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Tumultuous Times: Two Years Without Content

Here's the video version, if you want to read along with it.👌
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccTNR9I-EoY
And it's also on my DeviantArt as well, with some additional images for the context:
https://www.deviantart.com/neolin7812/journal/Tumultuous-Times-Two-Years-Without-Content-1233230654

Dunno if you’re surprised to see me again lol (If there’s anyone left to see this that is)

First of all, my apologies for not being active enough recently, as It has been a while since the last time I ever posted actual content, which is also the main reason why I want to write this as a way to explain what has been going on for the past 2 years.

For years, I’ve been watching Gmod/SFM content, as well as playing with bunch of mods and addons made by other content creators ever since I was a kid, and I always thought about doing the same, making content by myself and for others to enjoy.

It was until the August of 2019, when I graduated middle school, and I finally joined the SplatSource community and started making artworks and animations myself, crudely at first, but ultimately I got the hang of it.

But I always come to a scenario where I see a model from some game or some sites that I want to work with, but is not present in Gmod or SFM workshop, making me unable to make the stuff I want.

However, thanks to SplatSam, a good comrade of mine, who managed to teach me the basics of porting models to Source, that I was eventually able to learn how to port the models I want into Gmod and SFM, as well as uploading them for others to use as well.

And that’s how it has been for the next few years, making more artworks, trying to animate some stuff, and port more models over.

Things could have been like this, and I could still be the same for the next few years.

However, just like the old saying, life is not always smooth sailing, you know.

The year was 2023, May to be exact. At that time, I had just finished my freshman year at my college, and I’ve just made and posted a few TFA SWEPs for Gmod as an experiment for something new, and lastly I have been porting plenty of models and textures for both Gmod and SFM ever since late 2020, and so I thought it was time for me to relax a bit and focus on things other than porting and making content.

I started to explore different ways on how to make my workflow better, especially with making Splatoon renders in Blender using models from Source, utlizing different tools and addons, and keeping them on track.

Back then, I only used a few basic methods of taking notes, such as writing them as plain text files on my computer or my Google Drive, or even just writing some messages and sending some links to a private Discord server I set up specifically for it. Even at college, I still just used the built-in Notes app on my Samsung tablet for studies.

That is, until September, when I started my sophomore year at college, and it was when I discovered and started to really delve into the rabbit hole known as “Note-taking Apps.”. (Which I should have known years ago)

Originally I started off with Obsidian, but some of its inconveniences (Such as the lack for easier formatting and subscription-based sync service) made me decided that I need an alternative. After scouring through many note-taking apps, I’d finally settled with UpNote and Notion.

And with the note apps being settled down, I thought it’s time for me to start transferring some of my old stuff onto these apps.

But in the mean time, I noticed that something is beeping in my room, like some sort of alarm, but it ended soon afterwards, so I brushed it off as nothing to be worried about.

Wait…could it be one of the hard drives?

…No…it can’t be…right?

…right?

On October 16th, 2023, I’ve noticed that some of the programs and files are missing on my computer, which I checked, and found out that one of my 6 TB hard drives has disconnected itself from my computer.

Originally I thought it was just some minor detection issue, so I tried to reconnect it by replugging the cable, and it worked! For a few seconds before it had gone again. I tried it a few times later, until I realized that my PC just wouldn't recognize it anymore.

At the same time, I also noticed that there were weird scratching sounds coming out from the hard drive every time when I plugged it in, which I searched it up, and found out that it might be physical damages.


Oh no.


I quickly pulled the plug and stored my hard drive elsewhere and told my parents about it, so they took it to a data recovery center while I’m still at the college campus, and I was hoping for the best.
https://fxtwitter.com/NeoLin7812/status/1714011077552566500

Unfortunately, reality is often disappointing.

A few days later I got a call from them, and what they said devastated me:

“The disk is scratched and we can only recover about 70% of your files, and it would be NT$42000 for doing it.”

NT$42000…

I had 5+ TB worth of data in that hard drive, especially when it’s also one of the oldest hard drive I have ever since 2019. And it contains a lot of the old stuff I have, such as old games and emulators.

But now, all of them have suddenly been taken away from me in a blink of an eye.

There’s no way I can afford that recovery price myself, and my parents decided that it was not worth the money to do it.

