Not The Collaboration You Want

So I got this in my email yesterday. I assume it was quickly deleted when the person discovered it's REALLY not the collaboration he wants.

I'm so sad that the message wasn't kept there, even if it is automated spam. I was so tempted to respond by saying that I can play keyboard (get it?) and offer a lot of squeals and sneezes to his work. The other part of this that amuses me greatly is that this bandhub site is basically data mining/searching for key words (the title of my video is also a Basshunter song). Apparently the only qualification for finding someone to collaborate with is liking Basshunter. This gentlemen has the highest of standards.

Hey, maybe it's some sort of clever marketing scheme that goes completely over my head or a scam, but I still had some giggles. I am the least musical person you will ever meet. I can't sing, I can't play anything and I can't dance.

In other news....SHAUNA AND I FINISHED TESTAMENT OF SHERLOCK HOLMES!!!111!!!1!!!!!

Yeah we started that in like...October.

October 2015.

Was really fun trying to remember wtf was going on and what we were supposed to be doing. Meanwhile Watson doesn't understand personal space. I will say the monkey jewel thief comes full circle in shocking and unexpected ways!

I'll try REALLY hard to get Sherlock and Evil Within out before 2017. Just get the silly and unpleasantness out of the way once and for all. I've been working on the RPG again instead of video work though. I am SO close to having the first area done/playable. I predict another 16 hours of work, which is nothing if I'm working on it full time. I am not. Also the fact that the bloody copier took me about 2 hours to get fully functional is a little embarrassing. Emulates real printers and photocopiers I suppose. I have the level/map plan hashed out in my project and a strategy for building/testing all of them. Turns out making a game is a lot of work when you're the only one building, designing, writing, creating assets and scripting. Also, I highly recommend going into a project like this with at least a little knowledge of what you're doing and not starting out at level 0 in terms of trying to figure things out. Either way, Mesk, HKS and Nick have been invaluable resources.

Problem is this week is a little busy. I work 14 hours today to get home round 10:30pm, then tomorrow I'll be home round 9:30pm, then Wednesday I'll be home around 10:30pm, then Thursday I'll be home around 11:30pm the Friday...oh maybe Friday I'll have some time. Then Saturday I may have the daytime free, but I'm busy 5pm on. Sunday obviously is Christmas and I'll be busy with family. Boxing Day....hmmm boxing day would be a good day to work on videos while everyone is out stressing themselves with sales and shopping...excellent.

We're Going to Win Christmas

It's really hard to decide which one enrages me more. Like Sonic 2006 is bad in every way possible. Sonic Unleashed, if I remember, was at least PLAYABLE, but I rage quit a few times and never finished the stupid thing. I got to the end of the game and it FORCED me to watch the same cutscene over and over and over every time I died. It was not a short cutscene and it was annoying as hell. At least Sonic 2006 has skippable cutscenes.

Getting closer to the holidays and my opportunity to take a bit of a break. A community launch will be happening over the holidays, so I'm sort of on call if everything blows up, but other than that I will likely have time to relax a bit. I am very tired. Spent 4 hours attempting my grandmother's cabbage rolls. I did most of it right, but I accidentally used the wrong tomato product (sauce not juice) and slightly underseasoned the filling (but that may have been because I needed to layer them due to the size of the pan and the sauce juice stuff trickled down too far).

Did a gift exchange in the office as well and managed to score one of the Nerf guns my CEO got for it. There are four Nerf guns in the office now. Rob thought he was protected by his wall of monitors. His forehead sticks out at the top so Todd and I were trying to snipe it. Then Rob borrowed Todd's gun and started sniping the CE team. He lost one of the bullets in the process, but the CE pod is still well supplied thanks to Judy. The Nerf war has begun.

In other news, I do a pretty decent Tommy Wiseau impression.

Speaking of Sonic 2006, progress continues on editing the video for it. It will be part of my holiday "special" this year. I still need to put together a compilation of some sort for it. Not too sure what I'll do yet, but I had a couple ideas including making a new trailer for u toob. I should aim to finish editing Evil Within before the New Year. That and Murdered will be pretty much the only co-op projects I've finished this year. Yikes.

I can't guarantee anything for the new year, but know that I have a good stock of videos saved up so...shouldn't run out of content any time soon. My anxiety has been a little out of control lately and my sleep has been disrupted significantly 3 times in the last couple weeks. I'm tired a lot of the time and busy with holiday family stuff etc. so...I haven't had much time to work on personal projects let alone catch up on what a lot of other people are doing.

To the people I know who were put through hell in 2016 (aka the Blender of Misery and Disappointment), I hope you at least have a peaceful holiday season. I feel we're on the precipice of something big. But hey, on the bright side, if we all survive it, at least we'll have one hell of a story to tell.

A Few Thursdays in One

Not sure what happened last Thursday, and the one before but I got lazy or something and never posted the like...two paragraphs I wrote.

FIRST THURSDAY:
Good news! Germans can now watch my Bioshock videos on YouTube! Not that many Germans really cared or were hurting for it, but now I can delete those off my public drive. Hooray more space! 100GB seemed like so much for a public drive, but I'm actually pretty close to running out of space. Granted, I've been hosting a lot of other files in secret random folders all over the place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di1XUB0YIzw

This orange. This massive, mutant orange. It either has slices that are delicious, or slices that are tough and disgusting. I don't even.

SECOND THURSDAY:
At home not feeling too good.

TODAY:

Yeah so, last two weeks. I haven't posted in awhile cause my motivation levels have been all over the place. November wasn't the greatest month and honestly, like so many others, I'm just waiting for 2016 to be over. There were some good things this year, but it was a pretty rough go in general for a lot of people. Not to say 2017 will be any better. I think things are all going to get a little too interesting.

Today I celebrate 2 years full time at my current work. I've been super grateful to have full time work over the past couple years because a lot of people I know have either been laid off or just can't find a job and that's not for a lack of skill, drive or intelligence either. Market is starting to pick up, but there are a lot of upset people here and I think that's going to have long-term ramifications.

So what have I been up to? Well the good news is, I look like I've been doing a lot because I had some long sessions of Pillars of Eternity and have about 70 segments prepared for YT. Shadow of Mordor has been done for a very long time now, but I'm still uploading the last 5 or so segments. I have a huge stock of Vermintide, Saints Row 4 and Left 4 Dead 2 that I haven't even started to upload yet. I also have a bunch of other random one-off videos complete (like Ultimate Chicken Horse with my brother and Oliver).

Editing co-op videos (and a couple of my solo vids) is WAY behind. I did an inventory of what I have and what I still need to do and here is what's still outstanding:
-Bioshock Infinite - By far the oldest content still left. I really don't want to edit this, but I feel obligated to because it wasn't a bad LP...it just has major sound desync issues...
-Gauntlet - I actually found about an hour and a half of this that is still unedited.
-War for the Overworld - I have some DLC content I haven't finished watching and editing yet, which is unfortunate because quite a few people seem to like this.
-Dungeon Siege 1 revival - It was revived and died. I still have about 2 hours of video to go through.
-The Evil Within - Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh fml.
-SOMA - Haven't started this aside from...uh...well...
-VTM: Bloodlines - There was an accident. Shauna's computer was blasted by a rootkit and we lost our save file all the way up to the Glitchy Beach incident. It's recoverable, and I have plans for this, but we'll have to play back to where we were (and we were at the end of the game). I have all the video files thankfully.
-Pillars of Eternity - I'm in Act 2. I've been playing for over 65 hours.
-Extra Life 2016 content - A holiday project for myself. I will post this as part of the end of the year extravaganza.
-Sonic 2006 - See above end of the year extravaganza comment. I have some amazing plans for this. If I can get away with borrowing the PS3 a bit longer, this LP might actually kill me. I've been streaming it whenever I play for commentary by Mesk and HKS.

I feel like I'm forgetting something, but that's kind of a common feeling with me lately.

I plan to play Dishonored 2 next, but that may be late December. I have a week off between Dec 24 and Jan 1 so I want to do that then. Michael and I will likely do holiday games again (may bring my computer so we can marathon Army of 2 and record it).

Also this happened yesterday:

Forgot to turn off the outside water taps and one of the taps completely exploded. We've had an unnaturally warm November, so we completely forgot. We'll need to get a new tap for the outside, but thankfully there was no internal damage to the house.

The Elephant in the Room

This week...I tell ya. I'm not going to talk about the obvious, cause frankly I'm sick of it. Sick and tired and just...

Extra Life was great and we managed to raise just over $1200 for the Alberta Children's Hospital. Thank you so much to everyone who watched, donated or stayed awake in solidarity. You are all awesome. I managed to make the full 24 hours PLUS 1 hour because of daylight savings time. I got to the time and my knees and back were KILLING me. I stretched out on the floor to help that feel better and I guess I passed out for awhile because the next thing I knew was a cat was rubbing against my hair and face. The capture card worked well, so I'm really happy with that purchase overall. Also glad I worked out most of the issues with it the night before. Don't ask me how I fixed things cause I still don't know.

