(no subject)
I'm rather glad I managed to do most of my laundry on Saturday, because my part of England appears to be ushering in the meteorological summer with wind and rain. I do wish I hadn't been lazy and done my sheets as well though. Oh well, it can't keep raining forever I guess.
In other news life seems to be going "okay" right now, which of course means I'm living in a state of heightened doom-stress as I wait for the other shoe to drop. I really wish I was well enough to do any kind of work so I could just get off benefits, because constantly jumping through government hoops and trying to justify my illness is not making me any better. I've attempted to look at work from home jobs, but I'm not skilled enough to tell most of the real offers from the fake ones (they ALL sound dodgy). Even when I can they all effectively have me working for myself and reliant on finding transcription work (or whatever, transcribing audio seems to be the most common variant) even if I went through a middleman service that'd take a cut of my money just for collating jobs on their site. It just sounds way too complex and inconsistent for me right now.
To distract myself from all of that I've been playing a fair bit of modded Minecraft lately. Currently I'm using the FTB Direwolf20 1.7.10 mod pack, but honestly it's full of a lot of crap I don't want or need, so I think I may strip out the mods I do use and make my own singleplayer pack that doesn't take 600 years to load and eats all my system resources. At the moment all I really use are:
Forge Multipart (I love being able to cut blocks in to smaller blocks for architectural and decorative purposes),
Iron Chests (more storage in a compact space, yay!),
Extra Utilities (stuff like Compressed Cobblestone where I can turn 9 stacks of regular cobble in to 1 stack of compressed is a real help for me),
Chisel 2 (different textures for regular blocks. Purely aesthetic),
Inventory Tweaks (purely a convenience mod. It just makes inventory sorting easier and automatically replaces tools as they break or item stacks as they're used),
Not Enough Items (basically it's a recipe guide for in game blocks and items and has support for many mods too. Can be used to cheat, but if I wanted stuff easy I'd play on Creative),
Botania (a "magical" alternative to tech mods like IC2 or MineFactory Reloaded. I like the theme and how for the most part everything can be done from near to the surface. I also like how it doesn't rely on GUIs so I remain part of the crafting process, though it is possible to automate a lot more stuff than I currently do),
Baubles (adds extra "armour" slots to a character, but instead of armour you put mod specific things like rings or amulets there instead of having to tote them around in your inventory),
Biomes O' Plenty (I just like having lots of pretty or interesting terrain to walk though),
BiblioCraft (make decorative items such as furniture and display cases so now your castles don't look so empty)
BiblioWoods Biomes O' Plenty (now I can make decorative items out of the trees added by Biomes O' Plenty for a whole range of exciting colour options!)
JourneyMap Unlimited (displays an on screen mini map so I don't get lost and can add "beacons" to places of interest so I can find my way back)
Thaumcraft (mainly because I like the idea of the mod and really like coming across Silverwood trees and not because I actually use any of the features in the mod XD).
That looks like a rather long list, but compared to Direwolf20s list of 133 mods (and mod add-ons) it really doesn't seem like a lot to me. I expect my loading times would be improved significantly by not being weighed down by a bunch of stuff designed for multi player servers or made redundant by other far easier to use mods. Though I may want to add something to the list that will include pipes and sorters if I want to automate any of my more repetitive tasks.
I think I'd like to find a small, but fairly busy and polite FTB server as well. I like building stuff, but every now and then I'll create something that's so awesome that I wish other people could stumble upon it and be quietly impressed too. Also I find it weirdly soothing to just read the global conversations of others as they converse about stuff. I have yet to find a suitable server for me though because either they're too small and I never meet anyone else, or they're poorly maintained and full of griefers or trolls. I'm sure there must be one out there that's just right so I'll have to keep looking.
Such is the manner of my life right now. Not terribly exciting perhaps, but it's the way things are. At some point I'm hoping I manage to summon some energy and creativeness so I can get back in to drawing. It's been a shockingly long time since I last sat down to properly do anything and I think that depresses me more than anything else. I just don't seem to be coming up with any ideas right now though. No, that's not true, I am coming up with ideas, the problem is they're all writing related and I feel far more vulnerable putting words out in to the world than I do images. I think it's because I know I am (or could be) half way decent with visual art so it's easier to shrug off criticisms or see them as constructive, but I don't have much experience or feedback with writing beyond a few GCSE lessons and a class or two in college so everything goes straight to my heart. I know how demanding I can be with stories I read and I don't want someone like me to tell me that my inner worlds are crap and full of gaping inconsistencies!
