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.