Month: June 2019

So, I’d like to share a bit of what I am working on since not many seem to know. I’ll mention stuff and people seemed to be surprised.

Backlog Buddies – Backlog Buddies is a YouTube channel I run with my friend Tony. I have mentioned it before. Despite not updating it in a month it is not dead. Tony and I aren’t currently able to meet and I am having troubles finding time to edit and upload footage we recorded before. This is because while editing my main PC has to be locked for an hour and a half per video I process. This doesn’t count the initial 10-15 minutes it takes to cut the footage out of the original 6 hour long recordings. It is a time consuming and PC consuming process. I can’t even browser the internet when it is doing this because of how much it is tasking my CPU. Yes, I am saving up for a new PC that should be able to take all of this and more. But doing the compression techniques I do really eat away at the CPU. I have experimented with faster compression and processing types. I was not satisfied with the outcome. No 60 FPS, for one, and audio wasn’t syncing up right no matter how much time I spent getting it to do so. As well, audio was actually worse, somehow. Granted I am self taught in video editing and audio editing. I have been meaning to sign up for a class to learn better and faster techniques. Edit: Also, this doesn’t even count in the time it takes to rewatch them cause Tony and I let things slip that need to be censored and I lost my booklet of where to put in the censor beeps and where to edit in photos and text. Which means I have to sit through each 15 minute video and then censor the audio or add in the pictures. Plus, with some games I have to do lighting editing which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 days.

New Youtube project- I have been writing scripts for a new one. They are turning out well and much easier to produce, but a lot of effort goes into research. I am trying to decide how I want to present them before I start work on them. no need to worry about 60 FPS here so, they should be faster to edit. Plus I won’t be doing 15 videos, no lie, at a time.

Game Highlighter – I actually finished a new episode but I made a huge mistake when watching it before I moved. Now, I just have to edit it and record new lines again. This one has been hard writing scripts for, I will admit.

Unknown game studio – Kyle and I are working on our game together. I am in the process of writing the design document right now. I am designing everything myself, unfortunately. This is not a slight against Kyle. He is helping me out with art and models like you can’t believe. It is just he isn’t a designer. He will say his input and I will work his input into the designs. We are working on improving each other’s work as well. Not only that we are working on prototypes to learn our engine and how to work with each other better. Like, I am making a 2D tower defense game right now just to get used to 2D programming again. He is working with me to help me get things looking better early on so we don’t have to do a lot of resizing and other issues later on. We are trucking on.

Music lessons – So, to help with my depression I’ve picked back up music. I actually spent all day yesterday cleaning my instruments and amps. Hopefully this helps.

Gaming site – A few others and I want to make a gaming, and anime, site that covers the topics without going overly political. So there’s no “xxx devs hates yyyy due to zzzz content” in their games leaping. If a dev comes out and says something hateful we’d report on it. But none of that logic jumping certain sites do. Outside of hosting, maintaining, and a few articles this will be hands off by me. I’m not a good writer.

Penpal site – I’ve been slowly working on this. I actually just finished the core of the design doc for launch. I have no clue how long it’ll take but I plan on making a penpal site. I used to go to one and made tons of friends using it. however, the site was tired of maintaining it and purged it. this site still gets requests to bring it back, and a lot of them. I plan to fill this void. I also plan to add features the previous site refused to implement to make users more comfortable. The site did see a dip due to harassment. This is also a project for me to learn how to do SQL fully. Since until now I have always used autoinstallers to handle my SQL. I am working with friends to make this as secure as possible and will try to keep it up to date. However, I feel weird announcing this since I will need to find new servers for it cause of issues with my current. All the tech I have made internally does not work with my currently used servers.

TEFL – I am working on saving up for TEFL classes to teach English.

App development – Getting back into programming has been fun. Though most of it has been PHP and Javascript based. So, I am looking to get back into app dev. No apps to announce. Just that I am working on it again. I actually need to go buy a Mac and the new iPod for dev purposes.

I think that about covers it? Oh, also saving up to go visit China again.

Hello again. Today’s topic will be about what I’ve done to fight my depression and how it seems to backfire. A depressing topic, but I am depressed today.

