GOD MY EYES

I spent many hours auditing projects that have reached a specific support level to determine whether they reached their support level legitimately. I feel like I'm coming out of a deep sleep and my brain is a little fried. I spent a good 10 minutes mad at my spreadsheet because I couldn't figure out why two cells were highlighted green. I figured out later after that the search was still on, but not displaying properly. It was a maddening experience. Definitely been staring at a screen too long.

Pyre is released tomorrow, which means I'll be madly trying to free up recording space tonight after I get home from celebrating my brother's 21st birthday. I might even have access tonight, but I work tomorrow and will likely be way too tired to dive into it. I debated live-streaming, but I kind of want my first playthrough to be uninfluenced by others. If I really like the game, I'll consider streaming some in the future.

Also I have a Patreon set up now. Shauna finally made me give in and make one. While it's always nice to have a little extra money, it makes me insanely uncomfortable to set something like this up because I never started making videos and writing for money. I do it because I enjoy it and I'm learning from it. I do it because I'm creating, and that's all I've wanted to do since I've had conscious thought and memory. I'm not going to stop creating whether I'm getting money from people or not, so it never really appealed to me. It's not going to change or influence what I do either, and I don't want people to feel like I betrayed their expectations. Regardless, the people I work with are fantastic and I respect them a lot, so if I can help support what they do even in tiny ways, that makes me happy.

So, for the curious: https://www.patreon.com/EversorFatalis

And seriously, if you want to throw money around, you totally have the option of helping Kathleen meet her goals this year: https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=249862&referrer=bfAphFbPfSched

Who knows, maybe if I DO make something, I can buy commissioned portraits or something else I currently lack the skill to make for the RPG.

Either way, I need to started uploading some of the public drive stuff as unlisted video. I'll forgo all of the third-party music ones though as many of those would likely be blocked or monatized and the whole point of not monatizing my account in the first place is because I want people to be able to watch free, ad devoid content (as lame as it is coming from me).

Discount Guy Fieri

Was driving to work yesterday morning and this dude that looks uncomfortably like Guy Fieri pulls up behind me at a red light. Was in a vintage car and everything. Dark orange and not red though. I couldn't stop staring and then I started laughing.

I had more to say for this yesterday, but then some stuff went down at work and I missed the announcement concerning it because I was out taking something to my car. Then today I found out Chester from Linkin Park died so I'm just...really sad. Sounds like he's been dealing with a lot of tough stuff for years now. I know a lot of people that love the band, the music and the person. I've been listening to Linkin Park since I was 12 or 13 years old, so that's literally more than half my life. I'm so glad I saw them live when they came to Calgary for X Fest that one year.


So yeah...I'll do a real update next week. All you really need to know is RPG work continues and Starsworn isn't actually cancelled, it's just postponed and will be changing a bunch.

Bot Hunters

Fast approaching is the release a few of the games I've actually been looking forward to this year. Pyre and the new Life is Strange stories are coming out this summer and I am super excited for both. I am most excited for Pyre because it's coming from a gaming company I actually trust to produce quality gameplay and storytelling. I'm just expecting the Life is Strange episodes to emotionally destroy me. I hope to put these two up there with Horizon in games that actually impressed me this year. Outlast 2 was one Shauna and I were looking forward to, but man was it lacking.

Over the past couple of weeks at work I've teamed up with one of my coworkers in dev and we've been hunting bots on one of the sites I do tech support for. It's actually been quite interesting because each person has gamed the system in very different ways. I mean, the results are essentially the same, but each one tried a different strategy and had varying results. I could safely say I'd know exactly how to fool us/our system and get away with it, but I definitely do not have the skills for it currently. Anyhow, I've gotten really good at spotting suspicious behaviour on the site. I feel like a cross between a bounty hunter and a detective...only like the most lame one in existence.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43yqdd/look-at-this-massive-click-fraud-farm-that-was-just-busted-in-thailand

It's a common problem rife on social media sites. Unfortunately, all it's going to take is a more clever person to beat the system. It's almost worth not doing anything since we know how to catch people as is and would be akin to a trap. It's just...a lot of work investigating each case. So we're automating detection and likely putting in a recaptcha to give bots a hard time. My coworker already explained how this could be circumvented, but it requires a non-trivial amount of work on the cheater's side (i.e. they need to actually know what they're doing).

Anyhow, it's keeping me busy at work and I get to make a lot of spreadsheets, which is keeping my inner data nerd at bay. I've only crashed Excel twice since this started and one of them was because I tried to extract and open a  report including 6 months worth of activity on a site with over 500,000 users. That was my bad.

The best part is some of the smart ones that have been confronted with their cheating and banished are trying to get more information out of us stating that it's not enough evidence to condemn them. It's so tempting to slap them in the face with it, but it's unwise to give smart people the tools they can use to best you in the future.


Update on the dude who said I was annoying (one of them at least...I think there's a club): He has started his own Dungeon Siege LP (no voice unfortunately) and has-----WAIT FOR IT-----changed his dislike to a like on my video since I was so nice. I'll be sure not to spend it all in one place.

Also, the D&D campaign Mesk was going to run is now cancelled, which is a little disappointing because I was looking forward to that. I hope he picks it up again, but I guess for now I can turn my attention and focus back to completing my writing and RPG.

Don't Know What Ure Doing

It's true.

I'll never understand the people who comment on your channel to tell you that you suck or that you're annoying, but don't actually give you any useful feedback or pointers. They're there just to get a reaction, though I'm getting good at frustrating or confusing people to the point that they just leave. It's a win-win really. They either keep coming back and boosting views/comments while I mock them, or they leave which means they aren't my problem anymore. The most recent one left after he failed at gaslighting and I told him I was eagerly awaiting his response with how much fun I was having.

EDIT: He responded and now we're talking about how tired I am.

This weekend was spent getting some semblance of control over my life again. I got mad at the kitchen when I couldn't find some things, started tidying it up and then it got out of control and I did a full clean of the entire thing. It looks beautiful and I will murder the first person to make a mess in there. The problem now is that the sitting area has a bunch of crap all over the place, so this project is going to spiral out of control really fast.

I read through/audited/edited 104 pages of WMRR on the weekend, which is GREAT because I have a bit more in the reader version of the file. I'm slowly building the things I'm happy with into the document and then we will handle the unpleasant bits. I'm worried that the first third of the series is starting too slow, but it's kind of important to see where the characters started and where they end up.

Worked on the RPG a bit, but only in the context of fixing things/adding assets. Long story short, fixed some fiddly bits, lost the stapler I made and then I broke steam by adding an erase event and trying to save while something played in the sound test. So yeah progress is slow in that department.

Shauna and I also finished Outlast 2 over the weekend. It ended rather...abruptly in my opinion in that I had started a new video/audio file expecting 30mins-1hour of more gameplay, but it ended up being 10 more minutes. Shauna came back from the washroom and the game was over. We gave a full-length review at the end, but we were struggling on a few points since we really weren't ready for the review yet. I was just angry for the first half of it because I still had a lot of questions that went unanswered.

I have...so much video content to catch up on I'm pretty much drowning in it. It's a lot of time and effort I could be spending on a lot of other projects that are interesting me a lot more. That said, I still enjoy making videos. I just feel bad when I'm only releasing two segments of Pillars of Eternity a week.