Axolotl Thoughts

Viewmaster as the peak of e-waste

2026-04-05T05:35:20Z

Before we in my household had any proper VR headsets, we had the Viewmaster. No, not the old fashioned picture viewer thing, the "modern" remake that used your phone to put you in new and exhilarating places like space and Africa.

My family had a few phone VR headsets. A Google Cardbard, some Tzumi Dream Vision thing, and my Viewmaster. Unlike the others, the Viewmaster had a leg up in that the back shell was translucent and allowed for it to do AR as well as VR. The downside was that you had to hold it to your face at all times because that's important for nostalgia or whatever.

I really liked this thing! It used little "reels" made to mimic the look of the classic Viewmaster reels, but instead of slotting it in and looking at the pictures you would use the aforementioned AR features to look at it and scan it in before it takes you off to the mystical site of the... Statue of Liberty.

That "pass card" thing on the left is the same shape in all packs. They get you to touch it to the screen as some form of DRM so you can't just google pictures of the spools and play them, but it literally is the same shape for every single one.

ANyway, I had a few kits and they were pretty cool at the time! I tried to use it again recently only to discover that not only does my phone not fit in the recepticle anymore, the apps also don't work on modern phones.

_{Fun side note, that QR code with the headset on it is used by other non-Viewmaster apps to determine how to render the app or something. Most phone VR headsets have one and it does... something!}

It's kinda disappointing though. Phones kept getting bigger to the point they outgrew some of these devices and phone VR kinda just died down. Proper all-in-one VR is also not the largest yet but I'm hoping it takes off with the Steam Frame. At least Google had the foresight to make it out of cardboard so the bulk of the headset can be recycled, but the Viewmaster really hasn't had much for it since they killed the apps in... 2019??? Damn, I see why considering I only learned this past year.

It's a sad fate for many devices and peripherals, but not unexpected for strange and more niche things like this.

That time my laptop nearly exploded at school

2026-03-15T05:32:15Z

Earlier this year I was in the campus library studying for my chemistry test later that day when something happened. While I was working on my homework earlier that day I heard some snapping coming from my laptop, which seemed odd, however I had previously opened it up to replace the wifi card and battery so I assumed it was just some clips snapping back in place. It turned out my laptop was bulging... a lot. Right where the battery is located. This isn't good.

I did what anyone should do and recorded a quick video of it to show people, before shutting it off and removing it from power. I then decided to leave the library, in search of some place I could store it or some way I could dispose of the battery safely. I quickly scooped the laptop up in my arms, as I didn't want it to get crushed by everything I had in my bag and explode me, and went off.

Since it was the middle of winter I travelled through the campus tunnels, building-to-building, in search of either a fireproof locker of some sort (maybe in chemistry or engineering?) or a screwdriver so I could remove the battery and continue using the laptop for the lab I had that day. (This was a very busy day, I had a lab and then a test right after :/).

I ended up getting all the way to the other side of campus where my lab would take place before I found someone with a screwdriver, and started removing the screws from the laptop. This was when I discovered what that snapping sound actually was. The battery was so bloated that it actually broke the laptop chassis as it expanded. I got the battery out and closed it back up, so that I could use the laptop during the lab plugged in. I also texted my dad letting him know that we need to look into a new laptop, because I have multiple classes that rely on having one including in rooms that don't have outlets.

Some time passes and he gets back to me, telling me to get a refurbished thinkpad from the campus store. The problem being that the store closes before the end of the lab, which started in under 20 minutes. I scooped up the battery in my hand, packed my stuff away, and speedwalked respectably through the tunnels, which took about half that time before getting to the store where they took a few more minutes trying to find the replacement. By this point I didn't think I'd make it back in time, but decided to try for that anyway. I picked up the giant cardboard box with the laptop, grabbed my battery, and ran across campus outside. As I passed by someone I literally heard them say "is that a laptop battery?" Why did you just recognize it that quickly???

By some miracle I did make it back on time. Everyone was there waiting for it to start as I nearly burst through the door, sweaty, carrying a giant cardboard box and a potentially-explosive device.

So uhh... overall an exciting way to spend a Friday. I tried to set up the new laptop while also doing the lab so I could use it but I stupidly connected it to the internet and had to wait until I got home to use a local account. Love Windows 11. I also did end up passing the chemistry test in the end, so it all worked out lol.

P.s. I though I would add, I'd had that laptop for at least 5 years. They don't make batteries for them anymore so whatever I had in there was likely some defective old stock that was laying around we unfortunately purchased. Not the best, but at least this laptop lasted a good while and I have no plans to replace my thinkpad anytime soon now. Anyway thanks for reading :3

PayPal sucks if you're not American

2026-02-06T22:11:31Z

Depending on what platform you sell the things you make on, you may come in contact with PayPal. In fact you probably will. They're everywhere. PayPal seems to be good as long as you're American. Most people already use your currency so there's no conversion fees, and you can withdraw any amount of money at any time. That's not the same here in Canada, and it really pisses me off.

Currency conversion

PayPal charges a 2.5% fee to convert your currencies. This means that in order to get my money as CAD, I need to give them an extra cut. It would seem less infuriating if this was the only way they make money off of me, but they're literally the payment processor and already take a cut of my money. Additionally you may argue there could be transactional fees they can't control, but I highly doubt that considering my own bank charges 0% fees for currency conversion. I can even pay directly with my bank card in another currency, and they just convert it without extra fees. Keep this in mind.

Transferring money

PayPal also doesn't want you to take money out of your account, preferably. In Canada, you must have a balance of at least $25 CAD in order to withdraw. This doesn't sound like a lot, but USD withdrawals have no minimum and neither form of transfer has any fees unless you want it expedited (though 1-3 days is standard for EFT bank-stuff anyway). Despite this, if you have auto-transfer turned on, it will forcibly convert all currencies to CAD, and then leave them in your account. I have "convert currency" turned off in the auto transfer settings, but it does that anyway.

USD bank accounts

In Canada it's not uncommon for banks to provide some sort of USD account, and I have one. Additionally they can perform all standard banking actions including EFT transfers between banks and wire (in some cases, not mine). Cool. I'll just connect that and-- Oh. Wait. PayPal explicitly states on the account connecting page that you CAN'T use Canadian USD accounts. The only reason for this I can think of is the loss of conversion fees. Stripe allows this, I typically connect multiple bank accounts to Stripe for payouts depending on currency. The only way for me to get a payout in USD with less fees is to get my money as USD, pass it through Wise which I have for Steam so they can perform wire transfers in USD, and then have Wise convert it to CAD and deposit to me. They still have fees, but it's significantly lower in higher volumes.

I thought I could at least automate deposits in USD to my Wise account, but they don't even let you do that. In Canada you are only allowed a CAD and USD balance. Only the CAD one is allowed auto transfers. That's just the rules.

Oh and, PayPal just arbitrarily decides sometimes I can't spend money from my balance? Especially on Bandcamp, so I actually have money sitting in there that I can't do anything with.

Conclusion

Some of this may seem petty, like one should not be surprised when the large company wants to collect extra fees where possible, but those aren't fees that Americans deal with anywhere near as much, and the fact that my money has been run through it multiple times without my consent just annoys me a lot. They also apply a bunch of extra friction to the whole process of getting your money out of PayPal, that really just makes it feel horrible to try to use for anything productive.

Anyway that's my rant, not to mention PayPal is also just not a good company, doing things like building an ad network using the data Honey collects after paying hundreds of people to tell us they don't make money off of selling your data. Not a fan.

Also Itch & Routenote and stuff, you guys should totally look into getting Stripe Express for your payouts. Or like Wise or something maybe. Itch has normal Stripe for payments that are sent directly to the developers, but if you want your payouts collected by Itch (which I very much do, I have no clue how to remit taxes. I think even though I'm Canadian I'm still supposed to pay the EU VAT for European payments?) it's either PayPal or Payoneer, which will charge fees for inactivity and is meant more for professional corporate stuff.

Separating my online identity

2026-02-02T05:50:00Z

Yesterday I did a post about this but I wanted to revisit those thoughts and refine them. The main subject is the fact that PossiblyAxolotl was originally only meant as a personal general purpose username rather than something I would expect to be recognized by. I often use a username on most platforms regardless of if I need to for recognition purposes the same way you might want for social media platforms, so even offline I at times feel I am never really "off the clock." Like I have to maintain some professional appearance even when I'm just hanging out with friends.

For this reason I've started working on a separate personal site, and I've been using either a different username or whatever a platform generates for me depending on the need for recognition and who the target of that would be. I.e. I use my personal username on Canva where I work with people on school projects, PossiblyAxolotl on social platforms where I need it for recognition, and whatever I'm given for something like raindrop.io which I use strictly for personal and unshared reasons, where having a username serves no purpose to me.

I'm figuring all this out as I go, the main thing is I want to be able to develop my personal self more independently from PossiblyAxolotl. As in, I don't want to feel the need to constantly keep people posted on my thoughts, hobbies, and interests, for the sake of keeping active internet engagement. Wanna do more stuff for myself and all that.

Anyway that's all for now,

goobye :3

Things I use

2026-01-24T20:32:19Z

HeY! I thought I'd share some apps and tools and things I use that I think others can get some use out of too. I've seen a lot of "degoogle" guides and while they're nice, they all talk about the same things, don't provide alternatives to the same services, and only talk about Google rather than replacing more general mega-corporate products with smaller, locally run, or self-hosted alternatives.

Anytype (Notion)

First is Anytype. I've used Notion before and liked it. I especially like that every new line is treated as its own sort of "element" that you can grab and drag around independently. My main gripes with it being the classic intrusive AI and that it's really designed for online-only editing. I like being able to modify my important files and things regardless of how crappy my internet connection is. I also like open source stuff, so that's where Anytype comes in.

Anytype functions similar to Notion, but it's open source, local-first, and very private. They do sync your files to their server by default, but you can also host your own or keep files local only and sync between devices on the same network. I'll be honest, I'm not as well-versed in internet security as I could be, but when I launch an app and instead of asking for my email and password it assigns me a string of random words or characters I feel safe lol.

I'm using Anytype for my project organization, as it's very much made for larger project and knowledge management, but it also has a notes feature as well. Since they sync to their server they do offer a subscription for more storage, but it's not intrusive and again, you can sync to your own server or via p2p.

Tally (Google Forms)

Similar to Anytype, Tally also has a very notion-like structure, but for making surveys and forms. I like it because it's fairly easy to put stuff together with just a keyboard, and it's got a lot of extra specific features you can put into your forms if you'd like. Some I can think of off the top of my head, are payments through Stripe and a signature field. I used the signature field to get my playtesters to draw a doggy on signup that will be shown in the credits of Super Rocket Bytes lol.

It's also nice cause you can embed it on webpages with a solid colour or transparent background, so I have it on both the Sillyring page for submissions and my contact form and they fit in very nicely on the webpages.

File storage (Drive, Dropbox, Etc.)

I have a couple things I use for file storage so I thought I'd clump them together. First off I bought a NAS recently, so that's the main place I drop my files off. It's a Ugreen NAS which has a pretty neat web interface I honestly don't mind.

I also use Syncthing to sync files I want to be backed up. I seem to still have MegaSync on my computer for some reason though I'm not sure if it's actually syncing anything lol. Syncthing is very nice and easy to set up. I've got 2 4tb drives (one for redundancy) so 4tb total storage and it may honestly be more than I really need, but it's good to have.

I also have Papra as a secondary backup for certain files (as well as iCloud since my family pays for it), which is meant as a long-term app for dropping files in and forgetting. It's also open source and self-hostable if you'd like!

Forgejo (Github [Microsoft 😨])

I've got a little Forgejo git server running on a Raspberry Pi here under my desk, next to my NAS. I know a Raspi + Micro SD card aren't """good""" to be running 24/7 as file storage, which is why I mirror all my projects on Git.gay and Codeberg (open source only).

There's also instances hosted by both Disroot and the 32Bit Cafe, so there's plenty of options.

Memos (Notes)

I've written about Memos twice already before so I won't talk too much, but it's effectively a private Twitter feed for notes where you can create hashtags, upload files, and write notes in Markdown without needing to title them or structure them in a specific way.

It's also open source and self-hosted!

_{See my other posts here and here.}

Commafeed

I used to host FreshRSS which is very nice, but I discovered Commafeed a bit ago and it's very clean. I self-host it on my NAS, and it's just a really simplistic RSS feed reader that does what I need of it, without extra complications.

Linkding

I also used to host Slash for storing links and sharing lists of them with people, but I switched to Linkding a bit ago which is pretty solid. You can save and tag links, as well as sharing them with other users or publicly. You can then also share specific lists of links using certain hashtags.

