AFK

Pretty much describes me most of the time these days. At least D&D is typically scheduled a few days in advance so I can ensure I'm available for those times. This past month has been a little chaotic as work has changed, I'm still not feeling 100% and a lot of random family crap has come up. Long story short, my household has new people in it and that has been an adjustment. The good news is I have a semi-regular video release schedule going and I'm currently working on Sonic 2006 when I can.

If I can, I'm going to try and sit down and just finish the Diablo 3 run with Mesk and HKS cause that really needs to get done. We also haven't played Divinity either since last year. Heh.

More recording with Shauna coming up soon hopefully. I may have mentioned it before, but she's going to be producing the LP we're currently working on (Lucius) as I have like video projects to keep me busy for the next million years.

Or until we all die in a nuclear holocaust in the near future. Either one.

(I definitely mentioned Lucius before because I have a tag for it...too lazy to look it up now)

It Is Finished

Last night I accomplished the impossible.

I have finally, after over a year of anguish playing off and on, finished Sonic 2006. I have a lot of editing ahead of me, but I can safely say I will never have to touch the game itself again.

Unless there's interesting science to perform of course.

I won't have a final death count for awhile, but I have 67GB of video on my hard drive and approx 52.5 hours logged towards it.

Of that I want to say a good 5 hours was logged each to the Beach at the start and 5 hours to Kingdom Valley at the end. 3 or 4 was spent on Shadow's Desert level alone.

I'll have better stats once I go through it all, but this game...this game has taken a significant chunk of my 2017 year.

The point is, it's over.

Now people want me to do Sonic Boom, which I thankfully do not own a console for. I am safe for now.

The next Sonic game I will likely delve into is Shadow the Hedgehog, which is at least playable if not the corniest, most-cringe inducing Sonic game (aside from Sonic 2006) that I am aware of. It will not take me 52 hours to complete.

Settled-Ish

I am so close to finishing Sonic 2006, but I rage quit because Silver's part of the final shin-dig makes me slowly die inside.

Also I'm moved into the new place now. There's lots of issues like the shower head needing to be replaced (it was just...drifting to the side when you use it), the bathtub fixed or replaced (it's an old jet tub and shoots out black stuff when you try and use the jets), light fixtures need to be fixed/replaced (the bulbs were all burnt out and like, broke when attempting to replace) and the faucet leaked. Other than that, it's pretty good.

At least the floor is in now.

Video work is slow again due to being too exhausted after moving things, unpacking and trying to fix. Also started a new contracting job, which I'm trying to figure out a comfortable working schedule for.

In either case, uploading has resumed as of today.

I'll try to go through the Extra Life footage and post the good parts soon. Sonic 2006 was part of that sooooo we'll see.

Whelp.

Another reason not to travel to the United States by plane in the near future.

More "security" measures.

Driving all the way. It's fine. I'll visit Montana. TOTALLY cool with it. I'll count drive-thru coffee stands and cowboy churches the whole way to entertain myself. Take that TSA.

...

...

That or take a trip across Canada for the first time in my life. Never seen the East Coast and it's been YEARS since I've been out to Van City.


So we recorded more Divinity over the past few days. Also got through more Sonic somehow and I ACTUALLY found where I gave up on the game. I can't believe I made it that far without rage quitting. I know I never made it that far on Shadow's portion, and I'm pretty sure I finished Silver, but I never actually finished the game. Ever. I might actually end up trying to finish it during Extra Life this year before I move on to better games.

Then Mesk and HKS keep asking when I'll be doing Sonic Boom and Sonic Mania.

As I am currently unemployed, I've been focusing on getting other things done including getting through the massive backlog of recordings. As I think I stated in the previous post, I have finished Pillars of Eternity completely and am just in the process of uploading the last half of the series on YouTube. I also started processing Divinity OS2 and Resident Evil 7 as I need to get through those. My other priorities will be Dishonored 2 and Sonic 2006.

EDIT: I messed up the Divinity OS2 recordings. My voice is absent from 2 sessions and the third is awful quality 'cause somehow Fraps decided that my headset mic was a good option to use. This is why you ALWAYS check your settings and why when I forget I get super salty. I'm a little more than mad at the moment.

Changes

First off, you may have noticed that I cleaned up the top portion of the blog a bit by removing that text I'm fairly sure no one read as I don't believe many people utilize that link. It has now been moved to a separate page along with a complete list of all LPs I've done to date, as well as some links to the sites and works of people I make LPs with. I may do some additional clean up like this for the bottom portion of the page as well since it's kind of a mess of information.

Next on the news list is I finished Pillars of Eternity. I didn't defeat the Master Below yet, which is something I may try to do again, but the main storyline is complete. I wanted it off my to-do list so I could focus on other projects/start another solo LP. I want to do the new Life is Strange game as well as Lunar-SSS (a request from Shauna). I still need to finish Sonic 2006, but that won't happen until the end of October because...

