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.