A link manager in particular is very much not necessary for everyone, but for me my Firefox bookmarks bar was FILLED with links and things, so now I use it more as temporary memory and links to these services that I do use a lot.

Raindrop.io (Pinterest)

I used to use Pinterest to save images I liked, but I found that I'd scroll the feed for a really long time, and I also don't like big companies collecting a my information and showing me AI slop. I use Raindrop to make little collections of images and things, though technically it's meant for link aggregation.

I was having problems with it not working the other day and moved a bunch of stuff over to mymind, but it's a lot more restrictive with its free plan so I'm still on the lookout. It does seem to be working again today so I assume it was just some kind of outage, but I would like if they posted literally anything or gave any sort of error message for it.

That's all I can think of right now. Let me know if you try anything out, and feel free to give me other suggestions!

Thank, goobye! 🩷

Music wrapped 2025

2025-12-31T18:49:41Z

I haven't been using much of any streaming services as of late, so I don't have an actual "Spotify Wrapped" or equivalent to share, so I thought instead I would share some of my favourite music I've been listening to on my FiiO/Snowsky Echo Mini this past year.

This year has been a good part review of music I already knew because I needed to rebuild my library after switching to using an MP3 player, but I also got way more into stuff I haven't listened to in a good while. I also just the other day set up Jellyfin and Finamp which is a really solid music experience too cause I can listen to all my Bandcamp purchases, as well as CDs I rip.

Aphelion by Leprous

I discovered this album through a custom level for the game Soundodger 2, and I gotta say, it's really good. Somehow they made weird prog rock time signatures incredibly catchy, and Einar's voice is genuinely incredible. I own this album on CD and vinyl, and it's very cool. The first time I listened to the vinyl I genuinely verbally reacted like "woah" to some of the dynamics because you don't get that level of volume change in your typical mp3s. Songs I would recommend are Nighttime Disguise, which is a really good closer and people like to share it as an introduction to the band overall (and they also made this one in a livestream letting chat make decisions during the lockdown), and Castaway Angels, which is the calmest song of the album but it really brings out how much control Einar has over his voice and is just really pretty. Amazing album to sing along to, very nice.

The Devil-Faces of My Old Friends, Beneath Me by Heccra

I believe I found this album a long while ago from that guy on Instagram who wanted to listen to every music genre as to not be "genrephobic". I'm trying to completely stop using Instagram now, but they're alright. This one is really good to listen to through really bassy headphones to liquify your insides with. I recommend The Mint that Grows behind the Dumpster as that's the first song from this album I listened to, and it's also just really good.

Eat Your Dreams by Nelward

Nelward is such a goofy guy. Weirdly this is some of his most normal music from what I've noticed, as I recently started listening to more of his singles (Nelward 1-5 albums). It's still a solid album, and pretty catchy. I recommend The Werewolf and Eat Your Dreams (title song), but it's all really good. Another song of his I really like is Ghost, which is not part of this album but it's a really good song nonetheless and the music video is incredible. Truly a work of art.

Endgame and Utopia by Killerblood

This album is really interesting. It's purely instrumental and pretty chill, just something to listen to while you lay down and not think. I really like Ancient Opaque Pathway, mainly because of the pulse it has. I really like music that evokes the visual of like a grandfather clock rocking back and forth. Same kind of feeling I get from Ember Valley (day) from Slime Rancher 2, and kind of like my own song A Lonely, Lost Ship, though mine is meant to feel more like a heartbeat.

Last album I'll share is The Big Big Deal by tv room

Eli's songs always feel really cheer/hopeful even when they're not talking about something that's always the most happy or cheerful, and have some really weird and wacky instrumentation that I just really enjoy. Honestly I'm not even sure which song to recommend as it's all a very good album, though I do like the somber-ness of Head and Heart. Go listen to it, and more of his stuff.

Ok now I'm gonna quick-fire a few singles because I want to. Something You Said by tv room - yeah that's right, he's back. Love this song. Garage2 by 81.0x19 - they make some really funky weird electronic stuff, and yet nobody knows about them. Criminal. Sphere of Annihilation by ivri - I found this song in an episode of Big Shot & Friends (I forget which so I linked the remade pilot episode). Cosmic Relief by Nelward - he's back too, solid song and again, amazing music video.

That's all from me. Hopefully you find some neat music here, and I encourage you to do the same sort of "wrapped" thing on your own blog, forums, or wherever else! You absolutely don't need to follow my exact format or anything, this is just what works for me.

Goobye! 🩷

Are you a boy non-binary, or a girl non-binary?

2025-12-15T04:02:14Z

_{Hello! Just thought I'd give a quick note that this is a very opinionated post, so if you have different thoughts and opinions on the subject feel free to let me know!}

Something I've always found really strange around trans and non-binary areas on the internet is the use of the terms "AMAB" and "AFAB". "AMAB" meaning "Assigned Male At Birth," and "AFAB" meaning "Asigned Female At Birth." Something I've heard, (though it's heavily debated, look into this yourself after), is that those terms originate from the intersex community in order to refer to one who was arbitrarily or surgically assigned male or female for their bodily composition, which makes a lot more sense to me because male and female AREN'T gender terms. I've always found these terms so weird because to me, male and female refer to a person's sex. The physical reproductive properties of someone's body that do play a role in how it interoperates with another sex, and not gender, the arbitrary social construct humans designed around sexes. I don't like being referred to as an AMAB non-binary person, because it feels like someone's calling me a boy non-binary. I imagine it to be a similar feeling to that of a lot of transgender people when transphobic people attempt to make a distinction between a woman and a trans-woman. I'm non-binary because I am not comfortable associating with many of the traits expected of a "man" or a "woman." I am male, and that won't change without serious surgical procedures, but I'm not a man.

Similarly, I've noticed that a lot of information about looking androgynous or dressing as a non-binary person is exclusively focused on looking more masculine. I think a big part of this is the fact that western society values masculinity as superior to femininity. Tomboys have been a relatively well-accepted thing in society compared to, and I mean this not as anything other than the base-level meaning of the term, femboys. See? You saw that word, and you chuckled, chortled, maybe you weren't expecting to see it. That or I'm attempting to call you out for nothing. Typically, people react much more seriously to the idea of someone giving up masculinity to be more feminine. They see it as unusual or perverse, because again, society values masculinity much higher than femininity. Of course a woman would want to be a man, but why on earth would anyone want to go the other way? I firmly believe our society is grounded on a sexist belief that women and femininity are inferior to men and masculinity, and a generally bigoted belief that anything other than the default (cisgender, masculine, white, Christian, etc.) is wrong or inferior.

I'm especially grateful to be a gay, non-binary, Jewish, left-handed person... (left handed is the WORST one)

Side-note, I joke there but I do genuinely like being different. Being normal sucks. I'm an odd little goober and nobody can tell me what to do >:)

Anyway, there's been a few times where I've tried to wear something like a crop top, or posted a picture online because I think it's cute (:3), and felt worried that people might see it as bad or perverse compared to literally a cisgender woman wearing the exact same clothing, because they're "supposed" to be wearing it and I'm not. I want to be non-binary and not care how I'm perceived, but it's a near constant fight to not be seen as anything other than a man to people. It's so weird, especially when even in the non-binary sphere there seems to be so much more acceptance for XX non-binary people than XY.

I dunno man, it's just strange.

Also wow that was the most robotic way I could have explained that -- "The physical reproductive properties of someone's body that do play a role in how it interoperates with another sex" -- "interoperates"? Ok nerd

Ripping Off a Tim Hortons Recipe - I Can't Cook.

2025-11-19T05:02:32Z

I like to get this thing at Tim Hortons called the "Farmer's Breakfast Wrap." I am not a farmer, though it's still pretty good and I like that I can eat it while walking to class without getting stuff all over my hands. My one problem is that I have to go to Tim Hortons and spend a fair few loonies to get it, so I developed my own recipe based on eating it and thinking about what I'm eating.

Ingredients

Eggs (1 or 2-ish)
Hashbrowns, specifically the kind that are like a solid block of potato. Not the shredded kind, though that probably works too
Chipotle sauce or chipotle sauce mix + prerequisite ingredients
Wrap
Cheese
(Optional) I think they put sausage in these, I always ask for the non-sausage kind cause I don't eat pork so you'll have to figure this part out yourself

How to make

I kind of do all of these at once though it really doesn't matter the order too much.

First, take the wrap and put chipotle sauce on it. My sauce comes as a mix that needs mayo and some other stuff added, so add about enough to make the amount of sauce you want and then put it on the wrap.

Then put cheese on the sauce. They typically use sliced cheese and place a few in the middle of the wrap where stuff typically goes, but I've found that it works better to use shredded stuff at home unless you have something that makes really thin slices.

They use cheddar but I don't have that for some reason, so this will do.

It's kinda like making a pizza, only it's not a pizza.

Next I typically start the hashbrowns. If you have a specific method, do that, but I usually just put the air fryer in the fries mode and it cooks them nicely.

Sealed for eternity.

This might actually be the better time in my case to start doing the stuff with the wrap, 'cause I like to let the hashbrowns cook for a bit before starting the eggs. Sorry 'bout that. Just go back and undo everything you did to the wrap, then redo it now.

Ok now fry the eggs. At Tim's they typically cook them completely through, probably because runny eggs are a salmonella risk, but do your eggs how you want. I really screwed one of them up and got egg whites all over the counter, and the yolk of one also got broken.

Once the eggs are done, add salt and pepper like I didn't do because I forgot and then put them into the wrap, around the part where wrap ingredients typically go.

Once the hashbrowns are done, also put them in the wrap. It doesn't really fit two of them that well, so unfortunately the second one will have to stay on the spatula until I can find an appropriate adoptee.

After this I stupidly put the frying pan in the sink. Don't do this, because you still need that to fry the wrap. Wash the pan and re-oil it if you're stupid (guilty!) and wrap the wrap into about the shape of a wrap. Then, fry it on both sides.

That is not a rectangle. That is clearly a trapezoid.

Once the wrap is done, it's pretty much done. Now marvel in your horrible folding techniques and chow down.

Good stuff. Uh. Comments for me for next time:

Add more chipotle powder to the sauce
Learn how to crack eggs
Fry it for longer

I have a habit of either undercooking stuff cause I'm too worried, or overcooking stuff due to negligence. I think it's called not being good at cooking, but I'm slowly getting better.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. I'm off to prison for trademark infringement!

Professionalism on the Web

2025-11-09T19:41:28Z

I'm never completely sure how I should talk to people online. On the one hand, I have a seemingly "professional" appearance as an indie developer online, but I also don't really feel that way. I waver a lot between "everything I say must be full sentences with punctuation and have a purpose," and posting the word "gleep" because I'm tired. Because of this, more often than not I end up saying very little. Short words and sentences, little thoughts, and that's all. I'm not really sure how I should appear, because I want to be more personal but I also know the internet is the easiest place to be hurt and attacked when you are. Especially in my case as a Jewish and non-binary micro-entity. Western culture was built on antisemitism and the hatred of anything that isn't "the norm".

I suppose this is also why I like little forum communities and places like the 32 Bit Cafe and Melonland, because they're places that don't have all that attention you may get on Bluesky, or heaven forbid, Xitter (I deleted my account Sept. 21, 2024!). I don't have to create high-quality stuff, or sanitize what I want to say, I can just go there and post about a funky mp3 player I like or create a really goofy homepage that's only for the people on the indieweb to see.

These thoughts also impact my website a lot, as it's right in the middle of the intersection between indieweb and my "professional" appearance. it's kind of a mix between PossiblyAxolotl, the (un)professional game developer's studio website, and PossiblyAxolotl, the internet entity's personal website. That's why it's colourful, and has some random images and outlinks, but also has a fairly simple and seemingly professional appearance. That constant wavering, the website is definitely a bit more professional than it could have been visually. I constantly move stuff around, like my collection of web badges shifts from my frontpage to a hidden side page and back whenever I have a change of mood in how professional it should look. I'm slowly figuring this stuff out, but all I can really do is keep exploring until eventually I reach a mindset and it reaches a point I'm completely comfortable in.

Content and Sponsorships

2025-11-09T19:29:48Z

I recently got an email from a company, asking about some form of partnership on a future project. This company is also one of the manybe 3-5 that I would actually feel alright talking positively about in a video, though I'm also not sure how to feel.

For a while I've wanted to completely push out the idea of doing sponsorships as a whole. My YouTube channel is for my art and creations, and I don't like the idea of injecting advertising into them. Additionally, I don't consider myself a video creator first, instead calling myself a game developer with video making as more of a fun side hobby, rather than a job.

