lielac | Entries tagged with date: 2018: 12 december

Having completed my first playthrough (the Prethoryn Scourge is no more, and the galaxy is in stasis until I care to return to it and deal with the Awakened Empire who got mad at my fleet being bigger than theirs), I have turned to something I told myself I wasn't allowed to do until I'd proven I could complete at least one full playthrough from beginning to win year: making a custom species portrait mod.

It seemed a simple enough project. The aliens I want to play as in Stellaris are so humanoid as to be described by their creator as "not even [having] ridgy foreheads". Their only visible difference from humans is anime-bright hair that comes primarily in seven different shades. So incredibly Star Trek alieny. Simple, right? All I have to do is recolor the human hair styles into the seven primary colors of Amentans [see here], do some fussing with what looks like simple text files, and I'm done, right? Sure, it'll be harder than modding Dwarf Fortress, but probably every game is harder to mod than Dwarf Fortress.

Yyyyyeah. There doesn't seem to be any provision for static-but-customizable portraits, and animated portraits require fucking around with Autodesk Maya 2018. I can't even pick apart the vanilla files for the animations and meshes, because they're .anim and .mesh files that one can create from Maya projects using an exporter the Paradox people working on Stellaris have provided for modders. I did download Maya because there's a 30-day free trial, but I'm sure it's nothing so nice as Scrivener's nonconsecutive 30-day trial and so I'd best be brisk about this.

But I don't know how to start!!! I've only been up 10 hours, but this whole thing makes me tired. I could maybe cobble something together by guess-and-check, but I'm definitely too tired for that. Probably I just need to take a break on account of I've been recoloring hair for.... uh.... off and on for 7 hours, more on than off but probably at least 5 hours total of work. (-checks- I'm 3hr 25min into Magic Steps, and I know I spent some time at the start not listening to anything and probably half an hour's worth of Youtube videos on top, so 5 hours sounds about right.)

Ok, since I've seen it said that people can really only do (office?) work for about 4 hours a day I'm gonna lie down on top of the cat on my bed, and when I'm rested see how far if any distance at all I can get by fucking around with the .txt and Notepad++-readable files. Since I copied them all from the vanilla Stellaris files it'll be fine if I totally destroy something when I try to load the mod. Worst case is I corrupt my version of Stellaris somehow and have to reinstall it, which, 1, seems incredibly unlikely and most likely actual worst-case is I cause a CTD, and 2, would only be somewhat inconvenient.

iiiit's the year 2320 in my stellaris playthrough so far and i have robots, and the robots are droids and so advanced enough that i can use them to colonize planets, and so i am going to colonize ALL THE PLANETS because robots have a 100% habitability for everything because they're robots

well ok. not everything. all marginally-habitable worlds. venus is right out, and the poor dears won't colonize mars for me either. but my last act before saving and closing for the day was to start a colony ship constructing to go to a nice desert world that i can mine the hell out of because my uhhh minerals? -- the red gem doohickey resource, that one -- is in the red and i would rather not keep selling food whenever i get close to the storage limit because it annoys me to do that.

i've found/been contacted by... 12/13 of the empires in this galaxy. one fallen empire. the 13th is by process of elimination somewhere on the far side of the galactic core, where i can't send science ships because one side has perma-closed borders and the other side has an empire that has twice closed its borders temporarily specifically to kick out my science ships. fuckers.

democracy has an annoying amount of turnover in rulers. funny how that works, you have to re-elect them every 10 years. after this playthrough (because i would like to not succumb to altitis and never finish, never finishing is annoying) i think i'll whip up a custom benevolent dictatorship so i can have hereditary rule. the most annoying part though is that the candidates for ?president? are picked from Top Leaderly People, and lately that's been old people, and so in i think the last 5 presidents 3 died in the middle of their term. sigh. one time (before these last 5 i think) somebody got elected and then immediately fucking died like fuck off, dude, come on

the lower-down leaders are for life at least. and i have robots and i'm gonna make them sapient and then i can have immortal robots being my scientists probably and i might even hit a level cap before they fucking die! woo!

also i'm comfortably ensconced between two empires who like me (well, ok, one of them is mad because i broke a defensive pact but sorry, man, i'm not fighting shit on your behalf) and neighbors with nobody else, so any xenophobic empires will have to invade through somebody else before they can hit me

i kinda wanna make custom humanoids that are Basically Humans But With Funky-Colored Hair but you gotta be able to manipulate .dds files and i could not figure out how to install the plugin that lets GIMP do that.

zzzzzzzzzz should take my beds. meds. take my beds -- MEDS -- and go to bed. zzzz

I'm reading the Ontario Driver's Handbook online right now, because the test for getting your G1 learner's permit is just an eye test and written exam and then it's legal for me to get behind the wheel and have mom baby me through learning the ropes, but aaaaaaaaaa cars are only somewhat smaller than a adult Triceratops and might be hollow but are still a couple tons of metal going decently fast and I do not know if I can be trusted to not panic behind the wheel of a large moving vehicle

but like

gonna try

already have a key to the car, I got that just so I can get into the car without asking for a key

and it's just a written test, I know road signs by osmosis and really just need to bone up on specific rules and regulations around driving

it'd be interesting to know if the eye test would come back "you don't technically need glasses to drive", but I wouldn't get behind the wheel without my glasses unless I absolutely had to just because blurry vision is distracting oh hey cat (there's a cat on my lap and arm now)

anyway aaaaaaaaa

and it was SO GOOD

The animation was great, the soundtrack was great, the Spidey-People were great, there was no shoehorned-in romance, I only had to cover my ears because of secondhand embarassment once for like a minute which is not ideal but was better than that MLP movie which admittedly was also great...

