Okay, so first off, commissions haven't worked out, as in I haven't gotten any. Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with that...I'm taking steps to actually be able to draw worth a crap and then maybe people will actually know I exist. I really do want to share the image I have in my head as to what JBGamer and Violet look like with people, even if after I can draw worth crap the drawing looks...well, like crap.

On to the stuff that's happened to me lately that's the actual subject of this journal. There's a rather neat kind of video on Youtube, called a Let's Play video. The person who makes the video basically films himself or herself playing a video game, then takes the footage, adds commentary to it, and posts it as a series of videos on Youtube. The better ones go through the entire game. Some time ago, I was watching such a video, when I had the thought, "Man, it would be cool if I could do a Let's Play! I'm totally gonna try!" Little did I know that this was going to doom me into a severely uphill battle of man versus technology, that came to a head today. I'd already purchased a $120 DVD recorder with which I would capture the game footage, and the DVD-R discs I would put it on. (I first tried to use DVD+R discs, I'm ashamed to admit I thought the usual - was just a dash instead of a minus sign and the + discs were cheaper...but they didn't, um...work.)

Anyways, as I was saying, my battle of man versus technology came to a head today, when I was trying to get the 10 or so episodes worth of game footage ready to add commentary. First, the program I used to convert the DVD-R to a .avi file badly messed up the sound. Then, when I tried to convert to an MP4 file, Windows Movie Maker couldn't see it so I couldn't add anything. Then, I managed to convert the MP4 file directly back to a .avi with a different program, but then the volume control on my comp started going wacky; reducing itself to 0 without me telling it to. Then, when I tried to restart my comp to attempt to deal with this problem, my computer wouldn't boot up. It tried to auto-fix, and I finally got it to boot up again after I used the restore function that restored my computer to the state it was this morning when it actually worked properly. This got rid of a program that I need, I'm going to re-download it and virus scan immediately afterward so this BS doesn't happen again.

When the smoke cleared, I was left with a functional computer again, plus enough .avi file with good sound to make the first four episodes or so. I'll chalk it up as winning the battle but not the war yet. If you want to check out the intro vid I did for my future Let's Play playing, and know where to go once I actually manage to upload the finished product episodes, check out this link--[link]

...Not that I expect many people to watch these vids anyway. Kinda ironic that I'm doing this for fun huh?

--JBGamer