Great Success!

So, my last update mentioned that I was *finally* able to get my archives from google. Google, in their infinite wisdom, does not allow you to pick and choose what you want access to in its original format, so you have to get everything or nothing. In my case, this is 16 archives totaling almost 800GB.

It took about a week, but I got them all. Decompressing each archive takes about 4 hours. To further complicate things, although this has given me the original files, it does not retain the original filenames, and every archive contains a completely random, non-chronological selection of things. So basically this means that I need to sort through every archive and correlate each video against its original filename (which I can get via the youtube studio,) because all of my surviving YIR notes point to those original filenames.

Nothing is ever easy. But I'm glad I at least got that stuff, because losing that footage was not just a pain in the ass, but kind of depressing as well. I'm still missing probably ~50GB of stuff I'd been holding onto for YIR purposes, but never uploaded, but that's a much less bitter pill to swallow than losing 5 years of final renders.

So far I've done 5 archives. This will be a background project for quite some time before I even get it back into Vegas, but I am determined to see it through.

My major focus, I guess, needs to pivot back to KSP for the time being, because frankly I can't afford to keep all of that footage around as lagarith anymore. I'm very nearly out of disk space.

To give some idea of why KSP has taken so long, here's my raw time lapse timeline.

That is *just* time lapse footage that I've hard to archive as time lapse, otherwise I'd have run out of diskspace long ago. That was 48 hours of raw footage.

And that's just time lapse. I have a whole other timeline for non-time lapse stuff, and I actually still need to shoot some footage for the opening, which I've honestly kind of been dreading, because it's going to take the better part of a day and updates keep breaking mods.

Ultimately I intend to produce something "polished" like my first KSP video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUWYmoUUz74 ), plus several supplemental vids with the time lapse showing the build/test process.

I have bits and pieces of that completed, but it's still fairly daunting, especially figuring out ways to condense 3+ hours of time lapse into something watchable and coherent that isn't just an enormous visual mess.

I'm sort of at the "oh god how am i going to make anything out of this mess what have i done" stage of this project, which is always the most stressful, but once things start sliding into place, it is very satisfying.

I also have a small Arma project that might be finished by the end of the month, so you can look forward to that. Whether or not I finish it depends on how quickly I churn through my missions (which I'm still doing.)

Anyway, I will continue toiling away in the video mines.

As always, thanks. Your support allowed me to do something healthy(?): I picked up an inexpensive exercise bike.

I spent about 10 years biking at least 150 miles a week, climbing, running, etc., and was in fantastic shape, but the past 8 years have taken a pretty awful toll on my body, and I've fallen into horrible shape. Just getting sick would have been bad enough, but I spent the better part of the past 6 years surviving on pasta and $1 sausages for 3 meals a day since that's all I could afford, and that, coupled with incredible stress related to my finances and too much cheap booze, did a number on me.

It's sort of depressing to now pedal a bike indoors that doesn't go anywhere, and it's kind of sad that I've yet to manage 10 miles without wanting to die, and it's sort of ridiculous that it takes up literally 100% of my available floor space because I basically live in a closet how (I have to walk sideways to get out of bed,) but I think it has started to make a difference. I still look like shit, but I've started to notice that I feel less like death.

So, thanks. I figured I'd pass that along, because there's a 0% chance I would have be able to purchase something like that without your support.