I've always disliked the idea of becoming too corporate, especially after a friend of mine tried to exploit me for his own monetary gain (I don't talk to him anymore). I want to be genuine with people who watch my videos, and I don't know how I can be when being paid to talk about something. Even if I only receive a product or service, I can't really be truthful about the value of it to me unless I spend that money myself and can confidently recommend others do so.

I can't decide how I want this to go, because again, they're one of few companies I would actually consider talking about, but I don't want making videos to be my job, nor do I want to ruin the sanctity of my own creations by turning them into advertisements. It's a fun thing I do on the side because I like to do it. Maybe I'm reading too far into it, but I just don't want to go near the same path my former friend did. Becoming another MrBeast seems like the quickest way to suck all the fun out of having fun. I want to be free to do or say what I want, and share my genuine thoughts and feelings in my own art.

(Plus, if people want to pay me that's what Patreon is for-)

Minecraft world

2025-10-04T06:37:03Z

I've been wanting to write about this for a little bit but I haven't had the time or words, so I thought I would just start right now while I have a minute and see where it goes.

I've been trying to get back into doing things I actually like doing, specifically, I've been trying to find more of a balance between doing school, playing games, and making my projects. One outcome of that is I've finally started getting into games that everyone else has already gotten over years ago. Most recently Slime Rancher (the day before the sequel came out...). But this isn't about that, this is about Minecraft.

I've played this game for years, as you may expect from a living being, but until this past year I had never actually "beaten" it, or really played a personal survival world for any long period of time. Because of this, I decided to try giving it a real shot.

hous

When I play on servers with friends and things I don't really spend a lot of time on it. Part of it's the fact that I like to take stuff at my own pace, and do dumb things that amuse me. Usually I log on semi-frequently, only to find out they already finished the game and are over it only a few days in. I played Terraria with an old friend years ago and it sort of ruined some of the game for me because they spent more time searching for how to do things online than just trying it out.

On that, my house is wonky. You can't stop me. I will waste as much time as I want before reaching the dragon and nobody is there to fight it for me.

Beyond that, while you may expect a programmer like myself to be a very redstoney-optimized person, this is my farm:

I wanted it to follow the natural shape of the existing terrain, and the water going through it also helps with storage cause everything is funnelled into one hole where it's then shot into the air, then lands in a hopper leading to a chest.

I really liked taking the game at my own pace for once cause I got to spend more time just wandering and exploring the terrain, with the bonus of making my world size absolutely massive. I get to walk around and build fun little things I will never remember are there, and that's really fun.

The monuments

While exploring I noticed a lot of ocean monuments, all over the place. I thought they were supposed to be rare?

These structures genuinely really freak me out, I don't like them and it definitely has something to do with the long legs that stretch to the ocean floor it's just... euugghhh...

Even taking this screenshot in creative mode I was scared to get too close.

I think part of it has to do with the long leg-looking pillars that reach down to the ocean floor. They're very creepy and spider-like. You tell me which one you'd rather let in your house.

I came to the conclusion that they must be doing something. I have this weird habit where no matter how I walk, I always end up going in a circle that takes me back home anyway and I started to think about how, maybe those monuments are what are keeping me to this island? Every time I find my way back to an area I know, I see one.

Mini hous

I decided to build a little house structure on the island that appeared right next to the island the stronghold takes place in. I took inspiration from the structures already on the island, and filled in some wood and other stuff to make it seem like some sort of archaeologist reconstruction building, complete with dirt flooring.

This wasn't built to replace my other home, but convenience-wise it ended up more or less doing so. For a while when I explored I would use lodestones and compasses to mark key locations, so I also built a little stone pillar on top of the stronghold area with a lodestone on top. I was thinking it'd be cool to build some kind of statue there to really emphasize that this was some location of importance.

Eventually I built some nether portals, and this island's portal just so happened to appear in a nether fortress I had already found from my other home portal, which was very convenient.

For a while what really kept me playing was the fact that I hadn't beaten the ender dragon. Typically I like to have some kind of end goal, which was part of why I wanted to push off fighting it until way later than I ended up doing.

Exploring the stronghold is genuinely really off-putting. To add on to that, mine is entirely submerged under water. Was this intentional? Did whoever built this do it to protect it? Or did something else happen?

I've really come to appreciate the generation and placement of structures and things, this game gives you just enough to leave you thinking, despite the fact that the world is completely procedural.

By now I have beaten the dragon. I have an elytra as well from exploring the end (it took a while, but the end has such a cool backing track I didn't mind), and I even saw the dinkiest looking end city in the entire mine craft.

I think I'm gonna keep playing, though my frequency has gone down. I still have a bunch of ocean temples to destroy permanently forever, and there's still plenty to do. It just feels weird at times playing a game without a specific "you must do THIS" goal, though I've started enjoying playing games more casually as of late overall.

I definitely recommend trying out a proper survival world if you haven't before. Take it at your pace, do what you want, and just have fun. That's all from me, I hope to see you here next time. dramatically floats away

The term "friendslop"

2025-09-14T18:25:12Z

There's been a lot of games coming out as of late that have been classified by players as "friendslop." The term originates as a descriptor for games like Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., and other games like PEAK, but really it encompasses a large mass of cooperative multiplayer games. I don't like this term.

The term "friendslop" implies in the name that these games are "slop." Cheap garbage to be shovelled down the player's gullet with no thought behind them whatsoever. In reality, a lot of these games are genuinely really fun and addictive. Not because of their use of addictive, manipulative strategies like battle passes or lootcrates, but because they have a genuinely enjoyable gameplay loop that makes it fun to hop in, play a quick match or 2 with friends, and move on. Sounds like fine dining to me, especially in comparison to a lot of other modern games.

I assume the main reason this term exists is because of the prevalence of new games that fit in the category, with multiple games coming out every year that have somewhat similar gameplay. Things like all the aforementioned games, as well as projects like Content Warning or Phasmophobia. That and the fact that they're not "huge" games. Oftentimes they are relatively simple, focusing more on funny social interaction between you and your friends being brought out by the games themselves. They're also almost always indie games by small teams, or even individuals, leading people to arbitrarily assign the label of "slop" compared to that of larger companies (though most AAA games are arguably slop in comparison to many modern indies, and even old ones).

This term just feels derogatory to the work put into them. These are good games, and art, meant to be enjoyed, even if only for a short period.

Post about nothing

2025-09-10T04:17:02Z

I keep trying to type a post out, only to decide it's not worded right, or I don't like the flow, or something else is wrong and delete it. I feel like this shouldn't be the case since the whole point of this blog is to just be an open thought place for topics I find neat, but I think it may also stem from a conversation I had a while ago. Nothing big or anything, but someone mentioned how they found my blog odd as they're not used to the more casual tone a lot of my posts use. Because of this, over time, I sort of tried to develop more of a "professional" feel for my posts, which gradually made it harder and harder to just sit down and write about something. So I write about nothing.

I could write about some weird tech devices I have, or I could write about what Google service alternatives I recommend, or even something else altogether. But that's for another day.

Until then, thanks for sticking around and I'll hopefully have something to say soon! If you want something more, I listened to this album on the bus home from school the other day and it was pretty nice :>

My unnecessary convoluted self-hosting scheme

2025-08-16T06:36:06Z

A little while ago I learned what SSH reverse-tunnelling is and instantly had what I thought was an epiphany. I host a few services for myself. Namely, Memos, which I've talked about before, and Linkding (though I was using Slash instead of Linkding for a while). I wanted to be able to host these services on a Raspberry Pi at home here, but my dad refuses to let me poke holes in our network security for some reason. No fun. SSH reverse-tunnelling is basically using SSH to forward a connection from one port on one device, to a different port on another device. I realized I could host these services on my home network and tunnel them to another computer running Caddy, which then proxies those ports and keeps my home network relatively hidden. I decided to draw up a diagram that ended up looking something like this:

I thought this would be a fun experiment, and something I could try to figure out to see how good my technical skills are, so I decided to go for it. In order to have it work, I need a local computer, as well as the remote one, so I went with DigitalOcean's cheapest plan for the remote and a Raspberry Pi 3B+ at home.

The setup went pretty well overall. I tried to make the firewall as strict as possible, only allowing SSH from my home network and certain ports for web traffic. I also used a systemd service I only kinda understand to make sure it was constantly running the tunnel, and it could be stopped easily if there was a horrible security flaw somewhere. It ran well for a while, ignoring the annoying yellow flickering light that gets really obnoxious at night the Pi has. That was until I wanted to add something else.

I wanted to set up FreshRSS so that I could have my RSS feeds sync across both my Phone with NetNewsWire, and my desktop with RSS Guard. I added FreshRSS to my docker-compose.yml, made a service, and... it didn't work. I'm not even sure why, but it just wouldn't let me make another connection. My assumption was that SSH maxed out at 2 connections from a device, but that doesn't seem to be true from what I can tell. Whatever the reason, I realized something. I wanted to do this to allow me to host heavier apps for myself, but I was hosting the exact same things I was previously hosting on DigitalOcean entirely out of fear of putting too much onto the Pi. There was no reason to do this whatsoever.

A few days ago I decided to pack that all up and pay off the DigitalOcean server, deciding to move everything over to Kamatera since they seem to give a better deal, and now I finally have my FreshRSS instance. It also runs faster which is NOT surprising considering it's not taking requests and passing them back to another device on semi-alright wifi. Regardless of the actual utility of this, it was still fun to do. Though I am glad that STUPID flickery light is gone.

Also, if you're interested, this is my docker-compose.yml I made by cramming all the example ones together, and I just have a simple Caddy setup on my personal domain.

services:
  memos:
    image: neosmemo/memos:stable
    container_name: memos
    volumes:
      - ~/memos/:/var/opt/memos
    ports:
      - 5230:5230
    restart: unless-stopped
  linkding:
    container_name: "${LD_CONTAINER_NAME:-linkding}"
    image: sissbruecker/linkding:latest
    ports:
      - "${LD_HOST_PORT:-9090}:9090"
    volumes:
      - ~/linkding:/etc/linkding/data
    env_file:
      - .linkding-env
    restart: unless-stopped
  freshrss:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/freshrss:latest
    container_name: freshrss
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Regina
    volumes:
      - ~/rss:/config
    ports:
      - 5231:80
    restart: unless-stopped

Anyway that's all for now, goobye :3

I LOVE markdown editors... but which is the best?

2025-07-05T07:07:38Z

I'm a big fan of Markdown. Markdown is the format I use to write all of my blog posts here, all my notes, and a lot of what I do overall.

If you don't know what that is, it's a simple format that allows me to use special formatting to do fun things like those italics I just did there. It works like this:

*italics*, **bold**, ***bolded italics***, ^superscript^, ~subscript~, ~~strikethrough~~
> blockquote
# Heading
## Subheading
### etc. You get the point.

I like how many things use this because I can open any tool up and instantly have the muscle memory to do all sorts of fun formatting. Doesn't matter what you give me...

I will
Make it into a completely unnecessary table.

But this begs the question. Which markdown editor is the best? I've loaded up my PC with all sorts of markdown editors and likely various bits of malware in order to get to the bottom of this.

Disclaimers

Keep in mind, this is mostly for fun and my personal opinion, none of the tools here are bad so if you like one I'm not as big of a fan of I hope you enjoy it! I also can't possibly talk about every single markdown editor ever made because that would take a while and some simply don't run on my computer like Caret which looks like a nice, elegant editor, but I don't feel like figuring out how to extract and run a deb or rpm file on Arch right now.

Web-based Document Editors

This first category is specifically web-based document editors because for some strange reason I've noticed that neither Microsoft Office nor LibreOffice supports markdown formatting (though LibreOffice lets you paste markdown and formats it appropriately?). The main contenders I can think of here are Google Docs and Proton Docs. This one is more up to personal preference 'cause at least on the MD front they're pretty similar, but I prefer Proton Docs because:

It's not Google
It has code blocks (why doesn't Google???)

As just plain document editors I like Proton as it's super clean and simple, while still having most of the important tools for making a nice document and the whole markdown thing. It is still earlier on than Google Docs, but it's not Google's is also pretty simple, though I still prefer the simplicity of Proton overall.

One thing to note is that Proton docs does a weird thing when you export PDFs where it just kinda arbitrarily slices it where it crosses over to the next page, meaning you can have a line that's half on one page and half on the other. It also doesn't support page-based text editing, instead being exclusively for page-less documents so if you need pages consider another document editor like LibreOffice. I installed OnlyOffice the other day and it's actually pretty sick too, though it doesn't use markdown so it shall not be brought up again.

