Hi, it's pleasant to hear from you all.
I lost interest in the manual mapping with Windows Paint when I saw how much time improvement one could get with some of these automatic stitching tools. But because I felt that it would be even greater when such a tool could automatically distinguish foreground and background planes (a thing that would have been handy for my ongoing Rayman maps because PS1 and MS-DOS emulators didn't support the switch to Background only as in other emulators), I started to work on creating an image processing program in Java. I dreamt of the perfect mapping helper, conveniently working on every operating system. But it was more difficult than I thought it would be, creating movement vectors of scenery parts and recognizing what part is (parallax) background, foreground map and sprites/HUD. After months of working on it whenever I had time I had nothing working. So it slowly phased out of my sight. And with it the whole mapping because I felt guilty doing anything manual stitching when I could have invested the same time into my mapping helper code.
Since then (2011/2012) I only play games for playing's sake. Creativity-wise I still do some programming now and then but mostly for parsing texts. When I recently saw that there is a TypeScript map viewer working directly in the browser, it felt like the future for animated/interactive maps and I thought of working with it but the whole technology stack is a big hurdle to overcome and I still haven't set up a development environment where I can compile and run such code.
The pandemic is very easy to bear for me because also before all this I didn't interact much with the outside world. My last cinema visit still has been
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in June 2018. I wouldn't describe my previous years' behavior as anxiety but yet it is exhausting for me to talk with non-relatives (and also write, so I keep online live chats at a minimum, too). Now with the pandemic ongoing, I have new problems considering doing anything for fun at people hotspots because I would feel guilty for getting a corona virus infection for participating in a not-required activity - despite being vaccinated against. I accepted one dinner with work colleagues in December and there may be one Advent stroll event (outdoors booths) with my relatives and I already feel guilty just for telling that I might do it and maybe be responsible for another two weeks of pandemic. I can't remember doing any previous leisure activities in public for this year. Every single one was related to work, health or supplies. And private meetings also have been only with first-degree family members and their spouses.
In case I haven't told you yet, JonLeung, I like watching your Youtube videos. I even more enjoyed watching your convention vlogs for the impressions I last experienced live in 2000 (Expo 2000
) if you don't count flea markets, but I also have a soft spot for all the little details and anecdotes in your book reviews.
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