I'm moving again. This should be a more long-term move. Some stuff came up and I made the decision to move into my grandparent's old home (they moved to assisted living earlier this year). It's got more space and a bigger yard for the puppy which is nice. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but it's actually a thing now. The remainder of this week will be dedicated to packing up, making sure the new place actually has a floor (we had to rip out all the old carpets cause they were shredded and disgusting due to my grandma's walker) and getting the old place clean and mostly cleared out. That all has to get done this weekend, because next weekend I'll be tied up at a friend's wedding.

With that in mind, we're getting a Starsworn session in tonight and I'll start the process of encoding the last segments of Pillars of Eternity. I have to edit one portion of the video somehow, but the rest will be easy. I also hope to get a little bit of Divinity OS2 in before I leave, mostly because I think HKS and Mesk have been wanting to play.

After these next couple of crazy weeks, I will be starting to get ready for Extra Life. I'll hopefully do an official announcement for that near the end of the month.

Fuzzy

Too much been going on lately. Everything has been a crunch to get things done and ready by mid-October that ISN'T video or writing related. Then Kristy made me promise to submit to a writing contest. Then someone else made me promise to submit to a local writing program. I don't have anything prepped for this.

I had to cut D&D short this past weekend and everyone was kind of just flailing since they needed me for a few information points. I would have stayed, but I had family stuff to take care of that night that I got last minute notice for.

Then I needed to plan a trip to Murica for a wedding. Only going to be away for a couple days, so I'm not taking a computer. I don't want the farce that is security touching my laptop if I'm not going to be there for more than a couple days anyway. After I learned that security can seize your electronics and poke around on them and demand passwords, I decided that it's not worth it. I promised I'd be at this wedding and I'm not going to jeopardise my flight privileges/get denied entry into the country because I refuse to let them poke their nose into my privacy. They already get to strip me of my dignity at the security checkpoints. They aren't allowed to look at my personal information.

And what really pisses me off is it does absolutely nothing to make you safer. It's all for show. They haven't caught ANYONE this way. Security at airports is pointless. I know a guy who accidentally forgot a hunting knife in his CARRY-ON bag and they didn't even catch it. This was in the last 10 years too. He walked on the plane with a hunting knife.

And creating more restrictions and telling people what you're looking for doesn't help because smart people will find away to get around your precautions! Especially if they know EXACTLY what your criteria and "detection" methods are.

Why do you think we don't tell people how we know they're cheating on the site I help run?

Yes. This is something that enrages me to my core, especially after they forced my 80 year old grandmother STAND with a healing broken hip while they searched her wheelchair. She was in pain the entire time. Worst she could do to you is tell you about her childhood in Trochu about a 100 times while captive on an airplane for 4 hours. Screw you and your "security".

This is why I hate flying. One of the reasons anyway.



I'm desperately trying to finish my projects and I'm just...all over the place. I tried finishing Pillars of Eternity, which I started around this time last year. I gave up on the Master Below (for now) in the hopes that I'd be able to finish the game and get the majority up on YouTube just to have some closure with that. I mean...I still have approx 40 episodes to post before I run out, but still.

Also played some more Sonic 2006. After about 2 hours of anguish in the desert, I gave up and tried my hand at train hell again. I had stopped caring at that point and somehow facerolled my way through the level and....gasp...PROGRESSED. I still have a significant chunk left and I need to finish the never ending tears of Shadow's desert level again.

I'm not joking. I was 21 minutes in, and it was still going. And that didn't count all the deaths either. 21 unbroken minutes of hovercrafts that you can fly across the world with, sand wave rooms, robot crotches, birds, walking up random walls, sudden camera changes and like 7 checkpoints. Yes. The damn level has at least 7 checkpoints, at least 4 transitions and it was STILL not over. I think I died in part 2 of robot pain. I can't even remember. I blocked it out. I was there for about 2 hours before I returned to the gelatinous blue wonder.

And then I bounced across the water for about 10 minutes before I decided I had wasted enough of my life on the game and went to bed.

I've processed at least another 4 segments of Sonic 2006 for YouTube. I unfortunately forgot to do a Session summary and deleted all the files I was using to edit. I'm too lazy to go through it all and make a new one so I might just skip that session summary.

Working on the next chapter of Dishonored 2. I really just want to process that, Resident Evil 7 and Bioshock Infinite. Remove them once and for all from my hard drives. I'm just drowning in footage.

Stuffed Birds and Magic Hovercrafts

Had an interesting weekend...though I was mostly sick for the duration. I got a little downtime at least on Friday and my puppy, thankfully, slept most of the day. Made for an interesting, over-hyper evening, but at least I had some help after 5pm. Saturday was spent mostly moving my grandparents into a senior's residence. They were still in their old house, but my grandfather was having trouble keeping up with all the house and garden work since my grandma can't really help with it anymore.

