Interesting start to the year blasting useless guff into the abyss and finding the bits of software and projects which really matter to me. For the most part I have ditched social media, I was using twitter, mastodon, bluesky, and youtube constantly before and now it's some sporadic youtube use and the odd visit to bluesky. I stripped my three neocities sites right back to the essentials, decided against pursuing livestreaming for now, and picked to use NG blogs/news instead of self hosting a static wordpress site. Looking forward to being a supporter here again, and on neocities despite my minimal presence there.

I'd really like to make the Flash Forward entry I've had in mind since 2021, and with any luck I'll actually do it amidst work now that for the first time since then I'm no longer a post graduate student (thank goodness!). Ruffle was incredible then but has blown me away recently with how it can run older 3d frameworks like Papervision3D without much issue. Still yet to test a newer one like Away3D or Stage3D (my laptop, from 2011, struggles even with Papervision) but I have high hopes! Would be great to include something 3D in a submission.

One of the projects I want to include in that, which has survived the purge, I had some fun with recently modelling and rendering an asset for with Softimage 2015 R2, gif attached:

I'm so charmed by SI but when I have the computer to run it, I'm looking damn forward to using the latest version of Blender again. Using 2.79 on this laptop is an option, but not one I relish, and learning SI has been fun, even though it's a dead end. I'll be holding off on any new 3d work until I'm on Blender. It'll be interesting moving from Flash CS3 to a newer version of Animate, I have been really attached to CS3 everything (hooray for having an enterprise copy!) and of course it runs perfectly on this laptop, but I don't think I'll be able to keep it up on whatever computer I get next. Not sure i want to either, I've had a habit of dragging old hardware and software far beyond its use by date. That all being said, if I can get Flash CS3 running on the latest version of Mac OS somehow, I'll do it bahaha. But, I'll settle just fine for Animate.

Anyway hello, hello hello, great to be here again and pouring my thoughts into a blog post. I wont be a consistent poster, and if my track record is anything to go off then it'll be a while til I post again. Hopefully it'll be in April with that FF entry and to celebrate 25 years of the portal! How good

>> Link to the zip with the audio

As part of the ongoing efforts to move most of my projects to Newgrounds, I wanted to share this 16 minutes of piano ideas from back in August when I was still in the thick of uni work. It was the fourth week of semester 2, second year of creative media production. These sketches were made for the game Acolyte as part of a vertically streamed paper for the course. They never ended up getting used, in fact I don't think I ever even sent them to the group discord server so they just sat on my computer. I've enjoyed listening to them which is rare for anything musical made by myself. Probably ties into the fact that I was trying something different with these sketches for once. I was sticking pretty hard to one of the modes, I can't remember which, which lead to some cool sounding things. There's more than one point where it drags a bit, but there's also some ideas there which I feel could be easily elaborated upon which got cut off in this pile of sketches.

It's a shame that the dumping grounds don't have support for audio files! I love posting music and sound work wips, something the audio portal isn't really for. It's interesting though, alternatives for this kind of thing seem to be dwindling. Soundcloud either has or is about to implement a 12 submission maximum on free accounts. They were probably still losing money running the platform but wow this change is pretty damning for their community. I doubt Tumblr's longevity, and with the purge pretty much a year ago, the place feels like a wasteland. Most of those who I followed platform jumped, deleted their accounts, with a very small few clinging on.

It's interesting to me seeing that this account is slowly but surely approaching 10 years of age. I've lurked here, making the odd forum post and review here and there, but have remained largely quiet. This is my first proper news post, I still don't have a page bio written out, my header image works but is otherwise boring, and wow i've submitted next to nothing to the site. I can't promise that will change, i've made that promise so many times in the past 7 and a bit years and nothing has come of it. It saved me the embarrassment of having some opinionated 12 year old posting on this page, but now it's time for the slow process of getting more content on here.

It's 5am here in NZ now and this post is a hot mess.