What the heck kind of name is Telvy Phil? How’d a goober like you pass Selection?

A common question I’ve received at random rare intervals when interacting with people on the internet, or just people I have known for a long time online, is the question regarding what my name even means. Truth be told, not even I fully understand the truest origins of the name, let alone what it means. Considering my personal headcanon is muddied in teenage high-school era day dreamings, musings, and ponderings, not even I understand what it fully means.

I will clarify at least that the name “Telvy Phil” is in fact a compound name (or double name/double-barreled name) and each respective title of either “Telvy” or “Phil” do work, although I prefer most people online would refer to me as the former. I would also attest to the very least that the compound naming convention may or may not have been the subconscious result of me coming from a Spanish/Latin background and so the fact that name came to be that way is comically coincidental to me now that I realize it.

How people online refer to me truly is a fascinating case of culture, considering more average online users accustomed to online life purely call me just “Telvy”, while many persons, specifically in America who come from the more rural American and/or Deep South cultures just call me “Phil”. Overall I’m just known as Telvy online, and the full title of “Telvy Phil” is only fully stated in more formal settings on the internet (if that is even a thing).

The Telvy and the Phil

To really understand the name Telvy Phil, we have to dissect the two words “Telvy” and “Phil” respectively. 

Ironically the name I get called the most online (and the one I subconsciously consider my true first name), Telvy, is shrouded in mystery while Phil is clear to me as day. From my understanding and grasping of my ancient old teenage thoughts, the word Telvy came from a rather vague character concept that floated around super briefly in my head on bus rides home from school. 

Contrary to popular assumption the name is not jewish as people assume it is simply because it has an uncanny resemblance to Tel Aviv, the name of the capital of Israel. Not judaic in the slightest, and really it has no ethno-cultural ties whatsoever. The name Telvy is a purely fictitious and online name, and was in reference to a character that existed in my imagination aptly called “Television Man”. Telvy was simply a cute nickname to such a non-existent character.

Television Man, or Telvy, conceptually was a shapeshifting figure that could take the form of any human being, of any race, sex or age, and was predominantly represented as a morgue technician with an old 90s Television set for a head as his natural default. The character soon dissipated into obscurity yet the name stuck much later, far beyond high-school. 

The surname Phil is much more grounded, far less esoteric and imaginative, yet the origin story is cheeky and extremely straightforward to say the least. A long time ago I recall befriending a youngster on Steam by the name of PONYJOHN, real name Nate, from Minnesota. PONYJOHN was a real eccentric figure and was by far one of the youngest Team Fortress 2 players I played with years ago. The highlighted memory of him was how he was perhaps the first person to gift me a free game on Steam, that being specifically Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition (which I have yet to finish to this day, sorry Nate). Bare with you this was just a child who somehow had more money than teenage me and I may or may not have asked for it without realizing where or how he received the funds to give me what was at the time a game around 10 to 20 dollars.

On a normal day, PONYJOHN casually said to me “hey you sound like a Phillis!” to which I then replied “I sound like a what?”, to which he then elaborated “you sound like someone who’s name is Phillis!” Very random interaction that moment was, but I just took it as a weird statement of respect from him. Since then that interaction stuck and so did the name Phillis, yet I condensed the name down to Phil since it sounded a lot less odd and effeminate.

I have gone by a few aliases on the internet in the past, going prior around the turn of 2015 with the title Nutritious Bag Circles (long story on that one as well). After then I needed a new alias that was easier to pronounce, and much more sensible and less absurd in description. In the end I took these two names with hazy past origins, the “Telvy” and the “Phil”, and merged them together into a singular compound name. “Telvy Phil” became the name that stuck the most to me to this day.

Hello my name is Telvy Phil 

There is no doubt in my mind that Telvy Phil is the name with the most weight and history behind me at this point in time on the internet. Considering it’s the alias I’ve accidentally tied to my real life identity, used in the past and present for my online creative portfolio, and the one my current grounded internet reputation is built on, there really is no going back to any prior or new name.

