wolfwings

ObPreface: I'm an old-school gamedev/coder, that has never found an IDE beneficial so far yet, still hand-write my Makefiles instead of using autoconf, etc. Because I've never actively sought out 'invasively cross-platform' support, if it wasn't on x86 or arm running a modern *NIX-like, DOS, or eventually Windows, I flat didn't care.

To the point that my 'gamedev' for a Windows game in 2024? Uses the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run MinGW locally on the system and cross-compile back out of Linux into Windows binaries again. A fun aside: Windows binaries run just fine inside of WSL instances, so you don't even need to copy things out to run when testing things, just run it in place in the build output directory no problem. And add an exception to Windows Defender for the appropriate directory underneath \\wsl.localhost\ for whatever Linux distro you go with.

( That said... let's start talking about status, plans, and progress. )

With that out of the way I'll go into archive formats in my next post, because that will be better suited to discussing theory and options before we start poking at actual implementation details.

First, some context for those stumbling across this post in the ether:

Before last Halloween, I met one of the most special people in my entire life, M'Lady Paintless, her amazingly talented husband Metz, and their three wonderfully amazing kids.

I'd known M'Lady for years before that off and on before they were known as M'Lady Paintless in the fandom, and I was one of the ones that helped 'vouch' for them moving to the US as Metz was not a US Citizen only M'Lady and the children were.

When we finally met after they'd moved to the US there were what I can only described as sparks, more intense and life-awakening than anything I've experienced before. We... weren't sure what to make of it. They were distinctly and steadfastly monogamous, from the get-go, while I was poly. But we enjoyed each others company, and I scheduled another visit out... and another... and we decided to try something insane... while it wasn't Poly, we were all open to... well... seeing what happened?

We pursued this approach, seeing what would grow... and kept finding places I'd stumble, I'd face-plant... just... places where I stopped, suddenly out of road to drive down...

The best example I can give, is it took someone telling me I should be scrubbing my shower floor. I'd been washing it out and wiping it down, but I'd never scrubbed the textured surface. I simply didn't realize there was a concern towards keeping it looking that clean, I just... I'd never considered it before.

Or as another example, I was told to pull some stuff out of the fridge, and the lettuce I pulled out was wilted and very sad looking, almost slimy at points. I... had eaten lettuce in that state plenty of times, and when she complained the look on my face explained it all: "Huh? What's the problem?"

I've... basically never truly wanted in my life; I've had to eat very bad stuff compared to what most of the US expects I think, including dumpster-diving at grocery stores at times, but I've never wanted. I've had plenty of food, plenty of safety, plenty of sleep. I've never truly had hardship, someone in my web of friends always stepped in and helped me out... but I'd come to rely on that web existing, that safety net. So I'd never grown up, never hit rock bottom to find where I could for sure plant my feet, just trudged through the swamp of life so far to date.

And for not wanting... I'd never learned what I wanted either. So I almost never make a decision, I always pushed it off; like even when asked which baked potato I'd want from a tray from the oven? I'd freeze up. Just solid... not have an answer, not even able to choose such a simple thing. I froze.

I'd learned early on to just push off the decision to others, what do THEY want? How can I help THEM? Not outwardly submissive, but indirectly passive-aggressive type submissiveness even if I was domineering (beyond dominant in a bad way) about doing or getting it.

Beyond that, I also was... impatient? ...rushed? By the time it mattered, we'd clashed heads so often I was almost waiting for us to clash heads again, if we had time to cuddle or anything I'd almost have a list of bullet-points I'd run by as fast as I could, trying to complete the list before I got my hands bit or we butted heads... and THAT caused us to butt heads all the more.

So, yeah, I kept cascading a huge failure state between us.

Me and the kids? We got along quite well mostly, though I found out finally what scared them about me. To be frank... I explain things in too much depth and left too deep an understanding of why something was bad, instead of just a quick 'That's bad!' I'd explain why.

Me and Metz? Still get along just fine. As Metz put it: I'm a great technical 'employee' mindset, I can tackle design ideas for hardware to support a design easily, and implement them for computers at least.