I got my new car this week. That's pretty cool. It's small and red and actually accelerates when I press the gas pedal. The door locks work. It has FOUR doors. I can open it remotely instead of spending 5 minutes trying to get the key to work manually in the lock. And yet, I'm still sad about poor Sir Charles.

Missed soundtrack Thursday because I was too busy all day yesterday trying to pull some resources together to launch three new communities in the next couple of months with work. Next week will also be busy. I'm back in a state of always thinking I'm forgetting to do something.

Working on a few projects right now. Writing like crazy when I have a chance. I haven't touched Pillars of Eternity in about 2 weeks because of all the stuff that's been happening. May play some more tomorrow. Evil Within is still ALMOST done, but I haven't had motivation to edit. Have a few Left 4 Dead videos I want to post. Extra Life videos are currently going up, just slowly because they're rather large videos and my poor bandwidth can't handle it. I've been streaming Sonic 2006 and recording while I play so...I'll be pulling the highlights out of that. Dishonored 2 came out today. I plan on getting it and playing it just...$80...

Also, someone has been particularly vindictive on YouTube and has gone through all of my Dungeon Siege 3 videos and disliked them. Like...all of them. There's 59 there. It might be the dude who called me uneducated and then incorrectly told me how to pronounce the name. I DID butcher the name to his credit. Either way, I just laughed in his face and then Shauna swooped in. I just don't think this person realizes that he gave me a swath of extra views. That and the dislikes actually contribute positively to the rate in which videos are found.


As for the elephant in the room...all I'll say is someone at work crowned the cut-out with a tinfoil crown and I don't remember much of Tuesday night other than Tails' death screams and Elise's mutant neck.

Lumpy Paste Soup

Extra Life is almost here. I still haven't done my promotional video, but I guess it's been a little bit busy here lately with the car dying. GOOD NEWS THOUGH. I'm buying a new one. As of last night I put a deposit on a car. Should be about a week before I'm mobile again. Test drove it last night and this one actually accelerates when you press the gas! It's great!

Joking aside though, getting a newer car this time to get a little more life out of it. Either way, Extra Life this year will be like the first year playing at Kathleen's. Poor Kathleen will be stuck with me all day. I have a plan to do hourly update videos and smush them all together when the event is over.

We're not expecting that much locally this year because the economy and job market is really bad in Calgary right now, but here's Kathleen's donation page one more time: http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donordrive.participant&participantID=216662

She got past the $600 mark, so I think she said that she's wear a clown nose for the entire streaming session.

So new car, "saved" a community from its sad, slow, death (okay I didn't save it personally, but I believed in it until the person who could save it pulled a miracle out of his hat) and Extra Life on Saturday. Week hasn't been perfect, but it's definitely turning around.

Dishonored - The second game is coming out soon and even though I've heard bad reviews I'm still excited. I really liked playing the original game despite its issues.

I put way too much water in my oatmeal. Ugh it's like lumpy paste soup.

Thief - Yes Oliver, I will play it soon.

Nanowrimo is here. I never participate because I suck at doing these kind of things, but I'm still going to try and work on writing a lot this month anyway. The only person I actually know who has written an entire novel in a Nanowrimo is going to be participating again this year. Amy wants me to read her manuscript for her class and I'm sure I have something to do for Mesk that I haven't done yet cause I'm a lazy piece of shit. Either way, work continues in bits and pieces.

PSA on behalf of Shauna: Don't use the Steam overlay to browse the internet while playing games. Apparently she was looking up something on the PoE Wiki while playing, an infected ad loaded and it blasted her computer with a rootkit. I think she's managed to recover her data, but she had to reinstall windows on her machine. I've never really used the Steam overlay before to browse (done it once or twice) so I haven't run into these problems myself, but figured I'd pass along her message.

Also I think I did something to my finger. I can't make a fist without it hurting. Unless it's a leftover injury from dodgeball I didn't know I got, I have no idea how it happened. It started hurting after I got coffee yesterday so...?

RIP Sir Charles, The Red Civic

Well a lot has happened since last Thursday, especially in terms of my mobility. Thankfully all this started on a Friday so I had the weekend to work some of it out.

So the short version is I'm out of a car. The long version is I left the house Friday morning, put my car into reverse and then into drive to go forward, pressed the gas and all that happened was the engine revved. So I tried again, thinking my tires were slipping (winter is upon us and I still have my summer tires on) and the engine revved again. Thinking I was insane and accidentally put the car in neutral, I double checked and pressed one last time. The car moved. That was mildly concerning until I got off the back alley to the road where I would press the gas and it would accelerate to a certain point and then just start revving. I tested it a bit longer to see if I needed to go home, but it got "better" so I drove to work on a less busy road (taking it on Deerfoot would have been catastrophic, so good call me).

I made it to work all right and spent the entire day worrying about it. Gave my mechanic a call and he said he could look at it on Monday. I go to drive my car home for the day and it starts up and accelerates all right. I get about 2/3 of the way home when the car suddenly decides it doesn't want to shift into 3rd gear (it's a little hard to tell on an automatic, but I made an educated guess based on the fact that it would rev if I tried to go faster than 40 or 50km/h).

So I'm driving down Anderson screaming encouragement at my car and begging other drivers (not that they could hear me) to not stop so I could keep speed. Turn the corner onto another road and I'm like OKAY I'VE GOT A DOWNHILL SLOPE TO WORK WITH. So I coast down and get more mad than usual when people don't know how to merge, and keep speed all the way until I have to cross the train tracks...and make it up a hill.

It's not a steep hill. It's a long hill. I could only drive about 30-40km/h all the way up, no matter what I did. I got about halfway up when the engine light came on. So I put on my hazard lights and drove to the nearest residential street I could find and called someone to come get me. Managed to get the car home in low gear once I knew I wasn't going to get stuck in the middle of a busy road. Granted, I was close enough to my house to walk back if needed.

I spent the whole weekend worrying about a verdict I already knew I was going to get, cleaned out my whole car (there was a lot of random crap in there) and got someone to help me drive it to the mechanic late Sunday evening. Monday I got the call that my car's transmission was toast. Thankfully my mechanic only charged for 30 mins even though he could have charged the full hour.

At this point I have to say that hail damage was the best thing to happen to my car as I already wrote it off and got the money for it. Was about to give it away for parts when I got another call from my mechanic. He tells me he has a guy whose son totalled his car in an accident. Turns out it's the same make and model as mine. He says the guy is willing to buy my car for a few hundred because he wants to put the brand new transmission from the wrecked car into my car so that this guy's son can drive it. Been negotiating over the past few days, but, looks like I'm going to get some money and Frankencar Sir Charles will live to drive again.

However, I'm still out of a car. LPs with Shauna are currently on hold because it would literally take me 2+ hours to get to her house from my house on transit. I have a car I can occasionally borrow and I'm carpooling to work, but I'm going to need a new ride asap. I suppose I also have the option of a Car2Go, but there's a limited number in my area. Also going to have to find a ride of some sort to Kathleen's for Extra Life as I don't know if I can find a car and buy it in a week and a half.

In other news, the headphone jack on my work computer (mac ugh) is hosed. Not sure what happened there cause it was fine yesterday and it doesn't look like anything's jammed in there. Yet, the headphones won't fit in there. Guess my computer got the memo and is trying to be courageous. I'll try to investigate in detail when I'm not at work.

Also my phone is still chain crashing and resetting. It's also insisting that I have voicemail when I do not, in fact, have any messages. It seems to think I'm more popular than I actually am. GOD DAMN IT. IT HAS RESTARTED 5 TIMES IN THE LAST 10 MINUTES.

Pillars of Eternity continues, but I'm concerned about this weird static and interference I'm getting occasionally from the mic. Shauna is now way ahead of me cause I haven't played since like...Saturday and she keeps eluding to things that haven't happened for me yet. Shadow of Mordor is still going up and I'm eagerly awaiting Dishonored 2. Apparently the remastered (lol I typed remasted at first) Skyrim is out this week, which I'd likely be interested in seeing more about, but won't be playing yet. Um...Halloween dodgeball tournament all day Saturday so I'll likely be ded that day and actually ded the next day (though I'm trying to set up a D&D session with Shauna and Nick). Got a week of car hunting and then Extra Life November 5, which I still haven't recorded a video for ajsdahjksasjdaksbgsjdsal

Anyway, TL;DR - Car ded but will be resurrected for someone else, computer headphone jack ded because it gained sentience and figured out its an apple product, phone is almost ded and is taunting me, haven't made any progress on LPs since last Saturday, and rubber balls thrown at my face all day Saturday.

Capture Card

Got my capture card in the mail yesterday and the splitter the day before that. I can now record/stream PS3 and PS4 as well as a swath of other consoles. The catch is that if Shauna and I want to do a co-op thing, either she needs to come to me or I need to take my entire computer to her. Either is possible, but we live on opposite ends of the city. It's a 30-40 minute drive on average. The other option is playing online, but that doesn't help for Outlast 2 when it comes out. We'll figure out something though.

