes.

Oh, and, yes, I know the "blur" is incorrect. It should be blurring inside the polygons, not just outside them. I thought of a few ways to fix that but, yeah, finicky finicky finicky. My brother says it's distracting. Then I made a version with a black background and, yeah, still distracting. Hmm... maybe it just has to be real subtle?

If you know video conversions, you know what a pulldown is. I wonder if anyone's tried to to 3D animation with pulldown built in instead of choppiness with the fps don't pick up speed. But, then again, if it could crossmix a bunch of frames that were "missed" then chances are the game wouldn't be skipping frames to beginwith. Ahhhhhhh... paradoxes are cool.

I hope to make a downloadable version available soon, but if I switch to DirectX then I probably won't.

...

Well, because then it becomes more important to check the compatibility of a "production" engine than the compatibility of some demonstration on an experimental engine.

I do like the font very much. It's the first font I've designed in a LONG time. I'd love to make it a truetype font, but the tracings would be horribly complicated. Maybe I should research making bitmap fonts and figure that out.

The one benefit to so much free time is learning and experimenting. I feel like a philosopher in Athens.

Too bad I'm kind of hungry and I'm out of cash and there's nothing good to eat here at home. Time to pull from the no-longer-bottomless pit.

Slavery

Maybe "slavery" is too harsh a word. Indentured servitude?

For the most part I'm being left alone now. I just had to cook a bunch of times this week, run errands, you know. I'm dreading the fight we're going to have when one of the bills gets in that's been part of the Manx Tax.

I slept for like 14 hours today. I'm not sick. I guess it's what they call "clinically depressed". But I feel ok, though. I guess that's what the "clinically" is for. Kind of like how someone would say "technically illegal" when referring to someone who steals bread to feed his family.

At least there won't be anyone really watching me closely for the next week. I hope to use to productively to get work. I don't know how much playtime I'll be able to get in there. All I know is that today I made a HELL of a ham and that should shut everyone up for a while.

Of course, the house still smells of ham. It's probably a good thing, actually. Then whenever I'm about to get hassled I could just go: "Hey, doesn't it smell like HAM in here?!"

Well, with nothing really going on in my life right now I havn't much to say. I'm still learning OpenGL, though. It's hard as FUCK. The basics are hard because I just don't know my matrix math like I used to know it. The medium level is hard because I don't know the names of important things and they aren't exactly intuitive (like, somehow, "glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL)" somehow makes colored (not textured) polygons obey lighting rules. As opposed to "glEnable(GL_COLOR_OBEYS_LIGHTS)" or something I can search for. The hard stuff is hard because, unlike DirectX which makes new features and functions easy to find just because of the nature of the COM interface, OpenGL has to stay backwards compatible to, say, 1885, and now not only do I have to know obscure constants but now I need to know obscure function names and the parameters and dynamically figure out where they are in the library, if they're there at all (which they don't have to be) and all sorts of other bits of nonsense.

Thankfully, FMOD is DAMN easy to use. Very few problems getting it going. Too bad I have to spend so much time looking for work that, now that I don't have work to do, I don't have the free time to do this.

Ironic, isn't it?

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Sibling Help

My brother's helping pave the way so I stop being under the gun all the time. It doesn't help that I've got maybe 3 hours alone to myself per day. Other times there's always SOMEONE trying to oppress me around.

BUT, here's something neat.

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Trump Card

Like I might have mentioned before, whenever you live with your parents and you are 18 years of age or older, their trump card becomes "If you don't like it, MOVE OUT." Any arguement becomes similar to arguing with a kid.

They'll cry out "AM NOT!" and there's nothing in the world you can do to change that.

Main difference is that they can do it. They can force it. Locks can be changes. Police can, in Florida, be called to enforce it.

Now, I wonder if my not moving out when I had this job was a subconscious warning that the whole company wasn't stable. Again, thank GAWD I'm not paying $900+ rent/energy/water.

So you have assaults on your person all backed up by that one clause of "If you don't like it, MOVE OUT." What makes that so much more powerful now than it was a few months ago is that now I can't even move out to the ghetto if I wanted to. I have no JOB, bitches. So I must endure whatever assaults are imposed.

The first "assaults" on my person due to being unemployed:

1. Slavery. Whenever someone doesn't feel like doing something, I'm it. Anything someone doesn't feel like doing that involves going somewhere must be done in MY car using MY fuel, of which I will not be reimbursed because "I should have savings." Savings to tap if you want to get a fucking VIDEO FROM FUCKING BLOCKBUSTER?! Um, yeah.

2. Curfew. I am to be controlled, and assured that if I am not home at a reasonable hour the locks will be changed. Knowing my mother, she will be able to force my father into waking up and doing it.

3. Beratement. I'm sorry, I just came off of a very good job, mom, I'm NOT going to work at McDonalds. You know the saying "I'm beyond it?" That's what you get the privilage of saying after you hit an employment level. If you're CEO of a corporation, you are "beyond" picking up shit off the street. That's just the way it is. That's the whole POINT of wanting to progress to GOOD JOBS. Calling me lazy because I'm not jumping at those things isn't helping me feel better about my situation. Falling over myself and demanding to cut the grass for a shiny $5 bill isn't going to do more than just put a drop in the bucket against my $80 cellular bill.

4. Lack of entertainment. I can't sit back and watch a movie. I should be "doing something". Which means any enjoyment to distract myself has to be done in stealth. What's the whole point of that, anyway? I'm not the only person unemployed. Should all the other unemployed people not smile, not watch TV, not even use electronics they purchased while they DID have a job?! Am I supposed to be grounded or some shit like that? It's not my fault I'm out of a job: it's management who DIDN'T EVEN GODDAMN PAY THE FUCKING RENT ON THE OFFICE. If anyone should be grounded, it's THEM.

The answer to all these are: "If you don't like it, MOVE OUT."

Please forgive me if I find myself turning off my phone and not getting on messenger. I don't mean to be cold: I just mean to keep a roof over my head for as long as I can.