I just had an exam over the internet. I was to translate a text from japanese to swedish and answer a bunch of questions within an hour. All was fine untill the second that I'm pressing the send-button to submit my answers to my teacher. Yes, at the exact second I press the button, my internet bails out on me. I have a few minutes to spare so I quickly restart my computer. Doesn't help. I slip the text file over to my USB memory stick, quickly run over to my mother's computer, start it up and her internet access is also down. I then fail my exam, and no teacher in his right mind will ever believe me.

Now, yesterday I talked more to the guy who wanted to start a business together with me. He offered to put me on payroll if/when I want to quit school. (For reasons too long to explain) I said that I'd rather finish my class first, and declined getting any money until december. Maybe I should rethink that. I barely take the time to study these days anyway, and I'll be failing three of four exams this week (not as bad as it sounds, this education won't give me a job anyway, and I can't continue studying next term).

Seems like everyone's trying to get some green these days. I just met with a thirty five year old IT-consultant to talk about starting a company. He's apparently done so before, and is an experienced and seemingly pretty good programmer, but says that he lacks in creativity and game ideas which is where I fit the picture (sounds great to me!). I'm going out to grab a beer with him and talk some more later tonight. I'm not sure exactly what to talk about, but he seems to be a nice person with similar visions of what he wants to do in the game industry. I'm taking this opportunity pretty serious, but I'm not getting my hopes up just yet. Even if this won't work out, I'm very glad to see something happening.

I also got a request for an interview over at gamelab.com. I sent in the best answers I could come up with to their questions today. I'm hoping they'll send some traffic my way. Their site doesn't exactly look like a game portal, though, but I'm sure they know what they're doing.

Working on a game for a Halloween contest. Going for a new style this time. It's a bit like a first person point and click game in the same sense as Deja V?. I got a good idea for the plot, and it's looking good so far. I hope it turns out well.

Yes, some of you, probably very few, have heard about the project I originally intended to create for the competition over at TIGSource. It's called "Brave Karma Warriors" and I'm now intending to finish it for december 24th instead. So here's a little sneak peak at what you're gonna get for christmas:


While you're at it, feel free to drop by the TIGSource forum to check out all the magnificent entries submitted. There's over twenty eight entries to play, ranging from sodomizing hermaphrodites and poop propelled flight to Ingmar Bergman inspired adventures about pending doom. I also made a replacement entry that you all should already have played by now >:(

I made a teaser video for my upcoming game Akuchizoku the day before yesterday. An interesting experience, since I didn't think my computer would be up for the task.

I figured I'd let people know how to do it. The first thing I did was scale the game down to 25% of the real screen size in GM. This apparently makes the game run slower, but I didn't notice any slow down on my computer. Probably a good idea to scale the game down to about the resolution you're aiming for to upload (if you're going for youtube hosting or something similar).

Then, I used a freeware application called Camstudio to capture the video. It's an absolutely awesome tool, for a freeware program. It allows you to record in Div-X/Xvid on the fly, if you don't want to end up with a five gigabyte videofile on the harddrive.

Then I used VirtualDub (also freeware) to resize the video, synchronize the audio to the video and compress it to a more reasonable filesize for uploading. (Virtualdub is quite lovely, have been using it for years. Get some filters and you can do nice fade-in and fade-out effects, add in watermark logos etc etc.)

Finally, I tried three different host for the video file. Youtube was fast to upload to, but it took a good six hours before the video was available for viewing. I also tried google's video section, but uploading was slow and without a proper progress bar. Finally I tried 123video.nl, which was a bit harder to navigate as it's in dutch, but it was fast to upload with and took only fifteen minutes or so before I could view the video. Also allows you to embed the video on your own site. Definitely recommended.

So, feel free to give it a view on the official site of the game. And while you're at it, why not get a pre-order?

Okay, the topic is missing a word. It should be "Living with your crazy parents sucks". My parents - or rather my mom - is crazy, and living with her is horrible. Definitely not worth the money you save on having a lower rent than when having your own apartment.

