Catlinman

So I say things are returning back to normal but what does that exactly mean? Well, for me it means feeling motivated and determined to continue what I love to do. When it is not being a good friend to others or helping those who are having trouble with the things I enjoy, be it programming, digital art or anything and everything concerning computers at this point, I personally love working on creative tasks and somewhat try to push myself into new and uncharted areas of expertise. For me this means learning a new art style, working with a program I previously had interest in but never really got the hang of or just jumping into a barely used programming language and writing something amazing in it. It doesn’t even have to be complex in that sense - being creative in general is something I really enjoy. This might be as simple as imagining the plot for some game, thinking of scene direction for a short movie or expanding the idea of some art piece I will probably make one day. If you know me you will also know that I love planning and managing what I do. I am also extremely fond of knowing I am actually progressing with what I do. I use things like WhatPulse to track how much I have been using my mouse and keyboard and my entire set of applications, GitHub to see what I perviously worked on and even Last.fm to watch what music I recently listened to. It’s not only that though. Building communities and friendships with new people is also incredibly rewarding and I have come to cherish these things above all others. Everything shows that I am leaving something like a mark in a way. I am doing something and it is showing and I can look back on these things with a smile.

That’s what drives me the most in a way. The feeling that I won’t be forgotten. At least that was the case until 2015 came along.

Before I get into the more personal part of this post, let’s quickly cover what I have been doing these last two months and what I have somewhat planned for the next year. Most of you came to read this section after all I would assume.

So to kick this section off.. have some flashy cool images of amazing things I made recently!

Your probably remember this: Overdrive. Made it in May 2015. Didn’t like the original so I edited the entire image and “fixed” it. I like it now, it’s pretty good.

I worked a ton on rebooting what was back then known as Traditional Records and restarted my music label as Tradrec. Oh right I forgot to mention: I became the owner of the label and have ever since then completely restructured everything from the inside out starting from internal communications all the way to outside representation. It would not be anything without the artists - I merely do a small portion with the video editing, management and artwork/design. What can I show off now then? Well, I could point you all to the official YouTube channel and that would be fairly easy. If you like what you hear by the way then please drop a subscription. We all appreciate it a lot! On topic though: I guess showing some of the artwork I made for some of the songs would be a good way to go.

Cover for SKY’s song Her Thoughts.

Cover for SKY’s song Fight or Flight.

Cover for Axis Defied’s Orbital Friendship Cannon album.

Cover for Johann Regaya and his track Hands of Heaven.

This one was rather abstract. Quite fitting though for Shadomaker’s Phase Eight track which he also released on Tradrec.

There are a few others I am not going to post here to not completely spam this section with images. However, these few I think still deserve a place here.

The future bass design of Noyire’s Livsnjutare and the somewhat retro looking cover for SKY’s Gazing Beyond track. Both Tradrec releases.

As you may or may not tell from that I had a lot of fun experimenting with new styles this year when I did get back in motion. I was rather pleased with being able to still stay active on the side with the artwork here and there for a Tradrec release. I did also just recently do some work on my own which is not related to anything and was simply put a set of quick design and artwork projects I did on the side this year. Take a look!

Just made this one a day ago. SHIFT was something I had in my head for a long time but never quite knew how to properly pull off. Finally got around to it and it turned out good from what I can tell.

Valhalla Forest. Got bored one day and made a wallpaper for my new Mac. I like it. Was a nice little exercise in photomanipulation I did on the side this Autumn.

Apocalpyse. This was originally intended as a track cover but got scrapped. I liked the idea though so I kept it.

This one doesn’t really have a name. It’s one of my new university friend’s logo turned into an effect overloaded “thing”. Felt it deserved at least a little recognition here!

That should have been the end of my 2015 short lived art spree but it went on to the end it seems. I met an awesome girl at university who goes by the name of Public Stupidity. We’ve been working on a few pieces recently but nothing I am allowed to shed too much light on. I’ll just say we’re making a website at the moment and it’s going to have pictures on it. Before I move on from this subject: She has given me permission to at least share a profile picture edit I made together with her recently. She designed the character while I took care of the effects and compositing of the final image. Here’s the two variations we made!

You will probably be seeing us do a lot more things together in the future. As you can see we make a pretty good team. At least in that sense I don’t have to force myself to learn how to make actual good line art *hur* *hur* *cough* *cough* *choke*...