Albeit there’s nothing really important in that drive, as most of the stuff there were just installed games. But a horrible thought has now come into the back of my mind.

“All of my files aren’t safe anymore.”

Ever since Google decided to remove their unlimited storage option for pictures back in 2021, and education accounts back in 2022, I have put all my files onto the basket known as local storage, which made me get several hard drives, ranging from 4 TB to 10 TB.

And because of this, I have accumulated a lot of files over the years, including:


And now, all of these are being held at an gun point, and can be taken away from me any second now.

I had became paranoid over this for the next few months, especially after I learned about the XeNTaX, one of the oldest forums about reverse enginnering games for over 20 years, had just shut down.

20 years worth of knowledge, just went down the drain.

It was a stressful time, and it made me realized that anything could be taken away from me if I didn’t back them up immediately.

And after all these years, I’ve now come to realize that I’ve made a fatal mistake, and that is not having multiple backups of my stuff.

Though eventually, I’ve come across some information that made me a bit more relieved, as that I found out the hard drive that went down was a SMR one, while the newer ones I got are CMR ones, and is generally more reliable than SMR ones.

(SMR hard drives stacked their magnetic tracks on top of each other, so you can technically have more storage on the same space, however because the pin that writes the data will trim the track when they're writing, so they'll need to store the trimmed files onto the cache first, write down the data, then write them back, so these kind of hard drive is not suitable for constantly changing data.)

So that’s a relief at least, knowing that most of my stuff is stored on more reliable hard drives.

But still, this incident made me start to shift my focus from “Making Content” into “Preserving Content," for now at least.

The time now is early 2024, and there has been rumors about someone named “Aaron Peters” giving false DMCA takedowns across various Nintendo addons on the Gmod workshop.

But I feel like it will just be like that incident where someone updated their addon to put a jumpscare in them, I’m sure that it’s nothing to be worry about…right?

…right?

On April 25th, 2024, as I was just opening up Steam as usual, I noticed an announcement coming from Garry’s Mod, though it isn’t about a new update, but rather a statement about the Nintendo stuff on the workshop.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4000/view/4200245595694413052

“This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”

…

I was there the whole time, even on Twitter following Garry’s updates there, I know the entire situation is really vague and nobody really knows whether it’s really Nintendo or not, but I personally lean toward that it wasn’t Nintendo.

Especially now seeing as most Nintendo stuff is still fine on the workshop a year later, so I doubt it was actually Nintendo that did it.

I guess Garry doesn’t want to take the risk, considering his next project S&box will implement a system that allows you to profit out of your game made on there, so of course they want to prevent people profiting out of stolen assets.

But still, the damage has been done, with various news outlets and commentary YouTubers talking about it, escalating the incident into an unnecessary level, and causing some other creators to (sadly) remove their own Nintendo stuff from the workshop as a response.

Upon seeing this, I immediately made a tutorial on how to download your Gmod addons using gmpublisher.
(Which I should have done sooner instead.)
https://fxtwitter.com/NeoLin7812/status/1783226923981971912

This entire “Gmod Nintendo DMCA Crisis” has made me realized something, and that is:

“Steam Workshop isn’t a safe place anymore.”

Ever since its introduction back around 2011, Steam Workshop has become the main place for mods of various games, I know plenty of people praise Valve for it, however after years of experience with it, I find the workshop to be bad in terms of several problems.

The first problem is “The Lack of Version Control.”

Which means that if a mod gets updated, then there is no turning back unless you back the old version up or the author actually provides the old version as an alternative download somewhere kindly. Which can be quite inconvenient if the mod’s new version broke something while the old one does not.

And the second problem, which might be the most crucial one for me personally, is “The Lack of Direct File Downloads.”

Unlike most other mod sites, Steam Workshop’s way of treating mods is different, as instead of offering a file download and having you manually install the mods, it treats them like DLCs that you “subscribe” to, then automatically download and install them for you.

This may sound convenient at first, until you realized that they can also do it in reverse and take the files away once the mod is not on the workshop anymore, which happens to be the case for Gmod, after the January 2020 update that revamps its entire workshop system.

