So I had a train of thought the other day, while playing Borderlands 2, a bit out of the blue, which I kinda wanna write down and since I wouldn't know where else, I'll just do it here.

Basically what I thought was - Half-Life 2 plus episodes isn't really big on optional objectives or the likes. In fact, no Valve game I've played is. Side quests aren't really a thing (Lambda caches don't count) and being very linear is pretty much a staple of the whole series. And I wondered what it'd be like to try and build some optional stuff into maps... like, go make this boom, if you're willing to take a detour, you can make it easier, I dunno, blow up Combine machinery and if you take a detour first to take out their radio relay comm thingy, it'll be easier because they won't send reinforcements. Stuff like that. Or, for instance, if along the way in Nova Prospekt, you had the opportunity to liberate incarcerated rebels and vorts, who would subsequently serve as allies during combat situations. Etc etc.

Now that's all kinda heavily influenced by my current playing through Metal Gear Solid V, where I usually, before sneaking into an outpost, start by planting explosives around their comms, power supplies, anti air guns etc, but also some through Borderlands 2 - if you bother with the sidequest of getting the power back online at station whatsitcalled, it'll unlock the shops, garage and spawn point there. Etc. I figured stuff like that would be pretty cool in Half-Life 2. Or (didn't think about that as much) Black Mesa. Fulfill objective X in area controlled by grunts, if you turn on the power for the conveyor system, you'll get supplies from the conveyor belts. Or take some time for secondary objective this and that to turn off the AC so you can sneak through the then-unlocked vents. Etc etc.

So yeah. Bit of an odd rant here... just had to write this down to revisit once I'll have time and energy to maybe try and make use of that, at some point in the distant future... do with that as you will, I'd love to hear some thoughts from yall maybe

So my wife may need to have another scary brain surgery. Honestly I’m rather freaked about things. This is what she had written on Facebook because it best describes what’s going on.

Hi Friends.
I’d like to tell you all where I’ve been and why.
(May be a bit long, so the short version:
I’m having a cranial angiogram tomorrow at Tampa General to see what this neurological anomaly is (vascular brain stuff))
This is why I haven’t been out and about much.
Cute animal pics, love, light, etc are all welcome. This is gonna be hard ☹️

Long version:
Last year I started having some odd neurological occurrences. So we got with a neurologist and he ordered the MRI and MRA done.
We got the results in November, that there was some stuff going on vascularly in the same area that I had the AVM removed from back in 2010.
They could not definitively say what it is, hence just calling it the “anomaly”.
I was instructed to go back to Tampa General where I had the 2010 surgeries and talk to them. My surgeon from 2010 has moved to Colorado, so I was assigned to a new dr (a process that took from November to February to get an appt. specialists 🙄)
Anyway, met my new dr, who’s very nice and whom I trust.
So all this time we’ve been just sort of waiting for this test to figure out what’s even going on. (6 months)
We finally got the call on Friday of last week to schedule this procedure for Wednesday.

The angio itself should only take about an hour to an hour and a half, then about a 4 hour recovery, then I should be able to come back home.
Ben/my mom/Dave will have my phone etc.

There’s more, but it’s more about my feelings concerning all this and grief stuff
(My dads passed 3 years ago Thursday)
So I’ve tried to keep this as straightforward as possible.

We chose to not really talk about this or tell anyone until now because, well, what’s to tell?
There’s a thing in my brain, we don’t know what that thing is, come worry with us! Yeah no.. that just seemed, idk. Not productive.

I love you all, and I will have Ben update anyone who wishes tomorrow.

~L

Thanks.

Rodless Reel - Kickstarter

After over three years of developing this tiny fishing reel, i'm finally ready to release it. Check it out on Kickstarter and let me know what you guys think.

Ships worldwide for free.

Mapping for half life is what introduced me to 3D modeling at an early age and influenced me into studying architecture. In doing so, I was exposed to the world of design. I am now a CAD Drafter and in my free time I 3D model and prototype ideas.

Thanks for your support guys and gals!

If you remember this and you wanna know what happened between me and him:
link
...you can read about the end here, if you wish.

So, yeah. It's over.
It's all... done. I'm not sad, and I definitely appreciate the freedom now. I do miss him, though.
All of you who were worried of it being a predator scenario, you may sleep peacefully now. But it wasn't such a scenario anyway.

Brad and I played TF2 and GMod a couple of times. I remember he often asked me for technical help, and a little bit too often, I might add. But he was a good guy. He badly wanted me to get the new PC that I got in July 2018, but something happened before I did...