Extra Life is coming up in a couple weeks. I'll likely post my ad video for it on Saturday this week to promote it. Kathleen still has a ways to go to reach her goal. Click here! Help her out! Win some shit! Dictate what I play since I'll probably be hauling my entire set up over to her house!

!!!!!

Music:
Age of Wonders 3
Overlord? - This was not the soundtrack I was looking for...but I listened to it out of curiosity.

Then I got distracted by this.

Haven't played anything since last Saturday. Meanwhile Shauna has been stealing my Steam library to play Pillars of Eternity. She's pretty much caught up to where I am in the game now. I'll probably play more tonight. If not tonight, then Saturday. If not Saturday, than Sunday.

Also I should probably get better at filling in my time sheet. I have trouble remembering what I did yesterday let alone 2 weeks ago. Ugh.

An Actual Soundtrack Day

It's been a few weeks since I actually did this.

Pillars of Eternity - Since I'm playing it. 10 bucks says I know who disliked the first video in the first hour. YOU SHOULD BE SLEEPING. GOD. Not sure if I'll be sick of the soundtrack after awhile. At least it's not like Divinity OS where they had the same battle music the entire game. I remember HKS being disappointed in that while I was watching. Also, I swear to god, there's a few tracks in there that are REALLY similar to Dungeon Siege. Remind me to look into the Gilded Vale track.

Dragon Age Inquisition - Kristy will be pleased.

This week is a good week. I get a bit of work taken off my shoulders and aside from clients testing things on production when they have perfectly good staging environments to futz around in all they like, it's been quite nice focusing on a few projects rather than ALL the things. Also got some very promising news from one of our clients that I'm very excited about, but I still don't want to get my hopes up too much lest they be crushed mercilessly.


Alternating Pillars of Eternity and Shadow of Mordor now. Surprised at the interest levels for PoE to be honest. I'm liking the game enough so far. The writing is mostly good, it's also has some uh...interesting word choices for some situations in that it's like someone vomited a thesaurus. Sometimes the simplest word is the best word in my opinion, but I do like the attempts at thoughtful storytelling for once. The game is pretty dark so far though. It doesn't ease you into it at all. First couple of hours and you're slapped in the face with a death tree and domestic abuse. Happy happy fun times.

Theme Song

The sentiment of the last three weeks.

I literally had no time for a Soundtrack Thursday and I'm going to be moving around way too much today to seriously listen to anything. What's been going on these past weeks? I have no idea. I think my brain has entered stasis to try and preserve whatever sanity remains. 

It started with returning from vacation and having a massive panic attack in the middle of the night the week later which led to me oversleeping two days in a row (and made me inexcusably late to work). I've then been terrified of being late for the past 2-3 weeks, which added to the building stress levels. Since then we've had about 5-6 people quit (for various reasons), which wasn't the worst because they're all going on to new and exciting things, but one person in particular was one of my favourite people at my job. 

So as a result there was a massive information dump on me to prep for taking over the role temporarily until a new hire started. Now I have half that role, but I've been gradually taking on more and more to the point where my week is fairly full at work. There was a large event for one of our communities this past week which has required about a third of my monthly allocated hours for that community. Meanwhile almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong for another program.

Last week was the pinnacle of things going horribly wrong, but was probably the least stressed out of the last three weeks because I think I reached peak level stress for that time period. That said, I've suffered 4 major panic attacks in the past 3 weeks (one while I was driving which was fun), mostly health anxiety related as my intestine goes through cycles of discomfort and pain (I've just started to assume my intestine is trying to collapse on itself and create a singularity). It feels actually pretty normal-ish today, after a major issue this week which I had to stay home for.

I'm hoping it's something relatively benign and stress-related (please don't be celiac, please don't be celiac, please don't be celiac oh god I love gluteny foods way too much), because at least that can be fixed. I saw a doctor last week, got a bunch of tests done and heard nothing back, which is good because it means I'm not dying as far as they know. I have a follow-up next week, so maybe, finally, after all these years, I may have some decent answers of what's going on. 

Going back through the blogs, the number of times I've said I'm tired or sick, is a disgustingly high number. The worst part of everything these past few weeks has been the panic attacks. They are exceptionally uncomfortable and frightening despite my knowledge of what they are. When they start, they are REALLY hard to stop, and I often just have to wait for them to finish. It's not something fun to talk about, and people tend to have a negative view of things like depression and anxiety, which is unfortunate cause it would be good to have more support for mental health issues in this country. I talk about it occasionally, because it's nice to get my concerns down in writing, it lets other people know they aren't the only ones experiencing it, and because it scares me.

Despite various issues, I'm considering this period of time as a personal crucible. If I can make it through rough spots and be better at what I do, better at managing my health and better at coping with stress, then I consider it a valuable experience. I'll just have to wait and see how this all turns out.

From what I can tell, I'm almost done Shadow of Mordor. The majority of it has actually been recorded in the last couple of weeks. I anticipate the series being about 30-40 segments long (each about 30 minutes each). I tried getting some of the bonus stuff, but it didn't really yield anything interesting other than some supplementary story items, which is cool in it's own right. I have a bunch of the stealth missions outstanding because they suck and I suck and everything sucks about the stealth missions. I may just finish  the main mission and call this LP complete as I have most of the upgrades and I'd like to start a new LP project.

I really want to get Evil Within off my hard drives. If I have time with all the Turkey Day shenanigans this weekend, I will do so in addition to finishing Shadow of Mordor.

There is a lot of snow coming down outside. It's been a blizzard for the last like...hour. 

I feel like I'm getting to the point where I can do a demo video of the first area in my crummy RPG. I need to add a little more...life to it, configure some more battle options, finish the triggers for three of the Interns and finish the "boss" area. I have placeholders for a lot of things in it right now, but that can all be easily updated later. 

Writing wise, I have consolidated my working document and uploaded it all to Google drive so I can take it back to the old laptop and begin building all the random shit I have written out into a narrative that makes sense. IT MAKES SENSE IN MY HEAD OKAY? But yeah, no progress made on the reader version because I just haven't been motivated to tackle that mess.

Update on Kathleen's fundraising: She's off to a good start, but she needs more supporters. There are three free, signed copies of her book available to be won in addition to a copy of her favourite book. Check out her page! I'll be posting a video about it soonish as we're about a month out.

Speaking of which, I have decided to purchase a capture card. I will need to do this soon to have it ready for Extra Life in November. This will also allow Shauna and I to play LPs from the PS3/PS4 (as well as some other consoles). We're planning to do Outlast 2 next year this way. 

And yes, I am aware the demo for Outlast 2 is out. Shauna and I are not playing it in case it will be official gameplay from the finished product. If it turns out to be different, we'll play it retroactively. 

Here have a dongle.

This is Fine

Fire and all.

My new hard drive was on my desk this morning and I am very pleased. I will be installing it tonight and begin the organization process. Not that anyone's particularly interested, but I'll be using the new 6TB drive as an archive (was tempted to go for the high performance drive, but I concluded that I'll use the new one for storage and the F drive as the working drive).

Video production has essentially been at a standstill since I haven't had any time this week to delve into it. Maybe Sunday...

EDIT: It is now Sunday and I didn't realize I never finished or posted this. I have just finished playing 5 hours of Shadow of Mordor and my shoulder is killing me. New hard drive is here and I have transferred a lot of old LP videos over and organized them. I want some food now.

Aftermath

This week was the beginning of a two-week stint of a lot of extra responsibilities at work. It's good, because I've been wanting to take on a bit of a different role at work, but it was sort of like asking for one of the gates in a dam to be opened only to have the entire damn structure (lol) explode in my face. So in addition to worrying about some medical concerns, I've been getting a cold that's been passed around (or I never fully recovered from what I had a couple weeks back) and I've had a lot of stress stacked on top as I catapult into taking on a lot of extra hours of work/dropping other tasks to make sure things are taken care of.

All of this cumulated in a massive panic attack while I was driving, which, believe it or not I was grateful for. I was on my way home on my long work day (I now work 7:30am-10:30pm on one day at two jobs, which may need to change) and I was feeling pretty sick/faint. I was terrified that I was going to pass out suddenly, even though I've never actually fainted before. I got myself all worked up and I felt the panic attack coming on. The thing is, even though I KNOW what it is, I can't stop it from happening. It's the kind of thing that needs to run its course once it gets past a certain threshold.

It's not exactly comfortable and I haven't had too many of them before (I've had maybe 4-5 massive attacks over my entire life, and most of them are in the middle of the night), but I've had enough that I know how to recognize them. It was the strangest experience, because I went from feeling faint and nauseous, then short of breath, to completely alert with full concentration. I got this tingling sensation in my hands to the point where they went completely numb (I could still use them fine but I couldn't "feel" them) and it felt like my blood in my hands was bubbling. It wasn't hot, but it felt as though both my hands had the circulation cut off, but it wasn't painful and it was super intense. The rest of my body had tremors running through it and I had a burning sensation across my chest and face.