I know it’s common for people to go through multiple account names and profile pictures (and while a pet peeve of mine for people to do so in sites such as Discord) it’s understandable as to why some people do it. I don’t really see myself changing my alias to something else since there is so much historical context and weight to the name’s meaning and origin that changing it would remove something vital from me as a person on the internet. I do think “Telvy Phil” is a corny name that sounds stupid. Then again people name themselves stupid aliases all the time. 

I will at least admit it does sort of stand out, and the fact a lot of people ask me what it means, wanting to know the origins of this very foreign sounding name, and ultimately do like how it rings off the lips, at least attests to the weight of its value and legacy.

About a week and a half ago, I was given the opportunity to be a part of DISREPAIR, a newly released Half-Life 2 mod developed by the same team behind Half-Life Remnants, another source engine mod that I was blessed to be a part of its development team. While not a direct developer of DISREPAIR, I did participate as a play tester during the various iterations of the mod. Here is my review.

DISREPAIR is a short, atmospheric horror mod developed by Team Vestige and was released on Mod DB. You play as an anonymous Combine hazmat worker, dispatched to the destroyed ruins of the old Black Mesa research facility to take photographs of radioactive anomalous materials. What mysteries lurk behind the dark halls of the facility’s dark office complex?

In my time as a play tester, I recall the interactions between me and the project’s lead developer SCP Gaming being quick and engaging. With constant updates and feedback to various alpha builds, the project moved very quickly and efficiently. I recall the project being extremely short in development, and was fully completed and polished within a six month time frame through the early first half of 2023. 

With each new iteration of the mod’s build, new things were added, and necessary changes were made to make the mod a much better interactive experience. At first the mod was mostly a visual walking sim with very little challenge or gameplay, with taking 7 photographs of the various radioactive anomalies around the level the core objective.

The level design significantly improved from previous build iterations, with brand new puzzles appearing in each new version. The layout of each build was also substantially different and much more improved than the last.

Funny how regardless of each iteration, I would always get lost within the labyrinth of the decrepit office complex trying to find the next radioactive crystal. Either my attention span has gotten rusty with each build or the mod does a great job at making you feel lost and uneasy (both are extremely plausible).

DISREPAIR is a very claustrophobic and visually dark game. The atmosphere and music were practically on point with the mod’s pixelated monochromatic art style. Every asset seen is completely custom made, with no vanilla Half-Life 2 assets seen, giving it a true total conversion mod status.

In regards to visual filters and effects with its lighting and design, DISREPAIR does get in the way of exploration with the low render distance, as well as the analog camera filter obfuscating much of what you are looking at.

The sound design though is great with sharp, clicky and reverberated sounds for both UI and level interaction, adding to the already uneasy tension of the setting.

While not a challenging game, within its length DISREPAIR does offer otherwise serviceable puzzles with brain tickling solutions, as well as an original hacking mini-game mechanic.

In regards to narrative design, much of the mod’s narrative is expressed through environmental storytelling, as well as various notes scattered everywhere detailing the hidden story of the setting. Most of the material given is vague, and much of what is given is up to the player to piece together as to what is really going on.

Overall, DISREPAIR is by far one of the better source mods released this year, let alone a very polished mod that got released in a reasonable timespan. In a sea of unfinished, copy and paste Half-Life 2 mods with ludicrously long development cycles, it’s refreshing to see something that, while almost too short, is clean and original in design, as well as visually appealing and unique.

It was a pleasure to work with lead developers SCP Gaming and MPy, as well as the rest of Team Vestige in being apart of the development and iterative process of DISREPAIR. Congratulations to them on their success and recognition from the community, and I hope for more unique experiences to come from them in the near future.

 

-T. Phil

 

Ancient Hardware and a Corrupted Harddrive

Happy New Year everyone. Today I installed Arch Linux on my old crusty laptop.

Well, technically a week ago at this point. I just wanted to share my experience with the process of installing it on such old hardware.

For those of you a little less tech savvy, I’ve undergone the process of installing Arch Linux, a lightweight Linux operating system that is known for being a little bit tricky to install and manage. It is not as simple as downloading and formatting an .iso file onto a flashdrive, plugging it in and clicking next on each slide of the installer wizard window until its ready to go. In Arch, you have to manually type in scary commands on a scary black terminal window, partitioning your disks, formatting them, installing packages, etc. and anything and everything can happen if you don’t know what you are doing.