In June, he... he simply disappeared. He completely disappeared from the Internet, deleting most of his accounts and leaving no contact info for me. Blimey. :/

So yeah. But that was not the only relationship in my life.
There was a girl from Texas, who was kinda nice until she started being overly horny and begging me for nudes (eww). Plus, she always looked for excuses to avoid voice chatting with me and I never saw a picture of her. Could be a catfish. And she wasn't the only catfish there.

There was a cute girl from Taiwan once, but that's a WHOLE other story which involves a dumb Bosnian dude from Slovenia hating me so much after finding out that I'm bi.

Then I've had like... 4 more relationships. Two before that, and two after that. The peak was about 3 or 4 relationships at once.
Almost all of these are pretty much done.

The point is, it taught me a damn valuable lesson. Say NO for once.

It taught me another one too, but that's something I realised after reading Voltaire's Candide. It is the fact that "we must cultivate our own gardens".
5 out of 7 of these relationships started like this: "Admer, I love you" - "I love you too!" - "Will you be my BF?" - "HELL YES!!!"

It's just like Candide. He was given all sorts of goods throughout the story, like when he visited Eldorado. But of course, there were really bad situations too, like when the entire Prussian army started beating his butt up, one by one. The thing is, he never did any actual work. He was just going around the world looking for his beloved Cunegonde, and he just got lucky and unlucky at times. In the end, he settled for a piece of land, and he and his friends started actually working on that land, and everyone was happy. (I should read even more books)
And notice something. It's always the other person saying "I love you" first. Meh. I wanna conquer some land myself (it feels more rewarding!), not have it simply given to me so that I can easily lose it later on.

Also, seriously. God. Back then, I didn't know how to say no. It was probably because I was desperate and/or I didn't want to hurt the other person's feelings. Now I am not so afraid.

But yeah. I'm actually happy. Very very happy, partly due to the freedom I have now, and the fact that I don't have to lose so much time during the day to just chat (fact is, they were all from different time zones, so each would message me in different times of day - and that led to many hours being lost on Discord). All these breakups did not affect me at all, in fact I could say they made me a bit stronger.

I'll just not bother with relationships until I'm 25 or so. I'm just not ready yet. Especially for a real-life relationship.

You don't have to say a thing, as far as I'm concerned. I already know. I'm too young, I'm too childish, I have too high expectations... I mostly know...
And what was the point of this journal? It was just to make some things clear, and put an official end to my journals about furries and journals about my relationships.

Well, it's all about to say that this profile KrystevPlayz is me again. AK47NATOR and Krystev are just me.

I re-modeled the geometry from hammer in rhino and 3D printed a model of the house from my map.

It would be really cool to build some day.The small holes in the grass part are for fake trees.

It's been a theme for me to be a horrible friend. Since the beginning of my DeviantArt life I've just gotten people down and it would also be true in real life. In my very first account in DevArt I have mistakenly told my first best friend that she was dead. In my second account (EX475) I couldn't get one friend to not leave the site. I mistakenly trolled someone by free will in the Pfhorums and mistakenly did it again currently. And now I have told my best friend SweetMangle103 that we couldn't be friends anymore cause I where always ruining her.

I haven't forgotten my outbursts here either. I am sorry for everything. I apologize to everyone that I have ever hurt and everyone that depended on me. I am too weak to go around and say this to everyone and it would probably not make it better either. Cause every word I spit is a hazard.

When I go on a dating site I see 32 year old girls and think, "32? Way too old for you, dude". Then my brain follows up with "You idiot, you'll be 31 in a few months".

As of right now I am 31 and I don't know what to do.

Maybe it's good because it's a prime number?

0x0017
0x0002
0x07E3

Very simple, and it'll always be.
I've been thinking if I should send a .map file or a .jpg with this inside, but whatever.

I make sketchbooks. Some of them look aged which is quite fun. Been learning the craft for a few years now. ^_^I do plan to sell them soon.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1j4D4OuXK5Ppb_KUlK326ltmnsBpZ3ymN

"I.. Hurt myself today."

Mine certainly does. I don't know about you. It could've sucked for me greatly, but I got lucky.
This is yet another one of my "personal history analysis" journals. Hooray. I haven't posted one in a while, but either way, have a nice read.

Year Zero

When I finished 9th grade and completed elementary school, I started panicking.
The first question was which high school to choose. My parents really really wanted me to go to the local general high school. HELL NO. 4 more years of Biology, Geography, Music class (where you learn nothing about music BTW, just singing some songs and learning about composers), no. Just no. Also, book reports every 2 weeks instead of every month. No.