I was worried I wouldn't be able to go again if I pulled over into the shoulder on the road, so I just...kept driving. I experienced that for about 15minutes for the rest of the drive home and it started to go away when I was about 2minutes out. My subconscious was aware that I was almost in a "safe" zone I suppose. Anyway the reason I was grateful for it, was when it came on I knew that I WOULDN'T faint, because it was literally impossible. When I have panic attacks, my heart rate and blood pressure increases and you faint when the opposite happens. My nausea went away too so, I got the lesser of two evils.

So yeah. That was fun. Waking up has been difficult the last couple days, but I am feeling better for now. All of this will be addressed in a week's time. And yes, if you are all wondering, I would have pulled over if I was actually going to faint or throw up. I know what fainting feels like cause it's almost happened a few times (but never actually lost consciousness).

Anyway...here have some soundtracks.

Destiny: Rise of Iron - Actually like this soundtrack quite a bit. Apparently it was officially released this week. I should play more of this some day.

Game of Thrones - Apparently this is all the soundtracks. It's like 6 hours long. I'm going to just listen to a bit of it.

Working on the RPG again. Fixed a bunch of issues that were mildly frustrating, but also kind of hilarious. Working on the battle system and items now, but it's going to require a lot of testing to make sure it's functional. I'm hoping to have the first map done by the end of October. Theoretically, barring issues finding or making specific assets, the rest of it should go a lot quicker now that I have an idea of what I'm doing.

It wouldn't be a possibility this year, but maybe I can use this RPG as an incentive for Extra Life next year. Not that anyone would actually want to play the damn thing, but I could give out a copy to the top three donors or something. I'll talk to Kathleen about it. This year I may get Mesk, Shauna and Delta in on Extra Life activities. Likely going to be purchasing a capture card so I can do PS3/PS4 games.

Extra Life 2016 Announcement

Hey all, we're getting ready for Extra Life again this year. Kathleen was unfortunately sick last year, so we had a little bit of a quieter year. This year she's going for a goal of $2000 dollars for the Alberta Children's hospital, so I'm hoping to help her raise that!

I'll probably do an announcement video as I normally do, but I'll wait until I've got things a little more under control with work etc. In the meantime, you can find Kathleen's donation page here, and her Twitch here (I need to get the link...will add later) . She may do some pre-streaming, so you should all go subscribe to her on there.

A few weeks before I'm going to throw up a poll or something to see if I can gauge what you all want to see me play. I might order a capture card that I can hook up to the PS3/PS4 since both Shauna and I have an interest in LPing some of those games in the future anyway. If there's more interest for some 6-year-old gaming laptop friendly games, I can play those as well (problem is getting them to stream smoothly). I would love to bring my tower to Kathleen's place, but I don't think I want to risk moving it.

Soundtrack Thursday:

Psycho Pass 2nd Season - I liked the other music I tried out from a couple months ago so...here's some more!

Tokyo Ghoul - Don't look at me. I don't watch much anime. I just followed the dongles from Psycho Pass until I got to something I haven't listened to before.

Deathnote - An anime I actually watched in early University years I believe.

I am very tired today, but I'm still going. Going to be hopefully getting more answers at the end of the month and I'm not leaving until I have a course of action plotted out. I've had enough of this months ago and nothing I do or change seems to affect it all that much.

Meanwhile some sort of war rages in the comments section from last week. I'm amused, confused and wondering what the hell is going on. I'm only engaging to throw a little humour and information in there. We'll see if it hits critical mass and collapses on itself.

Also meanwhile, every video I post is getting bot spam on it lately. "Liked and subscribed" my ass. I can see all my recent subscribers. Thankfully YT is smart enough to identify these as spam and the problem mostly takes care of itself. I liked the "It looks like you put a lot of work into this and you make it look so easy haha!" on Shadow of Mordor where I literally make the game look as hard as possible  with the amount of things that go wrong.

Emo-Cakes

Life's been a rollercoaster since I got back. I want to leave again. Maybe I can go become a hermit in the mountains and live off the land or something. I'll give myself 5 days before I get eaten by a bear. Or squirrels. A swarm of squirrels. The little red ones. I'll put up a good fight, but in the end they'll surround my encampment and wait for me to get weak from hunger and dehydration. Then they'll descend upon me and I'll ignite the fire traps I set around me taking the little bastards with me. One will survive to tell the tale. And thus I'll discourage the great rodent uprising. Humans be crazy.

Actually if I'm anything like my one D&D character, I would probably just shove random mushrooms in my face and get taken out that way.

Going to be calling up all the old favourites today. I'm not in the mood for searching for new stuff.

Bastion
Crypt of the Necrodancer
Witcher 3

Been playing pretty much exclusively Shadow of Mordor. I want to get another solo LP out. It's been so long. I've actually been having quite a bit of fun playing it, but I keep getting myself into insane situations. The tagline for it really should be "I didn't want this" and the thumbnail for the series can be our emo-cakes protagonist doing a faceplant into a group of about 20 orcs.

That or I can do a compilation of faceplants when the series is over. Evil Within has got me all CREATIVE. Which, by the way, if you haven't seen it, I'd check out the oddities compilations. Those videos perfectly outline why that game is a "work of art".

The Oddities Within

Brand New Day

So Oliver got his car all cleaned up. Apparently it wasn't as bad as it could have been since all he had to do was pull up the lining in the trunk. The trunk's roof lining was taken too for some reason cause...uh...there's a whole lot you can do with that. Oliver seems to think it was some drug addict that did it based on what was taken in terms of change and valuables.

Anyway, unpleasantness behind us, today is soundtrack Thursday.

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

Repo: The Genetic Opera

Little Shop of Horrors

It's one of those days.

I'll be working on Evil Within probably Sunday/Monday since I'll be busy the next few days catching up with some people and going to a wedding. I'm also trying to get the Myst 4 content off the G Drive so I can record some new things (namely Shadow of Mordor and Myst 5). Also debating on whether I want to do the Dawnguard DLC for Skyrim or a run on Oblivion (I have a plan if I do this one). Dying for another solo LP since it's so easy to edit.

In the meantime I have a ton of Vermintide videos as well as Saints Row 4. Probably going to start posting those soon since it's been like...2 weeks.

What the Actual Fuck

Singing swing ladies, exploding tires, people screaming and yelling at each other in the middle of the night and street racers crashing through the park have all been just SWELL, but now we have something to crown the shit pile (quite literally this time).

Late last night some pathetic waste of human existence broke into Oliver's car, completely trashed everything, stole the petty change and some other useless items, sprayed bbq sauce all over the seats and then took a giant heaping shit in the trunk. There are no words to describe how pissed off I am, and I didn't even have to deal with that this morning. Oliver seems to be taking it pretty well, but I am not cause I probably could have stopped it if I actually got out of bed when I heard the noise last night. I thought it was the neighbours cause we live in a duplex next to a bunch of other duplexes basically stacked on top of each other. When I DID go and look, there was no one down there. Didn't even see the mess in the morning cause of the dew on the windows. 

The ONLY consolation is that I am obsessive about locking my car and it had not been touched by last night's activities. 

The person who did this isn't worth half the pile of feces left in the car. You want to be a dick and steal stuff, fine, but the moment you trash someone's car like that, that crosses the line.

EDIT: I have taken the afternoon to calm down and have devised a "cunning" plan for how to proceed. I believe it will take a lot of patience, but I think I might be able to get this guy and out him to the police. I KNOW this person has been around before because I've seen anti-theft lights in Oliver's car. Chances are, he'll be around again.

I'll be sure to update if the plan works.

Msuh. Yes...Msuh.

Or "mush" rather.

So tired...was up late just staring at the ceiling wanting to sleep, but couldn't despite my measures to do so. Just staring, thinking about useless things.

Brain is mush. Abdomen hates me. Everything blowing up first thing in the morning cause people don't know how to click on a link. Ugh.

But yay soundtracks.

Reservoir Dogs - Heather suggested this to me last week so I wrote it down here for the sake of my memory and let it sit in drafts until today. Another soundtrack that uses Hooked on a Feeling? Oh dear this song will be stuck in my head forever. Oh no, it got worse. Not Coconut. Nooooooo.

No Man's Sky - Just searched "soundtrack" out of curiosity. Think this came up because of it's current relevance.

Abzu - Did the same thing for this as No Man's Sky. I think I got it for the same reason. It's very mystical sounding.

I'm going to be away for a week and a bit. Yearly trip to Lake Winnipeg. Got some family stuff going on so will be out there with them. Will have limited internet access, but I think the cell tower down there is actually good enough to hold better than an Edge signal. I think I had LTE last year. Anyway I'll try to finish up Murdered completely before I got and upload some stuff I can release every couple days down there.

Going to try and figure out some games as well. Either going to take Arkham Horror or Kill Shakespeare with me. I don't think I can fit both in a suitcase and still have room for a few books and clothes.

But yeah, if anyone needs me I'll be hiding out in a remote location begin tormented by the evil white stripe hunting spiders while I stuff my face with as many baked goods as I can afford. I apologize in advance to my stomach.