Why did I have to be born with an "artists soul"? It's nothing but a self-obsessed pain in the arse. I think a plumber or an electricians soul would have been far more useful and easier to pay the bills with.
In other news life seems to be going "okay" right now, which of course means I'm living in a state of heightened doom-stress as I wait for the other shoe to drop. I really wish I was well enough to do any kind of work so I could just get off benefits, because constantly jumping through government hoops and trying to justify my illness is not making me any better. I've attempted to look at work from home jobs, but I'm not skilled enough to tell most of the real offers from the fake ones (they ALL sound dodgy). Even when I can they all effectively have me working for myself and reliant on finding transcription work (or whatever, transcribing audio seems to be the most common variant) even if I went through a middleman service that'd take a cut of my money just for collating jobs on their site. It just sounds way too complex and inconsistent for me right now.
To distract myself from all of that I've been playing a fair bit of modded Minecraft lately. Currently I'm using the FTB Direwolf20 1.7.10 mod pack, but honestly it's full of a lot of crap I don't want or need, so I think I may strip out the mods I do use and make my own singleplayer pack that doesn't take 600 years to load and eats all my system resources. At the moment all I really use are:
Forge Multipart (I love being able to cut blocks in to smaller blocks for architectural and decorative purposes),
Iron Chests (more storage in a compact space, yay!),
Extra Utilities (stuff like Compressed Cobblestone where I can turn 9 stacks of regular cobble in to 1 stack of compressed is a real help for me),
Chisel 2 (different textures for regular blocks. Purely aesthetic),
Inventory Tweaks (purely a convenience mod. It just makes inventory sorting easier and automatically replaces tools as they break or item stacks as they're used),
Not Enough Items (basically it's a recipe guide for in game blocks and items and has support for many mods too. Can be used to cheat, but if I wanted stuff easy I'd play on Creative),
Botania (a "magical" alternative to tech mods like IC2 or MineFactory Reloaded. I like the theme and how for the most part everything can be done from near to the surface. I also like how it doesn't rely on GUIs so I remain part of the crafting process, though it is possible to automate a lot more stuff than I currently do),
Baubles (adds extra "armour" slots to a character, but instead of armour you put mod specific things like rings or amulets there instead of having to tote them around in your inventory),
Biomes O' Plenty (I just like having lots of pretty or interesting terrain to walk though),
BiblioCraft (make decorative items such as furniture and display cases so now your castles don't look so empty)
BiblioWoods Biomes O' Plenty (now I can make decorative items out of the trees added by Biomes O' Plenty for a whole range of exciting colour options!)
JourneyMap Unlimited (displays an on screen mini map so I don't get lost and can add "beacons" to places of interest so I can find my way back)
Thaumcraft (mainly because I like the idea of the mod and really like coming across Silverwood trees and not because I actually use any of the features in the mod XD).
That looks like a rather long list, but compared to Direwolf20s list of 133 mods (and mod add-ons) it really doesn't seem like a lot to me. I expect my loading times would be improved significantly by not being weighed down by a bunch of stuff designed for multi player servers or made redundant by other far easier to use mods. Though I may want to add something to the list that will include pipes and sorters if I want to automate any of my more repetitive tasks.
I think I'd like to find a small, but fairly busy and polite FTB server as well. I like building stuff, but every now and then I'll create something that's so awesome that I wish other people could stumble upon it and be quietly impressed too. Also I find it weirdly soothing to just read the global conversations of others as they converse about stuff. I have yet to find a suitable server for me though because either they're too small and I never meet anyone else, or they're poorly maintained and full of griefers or trolls. I'm sure there must be one out there that's just right so I'll have to keep looking.
Such is the manner of my life right now. Not terribly exciting perhaps, but it's the way things are. At some point I'm hoping I manage to summon some energy and creativeness so I can get back in to drawing. It's been a shockingly long time since I last sat down to properly do anything and I think that depresses me more than anything else. I just don't seem to be coming up with any ideas right now though. No, that's not true, I am coming up with ideas, the problem is they're all writing related and I feel far more vulnerable putting words out in to the world than I do images. I think it's because I know I am (or could be) half way decent with visual art so it's easier to shrug off criticisms or see them as constructive, but I don't have much experience or feedback with writing beyond a few GCSE lessons and a class or two in college so everything goes straight to my heart. I know how demanding I can be with stories I read and I don't want someone like me to tell me that my inner worlds are crap and full of gaping inconsistencies!
Why did I have to be born with an "artists soul"? It's nothing but a self-obsessed pain in the arse. I think a plumber or an electricians soul would have been far more useful and easier to pay the bills with.