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I got sick, but my computer was fine
(31 Jul at 23:24) |
Hi,
Dammit! I got sick again. This time it was definitely Covid-2025 and it was pretty rough (I had a very bad sore throat, which I hear is characteristic of this strain) and it knocked me out of commission for a week during which I was expecting to have quiet time to myself to finish off this video! Instead the things that felt right to do were (a) play the new Donkey Claus for Switch II and (b) keep trying to prove that the one shape can't go through the other shape. I have One Last Approach here that I'm currently feeling pretty hopeful about, but also I wrote a lot of that code with Covid brain so who knows. (The real goal would be to produce some machine-checkable proof; no need to worry about virus-induced fallibility!) I'll talk about this in the video with some other results; I've got like 25 minutes finished at this point. On the upside, the computer has been completely healthy this whole time, almost like the problem was simply a bad driver 25 year-old webcam driver and it cannot actually be sympathetically infected when I fall ill.
I probably got Covid-2025 in JFK International Shithole, or maybe the humid undergrounds of New York City's Subterranean "Way" system, or in crowded comedy club, or etc. when I went to hang out with my YouTube buddies and also go to work. It's been 3 years since I got it last, so that's not a bad MTBF I guess.
Speaking of work: Exciting for me is that I am switching to "part time" (4 days a week) for the sole reason that I like my job but I also like having time for my gonzo programming projects and math holes, and would all else equal like to have more time for the latter. So starting this monday I will be 50% more funemployed and 20% less employal!!
I vow not to use my additional "free" time to just play video games, but I did play video games when I was sick especially. I am enjoying the Donkey Kong Bananza more than I expected. It is a very easy game, but also very fun. I am almost done with Tevi, by the same people who made Rabi-Ribi, which I enjoyed many years ago. It's a solid exploration platformer that I would definitely recommend to genre fans who are sick with Covid-25. For observant game design connoisseurs who have played the Metroidvania genre a lot, or too much (e.g., me), there are some subtle and smart mechanics to appreciate. Probably next... DOOM? |  |
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| the last time i had covid all i could do was watch youtube shorts of baby wolves trying to howl. tevi sounds better. |
| Congrats on going semi-part-time! |
| Hope you're feeling better Tom. Congrats on the schedule change! Free time is such an important part of our lives that I think many people aren't able to realize or take advantage of until there isn't much of it left. So much of life is doing what feels right. |
| Everything always goes into the square hole! |
Hi Tom,
Apologies if you've already written about this, but I was wondering what your drawing setup is like (software + hardware). I absolutely love the sped-up drawings in your videos and wanted to try my hand at recreating the style for my own drawings!
Also, hope you're feeling better!
Thanks,
Anand |
switchback: Hehe! I might use that one.
Anand: Yes, I should make a FAQ! I'm using a Wacom drawing tablet (Intuos; I have owned several of these) and Photoshop, although it might as well be anything since I pretty much just use the "pencil" tool. Photoshop is good though. I capture myself drawing with OBS (excellent) at high bitrate, AV1 (NVENC) and usually record audio at the same time, but I'll often pause drawing to talk or vice versa. Sometimes I dub in audio afterwards. I'm editing in Premiere Pro; the "rate stretch" is a pretty good way to speed up sections of drawing after cutting out the boring parts, although it is VERY tedious to edit video through any method I've ever explored. The new transcription features are very good for this workflow though.
For some of the new videos where I have drawings but didn't capture the process of drawing them (e.g. if I am doing a lot of zooming around it gets pretty whiplashy, or I did it across more than one session) then I wrote some software to "animate" the drawing from the PNG. This is technically part of BoVeX. It's a little lazy compared to the live drawing thing, but it does look better than just staring at a static image! |
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