Tag: hard drive

Reevaluation of priorities

Status update – I’ve been in Pittsburgh for a while, I’ve gotten past the ‘trial by fire’ of childcare and have a few days off right now to sort through things. I’m now sending out a bunch of long-delayed eBay orders as well as 100% refunds of the purchase prices of those orders as an apology for the delays in shipping. Also, as you might have noticed, my websites were down for weeks, due to a weird glitch in my billing setup at A2 Hosting. I’ve now sorted that out and all my domains are back online and should hopefully remain online from here on out.

The bad news is, I’m having real difficulty getting many of my external hard drives to work. That includes drives with critical content on them relating to many of my projects, some of that content is essential and irreplaceable.

I did back everything up locally in a massive reorganization effort; each drive had a mirror drive which was filled with identical content. Unfortunately, only 3 out of my 10 drives are functional post-move which means in a couple of cases both the original drive and its duplicate are both unusable. With data recovery costs at around $400+ per drive, I figure I’ll need $800 minimum to get everything back on track production-wise.

I have noticed that certain projects are almost entirely intact. One of the few of my projects that still seems mostly in place is my game ‘Miniature Multiverse‘. I need close to a thousand dollars in position in order to recover all the inaccessible data. That includes a ton of video projects that were nearing completion, as well as game productions, and scattered side projects including a batch of fan content I was close to done with and now cannot access.

So here’s the deal I’m making with all of you. I will work as hard as possible to wrap up ‘Miniature Multiverse’ and do it justice, with the goal of launching the project by end of 2018, several months early. I am desperately hoping it will then sell well enough to jumpstart the data recovery effort, which in turn would allow me to complete other projects, their existence contingent on ‘Miniature Multiverse’ succeeding. I won’t have a big ad budget for the launch, every last penny and every available waking hour goes into getting the game finished, so I’m counting on all of you to PLEASE buy this thing when it’s done because the future of nearly everything else of mine pretty much is hanging in the balance. If the game does well, I can accelerate my productions, and if it fails, then you’ll see a bitter wait of 2+ years possibly before anything around here makes much progress again.

I’d be grateful if you’d spread the word about the project – and share this Itch.IO page and the official website of Miniature Multiverse.

 

Seven quick notes

  1. I’m moving to Pittsburgh by end of 2018 and will try very hard, to have all my files backed up in at least two places [hard copy] and ideally three [cloud backup]. That does, unfortunately, require some extra hard drives to be obtained, so any purchases you can make from my shops in the next 30 days would be super helpful in ensuring that 100% of my project data is safe. I do not have unlimited internet in Houston right now, so although I’ve got cloud backup the monthly caps on my internet, will mean only 60% of my data will be saved in the cloud, by the time I move. So if you wish to minimize risks of loss on some of my key offline project files, like the Panoramic Worlds or Isola stuff, or video projects I’m attempting to complete/revise, etc, buying something from me would be extremely useful in ensuring I don’t lose random segments of my work!

2. To that end, you’ve probably noticed that I have a new Pinterest account I’m shifting to, here, as well as a DeviantArt account, trying to promote and sell my eBay art stuff. And there’ll be a lot more eBay listings posted in a week or so. So just keep an eye on that.

3. House Trek revisions on eps. 6-8 are essentially done, save the ep. 7 intro clip which is rendering now, and some scattered editing on the House Trek DVD edition. You should expect a major update to content on HornbostelVideos.com in the next 2-4 weeks… one which even goes a bit beyond merely additional House Trek and vlog content to include several other classic videos. (By classic, I mostly mean old… though several of these are really surprisingly good regardless of how long ago they were originally recorded.)

4. I’m hoping for additional momentum to develop relating to Twitter / FB feeds – so if you’re curious about what I’m up to creatively, please feel free to follow me on my Facebook page or on Twitter.    One cool note is that I’m posting some scattered visual material there relating to the upcoming video content and other imminent releases so if you’re interested in what, exactly, I’ll be putting online this month… please follow my social-media feeds in addition to bookmarking this blog! For example:

House Trek episode 6 space battle still image
House Trek episode 6 space battle still image.

5. Comics are inbound soon too. Finally, Another Road Taken chapter 1, along with a bunch of additional Troop 4 material, will go online. That should happen soon, and it’s long overdue.

6. A big ad campaign will begin soon on no fewer than four different platforms, and it should result in a major influx of web traffic directed here, good quality web traffic, between July 12 and July 20, 2018. There’ll be a ton of people probably trying to bid on my eBay listings during that span but right now traffic’s in a lull and there’s one handmade-art listing in particular there that is still at a $1.09 opening bid with only a relatively little time left before the auction ends. So if you want to win a pretty personalized artwork at a minimal cost, you should consider bidding on that! Or the stock media DVD, $1.99, an auction which is ending in 48 hrs. So yeah, this is a good time for people following my work to place orders, before the mad rush of public attention kicks in… and, hopefully, results in enough sales that I can thoroughly overhaul & back up all my data.

7. My decal pack is being updated with normal maps and a few extra things, both for the stock media DVD buyers and for those who buy it on the Unity Asset Store. Yes, I’m planning to try submitting the decal pack there as an asset for game developers using the Unity 3D game engine. There’s also some cool stuff I’m doing with my ‘virtual museum’ – it’s never sold well as an item in the past, maybe due to privacy concerns and maybe due to lack of awareness/interest. But I’m going to release an updated and heavily redesigned version on https://matthornb.itch.io/ – my Itch.IO page before long, which will allow buyers there to load the museum and load their own images into the 3D gallery, then gift the saved modified gallery to a family member/friend on a special occasion. The plan is that the licenses will cost $1 / computer for the authoring system that lets you load your own images into the gallery. The link to download the viewer would, by contrast, be free. So a person can simply buy the authoring app, use it to create a custom gallery commemorating an event like a birthday, wedding, holiday, memorial, vacation, etc, and then save the file that results from this, and it can then be sent to a family member and opened with the viewer app. There are still bugs to solve on this but… I’m working on it and I still think it could turn out really well.

 

That’s the news I’ve got for now. Keep an eye out for some amazing things in the next month!