My Podcasts

(Originally posted as a YouTube comment to someone asking for podcast suggestions, I went all out)

I do landscaping and I try to listen to podcasts to pass the time, so that's about 40-50 hours per week I need to fill. So some of these might seem too time consuming for you, and I'm sure you won't listen to ALL of them, but here they are.
(Edit: I realized this is pretty long and you might not care to read all of it or might not know what I'm actually recommending so here's the ones that I'd most suggest you try in order, and if you want to know more you can scroll down
1. Critical Role=Best but most time consuming.
2. Always Open=I anticipate every episode and is relatively short and you can get a good idea if you like it or not after only one episode.
3. Dude Soup=Much more sarcastic and less enthusiastic, but compensates with being super interesting and well researched with a nice dry sense of humor.
4. Adventure Zone=If Critical Role is too long and boring, Adventure Zone is much shorter and jokier.
5. Nerdist/Dear Hank and John/Story Break/Adam Ruins Everything=I'm lumping these together because I like them all for different reasons and think that they're each great and relatively educational on interesting topics and help expand your understanding and perspective of different topics and ideas in fun and interesting ways, but I haven't heard enough of them to more concisely place them on this list.)
So, I listen to...
Rooster Teeth podcasts:
Always Open = Shorter episodes (about 1 hour), interesting and open discussions about pretty much anything, but with a general theme of open sexuality. Not for everyone, listening to one episode should give you a good idea if you like it or not.
Off Topic = Very long episodes (about 1.5-3 hours), personality driven, it's a bunch of folks just talking about absolutely anything and everything, especially about their personal lives.
RT Podcast = A nice all-around generic podcast and generic length (about 1.5 hours), where they talk about most anything and tell stories and sometimes talk about news stories (very rarely political), the former CEO of Rooster Teeth is frequently on and he's a big Tesla fan (if you saw any articles talking about the guy that made his Tesla look like a cell shaded cartoon, those were about him) and he likes buying random weird tech.
Glitch Please = Average length (1-1.5 hours), very video game oriented, and recently one of the members has gotten super into board games, which can be fun listening to him talk about and might spark an interest for you in something you might not have really considered being more than Monopoly or Candy Land.
Fan Service = Average length (1-1.5 hours), all about anime. They have voice actors come on, directors, producers, animators, etc. They're also the crew behind Rooster Teeth's animations including the very popular "anime" RWBY. If you're not interested in anime, it might be worth watching like one episode to see the craziness they do with their cool set and fun segments, but it's probably not worth you sticking around.
Dude Soup = Average length (1-1.5 hours), not technically Rooster Teeth, is instead run by a channel owned by Rooster Teeth called Funhaus. Each episode kinda varies, they'll try to have a theme for an episode usually relating to a the biggest tech news story of the week, like the adpocalypse when that was first happening or the Net Neutrality repeal and they'll offer very balanced and nitty-gritty insight into issues and don't easily bandwagon. But the amount of time they'll talk about the "main topic" varies, they'll often get into more personal stories and just talk about anything.

D&D (general disclaimer: D&D shows center around campaigns, which are ongoing stories, so most if not all of them are best listened to in order):
Critical Role = This is by far my personal favorite "podcast," though it's also by far the most time consuming. Each episode is about 3.5-4.5 hours, and since it's a show it's not very good to listen to at random. If you skip a week or two, you're gonna wanna go back and listen to those before listening to the newest episode. HOWEVER, "Season 2" literally just started like 4 weeks ago, and is totally unrelated to the previous 115 episode "Season 1" and so far they've only made like 2 inside jokes referencing their previous "season," so if you're at all interested in jumping in and keeping up, now's your time to do so.
The Adventure Zone = I actually only found this one very recently and have been enjoying it. It's about 1 hour per episode and I'm only on like episode 20 out of 70+. It's MUCH more manageable than Critical Role since it's so much shorter. The main difference is that Critical Role excels at story telling and role playing and creating legit atmosphere and emotion and strong characters, Adventure Zone is much more upbeat and fun with tons of jokes with a great player dynamic.
Acquisitions Incorporated = A D&D show with an interesting gimmick, if the characters were actually entrepreneurs with tons of resources and equipment and businesses to manage. They still go on adventures and quests, but more to continue funding their investments and undermining their competition. I haven't been able to get very far in this because between all these other podcasts and shows I listen to, I'm actually kinda full on time, so this is usually a last resort option, when I've listened to all the other podcasts of the week and I still have to pull weeds for several hours.
Dice Camera Action = I've actually kinda fallen off of this one, it's very popular because it's officially hosted by Wizards of the Coast (the creators/owners of D&D) with one of the game designers as the DM, but his voice is kinda annoying for me and while it's decent with great moments, the show as a whole is kinda "meh" for me. It still gets a recommendation from me if you're super interested in D&D shows, but it's the bottom of this list for a reason.

