Things that Make My Heart Happy

 Since it’s the Saturday before Thanksgiving break ends, I decided to finally lock in and get work done. I tried the tried and true Pomodoro session, and absolutely fucking loved that shit. You essentially get four 25 minute sessions of uninterrupted work, with 4 minute breaks in between. I got a lot of shit done, and it doesn’t feel too overbearing since you get those small breaks. However, after the video I was watching for the timer I decided to take a 30 minute break and do things that “make my heart happy”. I realized that I haven’t come up with a list of things that makes my heart happy, so here goes.

1) Recording a video for YouTube (this is probably my favorite free-time, unproductive hobby)
2) Watching YouTube
3) Making a Lucas animation
4) Learning to code
5) Writing in this thing
6) Exercising

    When Christmas break eventually rolls around, I will actually have no “productive” things to do, which means I have plenty of time to do things that make my heart happy. A stream of videos on Yoshi’s Island and Zelda will likely be released. They did this week.

Yoshi's Island SPREE

 If you haven't noticed, I've been uploading a ton of New! SMW2 Yoshi's Island videos recently. The main reason is really just to get more videos out and to really make more progress in this game. It's been over a year and I'm barely halfway done, which is insane. It's taken me awhile. I finished World 3 this week and I plan on starting World 4 near Christmas time when I have more time (obviously).

Enjoy.

Wealthy ass text files

 Today I was using TextEdit on my Mac mini to learn all its features, and you can apparently add images. It’s super limited, though, since you can’t resize them or really move them at all. By default, any document you create is saved as an “rtf” file, which is essentially a text file that contains formatting like fonts, sizing, and color. However, once you add images, it becomes an “rtfd” file… I’ve never seen that. It’s pretty much specific to mac, and has a very limited selection of apps that can open it. But why? If you were going through the effort of adding color and images to your text file, why not use something more advanced like Word, Pages, or Google Docs? TextEdit has very limited options anyway. You can’t even resize the images, and your formatting options go about as far as adding color and making the text bigger. So now I look at “rtfd” as a wealthy ass text file, since its a rich text file with a bit more money (images) added.
    I can see the appeal, though. As crazy as it sounds, the TextEdit doesn’t include any page breaks, so it’s kind of like using pageless mode on Google Docs (or like a plain txt file). In a way, that’s better than other word processing apps, since page breaks can be annoying. If you really desire a long running, huge document, then this might be a good option. You can even export the doc as a PDF.
    So the TL;DR is… TextEdit is probably best used as a tool for quick notes.

WOW! Where the heck did you go?

 Hey guys, welcome back to my blog. Sorry I for not posting a blog post in a while. I completely forgot I even made this thing, to be honest. Lately, I've been fiddling around with Google Keep, and I've just got to talk about it.

Google Keep is basically a note-taking app for the web that is supported on pretty much everything that has a web browser. You can also download it on the App Store (apple) or the Play Store. Right now, I've been using it on chrome. It allows users to quickly and easily create notes, with options to add images, links, and even drawings. It's an excellent tool for taking notes in class (since you can draw like math notes and type out lecture notes from other classes) as well as just creating quick mental notes for yourself. You can put reminders, to-do lists, shopping lists, or whatever you'd like. There are also labels you can apply to notes to keep them organized.

I've really been checking out the drawing tool, which is very limited but also kind of fun to play around with. I've seen some people online posting about sketches they made with it, and it's pretty impressive. Shoutout to Joshua Pomeroy (https://www.youtube.com/@JoshuaPomeroy) for his video on sketching with Google Keep. 

If you haven't given it a try, I'd suggest so. There are alternatives out there, of course, like OneNote and Notability. However, if you aren't sure where to start and want something that is fast, reliable, and free, then Google Keep is a good option.

Other than that, I've been pretty busy with other stuff, so that's why I haven't posted a lot on my channel. I will get back to Oracle of Ages, but I'm mad at my computer right now for FUCKING up a recording I did on it. I finished recording the rest of Mermaid's Cave, and once I stopped recording after around 50 minutes of footage, the computer decided to crash. All of my footage went down the drain, and I save stated already. The next part will unfortunately not contain the rest of the dungeon. I got to record shorter sessions just to be safe, I guess.

If you took time to read this, thank you. I'm not sure how many people even see this blog....

I’ve been gone for a week

 Hi. I’ve been gone for a week because I’ve been on vacation, but I might be able to upload a video.  No promises. I’ll keep this short. 

Currently off camera I’m playing Dragon Warrior 3 for GBC. Fun RPG that reminds me of earthbound or dragon quest. That’s really all I wanted to say. More RPG games may come in the way future of my channel. For now Oracle. 

New Upload Soon (recording today) + other stuff

It's Monday!

Yesterday was the two finals for the Copa America and Euro Cup. Spain wins the cup, and of course Argentina wins the cup. (That Copa America game was a shit show, haha 😬) Soccer done. 

