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.

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.

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.

Purple is the Manliest Colour

It's true.

(seriously, not going to let that one go any time soon).

Today will be a double post day as it's the beginning of Comic Con (yey). I'll be leaving work and heading right over to the grounds to wander the con and see what's there this year. I'll be posting daily recaps as I usually do. Friday will be short though as I'm only running over there in the middle of the day on my "lunch" to see Agent Coulson. I won't be there in the evening cause I'm going to be helping clean up a place. 

For now...soundtracks!

Psycho-pass - Didn't get to this one last week. It's another of Mesk's.

Persona 3 - One of Kristy's favourite games if I recall.

This week was probably the only time I'll ever accomplish 20,000 words worth of writing. Ever. I can't believe some people find this to be a small amount. I can't even comprehend that notion. The reason I was able to do this? I'm preparing a compendium of my work so I can try and organize my thoughts and solidify the history and lore for this project. I'm trying, so hard, to get a full reader's copy done and I have learned through initial feedback that my delivery of the backstory and history in the first two chapters is lacking. I will amend this somehow. 

As for video, I have started Shadow of Mordor and continue with the usual line up of editing and recording previously mentioned this month in my posts. Hopefully I'll have this uploading soon. I also have a plan for a new series...but I won't elaborate on that quite yet. I want to do a beta first since my last attempt at trying something new ended with my hopes and dreams being crushed before the first installment was even complete. 

See you soon for my Thursday recap of the comic con!