To more boring but also important matters: Programming! I mainly spent this year cleaning up most of my old repositories and revisiting old projects and completely refactoring them. Other than that I spent a lot of time learning new systems and generally getting used to new frameworks and programming languages. Some of these include the amazing Crystal programming language which I have grown quite fond of or the rather unknown Moonscript language which is based on Lua and compiles into Lua. Magical! I don’t have anything to show off yet but I am working on a website in Moonscript which you will see rather soon.

Before I forget: I will be rewriting my website soon and begin porting it to Python and the Flask microframework. A close friend of mine used it for a site I have been maintaining in his absence and I have come to like it a lot. What does this mean? Well for the one part my website will be a lot easier for me to maintain and on the other hand this means that I will say goodbye to Tumblr when it comes to writing blog posts. I will probably still mirror posts here but first I will have to mirror all my old Tumblr posts to my new blog page which will be part of my main website (catlinman.com). You won’t really notice a change other than a new design. The domain for the blog will remain the same (blog.catlinman.com).

I have also picked up Meteor along the way and am building the official Tradrec website using it rather soon. I guess soon here is defined in Valve time. At least it was but I am getting back on track with things so expect me to have info on that in the future.

Once again, there are a few projects I just want to surprise people with so I am not revealing anything else for the time being. Maybe it’s also a good idea in case I fall in a hole again. That way I am not letting anyone down who was hoping for me to complete something I announced but never got around to so far.

It seems we have reached the end of the status report in terms of productivity. Before things get rather dark and depressing let’s reflect on another image young Cat left in his imgur folder.

Alright, there we go. Good stuff. Time to talk about the bad things. Here we go.

The year 2015 - things started off as usual, I was determined and ready to start a brand new year and hoped for the best. I was nearly the completion of my A-Levels and had just previously worked together with Meganeko and things were going good. I have had to deal with quite a bit of crap in my life and I generally don’t have trouble when it comes to dealing with issues and moving on. When I had to say goodbye to my best friend for the next couple of years, experience the death of a person I had a close friendship with, started questioning my self worth and not being motivated to move on with projects as well as dealing with the fact that my family was having a hard time with one of it’s core members suffering from cancer in the shortest amount of time (2 weeks notice) - I just found it hard to move on and pretend like everything was alright. There were obviously even more things going on in this time that were dragging me down even more but I don’t see how they play a role here.

I enjoy helping others as you might know and this includes helping them through hard times by talking and just reassuring them in a sense. When I do this I completely ignore my own problems. I had problems before that were probably equally as bad as some mentioned in the previous section but never had to cope with all of these at the same time. I noticed that I couldn’t focus on others as I had used to and found myself constantly ignoring people because I was scared that I would drag these people down with me. The main reason I don’t talk about the bad things that happen is because I am almost always afraid of pulling others down with me. I’m fine with taking one person’s burden but actually being a burden to others is not something I could come to terms with.

I took a break and let things simmer down. I played a lot of video games and forgot the world. I stopped dreaming of tomorrow and only focused on the day at hand. My projects didn’t advance and neither did I. I managed to pass my A-Levels with a good grade even though I didn’t spend more than an hour in total learning for them, passed my driver’s training and got a license after being a rather slacky with that as well and applied for university back in August. I got accepted right away and then later on the first of October moved to Koblenz Germany to study Computervisualistics there. I’m still studying as we speak. The decision to do all of was probably one of the better choices I made this year. I met a bunch of new and awesome people who I guess at this point look up to me for one reason or another and fell in love with an even more awesome girl. I made the decision to forget all that has happened and get back on track recently. It has not been easy but I feel like I am making progress again. I am able to motivate myself to move on and that’s an amazing feeling in itself.

I hope this has cleared up a few things concerning what has been going on with me this entire year. I’m not sure if I needed to state all of this or not. I’m not even sure if anyone is going to read this far. I just felt that it was time to talk about more serious matters and drop the act of everything always being alright with me. I don’t feel I need to explain or elaborate everything that happened but giving the slight gist might help those that have asked me countless times of what exactly went on understand what did go on.

Woah, where to start. It's been almost half a year since I last wrote a text post. I could contemplate saying my usual "I've not been up to that much" but this time it wouldn't just be my friends saying that "that" is a lie in itself since I can't even find a good point to start at.

I guess it would be best to start off with some good old animation and then move into for some more abstract topics like programming. Anyway, here’s an intro animation I made for Xavinightshade a few months back.

As you can see I have been trying to improve my animation quality by adding some more dynamic elements like that short opening sequence you can see in the video.

I had also been playing around in Blender quite a bit and came up with a bunch of render tests that turned out quite nicely.

You can tell that those three renders are pure tests in terms of playing around with some of Blender’s system. I also created some lighting based tests which somewhat go hand in hand with each other.