Today I'm planning on recording some more Oracle of Ages and finally uploading that Mother 3 part. Those are 100% certain. I may or may not record Yoshi's Island depending on how busy I am. I am praying that my video doesn't desync with the audio like the last Oracle part. Near the middle of the video, the game audio wasn't synced with my voice or the video, so it makes no sense and is extremely hard to watch. I honestly thought that part was solid too, with no lag or screw ups. Oh well.

I'm also thinking about uploading a new game, preferably Arn's Winter Quest by Toby Fox. It's one of the strangest hacks I've seen on EarthBound and it's kinda crazy it was made by the guy who made Undertale. It's rarely ever talked about or remembered (only by EB fans), but I thought it'd be fun to revisit Toby's creations from '06.

That's it.

Good Morning...

Today is the day of the Copa America and UEFA Euro Championship final. Argentina vs. Colombia and Spain vs. England. 

Anyways, soccer aside, I'm planning on uploading some more Oracle of Ages soon. I've been on vacation and have not been able to record, so that's why there hasn't been a video in a few days. I have another Mother 3 part already finished but I haven't gotten around to uploading it. As for Yoshi's Island hack, IDK when I'll play that again. I have been mostly focusing on completing Oracle of Ages (it's taken me almost 5 damn months at this point). As I said before, the Yoshi hack is incredibly hard and takes a while to complete even just one level. I will try to record it sometime before the end of summer.

The video quality lately has been pretty shitty, and I blame that on my shitty tools. First of all, I'm using a pretty lousy emulator to play Oracle of Ages. WebRcade is just obsolete now. It was useless for PC users because they could just download a better emulator alternative like RetroArch or OpenEmu (which has a fuckton more features). Plus, now that Apple has been allowing emulators on their App Store, WebRcade is no longer needed on mobile devices either. WebRcade on your phone isn't great either, since you absolutely needed to connect a bluetooth controller in order to play. Stupid. Was it really that hard to just program some damn virtual buttons? That's like exclusively what I use when playing on my phone. Nobody is gonna wanna pull out a big ass controller or backbone controller when they're playing for 2 minutes waiting in a line. So, now that it's not useful on phones or PC's, it's basically kinda meh. The need to contain all your back ups and save states in a dropbox account is also annoying. If you don't, you could easily lose all your game progress because it's stored in your IndexedDB. Because the focus of webRcade is "cloud based", you technically could play all your games on various devices and have the same backups, but that means it has to pull from that Dropbox account every fucking time you load a new game, save state, or load state. That's why you see it load EVERY TIME I MAKE A SAVE STATE in Oracle of Ages. I know WebRcade was made with love for retro games and out of passion for the people who play them (it's free), but it needs an update or something.

If I'm complaining about it, why am I  using it? Because I'm a dumbass. I originally found WebRcade and thought the idea of it was neat and that the interface and editing of your "feed" was simple. I ended up making my own feed with a bunch of games. Admittedly, it is a stylish way to pick a game to play. I also liked how it supported a lot of different systems, and that most of them ran fairly well on my chromebook. I used it for a bit, and then figured I'd start the let's play of Oracle using it. What a fool. I really want to change emulators now, but I have found that no emulator accepts the exported save file I've retrieved from digging deep in the dropbox folder. Garbage. I even used the same emulator that the one in WebRcade is based off of: VBA - GBC. 

The emulator overall is just missing a lot of things and is kinda a drag to use. You want a good "browser based emulator"? Try Emulator JS. I'll list the good things about WebRcade first:

- Runs most games on most systems surprisingly well, even if you have a slow computer

- The Feeds look pretty good once you add all the boxart and descriptions

- Easy to customize your own feed to how you want

- You can share your feed to all devices to experience the same thing, as well as have all your backups on all devices through dropbox

Now, the bad things:

- Cannot be used offline (as far as I'm aware)

- Requires external controllers or keyboard when playing games

- Dropbox link is required, and makes loading and saving very slow

- Missing key features like fast forward, shaders, cheats, etc.

- Only accepts certain file types for some ROMS (namely CHD for all the cd ones)

- If you aren't using dropbox, you must manually put a link to all your games from an external source. (good luck doing this for thousands of games lol)

That last one is why it's "cloud based". In summary, if you want to play emulators using your browser, (which is what I must do since I do not have a PC) use Emulator JS or something like that. 

On top of having to deal with WebRcade, the videos are also shitty because my chromebook is shitty. It constantly lags when I try to record and can barely handle editing the video together. The game audio is often not in sync with my voice because it just shifts when I'm recording for some reason, and I cannot fix that. 

To end this really long post, I'm sorry the videos haven't been the best. I'll try to fix them as I go on and I will continue to upload regardless. Before they were honestly okay, so I don't know what happened. My computer is slowly dying on me I guess.