RT+D&D:
Heroes and Halfwits = Earlier episodes were average length and weekly (1-1.5 hours), they later changed it to be longer episodes, but every other week (1.5-2.5 hours per episode). Not as good as Critical Role, or as fun as Adventure Zone, the main reason to watch is the dysfunctional group of friends and coworkers flailing and yelling and bumbling around in the game.

Other (either podcasts I'm interested in or have listened to only a couple episodes of but wish I had more time for):
Dear Hank and John = Time varies, but generally shorter (0.5-1.5 hours) If you wanna hear about some of the most influential and positive YouTubers ever host a podcast, this is for you. I've only ever listened to one episode, and I enjoyed it, I just haven't had time to listen to more.
The Nerdist = One of the most famous and original of podcasts, hosted by Chris Hardwick and of average length (1-1.5 hours), he usually has a guest and they generally talk about what the guest does and tell stories about their careers. I've only listened to a couple episodes and seemed to focus on comedians, though this isn't really a comedy podcast. It's great either way and worth a listen.
Story Break = A great podcast from old school YouTube group RocketJump that talks about how to make a compelling, good, well-written story. I really need to listen to this one more (only one episode under my belt).
Adam Ruins Everything = A lot of these podcasts I kinda recommend with the secret intention of suggesting a podcast that's actually kinda educational and discusses topics in depth in interesting ways with interesting people, there's no beating around the bush with this show though. The entire premise is to directly educate you on concepts that you might take for-granted and go super in depth, and it's super fascinating and enlightening. Strongly recommend, despite my only 3 episodes I've listened to (to be fair, I only found out about this show like 5 weeks ago).

I think that's everything, I'll update with more if I think of it. XD

Tumblr Rant

The thing with all this super "fluid" tumblr crap is that as long as no one is directly asking me to refer to them in any of these stupid ways, I don't care. I prefer benefit of the doubt, where I assume that the number of people actually stupid and self-righteous enough to claim they're half that crap is overblown, and that most of them do it for personal/RP/small-community reasons.

Basically, if a group of people think it's more interesting to call eachother "voids" and "sparks," or say they're "cosmicgendered," let them have their fun. If someone talked to me trying to convince me that they're actually those things and want me to acknowledge them as such, THEN I'd have a problem.

...

Also howdy! It's been so long! I do have more plans in the future, but when I actually commit and post them could be another 2 years. Let's hope not!

Activity

I don't want to make only one post on my blog over the course of an entire year, so here it is: My second blog post of 2014!

Today I'll be discussing something completely unrelated to the rest of my blog, but I feel like it's kind of an important issue. This post is about sexuality, specifically about my thoughts regarding things relating to transgenderism.

Why am I writing about this and posting it here? Because I just started a discussion (not an argument) with someone on the matter, and their biggest point is that it all comes down to a matter of perspective. At that point, I realized, "I have a blog titled Decent Perspective that I made with the original intention of sharing my perspectives and opinions in the hopes that they are overall decent." So here we go.

My Website

I've recently undertaken work on creating a website from the ground up. No templates, no easy-to-use programs, I'm making the entire website from scratch in Notepad++ using nothing other than the code the people helping me and I know.

Today was Day 2 of the 2 day overhaul on the site, and while it's still very basic and feature-less, the overhaul was a success. It now has a spiffy navigation bar at the top (though further refinement is required), a background, and much sleeker coding (thanks to a friend who introduced some useful CSS code). Basically, there is now a promising foundation of code and design to build off of.

The DnD adventure I was making and documenting on this blog is on hiatus until further notice, especially since first priority is this website. The website won't be receiving anymore updates for at least a week since I will be visiting New Jersey for vacation.

If you care to visit the website, it's http://friendsforthings.com/index.html.
As always, feedback would be appreciated, so leave the comments on this post if you have anything worth saying.

Other Projects

So here's a little mish mash of news, both good, bad, and benign.
1. The text adventure is on hold while I pull myself together. When I work on it again it will be completely rewritten from the ground up for 2 main reasons. First is because I need to integrate some new tricks I learned (which was a major reason why I started the game in the first place). Second, I'm going to use function commands, which will allow me to create an actual framework for the game which can be reused and modified as many times as needed.
2. There still seems to be "missing DLL" errors for people. I've been looking into this but haven't found a solution. I'll look into it more when I actually start working on the game again.
3. I've recently begun another project I would appreciate support with. I recorded myself in a video call with a friend of mine while we watched the season 4 premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Please note I'm NOT a brony (my friend is), but I do appreciate the show. Anyways, I took the recording and mashed it up to cut out the boring bits and added a few jokes in post, too. Feedback would be great!
(Click Here) A Comedic Reaction to the Season 4 Premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic [P1] 

That's it for now!