Desktop Markdown Editors

This is different from document editors because rather than being your typical office WYSIWYG-type editor, they tend to lean more towards showing you the actual markdown you're typing and adding simple colouration and other formatting overtop that to improve the "markdown writing experience". I prefer this way more than what Google and Proton do where they intercept the markdown and convert it into their more graphical form, though I completely get why they do that cause they're developing a tool that's made to be more general and specifically graphic-focused rather than a fancy text editor. Anyway please give a round of applause to today's editors:

VSCode

I used to use this as like my main text editor for writing these blog posts for a long time. It's perfectly good, though it's very clearly for more general code-writing as if it were for writing documents and written-words it would have a maximum line-length and wrap around since that's a lot easier to read and write when trying to writ actual words.

Perfectly acceptable to use, though it lacks a lot of the cooler functions without at least getting a plugin like exporting markdown to HTML, PDF, etc. though, again, not surprising for a code editor.

Ghostwriter

I'm gonna write this section in Ghostwriter instead of my typical editor because I do what I want. You can't control me. Ghostwriter is neat. It's got a nice sidebar that lets you quickly jump to any headings, has some neat statistics, and a little markdown reference guide with some of the important stuff there. It also has HTML exporting, but keep in mind that it comes out almost completely unformatted CSS-wise so it'll give you a plain HTML file (which may be what you want). It's also got a side-by side live preview to show you what you're doing but that weirdly looks even less styled than the HTML that comes out of it.

It's alright, and pretty solid for a completely free tool if all you want to do is edit some simple files, but personally I prefer this next one.

Deepdwn

Ok back here I go. Deepdwn is what I typically use now for local files if I'm writing longer stuff like this. Deepdwn is not a free tool like the rest of these, but I am alright paying a small one-time fee for a nice editor like this. And this one is NICE. Wow I've just realized boring things excite me.

I dunno what to really say beyond, this is just a solid editor. It supports all the typical features, plus one thing that doesn't work in Ghostwriter but does work in most others where you can select text and paste a link, and it automatically converts it to a proper markdown hyperlink (i.e. [text](url)). You can export markdown files as plain HTML, styled HTML, or as a PDF file that come out looking somthing like this:

It's got a lot of neat features like support for mermaid.js, some sort of text to music stuff I don't understand, and some other cool things like typing streaks causing weird effects and screen shake. If anything here interests you, take a look at its website cause I am not going too deep into each of these.

Oh yeah, this one also has a preview and a weird sidebar, but a slightly more useful sidebar as it's also for file navigation and the preview is in a second window which I prefer as I can enter "distraction-free mode" on one monitor and have the preview on the other. That's all, I'll move on.

Note-taking

I've actually talked about my favourite note-taking tool before so I'll try to keep that one relatively brief, but I have tried a few.

Obsidian

This might be controversial...

I tried to get into Obsidian a while ago, but my brain just doesn't work like that. It's the same reason I don't like the iOS notes app; it's too organized. Even if most of the organization is just titling notes and then having them all listed, I just can't get into it. The whole mindweb thing makes me feel like I'm not linking enough stuff together, but if you're more organized than me and like connecting your notes together, I've heard almost exclusively good things about this one.

Memos

I LOVE Memos. I did write a whole post about it a while ago so I'll try to keep it pretty brief, but it's basically like a private Twitter feed for your notes. You can tag stuff with specific hashtags to keep stuff grouped together, but besides that it's a chronological feed of either the creation date, or the last edited date.

This one does have to be self-hosted, but I just have a Raspberry Pi 3 running it and it works great.

More?

There's a lot more markdown editors out there, but these were just some I wanted to highlight. There's some lists around on Github and MarkdownGuide. I've also used Marknote before, which is pretty much a desktop version of the iOS notes app, and just now I gave a quick look to Collected Notes which allows you to publish your notes to a public-facing webpage, not unlike a blog. The's a lot out there, I've just talked about the ones I've used and like, but definitely don't feel like these are the only options out there.

I will leave you off now with a quick list of what I listened to during the writing of this post. I just finished the last album of these 3 lol.

Aphelion by Leprous
DIGITAL UTOPIA by milkypossum
For Your Safety And The Safety Of Others by Graham Kartna

That's all from me, goobye :>

I use Arch BTW...

2025-06-17T23:20:38Z

_{Note: this post doesn't go into detail on the basics of switching to Linux, you can read my previous post on Linux here.}

I've been using Linux as my primary OS since around November of last year (2024 to any future readers), and it's been pretty neat. 3 months ago in March I switched from Kubuntu, which I had been using since I started using it full time, to Arch. I guess for context even before I switched to Kubuntu, I had technically previously used a Linux desktop as my primary desktop when my only personal computer I had to myself was a Raspberry Pi 3b+, but that was when I was probably around 11. I did retain some of the basics from that and the occasional webserver configuration, though.

Installing

The basic installation of Arch wasn't all too difficult, but it's pretty clear that they expect you to have some sort of baseline understanding of a couple of CLI tools, or at least of Linux in general so that you can figure it out like I did with some of these. This was especially clear when they get you to partition your disk with a tool called fdisk (or another if you prefer), and they simply give you a few examples of how you could partition the disk and leave the rest up to you.

I did run into a little bit of a problem that was a little bit terrifying... By this point my disk was completely wiped besides the leftover EFI partition so there was no going back, but for some reason when I tried to run pacstrap to install everything to the disk, I would get a kernel panic.

_{see that big QR code? That's all the error information and it's terrifying when you boot on your computer and see just that...}

I tried a few things that didn't work, but eventually I realized the problem was the fact that Arch was trying to download some Linux kernel files to the EFI partition, which was 100mb in size and completely full. I hadn't considered touching it previously because in the wiki they tell you to keep it, presumably more for if you're planning on dual-booting with an existing OS on the computer. I tried resizing it, which weirdly made it show up as having a few gigs of storage but it still filled up at 100mb, so I decided to just wipe it and make a new one.

Success!

Initial setup

When I was setting it up I ended up having to go back onto the bootable USB a few times. The main reason was forgetting to install something important like NetworkManager, which is kinda important for connecting to the internet and doing things. After that though, I was free! I had a fullscreen command line and an 1tb drive with all my important files to my name, and I now get to be one of those Linux users!

I decided the best choice of desktop environment, at least for the moment, was KDE Plasma because I love it and it's very pretty. It's like Windows if it was good. It's also what I used on Kubuntu, hence the K in Kubuntu. (Fun fact, the K in KDE used to stand for "Kool," making it the "Kool Desktop Environment." They don't call it that anymore though.). I would love to try out something a bit different, and I've especially got my eye on Niri, but I just don't have the time to start ricing, or basically, extensively customizing anything at the moment.

Besides that I also took a moment to install yay, a tool that lets you download packages/apps from both the official Arch Linux repository, and the AUR. The AUR or "Arch User Repository" is something people brag a lot about when talking about Arch Linux. Basically what it is, is a large community-run repository of build scripts. They download files, move things, and install stuff, but since they're community maintained they're usually pretty up-to-date and can be very customized to work perfectly on the average Arch system. A lot of them also build the apps from source which takes FOREVER.

Some problems

I've had a lot of very specific issues that I've eventually solved. A lot of them end up being "you don't have this installed, you should install it," but they're just not things you tend to think about when normally using a computer.

The biggest one that still haunts me to this day, is just the fact that for some reason I can't mount my NTFS formatted external drive through KDE Plasma. I've got ntfs-3g installed, yet it still gives me an angry message when I try to mount it. Honestly this one hasn't been a huge issue though. If I instead run sudo mount ... to mount the disk it mounts fine so I just wrote up a simple bash script that sits on my desktop that mounts it:

#!/bin/bash

pkexec mount --mkdir /dev/sda1 /mnt/Backup
xdg-open /mnt/Backup/

pkexec is equivalent to sudo, it just brings up a gui password input field in KDE so I can just double click it and type my password in. xdg-open also just opens the folder in my file manager, in this case, Dolphin.

The other big problem I had I actually ended up solving yesterday. Basically, my printer wouldn't print. I tried installing all the typical HP drivers people recommend, but it wouldn't detect it properly or just wouldn't be able to communicate with the printer. I ended up getting my solution from a random Arch user on the Ubuntu wiki, which feels like a strange place to find them but it worked. Printer now prints. Things are right in the world!

I feel like I have had other weird specific issues, I think at one point I couldn't get KDE Connect to uhh... connect... but most of them were fixed with a bit of searching online. The Arch Linux wiki is extremely helpful.

Keeping up-to-date

At least with how I use my computer, the issue of computers suddenly not working hasn't really shown up. I just run yay -Syu whenever I remember to (almost every day) and it updates my things. It's also nice cause Kubuntu only updates when Ubuntu does, which is not super frequently so your KDE tends to get out of date pretty quickly, while over here I get the newest release pretty much as soon as it's out.

General stuff moving onward

Something pretty big I've noticed is that with most software I install, it tends to just work. I've had almost constant issues using some of the specific software I typically use on Ubuntu-based distros, they just don't like to work sometimes for some reason. Meanwhile over here, I've been able to install some things and genuinely gasped when I click on them and then they open. I also like that with KDE Plasma specifically (not sure about other DEs) it's super easy to set up WINE to automatically run any EXE and MSI files so it's pretty much capable of running everything I may ever want to.

Moving forwards my main goals are to build an AMD-based PC so that I can use DaVinci Resolve, the Linux version HATES Nvidia, and to get a Framework laptop cause they're cool and I've heard tiling window managers are especially useful on laptops where you have smaller screen real-estate. Technically I'm using a laptop right now, but I also wouldn't call this a very genuine "laptop" experience.

_{(yes my laptop has an antenna, the built-in wifi card sometimes just stops working for hours on end. This has been an issue since I used Windows, it's ASUS' fault.)}

Excited for wherever I go from here, it's very fun screwing with my 'puter and making it do silly things. Goobye :>

I'm back!!

2025-06-15T00:00:00Z

Hellooo!!!

I've been trying to get back here but it's been a bit challenging. I switched to Arch Linux and for some reason Jekyll, the system I used to use to build my blog site, didn't want to install properly. Probably user error, but I am also lazy and didn't feel like fixing it so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I am now using 11ty, a similar type of thing that I've honestly found easier to use than Jekyll so far. I did have to more or less completely reconstruct the website, but it's pretty similar now, with a few small changes. I also didn't feel like bringing back the old comment system since it's been outdated for a long while, so instead I'll just save an archive of the comments under each and put them down there later.

I've had a lot of things I wanted to talk about but couldn't, so I'm really happy to finally have this back up :D

The checklist I have on Memos alone has 13 post ideas...

Anyway, I don't have too much more to say specifically here, but I did send out a newsletter not too long ago with some things in it. Also, if you find anything that doesn't look right here please let me know, I haven't checked everything out just yet. Hope to see you again soon, goobye!

This YouTuber Exploited Me For "Content"

2025-03-15T00:00:00Z

YouTube's economy right now has a very heavy focus on creating low effort, highly mass-producable "content." Not to say that wanting to make money off of somethin you're putting effort into is a bad thing, especially when creating videos is your full-time job, but right now the majority of the world's focus is on cheap content made simply to make money with no soul or effort whatsoever. (If you want to see some real bad stuff take a look at JJJacksfilms' reactor bingo series where he and his chat play bingo with common tropes in freebooted YouTube Shorts reaction videos).

A long while ago a former friend of mine decided to take interest in the whole "YouTube guru" space. Basically, people on YouTube who give financial advice to up-and-coming creators with the goal of maximizing profits while minimizing effort needed. I knew him since very early on in his original game development channel, back when it was below even 300 subscribers, so I felt I had a fairly close connection to him and so did many other game development video creators, which is one thing to keep in mind with how this happened at all.

For a bit of extra context needed up ahead, after starting a YouTube guru channel and getting a decent amount of success through it, he created a YouTube course charging nearly $1000 USD at first where he shared the advice he learned for free online and other info on how to get rich through YouTube.

The project

He contacted me with a proposal: I create a video game, he pays me for the game and creates a devlog documenting the process based on my videos and notes given. I wasn't really a fan of doing it to begin with so I passed the idea around to some other uninterested people before he made his initial offer. $100 to make the game... to which I didn't respond and he followed up with an "erm... I meant $200." thinking back that is a very low offer to develop any sort of game, especially since, though we didn't agree on it (or have any actual signed documents which is a HUGE red flag), he acted as though I had given him full ownership of the project. But I had never done any contract (or lack thereof) work and I thought it could be good just to give his idea a try, as a friend.

The video was to be titled "I Made a First Person Shooter in 2 Minutes." So, how'd it go?

I developed a small arcade-y first person shooter in a little over a week. Then, he handed it off to another programmer who read the code, copied the files, and created an AutoHotKey script, hence the 'under 2 minutes' part. While making the game I also knew of this and took the time to only use integer values for placement and adapt my workflow to make it as simple to remake as possible with hotkeys rather than mouse movement.

