Suicidal Pedestrians and Interesting Names

There was a man walking against traffic, on the Calf's Robe bridge this morning, on Deerfoot. ON THE BRIDGE AGAINST TRAFFIC. I kept seeing all these people ahead of me slamming on the brakes out of surprise, and I get there and there's a dude carrying a trash bag, walking in the shoulder on the god damned bridge where you drive 100km/hr and is the most dangerous section of the most dangerous road in our city. That was about as good as the people riding bicycles on that road last year.

Then I get into work where my coworker was waiting to hear about the birth of her nephew. She got the news a few minutes ago and they named him "Ansible." Okay then. I fail to see how a baby translates to "faster than light messaging," but maybe it's a magic baby. Either way, we've been trying to figure out what his nick-names would be. Maybe he'll just go by his middle name...


While I wait for the world to inevitably come to an explosive end, I've been working a lot on writing and the RPG. I got an extended session in to work on the RPG last Saturday and I got A LOT done. I'm actually almost done the functional bits of the "Tutorial area" (the Office). And I know that sounds like tutorial as in showing you how to play, but really I mean tutorial in that I'm learning how to work with RPG maker and making things as silly as possible. Functionally, it's playable. There's a few elements that lead to dead ends or incomplete segments though, which is next on the list. I've also started to map out the next two level sections.

One thing I've learned is that all the dialogue and text I have pre-written ends up changing when I translate it to the screen.

If I could work regularly at the rate I worked last Saturday, I could be done a lot of this by the end of the year. That said, motivation, life circumstances and difficulty barriers will likely crop up. I want to see if I can have something playable for Extra Life this year so I can offer it as an incentive for Kathleen raising money. This game is intended to be for a small audience (mostly private), as there are a lot of assets like music that I wouldn't be allowed to use. That said, if I could create most of the assets myself, which is difficult, but I have the ability to do, AND could come up with a solution to the music, I could make this available to more people. I never intend to sell or market it though.

As for the writing...I've actually got a lot done there in that department. I've cranked out a lot of pages over the past two months, spending a lot of time downstairs on the couch keeping an eye on my puppy.

The downside to this productivity is video production has been reduced to a couple hours a week. In the past two weeks I've done little more than edit a little bit of Dishonored 2. I still have a massive repository of videos in the form of Pillars of Eternity, but even that will run out eventually and I will need to finish the game. The good news is a lot of the footage is there to work with, so now that I've set up my remote desktop, I can realistically work on this.

Lastly, in the past week we had the second session of Mesk's D&D campaign, in which I participated as an NPC character from the previous session. It again, went for a good 8+ hours, but I was able to stay to its conclusion (well mostly, I think Mesk did something extra with one of the characters afterwards). I also managed to voice (very terribly) all the lines as I played. I often neglected to voice my own lines though, mostly because I was focused on what I was typing. I think it went really well.

The session was as interesting and entertaining as the last, with more focus on plot advancement and character interaction than anything else. There were only a few opportunities for battle, some of which were talked their way out of...or escalated to the point where one of the characters tried to solo a boss (and then got interrupted when I sent a gundam in there cause I'd been waiting for that freaking robot to skewer someone all game). Speaking of robots, there was definitely some softcore robot love going on in this past session.

As for my first "real" roleplay (in that Nick and Shauna aren't around to forgive my terrible interactions with other characters and that it was not verbal), I think I did okay. I already know I wasn't GREAT and there was an incident where I had to move locations and it happened to be at the worst possible time (as my character was required for information), but I was WAYYYYY out of my comfort zone. This isn't something I've ever really done before, and a lot of these roleplaying or tabletop games have been forcing me to learn and try to get better at this.

It's definitely a rediscovery/retraining. It's something I think I had when I was kid when an old friend of mine and I would make up our own games and fantasy worlds. Then he left without notice and my new "crew" swiftly crushed those fantasies as they weren't too interested in those sorts of things. They also weren't afraid of voicing those opinions to my face. Since then I've been hardcoded to think things like roleplaying, writing and world building need to be kept a secret, and any failure to do so results in ridicule and embarrassment. So in my head I'm like, "yeah, this is cool and engaging" but you go deeper and all I hear is "you're making a fool of yourself." It's also an issue of "if you aren't good at it, or taken the time to get good at it privately, then don't even bother," which is a whole other clusterfuck that's built up over the span of a decade and only started to get broken down and rebuilt about 5 years ago. I care a lot less now about what people think, but it's the reason I get scared away from some things still. An example is when "you know *insert famous person here* has already done it right?" ended up translating to "someone better than you did it already so why bother trying?" in my head and I completely abandoned multiple hours of work on a project and never returned.