What About Content?

Very short post here. I just wanted to mention that if anyone is wondering why there's less and less posts here, it's because I'm trying to focus about 80% of this blog on my game. No more, no less (I don't mean this that I'm counting the posts and seeing the exact ratios, I just mean that I want majority of my posts to be about the game, but will definitely cram in a few My Perspective articles). If I can't give updates or at the very least talk about my game frequently enough, then I won't make other posts. As a result, less time to work on the game = less updates/interesting notifications about the game = fewer blog posts. If you want to keep up to date with things I find interesting or worth mentioning, check me out on Google+. That's it for now.

Missing DLL No More!

Versions Folder (Click Here)

Okay, for those of you who have experienced the infamous "Missing DLL" error message when attempting to run my game, I finally fixed it. To be honest this hasn't been a real priority of mine because nobody reported it. This means that it really is nothing and just a fluke every now and then, or nobody feels like letting me know when this really big project I've been working on and spending hours on is broken. :/

Anyways, I'm currently uploading the latest version. I didn't want to actually upload this because there's some random things thrown in that will definitely not exist in the final game, but I need to get a compatible game uploaded so people who don't own Microsoft Visual Studio can actually play it. This is also the version I've been sending out to potential assistants, so this is kind of a developer preview public release, which kind of reminds me of what Microsoft did with Windows 8. Anyways, enjoy being able to play the game now if you couldn't before!

Slowing Down

Versions Folder (Click Here)

I know it may not seem like it, but I've been really cranking out code for my text adventure. However that's going to have to slow down for a little bit. I have a lot of other work on my plate at the moment so the whole 2 month plan is gonna be modified. I mean if I actually do find time to finish it in 2 months or less, I will, but right now I can't, so maybe 3 or 4 months.
Blah blah blah, college.

Game Engine (and minor, but cool news)

Versions Folder (Click Here)
So the big announcement is that I plan on selling my game engine upon my game's completion. Obviously I don't expect many buyers (if any), or a large price. After all, it is C++, which isn't exactly difficult to program. The idea behind selling the engine is to save people a lot of time coding. This also requires me to constantly revamp the code to be more legible and efficient as I work. I will also accept commissions for anyone who wants their own text adventure but may not know programming or have the time for all the coding required. Commissions will cost more than the engine, but neither will be anywhere near expensive. I acknowledge that I'm not a professional, so I won't charge like one.

The other news is that music might soon be included. I mentioned in an older post that the final release might come with an original soundtrack of sorts. I might be fulfilling that reality sooner than expected.

Fixes, Expansions, and Requests

Versions Folder (Click Here)

So in the last version of the game I had rewritten all the code and gave everything a new layout to make it look nicer. This was mostly because when I looked at the old copy of the code I had no idea where I left off, where to keep writing, and where the bugs were. The process of rewriting the code took longer than I wanted between updates and I thought I got 400 page views, so I released the new game half complete. Examining the tree was not an option and several other choices cut the experience short.

Perspective On: Internet Speeds

So I realized I didn't test my wifi internet speed at our new house. So I just tested it. 18.72 mbps download and 1.4 mbps upload. A second test clocks it at 21.49 mbps down and 1.47 mbps up.
So, pretty amazing download but super crappy upload. After all, out of the entire United States Michigan has some of the most reliable and realistically priced internet.
I do use AT&T and this is about 5 mbps faster download than our old house. Now this is a connection I can definitely work a lot with, HOWEVER I still have strong feelings in the big data imbalance here in America. Affordable fiber should definitely be a thing (come on Google Fiber).

Spammed

UPDATE: I cannot block these sites. My plan was to block them then try reset the page views and just cope with the lost count of actual page views and start from scratch, but that isn't going to work. Apparently they slow down or stop as you gain a legitimate viewer base and as Google tracks down and blocks these sites individually. If anything this gives me more motivation to try and get more legitimate viewers, so these inflated numbers will stop screwing so much with my blog.

So I just took a good look at the statistics for my blog, and noticed something interesting.

The top traffic sources were from a site called vampirestat.com. I looked into the situation and it turns out they are a site that spams blogs with page views so the owners of the blogs notice an unusually high amount of traffic stemming from that site, tricking the owner into going to their site, increasing their own page views. As a result the owner gets super inflated page views. There are several other sites which also use this technique, further increasing the difficulty to get an accurate page view count. I'm looking into how to block these sites.