In glowfic parlance, which I will absolutely use because glowfic is great and its conceit of "multiple versions of people get together and Do Stuff In The Multiverse" is fantastic, there were four definite alts (Peter Parker and Peter B. Parker, "Spider-Man" 1 and 2; Peter Parker, "Spider-Man Noir"; Peter Parker, "Gwen's dead best friend"); two possible additional alts (Peter Porker, "Spider-Ham"; Peni Parker, "Mecha-piloting anime girl Spidey"); and a couple circumstance alts (Gwen Stacy, "Spider-Woman"; Miles Morales, "Spider-Man"), though Miles is an interesting case. Also some more alt stuff which is spoilery, sOOOOOOO.....!

( Le movie spoilers here )

Basically: Really Good Movie. You Should Give It A Watch Unless You Have Epilepsy In Which Case Sorry About All These Seizure-Trigger Movies I Guess (or unless you don't like rompy superhero movies in which case... sure ~~but I don't get you~~). 6/5 Spiders. I Think I Might Buy Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider Issues Now.

This wouldn't be very impressive if it was a Runescape level out of 99 or 120, given the experience curve, but since aging is entirely linear I'm pretty well up there. Birthday, woo!

Also, on this day two years ago I 1. got a grandmaster quest for my birthday, and 2. got all my RS skills to at least level 99 and thus became eligible to equip the snazzy cape my avatar is wearing in my icon. (It's particularly snazzy because one can customize it to have any four colors, and so as soon as I bought mine I made it quest cape colored. It defaults to desaturated reds. Some people make theirs eyepopping neons.)

I'm a nerd, and I'm a grown-ass nerd and have been for five years now, and since it's nearly 3 AM I'm going to go to sleep and hope the wood putty has fully cured in the morning and continue fixing my floor and see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse this afternoon and other excellent birthday things.

Current Mood: sleepy

Despite the title today hasn't been too bad; it's just that I'm currently a little cranky.

1. I missed that doctor's appointment, and when I finally got around to scheduling a new one the earliest afternoon spot was on the 28th. Eh, I won't die of earwax-clog, it'll just be annoying.

2. I got a new desk chair with working wheels! Woooooo! The ruts I accidentally dug into my hardwood floor won't get any worse!

3. ... but in the few days between when I got the chairmat and this new chair, the old chair warped the chairmat into the ruts in the floor. Ugh. UGH.

4. So mom and I went to Home Depot and got wood putty for me to fill the floor with, because clearly this has to happen, like, ideally several months ago but since that would cause a time paradox second best is today.

4b. We went to Michaels first, though, and I came across a candy mold shaped like pixelated hearts and I had to get it. Mmmmm, souls. Tasty and wriggly. I'm gonna look up a recipe for gummy candy and get food coloring and make Delicious Human Souls. Alas I think making a clear thing white is less feasible, so no monster souls.

5. And now I'm waiting for the first layer of wood putty to dry, and since it's in the floor in front of my desk I can't even play Runecape. Ugh. Uuuuuuugh. There was no good time for me to do this, though, so the least bad time is Right The Fuck Now.

6. I've got an alarm set to poke me in a bit over an hour, and if it seems dry enough I'll add another layer. Hopefully I'm not royally fucking this up, but if I am that's not the end of the world.

7. I am coming to you from my phone, where Dreamwidth doesn't have a mobile site but the way the desktop site appears on mobile is, like, functional. The text in this text box is an acceptable size. I can zoom in to poke links. Certainly not much worse than the Glowfic Constellation, whose links are actually easier to tap without zooming in.

EDIT: 8. Correction to point 4b: turns out you totally can make white gummy candy. First recipe I've looked at calls for sweetened condensed milk.

Current Mood: working

Also I really fucking need to go to bed because I have a 10 AM doctor's appointment to deal with all this fucking earwax and I would find it incredibly annoying to sleep through it.

And no, brain, it's 6.5 hours away, I am not pulling an all-nighter with the help of caffeine. No. If I have to choose between making the appointment and having any time at all to do things like shop for something to replace my old desk chair I will miss the easily-rescheduled honestly low-priority appointment.

One thing I find immensely helpful about Tumblr is, in the dashboard and uhhh I think one blog theme the one that every new account has by default lately, you can press J or K to go down a post or up a post respectively. This is so useful, whether to skip a long post I'm not interested in (or have seen already) or to quickly skim a bunch of posts when I'm looking for Something but I can't remember enough to tell what if any tags it had, that I wish other sites had it. Pretty please! Tumblr dot hell is a trashfire but these keyboard shortcuts are so useful ok

Because I care entirely too much about things like this: I installed the XKit extension "Alternative Timestamps", which causes dashboard posts to have timestamps both absolute ("YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm") and relative ("X [minutes/hours/days/etc] ago"), and then went allllllll the way back to the first post with a timestamp on December 17th. Subtracting the 5 pages of December 18th posts so far, there were 21 pages (210 posts) of posts for the entirety of December 17th in my timezone (EST); this is more what I expect of not checking Tumblr for 8 hours on a typical day, and even then it's on the low end.

I have no idea if my Tumblr circle was disproportionately likely to boycott the blue hellsite, but it's plausible; I'm in a very fandom-heavy circle, and I have heard tell that there are rather a lot of people who use Tumblr for like, not fandom. Well, the nature fandom, I guess, but not, like, media fandom. The parts of Tumblr I do not intersect with are alien to me. But I would be deeply interested in how much of a dip Tumblr's traffic took yesterday.