Growing up I dealt with depression often. I would always feel alone and that I had no friends. It wasn’t until I met my friend Kris and my other friend Justin did I start to feel like I had friends. I had made some online, but they always left. We’d have some stupid argument and they’d leave. I mean stupid. They’d get upset, or I would, that one person didn’t like another anime, game, manga, or band. We’d argue why we didn’t and did like said product. Then they would leave, angry. Usually, it was me who didn’t like the stuff. I’d give them a day to cool down but when I would message them again they’d ignore me. Give them a week and they’d just tell me to, “fuck off”. Give it a month and I’d be blocked. I never understood how someone you would chat with daily for hours on end about everything you’d remove from your life because they didn’t like something you’d like. Hell, most things I like people don’t. I like the game Devil’s Third. People make fun of me for liking it. So? I let them have their jokes and I just enjoy my product. In the end I can still talk to them. I felt happy to finally have real friends. Fast forward a few years and Kris and I go to different high schools while Justin and I go to the same. Justin and I grow as friends and become best friends. He’d buy me food because I was poor and I would do my best to make him laugh or feel better. I also did my best to try to get him to fit in with people, but a lot of people didn’t like him. In this time frame I meet a D&D group, mostly people who used to be my brother’s friends. Despite a lot of stuff going wrong these were my least depressing times because I would spend it with friends.

Here comes college. On my way to college a lot of people I would hang out with and talk with regularly stopped talking to me. I never got an answer why. A lot of people would refuse to meet up if I was invited. This led to people no longer inviting me out; even though we’d talk like normal online. I had to make new friends in college. People in my classes didn’t like me. My depression starts to spiral out of control. I wind up at my school’s bowling alley just waiting for class. I meet a few people who are playing fighting games. After a while they invite me to join, and this is how I got into fighting games. After some started to graduate the group fell apart. People were upset with me for breaking up with Kim. Some were upset at my brother and decided to stop talking to me due to that. Some were upset we didn’t “grow up” and stop playing video games and stopped talking to us. Basically shit just hit the fan. This severely worsened my depression all over again.

Luckily through it all I had my D&D group. They were always there. For those who don’t know I run a YouTube channel called Backlog Buddies. This plays a big role later on. In it Tony and I play games and have fun. Tony is from my D&D group and one of my oldest friends now. Just like everyone from the D&D group is now one of my oldest friends. Even though I had them, the fallout of losing an entire social circle again drove me to a bad place. I tried to kill myself 6 times in the span of 2 months and even sliced up my left hand, something a lot of people don’t know.

So, what does this have to do with depression? Well, because I was always alone I was depressed. I would try to find new social circles to fit in so I wouldn’t feel alone. To this day I have my D&D group. They help immensely but we don’t get to see each other often. Once a week, if that. Before the week is over I am drowning in bad thoughts. What saves me each week is if we get to meet up. Lately we haven’t been able to meet up. Things haven’t been going well. With the constant rejection of job after job and not seeing my friends I’m just in a 24/7 depressive state. Lately, I’ve taken to going to GameStop and just sitting there for hours on end if one of the workers I know works there that day. I’m at that bad of a state. To fight my depression I need to talk to people face to face. Talking online actually makes it worse; which is why I tend to ignore people these days online. I’m already feeling bad.

