I know I very rarely post journals, so I was thinking to do so again.

There's been a whole fucking lot going on in our family over the past couple weeks. As my wife said in a recent journal of hers,

"Long story short- I've spent roughly a week living in a hospital waiting room after someone extremely dear to me had a mortal incident and dealing with my own health issues in the fallout since. I am not at full liberty to go into details as yet so, please don't ask."

So, I can't really disclose much any of that as of yet, but I figure I'll try to atleast touch on the more pleasant recent news, as well as...er...mixed news? winces This journal will be mostly me nerding about video game stuff.

Car troubles continue...I've had to put my car in the shop three times recently. The most recent time was that the battery I'd purchased apparently had some kind of malfunction and I'm going to get it replaced. Somewhat thankfully, it was still under warranty, so as I understand I should only have to pay for the installation. That still sucks, but at-least it's only likely to be only a few hundred dollars as opposed to potentially 1,000+

I feel good that I've been posting up more art again recently. I think part of what's pushed me is that a good friend of mine really likes my silly video game comics, and they've been through fucking hell recently....

I'm working on getting caught up on My Little Pony FIM. I finished the last season before the movie, so perhaps this weekend I can arrange to make some popcorn and have a movie night with :ashleyfableblack: The show continues to be super adorable and make me smile.

I've been on Descent marathon, including the "clones" and "spiritual successors". I'm currently playing through Descent 3, which while occasionally confusing, is a great improvement over the complaints I had with the first two (overly dark environments, awkwardly slow/sluggish turning/aiming with the controller on the PSX titles). I still get lost in the big sprawling levels, but not as badly thanks to improved variety in scenery. If anything I get confused more by the mission objectives at times, but it's not been anything a quick guide look-up couldn't fix. I loved how in one the levels you actually revisit the very first room from Descent 1, in a dilapidated state. Pretty awesome. All three games have great music, the third one even has really cool dynamic music, which is more common now but feels pretty revolutionary for a game that age. I've been getting a bit into the mod community for Descent 1 and 2, I played an awesome mod called Vampyro on Descent 2, I highly recommend it. It has it's own intro sequence, and awesome custom artwork and models, it's a revenge story where you play as a vampire in a haunted house! As confusing as the games can be for me at times, I keep coming back because I love the music, visuals and excitement of the games.

I tried playing Forsaken one psx, and I wanted to enjoy it, but the controls were just...ass. I constantly died died because of the tiny fast moving enemies evading my slow and stiff aim. Maybe I'm just spoiled by analog control sticks, or maybe the controls suck on that version of the game. But I recently found out they remade the game on X-bone! So when I can afford it I want to pick that one up, hopefully it controls better and maybe even has some new content too!

Another related game I saw on the X-bone was Overload, which is essentially Descent with shinier graphics. Looks fun to try!

On Starbound, I've started a build project of making Finn and Jake's awesome tree house from adventure time. I was inspired when I saw this person's build of it https://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/1xnyl5/i_made_an_adventure_time_tree_fort_build_wip/
So I remade their tree house as best I could, for a framework, and I'm now at work remodeling the entire thing to my own liking. I'm having a lot of fun with that project and look forward to showing it off! I am considering expanding into other adventure time builds too, such as recreating Ice Kings lair in 2D.

On Mine-craft, I've been working on my big Joust build project, but I had a rather scary problem recently - my laptop just shut off while playing on my single player world! Thankfully I had made a backup of the world that same day, since suddenly closing Mine-craft has caused chunk errors for me in the past. But still - this worries me, on top of my laptops performance getting worse and worse. I used to be able to run Minecraft with 32x or higher resource packs but it seems every time I do now, it turns into a slideshow. I wish I could afford a new computer, but I have several important things to e saving for right now. So, I just hope it won't happen again...I may have to pay with super low graphics to keep it form overheating my laptop.

Another problem I've had with Mine-craft was mcedit being rendered obsolete by the ocean update. There's a replacement for it in the works by some folks, but I don't when it will be released. I used mcedit a lot and I would really like to be able to access all the cool new ocean and villager content in my established single-player world....so I'm really looking forward to that editor coming out.