June 25, 2017

This morning I once again woke up around 7:30AM and I refused. I went with it yesterday morning but this morning I wasn't having it, so I rolled over and went back to sleep until ten o'clock. It was nice.

When I got up I took a shower and headed over to my Dad's house. When my sister arrived we carried the grandfather clock downstairs and loaded it into my Dad's truck. And then we waited because it had started to sprinkle out and the bottom of the grandfather clock was sticking out from the cover of his bed cover.

There was a break after a little while so we went for it and drove over to my house, where my sister and I unloaded the clock and got it set up in my living room. I even got the weights set up and got it running, which it hasn't done since it was at my Grandma's house. The first time it struck an hour it chimed and it was like a flashback to my childhood. It was pretty cool. It has been running for about ten hours now and I think I've lost about four minutes. That means I need to adjust the pendulum. There is an adjustment screw at the bottom of it and apparently one full turn of the screw is equal to thirty seconds over the course of twenty-four hours. I need to find out which direction is faster and slower. My plan is to set it to an hour and then come back twenty-four hours later and see how off it is and make adjustments accordingly.

After my Dad left, my sister and I set up a shelf, and then when she left, I made a late lunch. I made an egg sandwich and it was by far the best one I have made so far. I toasted sourdough bread with butter and garlic powder. For the eggs I added in red bell pepper with a little garlic powder, put a little cheddar cheese inside when folded it in half, and a little mozzarella cheese on top. It was so good. I was genuinely surprised.

It felt like the rest of my day was spent watching movies/livestreams/videos and messing with GIMP. I spent way more time than I needed to with GIMP because I thought something was wrong but it really wasn't, so I was trying to correct a problem that wasn't really there. My goal was to make a neon green book to go on the screen when/if I do the book reading thing with Elite Dangerous in the background. I found a black outline of an open book, erased all the white, figured out how to make neon looking lines in GIMP, made a metal border for it, and then spent a bunch of time turning it into a GIF. When I finally got what I wanted I saved it and checked it in a browser and I kept seeing a big white border around the whole thing, instead of the transparency it should have been. I spent so much time trying to figure out what was going on and nothing I tried worked. Then I pulled up OBS and found out it was actually transparent, even though the browser wasn't showing it. I don't know. It was a waste of time.

I continued working on it and then moved on to trying to have a slightly transparent background. That's a thing that I think is beyond GIFs. They can do fully transparent but not slightly transparent. I tried to fake it by having a fully transparent background, and then putting that on top of a slightly transparent PNG in OBS, but in order to do that I had to replace layers instead of combine layers. Combining layers works without transparency because each layer just covers up the last. With a transparent background, if you combine layers, all the layers are basically there at once, so it creates a blurred effect. But, with replace and a transparent background, at least with the image I used, it kind of looks like crap. It is a much smoother animation with a plain black background. So I think I'm going with that. At least if I want to go with a GIF.

I eventually called it a night because I had already spent way too much time messing with it.

The movies I watched were Power Rangers (for a second time) and Chips. Power Rangers is still good and I hope they make a second one. I feel like it did well enough for a sequel. And I know Chips got completely destroyed by critics, but I liked it. It was a very Dax Shepard movie, and I'm a fan of his movies, so I didn't have a problem with it. I'm also a fan of Michael Pena because he is really funny. I think people were expecting a more faithful adaptation of the TV show, forgetting who Dax Shepard is, maybe. Using the Chips name was probably the downfall. I imagine people would have enjoyed it much more if it was just a standalone movie about bike cops. Oh well.

It is now midnight, as the grandfather clock has reminded me, and I should have been in bed awhile ago. I'm going to record my audio journal, and hope I don't ramble on too long about my GIF making.