Let’s now talk about the idea that killed numerous friendships: Backlog Buddies. When Backlog Buddies was created I thought of it as a way for Justin and I to hang out more. Justin and I hadn’t seen each other in about 2 years by this time. We were both busy and worked different shifts. I worked morning and school at night he worked night to mornings. When we could meet we didn’t know what to do so he’d end it. I came up with the idea of Backlog Buddies. he liked it but didn’t want to do any of the editing or actual work. I told him I would handle it. So, we set up a date and time to be off of work and school to meet up and play games. We had a lot of issues at start. From getting the recording device to work, to get it to stop overheating, to the PS3 not working and just tons of issues. Then there were the audio issues. Something I didn’t get fixed until way later. As time went on Justin started to ignore my texts if they weren’t about the show. Then he started to make plans because he “forgot” we met up the same date and time for over a year for recordings. It wasn’t until I started to work at Domino’s again did major issues start to arrive. He would leave the entire store to me while he would go sit in the back and talk with drivers, all of them. He could do this because he was an Assistant Manager and was “doing inventory” but wasn’t. I would complain about this and nothing would get fixed. He would have me do work that the drivers were supposed to do because he would spend all night talking to them. He then started to put up things on the make line that hurt my back and I couldn’t work over. Promising he’d do those for me, but never did. There were other issues too, but I injured myself numerous times working under him and was doing the entire stores work while he would fuck about. If we had other insiders they wouldn’t listen to me and only to him. He would refuse to tell them to do anything so they would be in the back folding boxes while we had a screen full of orders and orders coming out of the oven. Eventually I had a mental breakdown at the store. I had a huge fight with one of my very important friends who told me to never talk to her again. I was stressed from work and Justin was being a dick. This is what was the final nail in our friendship. I remember him coming up to me angry huffing and puffing and telling me “Fix your shit or leave”. So, I just left. Later I find out from mutual friends that he was tired of being forced to spend time with me. That he couldn’t escape me because we had Backlog Buddies and work together. I put in a request to change shifts, everyone called me a child for doing this, and I told him we weren’t friends anymore. Everyone took his side until they asked me about it and then went neutral. I don’t know what he told everyone when I stopped being friends with him but a lot of people were upset with me.

Now out of a best friend and no one to talk to but Kim our friendship started to grow, or so I thought. While I repeatedly expressed wanting to just stay friends she said she agreed. In the end she kept hoping we’d get back together. As we continue Backlog Buddies with our friend Mare things got worse. Mare was very perverse. Neither of us had an issue with this. What Kim had an issue was with me talking about dirty things with Mare. Often times she would leave recordings crying or just storm out and not talk to either of us. As the show went on things got worse. We were limited on what we could talk about for one. Even after having a counseling session with Mare who agreed we shouldn’t be together and having Kim and I agree to it, Kim still went on hoping I’d be with her again. It gets annoying here so I am going to skip a lot. Kim starts to date a new guy, finally, and just abandons me. she leaves our lease 1 month early and shuts off our electric bill. She stole some stuff too. Again, Backlog Buddies caused another close friendship to end. Granted it wasn’t a healthy one, but it still did.

Good thing Tony and I have such a stable relationship that we can stand sitting in a room for 3-6 hours playing games together and talking. Even on topics we disagree about. Unfortunately, life has made it hard for us to record. Seeing Tony for those 2 years every Monday really helped. I went from seeing two close friends often a week to seeing 1 once a week and sometimes our D&D group.

I find it funny. the thing I created to help with my depression and help mend a dying friendship killed 3 and spiraled my depression even worse. Same with Elvenmonk Studios. That was way more than I intended. I’m not even sure if is coherent.

Who do I mean by “we”? I mean everyone, but I want to focus on the US. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but it is true. I am sure you can think of a group right now with a negative image. It could be the US with its police violence, school shooting, and rampant criminals. It could be furries, people who dress up as animals, being pedophiles or into to zoophilia, that is sex with animals. You could even know someone who thinks Muslims are all terrorist or that everything in China is a ripoff and you can’t trust them. We all have this issue.

Someone may reply “Well, we think this for a reason” implying that a majority of said group does it. Usually, this isn’t true though. When looking into this issue it is often because certain groups are portrayed a certain way in the media and by a vocal/visible minority. Now, I want to stress that I say usually. There are some instances where a majority does fuck it up for everyone and adds to the confirmation bias. Then again you have instances like Joey Salads faking “Social Experiments” to try and make groups look violent. Feeding into confirmation bias against specific groups.