A Little Used

The Twitter account I made back in University for participation marks got hacked and has apparently been used to follow random spam, porn and Arabic accounts. I reaccessed my account and unfollowed everything out of spite. Apparently it was first accessed in Vietnam about a month ago, then left untouched until a couple weeks ago, then it's been to Russia, Argentina, Georgia, Thailand and tons more. IT'S BEEN AROUND. Anyway the only reason I saw it was hacked at all was because someone sent me a video uploaded to Twitter and it tried to auto log me in.

So yeah, either check in on your stuff more than once every few years or just delete it because apparently this happens. Also if Twitter tells you it's locked your account, it lies. It apparently "locked" my account 3 times on three different days. Also if it detects a suspicious sign-in, apparently it doesn't actually do anything to protect your account. Just...fair warning.

EDIT - So after going through all that I try to watch the video for reals. "Not available in your country"

...

...

I'm done with the internet tonight.

Gooey Paste

I actually made some video editing progress this week. Be amazed! Jumped back to Murdered to give myself a break from the anguish of Evil Within and was greeted with 10 minutes of dancing around jittery demons (I was REALLY bad here, but it's funny so it's okay I think). Other than that this week has been pretty uneventful other than working on writing and other such projects.

This week I've decided to do some soundtracks from some of the LPs I've done. I've posted most of these before I think.

Bulletstorm - Probably one of my least viewed LPs. Likely not one of my better ones either since it was pretty early into my voice commentary LP "career" (not sure what else to call it). I arranged this compilation myself back when I thought I could do such things. Mesk provided me all the tracks.

Half Life 2 - Some really good tracks, but also what I'd classify as ambient noise and stingers. The Half Life series has always been a favourite of mine.

Saint's Row 3 - All videos found on the LAG YouTube channel, but I think there's a link somewhere on my own channel under co-op LPs.

Stomach/abdomen no better really. It's been a week, so maybe I should see a doctor or something. I just hate it when I go, they can't find anything (usually the case) and I end up wasting more time in places that I really don't enjoy too much. I appreciate hospitals and medical centres for what they are and what they do, but they're loud, crowded with sick people and I get no answers. A lot of anxiety for very little payoff most the time.

Working on stuffing my face with pretty benign foods, including oatmeal (which I'm not particularly fond of, but it's filling and healthy or something). Like do people actually like oatmeal? I mean the taste isn't so bad with sugar, but the texture is just...like it's a sloppy, chunky mess. If you put too much water into it it's like a mushy soup and if there's not enough water the oatmeal soaks it all up and it's a gooey paste. I've tried it with lactose free milk, but that doesn't seem to help the texture all that much as it's...just water with other crud in it.

OH GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING

The theme of this week is screaming internally. It's the kind of scream you imagine you'd have if you turned and started running away in horror with your hands in the air. Not of terror, not of delight, just a vocal expression of NOPE. I will also accept this.

I have so many windows open on my work computer I think it's going to just give up. People have returned to the wedge section of the office, so there is increased traffic by my desk and the return of loitering behind me to have extremely loud conversations. Touque guy is now fedora guy. Also children are here for some reason. One has a batman hoodie and they decided that jumping as hard as they can near my desk is a good idea.

This week I learned that the fastest way to horrify Amy is to tell her I put bras in the dryer. Her despair was exponentially increased when I told her one of them escaped the mesh bag I use, hooked itself to the door on the inside of the dryer and got trapped under some clothes to be mercilessly ripped in half by the soggy mass of linen (I'm in a descriptive mood today). I opened the dryer and half of a bra was just...hanging there. I actually laughed when I saw it cause it was old and falling apart anyway, but DAMN it was comfortable. Its loss will be lamented. Usually it's the tank tops that get their straps all a-twist. Anyway, I guess I truly am the Lord of the Laundry (incidents).

Evil Within Chapter 5's first 30 minutes start with a 2 second audio desync. It ends with a 10 second desync. How?

And now for something completely different

Yeah okay something else - Look what this week has done to me. How fast do you think YT will rip this playlist apart?

Or maybe this - Can't remember if I did this one before. Oh well.

My brain - Don't ask how I stumbled upon this. The chorus sums up the week nicely though.

I think I discovered why I constantly feel terrible. It's a combination of stress spikes and what I'm eating. Seems to me that I can't have more than a little dairy (most cheese and yoghurt seems to be okay) because even if it's lactose free, it seems to sucker-punch my digestive track. Also beef is occasionally terrible in that I'll have it when I'm feeling generally good and be okay, but if I'm even SLIGHTLY off it'll be a few hours to a few days of just an unpleasant feeling in my gut (kind of like the Drumpf Effect). Carbonated drinks make things worse. Random types of seafood seems to make my heart race despite how delicious it is. Also legumes are apparently the kryptonite to my intestines.

So that's fun. Not really sure what I want to do. Eat delicious things and feel terrible or contemplate cutting out everything remotely tasty for periods of time. I should probably get this looked into, but like with other issues usually I just get a shrug from the doctor rather than a legitimate plan.

Wow, Much Lag

Very Slow. Such fail. Wow.

My browser and the internet at work is flipping out.

The park has been fairly quiet this week since the tire exploding incident. I still have no clue how they managed to drive the wrong way down a one-way street and burst their tire (and then proceed to drive on the flat tire despite the damage they were doing to their rims). That and the swing lady seems to be mixing up her schedule to be out there at midnight instead of 5am.

Grosse Pointe Blank - This is Kim's fault.

High Fidelity - This is Heather's fault.

Hey Mesk. Look. - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs - Matador (Official Video)

Video work is going slow, mostly because I'm lazy and also because I've been spending the majority of my time writing or watching people make fun of the American elections. I'll be away all weekend. I'll either be reading and trying not to get a sunburn, or being dragged behind a boat at unreasonable speeds if people can talk me into trying to drown myself again. The former would be good 'cause I'll finally get some reading done, however, the latter would be good practice for the Drumpf presidency scenario.

I'll be back Monday night. Ish.

Oh, also, I caught an Abra and hatched a Snorlax. Yey.

Street Racers and Poke Battles

This past week has been an interesting one. Started out with a Karaoke adventure that ended prematurely because I started feeling really ill and also included the room randomly clearing whenever a new Pokemon was announced to be running around outside. So far a number of friends have been out late every night doing laps around the major Pokemon areas, one of them out until 3am with about 100 other people. Then, since there's a gym literally in front of my house (but unfortunately not close enough to access which would have been GREAT for trolling), we've had the daytime horde of children and teens fighting over it. Then between...let's say 10pm and 2am we get cycle of small strike teams that will either walk or spontaneously jump out of cars to come take the gym and then just disappear into the night. The cycle is usually Yellow > Red > Really strong Blue > Weak Yellow. Last night it stayed blue. Not that I'm monitoring it or anything. But literally anything anyone says in the middle of the park is amplified and echoes because the houses are in a semi-circle around it.

Oh and then a couple nights ago I was woken up at 3am by street racers when one of them (a beige/brown truck...like actually a truck...street racing) didn't realize the road ended and promptly slammed on their brakes to stop. Doesn't really work when you're going 120km/h+ in a 50km/h zone, so I woke up to tires squealing, then a crunch, then more squealing, then some engines revving, then one final squeal. Eight minutes later the police show up and one of the neighbours goes out to talk very loudly to them (not that the entire block wasn't already awake. Went outside to assess the damage the next day and well...

This is the fourth time this has happened in some form. This wasn't the worst though cause the truck drove away with its two buddies. The worst was when a couple of high teenagers were speeding, didn't realize the road ended and crashed through the park to hit a tree on the other side. No one has been seriously injured yet, but it'll likely happen eventually. I mean singing lady is out there at 5am a lot.

Today's theme for Soundtrack Not Thursday is stuff people have been trying to get me to watch and I just haven't had time for yet:

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood - Chris and Amy both say this is good and encourage me to watch it. I binge-watched the original series when I was a teenager after a high school friend died. No idea why I did that to myself, but it wasn't bad. Apparently this series is better.

Walking Dead (Vol 1) - Nope still haven't watched any, much to a lot of people's surprise and disgust. What? Zombies just don't really interest me. Yes, I know it's more than that etc etc.

Daredevil Season 2 - Watched the first season, but haven't gotten around to the second season. Still waiting for Jessica Jones season 2.

Also if you would like to see one of the most anguishing moments I have ever experienced in a game. Enjoy.

PS - If anyone is wondering, I'm Instinct. I think the dodgeball Pokemon group (this is kinda hilarious when you think about it) are all in denial because they keep telling me to take the gym in front of my house for Valor. And I'm like sure...for "Valor." I'm literally the only one in that crew on team yellow. 90% of them are Valor and the rest (like 3 people) are on Mystic.

PSS - Pro tip: Put your coffee down before you try to catch Pokemon.

PSSS - With the coffee incident, the two times I've fallen up the stairs with drinks and the spill of an entire glass of lemonade all over my desk, I feel there is a sippy cup for me in my future.

PSSSS - You both scary and hilarious America.

Moose Moose Beaver Hockey, Igloo Igloo, Hoser

Pretty angry so I forgot it was Thursday until now. Granted it's only 10am, but still. Currently listening to the Age of Empires 2 soundtrack because I like it and it makes me less angry for some reason.

