Decembrrrrrrrrr

Weather has cooled off here quite considerably, which has been GREAT for my cough. Not actually great. On the upside, I can actually breath/speak without coughing every five seconds so that's a plus. On the downside I've passed on my cold to some other people so...I'm sorry. Humidifiers though, been the best tool out of this entire ordeal. When the humidity in the house naturally sits around 35-38% and the air outside usually doesn't go above 50% at any given time, it's quite useful.

Anyway, aside from still waking up late, having a drippy ambiguous water leak over my and my coworker's desk and accidentally spraying coffee all over the coffee table (lol irony) this morning, things are going a lot better (again, I'm so sorry).

December is fast approaching and I'm excitedddd. Steam has a Black Friday sale or something going on because most of everything on my wishlist is on sale. This is bad for my wallet considering I have some significant purchases coming up in the next couple weeks in addition to Christmas. And then there's living costs...gas, food, housing...BUT ASIDE FROM THAT, I'm excited about a lot of video and creative work going on. December 1 I'll be posting some special videos that hopefully YouTube won't censor and I'll be planning (hopefully) a decent upload schedule for December to make up for the lack of uploads during the summer and fall.

Oh yeah and it's soundtrack Thursday.

Star Wars Old Republic - Cause Star Wars is a thing right now.
Bastion - Cause it's really good
Life is Strange Episode 5 - It still hurts

Porcelain Arms

I've managed to catch a rather nasty head cold. I was coughing so hard that I believe it aggravated another problem I have, so I'm in varying amounts of discomfort. The good news is I have now caught up on a number of things as I've had the time to do so...that is when I'm not working from home, sleeping or waking up in the middle of the night thinking one of my arms turned into a ceramic object.

I'm not joking. Whatever they put in nighttime neocitran is some interesting stuff because I woke up last night and had the most lethargic freakout when I thought that my arm and hand had turned bright white and transformed into porcelain. Just the one though cause I remember taking my pulse in that arm just to make sure it wasn't actually pottery. At some point logic or sleepiness won and I passed out again until morning. I may forego the neocitran tonight.

Murdered Soul Suspect Episodes 1 and 2 are now uploaded. I am well into the next two segments of it. I managed to power through 4+ hours of Gauntlet and now have 3 more episodes ready to upload. Right now I'm trying to remember where I stuck all the Evil Within stuff and whether or not I still need to transfer the Evil Within off the old laptop. Either way, I'm out of space for Myst 3, which is probably good because I shouldn't be recording that with half a brain and when I'm coughing every 5 seconds. How annoying.

Um, yeah so Gauntlet episodes coming soon and...more Murdered. I had some other plans, but I'm still having trouble remembering what's what so, I'll give another update when I'm feeling better.

Wat...

Today I have some tracks that I've already featured before...but it was a long time ago so I'm counting it.

Suckerpunch - Still one of my favourite movie soundtracks.
Guardians of the Galaxy - The version I had in my playlist got entirely muted because of one song. So here's a version with just that song muted. Crap I'm going to have the Pina Colada song stuck in my head.

Speaking of videos with copyright claims. I uploaded the exact same footage twice (one video is private and includes both LOTR and Incredibles from Extra Life while the other is split in two) and only got a copyright claim on one. The one that got the claim on it is the longer, private video. Wat. Whatever, no one's going to watch that version, but what did it claim you might ask? A 32 second clip of a song that was playing in the distant background that came from Fallout 4. Wat.

Wat.

Life is Strange Episode 4 - The track mixing in this version is pretty awful, but the quality otherwise is pretty good. I also love all the butthurt about the endings. People are upset that it wasn't a "happy" ending. While I like my happy endings sometimes, I don't want everything to be that way. Both endings had sadness in them, and in both instances Max learns/accepts something. If it had been perfect and wonderful I feel like that would have been a slap in the face and made the entire experience worthless. Tell me a good story and I'll take any ending.
Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring - Got to love a classic.
The Last Goodbye - Billy Boyd - Was a suggested video on LOTR FOTR.
Game of Thrones - Since Shauna and I have been watching it.