But overall? I'm simply immature. In ways I couldn't understand before because I'd never been around those that had lived a truly hard life, I'd been around those that I could 'rescue' repeatedly, or that would willingly keep giving me tasks to complete and micro-manage me. I'd been taken advantage of and take advantage of others, in lay-mans terms I'm learning I've got something that's... similar to co-dependence, but I'd learned to fix some pieces in recent years without realizing, so I'm not fitting it in every way, but it's a good fit and is helping some to learn more.

So, recently, we'd decided I needed to move out to an apartment nearby; we simply needed distance while I fixed my personal issues we've found. My physical issues I've mostly fixed at this point, I'm healthier than I have been in YEARS, and have shed considerable weight, over 40lbs though I have no goal so I haven't kept track.

Then, today, a friend was driving the rest of my stuff out from Kansas City, something we'd scheduled before now but I'd forgotten about. So I discussed it with M'Lady and Metz and the driver, and we decided I should take advantage of the ride and help with the drive back to Kansas City if I could find somewhere to stay there.

It says a lot that it's still fine for my stuff to stay w/ M'Lady and Metz for now. There's no ill will there, it's simply that there's critical damage between myself and M'Lady right now, damage that can't be repaired while we're in the presence of each other. Healing is needed.

And then in another change of circumstance, Karma of Sparkle Kreations contacted me the night before my Kansas City driver was coming out, and asked if I could help them with some fursuit work, specifically soldering fursuit bits.

So... plans tweak again, my driver was fine hanging out for a few hours, so we (me, Karma, Cirque, and the driver) all went out to a local mall just to hang out, see if we get along as a group, and discuss the possibility of me staying for 4-6 weeks to save up enough to get an apartment.

And that's where I'm at now. Moved a few dozen miles away to stay at a friend's place for a month and change, and then I'll have an apartment entirely on my own for a month or two before my future roommates can move out and we'll be there for at least a year, seeing where we are at that point.

So... that's where I am now, what mistakes I personally made to end up here, and what I'm doing about it medium to long term. But I'm staying in the Denver area, I'll be around at some meets w/ Karma and Cirque perhaps, and I think that summarizes the current situation.

As for where I hope to be after that? I still wear the necklace M'Lady gave me, I will continue wearing that. I still have hope. This hasn't been a door closing, not yet; this is very much a last ditch effort to avoid having to close this door, pulling back to re-assess and let things calm down, let the irritation die down as I work through my issues.

But this attempt to repair things... it hurts. A lot. I won't deny that. I haven't cried this much since Vex's funeral, haven't been this much of a mess in years. M'Lady would and has told e to stop staring at the wreckage and do something to clean it up. And I am. Tears or not, I'm moving, not wallowing in those tears.

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Edit in 2016: I'd posted this months ago, but M'Lady Paintless felt it revealed far too much, and that it could be used to hurt the kids, and to paraphrase her: If I threatened the kids she would destroy me. So I removed access to this post at the time.

She has since blocked me online entirely instead of ever suggesting what I could edit to post this, so I'm unlocking it for public view at this point.

A lot of what I wrote at the time was in the mindview of trying to make amends still, hoping to patch things up, but that ship has well and truly sailed at this point. I'll never truly understand what I did wrong, only taking solace in that I never gave up on things until she gave up on me.

This is partially some notes, and partially a guide to setting up a fully UEFI (though not Secure Boot enabled) Linux laptop, optimized for use with any and all SSD's including the most recently known details (as of January 2013) on how to get the best performance and endurance from consumer-grade SSD's, including minimizing I/O latency and allowing as many features of Linux as possible to work.

Note, however, that I am making one specific trade-off: I'm optimizing for a machine with 8+GB of memory, and an SSD under 100GB when we're done, so I'm not even attempting to add swap space or enable disk hibernation as a result.

This work was done to configure a Dell Latitude E6430 w/ 16GB of RAM, and a Samsung 840 Pro 120GB SSD. I must give Dell EXTREMELY high marks for their UEFI BIOS, BTW. It's the best I've seen for dealing with advanced setup and configuration and made this a breeze compared to my ThinkPad W530's BIOS.