The cool thing about Arch is how extremely lightweight and performant it is, especially on hardware. So lightweight that you can install it on an ancient computer and it’ll run as good as new. My old laptop is a Presario Compaq CQ60 that containing a single core processor with a whopping 2 gigabytes of RAM. Pretty bad, even for laptops of its era, plus it ran on Windows Vista (evil smelly operating system).

A long while back I attempted to turn on this old ancient relic to see what I can scavenge, and to my surprise I found old files from that era. It was exciting, but during my process of scavenging through ancient files like an old scholar in a monastic archive, I accidentally snagged the power cable, and the computer was so low on power that it just flat out turned off. With haste, I turned on the laptop with the operating system stuck on boot. Unfortunately Windows Vista got corrupted and the laptop was gone for good (or so I thought).

Months later I returned to it after purchasing a SATA to usb3.0 drive and attempted to rip the old data out. Using my other laptop that ran Ubuntu and with the help of TestDisk, a free open source hard disk recovery software, I managed to safely copy and secure most of the important files, and oh boy did I find some very important stuff. I found old home movies of my 13th birthday, Christmas of that year, family vacation trips and more. I was happy to secure my find, and after making backups I was left with the old husk of a machine I had. It had no practical use to it being so old and slow, but even then there must be something I could use for it. Then I thought “why not install Arch for practice and fun?”. So I did.

Setup

Now I couldn’t install Arch on the current hard drive since its basically corrupted and too old and too slow for that matter, so I went on and purchase a cheap 240GB Kingston SSD from Amazon, and proceeded to replace the old disk. One problem came up suddenly, and that was the fact that I had terrible screw drivers and the screws on the old HDD got stripped to the point that it was very difficult to take them out

While attempting to remove the stripped screws all day, I basically went “screw it” (pun fully intended) and just slapped the SSD in naked with no caddy and just left it as is. Honestly as long as I didn’t drop it and shake it in such a way that will loosen the SATA connector on the drive then all will be well:

Afterwards, I proceeded to install Arch!

Arch Setup

I must confess though, this technically wasn’t the first time I installed Arch. Prior to this I installed it on a Virtual Machine on my main desktop PC through VirtualBox with the EFI setting deselected. Manually through a formatted flash drive it was overall the same process. Only problem was I had to use a physical ethernet cable from my desktop, and trying to go back and forth on my phone being low on power during the process got annoying, but honestly it wasn’t that big of a deal.

The same steps I took to installing Arch on VirtualBox were as followed thanks to a tutorial from Mental Outlaw on YouTube, which you can find here.

In that video, someone left a comment that detailed all the commands typed in order from the video which was what I used completely. I cleaned up that comment and these were the commands I used.

*Note: Take this as a little tutorial on installing Arch from me to you, but in my opinion I recommend you watch the same video I wached for your own sake (and of course read the Arch wiki which all the Arch elitists will yell at me for not mentioning if you have any specific problems).

Installing Arch

timedatectl set-ntp true
cfdisk /dev/sda

This next part you need to partition your drives. The first one being your boot drive, which I placed mine at 128M. The second partition being the rest of the SSD’s space for storage. Both drives should aptly be titled /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 respectively. /dev/sda1 will be our boot drive so we mark it with pressing “b” on our keyboard. Afterwards we write our disks in by selecting ‘write’, followed by responding to the prompt given by typing “yes”. Our drives are now partitioned! Now we just then need to format them.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

I do have to elaborate on this next step since I was having problems at first. After we format our drives we are ready to install the basic packages to have Arch function, but on my end I was having errors when using it with the error log saying something about a corrupted keyring or absent gpg keys. It was bad enough to where I couldn’t progress to the next step, and I’d assume it had to do with the .iso file I was using. After doing some research I figured that was it, and I resolved the problem through the following command

sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring

Afterwards, the following commands were as followed:

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware vim (i used Vim, but you can use alternatives such as nano. same wording applies)
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
pacman -S networkmanager grub
systemctl enable NetworkManager 
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
passwd

Now the next part is typing in your root password for your system after typing “passwd”

vim /etc/locale.gen

*WARNING: If you do not know how to use Vim, I recommend looking up some basic tutorials on the commands since it does not function like most typical text editors, or else you’ll edit and erase something important. Either way the next step is choosing which keyboard layout you want by uncommenting the one you want. Mine is the following:

/en_US (then uncomment en_US.UTF-8 + ISO)

the following lines I uncommented and the rest of the commands are as follows:

locale-gen
vim /etc/local.conf (type your keyboard language format here. Mine is: LANG=en-US.UTF-8)
vim /etc/hostname
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime 
exit
umount -R /mnt
reboot

And we have now installed Arch!