Played more SOMA with Shauna. I'm sad to say it's lost most of it's tension and horror due to a changing tone, but I don't mind the story and the atmosphere. It's a little heavy-handed with the symbolism and psychology, which makes it somewhat tiring. They seem to be dragging out one fairly simple theme out over the entire game. Whenever the monsters actually do show up, it is mildly frightening, but I don't get the terror that I had during the original Amnesia or Outlast. I'm not sure if that's what they were going for or not. It's like Amnesia (duh), mixed with Bioshock, mixed with Alien Isolation, mixed with Penumbra (also duh but kind of unfortunate).

I think the problem with it is everyone in this game is just so damn cheerful no matter what happens. There's no sense of isolation or loneliness. We had that at the beginning of the game when we didn't have a friend in our pocket, but now that we have her, it's like...well we aren't exactly alone are we? Even when we find out what happened to the world and our protagonist, there's no sense of urgency or self-preservation. There's just a little bit of a mystery of what's going on. I don't know. I don't hate the game, but it's certainly not anything mind-blowing. Maybe we'll be surprised.

Either way, well talk more about SOMA when we actually finish the game. I'm probably going to be pushing SOMA to the top of the list of our co-op LPS.

SOMA - Because it's a somewhat recent release.
Murdered: Soul Suspect - CAT.
Evil Within - I actually look forward to editing this. It's so awful.
Sherlock - This is the "I don't feel like editing anything else" project.
Bioshock Infinite - I should really just scrap this. The recordings are so messed up.

After Extra Life

All right I'm going to do a quick recap of the weekend here. I'm currently uploading the Twitch streams from the weekend. I might do a highlight reel from the games I played, but I will also be uploading the full streams...if it actually works. I don't think YouTube is happy with the length of some of these, even though I've seen 10 hour videos on YouTube. It just processes endlessly until it fails. I just spilt up one of the videos to see if that helps but...well we'll see. The Sonic one is live if you're interested in seeing me unintentionally kill Sonic in a lot of interesting ways.

I had to work on Saturday in the morning and afternoon, so Kathleen and her friend started off the day playing some Fallout 4. If you're interested in seeing any of her gameplay, you should be able to find the video for at least a couple days here: http://www.twitch.tv/missswat/profile

Anyway, I joined Kathleen after work, covered in sparkles and bits of that fake evergreen tree stuff because I was putting up Christmas decorations. Kathleen and I played some games from about 7:30pm-2am and then both uh...promptly passed out. Kathleen at least had an excuse as she was feeling pretty sick that day. Kudos to her for toughing it out so long. I just passed out because I have no willpower. If you watch to the end of the Incredibles stream, you'll see me falling asleep at the end. I actually lose consciousness for a couple seconds at the time, resulting in me taking unneeded damage/dying. 

I tried streaming Transistor, but the computer I brought to Kathleen's didn't do so well in terms of Streaming and running games at the same time. So I gave up on that after about 30 mins of trying and switched to Gamecube games, which turned out a lot better as the Gamecube could run them while the computer streamed. Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers was the first game I played. It was...hilarious. I loved playing that game for awhile when the movies first came out. I don't remember their faces being so terrifying when converted to...whatever the hell I was looking at. Gimli in particular was...well you'll see. I switched to an Incredibles game after because I got mad. I managed to finish that entire game in about 3 hours. It was also quite hilarious. I plan to play this game co-op with Michael someday as for some reason, we've played it multiple times through together. Probably do to a lack of good owned co-op games. 

I fell asleep after that and woke up at 7am. I played Sonic Mega Collection for a couple hours and then packed up. I had somewhere to be in the morning, so I left Kathleen's and headed out to that. Almost didn't go anywhere as my car wouldn't turn over initially. I hadn't left lights on or anything, so that was exceptionally concerning. I took a look at the battery and saw a boat-load of corrosion on the battery so I cleaned it off the best I could and the engine turned over when I tried again. I'm likely going to have to get that looked at before weather gets super cold. Anyhow, when I got home after, I streamed Transistor on a better computer to make up for the streaming failures of the previous night. I keep forgetting how much I enjoy playing Transistor. I managed to break the AI a little though in one of the bonus levels. 

