Some work on Jake's Version 4 Redesign

I've spent the morning collecting my notes and thoughts on the way the nodes must work based on the tests I have administered on the bench.

I got kinda quiet there about this project and I will do that sometimes it's a long-term year long project among other year long projects so I will kinda weave between the 4 main things I am working on nowadays.

So before I sit down and start playing my guitar and doing some practice I wrote my notes from the morning's thoughts... I will meditate with my guitar a bit and come back, write more notes after I take my dog out.

Alright, I am also inviting people in to see my notes and code and maybe post on the Armored Mask blog if they want. People close to me, people I have known since I was a kid.

Been too guarded about what I work on but I share bits with people and then don't finish the game. Toghairm was my first time in a long time having strangers play something I made. Last time was the RO server. I have been really down on my own work and never really feel like anything I can do is good enough but I need to just get some projects finished this year so I get to pick a game from my list of half-finished games and finish it, help my wife with her game and then I got my light system with Jake and for the fourth project I got Mantilogs. I think if I have 3.5 projects for a year it's better than trying to work a single project into a week or a month not knowing what's going to happen when you start.

I'll be cleaning my kitchen today... needs it pretty bad after almost no time when you gotta deal with these bastard mice that appear every time it thaws or the grass across the road gets cut it's once or twice per year. I like mice but these ones are real bastards. They have caused me multiple days worth of network repairs, fucked up a bunch of my food, chewed holes in anything they can get their teeth on. Assholes. So I got some new kinds of traps. A dozen of them. Gonna go at em hard this time, flush em out. Then I will take a couple days to cool off and play some old video games because I will probably be feeling kinda depressed after having to deal with all that. I like living things man. Insects like the little eye cleaner mites and the mantids and crabs I have raised, arachnids like little jumping spiders and big ol wolf spiders that I live with, reptiles like my little snake and lizard buddies, of course mamals like the cats whom I have developed a sleep disorder around and really gotta fight to get sleep without a cat near me. My dogs who have been faithful, loyal buttholes over the years both getting me into and out of dangerous situations.

I wish all my old friends could be here, from Sage the Hedgehog – An antisocial little spikey bastard who loved armpits, Tramp the gray cat who put up with all the dumb crap my child mind could throw at her after following a hyper kid home one day, The magnificent adventurer Charlie Brown – A hamster capable of great feats of escape and long term survival, Mei a cat my dog Fate adopted back when I lived in the inner city... Mei being the friendliest little headbutter with a fucked up tail and paw I ever knew and Fate being the most feircly loyal to a fault dog I ever knew. She would tear herself apart if she got seperated from me longer than it took me to shower... eventually I had to shower with my dog every day so she would now sit and howl for me to come back. I had to kennel her a couple times and she obliterated the damn thing. It was barely functional after some work with pliers and hammers.

Chi of course was the first cat I got after Tramp passed. I grew up with Tramp from a little toddler to an adult. She was the most stable thing in my life to that point so it took a while before I got Chi... I had gotten Sage to try and help me feel less lonely at night but didn't really work so I started looking at the Lollipop Farm, a local animal adoption and rescue place... found a cat that they had listed as "Lost" but it looked like nobody was gonna claim her... That cat was then the only one they got right when they asked me to make a list of cat IDs to bring me.

She took to me the first night. After a couple hours under the bed she came out and laid down next to me while I watched some dumb cartoons. Later on introduced her to Sage, they got along in as much as didn't care about eachother. Later came my Wife and her cat Kylie and yeah... but Chi became my best friend really. One day she got sick and passed... I always blamed myself for not being able to help her and it still hurts when I think about it now. Kinda why I haven't gotten another cat since Mei passed in much a similar fashion.

Mei was my dog's cat but after my dog ate a sheet and got all screwed up inside and passed... that haunts me pretty bad too... shit like this makes me scared to get close to anyone or anything. I keep on trying though... I guess that's good? But Mei became my cat because Fate was no longer there to take care of her. This cat walked into my house one day right up to my dog and headbutted her. Then they were friends forever. When ol Fate passed before her time and I got Mei I had kinda not liked her, even though she was really friendly she wasn't Chi. They got along fine though, her and Chi. But I lost Chi and Fate about the same time kinda like a one-two punch... it all kinda blurs together sometimes. But I gotta remember the good times, not the sad ones... can't change what already happened just gotta work on now to change tomorrow for the better hopefully right?

I learned to love Mei as well and then she became my best friend but she was all messed up already when we got her and slowly as she got older she eventually got sick and passed. Another time I felt helpless. Nowadays I am scared to get another cat. I love all these little weirdos and it really hurts when bad things happen to em... and I gotta protect my weirdos from the mice so I gotta start killing the mice now, if they keep showing up in this volume I can no longer keep trapping and releasing them out in the woods up north of here.