So I'm supposed to get officially cleared by one of our clients because I MIGHT work on the account. I likely won't be, but I need to do it anyways because apparently we're all criminals waiting to happen. I fill out their forms and give them an arm and a leg. They ask me for my soul next and I'm like, dude, I can't give you my soul right now, I don't have the right information at the moment. So they keep emailing me over and over ignoring my email stating why my soul is currently off the market. Finally they find my email or w/e and are like okay well you could TRY sending this part of your soul and I'm like k, I'll do that when I'm able to. Then they just email me out of the blue today and are like yeah...so we're going to need your first born child as well.

The analogy has gotten a little weird, but I don't appreciate having arbitrary requirements thrust upon me. Apparently this has only happened to one or two of my other coworkers and some got away with sending like...a driver's license as ID AND proof of address like...there is no reason you, as a company, should know everything about me. 

Talked to some other coworkers and apparently only two of them have gotten off with no additional requests. One person got it bad enough that they were asking for financial records from their personal business. 

Anyway....

I remember last week I decided to have a Final Fantasy week (suggested by Delta). So here you go.

Final Fantasy 3 - A lot of people seem to really like this one.

Final Fantasy 4 - I THINK this was the one Shauna said she really liked. 

Final Fantasy 6 - Because tormenting Mesk is fun...I mean, in honour of his LP.

I'm off for the day. Expect Riven to appear soon on my page. It's time. Also working on another video project that I'll share soon.

Toasters and Kettles

I burned the top of my mouth on stew last night. It's not happy today. What is happy is the breaker was reset (finally) for the coffee machine in the kitchen at work, so today should be a little more functional than yesterday. Apparently running the toaster and kettle at the same time is catastrophic.

Dirty Dancing - Kim's suggestion. Was nice an upbeat for working on reports, which all managed to work somehow this month. Well, as much as they ever work.

Princess Bride - Guess I'm stuck in the 80s today.

Top Gun - 80ssssssss

I started constructing custom assets for the RPG. I did a test piece last night (in the form of a photocopier) for the game, because until this point, the placeholder for these things were rows and rows of microwaves. It didn't turn out half bad...though the shadows on it are a little funky. Also having trouble gauging size, but I've always been a little spatially challenged (as anyone who has watched me play puzzle games will know). The good news is I have some base-level skills for making my own crap, so I might be able to make items and objects on an "as-needed" basis. One thing I'm not skilled enough to do (at the time) is characters and portraits. That I may need to find other assets for. Also I got Mesk's Captain Planet Sprite to function as intended so there's that little success as well. The office (tutorial zone), believe it or not, is reaching completion. I have all the hard stuff and customization left. Most of the scripting is done at this point...except Grey Morton, some encounters and battles, and the last bits of Purple and Blue Morton. I still don't know what to do with the one room either...

I'll need to do some edits and clean-up of the dialogue (I've been rushing a bit out of necessity to test if certain scripts work) and then test absolutely everything. There's already a few things I've encountered that just make no logical sense, so I'll need to get clever.

Clawing through the rest of the week. I'll have like...a million questionable quality Vermintide videos on reserve if I run out of things to post. Meanwhile just trying to get through the backlog as usual.

In Memorium

My grandfather passed away early Tuesday morning, so this week has been a little chaotic. A lot of my family had to fly in from other cities, but they got here in time. Will be having random family passing through the city all the way up to the funeral next week, so I'm going to be a little preoccupied dealing with that as well as my own personal feelings. He hasn't been well since before my grandma passed, but his health declined after she was gone. He had a rare type of dementia, so his quality of life wasn't the greatest. He would have never wanted to live like that. The staff where he was living was fantastic though, and I can't thank them enough for taking good care of him and making sure he was as comfortable as possible.

Soundtrack Thursday is dedicated to him today. When he was healthy, he really loved watching Star Trek. Going through his things at his house a few years ago we found so many VHS and DVDs of Star Trek, old and new. He never watched any of the new remake movies, so today I'm going to listen to the old movies as well as TV soundtracks. 

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Great nostalgic soundtrack...until you hit Amazing Grace in bagpipes. And I know why there's bagpipes. I've just never been a fan of them at funeral type things. That said, if I could arrange a chorus of screaming bagpipes for a my funeral, that would be hilarious. Would have to be like 5 conflicting bagpipes though.

Star Trek VIII: First Contact - Figured I'd get a film from the second generation of crew and captain. I always personally liked Picard more, but I'm also a fan of Sir Patrick Stewart, so I'm biased. 

Collection of Musical Scores - Here's a broad range of feature scores for Star Trek that I stumbled across. Figure it's a good way to end off the afternoon.

For those of you that missed the last post (of the like...5 people that read this), the Myst series is now fully live and updated on YouTube. The playlist is public, but the videos are unlisted. It's the weakest in the series (of my gameplay at least), so I thought I'd avoid spamming people with an entire 8 part LP when it's not that great. I'll be uploading Riven in July, which in my opinion is the best so far, and I will make those videos public. Other than that, I can't promise any regular updates over the next few weeks, but I'll try to get what I can released.

Myst 1

Hey all...kind of a rough weekend for me. Well, kind of a rough Sunday at least. Saturday was super productive and I got out to play some games with co-workers and then I got blind-sided by my grandpa's health suddenly taking a turn for the worse Sunday morning. Working from home today in case I need to make a quick trip downtown, but yeah...my little burst of productivity has been killed. Thankfully I have a repository of content to draw on for awhile.

Either way, this is the official announcement of the beginning of the Myst content I plan to release in bursts during the summer. Each game will be have unlisted videos released under a public playlist initially so I'm not spamming subscribers with relatively slow-paced, contemplative videos. I will post timestamps for various events during the videos so you can find what you need/what you want to watch. This will be exceptionally valuable because even I was getting annoyed with some of the parts (but I know all the answers now). Originally I never intended to post the entire video segments, but...you get 'em anyway.

Myst 1 Series can be found here.

As promised, I also have my written notes and drawings:

Good luck trying to decipher everything. May help if you're watching the video and I mention that I write something down...especially for the tunnel cart puzzle (i.e. picture 2). 

I Remembered This Week

But I forgot my lunch for a second time. I grabbed the important things: keys, clothes for badminton, coffee...but left my sad Frankenstein salad on the counter. Second time this week I forgot my lunch. There is no delicious food from a food truck to save me today. The double food truck week is next week. Guess I'm going to have to venture into Hipster Town to get over-expensive food. See, this is why I need to restock on emergency noodles.

Payday 2 - Asked Delta what I should listen to and he said Skyrim and Payday. I'm pretty sure I've done Skyrim a few times now so...Payday it is. So far it's been pretty good to work to. It has elements of Unreal Tournament in the tracks. It's like they took that sound track, added more dubstep or drum/bass and then...uh opera? Sorry operatics suddenly just started as I was typing this. Ode to Greed. All right.

Crypt of the Necrodancer - I have no idea what the hell this is, but it seems to have a similar music style, so I was curious. The art they use for the video looks like female Link digging up a rave grave.

VTM has turned out to be amazingly broken. Might have been my fault though. Okay, it's DEFINITELY my fault, but we're not sure if it's 'cause I ran it not on the patch once. Shauna had a patch for VTM that I didn't know about or forgot about, but we didn't seem to have issues then. Now...well the wires, cables and chains that are physics enabled look like they're caught in a hurricane, doors are disappearing, entire assets are disappearing, and we're getting stuck in doors and between shelves constantly. There's also people warping all over the place, a lot of jittering and fences and water missing so we can access areas we really shouldn't be able to access.

More War for the Overworld (DLC) coming as well as Murdered videos. I want to try and finish that series soon so I can move on. Motivation...we'll that's harder to attain.

Whoops

Never finished or pressed publish on Friday. It was a musical day.

Lion King the Musical Soundtrack - Shauna recommended this one to me. Always enjoyed Lion King music. I was obsessed when I was 5-7 years old.

Prince of Egypt - Such a good soundtrack. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit as a kid too. Hans Zimmer did an amazing job.

Disney Piano Collection - I just thought this was nice to listen to on a Friday afternoon. Need something a little lighter before the weekend. Monday is the heavy music day.

I'm just going to call last week a fail in terms of regular posting for both video and these blog things.



Monday Edit: So early Sunday morning I wake up and I hear someone outside singing or something. Being a tired grouch, I just turned over and promptly fell back asleep. Wake up one hour later and they're STILL singing. I fall back asleep again cause 6am is an ungodly hour. I was later informed that it was a woman, singing back and forth on a swing at the playground in front of my house, for over an hour. Kind of weird/creepy. Thought it was a one-off thing, but yeah, it happened again this morning. Either I need to figure out what this is about or start closing the windows at night (weather is about to get hot though so...)

Buh?

I completely forgot it was Thursday today, so I'll postpone soundtrack day to tomorrow. I blame a poor sleep. I woke up at like 430am cause I was too hot, then I threw off the covers and it was too cold like ten minutes later, so I put the covers back on again and then had to throw them off a few mins later etc. Eventually found a happy medium and then my abdomen started complaining because of something I ate or w/e. Anyway when I finally dragged myself out of be I noticed the window was wide open next to me.