He then handed off the development recordings, notes, and AHK script to a writer who wrote the video script, recorded it, and passed it to an editor. The video then released to critical...

Well definitely critical.

I really like that one in particular, it was really eye opening in realizing what was actually going on.

This one was also really nice to see because as I alluded before, he acted as though he made the game. There was no mention of me in the video or the description, nor any of the creators of assets I used that I specifically listed for him to credit. The only reason people caught on was the fact that the editor left a screenshot of my Godot window with one of my games very visible in the video.

Truly incredible. Weirdly the person who made the macro was credited which I felt was odd... and it was never mentioned in the lack-of-a-contract that I would not recieve any credit for my work on the project.

The video was unsurprisingly taken down and is now only available through the Internet Archive (my beloved 💖), and I gave the person who archived it the whole list of credits for it because I feel that's really important to give. Especially when they ask for it when giving you the assets. But before then, he did try to continue the project. The second video would be "Fortnite, but you are the storm," or something along those lines. Originally he tried to get me right on that right after the previous one, but instead settled to get another friend JujuProd on the project, and assigned me to making 7 games in a week. A simple task.

Juju I believe did finish his whole game and the video had a partial script before he pulled the plug, and I fully just gave up on the 7 games project because I was tired and wanted to make my own games. (I know all this because I had access to the Google Drive dropbox for the project, though he seems to have deleted it at some point in the past few years.) I hope he did get some compensation with the project cancellation, but the fact that he only targeted young, beginning game developers for these projects does feel pretty fishy.

The community

Beyond the first project, I also had a big role in his community. Again, I knew of him since he had under 300 subscribers and know how to make a Discord bot and manage a healthy, friendly Discord community. This was not that. The YouTube guru niche, unsurprisingly attracts a lot of people who aren't interested in "true, heartfelt creation," eugh. I'm just here to MAKE SOME MONEY!!!!!!!!!!! (Side note, if you just want to make money why would you choose any inherently creative niche? Just invest in crypto and NFTs like normal stupid people...)

I ended up as basically the "community manager" for his Discord server. Of course, he was planning to find some "chronically online person [he can] pay for cheap," but that never happened so I filled in the role for free. Some things were fun, I coded a custom bot that allowed people to submit their YouTube channel URL to be allowed in (this kind of bot with some other moderation features probably would go for a few hundred dollars, but I did it for free for my friend) and I do think it was pretty neat.

But as I said, these types of communities attract a lot of the less savoury type of people, so I ended up seeing a lot of homophobia and transphobia to the point where me I couldn't keep up, and I got a couple DMs like this:

I thought this was the end. There were a few loose ends, and I ended up directly DMing the creator of that third comment from earlier on (the really long one) and we had a really nice conversation where I learned just how much I really was screwed over, but eventually something happened and I found out so much more.

Uncovering the rest

_{This part is best read while listening to Reset The System by SCNTFC}

A while after these events I joined a Discord server with a decent chunk of other game development video creators. At one point my former friend was a member of this server, he was creating a fair bit of a name for himself as a YouTuber after all, so out of morbid curiousity I decided to search for his name.

He was banned for packing advice from that server into his nearly $1000 course, no more interest in game development whatsoever, and behaviour including xenophobia and intimidating other members to the point of requesting a ban.

A lot of that uhh... made a lot of sense. He often would comment on the fact that his audience living in third world countries were too poor to buy his stuff, and when he said he would find someone chronically online to take on the role of community manager, I neglected to include the fact that he specifically mentioned something about looking for a chronically online Indian to pay cheap.

Before that was mention of another project... of which I knew more about than everyone else there.

The collaboration

A long while before the main project of focus, he reached out for a simple competition. The idea was "whoever makes the better rhythm game gets music licensing rights," and... sues the other person.. I guess? it was funny lol, why not. I started my project immediately, creating a simple but promising prototype in just a day or 2.

2 days after starting, he messaged me asking to postpone the project, and never came back. Looking through these old messages in the game development server, I found out that he had asked another friend of mine to work on the same project, only to say something along the lines of "nvm, my first choice said yes," which feels incredibly rude and disrespectful.

Among these old messages I also found a screenshot of him basically saying in plain daylight why he worked with younger, inexperienced devs, basically to the effect of "they don't know as much and I can pay them less." This is what the drive to produce money over art, entertainment, education, and more did to this former friend of mine. There's so many specific memories that jump out, like one time we were in a call with another friend who does graphic design. He was presented with a logo to which he then replied saying something like "niice, did you make that with chatgpt?" which is probably the biggest insult you could possibly give to a graphic designer EVER.

Conclusion

I haven't talked to him since March of 2024. Far later than it should have been with anything like this. Nothing felt better than what I just did today.

_{...And then spent half an hour trying to figure out how to crop an mp4.}

I hope people take this as a warning. Keep a lookout for shady characters such as this. Never undersell yourself; if you're just starting out you may not provide a service worth as much as a professional, but you still have worth and value in what you do. Don't exclusively chase money, especially in a creative niche. It just turns you gross and goopy. Ewww...

But seriously. Everyone is capable of doing some crazy things, but we should try to be the cool and fun kind of crazy, not the insane capitalist who exploits their friends for income.

That's all, I've been me, I hope to see you again in my next post which will be far more light hearted. Goobye :3 🩷

Short-form

2025-03-10T00:00:00Z

Short form content is.. something. Specifically, vertical videos that typically are around a minute long, but ALSO a very easy way to get distracted and lose hours of your day. I have mixed feelings about short-form content.

I used to make YouTube shorts, which would also go on TikTok and Instagram. I deleted my TikTok and public-facing Instagram a while ago, because I think Meta isn't a good company and... well you're about to read that. Honestly I don't think the shorts I made were bad by any means, they were a nice way to get a quick video out without disappearing for months, but I have come to fundamentally disagree with a lot of what short form content is.

The term "content"

I don't like it. Not a fan.

I love to put effort into making stuff for people to enjoy, and the term "content" seems to in this day connote what may be referred to as "slop," or "a product of little or no value." That's not to say every piece of content on YouTube shorts or TikTok is slop, but it's far more difficult to build a long-term engaging story between you and the viewer when it's so restricted, and easy to swipe away and forget about that video ever existing. I don't like this whole concept of this "content economy," that is, the idea of mass producing videos and media in order to rake in large amounts of money, but that's exactly what is enabled by cheap minute long vertical videos. I had a friend who went very deep into the whole "mass produced YouTube economy," thing and it genuinely felt exploitative.. though that's another (very interesting) story for another day. I don't want to be a part of that whatsoever. I want to make videos for people to watch and genuinely get something out of, whether it's a finished game to play or a simple feeling of satisfaction seeing the whole story of it through, and I also just like to be creative.

Short-form success

I mentioned that I've made shorts before, and I actually had some success with some of them. One of my shorts got over 675 thousand views. (This is where you're supposed to clap). That was cool, but short-form videos heavily discourage engagement with how they're designed. The majority of the interactions you will have with short-form videos are: watching, and swiping. While that video did garner a huge jump in subscribers for my channel, it didn't affect the long-form ~~content~~ videos I actually cared for at all.

Some people base their channels entirely around shorts which tends to go better for that, but you don't build community or long-term interactions through shorts, you get a subscriber and then they run away and forget you were there. I find it fascinating when I see a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers getting less views than my channel, because I am NOT big. My newest video has 8 thousand views and that's more than some channels with millions of subscribers that are based around short-form creations. My caveman brain gets some level of dopamine from seeing big number go up, but it's discouraging as someone who tries to put a good amount of effort into something longer to get so few eyes compared to something I threw together in order to keep people content for a few minutes. I'd imagine it's also incredibly discouraging to those shorts creators to make anything longer when they see not even a tenth of the turnout at their long videos compared to their shorts.

Wait what time is it?

I was gonna write this blog post about 5 hours ago. Wanna know why I didn't? I got this STUPID app called Instagram on my phone and it's full of minimally engaging, constant dopamine-bursting videos that me and the gay people in my phone send to each other. From a user-side they make it so easy to simply swipe, and swipe, and swipe, and you don't think of how much time could be passing because all of the videos are so short. I genuinely really wish there was a way to remove the shorts button from the YouTube app, and the reels button from Instagram, but they know that's what brings you back.

I know I could delete them, but Instagram has its weird tentacles all over the place in the social lives of almost anyone under 30. I do want to distance myself, but it's much harder to do so once you're already such a longstanding user. (This is also why I'm grateful to have never used Snapchat, I found it creepy that the camera opens on launch).

-ALSO: I have been informed of a distraction-free version of Instagram that's mainly for DM-ing people, which seems perfect. But alas, I am an iOS user. I have been bested by Android users once again. 😔

The media

Word of advice: don't take what you see on social media as true news. Especially short-form. Something that news agencies have known for years is that people are more likely to engage, and therefore, bring in more money, if something is shocking. I'm not sure if this is really how it works but I imagine it simplifying down to a sort of psychological caveman-brain moment like this:

If I am to tell you "hey, these berries are safe to eat," you might note that down, keep it in mind for later, but if I instead tell you those berries are toxic and they'll kill you, you're much more likely to keep that in mind in order to ensure you keep not dying. While I see a lot of stuff I do agree with, news-based, I also try to keep in mind that mass-produced, under-researched, biased, shocking content is far more engaging to users than good news, and you should always try to do your own research into a topic before deriving any perspective on it.

The good

As much as I don't feel very positively towards short-form videos, it's also hard to completely brush away. The only reason I stopped to come write this is because I saw a video of a Japanese pianist playing Undertale music in a busy city, which was weirdly calming, but also motivating. Shorts have genuinely provided a huge platform for small business owners, artists, game developers, and creators to build and grow an audience. Creators like Andy Land make amazing art which might not get the recognition it deserves through traditional means. To me though, I just don't feel the best about it as a medium. I have absolutely nothing against people who do make shorts, some of my friends do and they're typically the more productive and engaging sort, but I simply don't feel like as a creative it's been very positive for me with how I want to do things, and as a user while there are genuinely amazing things hidden in there, it's so hard to find them that it doesn't feel worth it at times. The commodification of "content," the lack of proper community building, and the trap that is doomscrolling all make me worry about what the point of any of this content is at all. And the fact that I genuinely can't remember a single short I've seen that isn't a special standout animation or music post is a bit concerning.

While I've got you on the line, what do you think? Is this more of just a personal thing with me? I'd love to hear some thoughts

-Ax 🩷

The best note-taking software

2025-01-30T00:00:00Z

"WOW! What an exciting title!" you must be thinking. I know, I know, I've really outdone myself here. But don't worry, I personally do think this is really cool and well worth talking about, so please don't go...

I've tried a fair few tools for taking notes, all the usuals from Google Docs to Notion and Obsidian, and more. But none of these have really ever stuck with me. Google Docs works best for writing documents, as the name suggest (though I still prefer having a desktop app like LibreOffice Writer), and while I do think tools like Notion and Obsidian are good if you take the time to learn them properly and create a system, I don't really want a tool that's that complicated. All I want is:

Someplace I can quickly drop notes without titles
Markdown support (I LOVE MARKDOWN, THIS BLOG IS WRITTEN WITH IT ❤️❤️❤️)
Simplistic organization so I can categorize notes, but not too much extra
Accessible from any device

Basically I wanna be able to make digital sticky notes with small bits of info and categorization as needed.

This is where my new FAVOURITE note taking software comes in:

Memos

Memos is an open source, self hostable, note-taking app that can be compared to dropping all your notes in a private Twitter feed, with some extra features. Do people still use that? It's uhh... It's like if you had a private Bluesky.. profile.... yeah. Mastodon may be a better comparison- but that's irrelevant.

While you do need to self-host Memos, it's actually one of the easiest self-hosted tools to self-host I've ever self-hosted. You can basically just copy the docker compose file and caddyfile directly from the Memos docs, and it sets it up with SSL and everything.

And I mean... just look at these results!

In Memos you're able to post memos to a private, workspace, or public* feed. Public feeds can be disabled which is what that asterisk is for. Don't go looking for anything else, you won't find anything. When you use hashtags in a memo, they're automatically added a list of all current tags on the side, and you can choose what tags to categorize by with a simple click. Additionally, all of your typical markdown including fancier stuff like - [ ] checkboxes are all supported and fully functional, allowing you to create checklists and quotes, and whatever else you may need. (Plus, you can also enable additional features like adding locations to memos which could be useful, though I keep it off typically.)

I've genuinely found Memos to be the only note-taking software that really works with my brain. It's organized enough with tags (There's subtags too if you do #tag/subtag, though I prefer just using multiple tags), but it's not overbearingly organized and a hassle to mess around with once you get a system going like Obsidian or Notion (I mean, I know someone who basically has an entire actual website built up in Notion just for her own personal note-taking. I could never haha). It's got the markdown (❤️), and I can add it to my phone homescreen as it functions as a progressive web app.