What brought this to my attention at first is when I started to teach people English as a second language online. Many of my students wanted to move to the US at first. However, after learning English they thought the country wasn’t safe. In fact, a few of them would message me every day asking if I was still alive. Curious I asked why they thought this. They would say they have been watching or reading our news and can’t believe how dangerous our country is. Stating while their country had crime it was no where near as rampant as the US. Then came the school shootings and police abuse issues. They were so terrified of a country they were eagerly waiting to visit they instead would go to visit the UK or South Africa because they believed them to be safer than the US. A few of my students were actually harmed in South Africa and a few mugged in the UK. They couldn’t believe this happened because of how safe the countries seemed due to their news.

As I stated, they went to these countries where they were harmed because they seemed safe. Where if they went to the US they more than likely would have had no issues. The US’ news constantly displaying horrific and negative things about us actually decreases people desire to come here. When my ex-girlfriend and I were discussing moving in together we were trying to decide on a country. I asked why not the US and she said because it wasn’t safe. My ex was from China. The Chinese news displays nothing but the bad news segments from the US and instances of people saying negative things about China on the news. This led her to believe she will be murdered for being Chinese if she dared to step foot in the US. Now, I know you’re thinking, “Well, the Chinese news media did that!” but we gave them the ammo and footage. What I have found out on many international exchange sites is this isn’t an issue of just China alone. Even India and Japan are displaying news putting the US in bad light. That everyone here is racist, violent, and you will be beaten by the police for breathing.

What can we do though? Well, we can start by spreading actual positive stories on the news again and around social media. Even positive stories like “Restaurant gaining business due to sticking up for gay rights” still has a negative connotation. Sure, it is good news for the business and showing we are going to support a place for sticking up for the rights of others. However, if you notice it also implies there was conflict over gay rights. We need more stories of people being altruistic spread around, at least I think so. If you look at UK news it is usually positive news like more people are owning houses, two lovers meet after years of being separated, couple beaten in homophobic attack, scientist finds gene leading to tanning addiction, 2 teens murdered in London, or how someone helped avert a nuclear crisis. All stories I found at a quick glimpse just now. Where as when I search news in the US I get dead American, detective saying all gays should be dead, 3rd NY police officer committing suicide in 9 days, man arrested outside of NJ elementary school with loaded gun and tons of ammo, and transgender woman murdered in DC. If you notice, while the UK news has negative stories they also have positive stories but on the US side it is pure negativity.

I hear tons of US citizens saying “This country is going crazy” but is it? Where I live there seem to be tons of reported crimes. However, looking into it there are less crimes committed here than London. However, if you go by our local news and London news then we seem to be the more dangerous place. Why do we choose to focus on the negative? Money. People are more likely to watch news that makes them scared or paranoid then they are when there is news that makes them happy and safe. They feel the need to watch the news to learn about the new dangerous drug your kids may be doing. Where as teenage youth group goes in to cheer up sick kids? Nah, no one cares to hear about that here. Due to this news stations run more fear mongering stories to get more viewers and more ad revenue. Of course, I am aware I am repeating nothing new. I just wanted to bring this to light and how it actually is affecting our nation. We lost out on actual engineers and doctors, my students, coming here and potentially making our lives better due to the fear mongering our news does. Now we have the issue of people not wanting to raise families in the US anymore because it isn’t safe. This is what I have heard from numerous people on why they don’t want kids. Anecdotal but still relevant.

What is funny is I remember when this started to happen. When I was in elementary school I had a project where I had to watch the news every day for a month and cover a story on the news. This actually sparked my interest in the news as a kid. When the project was finished I would still watch the news. However, once I entered my 8th grade year the news took a huge negative nose dive, at least locally. I stopped watching the new because it was nothing but fires, murders, rapes, new drug crazes, dangers of the internet, dangers of Xbox Live, and on and on. They aren’t even covering much anymore. Before they did investigative journalism and would expose corruption. Now, they’re not. They will report on a murder for 15 minutes with nothing to say other then “He was (race) (age) and (murdered this way)” the entire time. No clue who did it. No clue why it was done. Just repeating about a murder victim adding nothing new to the story.