So I chose the school that so many people recommended me. An electrical engineering high school. Precisely, the IT course. There were 3 at the time: IT, telecommunications, automatics. The IT course had been introduced a year prior, and it's supposed to have more programming and IT classes than the other courses, which I find really nice. My parents didn't want me to go there because I'd have to travel by bus a lot and I'd lose 2-3 hours daily because of the long bus rides. But it's worth it IMHO.

What will happen to me? Will I get beaten to death by bullies in high school? Will professors be evil in high school? How will I even find my way to the bus station in the city?

Thousands of other questions, however, were frightening me. I thought I'd not be able to handle it for sure, right?
Incorrect.

Year One

The first year was not as bad as I thought. I had to get used to taking buses and that stuff.

In the first year, I was in the morning shift, so class would start at 7:00 and typically end at 13:10. It started at 7:30 on Mondays (Practical class + History), and at 7:40 on Wednesdays. Mondays were special: 7:30 to 10:30 (3 classes of Practical class and 2 classes of History).
But that meant I had to wake up at 4 o'clock. D:

There was a bus in 5:40 that would arrive to the bus station in 6:30, so I took that one, until they canceled it, so I had to take the one in 5:15 that would take a longer route but get there in 6:30.The professors were nice. My classmates were angels in comparison to the ones from my elementary school.
I was even given a chance to switch to German. I had Turkish in my elementary school and I got tired of it after 3 years. Some Turks came into the town when I was in 6th grade, they convinced most of the parents to vote for Turkish to be a secondary foreign language and it happened. :/
So I switched to German. Surprisingly, it went really well for me. Mum couldn't believe it.

Sure, there were some classes where I under-performed: Electrical Engineering and Technical Drawing.
Technical Drawing was that one class where you must be precise down to a micrometre. Otherwise you get a 4 instead of a 5. First semester went like 4, 4, 1, 5. That 1 was when I brought the wrong type of paper to do the blueprint on. Second semester went like 3, 3, 3, 5. I could never draw well. But at least this class was only for the first year.Electrical Engineering... my professor was quite interesting. She would go through the lessons at 120 km/h, barely explaining most concepts, and we would not understand much. Lenz's Law, Kirchhoff's Laws, ask what they are to any of my classmates and they won't know. On my first test I got a 1.

Why? Because I was just missing a word or two in my answers, and she crossed basically every answer that had such mistakes. We've even had a situation where we finished all of the lessons for the first year, and moved on to lessons from 2nd grade.

AC currents? Trigonometry? We weren't supposed to learn that right in the first year, lol! But alas, we had to. And frankly, I'm actually thankful for that.
Even though she was very strict on tests, she helped me understand trigonometry and AC currents better later on, in the 2nd year, that is when we got a new EE professor. He's cool.
I had a 4 in EE in the first year. Miraculously, considering that everyone performed badly in it. Like, 60% of the class would fail the test, and I'd be the only guy who got a 3. Of course, there was that one girl who always got a 5. But I can't be like that. She never had a 4 or a 3 in her life. That's just not my style. (don't get me wrong, it's not like I get 4s and 3s often, I actually tend to get 5's, with a tiny tiny mix of 4's - I avoid the lesser marks)

But either way, I surprisingly made some small headlines by winning the Regional Spelling Bee in Mostar and participating in the National Spelling Bee of BiH, and winning 2nd place in an IT competition in Mostar. Pretty good for a first year in HS. This is what I'd see when I crossed the bridge leading to the bus station. Nice view.

And bam, the first year ended in the blink of an eye. I survived with a GPA of 4.57, where 4.50 is the minimum for an excellent status (or let's call it A if you wish. 1 = F, 2 = D, 3 = C, 4 = B, 5 = A).
Sooo yeah, then I had a nice summer break and the 2nd year began.

Year Two

But MAN, is the 2nd year good!
I got Programming, something called Processing and Transmission of Signals, and Electronics. I lost Chemistry, Technical Drawing and IT Systems. (BTW classes are not optional in this country - you get them, you have them, and you lose them)
On Programming and IT class, I'm basically the guy who walks around the classroom helping his classmates with their technical problems, and then finishing the actual task on my PC in the last couple of minutes. The two professors are surprised by my efficiency. Of course, sometimes my classmates would get scared of the things I was doing. :v

Two classes I like in particular are Practical class and History. They are held in a special place, away from the school.This is a photo from the cleaning action. We were taking out all the trash and cleaning the place up.Playing Super Mario Forever during History class. One of the circuits we built on Practical class. Not quite happy with what we're doing to the IC itself, but hey, it's flashy!