I've only ever used it by myself on my own personal instance, but it's got some cool "social" features that I think could be really useful among indie dev teams... and other people presumably? That's out of my range of focus. Comments, reactions, that kind of stuff, and the "workspace" feed is viewable to anyone with an account on your server.

Personally I think one of the coolest features is just the fact that it natively supports Mermaid.js (and LaTeX math notation!) which means I can create flow charts and other diagrams with a few lines of text.

I've personally already used Memos for a few school projects and I've found it super handy since I can create a checklist, individual posts detailing different things, and tag it all super easily. Maybe I just need to be babied, I don't wanna organize my notes, I want Memos to put all my hashtags next to each other for me.

My only complaint at the moment would just be the fact that there's no way to be signed into multiple accounts at once unless you open up a few private windows; I have a separate one on my instance for school stuff with account information that mirrors that of my typical school account which is nice to keep things just a little bit more separate.

If I have persuaded you, why not give Memos a try? They've got a live demo that gets wiped once per day over at demo.usememos.com. It seems someone has changed the admin account password today, but you can still register a normal one or wait `til tomorrow haha...

if you do like it, let me know! I'd love to hear I have successfully spread the gospel of Memos. That's more or less it from me, thanks byeee!~

-Ax 🩷

*OK I LIED THE ASTERISK DID LEAD SOMEWHERE

...oh and would you look at that! One idea finished from my Memos blog post ideas list!

One month on Linux

2024-12-26T00:00:00Z

So I've been using Linux for about a month, or maybe a little more. Specifically I've chosen to use Kubuntu because KDE Plasma is awesome and more familiar to me than GNOME as a former Windows user.

Overall I've really enjoyed it! I've installed a nice custom cursor and some theming stuff, got all my important software installed, and weirdly have found that it's more compatible with a lot of my hardware than my old Windows install. What I mean is, I don't need to install drivers for anything. My mouse has this weird feature where if I push the scroll wheel to the left or right it acts as a button press, and that is mappable from the system settings. My Wacom drawing tablet also just works with he device, no additional drivers needed which is really cool.

Unnecessary explanaton

From what I understand, Linux drivers are written to be far more general and are included in the system kernel, while Windows ones are typically made by the peripheral producer for a specific device. Very cool.

Here's my desktop currently... ignore all of my files lol

Doesn't look too unfamiliar from a Windows perspective!

This is going to be kind of a tutorial in a way explaining how I ended up setting my computer up, as well as just generally going over my experience with Kubuntu and switching from Windows to it.

First of...

Why?

Microsoft. Need I say more?

I've found a lot of Microsoft's recent moves to be a little less than satisfactory. Basically, I am PISSED OFF at Onedrive. I don't even care about the AI stuff, just LEAVE ME ALONE I DON'T WANT TO BACK MY FILES UP WITH YOUUU.- That's a joke, kind of, Onedrive has genuinely been really annoying and while I do appreciate some additions like the inclusion of 7z and rar support, I'd rather not have a computer that gives so much of what I do to some scary corporation in the US. Forced updates are also not my favourite. I just wanna use my computer maan.

Not to mention, I actually already use a lot of open source software. GIMP, LMMS, Godot, all of which can be gotten with a simple sudo apt install <name>.

The setup

There's a few things I noticed right away:

The official Discord client sucks on Linux
No flatpak by default in Kubuntu (how to fix: https://flatpak.org/setup/Kubuntu)
OBS just worked??? Why did it work? I found it so problematic before lol

IMO the only good, usable Discord client on Linux is Vesktop. You can install it through flathub or directly from their github, but it's basically just Vencord. The reason I like it is that it isn't built on OUTDATED technology like the official client, meaning it can't screenshare from Wayland (if you use Kubuntu you're using Wayland). Vesktop is very up-to-date and even lets me use my custom mouse cursor! I love this thing, it's so pretty with its red accent :3

Personally I have the version straight from the Github because, while flatpak works, I've had some problems with the version of Vesktop from it... which are probably fixed by now. Speaking of, don't use snaps, or even flathub if you can avoid it! When downloading software I prefer to either get it from the official Ubuntu repository, or the official creator of the software. The version of firefox that comes built in is actually a snap so I highly encourage you head over to the Mozilla website, copy and paste a few commands, and do a simple sudo snap remove firefox to get a nicer version that, again, works with my custom mouse cursor (the built in one doesn't). I see why people don't like snaps...

Some stuff is really slick though, you can do a simple sudo apt install wine, set the file association, and your computer will just run EXE files as if you're on Windows. Since packages can be created by anyone and added to Flathub, you can also have neat apps like The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, which get automatically added to and categorized in your apps list:

Not everything's been perfect though, I recently switched to DaVinci Resolve and while it has a Linux version, it's not really the best. It also has problems with my laptop GPU that don't appear on Windows like claiming my GPU memory is full upon opening the timeline... which isn't good when I need that to edit... but it's also given me an opportunity to learn a bit of kdenlive and I honestly can probably work with that since I have wanted to make more of my visual effects myself through Blender. I also had the aforementioned problems with Firefox and Discord which were annoying. Playing games was something I was worried about, but thanks in part to Valve and the people making the Heroic launcher, I can play all of my Steam games and years worth of free Epic Games.

Customization

One of the main things people talk about when talking about Linux, is the customizability. You own the thing, and you can do whatever the HECK you want with it. In fact, YOU WILL. I WILL MAKE YOU CUSTOMIZE YOUR DESKTOP. MUAHAHAHAHAH.

Ok but really. Pretty much everything can be customized, and I have customized a lot of it like my pretty mouse cursor, the glassy look of my desktop, and the fact that everything is purple. It wasn't purple before, I did this. The only thing I can't bring myself to change is the app icons cause it makes me genuinely really unhappy to see a bunch of matching, themed icons together with a few that aren't included in the custom theme, but whatever. The default 'Breeze' theme is cool too I guess. You can even change the animation for when you open and close windows if you feel so inclined and I genuinely think that's really cool:

I will say, even though this is all really cool there are still some downsides, or at least some things to learn.

The things to learn I just mentioned there were

Mainly, get used to typing commands. As much as you could use the Discover store to install everything, you could also do not that. If you know what you want, there's a decent chance you'll find it faster just by typing a name in an apt install or typing something into the start menu search bar, which will automatically try to find you relevant apps from Discover in the case of KDE Plasma.

Also please read what the computer is telling you, when I was first messing around with Kubuntu I tried to install a package which gave me a big list of red text telling me what it would be removing. It turns out it wanted to remove EVERYTHING I had on my computer... and I gave it permission to do just that.

Conversely I'd highly recommend exploring and installing software that looks interesting. You will not be using any of the standard closed source Microsoft stuff that came on your Dell, look around at what's available and try out some new software. Ghostwriter is a pretty neat little markdown editor I've been using as a small notepad from time to time.

Forward

It's kinda interesting switching to Linux, technically my first ever personal computer was running Debian, as it was a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. While there's still a lot to learn I did already know some of the basics, and using Kubuntu gave me an extra leg up since KDE Plasma seems to have very intentionally borrowed some of Microsoft's keybinds (alt+f4, win+shift+s, etc.). I've also been working with Linux off and on for things like my (now defunct) wiki and my (still existent!) forum (which you should totally join, we can talk about Linux and other nerd stuff). It's already been very nice and interesting to learn, so I'm excited to see where I take it next. Maybe when I build my PC I'll try something different, maybe Fedora or Arch-based? What could go wrong.

-Ax 🩷

if everything worked out this should hopefully be a forum thread for conversation! Join the conversation in the PossiblyAxolotl Forum!

The comments section

2024-11-18T00:00:00Z

The comments section is an interesting thing. On the one hand, it can be incredibly helpful to recieve feedback, or discuss a specific topic. On the other hand, it's also a vehicle for hate or worry about one's reach.

I've been thinking about this for a little while, and I'm honestly not sure where I stand on it, especially in my blog. I love having YouTube comments and reply to almost all of them there. It's really cool to see the amount of reach my videos have and the amount of people who have taken the time to watch one of them. On my blog though, I think I've started to try and see its activity as some sort of a metric for how interested people are in my posts. This is my blog where I talk about my interests, and specifically should not be about exclusively prioritizing engagement.

It's a cool system and I'm really happy with how it works, but I think I'm gonna use it less overall. Only have it here when it's relevant. I'd much rather have engaging conversations with people who wanna chat through email, as that's a far more developed system and you can actually... have a conversation there.

On that note, what are your thoughts on comments, throughout social media, blogs, the internet, all that. Let me know in the comments!

-Ax 🩷

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

Where is it?

2024-11-10T00:00:00Z

A (very cool) friend of mine made a video, of which I've linked here, that within the first couple seconds got me thinking about a certain project.

Sporestory.

Where is it?

I'll be honest, I haven't worked on it, probably in months.

Sporestory is a project I really love. I wanted to put so much into it, and I already have put so much into it, but I ended up putting too much pressure on myself to do too much at once.

This is not to say there will never be a Sporestory, but there will not be soon. I still love the art and the music I already made for it, but if/when I get back into it I want to do it right. To clarify, the video didn't inspire me to kill it, but it made me realize I should probably let it rest for now. I've put off working on so much because of one game I haven't been working on, and that isn't helpful to anyone.

I also feel I put a lot of pressure onto myself to work on it, very quickly creating brand assets, leaks, a webpage (that still looks really nice IMO), but I did it all too early without even taking the time to consider what a game design document was, to consider writing a timeline out, to consider planning it properly, too startstruck by the idea of what it could be, of specific scenes, without filling the gaps in between.

I definitely announced it WAY too early, the idea of being some sort of Toby Fox, silent chaotic character always really interests me but I find that difficult to do when I suck at keeping my mouth shut haha, but it probably would be for the better if I thought stuff out better before I announced anything.

I really want to work on Sporestory, and to make some sort of quirky RPG for Playdate, but the way I have it Sporestory can't be it.

For this I think it's time to let the game rest. But I don't want all of this to have been for completely nothing, this project has been an amazing learning experience in music, art, and programming, so here's some of the stuff I did do.

Music

Here's some of the songs I made for the game, in no particular order. I'm very proud of some of these, so hopefully they'll come up again someday.

Gameplay

Here's some gameplay of the second version, I ended up completely rewriting it from scratch at one point and this was of the second version which was far better coded and a really nice base for an RPG.

...

I still feel bad leaving this project here, I put a lot into it and even made things like a custom editor in Godot for making maps, but this is for the better for now. It may return, maybe I'll start writing a proper outline, but for now I need to do something else. If I do rewrite it, it will be very different. I originally wanted to make it as a short, Pikuniku-like RPG, but it very quickly grew out of control with no real plan to hold it back.

Sorry to say this, I feel like I've failed this project, but there has been almost no fire to work on it for a very long time.

I'm going to work on some smaller stuff, take better care of my mental health cause that's really been lacking as of late, and work up from there.

Maybe I'll do smaller devlogs, like a series, something to keep me on track, maybe I'll try some other things, but I need to learn and really solidify a process I can be sure of in making my games.

-Ax 🩷

Update

It's been a day or so since I wrote this, and I have thought a bit. While most of this stays true, I do still really want this game to work out. I think I need to really rethink my plan, and work on some other stuff first, but I will try eventually. As I said it'll probably be a short pikuniku-type experience, but that's what I want to make. First I need to make a proper game design doc and work out from there though, fill in all the holes I left in the initial process and such.

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

The creation conundrum

2024-11-01T00:00:00Z

Personally I've always considered myself a game developer / programmer-type person morseo than a YouTuber. That's not to say that I don't enjoy making videos or that I want to stop, because I love making them and consider them a really fun part of my whole creation process, but I never want to make a low-effort game for the sake of creating a video.

Games for videos

Something I see all too often is people making low effort games, not for the sake of learning or creating something out of creative expression, but simply to get something cheap out they can make a video on. I want to make it clear that I understand why someone would want to do that, but it's not something I want to do. I am by no means a "trend follower," in fact I really hate intentionally creating videos following trends and actively try to create games with unique ideas I have (my list currently contains around 30-40 ideas I believe).

Creating games for videos and creating videos for games are very different things. I was briefly part of a hyper-optimized game dev-exploiting scheme where a former friend would make devlogs while outsourcing everything, including the game development, to other people like me, and overall the project just made me unhappy. I had to sacrifice a lot of quality and the overall reception was pretty bad. I've written posts about it before of which are now gone, but I'll revisit the idea in the future when I feel particularily bored.