I don't want to be taking chances with my health or their health because I was not strong enough to kill mice which could very easily kill us all... I like mice and I hope to return to catch and release in future but it seems the covid mice have gotten far bolder and smarter and with shit like rabies and hantavirus being a threat... and the size of them... I am used to city mice so when I saw these country mice I was very concerned. They are almost as big as pet store fancy rats as my wife says. They certainly are mice, they got the mouse shaped ears and faces and bodies.

I detest killing when it can be avoided but here we are in the dead of winter and we can not avoid it. I need to be able to clean my kitchen and not worry if a mouse just pissed in my sauce pan. I have a habbit of washing my dishes and cooking tools before use now.

Most of all I just really want to clean my house man, I kept waiting to get in and do the deep clean until after I dealt with all the mice but they kept coming and the next thing I know it's winter. What a shit show, eh? They managed to avoid all the traps I set out and now I got some snap traps baited and placed strategically out of cat range but in mouse path. I intend to drive them out with cleaning and force them toward the traps. If I can get all their hidey holes and catch the majority in one fell swoop... I think I got like 3-5 total at this point, some fell for catch traps and got released out in the woods. Winter set in but the ones that remain are too smart for any of the old traps. We even had to break out the glue traps and had to poison a few... that was sad. Hopefully the snap traps are less... painful.

I wish I didn't have to worry about them having tons of diseases and could just put them in some cages and not have to worry about it but yeah nah... one bad day, one outsider coming in and coughing something into the cage of one of the tamed ones and then bam, all hell breaks loose.

I need to deal with them and get the house clean in one go. Then put some stuff in place to prevent new infestations from starting. My mother always used steel wool and that worked for some spots but other times they chew a new hole in nearby. So I figure if I can get rid of all the hidey holes, cover up all the other holes and drive the rest into traps (both lethal and non-lethal catch traps) I don't really want to be doing this but here we are. There's too many now and they just keep coming. You get rid of one and someone else comes and takes over their territory.

Yeah, mice, unlike rats are territorial. Rats are more communal by nature and live in communities. Mice are more guarded and solitary. They mostly just establish territories and try to collect mates. A lot of times the young seem to get eatten and between that and the territorial nature you end up with less offspring in mice I guess when in a confined space like a house?

If I find pinkies I can probably just raise them til they are old enough and let them go in spring but all adults gotta get dealt with in any way possible and all at once while it's still cold and I can get the holes filled with mouse deterrents preventing any future mousey murder being needed (hopefully).

Anyway I'll see if I can add something simple to the lesson list for my wife for today so I can keep ahead of her in my teaching lol... not great to have the student say "How do I...?" and have to go "Look at the documentation or google it." anyway, yeah. Guitar time, then research and development. Then THE CLEANENING!

So first up is guitar, then I will do some game dev R&D with my own little project. I got some ideas and they might work for her too. Then, assuming things arrive early enough I can make myself a steamed mug bread and take the dog out then do a little more work in here and start cleaning the kitchen and living room.

The hope is to have cleaned the house at least mostly by the end of the weekend and to have fully cleaned it by the end of the week, bit by bit.

I should actually clean up my t-shirt designs next week too. I will add that to the weeks tasks. There's a few things I want to do to my shirt designs to clean up. I want a border around the hero facing the giant monster and I want to make the circle around the We Were shirt to either blurr into the fabric or just end abruptly with a little logo at the bottom right or something... We'll see.

I also think I should start making daily sprites to sell and for free. Release them as packs for like $10 at the end of the month or have people pay $5 a month here to get them early if they want. If I get a lot of art out there maybe I can get some commisions too. The asset packs are side money, commisions can be good money. Contracts doubly so... gotta read em closely, though.

I have toyed with the idea but never got around to executing it and I figure if I am going to need to do some spriting every day to keep my skills from rusting I may as well make them something I can sell. I will start simple with things I know I can bang out in like 15-30 mins every day and then as I improve add more complex stuff in.

Well I might actually not sell that stuff here, I will sell it on Armored Mask, the site where my game projects will also be published, here I will keep my logs about crap going on and what I am doing and why I made decisions I did, etc.

So if I go quiet here you might want to look for me over at The Armored Mask site, which should be familiar lookin'.

Alright, like I said guitar time, art, R&D, then of course cleaning after that.

Tried some new settings. Gonna have a screenshot of em here.

I will upload what came of these settings with various effects later on on my audio server. I can give out invite codes to it right now but it's not a lot going on right now just my noodling trying to make samples with my old SG.

Until I have something of value the audio server is by invite only.

Anyway gonna eat lunch, get some R&D and some art done and get to work cleaning my kitchen. May update, may not.

Cheers.