I decided to look into the complete list of referrals and get a more accurate count for myself. It looks like I have

Thank You, So Here's Something Special (v031 Update)

Versions Folder (Click Here)

I've been keeping a very close eye on my page views, and I wanted to thank you guys for getting me over 400 views already. I seriously would not have guessed something like this to happen when I started working on both this blog and the game. I wish I could see how many times each version has been downloaded, but I would then have to change services, probably to some site that shows ads before each download, and I'd rather not. While I would like the ads on this blog to generate some revenue, I don't want the link to the games being confusing and/or covered in ads. Even this blog is very conservative with the ads. Blogger suggests I insert ads between each post, but I will never do that because then this will get very tacky very quickly. Besides, they always throw me off when I'm trying to read from one post to the next.

I'm Moving!

Versions Folder (Click Here)

This post looks a lot longer than usual, but it's really only because of the massive pictures that I added. Hopefully this doesn't take up the entire page :/

I have stayed up all  night to get the next update for the game out as soon as possible. At this rate it would normally be finished and posted sometime tomorrow. However, my family has purchased a new house. We've been gradually moving stuff we don't need over to the house for a couple weeks now, but tomorrow and Sunday are the days of the actual relocation. All day we'll be moving our furniture and other necessities as well as any other crap we've left behind so far. So the update will be coming out sometime next week.

Here's some general updates on what I've been working on:
I did technically rewrite the code again (slowing down general progress). However there's no big drastic changes in code. I smoothed out a couple rough spots that started to get really bulked up. Instead of something like,

I changed it look more like this,

More Updates

Versions Folder (Click Here)
(I'll be adding this to each post related to the game)

It's been a couple days since my last post, and a little longer since my last update on the game, so here's what's going on. Production is still very much under way. However, Chemistry midterms and moving houses caused a lull in development. I also started to toy around with a version 0.4.0, but decided it wouldn't actually be much of an improvement. So I'm getting back to work on expanding the current version and throwing in some code improvements along the way.

Again, I would really appreciate feedback on what you think of the game. What should be added? What needs to be fixed? etc.

P.S. Oh, and the dice system is now in development and will be implemented in the next update.

My Perspective: To Markiplier

Okay, if you happen to be following this blog because I've begged you to or you've wanted to keep track of the updates for my text adventure then this post is not necessarily for you. I'm only posting this here for 2 reasons:
1. This is my blog, not only that, but it's a blog called "My Perspective" meaning I founded it with the intent of posting my opinions/perspectives when I feel like it. I only started with the game thing because I couldn't think of enough things of interest to post here. So yes, I will be sprinkling these little windows into my personal life throughout my time maintaining this blog (which I hope will be a very long, long time).
2. Darn character limits on other sites like twitter and youtube won't let me post the following message, which is directed towards the growing and already popular Markiplier. (To be specific, this is in regards to his video on "Ripest of Fears")

V 0.3.0 Release!

It took me longer than planned, but here is version 0.3.0! It should be the most stable build and has made the most advances to the story. I wanted to add some more branches but that's gonna start getting complicated so I figured I would just post it before I get into the gritty stuff.
Versions Folder

Changelog:

v 0.3.0 - Complete code rebuild. This is the most expansive version to date. Much more stable and includes several new branches.

Too Tired for Dreams

Not a Text Adventure update.

I'm posting this to this blog because the definition to "blog" (as according to Google) is: a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis.

I didn't think this fit on something like my Google+ posts. You see for the past few years I've been staying up late. I'm a bit of a night person. I can focus better and it just has a better atmosphere. Everything is settled and calm. And it's almost expected for high schoolers and college students to thrive on almost no sleep (I'm a college freshman). No matter what time I have to get up the next day, I usually stay up until about 3:00 am. I do usually feel fatigued by the end of the day, but nothing a quick power nap can't fix. Even when I do turn in early, I fall asleep in bed watching youtube videos on my tablet. Last night I decided to try turning in early (11:30 pm) without any distractions, and it brought back a strange feeling.

Release of Version 0.3.0 on Hold

The new version is presenting more challenge than I thought it would. The main issues stem from the integration aspects I'm working on. I'm trying to implement a death system that will take you to the end of the game no matter what. I had a good system in the code, but I immediately found an unrelated bug, but ended up removing the whole thing trying to track down the source of the bug. So it's like a 2 steps forward, 1 step back kind of deal.

Another Rewrite

So I'm once again rewriting the code for the text adventure (which I still haven't decided a name for yet). It won't be as core changing as the last one was, but it should significantly improve efficiency, set up for simpler option expansions, and I plan on following every path for at least 3 branches. I seriously hope this is the final build before I can really start getting the story and RPG elements under way.

Please spread the word about this little project of mine, and name suggestions would be appreciated.