This applies to all groups. Just remove the US specific stuff and apply it to your group. If you’re a furry and you wonder why people look down on you remember when a boy was abused at furry parties or Kero the Wolf was caught abusing his dog, video 1 (posted out of order because the second video has more evidence while the first is just claims) , and if so many didn’t block me or were banned I would link to the numerous furries who post on Twitter being pro zoophilia and posting pictures of them having sex with their dogs (my Twitter is messed up). Also, dear god, anyone remember Rain Furrest? Or how male feminist seem to be predators? Don’t forget the Ars Tech writer who was a self proclaimed male feminist arrested for trying to have sex with children but getting caught by a FBI agent instead. Like I said, every group has an image problem. We all have to work on fixing these issues. Good luck to the furry community on that; I have no fucking idea how they are going to do that. Just like I have no idea how gamers are supposed to fix the image that we are everything wrong with the world.

No, I am not going to touch the race issues. Just no. I don’t want to deal with the fallout of that. Oddly enough, despite this being a negative post I would love to see more positivity and try to keep the future ones more positive.

Now, I need to sleep as I am rambling.

Hello, I’m honestly still surprised this site gets any views,455 unique views this month so far. Yes, I know I had been working on a new layout for years. I made quite a few prototypes. Each one I couldn’t get right. Either functionally or color wise. Ex-artist Kim was never satisfied with my color schemes. I preferred simple she wanted complicated. Then when it came to technical side there was no middle ground. Functionally we wanted different things. Kind of an issue. Then she ran off with assets contracted under me. Which takes me to the next part.

So, some of you may wonder why the site is now a blog instead of Elvenmonk Studio’s official website. Well, due to Kim and the other artist we were working with both ditching me and running off with assets they were not supposed to take, as well as equipment, I’ve been too depressed working on Elvenmonk Studios. Everything I do I just remember the bad of the company. It’s… tainted to say the least for me. However, I started work to help my friend launch his company. There, I have no issue working. I have no bad blood. I find working under a new company name really helps. While my friend’s company isn’t in game development it still helped me find one thing that was wrong. I had been toying around with ending the studio, and site, for a while. Again, due to a lot of bad things that happened. Instead, I have decided to make it a personal blog and possible portfolio. Y’know, going back to its….. 4thpoint?

What do I mean by 4th? Well, the site has been a roller coaster of ideas. First it started with me posting anime gifs back in the early 00s, I think 03. Then I started to learn the basics of HTML and decided I would be the next eBaum’s. Where they strayed away from edgy humor at the time I did not. This version of the site oddly got popular. I remember telling 2 people in Jr. high about it and next thing you know I was getting so many visits from people at school. People started to ask me to help them make a website. After I grew tired of stealing pictures on the internet I tried to make a flash site. Here it was less a Newgrounds and more a personal dedicated flash site. But I am terrible at animation and art so this never happened. Then I tried to make an anime news site. Since there were so few of those, but manually adding in tables and text was annoying. So, I gave up on that after 2 months. Then I decided to make it a portfolio to show what I can do. At this point I really kind of gave up due to depression. I never wanted to work on anything for fear of being laughed at and fear of failure. So, instead of trying and learning. I did nothing and failed. This is a issue I still have, but I am working on fixing.

What’s in the store for the future? No clue. A friend and I are forming a new studio, name is not decided, and we are working on finishing a project I have been “working” on for years. I say “working” cause I was mostly coming up with ideas and that was it. Finally, I am putting the ideas in to practice, writing a proper design doc, getting tech made, and trying to string everything together. I haven’t programmed in years so I have to get back into that. Luckily my new partner is very agreeable, ha, and encouraging. Him and I have a lot of the same ideas and he is able to produce content faster then I can work, which is a first. I feel motivated for once because I am working with someone who can not only carry their own weight but exceed what I am pulling as well. This is inspiring me to get better. As for little ol’ Elvenmonk.net? It’ll be a blog. Maybe a portfolio. But, I will write here every now and then to express my thoughts. I don’t expect a safe space. You are free to disagree. I’ll write about anything so keep your eyes open for hard hitting topics!

If I remember I’ll try to write a post tomorrow. Things have been going pretty wrong lately so I might not be able to. Either way, toodles for now.

Holy crap this theme is ugly. I’ll have to find a decent one until I can make one.