Triple O

"Out of Office" for the next week. I will be travelling to Murica to partake of the many flavoured Oreos and Cherry Cola. I will return next weekend. I will have internet access for the entire week, but there shall be no recording (which is not necessarily a bad thing as I am low on hard drive space for the 1000th time due to Tera recordings) and I will either be bringing a hard drive with me, or pre-uploading my videos for the week. So there should be no interruptions in video releases unless I forget to make them public.

At least one of you will be pleased to learn that I am almost done editing Alien Isolation. It has been difficult finding a good chunk of time to do this as I have work, people I have promised to game with, other chores and appointments. Also turns out I need this "sleep" thing I keep hearing about. I thought I could just not sleep, but I tend to pass out periodically and it's really annoying. Sometimes when I'm playing a game. Yes, I recently had two microsleeps while recording Neverwinter with GeneralDelta. Oops.

Lord of the Rings: Third Age will be finished this week. I have 4 more episodes. May also add custom title cards as GeneralDelta was so kind to make them for me. Dead Space will continue as well. I REALLY need to finish recording it soon or I will completely forget how to play, and it's not a good time to forget about it. I've just been putting it off due to space constrictions and because I've been a little stressed out (and it is kind of a stressful game).

Meanwhile I've been streaming a bit as it does not require any hard drive space from me. I may be streaming some Left 4 Dead 2 with Shauna and Nick tonight. I'll see if they're up for a stream or not. Usually it's only one or two people watching anyway. http://www.twitch.tv/drschwa


SEE Y'ALL IN A WEEK.

Home Again

I never mentioned it but there were no uploads over the weekend because I was not in the country. I went down with some people to Montana IN AMERICA, to ski for the weekend. Quite a memorable weekend. Here are the highlights/main events:

-Got a total of 4 Tim Horton's cups and won nothing out of the 8 roll-up rims (2 per cup for 50th anniversary)
-Saw two golden eagles within a kilometre (or a mile as we were IN AMERICA) of each other feasting on the carcasses of two deer
-I tried "Cheez-its." At first I was like "meh," then suddenly an entire box was gone. Not sure what happened
-Counted 11 sightings of the ten commandments (which some people decided to turn into a drinking game)
-Encountered -40C weather without windchill. Decided skiing that day was a poor life choice. Pipes burst in 5 places in our building. Water was pouring from the garage area. We had no water for a day. The condo was very smelly.
-I only used my face to stop twice...less than 3 minutes apart. Hilariously enough it's also the same run I slid 1/3 of the way down on my back last year. I fell back on my skis and couldn't stand up, so I was just sliding and giggling the whole way, bouncing over moguls. Too bad that one wasn't on camera...
-Canadian Stage Charades was invented as we arrived at a pub, commandeered the entire second floor which happened to have a stage (they opened it as our group was 14 people), and someone suggested we play stage charades. Random people came upstairs to watch including the bar tender from downstairs who randomly decided to don a temporary mustache tattoo. The server also ended up participating. We weren't sure if the staff was amused or terrified
-A drunk man investigating the noise upstairs invited us to feel his jacket. He insisted it was silk. It was actually corduroy.
-We broke something nearly every day. A glass bowl nearly met its untimely end on the last day
-"RELEASE THE FARTS" is screamed and suddenly Mike and Ikes are launched from a bowl across the room (I'm not even sure of the context on this one...I walked in at the last second)
-The farts were released
-Apparently ice sculptures were constructed on the balcony after I went to sleep
-AMAZING POWDER AAAAAAA
-Holy crap you Americans have a lot of flavours of pop. Our group's main purchase in the U S of A may or may not have included Cherry and Vanilla coke. Because we don't get that here. Not cheap at least.
-Grapes were on sale, so I bought a bag of them for the weekend. I then forgot about them until we left and I remembered that fruits and vegetables at the boarder are not so great to have. So I ate an entire bag of grapes in an hour so they wouldn't be wasted. Never again. My colon is still refusing to forgive me.

The Plane to London

There are a lot of aspects I would like to write about from this trip, not only what happened and what we did, but what I was thinking and what I want to do now that I'm back home. I have a whole new set of ambition that I did not have when I left and I am excited to see it through. I did not manage to write every single day as I started out. I managed to keep up with the entries for about a week since I got tired or sick some days and didn't want to write anything. As of right now, I am 9 days behind. For the following journals, I will type the day I wrote it in brackets, and the day all the events occurred in italics. Any interjections I have with my original narrative will be bold like this block of text.