I make videos for games. That means I create a game first, I try to bring it to a good, solid state, and then I create a video on it. Along with that I put a lot into my videos which also makes them take a while. The point is, making videos on a schedule isn't my top priority. I want to be proud of the game before I show it off to the world.

Auuughhhhhh

As of late I've been struggling over a few problems in my process, mainly guilt over not getting a video out on schedule and not being super active in creating supporter-only updates and videos on YouTube. I've been very busy with school, along with a never-ending game project I'll post about very soon, and I've felt kind of unhappy about how little time I've had to make games I want to make. Now, I'm not saying this to get your sympathy, I am extremely grateful to be in the position already and I'm super happy to have all you weird internet people supporting my stuff, I just want to explain this properly, as I haven't really taken the time to do so prior.

The point

What I'm trying to say is:

I'm sorry for taking so long, don't expect me to speed up. I'm a game developer first and foremost, and I consider myself an artist in that sense and do not want to sacrifice quality of the game in order to accelerate my process. I've felt so caught up I haven't been able to work on my newest video, let alone my current game projects, and I may need a bit more time, but I'm always trying to create stuff. I love what I do, but it takes a while.

I'm not quitting any time soon, and I can't wait to get my next projects out, whenever that may be.

P.s.

One more thing: since I've started to figure out a mood for this blog I thought I'd rewrite my introduction page if that interests you. I hope to try and make this blog a bigger part of my online output as I've gained a bit of distaste towards parts of social media culture so if you'd like to always be up to date on the weird topics that interest me, updates on life and game projects, and whatever else then subscribe to my RSS feed with your favourite RSS reader! I recommend NetNewsWire for iOS and Thunderbird for desktop, but I don't know much about Android RSS readers. (Email me your favourites?)

I've also been working on some silly web projects in the little free time I have had, so feel free to look around my website and i-eat.rocks (yes that's a REAL website I have to PAY MONEY for) :3

That's all from me, I'm so excited for you to see what I'm working on,

-Ax 🩷

ATproto appreciation

2024-10-21T00:00:00Z

If you've been around the block at all you might know about some pretty dicey stuff going on over at Xitter, their most recent stunts being allowing users to view posts of people who block them[^1][^2] and training AI on your tweets[^2][^3]. Now, it's actually been exactly a month as of today since I left the platform. After realizing the platform has generally been horrible for my mental health, experiencing huge amounts of hate, antisemitism, homophobia, and more, I decided to pack up and move over to Bluesky. Bluesky is, in the simplest terms, Xitter, but without Elon's musk.

The moving process

Here's the quick and easy process I actually followed to leave Xitter

Lock the account and add a pointer in my bio to my links page
Change the account password and disable 2FA
Write the new password on a sticky note
Delete the password from iCloud
Lock the password stickey note in an inconvenient-to-access safe in my room
Watch as your heartrate naturally lowers itself to a more typical human rate

Because I decided to move away that fateful day, I was really surprised to see the amount of people actually moving to Bluesky. People consistently say they'll switch, but more often than not very few actually follow through[^4]. This time is different though, just in the past few days I've been able to find a huge chunk of the people I would actively follow and interact with on Xitter, on Bluesky including various game developers, 3D animation friends, and content creators. As I and many others get more interested in this platform, there are 2 main things that really jump out at me:

It just makes sense

By "it just makes sense," I mean, a lot of the features, especially in the space of moderation, just make perfect sense for the type of platform that it is. A lot of Bluesky moderation is created and run by the community, which makes sense as an open source project. On Bluesky you can create a blocklist that users can choose to follow, automatically blocking accounts featured in it such as this content scraper list. Additionally, labellers allow one to place labels on certain accounts, such as in the official moderation labeller, as well as having other uses like identifying people in the games industry. Checkmark verification is now a thing of the past thanks to AT Protocol identifiers, allowing someone to verify their ownership of their webdomain and use it as their Bluesky @. I LOVE this because it means that anyone who has a website (anyone who really needs to be verified probably should have a website by that point) can verify themselves as the site owner, without needing any level of human intervention, as well as just generally making it far easier to verify account authenticity.

It feels nice here

Along with these features, and things like starter packs (lists of users you can follow with a single click) which I shared a few of in links above, the general mindset around the platform's users is to simply block aggressors and annoying people. Strange concept, I know, but it turns out you tend to have a far more pleasant experience if bad people are left ignored. usually fighting fire with fire just makes the fire grow. The platform feels nice and safe, because that's part of its design.

Community-based moderation allows you to make any change needed to your feed's moderation in order to ensure you feel safe, and the algorithm isn't actively fighting to push a political argument[^5]. If you've talked with me about political stuff you would know I hate polarization, especially in social media; constantly showing everyone every extreme does nothing but push us further apart, but I'm not going to get into it here. My feed is predominantly game development and art posts and it makes me feel happy :3. Custom feeds created by community members are also able to do way more than your basic Xitter feed ever could by amplifying certain tags or only showing you posts that your neighbour's dog liked, allowing you to see exactly what you want.

Moving forwards

Maybe it's just because it's a new platform, but I genuinely think that Bluesky is one of the few social platforms that actually has the users in mind over just plain profits. Mastodon is around too, but I think it scares people away trying to understand how federation and different instances work. All of this is to say... you should totally follow me on Bluesky! I don't plan to be as active there as I once was on Xitter for obvious reasons, but I hope to be around and see more people in this newer, more positive era of social media.

_{(Xitter = X + Twitter, I didn't even consider that X could be pronounced "sh" until way after I started using that term but it fits too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)}

P.S. Feel free to share your Bsky @'s in the comments as well as a little description of what you do, or reach out to me via email :)

References

Note: News is biased; I try to find sources on both sides of the political spectrum when possible. Feel free to check the credibility of anything I source at mediabiasfactcheck.com or your favourite fact checker.

[^1]: "Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs" Elon Musk, Xitter

[^2]: People are flocking to Bluesky as X makes more unwanted changes Mia Sato, The Verge

[^3]: X is the latest social media site letting 3rd parties use your data to train AI models Jenna Benchetrit, CBC News

[^4]: The Main Advantage Bluesky Has Over Twitter (Besides The Obvious One) Paul Tassi, Forbes

[^5]: Twitter's algorithm favours right-leaning politics, research finds BBC

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

The best videogame you'll never play

2024-09-19T00:00:00Z

I love to learn about old and forgotten media. Stuff like classic / indie websites, weird game & internet lore and secrets, or in this case, a game lost to time.

Ever since I was young I've been very interested in indie games. Maybe it was fate, maybe it's cause I missed that span of time where AAA game companies tried to push mobile publishing, but some-way somehow in 2018 I ended up purchasing a bundle of 2 specific indie games...

I also bought Causality that day, but that's not relevant.

Bean's Quest and Bean Dreams were hugely important games in my childhood. If it weren't for Bean, I wouldn't be the creature I am today.

That may be overdramatic, but these games still mean a lot to me.

While you may or may not have heard of these games, you've probably played something else by the developer, Kumobius, like Time Surfer or Duet.

The bean games were very simple platformer games where, instead of moving and jumping, the player constantly jumps (as is the natural state of a Mexican jumping bean). You tap left or right on the screen to move in that direction. This solves the constant overarching problem of mobile platformers not working well on mobile due to having too many on-screen controls or complexities, and I love it. (Bean Dreams trailer)

_{It was also one of my first introductions to axolotls! There is an axolotl hidden in every stage, who upon collection says "thanxolotle." This is art.}

Everything from the art, gameplay, and even the amazing soundtrack of Bean Dreams have stuck with me for years, which I was so shocked to discover that sometime after 2020 the games had completely vanished. Not only were they delisted off of a few platforms, but they had been completely wiped from every storefront, and even the developer's website.

_{Side-note: according to the script I was writing in April 2021, I noticed the game's disappearance a few months before then.}

Around this time I was really inspired by YouTube investigation-type videos, like that of Nick Robinson or F4mi, so I thought that I would try to perform a bit of an investigation of my own.

A mediocre investigation

Wow thanks >:(

So, at that time I was basically a child. I knew very little about investigating, but I was extremely hyperfixated on these particularily bean-based video games which was the driving force for my investigation.

Kumobius is, or at least was a team of 3 people, all of which have actual jobs doing real human things like working for companies and doing taxes. Specifically the brothers Tom and James Greenaway, as well as Ivan Neeson. Because of this, by the time my faux-investigation started, none of them were very active on their social media accounts at all. All but Tom Greenaway who, while not particularily active, still posted more regularly than the rest.

I had my target.

I tried contacting him by email, Twitter comments, etc., but to no avail. Probably because at the time I wasn't sure how to talk to people and still don't really know, and ended up making my messages look a lot more intimidating and long-winded than they had to be.

_{I'm being very vulnerable sharing these posts, this is effectively a child trying to seem intelligent in front of the adults so don't judge me :<}

![@tcmg Hi Tom! I was hoping to ask a few questions about Kumobius if you’re ok with it? More specifically the bean games. What has happened to them? Why were they removed from stores? I’ve been trying to contact you for a while so I do hope I can get a reply. Thanks! -Axolotl](/assets/images/bean/idiot on twitter.png)

That didn't work, but I did have one more idea. I noticed a group that Tom had at one point worked with called Set Snail... and their DMs just so happened to be open...

(twiddles fingers), Don't mind if I do!

_{That was weird, I'm sorry.}

I sent them a message of which I can't view anymore because I don't have X premium, effectively just asking if I could talk to Tom.

...

I explained myself to him and, while I did get a response, it didn't give as much information as I was hoping. basically, neither Tom, nor the rest of the founders still did work as Kumobius, and so he simply didn't have an answer.

This was disappointing as it was my one real "lead" in this investigation, but even then, it wasn't the only thing I uncovered.

What else

Beyond just trying to contact Kumobius, I also spent a lot of time looking at the Bean's Quest website through archive.org, and noticed they actually had a Humble Widget for Bean's Quest. Now, I was expecting the Humble Store page to be completely down like all of the other store pages (Desura is a specific case as it turned from an indie games distribution platform to a cheap kids webgame site), but somehow the Humble Store page slipped right through the cracks. It's missing a trailer, but the game can be purchased and played right from Humble.

You can NOT comprehend how excited I was when I saw this.

While Bean Dreams is objectively the better developed game, or as Kumobius put it, the take 2, Bean's Quest is still really fun so I was at least glad to see that one was still around somewhere. (And you can get it HERE!). Bean's quest was also their first game published as Kumobius, and is still very impressive for that alone.

Another micro-discovery I had was the game Calamari Kid, which was supposedly shown off as a Kumobius game at GDC 2018, instead was published by Sean O'Dowd. Haven't looked too deep into it. Strange.

The future of Bean

Bean's future isn't crystal clear, shockingly there is enough of a community surrounding this game to have had a Reddit post just 6 months ago, despite the disappearance happening around late 2020. Someone else also reached out more recently, and actually got an email response from another Kumobius founder, Ivan, stating that a major reason for the removal of the games is the fact that they were built on an older version of their engine that they couldn't justify the cost of maintaining, so they had to take them down. It's a sad conclusion, but not unheard of.

He also mentions that at times he "[thinks] about seeing if he can fix them up and get them compiling and running again," which I hope someday is the case as these games were not only a huge part of my childhood, but also a huge inspiration for me as a game developer in what I make now. One of my very first games was a demake of Bean's Quest, featuring a horribly timed version of Fortune Fields from Bean Dreams.

I don't know if there ever will be a time when we do see Bean again, but regardless,

to the whole Kumobius team for making this game.

_{Moral of the story? Lock your DMs so people like me can't get in. And listen to the Bean Dreams OST.}

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

Blogging propaganda: you should blog

2024-09-09T00:00:00Z

I think blogging is a really great thing and more people should do it. It's an online space where you can shaer your thoughts and feelings, without needing to appease some magical social media deity or post simply just to collect likes. Blogging, especially when you don't have a specific social media platform audience in mind can be hugely beneficial in allowing someone to parse their thoughts and emotions. You can create a blog to talk about mental health, interests, creative writing, etc.

Cohost shutting down came as a bit of a surprise to me, and likely many others. I was never a huge Cohost user, instead opting for creating my own blog (you'll never guess which one it is), but many people used it as a sort of personal blog platform / friendlier Tumblr alternative. While most blog sites can't really provide a true alternative to that, I still believe blogging is a really useful thing that more people should do... so I created this post to try to bring people in.

Here's some blogging tools I've found that I think should be easy and quick to get into and start writng stuff.

Bearblog

Bearblog is a super simplistic privacy-focused blogging platform. It's really quick to get into and fairly simple to use. If I didn't use Jekyll for my blog I would probably use this instead. It requires some basic technical knowledge to use just because it uses Markdown to format blog posts, but Markdown is super straightforward and easy to use:

# Heading

This is some text, hi! Here is a [link](https://www.google.com/). 