The next thing I did was installing some extra optional packages to tidy things up, and afterwards installing the desktop environment of choice. I went with the xfce desktop environment since it has little bloat compared to others, but the main I chose it was because was because I was able to edit the look to make it look like Windows95 through a custom theme on Github called Chicago95. Mental Outlaw also has a video on installing the theme here

The result ended up being better than I thought too!

Overall that is my experience with installing Arch Linux on physical hardware. Apparently to many installing Arch is half the battle and the other is maintaining it if it breaks. That may be a pain to many, and to those that would like an Arch based distro thats fresh out of the box and doesn’t break (for the most part), you could instead go with EndeavourOS or Manjaro.

Either way, that was my experience installing Arch Linux on my old crusty 2009 laptop. Hope you enjoyed this rather basic tutorial I had as well. Take care and have a good one everyone.

 

 

-T. Phil

Merry Christmas frens, and welcome to the first edition of Telvy Has Spoken. The premier blog series on this site where I talk about any and all things me, Telvy Phil, as well as any experiences, shower thoughts, expressions, or things I would like to share in regards to my life, my personal projects and work online.

To those who follow me from Discord It appears to be a Christmas miracle of sorts by how I have finally been able to unearth myself out of the void in these past few months. This website, as with many other things I have online, have mostly been abandoned by me due to indifference and preoccupation with more personal matters. Perhaps I’m just too busy and distracted to take the effort to use them to my advantage, instead preferring to sleep through whatever available free time I have when not working my usual 9-5 job. That is something I want to change, or atleast make an effort to not become the norm of my activities.

There is a lot for me to unwind about my whereabouts these past couple of months, and I mean a lot. It first helps to contextualize who I am briefly to the few who stumbled across this site be it by intention or by accident. So yes, hello! My name is Telvy Phil, or Telvy for short. I’m an aspiring game developer and digital content creator and my main fields of expertise focus on project management, design and writing. I do specialize in programming and some level design and sound design, but I see myself as a producer and designer first and foremost. I’ve been tinkering in the Source engine for around 10 years on and off, and I’ve tinkered in other engines such as Unity, Godot and Unreal 4. I would say my peak in terms of semi-professional game development was around 2018 when I was one of the many unfortunate freelance developers that worked on the infamous standalone Half-Life game Hunt Down The Freeman. 

Now that I have your attention from that, I can direct my focus towards the few who follow me here on Discord or elsewhere to explain why I’ve essentially ghosted everyone for almost half a year. While I have been relatively active in the formal half of 2022, the latter half took a massive turn due to events that have ended a long arc of my life, paving the way for a new one. To further contextualize, I must turn the clock all the way back to around December of 2021 up to January of 2022 and onwards, and it all started with the development halt of Tactical Thot Exterminators.

TTE

Around early 2022 I began a new chapter of Source modding shortly after I made the tough yet necessary decision to shelve any and all development of my previously active modding project Tactical Thot Exterminators, or TTE for short. TTE was a long and arduous journey where I spent a hefty 4 years of my life working to the best of my strengths and resources on a major total conversion mod for Half-Life 2. I began the project way back in 2018 as a one-off joke with long gone friends and acquaintances in a Discord DM chat group around the same time I was still working on Hunt Down The Freeman. It was a surreal, chaotic mess of memes and ideas that eventually grew way out of scope way too fast and ended up becoming a long term endeavor. Shortly after Hunt Down The Freeman released and the catastrophic calamity that game had on the Source modding scene, I was left with TTE. TTE was eventually left with me as well since the DM group I was in quickly dissolved and I never talked to anyone in there ever again except my one friend Hunter who played the role of TTE’s first major supporting character, Thicc Nibba. 