And some of you know that I'm a school mapper.The professors actually like this project, believe it or not. Tell me whatever you want about that 2007 incident, but you know I'll ignore it. :^)

And recently, I found about an extra class where we'll work with Arduino boards. Man, I've been waiting to get my hands on one of those for a while.

The 2nd year was a great change.
I was no longer in the morning shift, I was in the other, afternoon shift.
Class starts at 13:20 and ends in 19:30. However, that ending at 19:30 never happens in my schedule.

Monday:       11:45 -> 17:10
Tuesday:      13:20 -> 19:00
Wednesday:    07:30 -> 10:30
Thursday:     13:20 -> 18:00
Friday:       13:20 -> 18:15

Next year, I'll lose the following classes: History, Physics, Practical class, Electrical Engineering ( ), IT.
I'll get the following: Mobile Programming, Computer Networks, Computer Architectures, Democracy, Digital Electronics.

Conclusion

Well, frankly, I've learnt nothing new about programming in high school because I already learned it at home, except the difference between a++ and ++a. (we have C++ for these two years, and we'll get another language in the 4th year)

But what I did learn was a bunch of stuff about electronics. It made me start following YouTubers like GreatScott, ElectroBoom and the like. Not only did I find ElectroBoom's purposeful bloopers funny, I actually understood why they happened and how to prevent that stuff. Lol. Sadly, I don't have many options for buying components. I'll have to get components somewhere. There's a Conrad shop in Sarajevo, and other electronics stores. I'll see what I can do about this stuff.

I met new friends, got used to a totally new community and place. It's quite nice for a change.
The only problem with these new friends is the same as with my old ones. They have no particular interest in anything.
Basically, these guys (and girls) signed up for a school about electrical engineering and programming, yet they don't like either of those.
Most of them signed up in my high school either because they had no idea what school to sign up for, or because they quite simply had a cousin in this school or a close friend.

Had I decided to go for the general high school, I would've been suffering, lol.
Their professors are super strict over there and I'd pretty much be an amount of wasted potential. And people would be disappointed. :/

But yeah, this high school rocks. I love it more than elementary school.
If I made the wrong decision, it'd probably suck like it does for most ex-classmates of mine. The general high school wasn't the only choice though. I could've gone for a medical high school, or a construction high school, or a traffic high school, none of which I'd like lol.

There was a girl in elementary school who had all 5's, and even she has trouble in that general high school. I was the only 1 out of 2 people who actually signed up for this type of high school, and the rest mostly went to the general one. And they're suffering, from what they told me.

Either way, I'm pretty much happy now, since I'm slowly getting to know my abilities and what kinds of jobs I'll want to do in the future.

I might end up writing a part 2 or 2, 3 and 4, who knows.

Hey all,
So I know I haven't been super active for the past however long in terms of posts, but those of you who pay attention to the Active Users section of the front page have probably noticed me being online (THWL is, after all, still my homepage!) So I just want to say I'm not dead in case I don't log in for a while;
There was a fire in my apartment building early this morning, and while there were no human casualties it's currently not safe for human habitation. The apartment I share with my Mom is untouched aside from the smoke, but because it might be carcinogenic, the fire department has told us we gotta vacate until the county can bring in some cleaners, as well as someone to make sure the structural integrity of the building isn't compromised from the fire, which was on the ground floor and pretty well gutted the apartment it hit.

They're still investigating the cause of the fire but it's pretty clear it was accidental (Though jury is still out on whether it was caused by negligence on the part of the landlord) and I'm staying at my Dad's until everything is given the green light. Since he doesn't have internet, and I have a data cap on my phone, I probably won't be able checking in as often as I usually would.

Anyway, just in case anyone notices me suddenly dropping off the face of the earth, I'm still alive, and will be back.

I wish I was someone now. But. You all know how it goes for me. I can't get anything done how hard I try. I try my best, and that best is REALLY little.

I want to leave gaming. I want to stop use my stupid PCs and just stay on my Mac and work on videos instead of unfinished game projects. Can someone kick me off this site and get it over with? I really don't want to work with Half-Life anymore. Cause I am untalented and unfocused, and rather want to do things I can do. Like slideshows.

If you want to see me when I deactivate then go and post here The Pfhorums

EDIT: Got over my sadness there. Anyway. The HappyFaces test server is

CLOSED (Well that didn't go well)

For some reason, I see the PS2 port of Half-Life more atmospheric.