The blog article I mentioned earlier is out. Finally.

It is very ironic, but after spending many hours listening to people tell me about the tragedies in their lives and being surrounded by colleagues who talk about how they suffer from listening to people talk about their problems all day, I have come to believe that I am placing unnecessary weight on people when I tell them what I go through.

Because of this I feel immense guilt talking about myself and the suffering I bear. But I couldn't not write this article, I owed myself this much, so I tried to not make it entirely about miserable little me.

In other news, I've been having computer problems recently.
My Windows 11 install unexplicably collapsed two days ago and I cannot boot into it anymore. So I've been booting into my old computer's drive, with Windows 10 on it. People online say that this is a terrible idea, that Windows will freak out because the hardware and drivers are different and blah blah blah, but as far as I can tell I'm completely fine.

I believe, and I may be wrong, that this may have been caused by Windows 11 updates failing ("Something didn't go as planned. No need to worry — undoing changes.") over and over again which has a chance to damage the OS in a way that stuff like sfc /scannow cannot catch every time it happens. And if that truly is the cause then I've got nothing but Windows 11 to blame.

I've turned a blind eye to the fear surrounding Windows 11 but now that I went through this I lost the trust I had in Microsoft. I think I'm out of the woods now and while I have access to project files that open with no errors or missing VSTs I'll keysound songs... And I guess the next step is Linux.

Where did the site admin go after opening this Journal? Bingo? Well yes indeed. I spent the last chunk of February playing through Resident Evil 4. I'm impressed by the way this game plays, got me thinking about areas of game design I hadn't thought much about before.

A lot of shooters I've played are very similar in how they incorporate their guns. The player starts with a pistol and acquires a growing arsenal of weapons throughout the game, each weapon being situational, headshots are very rewarding, and ammo is limited but so plentiful that it is trivial to think about it.

Because this is true for so many games, my experience is often the same. Whatever's the situation, I stick to the pistol and, always on the move, I click heads from far away, my ammo for everything but the pistol usually maxed out at all times, because the game lets me do that, unless the difficulty is ramped up to the maximum, which in my experience generally means that enemies deal more and receive less damage, are more plentiful and aim better and faster.

This game was different and did not let me play how I usually play. Ammo is sparse compared to how much damage enemies can take, even for the handgun, and Leon is very strong but not some superagile freak who can run at mach 7 and dodge everything with enough skill (walking back is quite slow, strafing is not possible and there is no jump button). Even when shooting heads all the time, the pistols can't resolve all situation, at times the knockback of the shotgun or the wide radius of a grenade is absolutely necessary to fight off a group.

I was confused and slightly bothered to find out that you can't purchase ammo but I believe the game is all the more interesting thanks to this. I still struggled lot with remembering to use grenades, a problem I have in all games, perhaps because of many traumatizing experiences in CSGO where I would never land my damn grenades or injure myself or my teammates with them...

The game also made me realize I'm infinitely more comfortable playing horror games in third-person over first-person. Things getting very close to my face has a much stronger effect than being chased or facing off against a very large/tall monstruous creature, and the third person camera dramatically mitigates this. Nevertheless it was very hard to look at the Novistadors and Regeneradors to the point where I don't quite remember their features off the top of my head even though I was looking at and shooting at some a little while ago.

I believe modern games place a lot of importance on "movement that feels like you're in control" which translates to a lot of lenience, complex control schemes that reward players who put in the effort required to get comfortable with such control schemes, and when this idea was presented to me I thought of the many NES games that feature slow and stiff characters who, by their inability to dodge much of anything, incite players to give up on trying to understand how enemies move and attack and just mash the B button and pray that enemies die before they do. Because I thought of such games, I've subscribed to the idea that "leniency in video game controls makes games feel great". But playing this game made me reconsider that, at least in the context of shooters.

People may have noticed that despite starting a Blog 2 years ago I hardly write anything on it...

The reason why is not because I have little to write about, but rather because I struggle a lot with writing down thoughts in a way that is organized and I've come to (perhaps wrongly) convince myself that a blog article requires a minimum length that I barely ever manage to meet, resulting in articles staying unfinished.

As an attempt to solve this I decided to start this Journal. The layout is similar to the Blog section (in fact it uses the same .css file as the Blog) but everything will be contained in a single page and posts will be as long as 2 lines if I feel like it. I think I'll be using this the same way I used Twitter.

The Blog will of course continue to stay and receive updates. In fact I should have an article ready for it soon, but more on that in a few months...

Also I've been listening to ytpmv elf daily for about 3 weeks. I'm not sure what's going on but it's healing me, I think.