On the topic of artwork I also created this weird but cool looking wolf. Don’t ask what it was for though.

Here’s an actual speed paint I did a little while back as well titled “Hero”.

With those two last images being something I created in Photoshop I also just a few days ago worked on a little render which I will talk about towards the end of this post.

That all somewhat covers the art side of the last few months. There hasn't really been that much going in that area. To be honest I had been focusing more on technical things and generally taking care of old projects and tasks I had backed away from in the past.

To be honest I spent a lot of time refactoring a huge portion of my old code and making the updated versions available publicly on my GitHub profile. The main reason I went back was that a lot of the things I did two years ago when I got into this whole business were not bad but flawed in a beginners way. In a sense I corrected a lot of past issues and improved on things from the knowledge I had gained since then.

A good example could be the website I created for the Hivecom Teamspeak server which I incidentally also host. The website that used to be in place was back from the time when I had no idea how to actually write a good website and was just a general mess so to say. I actually have an old screenshot of the page which you can see below.

Also as you might notice the image above says Hivemind instead of Hivecom. The server was renamed after I bought an actual domain to make life easier. If you want to see what the website looks like now you can just head over to http://hivecom.net/ and check it out for yourself. If you compared the functionality of the page to that of the older website you will clearly see that there are a few new features like the donation center and the option to directly look up users on the Teamspeak server that I added while creating the new page. If you feel like it you can also snoop into the source code which is available from the Hivecom GitHub repository.

On the topic of making websites’ code openly available; My personal website’s source code is also available on GitHub at this point. If you wanted to know how it was made then now is your chance to find out. It’s nothing special in a way since it’s your plain case of a static PHP site (unlike some of Hivecom’s elements). This is due to the fact that I simply used PHP back then and it works for what I need now. No need to use Rails or some other fancy web framework for something that doesn't require it at all.

Speaking of coding and refactoring and recreating things; I spent a bit of time to rewrite a silly old program of mine called Rotcrypt as well as a Bandcamp downloader called Campdown. I was actually going to write a post comparing early 2013′s Rotcrypt code with the code I threw together while rewriting the program at the end of 2014. We’ll see if I ever get around to writing that post.

I also got around to “mostly” commenting and refactoring the entire source code for my Ludum Dare 29 game “In the Dark”. You can find the source code for that game on GitHub as well.

While working on a collaborative game project based on the LÖVE2D framework I built a console system for the engine which gained quite a bit of attention from the LÖVE2D community. The console system titled LOVEConsole can also (as you would probably expect at this point) be found on GitHub. It’s useful to say the least if you are working with LÖVE2D at any point.

Now before I forget I also wrote an extension for Google Chrome for no real reason at all. It’s called “YouTube Thumbnail Extractor” and it does exactly what it says. I got tired of having to edit URLs all the time to get to certain YouTube video’s thumbnails so I wrote a tool which would fetch them for me. You can grab YTThumbnailExtractor from GitHub.

That’s pretty much the coding part. It’s quite a bit to take in all at once. Considering that the next section covers more artsy stuff again to sooth your brain some more.

First off I recently worked together with the electronic music producer Megeneko to come up with a sort of music video for his latest album. The result of our collaboration can be seen below in it’s full glory.

It was somewhat weird to suddenly have him approach me out of the blue after I had been a fan of his music since his first album. Working with him was a real charm though and I can’t wait to do so again. Check out his music if you liked what you heard in the video!

Now back to the Blender artwork I said I would talk about at the “beginning” of this post. I got bored a few days ago and after a friend (Jan Dolanský to be precise) asked me if I was going to be doing more art anytime soon I felt somewhat motivated to go and make a new Blender render. I didn’t have a lot of time but the final outcome got a ton of attention on /r/blender which somewhat amazed me. Well, you can judge the image for yourself so here you go.

I also uploaded a short video showing off the compositing process of the image which you can see below.

The image as already mentioned was created in Blender 2.73c and composited in Adobe Photoshop CS6. Nothing out of the ordinary for me so there’s not much to say on that part. Making the image was a fun process since I got a good deal of practice in terms of working with natural looking grass in Blender which is usually an extremely tedious task to get right.

That should sum up most of what I have been doing during my productive phases. Some of you might know that I also spent way too much time playing games recently *ahem* in particular Osu but that’s something for another time. I’ll try to keep on making things even though I am nearing the end of my current education with my "Abitur” slowly creeping up on me. This means that I may or may not be too busy to make things - as you might know though if I don’t have time for something I will make the time for it so I guess things will stay as they are right now.