The cat's eye is healing admirably and, other than the fact we have no money for food this month again, things are stabilizing as a whole.
I have casted over some silly indie crap Schwa sent me and I'll probably process and add them to the LP thread in the castover section in the future.
/edit
Our rent subsidiary has finally appeared.
It is less than 1/10th what Granny figured we would be getting.
/edit 2
I think I might go for FF6 after Alice, followed by FF13.
Currently, Guild Wars seems totally abandoned for the time being, mostly due to Schwa being dead. Gauntlet was started and never touched again, also due to lack of aligning schedules and largely Schwa being dead. I am not too keen on starting either of these up again any time soon, so in the end it makes little difference.
I have been organizing my data drives with the goal of recovering space, as I am actually running extremely low on non-recordable space at this point in time. I haven't done a data sorting since I began encoding more heavily in 2014 for obvious reasons.
After exceptional research and cleanup over the last two weeks, this is what I am looking at.
This is important because due to financial ruin I will not be able to do anything about space problems for potentially a year or longer, whereas I might be more inclined to get another aux external due to the dropping prices of high capacity storage.
Some space is float awaiting processing. For example, 130gb on G is a Bulletstorm asset dump that needs to be processed for viable content for Unreal 4. Since I am not actively working on a project I have no pressure to process that data and it's just kind of sitting there. 100-200gb of G is devoted to Anime either awaiting a time to watch or have been watched and need to be stripped of usable SFX samples before being cleansed. L contains some redundant backups and portions of V and G are also redundant backups of certain mission-critical information (Ret models etc). A scary amount of data cannot be redundantly backed up due to its scale - for example, my 1.5-2tb of music, a large portion of which is either not available on the internet anymore or is exceedingly hard to find, including some rips made personally for me or by me.
Repeated and heavy-handed data purging saw removal of nearly all Warcraft 3 project data and a large amount of old content from <2006. For now, that has set us at a low, but stable, threshold. Once project creation continues at a reasonable speed the problem will only worsen again.
The most dangerous thing that could happen is a recording drive, particularly X, could start developing problems again. These drives get put through their paces with my workload, as video encoding is particularly hard on disk access. I've had platter drives last with 7 years uptime on their SMART data and no discernible problems, but those drives were never used as heavily as this. The only more demanding environment is, basically, server storage. I've always tried to maintain a float of 1-2k for potential hardware crisis, like when my last two video cards melted down.
Currently, V, a green, has a fair amount of free space but is being treated as a record float drive. It has some data on it, but I used to basically full capture Dragon's Dogma with no interruptions between recording. The drawback is that this sets me back a huge amount of time when I fill up everything because my CPU is not particularly fast at encoding this much video.
As an idea of the time commitment, a single 3 hour segment of Divinity takes roughly 10 hours to edit, and another 8-10 hours to encode. As a source file, that occupies around 400-500gb of space, give or take depending on motion, color depth, etc. Fraps codec is not lossless, so compression does play a bit of role in all of this at the source level. The heroes videos, due to their very low FPS, occupy comparatively small space, as do games like Dragon's Dogma, Rondo, for obvious reasons. Therefore, logistically speaking, concurrent runs are best paced between comparatively fast and slow games. Alice and Divinity are good examples - both are big files, but Alice should be completed relatively quickly once committed to, and Divinity has been going for most of the year due to incessant interruptions. When I start FF6 I'll probably run something alongside it that is comparatively faster or more constricted in availability, such as something I may have on steam, whatever I feel like at the time.
Workflow management is tough, because I also verify content. I usually run the video I am verifying in my secondary monitor while doing something else, such as in the past, 3d modeling or writing. Since I don't have a running project to multitask it actually makes verification a lot more difficult because I can't do it while doing other stuff that actually requires attention or is recording-related for obvious reasons. Also, all of my CPU bsod's have happened with MPC running alongside an encode, and it's a coincidence I am not willing to take lightly.
Long high-overhead recording sessions like those commonly associated with Divinity fuck all this up because then there's a huge amount of work that is not particularly enjoyable to actually do, because it's very tedious. Verifying something like Dragon's Dogma was comparatively easy, Divinity needs editing work. Gauntlet and Guild Wars will be similar projects in scale compared to Divinity and will be equally unpleasant to process. The first two segments of Guild Wars are not even that great in my opinion because it was clear I was the only one really into it.
Anyways, what all of this equates to is that on top of all the real life problems that I'm running into I'm also hitting speed bumps in the processing department that largely circulate around either lack of motivation or the slowness of my hardware being unable to handle the workload favorably. My plan to acquire a new machine by around this time would have allowed for concurrent encode/record projects and greatly sped up. Since I can't make that change like I had planned, I'm stuck in sort of a shitty spot I'll just have to wade through really slowly. Nonetheless, projections are pretty favorable for this month overall so long as nothing else bad happens.
/edit 3
I have researched and found a way to bypass the unstable menu in Spellforce 1. I can enforce resolution changes and other stuff via a lua file (lol scripting lol nvidia the way it's meant to be played lol) and now I can run this game like I wanted to many months ago. I don't know when I'll pick it up, but it should be ready for a test whenever.
/edit 4
The OP has been updated to more accurately reflect my current mindset on project foresight. The major castover project that I have on the burner is a Diablo 1 castover that needs multiple resyncs and the latter half to be casted. It got delayed and backburned by August. I am warming up with a new Civ5 game that is proving to be really retarded. Spellforce 1 is added to near future considerations as I wanted to do it a while ago and now have a clear means to test it.
Although I list Undercover Coaps as a Request Consideration, the Request Consideration list is actually a lot larger than just that (it's where FF6 and Zelda come from). There are other titles on that list I'll treat as a higher priority later down the line, but I'm not ready to tackle in this foreseeable string. Priorities change a lot internally, so it's sort of a placeholder in this regard.
I was looking into possibly setting up a Donation opportunity and potentially a Patreon if there was enough interest, but seeing as Paypal's deposit is not actually being seen by my bank, I'm already getting bad flashbacks of my last interactions with their service.