So since I fail, here's the song I haven't been able to stop listening to the last couple of days. Also, I think my mind is tissue paper because it ripped in half after this.

I feel like I should at least give you an update, so over the past week I've mostly been working on clearing out the Saints Row 4 stuff. I found an old Thief 1 test recording from...who knows when taking up 13GB of my hard drive so I processed that and uploaded it to the unreleased folder. I made the decision to take all the Guild Wars 1 footage I have and just process it into unedited footage (i.e. not pair it down into a clip show like SR4) as we are unlikely to continue it at the moment and if we did pick it up again we'd likely start over. That way I clear up space. I have two Dead Space videos uploaded, but unreleased and am considering that series finished. I will likely still lower the difficulty just to officially finish it, but I'm mostly moving on now.

I'll likely just marathon a good 4-5 hours to finish the Murdered series so I can move my focus to Evil Within for the co-op series. I'm continuing to record VTM with Shauna today actually. I need to bring my external to her house though since she's running out of hard drive space.

As for writing I've actually been mostly focused on that lately. I'm still re-editing Mesk's Ret Tech document and working on the RPG as well as WMRR. My productivity has been drastically reduced due to a struggle with motivation and mood issues. I'm slowly crawling my way out of that, but for now, business as usual. Looking forward to when I get my poop in a group and release the stock pile of videos I have built up over the past couple months. It's been pretty sparse due to laziness lately. Sorry 'bout that.

I'll also have to take time in the near future to tell you all the tale about my boss, his inherited Italian Apartment and the saga of the squatters. I swear to god he has the best stories.

Patience Test

Well, on the driving related topic of last week, I got my class 5 GDL license...but at a hefty price. Yeah sure, I passed, but it was expensive both for my wallet and for my patience. The person who tested me was confusing, took me on the wrong route, pointed out random things that had nothing to do with the test CONSTANTLY so I was distracted, then would announce when I missed the important things to the point where I was so confused and flustered and made more mistakes because I had no idea what the hell she wanted. It's taken me a full week to get over this. Whatever. I passed. It's done. I don't need to do another test until I'm old and probably shouldn't be driving anyway. By then we'll likely have all self-driving cars anyway.

So this week I've been working on some side projects including writing, some Left4Dead2 with friends, working on that RPG I started weeks ago and re-editing some stuff for Mesk. Pro tip. Don't edit a document across 3 computers under two different formats. Apparently you lose half of what you've done. I still don't know how this happened. Also participated in a dodgeball tournament and came second. I have some lovely trophy bruises on my legs, so I've been wearing pants all week to work despite the heat. I actually participated in the Quick Draw as well this year so, you should see me losing horribly in that video.

Update on that RPG: Mesk sent me a bunch of the scripts he used for his Captain Planet RPG and I'm slowly beginning to plug those in and test them. There are a couple that work independently and a couple that need a few of the other scripts to work, so I'm going through them, figuring out what I'd like to use, and testing them out. Nothing too complicated has been added...yet, but I expect everything to snap in half at the slightest provocation. I'll make the second dev video of this soon. First can be found here if anyone's curious. It's mostly just me getting confused and laughing at my own oversights/stupidity.


Uncharted 4 - Not quite done this yet, but I don't see much harm in listening to the soundtrack. I can imagine what's in store for me. It's a really good game so far though. I've been enjoying a lot of the random little dialogue bits and just the detail put into the different environments and the way you interact with them. Simply fantastic.

Tomb Raider (2013) - I plan on playing this series sometime in the future. I have a collection of the games on Steam, so I just need to find the time to play them (hah).

Thief (2014) - Oliver is still afraid to play this because he's worried it'll taint his perspective of the original 3 games (which I also still need to play).

Oh man where am I at right now? Currently finishing Uncharted 4, continuing VTM with Shauna, occasionally making more Saints Row 4 (will be posting those soon), haven't touched Shadow of Mordor or Planet Alcatraz in awhile, need to continue Myst 4 and...I think I have some outstanding projects with Delta.

Balls, Pedestrians and Cold Coffee

This week is out to get me. Tuesday evening I nearly got hit with a 5 pin bowling ball. They're not the massive 10 pin ones, but a 4-5 pound ball travelling 20-50km/h could potentially kill me if it hit me. So I'm at work and I go to retrieve a bowling ball for a kid that didn't throw it hard enough down the lane and to fix the pins for him. The guy on the next lane, however, continues to whip balls down the lane as hard as he can while I'm there. Suddenly I see this blue object fly past about 5 feet to the right of me as the ball launches off the gutter and bounces off the top of the pinsetter.

5 pin balls regularly launch off the gutters there and fly into the back room. They bounce around a bit and dent walls and get chipped. They also sometimes bounce off the catwalk in front of the pins and smash into the black lights used to light up the pins when we do the glow bowling. I've seen that happen twice now where the black lights will get knocked out and fall, smashing all over the lane. Apparently there was some Russian guy in the bowling alley a few nights before that who got pissed that the scoring system didn't give him a spare and he ran down the lane, ducked under the board and kicked the pins over. He was removed. Also one of my coworkers has been spreading rumours about theft (multiple month old rumours actually) and now people are worried about being spied on by hidden cameras in the back room. Trust me guys, there's no cameras back there. We haven't been given the budget for it.

Then yesterday must have been a full moon or something because people were doing such stupid things. All the stupid. So downtown after I picked up Shauna to take her to her apartment walkthrough, there's this guy who just starts walking out into the middle of the road. I have a heart attack because I think I somehow missed a red light, but I looked up and it's green. The dude just crosses, staring at us like we personally offended him (I wonder if this is the same guy Kristy encountered...only this happened to me at 5pm and that happened to her at 12am). So I continue to drive and he just stands in the middle of the street. Meanwhile everyone behind me is confused and unsure of what to do cause he continues to cross after I've passed him.

I spend an hour taking pictures of Shauna's old place in case she needs them while she negotiates the moving out conditions and then we have to listen to the landlord go on and on and on about literally nothing. I have no idea what he was talking about the entire time. He was giving us some lecture on how some people like to clean a lot more than other people and then brought up some unrelated tenants and their cleaning habits. I had absolutely no patience for any of that so finally I just walked between him and Shauna, picked up my bag and just started opening the door. I think he finally got the idea at that point that at least I was done talking.

Then on my way home on Deerfoot (one of our cross-city highways) I was driving, turn a corner and see a guy running up the right-hand lane in the dark with a pylon. I nearly have another heart attack because I thought he was running at me and I didn't want to hit him (the speed limit on that road is 100km/h). Then not even five seconds later I see someone riding a bicycle with no lights in the dark on Deerfoot.

Sigh.

I guess this is what happens when you officially reach level 27. Thankfully I'm not a famous musician, or I'd be screwed.

Okay here's some soundtracks:

Uncharted 3 - Finished this game last weekend. Was good, but Uncharted 2 was better. I didn't have to deal with an angry shot-gun wielding Russian though. Just had a confusing warping fist-fight with a British guy. Onto Uncharted 4 right now, which is supposed to be excellent. So far it's been pretty good and not nearly as frustrating on the hardest difficulty as 3 was.

Age of Mythology - I played this one quite a bit as a kid as well. I only remember snippets of the game currently, but I remember a lot about the underworld and the shades as well as the Norse Mythology units. I also remember that Ajax was my favourite character but I can't remember why. This game had some good variety for map clear conditions in the campaign. I'm likely going to play this one again soon (see last week's rant on RTS games).

Started playing Myst 4 and got a few hours in. I was stumped on a stupid rod/hammer (lol) puzzle...mainly because I had the wrong conceptions about how it was supposed to work. I showed Oliver the puzzle and he ended up solving it, mostly because it made him angry. He accidentally figured out I was wrong about how to solve it and it was actually a lot more simple than anticipated. Again I over complicate things. I saved it after he figured it out, but I'm going to go back and do it myself. I'll probably put both of our struggles into the final video.

Permission to Cry?

So yesterday I took my car in for servicing because I have a recall that's over a year old and as it turns out I don't want to take the chance that my airbag might not deploy if the worst should happen. Turns out my car isn't in great shape and I'm going to end up spending about 1/3 of my car's total value (don't freak out just yet, it's a 2003 Civic). And this is after I opted out of half the repairs they suggested in favour of taking it to a guy I know for a second opinion. Fixing the most vital stuff at the moment and hoping everything else will hold out until August/September ish. Budget is going to be pretty tight this summer as I replenish my savings.

Age of Empires 2 - This soundtrack is extremely nostalgic. This was one of my favourite games as a kid, and remains to this day one of my favourite games of all time. As Kathleen likes to say...I'M A MAN ON A HORSE.

Uncharted 2 - I really liked this soundtrack out of the three games the most. Maybe it's because some tracks reminded me of the Legend of Korra. I also think this game is the best of the series so far (I haven't played 4 yet, which is supposed to be really good). The entire series is delightfully ridiculous. - Mesk, you might really like a few of the tracks in both Uncharted 2 and 3.