June 20, 2013

(June 21, 2013)

Strictly speaking, the date happens to be June 21, but I wouldn't want to leave out the first day of our fantastic journey across the European continent. We will be touching down in London soon at the Gatwick airport after a typical flight of movies on minuscule, dated screens (seriously, the only "tube" TV I've seen in the past few years is the crummy one I have in my bedroom to play Gamecube and Sega Genesis on) half hidden by passenger's heads, at least three screaming or crying children and the occasional bout of turbulence. On my right is Rachel, who is currently watching a movie about some guy in India collection old people (?) and to my left is a quiet man, whom I have decided is French, or at least of a French-speaking country (plus he chose the French option for his movie...I'm not creepy...). I liked his iPad cover. 

The day began with me not wanting to get up as it would likely be my last comfortable sleep in five weeks (I will be happy to be proven wrong). I was convinced to get up, however, by an irritating song on the radio (which is usually how I start most mornings). That, and I needed to finish packing. And I swear I mean finish this time. I was too stressed and nervous to leave it to the last possible minute as usual. The morning was mostly uneventful aside from a trip to my grandparent's house for coffee and cookies. Because what my nerves really needed was caffeine and sugar. Of course this was later helped by my last taste of Timmies, an iced cappechino I enjoyed with Hazen, Kyle, Rachel's mother and Rachel's mother's boyfriend.

We had our coffee and good-byes punctuated with the irritation of lines, papers and grumpy uniformed airport security at the scanners. Because the smell of a thousand feet is supposed to make me feel secure on my flight (I'm always a little bitter about security at airports). Regardless, I removed my footwear (the only city I actually HAD to going through security...which was odd), bag, phone, laptop, jacket like the rest. 

Upon passing an arcade outside security, we came across an old favourite of ours from Jr. High math class: Bubble Bobble. We decided we had time for a game. As my friend's lives dwindled, I still had two lives and limited minutes to get the high score. Triumph I did, though we barely made the last call for our gate as a consequence. Heh.

So here I sit, old people movie now complete (strange Indian theme on this flight with the showing of "Life of Pi" first), breathing recycled air as Rachel digs around in her pack for something eluding her reach. I will probably return to reading "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and actually finish this time after trying at least three times in the past to read it. It has actually piqued my interest, probably because I'm a fan of the episode based on the book in the BBC Sherlock. 

...

So thus begins our journey. On a cramped, stuffy, sleepy, dated aircraft.

(Which I will appreciate before this trip is over) 

I'm Back!

And ready to get back into writing and video production. I'll be beginning videos today, including more video game recording and to get back into Dungeon Siege 3 to beat that stupid multi-armed boss. I am not going to sleep tonight until that statue is no more. I have had a request to play Diablo 1 after this LP, so I shall do that. I also decided while I was away that I would LP Half Life 1 and Overlord 1. I feel like I have unfinished business with both. I'm also debating uploading the Baldur's Gate video footage that I have, but I'm not sure if it would be interesting enough. We'll see. I certainly get mad in it because of some of the fights.

I will also be posting updates here from my trip with video and pictures. I journalled the entire time (though I have yet to finish the last 9 days or so of the trip). I figure I can hit two birds with one stone by sharing what we did and edit them up in the process. My only fear is that I can't read my own writing. I shall start now. After all, what else is one to do at 5am when they can't sleep?

Travel

As of Thursday, I will be gone for a month and a half. I'm trying to get a lot of videos uploaded before then, but I won't have Dungeon Siege 3 fully recorded, encoded and uploaded before I go unfortunately. I won't be taking my laptop or external drives with me as they are too heavy and I don't want to risk them getting broken, lost or stolen (I can't really afford to let that happen). And so, I will try and post some updates here and perhaps have some videos prepared for when I return at the beginning of August.

I am done school, graduated and ready to work full time for the rest of my life. Good news is, I will probably have MORE time to record with no homework or papers to worry about. I'm actually going to miss school though. I'm a nerd.

So, I will be around for a few more days. After that, if you never hear from me again, I probably fell victim to one of the following:

-kidnapped by trolls
-got hopelessly lost and starved to death
-got eaten by a bear or a giant rabid moose or a grue
-got assaulted by a killer rabbit or beaver or a combination of the two
-executed my leap of faith incorrectly and missed the haystack
-got hit by a runaway scooter
-sacrificed myself to disarm a bomb that would have been sent to the earth's core in a desperate attempt to destroy the world
-choked on a crepe
-went crazy after being bitten by a cave spider
-got run over by a street cleaner
-got slapped in the face with a cod
-got trapped in an invisible box by mimes
-engaged in an epic battle with one of my many doppelgangers, eventually destroying us both
-encountered a giant robot minotaur in a labyrinth where I became lost after being kidnapped and taken there by trolls

Or something along those lines.