First of all, she's been a hippie and a very spiritual person for most of her life. She believes in anything illogical (be that aliens, magic, ghosts, spiritual mumbo jumbo, new age crap, god or whatever, as long as it can't be explained through logic, she automatically decides to believe in it), and that causes a lot of problems. You can't have an argument with her, because relying on logic will automatically cause her to feel that she's right. She also decides many important things by consulting a medium that is obviously full of crap. Right now, the medium's acting as some kind of marriage counselor, and is telling my mother that she's forced to take a lot of crap at home. This results in her being absolutely 100% certain that everyone's against her, and that she can do no wrong. And as an effect of that, I have to wake up everyday from my mom fighting with her husband for about an hour and a half.

What do they fight about? Well, from what I can understand, it's partially economic stress. This is perfectly reasonable to me, as I myself can get on edge when I have no money. But the second factor is that her husband's an ayurvedic doctor, and she feels that he's too friendly with his female customers. For instance, she would want him to kick out anyone who has intimate problems, or is interested in stuff that has to do with sexuality (which a big percentage of new age people seem to be). This is also slightly understandable. However, he is a damn doctor that practices alternative medications, and it's hard to get patients that doesn't have intimate problems. And their economy is crap, so he can't really afford to lose any of the patients that he does have.

Then, we have the cleaning of the household. I pay rent, and quite a lot for just a room. And hence I feel that keeping my room clean is my business, not my parents. Of course, the rent includes food and electricity, so I'm probably paying less than I would if I was on my own. However, she gets angry at me and my brother all the time as soon as our rooms aren't in perfect order. And cleaning your room everyday when you're studying is a task that's pretty tough on someone who lacks any skill when it comes to the subject. I'm awful at cleaning. It takes me hours to straight out a small mess, and days to sort out a big one. And whenever I actually get my ass off and do clean up, she complains about me not doing something else. To make things worse, she recently pulled out all her teeth, and through some kind of herbal therapy discovered that she was abused while she was a kid (which is probably just a load of crap, but you never know). So now you can't help but feel like you're picking on someone weak whenever you talk back to her.

Now this is nothing compared to what she's like to her husband. The guy works eight hours a day, while my mother's retired because of illness. When he gets home, he cooks dinner. He does all the laundry of the household and goes shopping for groceries, plus walks the dog. Yet, she always chews him out as soon as he does the slightest thing wrong, as she says that she thinks it's good to be "honest" about your feelings. Now, don't think that he's a damn wimp and just sits and takes it, he gets pretty vile when she manages to push his buttons (which she seems to do almost every day). And this goes out on me and my brother as well. Because listening to someone continually picking a fight with her husband all day long, and eventually starting big nasty arguments is not a pleasant experience. Also, it makes them both take out some of their frustration on us, and every now and then they say that we're the reason that they're angry at each other because we don't clean our rooms.

Another annoyance is that she practically doesn't sleep. She sometimes meditates and falls asleep at random points during the day, but she's always up and running about during the night. This is quite problematic for me, since I have sensitive ears and have a hard time falling a sleep when things aren't decently quiet. The times that she does sleep through the night is when she takes enough painkillers for her illness to dose off. I think she gets some kind of "hang over" from taking her meds, which might explain her terrible moodswings. I don't think she's an abuser, though... I believe she has restless legs syndrome or something like that (the doctors can't figure it out).

Finally, my mother has efficiently gotten rid of all of her and her husband's friends. She's paranoid and thinks that they're only using her to make themselves feel better, and that they want to take her beloved family (that she treats like shit) away from her. I seriously feel that she belongs in a home for mental patients. I'm not sure if she's gotten dementia or if she's always been this crazy. I do know that she has gotten to be more and more antisocial and more irritable during the last few years, though. And it's becoming a damn nightmare.

Now I might be making it sound worse than it is. I don't know. She's only as bad as what I say about 50% percent of the time. When she's in a good mood, she's quite nice, and she's always been a good mother while I was growing up (except maybe a bit over protective). Still, I can't help but hate her now. I hope things get better between us whenever I can seize an opportunity to move someplace else.

Okay, worst first blog entry ever, but I just had to vent this stuff :P