You can **bold** and *italicize* text super easily too.

That turns into...

Heading

This is some text, hi! Here is a link.
You can bold and italicize text super easily too.

It's also super customizable, having lots of built-in themes and a CSS editor so you can customize it however you want if you know a little CSS.

Overall I think Bearblog is pretty cool, I would just keep in mind that there is an optional subscription allowing you to do things like use a custom domain.

Blogger

If you're not a Google fan, skip this one.

Blogger is a very longstanding blog platform owned by Google.

Blogger has a visual blog editor similar to that of other Google products allowing you to quickly create posts without needing to know any specific sort of formatting

They also offer a nice lsit of different customizable styles, albeit more generic blog-style.

Along with that, Blogger also allows you to use a custom domain (if you own one) and has a built-in (optional) comment system, with the caveat of the whole Google thing. This one has some weird adsense monetization thing, but I haven't messed with that or really want to, to be honest.

Write.as

If you just want a simple way to put some text out into the world, consider something like write.as.

There's not a huge amount to say about all the different features, cause it's built for simplicity. If you're more into creative writing or just want a quick and easy place to post some words, this one is great for that. It's built on Writefreely, which is an open source blogging system you can self-host and run on your own server if you know how to do that.

Self-hosting

While these are all publicly-available platforms that anyone can create an account for, you can also self-host your own blog and not have to worry about any subscriptions or Google tracking. Personally, I use Jekyll, which is a more complex library using the Ruby programming language that generates a blog website you can host on your own server, or a static server host like GitHub or Cloudflare pages. It uses Markdown like Bearblog, but I just edit it in a regular code editor on my computer. WordPress is also an insanely popular one used to host a good chunk of blogs such as Cabel's blog and I believe also has a visual editor like that of Blogger. I've also heard very good things about Ghost, but I haven't tried it myself.

If you self-host with something like Jekyll, you can actually throw the files directly onto a Neocities or Nekoweb page, or literally any other static site hosting platform (I use Cloudflare Pages).

RSS

All of the blog systems I talk about here also generate an RSS feed, which is basically just a format for data that allows you to easily congregate all of the blogs you like into one place.

You can easily keep all your blogs in one place by using an app like NetNewsWire for Mac and iOS, Feeder for Android, Fluent for Windows, or Thunderbird for Mac, Linux, and PC, but I'd only recommend it if you also use it as your email client. Usually you can find an RSS feed by looking around for a link the webpage, or by adding something like "/feed" or "/feed.xml" to the base url. From there you can put that into your favourite RSS app and off you go.

Now go, make a blog about your favourite SCPs, your short stories, recipes you've tried, some weird tech meta-blog where you talk about blogging, literally nobody can stop you.

If you're reading this there's a decent chance you already know a lot of stuff about this, or maybe even more! If there's any other platforms or tools you recommend, feel free to let me know in the comments here.

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

The most sketch comment system on earth

2024-08-11T00:00:00Z

_{Note: it is recommended you read this post first, but not required.}

So, a bit ago I made a post talking about how I got around using some paid services using Google Sheets and other free services. In that post I also mentioned that a comment system should be possible using some really similar code and so... I did it.

This was a little more complicated than I was expecting it to be for a few reasons. Mainly, I needed a way to separate each comment so you could go to a post and only see its comments, without those of all the other posts. I also needed a way to automatically add the comment box to the bottom of pages I want to use comments on, and a way to display a link to it for emails and RSS people.

In order to separate comments to the right posts I decided the easiest way would be to include the post title when sending and receiving comments, and using a separate sheet in the same file with the corresponding title to store the comments.

Now this does impose a limit of 200 posts with comments (and a max of 10 million cells but that's still plenty), as that's the max amount of sheets you can have in one document, but if I ever reach that I can always just use a new sheet after a certain point.

The code for this is based off of my guestbook script, but I had to change it a bit so that it creates a new sheet for posts that don't already have comments sections before submitting data, and add the ability to retrieve data from specific sheets based off of post title.

let sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName(data.parameter.title)

if (sheet == null) {
    SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().insertSheet();
    sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet();
    sheet.setName(data.parameter.title)

    sheet.appendRow(["datetime","name","message"]);
}

_{Creates a sheet and adds the headers needed to retrieve data}

That ended up not being too difficult, but I did have to learn a few things about Google Sheets App Scripts to make it work. As I said before, most of the base was already there in the guestbook script, it just needed some modification to allow it to store stuff for separate posts.

Next up I needed a way to create the comment box, which I did by adding this little HTML snippet to the end of posts I want to have a comment section.

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

This way, when you see a post through any means other than looking at the blog site you still see a button that goes all the way down to the comment section. Then, I wrote up some JS that's included in the footer HTML file since that's included on all pages that creates the comment box and fetches the comments from the sheet.

_{I remove all "&" signs because they were having issues...}

My favourite part of this is, as a privacy enjoyer, it only collects the public submitted info. Nothing besides that is kept or sold... unlike a certain popular comment provider (disqus)

_{Sorted Purpose or Activity, Type of Personal Data, Source of Personal Data, Basis of Processing}

And just like that, I have a comment system that has been put to... great... use...

Huh... maybe this was a mistake

_{(Full script here)}

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

The art of not paying for stuff

2024-08-02T00:00:00Z

I DON'T MEAN STEALING---

What I mean by "not paying for stuff" is seeing some existing service, and making my own, crappier version for free.

I've been doing this a lot, mainly in part due to the fact that I can't pay for stuff online, but it's also a super cool learning experience and allows me to create my own version of a service that's free for me, forever.

Here's an example:

Guestbooks

If you didn't know, there's a secret page somewhere on my main website, which leads on to a guestbook:

_{I wrote a custom emoji system for it that works similar to Discord's so I could add stupid irrelevant pictures to messages :3}

There are services that provide guestbooks, and some are completely free, however one I was using shut down and I don't really want to redirect all my users to "sketchyguestbook123.com", so I thought it was probably better for me to make my own. The way that works is with some fun Google Sheets API stuff.

I don't want to go into a huge amount of detail because I only half-understand this stuff, but basically: you can create some App Scripts within a Google Sheet that can accept get and post requests, and modify or return sheet data accordingly. Basically, what I can do is write a little code that grabs the list of entries from the spreadsheet and turns that into the actual guestbook, and another going the other way to add to the google sheet.

_{See the full script here}

Besides taking a few seconds to load in, this honestly works really well and looks way more professional than redirecting to another service. And nobody even needs to know that I'm simply doing it out of frugality and not because I want to be professional! ... wait...

I've actually been thinking of making a similar system for comments on blog posts here, but it would need to be a little more complicated to account for the creation of new posts.

Mailing list

There's a decent chance that if you're reading this you actually got this post in your email! Or that my code failed to work. I've been messing around with sending emails with smtplib in python and it's been super cool. I literally just set up a script that grabs the RSS feed from this blog and if it hasn't been too long since the last post's creation, sends it out to all of the email addresses in another google sheet. I also have a little (kinda ugly) form set up over here that allows one to sign up for the mailing list and have their email put into the same sheet. Then, my script does some Google API stuff and sends out an email from my email address to each subscribed address. Assuming this all works, that is.

I've tested it on myself already, so hopefully it all works out well. There's also a small chance everyone gets the same post 2 days in a row, but hopefully not. The nice thing about this all though is, again, it all looks nice and I don't have to pay a subscription for it! It's just a script scheduled on a Raspberry Pi to run once a day.

I would share this code, but it has a LOT of sensitive info including my email address, an app specific password, and some API keys which I do NOT want to share today.

Web.. site... (?)

I guess you could also say I used a similar mindset for my website since it's all coded by hand, and part of the reason I know any amount of Javascript at all. That wasn't really intentional at all, I just wanted to learn html and css and all that stuff and never really liked website builders.

I don't know if this really counts cause this is a lot more common than making a mailing list over using something like Mailchimp, but whatever.

I did have my own custom blog system originally as an exercise in doing Javascript, but now I'm using Jekyll which is way nicer to use overall, and hosted in Github pages the same way as my normal website so it's MORE DIY than if I was using something like Blogger.

Moral of the story? Don't bother paying or stealing or whatever, just make an inferior product yourself. 👍👍

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

Fish & forwards

2024-08-01T00:00:00Z

A few years ago I participated in this game jam called SeaJam, which was hosted by my friend Polymars to raise money for TeamSeas. In it, I made a game called Katamari DamaSEA, which was a parody-ish game of Katamari Damacy, where you picked up garbage on your katamari in a certain time limit. Beyond that I actually had a few other ideas that I never ended up using, and the specific one I want to talk about is that of a fish soccer game, since I recently participated in my own game jam called FishFest, where I actually ended up using it.

_{Here's an animation I made for the devlog when I started as I really liked this idea and initially assumed it would be the one I go with}

After the conclusion of SeaJam I still held onto the idea of the fish soccer game, cause I thought it could be really fun depending on how it's implemented, but wasn't confident at the time in my ability to do it well.

2 years later I decided to host FishFest, a fish-themed game jam I conceived in an extremely sleep deprived state at 2 am.

_{Here's the full story for why lol}

The rules were simple: make a game... featuring fish.

Conveniently I had this idea backed up from SeaJam 2 years prior, and a lot more experience in game development, so I thought it would be appropriate to spend the week finally creating my dream fish soccer game.

Honestly, I'm super proud of how this game looks. Shockingly, even a world renouned game developer such as myself has idols to look up to, specifically people like Ash K, Torcado (who was very nice in telling me how to do diagonals in CSS which I do a lot for my main website), Kultisti and in this case I was inspired by some games made by the team over at Sokpop.

_{Oh Crab! and Fishy 3D, by Sokpop}

I definitely took a lot of inspiration from Fishy 3D, but even then I did a lot of my own stuff too. This was the first time I ever really wrote a shader on my own, which I used for the moving background water. It's just a simple scrolling noise texture over a static one, but I think it looks pretty good and have even been using it subtly, but hue shifted, in some of my website favicons.

Additionally the transition shader I used was also hand-written by me, which is huge for me as I haven't really done much with shaders previously.

I have to say, I think this game looks pretty good! Combined with some state-of-the-art simple fish AI I'm genuinely pretty proud of how this game turned out.

I know this isn't a huge game or anything, but this is a huge step for me as this is one of the first games I've made where I can step away, even for as long as it's been since FishFest, and say "yeah, I think this game is good." It's a sign that I'm actually growing as a developer, capable of going back and making this game that previously seemd unattainable, and I'm super happy with it.

This game is proof to me that maybe someday I'll be one of those cool itch developers like those who inspire me to do what I do. 🐟

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)

Look at him go!

2024-07-24T00:00:00Z

This will be very relevant later...

The evolution of the PossiblyAxolotl logo

2024-07-19T00:00:00Z

I sort of have 2 logo / recognizable brand-things. First off is the actual logo used in games and things, and second is my 3D avatar I based off of the initial logo.

When I was first starting out I wasn't really sure how to do the whole logo thing, so my first try was this sort of P A mix with both characters leaning and combined into one:

The Beams

The first iteration I stuck with long enough to use in a game was this one featuring these beam guys.

The game was TRAYveler, my first Godot project and the logo was featured in the bottom left of the title screen:

![](/assets/images/logo evo/title.png)

I also made a pixel version that never ended up used in any released projects, but it was featured on startup in this game.

The Ball

The game I made that pixel version for got horribly corrupt and so I had to completely restart it, and when I did I created a new player icon I decided I liked and would like to use as my logo up until after I had started making videos.

Since it was 3D I used a green backdrop in Godot to green screen it and make my intro feature it. There were 2 versions of the intro, one came later than the other before I started to cut down on intro stuff:

_{I also really like chromatic aberration :3}

Something Else...

A little while after that I got a free trial for Adobe Illustrator which I decided to take advantage of to create a new logo.

I had also tried Vecmaker briefly but I don't like that I can't save SVG files from it as I like to be able to scale a logo as much or as little as I'd like.

Here's some screenshots of various iterations I had on the logo, as well as a Gameboy one I made for Ax's Great Axventure, my first game project which never became a full game.

And...

It's The Thing

There it is.

That one's stuck around the longest overall. I've recently been thinking of adjusting it a bit, just to make the lines more consistent and maybe make it a little softer looking but overall I'm fairly happy with it. I've also made some other iterations of it with different expressions for use as emoji and profile pictures for other channels before I modelled my goober and started using them as my main channel instead.

The 3D one is made to be a sort of 3D version of the 2D one and I'm pretty happy with how the model looks :)

(Comments removed due to outdated system, archive coming soon)