Months have passed since then and I was practically isolated from anyone and everyone online, and I spent a large chunk of that time creating whatever I was able to make of TTE with what little knowledge and resources I had on Source SDK 2013. While I had worked on a relatively massive project as HDTF, I was still fairly intermediate in regards to making anything proper in Source like maps, models or anything that truly made one polished mod stand out from another. Eventually I coincided and released the first version of TTE known simply as the Alpha Playtest Demo. A buggy, unfinished, bloated build that was a conjoining of whatever I had to show to the world of my modding prowess, the Alpha Playtest Demo was released on Moddb around mid 2018. With the help of some networking in the Source community, specifically with Source mod YouTube lets-player Bolloxed, I managed to get some traffic of my mod out there with 2 gameplay videos of two separate sections respectively of the build that amassed around 20k views on YouTube. Not so big of traffic to be significant compared to other games or mods, but massive enough for me to fully devote myself to the project and create the first iteration of the TEAM TELVY developer Discord server. Thus, the TEAM TELVY brand was born.

Since then for around 2 years I worked on TTE extensively, writing lore, characters, story, recruiting developers to my project that came and went, and things were happening and content was being made albeit extremely slow. Things turned for the worse around 2019 when the Covid Pandemic came into center stage and the global shutdowns resulted in my whole dev team becoming unavailable overnight. People’s lives were turned upside down, nobody was able to do anything productive, and the whole project took a massive halt for the worse. Since then for around one and a half years, TTE’s development reached an egregious slow pace to the point where it might as well be considered a dead and inactive project.

Things had to change, and I knew for a fact that the whole project needed to be shelved in favor of something more efficient and tangible if I wanted to improve the brand image of TEAM TELVY. Eventually I made the conscious decision to halt TTE’s current development and plan ahead for something completely new in the future. While I never truly “canceled” TTE and scrapped everything I had, I did at least shelve it aside with the intent of potentially coming back to it, albeit a completely different mod in the end. For once I was filled with a newfound sense of excitement and confidence for TEAM TELVY’s next potential mod project. There were many ideas of what I wanted to make, and I had to be careful not to create the same mistakes that I did with TTE. Many ideas were floating around on what I could potentially make, but the fundamentals were broken down to ensure that this next project was much more tangible to create and within my scope. Thus, TT2022 was born.

TT2022

TT2022 was the codename for the newest TEAM TELVY mod project and was a placeholder name for whatever title the new mod was going to have. At the start of this endeavor there were around 5 or so different premises that the mod could take place, 2 of which were actually proper and tangible ideas while the rest were vague and unclear, mostly concepts thrown together with no substance. As I gathered with what remained of my dev team, there was one idea that was way more fleshed out in premise, design, aesthetic and narrative that I really liked, and coincidentally everyone really liked as well. It was an idea I actually had for a completely different game that I conceived many months prior when I was still working at a small gas station convenience store, a part of the grocery store I was working for during school. The premise was simple yet very appealing and easy to understand: A stylized, retro-futuristic first person adventure game, set in a gas station for spaceships out in the stars. A game that combined a youthful and extremely relatable cast of characters, in a colorful and fantastical rendition of the future once long forgotten, with a truly dense and rich lore set in a small corner of the universe. To the Zodiac we blasted off to and thus, Aldebaran Express was born.

ALDEBARAN EXPRESS

Set within an expansive logistics network of intergalactic routes spread across the Zodiac, Aldebaran Express tells the tale of space retail workers in the middle of an isolated fueling station within lightyears of brushing distance of the massive red giant of the Taurus Constellation, Aldebaran. While the general premise of the mod’s setting was simple, the style of presentation and aesthetic was what was truly captivating to the few working on the project. Within the early days of pre-production we had a solid goal in mind, and we spent a lot of time organizing what needed to be done. About a few weeks of planning we announced development of Aldebaran Express within the Valve Modding Community Discord server and reserved a channel for the mod’s development progress. 