There used to be plenty of sites and services that allowed you to post the workshop link and make them fetch the workshop files for you, until 2022, where Valve made an update that prevents the services to anonymously fetch the files and had to check if you got the game on Steam or not. The team behind the site asked Valve about it, and Valve supposely told them to stop, which they did. (unfortunately)

I think I know why Valve decided to go with this method, as it gives more control towards the modders, who generally don't like their works being easily downloaded and stolen by others, or perhaps even getting sold. However after I’ve seen countless dramas that ends with bunch of good and even useful mods takendown by the authors of them because of stupid reasons, as well as essentially blocking access towards players that bought the game on places other than Steam, I feel this kind of system has done more bad than good towards the community in general.

Back in the old forums days, sometimes you couldn't even remove the posts yourself, but rather contact a site admin for it, because the central idea was that “Once it got posted, it belongs to the community.” Although I guess that’s also a reason why many old forums are closing down and getting replaced by Discord instead, as it focuses more towards individuals rather than communities.

Around this time, I came accross a post made by an old talented Splatoon porter, Pinkolol16, which is on her own Steam Group:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/pinkport/announcements/detail/4203623295417925498

“Centralisation is a very bad thing, people. More than you could ever know. It destroys your ownership. If you do not have the ability to control and own your assets, you do not own them. You are renting them.”

Centralisation is a very bad thing, people…yeah…and I had to learn it through the hard way.

This is the moment where I realized that Steam Workshop cannot be the only place for my addons, as they can be vulnerable towards DMCA trolls like that, so I went on and tried to find somewhere else to upload my mods to.

(Unfortunately some of the recent events have proven my point above, sad.)

The first site that came into my mind was garrysmods.org, an old but gold site for all of the mods back in the Gmod 10-12 days.

That is…if it wasn’t suddenly closed down a few months ago back in August 2023, and redirects to the Steam Workshop.

I still remember seeing some people saying there’s no reason for it to exist after Steam Workshop is a thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gmod/comments/1629pek/what_happend_to_the_garrysmodsorg/

Well guess what? THERE IS A REASON.

sigh

With the first option gone, I had no choice but to look for other ones.

• Nexus Mods? Too strict on other game assets.
  
• Gamebanana? Too slow for large files.
  
• ModDB? Not good with smaller mods.
  
• ModWorkshop? Looks nice, but they strictly prohibit Disney and Nintendo content.
  
• Thunderstore and mod.io? Feels really nice, but they need actual developers of the game to support them, which I doubt Garry himself would even consider.
  
• SFMLab? Well sure but it’s for SFM mainly.

Yeah…I even considered other sites like itch.io and Gumroad, but they’re more for indie games or products, not mods. And I also considered some obscure Russian sites like ModGames.net or Gamer-lab.com, but none of them are really good alternatives and are limiting in their own ways.

And I don’t want to be like some others that just puts them onto various cloud storage providers, as:

1. They can cost quite a lot for individuals like us.
   
2. Usually they won’t be available after a while, as the author behind them can simply take them down anytime.
   
3. Personally I find them to be unreliable, as they can hold your files hostages with your account at risk if your files somehow “violated” their terms of services.

At this point, you'd feel like Steam Workshop really is the only place that can tolerant the special modding scene Gmod has, which utilizes various assets coming from other games.

Just when I was about to give up, I finally found a site that met what I want: GameMaps.com

Man I still remember that this was the go-to place for Left 4 Dead 2 mods before Steam Workshop was a thing and garnered all the attraction of most other players after 2013, which I would not expect that this mod site would be my savior after a decade.

Though sadly the site doesn’t have version control either, but ultimately I found my solution for them, which is through direct download sites like Catbox.moe and FileDitch.

Oh well…guess it means more work has to be done now.

A LOOOOOOOT MORE

How much work do we have left?

Oh boy…

So I got a couple more hard drives and started working again.

Wait…what is that I’m seeing?

Oh you got to be kidding me-

On March 3rd, 2025, just when I was about to check my new hard drives, I’d noticed that my C drive has only 10% of health left on CrystalDiskInfo, with Lifetime Remaining as its main concern.
https://fxtwitter.com/NeoLin7812/status/1896446220002107791

I’ve been working with this computer for almost 7 years now ever since late 2018, and I’ve upgraded it a few times before, mainly the CPU and graphics card, but I never really checked the health of my system drive.

So I told my parents about it, and they agreed to take my computer to a shop and let them check it, where they recommend me to swap it out with a new one.

The old drive only had about 500 GB of space, which is generally not enough for today if you work with a lot of programs, especially when most of them store their data there by default nowadays, which usually you can’t even change by yourself.

