MirceaKitsune
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Struggling in between Youtube and hardware issues
🕑 Added 2018-06-03 18:52:36 +0000 UTC May and June have seen a series of unforeseen circumstances, which have unfortunately affected my workflow and continue to have a major impact today. Although I'm moving forward, I've been much slower last month as most of you could probably tell from my lack of updates... unfortunately this month will also remain slower than the usual. I'm currently trapped between two major issues: Youtube nearly deleting my channel and essentially forbidding animation on the platform, and a computer problem forcing me to buy new hardware from our food money. I'll describe both to be sure everyone understands the situation:- Youtube:
As you may remember from last month, I had to take my animations down from Youtube and make my entire channel private for 3 months as a precaution. What exactly happened remains unclear; All we know is that Youtube went insane and started randomly deleting the videos of small animation channels, accusing artists of creating "violent & sexual content" when they are doing no such thing. Attempting to communicate with staff about the problem has proven impossible: Appeals are not only rejected immediately... in some cases Youtube even takes revenge on those appealing their decisions by giving them an additional community strike, literally making it dangerous to try contacting them at all! This happened to countless content creators both in and out of the fandom, who are just as baffled and trying to figure out what to do next.
For this reason, a lot of effort last month went into learning https://d.tube in order to transfer my content there. Unfortunately the site is still buggy and missing a lot of features, for which I had to make a few local changes including some pull requests to the project; For proper video storage, I've had to setup my own IPFS Uploader and enable support for 240p + 480p + 720p + 1080p encoding... so far it seems to be working well with my videos finally offering all of the formats. The sources also have to be converted manually with ffmpeg to avoid certain playback issues, thus I had to figure out the proper options to make sure their quality is in no way affected by re-encoding. The only remaining issue is finding IPFS nodes to pin them, so people don't have to wait +1 minute for each video to load... I'm currently working with close friends to find server admins willing to pin my content so everyone experiences faster loading times. I expect my animations to be back up this month, at which point I'll be posting a new journal to let you all know.
Because of everything that's happened, I am feeling discouraged from working on animation in general at the moment. I didn't imagine that in the year 2018 we'd be living in a time when artists are treated as a danger to society, something that hasn't happened since the Nazis if not the medieval ages. People are increasingly afraid to draw and animate out of fear of persecution, often due to being attacked by those with extremist views for transmitting "forbidden ideas". We seem to be on the brink of a new dark age making its way to both America and Europe... it's uncertain for how long this will last until things go back to normal, nor what else might be done to us until society gets back in order.
- Hardware issues:
Meanwhile I've been dealing with a separate issue further affecting my work. Long story short, a very clever malware or impossibly obscure driver bug has been messing with my computer for over 3 months. At first I thought it's a minor driver bug that would get solved after a few system updates, hence why I never even mentioned it... unfortunately it's turned into an entire story of its own. You can find the more info about what's been happening on this bug report where the issue has been discussed in detail with one of the developers:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105425
The long and short of it is this: Whenever I open any 3D renderer, be it a resource intensive game or a simple scene with low-poly models and low-res textures, there's a chance that my computer will instantly freeze and brick itself until powered off and back on: The last frame freezes on the screen forever, sound cuts off entirely, keyboard and mouse do absolutely nothing. The issue is highly probabilistic with random factors affecting its frequency: Sometimes it happens in a few seconds, at other times after a whole hour. Every possible way to debug it has been attempted to no avail: We've tried capturing an apitrace, countless kernel parameters and environment variables, adjusting the BIOS settings, hand-picking various renderer features, watching the frequencies and temperatures, and much more... the freeze leaves absolutely no traces and we can't even know what's doing it, other than the fact that it's related to the video card in some form.
Sadly this leads to a situation where it's both dangerous and nearly impossible to consistently run any 3D game or animation program. This means that unless the problem is solved, I can't test the games I'm developing nor continue working on certain Blender projects. I'm practically unable to continue work on 90% of my projects at this stage (including Vore Tournament). For that reason I had to take a difficult decision: Going for new computer parts... at a time when I'm barely making enough money for us to eat. I don't have the skills nor the mental state to get another job, so I either continue making projects for Patreon or I have no income.
Initially I was only going to buy a new video card. Unfortunately any decent one is much too expensive and I couldn't afford such a thing on my own. After asking for help, some very wonderful beings agreed to send me a card they have as a gift, which will hopefully arrive this month if the shipping goes well. It's exactly what I need for my OS and its drivers, and ideally it should also give me GPU rendering support in Blender Cycles at long last! However there are two major issues: My computer case is too small to fit it, whereas my current power supply unit is not powerful enough to run it. Since buying those two components is far cheaper than getting a new video card on my own, I chose to go for this option... however the case + PSU are still expensive enough that buying them will leave us dry.
I've already bought the new computer case yesterday, as I caught a rare offer at a cheaper prize which I was afraid I might miss later. Even if I wait until next month to also buy the PSU, we're already out of money to buy anything else if we're also going to pay the bills this month. I've proposed to my mom that she lets me eat plain rice and potatoes for a while, but even then we wouldn't have enough to pull it through. We honestly don't know what to do and feel that we're in an impossible situation... only time will tell in the upcoming weeks.