Things were off to a strong start. We had asset production, a formation of a script with a cast of characters, and the process of piecing parts together started relatively smoothly. The progress of pre-production eventually led to a basic stage of development consisting of level design prototypes to test what we could do in terms of style and aesthetics. One of the core goals of Aldebaran Express, and for that matter TT2022, boiled down to the following: create a solid, playable mod within 3 to 6 months. It had to be a short and compact experience, within the boundaries of our strengths and weaknesses, and must be unique while not ambitious. Overall while we were within the lines of those goals, things began to conflict very early on that gradually shifted the direction of Aldebaran Express’s development.

The first major issue was obviously the Source Engine’s limitations in regards to level geometry. Aldebaran Express was first and foremost a style-over-substance game. Gameplay was intentionally basic by design and the whole appeal of the game came strictly from both its characters and artstyle. The game’s setting and visual design was overall smooth and elliptical in nature, something that Source is obviously not very good at unless you take the plunge into environmental mesh work versus traditional BSP brush work, and that required a serious amount of work to get right. The second issue was modifying shaders which was a whole new can of worms in itself. Considering we were attempting to create a vintage, grainy celluloid anime style look with no one of such technical prowess, that set us apart in terms of the mod’s visual design. While minor technical setbacks in the grand scheme of things, the biggest shift in development came when my final university semester graduation project became a second thing to worry about

For context, I was in my final semester as a student of the School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas right exactly at the same time Aldebaran Express started development. As an ATEC student, in order to graduate with your degree certificate, you were required to submit a Capstone proposal which eventually led to the creation of your final Capstone project. Essentially what I had to do was create literally anything to demonstrate my skills in my field of focus, specifically games. At first I decided to just work on a very basic game prototype in Unity, but afterwards after consulting with my Senior Seminar professor about Aldebaran Express, he said I was able to use that for my capstone project! While cool considering I was able to create a game on a 10 year old game engine in order to graduate, it permanently altered the original plan of Aldebaran Express. Now it was a matter of time trying to do anything with even less time and people in order for me to graduate than to make a playable demo within the timeframe we set.

Development shifted, production was flipped overnight, and eventually most of the time spent on Aldebaran Express was collecting whatever my dev team members created in as little time as possible. A collage of every asset and concept art was placed in a very appealing blog post here on this website to demonstrate to the whole school what I was capable of achieving, you can check it out here. Ultimately it turned out pretty well considering I was able to graduate from it, even if it wasn’t my intention to do so. While for the general fact we were unable to meet our goals for Aldebaran Express, let alone TT2022, we were at least able to create a very appealing mod project that was way more well received by many members of the Source modding scene. We thought we could keep making more content, but the more we tried to add more stuff the more ideas kept coming in, we came into a sudden realization throughout weeks of discussion. 

Overall, Aldebaran Express was a very unique project, and something that was deeply personal to me in regards to its inspiration and upbringing. I knew for a fact this mod had the potential to reach a massive audience, and I’ve even been told by others that games like Aldebaran Express are preem content for big name content creators and influencers to play and get massive exposure. It was a small, short mod with lovable characters and can be completed in a very short amount of time, and we came to realize the fact that Aldebaran Express was just too cool to be limited to a source mod. It needed to be on a much more modern engine, something that we had more control over in terms of licensing and franchising. I even fancied the idea of making the mod a VR game, or atleast giving it a VR mode. 

The ideas were endless, and for the first time I was genuinely excited for what I had created. Eventually, while I had yet to announce this to my dev team, I ultimately placed the mod on hold in search of other engines that we could continue work on. I’ve searched for other alternatives, the obvious being either Unity or Unreal, but there were also smaller, more niche engines that other colleagues recommended, even volunteering to create frameworks for me. Still, Aldebaran Express’s development remained frozen since then and other life events appeared that are halting any kind of game development time I have. This honestly led me to my current explanation of why nothing has been done since then.

