In Memorium

My grandfather passed away early Tuesday morning, so this week has been a little chaotic. A lot of my family had to fly in from other cities, but they got here in time. Will be having random family passing through the city all the way up to the funeral next week, so I'm going to be a little preoccupied dealing with that as well as my own personal feelings. He hasn't been well since before my grandma passed, but his health declined after she was gone. He had a rare type of dementia, so his quality of life wasn't the greatest. He would have never wanted to live like that. The staff where he was living was fantastic though, and I can't thank them enough for taking good care of him and making sure he was as comfortable as possible.

Soundtrack Thursday is dedicated to him today. When he was healthy, he really loved watching Star Trek. Going through his things at his house a few years ago we found so many VHS and DVDs of Star Trek, old and new. He never watched any of the new remake movies, so today I'm going to listen to the old movies as well as TV soundtracks. 

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Great nostalgic soundtrack...until you hit Amazing Grace in bagpipes. And I know why there's bagpipes. I've just never been a fan of them at funeral type things. That said, if I could arrange a chorus of screaming bagpipes for a my funeral, that would be hilarious. Would have to be like 5 conflicting bagpipes though.

Star Trek VIII: First Contact - Figured I'd get a film from the second generation of crew and captain. I always personally liked Picard more, but I'm also a fan of Sir Patrick Stewart, so I'm biased. 

Collection of Musical Scores - Here's a broad range of feature scores for Star Trek that I stumbled across. Figure it's a good way to end off the afternoon.

For those of you that missed the last post (of the like...5 people that read this), the Myst series is now fully live and updated on YouTube. The playlist is public, but the videos are unlisted. It's the weakest in the series (of my gameplay at least), so I thought I'd avoid spamming people with an entire 8 part LP when it's not that great. I'll be uploading Riven in July, which in my opinion is the best so far, and I will make those videos public. Other than that, I can't promise any regular updates over the next few weeks, but I'll try to get what I can released.

THANKS GOOGLE

Ugh. Just spent an hour getting angry, then upset, then REALLY upset over YouTube's new uploading shtick. I woke up this morning and stumbled over to my computer to see that both uploads that I had started, had failed. The reason? Unsupported file format.

Wait. What?

Apparently, as of yesterday, .mkv files are no longer supported. I encode everything in .mkv format. For the past three years, I have encoded all of my videos, everything I've posted, everything I have not posted, in .mkv format. There are very few exceptions. Why is this a problem? Well, .mkv is a container. It is very difficult to covert the files back into a format I can work with and edit. This is additionally a problem because I delete the raw Fraps files as soon as I have encoded the videos properly to save space.

Beginning to see an issue here?

Let me show you something. This, is my computer:

This, is an example of one of the drives I use for recording:

And this is how much space an hour and a half of recording your average game takes up:

I have added two internals and purchased two external drives for this hobby. I know people who have more drives with larger storage capacity to do exactly what I do. This is why I encode in .mkv format. One of those .mkv files takes 134GB of video and turns it into 3GB.

All the videos you see on this page are in .mkv save one. This is where the bad and good news comes in. Here's the bad news first. All those videos in the top middle, were videos I had prepared in advance for YouTube. I'm leaving for two weeks...in a week. These were intended to keep my channel updated while I was gone. I cannot use them now. All those Dragonborn videos need to be converted. I do not have the raw files anymore. I deleted them two days ago. So I need to figure out a way to convert them if I want to post them, which will most likely mean a drop in quality. I will consult someone about this. The good news is I can start encoding in .mp4 format. Seems to have little difference in file size and the quality seems fine. I can start encoding all of the videos for YouTube that way. Life moves on. I'm over it now.

What I'm not over is that in my rage, I made the mistake of posting my complaint in the wrong place. I actually debated it knowing that a select few would be pricks about it, but I ultimately did it because it was cathartic. I then proceed to be lectured on how my problems meant nothing and that people are currently dying of disease and war in other parts of the world right now. A completely fair point. That said, I have control over my emotions, control over what's going on in my life, control over what I care about. This person didn't bother to ask what I do or think or care about in these situations. He just assumed I was being a selfish asshole. Yeah, maybe I was. For a single hour of a single day I dared to be angry about something relatively trivial in the grand scheme of the universe. Of course it means hours of work on something I don't have, especially when I've made promises to other people to make things for them. I can handle strangers being jerks. Most of the time if just makes me laugh. When it's someone I know personally, that hurts a lot more, because there is more meaning behind the comments besides being an asshole for the sake of making people mad. I'm over this, but now I get to feel like a terrible human being for the rest of the day, no matter what I tell myself or how much I care about what's going on in other places.

This is why I post videos. This is why I do LPs. Everywhere I go, everything I do, I feel like very few people take me seriously. Everyone else is more important, has worse shit to deal with, has a louder voice. I can sit, and talk and enjoy a game, for a few hours of my day, and not have to worry about the more pressing issues in my life and around the world in other people's lives. It helps me deal with confidence issues, depression, anxiety and all the abuse, names, bullying and manipulation I have been at the receiving end of for at least fifteen years (and why I am extremely lucky to know legitimately decent people these days). That was why YouTube's decision was a big deal to me, because for a moment I felt like something extremely important to my well-being was threatened, and I panicked. No one ever stops for the full story though.

So thank you for putting up with my rant. I'm over it and on to figuring out the .mkv issue. It's a challenge and I like those most the time.

Also, I'm going to attempt to bake cookies for a friend as she is leaving for grad school. This will end one of two ways: I will make a passable cookie...or I will burn the house down. Though, in reality, I'll probably just forget a vital ingredient again. I'm a terrible baker.


EDIT: The house is still standing and I have made a passable cookie.

SECOND EDIT: I have heard rumors of other people having similar issues and that it is a bug. I am praying this is true. Either way, I have spent the entire day being upset over essentially nothing. On the bright side, I now know that a) I say some dumb things and over-react when these things happen and b) I made a very good decision in 2009. I will leave it at that.

FINAL EDIT: It's fixed. Sigh...well this is a good lesson for when something like this happens again. Thanks to the people who put up with me yesterday and helped me feel better. You know who you are =p