At least I'm learning a lot about myself. I guess that's why I have a lot of respect for these other players and the ease in which they jump into their roles. I enjoy watching them interact with the world and develop their characters/story. I know the campaign has been a lot of work for Mesk to run, but it's paid off in my opinion. Apparently there's a lot of people interested in joining, so I'll likely take on the role of various NPCs, which will probably be good training for me. Either way, I'm in for the other sessions, whether I'm watching/commentating or playing.

When I find out what Mesk wants to do with the D&D videos and what he wants to share of it, I'll likely post links to them in the blog.



PS - To my old friend, I doubt you're reading this, or ever will, but if you are, know I still have that house you built for my favourite toy. It's on display in my sitting area. I lost all the monster cards and that stick figure book though and that kills me a little.

One-Shot Marathon

I started this blog on Monday, got busy, went to dinner and passed out on my couch so I never finished it. It's Tuesday now, but pretend that this was all written yesterday mmk?


Had my first taste of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition last night as I watched a campaign run by Mesk. It was drastically different than the other experiences with Dungeons and Dragons I've had in the past. I was introduced to the game on version 3.5 and I've played with two groups of people on 4th edition. In both cases, I've played with/know the people in person (in addition to playing with one group occasionally online when we can't get together). This was an incredible learning experience for me because I had a chance to really pay attention to text-based interaction and roleplay. I've seen some of Mesk's videos, but I must admit I wasn't so concerned with the mechanics until this.

I notice that the players have a lot more time to think about their actions, roleplaying and conversation vs when it's voiced, which is a lot more awkward when you have long pauses to figure out whether a) it's really what you want to say/do and b) whether it's actually in character. Writing it lets a person say exactly what they want in a relatively orderly sequence and have time to think through it. This is a level of interaction and roleplaying I was not prepared to experience because I REALLY suck at roleplaying at the best of times (that said I've never really done...text based roleplay before so...). Seeing these players do it with such ease was a little intimidating, but impressive. I can tell there's a lot of anime influences in these people's lives though with how many references were made. I got like...1/3 of them (and the only reason I got the DBZ ones is cause Shauna introduced me to DBZ Abridged).

I recorded the game and ended up voice acting a lot of the spoken lines (very poorly). Was more for practice and fun than anything else since I haven't been doing much LP work lately. I made it through about three of the eight hours before my voice completely gave out and I had to resort to just commenting occasionally, or when I was really tired late-game, simply giggling. Some of the rolls were really hilarious. One of the things the players tried I'm like, there is no way this isn't going to end in tears. It actually didn't, but man that whole end boss sequence escalated quickly.

One thing I didn't expect was the length of the one-shot. I expected it to be 3-4 hours tops. It went for 8 hours and I ended up delivering a 10GB recording to Mesk. I actually didn't know how it fully ended (there was a lot of character building stuff going down) so I peaced out at 3:30am to be unconscious for three hours (work in the morning).

Personally I think the campaign went really well. There's a lot of weird things in 5e I'm not used to, but Nick made the comment that it was really plug-and-play vs 4e, so I can see why that edition appeals to custom campaigns. I saw a couple players min/maxing their characters, though when two of them were actually hit, they were almost one-shotted, so I can see that a lot of it went into maximizing damage. The test seemed to give Mesk a lot of experience and information, so that was good to see. I'd definitely watch again or even join in the future, but I don't know how my experience would play into the group dynamic. My campaigns have made me very cynical in terms of events and characters - see Boats of Doom and Undead Campaigns when I finally get the videos done for them. Basically the former had us enslaved at the beginning and we got all our items constantly stolen and the latter has been never-ending harassment from the undead and assassin HANDS.


So after my nap I attempted to vote in the morning. I packed up a puppy and drove over to a church nearby to vote (by-elections cause Harper took his ball and went home). I walked in and made it pretty far before I realized that it was the advanced polling station and actually had to go to a school to vote. A school that's like...a block away from where I live. I debated going back and realized that it was the start of school (was about 745 and the school starts at 759), so I decided it wasn't worth dealing with the kids and the buses and cars and parents and general chaos that I typically avoid the area for. The people I knew would win, won anyway so meh (my area is full of of new families and old white conservative people...the latter being the majority that votes). Then I facerolled a few spreadsheets at work, ate a lot of Brazilian food (BUT NO BBQ PINEAPPLE!!1!!!1!) and made it through watching two cat videos before I was suddenly unconscious on the couch.


I think the short-term solution to needing to supervise a puppy a lot on the main level would be to set up a remote desktop on the laptop for my main computer and just work on things downstairs. I would get so much more done for RPG making, sprite creation, video editing and going through some old files/videos. This will likely be implemented Thursday or Friday though as tonight I work and will definitely be passing out immediately when I get home and Wednesday I'm TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. Don't know why I capitalized that to be honest, but now I have BTO stuck in my head.