Fortunately, my parents agreed to let me swap it out, so I got a new system drive with 2 TB of space.

However, it also meant that I had to reinstall the system as well, so I backed up all of my stuff, and let the shop take care of it, and I had to work with my gaming laptop only for about a week or so.

Eventually I got my computer back with a fresh install of Windows. Everything feels smoother and quicker to load again.

But it also means that I had to reinstall all of the previous programs and tools I use to make all the content, which will take a while.

A good while, that is.

Speaking of, there’s a new semester coming up, which I’m already in my junior year by this point.

Oh yeah, college.

I’ve been making content ever since mid to late 2019 at a pretty rapid pace, to the point where I can upload several new addons within a day.

Back then it was more about trying to get some fame and recognition as I did not know how it felt back then, and later it was because I truly enjoy providing new content for others to play with and enjoy.

But all good things have a cost behind them, as all of this was done with myself neglecting a lot of important stuff in my life.

You know, minor stuff like file management, folder names, organizing notes, as well as usual stuff like my studies, my social life, and lack of sleep.

And of course the worse part…my own health.

You see, when you got so many things piled up, you’ll always think about “I’ll do them later.” Which typically you’ll just end up procrastinating more and piling more stuff up to the point where you really just don’t want to be bother with it anymore.

But sometimes, some things DO need to be taken care of, such as the mid-term and final exams or assignments need to be handed in tomorrow, and that’s when “staying up late” comes in.

I find myself having multiple occasions of rushing through my assignment or scouring through my college teaching material just before the deadline, so I can spent more time talking to others online (which are often on the opposite side of the earth to me) or making more content.

I had been through this so many times that it kinda screwed up my sleep schedule, where I would sleep at day and woke up sometimes during afternoon or even at night.

And with a bunch of legacy problems piling up on the back of my mind, desperately wanting to solve them at some point in my life, it ultimately made them become a burden inside my mind, taking a toll on my own mental health.

Throughout the years, I have always been thinking about all the things I need to do, what else I need to finish, and what stuff I haven’t done yet.

All the personal projects, all the addons and things I need to fix, all the artworks and animations, all the commissions…everything.

And I was eager to have them finished, but I know each of them will take quite a while to finish, and I don’t know if I've still got any time left.

When I finally graduated high school and made into college, I was anticipating that I can finally have more time working on my own stuff, compared to the stricter time limitations I had with high school.

But that was 3 years ago already, time flies, and I’m not a freshman anymore, but rather someone who’s just about to enter my senior year of college, which is about a year before I finally graduate and have to deal with life myself.

I thought I would finally solve all of my past issues and make more stuff, become a well-known figure, and an actual contributor to the community.

But now looking back on those 3 years, I feel like most of the time was instead spent on dealing with problems I was forced to face, and I should have dealt with them sooner, instead of realizing most of them until something serious actually happened.

I know that my own health is more important than my own work, just kinda wish that I can balance between the two, instead of having to choose one over another.

All the things I claimed, all the promises that I have made, turned out to be nothing even after 2 years.

Just like I said before, reality is often disappointing.

Welp, at least I’ve now explained what I’ve been dealing with for the past 2 years, so it should make things clearer now.

Though I honestly thought I should have done this sooner, but still.

Feel like most people might have given up by this point, but I’m not one of them.

By the time you’re reading this, then it means that I’ve pretty much dealt with most of them now, and should be able to get back soon.

For those who are still waiting for my new stuff, no worries, I still have plenty of things waiting to be made.

And for those who tried to ask me or commission me, I’m sorry to have had you wait for this long, my sincere apologies.

Either way, I still want to continue doing what I enjoy lol.

So what do we learn after this?

1. Always take notes of your learnings, because you don’t know when the place you learned it will be gone, and it might ended up being useful one day.
   
2. BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! Always keep your important files backed up in other places. (If you are able to, that is.)
   
3. Don’t put all of your mods onto a single site only, especially the limiting ones, having more options is always good.
   
4. Do things as soon as possible, don’t drag them out for too long, otherwise you’ll start to procrastinate.
   
5. Take care of yourself more, your health is more important no matter what, and don’t think too much about it.

So yeah, I’ll see you next time with my new stuff coming, hopefully sooner rather than later.

And as always, до свидания товарищ.👋