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( Overview )

( Partitioning the Drive )

( Creating the Filesystems )

( Kernel Configuration )

( (Non-)Bootloader Configuration )

( Dual-Boot w/ Windows )

I'm seeing one major obstacle to why things like Open Canvas don't take off more:

( They require you to use/learn their tools to make art. )

( The following is, verbatim, what I submitted as feedback to Google for why I left Google+ )

Amusingly, this re-activated my "Google Profiles" link, so that is active instead of a redirector to my Google+ account. So http://profiles.google.com/wolfwings still works and displays correctly.

Working.

I wish it was more complex than that, that I had some amazing thing to show for all this time busy besides more cash in the bank, but I don't.

I've had several projects I've been promising to work on, and they've all sat nearly 100% idle because I've been so run ragged I can't focus to code or work on anything detailed... I'd love a good old-fashioned night of physical exertion right now. And no, I'm not being subtle here... camping, wrenching on cars, hiking, sparring, BDSM, sex, a mix of the above, but something physical is what I crave lately that doesn't involve staring at a screen or sitting on my ass for hours.

As to why? That's simply. I haven't had two contiguous days off in around a month now.

I took two days off of work (last saturday/sunday) so I could rescue a friend by driving out to Las Vegas and back. 50+ hours sitting in a vehicle as a result across roughly 6 days. That was a big marker that got called in.

This weekend I've gotten called into work, opposite my normal shift of midnight->noon to cover someone for noon->midnight, so I'm basically losing this weekend as well. I've heard something about the earthquake in Japan, but I'm oddly detached from it... I just don't have the brain-power to spare to dedicate to that it seems.

This last Mon/Tues/Wed ended up spent almost entirely sleeping instead, and doing a crap-ton of chores like my own laundry and bedding that had been badly neglected until I realized my own bedding smelled funny, then (again) getting called in to help with something suddenly.

So... there goes the last 4 weeks of my life, and before that it's just way too much of a fucking blur at about the same tempo. And the annoying part to me is so much of it is tasks that simply force me to drop all my side-projects suddenly, without having a chance to explain why or schedule ways around my absenses, which hurts.

Help? =^.^=

I have a friend that's kinda freaking out because they found out the doctor they'd been going to that'd been having them do basic physical rehab for knee pain hadn't been telling them the whole truth of the MRI results: They actually have a hole in the cartilage and some bone damage. They hadn't mentioned either of these things on any of the previous visits, just offered the occasional cortisone injection.

They (my friend) finally has an appointment with a sports-medicine doctor on Monday, but this sudden shift in what's wrong from 'not much, possible tilted knee cap' to 'Yeah... you have a hole in your cartilage, not a tear, and your bones have ground together some already!' had them kinda freaked out and they're wanting to talk to someone that's dealt with knee problems before, to get some second-hand knowledge and talk to someone else that's gone/going through similar to themselves.

Anyone out there on my wide-ranging friends list care to talk to them? Comment here, I'll grant access to a second post that'll be up immediately after this one with contact details.

As usual, just what it says on the tin. Looking for an artist willing to design a bit of steampunk-ish gear, specifically: I'm getting a fursuit of my actual fursona, WolfWings, and I'd like to get a bit of jangly, steampunkish kit to wear over the fursuit mostly over the front chest, shoulders, and arms.

The only real way to describe the idea is a post-apocalyptic steampunk urban shaman. Or to use a lot less fancy words: Drop a stereotypical Amerind 'shaman' into the wrecked cities of the movies "I Am Legend" or "Book of Eli" or the games "Fallout 3" or the "Left 4 Dead" series and imagine how they'd piece together a ceremonial outfit. Just realize this would be worn over top of a fursuit based on the character sheet I've had drawn by Wolf Nymph. Think things like using a driveshaft from a car as a ceremonial staff, and the like.

So... anyone out there know any artists that'd be interested in a commission like this? There's no rush on it, I won't have the fursuit itself for many, many moons yet.

You know how sometimes people on your friends-list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes. ( Read more... )