Well, this should be interesting. (Youtube ramble, Raindeer and Horseapple update. Original, no?)

Okay, so apparently Google Plus finally went from a tiny innocuous cyst on my Youtube page to a full-blown blister that burst and spewed forth all its garbage in one go. Google+ now nearly used my real name on my online ID (good thing my e-mail doesn't say anything about my real name) and seems quite insistent I should 'share' quite a bit of personal information, as if to invite me to poke at the remains of this painful blister and get some sort of infection, rather than apply a bandaid and isolate it safely. Also, apparently I misclicked when it burst, so now everything I had saved on my Youtube account got deleted and reset. All of my playlists appear to be gone.

Now, normally I'd be happy with this sort of thing. It's an inconvenience, sure, but Youtube has been eating way too much of my time as it is, often keeping me up for hours on end while otherwise I'd just go to bed. I try to get writing done while watching videos, sure, but I'm still distracted and the quality suffers for it. So on the whole, I don't really mind most of my playlists just disappearing like that. Heck, the music one I can rebuild, easily.

But there's just one thing that kind of irks me about it.

One of my playlists was called 'Project Horseapple Resources', and it was pretty much what the name said it was: resources for my Project Horseapple. Granted, the odds of me ever finishing it are slim to non-existent now, but it's the thought that counts. Basically I had a playlist of relevant videos that detailed the different steps of making an animated short, some topology videos, I think I had a few advanced facial rig tips in there, too. Bottom line is that it took me a while to gather those videos, and since I hadn't progressed far enough in my project to really use them, I only ever watched most of them once, hardly enough to reconstruct the whole list based on memory. The modelling, I can get, the rigging notsomuch, the screenplay guide... probably, but I have no idea what I'll be missing. I've looked up if there's any fix for it, but I guess it's not too important in the grand scheme of things.

Edit: apparently the account didn't get deleted, it just tried to make me get everything out in public by using my Google account. Stupid on my part, classy on Google's. We'll call it even. Resources regained.

And while we're on the subject, the raindeer is on hold again, as is Project Horseapple. I may finalise a script sometime this month, but the modelling and rigging is nowhere closer now than it was last year, really. First a proof of concept with the raindeer, then a pony creator, then the animation with Whimper's story at the Applecross Games, which was hinted at in Passiflora's Plight, if you recall. Yeah, that was my intention: make an animation about a colt who bulks up. I was hoping to at least leave something useful behind (like an all-bone driven character creator rig) when the inevitable failure came, but this little Youtube spat seems to have thrown a spanner in the works there. I'll try to work in more raindeer work sometime to compensate, see if I get anything to show for it. The model needs more tweaking around the neck, which means backtracking and erasing the work of a day or two to start over.

Oh well, stuff happens. Speaking of stuff happening, I'm focusing more on my thesis now, I expect to get cracking (see what I did there) on the next and last experiment any day now, but I'm going to put a little cut in my outside activities. Chatting in the The Writer's Group room is fun, but the timezone difference messes with my sleeping schedule, and most of the time I end whining like a little kid there anyway. Better to stop talking about what I should do and actually do it, you know. I'll probably just hop in for a few minutes at a time, if at all.

On a final note, I know it's early to tell, but I probably won't be watching Season 4 as it airs. College stuff first, and all the (attempted) creative stuff takes precedence. Besides, the writers will probably continue the same bad habits they started with Season 2. I can stand to wait.