THE END OF AN ERA

Now here we are, the part where I actually explain why I’ve been gone for so long. Some of you reading this may be aware of my whereabouts, yet obviously for everyone else, clueless. The situation goes as follows:

There is no doubt in my mind that I am currently undergoing an immense transitional period in my life ever since I graduated from university. A complete arc that has encompassed most of my young adult life has ended, that being the pursuit of higher education for around 7 years. School was always a painful and miserable experience and the countless unspeakable hours spent just pushing it through to the next day are no different in terms of strife. The times I’ve fallen down, the times where I was on the brink of failure, the times I just wanted to give in and give up have all just ended just like that. To think that I have just “finished” is something that I still cannot fully understand or grasp the scope or immenseness of as of now. It was as if I was always just this, a student, whose sole purpose is strictly just academia, nothing else mattered but that. Now it’s all over, and the shock afterwards began to set in.

Around 2 months into post-graduation I wasn’t really doing anything at all productive. I was essentially in a complete NEET state that mostly involved waking up in the morning, meandering around on my phone or around the house and sleeping throughout the whole day. I was dazed with no clear goal or direction, and the only thing that kept me preoccupied was a small business startup partnership that I was involved in way before graduation that dated back to the Fall of 2021. It was an overall one-sided endeavor that punctured a massive leak into my savings that, with each passing month, got bigger and bigger and eventually got to the point where I had to split from it.

Lost, no purpose, and being dangerously low on money, I was stuck. Really the best thing for me was to get some basic wage job to make back all the money I lost, be it from the startup or from school. It was annoying at first trying to find jobs out there and my mother kept getting increasingly pissy with my behavior and attitude with trying to find work. Eventually, things changed later around the Fall when I secured employment for the new HEB grocery store that was opening up in my county, the first of its kind this north in Texas. I worked for their BBQ restaurant department and for the first few months, as I was getting adjusted to it, life for once looked promising. 

By then I was out of the business partnership, I was making way more money than I ever made in my life, and I began to take initiatives to improve myself mentally, physically and spiritually. I began strength training at my local gym and took the initiative to ride my bike the handful of miles to get there. Around the few months working in, I was finally able to work through the effort of securing my driver’s license and finally, around November, I took my driving exam and finally after 7 arduous years of fighting for it, I got my license and became more autonomous than I have in the past. Life was getting good, really good actually, or atleast much better in terms of self-esteem than I was for the whole year.

Do not be mistaken though, I am struggling still, yet that is the way of life. My job, while good in its own respects, has essentially eaten up my time for these past 4-5 months with no clear sign of change for a while. The staffing shortage due to post-grand opening in my department had ultimately forced me to work full time hours as a part timer which practically erased me from any form of online activity. Alongside going to the gym around 4 to 5 times a week training extensively, I literally had no energy or rest to do practically anything in my free time. That is changing though and life is actually looking promising for 2023, more than anything else recently for that matter.

THE FUTURE

I can say with great conviction that the world of tomorrow is veiled with uncertainties beyond our comprehension. From what we see out there it seems that the world is on the verge of collapse. We flush ourselves with too much information and data on the internet, and the results make reality turn out more grim than it seems to be. Truth is, it’s not what it all seems to be, and really to any young viewer who is chronically online reading this, trust me when I say this it’s not so bad. The drama, the news, the events, it’s not real, and really the best you can do for yourself is to take care of yourself first and to the people actually close to you in real life. It is not your obligation to let the weight of the world rest on your shoulders, that responsibility belongs to one person only, and that person we celebrate His birth on this very day.

Starting in the future I have no clear goals as to what I want to do in regards to my online life. I eventually plan to start a new Source mod project that won’t be as complicated or unique as I’d like to think, and I intend to venture into other engines to expand my horizons. With all the money I’ve been saving I plan to build together an actual proper new workstation desktop PC that will last me for the next 10 years. I want to develop more skills, and learn new things to make me a better artist and creator than before. From then on only God will make witness to my reality and reveal the truth of my destiny to me. I think deeply about the world, and really when it becomes all too overwhelming, I’d like to turn to Scripture for the answer:

 

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

And the world passeth away, and the list thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever”

[1 John 2:15-17 KJV]

 

Merry Christmas frens. That will be all from me for a while. For now cherish this day, and rest easy. Expect more to come from this page in the coming year, and as always stay tuned for more.

O come, O come, Emmanuel. To free your captive Israel.That mourns in lonely exile here.Until the Son of God appear.Rejoice, rejoice o Israel.

 

-T. Phil