Kathleen played a lot of Fallout 4 and dabbled a bit in Final Fantasy 7 (one of her go-to games). I'll have to ask her if she played a lot of other stuff. I think she had something else running on her tablet at one point, but you should hear her ranting about FF7 characters in the background of my videos. 

Overall she raised just under $500 this year. Not as much as previous years, but I'd like to congratulate her on pulling together that much on such short notice. Next year we're planning to advertise sooner, but every little bit counts, so thanks to everyone who donated!

In other news, I started playing some Myst 3 after getting it to work on the old laptop still running windows 7. Windows 8 baffles the 3rd and 4th instalment and the common factor appears to be anything running below directx 10, which both games do. I may continue to play/stream Transistor...because now I really want to play it.

Also decided that I want my December solo LP to be Shadow of Mordor. Because Lord of the Rings. This is providing I can finish Dead Space 2 before then...and have enough hard drive space to work with. So...I have work to do.

Honking Noises

This song played on the radio this morning and now it's stuck in my head. It won't stop. Now you're all going to suffer with me. Enjoy the honking noises.

So actual soundtrack Thursday...

COD Modern Warfare 2 - Played some of the co-op missions last night with Michael and I remembered how good the soundtrack is. I was going to go for the shorter one that I found but the sound quality is terrible. So here's 3 hours of high quality music instead.
Life is Strange Episode 3 - Still working my way through these tracks.
Myst IV - Always enjoyed the soundtracks in the Myst series.

Sorry for the lack of uploads. I'm really disorganized at the moment. I can't remember what I have prepared and what's currently sitting in a Vegas file waiting to be encoded or half-done or on Shauna's hard drive etc. I screwed up Trine 2 somehow, but I salvaged what I could of that. Either we skipped a chapter by accident or I missed encoding an entire segment that I now can't get back. Either way...more Trine 2 has been uploaded, but it skips ahead a bit.

I'm currently working on a script for an RPG that I intend to make. I have no idea if I have the skills or resources to accomplish what I want, but I'll find out sooner than later. This wouldn't be a short project, but it's something to do in my down time. Regardless, I'm almost done scripting the intro and first area. The writing is the easy part though. The real challenge will come with building this thing in RPG maker. Anything I can't find as a resource will have to be built/designed by myself.

Oh, and of course, Extra Life FOR REAL this weekend. Will be starting at 7pm Mountain Time (-7) if you want to watch me and Kathleen try to stay awake all night.

Extra Life Announcement 2015 (Also Soundtrack Thursday)

EDIT - Kathleen and I will be playing November 14/15 instead as we have work conflicts.

It's that time of year again, and while we aren't as on the ball as in previous years due to work (Extra Life is this weekend...) we're still going to be doing an all-day streaming event on November 8, 2015. Here is a jittery, spur-of-the-moment- awkward announcement video I did walking to my car yesterday after work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtrV8vCv7NU

It's like a really awkward found footage video. Oh wait, that's all found footage videos.

Kathleen and I will be gaming together and separately, playing a variety of things. I'll be bringing the old gaming laptop that may or may not die at the slightest provocation, my capture card and Gamecube, and of course, a lot of caffeine. General Delta and the rest of the LAG crew will be streaming with me off and on that day as well (likely early on and then later at night).

Games you'll likely see:
-Borderlands 2
-Left 4 Dead 2
-Fear 3
-Transistor (I'll be playing this solo)
-Mario Party (Gamecube)
-Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers (Gamecube)

Other suggestions welcome. I will even venture as far to play a horror game. I have a few to choose from.

Here's my soundtrack picks for the day.

Life is Strange Episode 2 - I really like the last song.
Witcher 3 - I was informed this is a good soundtrack, so I listened. I liked it.
Django Unchained - Was a suggested video on the side of Witcher 3
Kill Bill - Guess I'm on a Tarantino binge now.

PS - Holy balls this orange is sour. Why did you betray me orange?

PSS - THEY HAVE THE DUMPLING TRUCK OUTSIDE

PSSS - Also vegan shepard's pie isn't half bad.

PSSS - Grape and pumpkin kit kats are tasty. Not sure what to think about this fish almond snack.

PSSSS - This has been a weird food day. None of the above is related in any way...other than being consumed in the last 24 hours.