Unreal Tournament - Always enjoyed this soundtrack.

Work has been slow lately as I've been struggling with finding the motivation to get things done. I've also been playing a lot of Uncharted 1-3 (currently near the end of the third one) because I get to sit on the couch, be lazy and occasionally scream obscenities at the game because I elected to play the third one on the highest difficulty possible and everything can kill me in essentially two hits. I promise I'll return to my current projects soon...I just need to get out of this funk first.

Had some new requests on one of my recent videos with Delta. Apparently I haven't been playing enough mainstream or "classic" games. I have to admit, the last couple months I've been playing a lot more obscure things, but I didn't think that bothered anyone really. Regardless, I'll be continuing those until I finish them. I also have all the Saints Row 4 and Myst series in reserve.

I think I've touched on why I don't generally LP RTS games. It's recently come up again, so I figure I can give you the run down. It's not that I don't like them. Warcraft 2, for instance, used to be my favourite game when I was 8 years old...before I discovered Dungeon Keeper 2 and Diablo. The problem is that I find micromanagement very difficult. I am terrible at focusing on multiple elements at a time. I can't remember order of operations easily, I constantly forget things like upgrades and I haven't taken the time and effort to learn when to build what and when to act. I am a lot better at strategy and game plan, but that doesn't matter when you can't make your units and buildings come together in a logical way to orchestrate that. One of the reasons I really like Dungeon Keeper 2 and War for the Overworld is that things kind of just...take care of themselves in the background and I can focus on crushing my enemies. Pro tip if you ever play against me though: I often get tunnel vision.

I'm also, historically, an extremely defensive player. As a kid, I always built up my base and army exactly how I wanted because the AI allowed me to do so. I got into a lot of bad habits doing this (and I was really gutless in a lot of ways). I had to learn (and am still learning) how to be aggressive. Playing against real people really screwed me up, because I got used to losing every single game and the constant humiliation because of it. I learned an extremely valuable lesson about people during those years. Let's just say that I'm still friends with the people who were patient with me and never made me feel like shit no matter how bad I was.

That said, a) I don't think I would be good enough to be entertaining (I would just frustrate people who have taken the time and effort to get good at the genre), b) I don't think I can handle the criticism that would result as well as I could with any other LP type (as I'm already criticising myself constantly). The only RTS games I would probably do in the foreseeable future would be the Age of Empires series, Age of Mythology or Warcraft 2 (which I've already done a little dabbling in).

Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty awful at virtually every other game, but I have patience with both those games and myself...to an extent. Evil Within is always the exception. God that game was awful.

Unholy Grail

Last night I expected to find the holy grail of documents, music and other files on the hard drive I pulled out of the old laptop. I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I spent a good hour+ trying to get into it too. The one good section I recovered was all of my old school and writing class stuff as well as a dump of all the early WMRR documents (of which I was looking for one particular piece of information and it turned out to be lame so I'm not using it). I also found a section of old conversations I saved for whatever reason and god I used to know some annoying, pretentious people. That's not to say I wasn't annoying myself. It's amazing what 8 years can do to a person. I hope I'm not as irritating as I used to be back in the MSN messenger days. Also half the conversations make absolutely no sense. I think we were all on crack. At any rate, unless I find something particularly useful, I'm going to obliterate these logs permanently once and for all.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any of Mesk's old video. I think everything I had was copied onto the externals, so what I have there is what I got. There's some ancient backup CDs, but I'm pretty sure I've already scoured those. One entertaining bit I found, however, was a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack stuff. God it's hilarious. I can't believe I listened to this stuff seriously:

Shadow the Hedgehog - So I listened to this entire thing at work today. I was squirming in my seat at some points and stifling laughter. I have to admit though, some of it is a little catchy. I can see why I liked it with some of the heavier rock tunes. Man "Almost Dead" and "All Hail Shadow" are terrible though. I really need to do something silly with these tracks. Oh god...the memories. NO VECTOR, SHUT UP ABOUT THE COMPUTER ROOM. NO I WILL NOT TOUCH YOUR GLIMMERING JEWELS. Just...the reveal at the end...the gas...the blobs...okay, Michael and I need to LP this.

My soundtrack Thursday got a little derailed. All right...

Sonic Adventure Battle 2 - Again, just...some truly awful tracks. There's some great level music though. Michael and I used to spam the sound test tracks. That "Follow Me" song is perpetually stuck in my head. It takes like 2 seconds of the song for it to take hold.

I refuse to play the Sonic Heroes soundtrack. At least for now.

"When there's nothing left to lose, you win!"

...what? Well, I suppose it's...optimistic, but in a depressing way.

Allergies Suck

Spring hates me. Understatement of the season. I'm pretty sure I sneeze more than my entire office combined. If I don't sneeze at least once an hour, assume that I died in a tidal wave of support tickets. I should be recording LPs right now. It's basically my trademark that I'm wasting here. Though, Mesk would likely argue that my trademark is either being RIP or laundry.

Lightbulbs also apparently hate me to as I have made three explode simply by turning on the lights in the past couple months. Either I'm cursed or we have really poor quality lightblubs in the house. That said, according to YouTube commenters I sold my soul to the devil to make Diablo 1 work, so maybe that's the problem.

Mad Max: Fury Road - I can't remember if I did this one before, but I watched the movie again recently and I really love it.

Pacific Rim - Quick! Go watch/listen before YouTube strangles the life out of it! Too bad about the audio blips in between tracks though.

Lord of the Rings - Ooooh I found a really nice compilation. Fun fact: I own that poster in the background. Mildly awkward story about how I got it. However, this isn't the time or place to tell that story, so I'll let you all make up your own story.

My friend wrote a book and it is now published/released! Between Fire and Pines by Kathleen Sawisky is now available online through Amazon. You can find it here: https://www.createspace.com/6226638

I think she's also got a contest going to win one of her books for free if that's more your cup of tea: https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/fc18c34d940eff6a/?ref_=tsm_4_fb_h_o_li_r#ln-ln

Also finished Legend of Korra for the first time over the past couple of days. I think I have my favourite scene from it. I enjoyed the whole series quite a bit, but this is the only part I actually went back to watch again immediately after seeing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmmP4uHRmkk

It's right up there with my favourite scene from The Last Airbender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ8aLRnd80k

I think you may be able to determine the sense of humour I have based off these clips alone...

Shouting and Shout-outs

I cannot begin to describe my hatred for Tableau. Every time I use this program there is an endless struggle with the formatting and maps. I really just need to take a crash course and just sit down and learn how to use this effectively, because so far I'm just using what's been given to me and I keep having to come up with dirty little tricks to get it to work in my favour. I'm not sure what changed since last time to make it so I can't refresh all extracts at once. I didn't do this report last month so something may have been adjusted without my knowledge. The good news is Argentina isn't disappearing. The bad news is Tableau hates Cameroon. Oh and Japan. Japan was a problem last time. Maybe it's included in another filter list for some strange reason...ah hah! Why is Jersey AND Japan included in South Asia? I don't recall doing that. Wait why is Jersey included in North Asia too? WHO MADE THESE FILTERS? Oh yeah...

It's okay, I found Japan. I still have no idea what happened to Cameroon though. It's fine. I cheated either way.

Noooo Russia you're too big. Also how did Algeria get included with Eastern Europe? I swear it's, not me for once. It's the list I was given. How...? Okay whatever. Congratulations Algeria, you are now located in Eastern Europe despite actually being in Africa.

As for the actual built report, China somehow broke. Wait...how did the number of active users exceed the total users. What snapped in half? Oh god...

Also, fyi, if you're running a report and it takes 7 hours, maybe consider that you have accidentally entered the year as 2015 instead of 2016. I have no idea how it ran when the start date for that period was before the start date of the previous period. With all the things that have broken for less...THIS ran the full way through.

Civil War is out this weekend and a friend got tickets so we're going to see it. Figured I'd reflect that in my soundtrack Thursday.

Captain America: First Avenger - Have fun getting track 26 out of your head.

Iron Man - I just love how all pre-existing full compilations have ceased to exist thanks to YouTube's copyright rampage. There was another big one recently and now there's companies claiming on behalf of other companies. It's confusing. And annoying.

I have some shout-outs to a few people here. Right now on the Legends are Gaming website (http://legendsaregaming.com/) they're finishing up a week of streaming (mostly Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft) and are currently in the middle of a Diablo 3 giveaway! Check out this link if you're interested in winning a copy of Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. You should be able to find all the links to LAG's YouTube etc. on the previous link.

My friend and fellow Extra Life player Kathleen is publishing her book! Last I heard it was almost ready for release (she's writing the blurb on the back). I will post an official link to where she'll be selling it online, but if you want to learn more for now, check out her GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/fireandpines

PS - This blog should really just be renamed "Schwa's Adventures with Macs and Reporting: A Saga of Occasional Lost Laundry." You'd have to dig through a lot of confusing rants to piece together the context.

PSS - I forgot to press "publish" yesterday.