What I've learned from moving them is that my grandparents own a lot of weird shit. From various ceramic figurines to a FREAKING STUFFED PHEASANT. Yes. An actual, taxidermy pheasant. It was staring at me from the backseat of my car.

 

My cousin kept saying we should attach it to my car as a hood ornament. Instead my grandpa wanted to mount it above his door in the hallway of his new place. Thankfully, for everyone involved, it does not fit above the door. It's currently on top of a cabinet, surveying the living room area. The thing is, I had forgotten about this thing, but I knew about it. I remember as a kid I kept randomly encountering it various locations in their basement. 

In my grandparents' inventory as well was a life-sized ceramic dog (a poodle of some sort), a weird statue of two kissing naked people, another bird decoration which was not taxidermy (I think it was made of plastic or something), five half-full maxwell/kirkland coffee tins, three separate containers of other assorted nuts, a medical condition/symptom book from 1985, a Bible that was given to my great great grandfather in 1840 when he left England to go to Canada (which is pretty damn cool and has a record of births and deaths in the family in the back), a safe that's about the size of my forearm and weighs twice as much as me (or at least it seemed that way), a coat of arms with two actual swords in it, a bunch of certificates belonging to my grandfather (I assume for all the secret societies he's involved with), a giant mystery trunk belonging to my grandfather (that was from when he was kicked out at age 18 to travel to Calgary and work with CP Rail), yoghurt from September of last year (which I'm pleased to say did not arrive at its intended destination and took a permanent detour into the trash), a lot of Jesus books and cassette tapes (for whoever remembers what a cassette tape is), and some really hilariously awkward childhood photos of my cousins, my brother and myself (most of the awkward ones are me, naturally...the ones with braces are GOLD). 

It was also really hilarious watching my father try to back a moving truck onto their driveway for five minutes. He hit the snowbank twice and got stuck on the ice. He doesn't know, but he had an audience of about six people...i.e. everyone who showed up to help move. I thought to record it too late and ended up with a useless 10 second video. 

So after a lot of angry muttering from my cousins about my uncle's "supervising," a lot of confusion about some dirty old sleeping bags (which turns out were just to cushion furniture), chasing Lauren with the pheasant and contemplating the scariest place to put it, watching my father try to park a moving van in a restaurant parking lot, Lauren fixing my terrible decorating skills, trying to figure out which plates were for eating and which ones were decorative, avoiding about 10 crashes with the awful trollies available for furniture, having crazy heart palpitations from the cold medicine I took (I have issues with acetaminophen and no, I still don't know how to pronounce it), running across a parking lot in -21C weather with no gloves carrying two bed rods, and hearing about carrying the glass cabinet up the driveway of slippery doom, we got them all moved in. 

So hovercrafts. Played some more Sonic 2006 yesterday after like...a month or two of not touching it. I got very angry with Shadow and the bloody sand waves. What I did discover, by accident, is if you hammer the X button when you get airborne in Shadow's hovercraft, you can fly across the map (but only in straight lines...steering is not an option). I got into some interesting positions because of this. You can actually fly to the finish line from the start if you desired, only the game requires you to jump through some arbitrary hoops to activate the door at the end.

Pillars of Eternity and Resident Evil 7 should continue to go up over the next week. I think I have other things ready, but my brain is fried and I can't remember anything beyond hovercrafts and stuffed pheasants. 

Getting a Puppy

Will be picking him up on Friday.

I haven't been posting many videos lately, and that hasn't really been because I don't have them. I am on segment 28/110 right now for PoE and I'm still not done the game, so, you can expect videos from that for awhile when I'm not overly lazy. It's not even that difficult to publish it's just...extra effort. Been working on a few side projects as well as preparing for puppy, so finding the extra motivation has been hard and I'm not exactly model of mental health these days.

I have two Sonic videos more or less done...just waiting for a certain clip to present itself. The session I'm editing is fairly short (about 2 and a half hours), but a lot of it is spent futzing around with the demonically possessed soccer ball.

Dishonored 2 is also more or less finished...just need to some minor edits as I mentioned before to cut down on time spent watching me get lost and confused.

Evil Within has three chapters left for me to edit. Three! I know chapter 15 is pretty short, so I think it's just 14 that will take up my time. Will post chapter 12 later today probably if I remember, but I'm not sure when we'll get home as I'm playing Carlo's zombie RPG thing at his house (we're playing as ourselves and what we would do in a zombie apocalypse setting in Calgary...so essentially I'm so dead).

RPG stuff is stagnant at the moment cause motivation. I need to work on some assets for Mesk (and myself). There's a couple elements of the interface that I'm annoyed with (particularly the formation screen, but I need to use Ruby to change that shit so...guess I'm going to learn some Ruby). I also need a number of custom assets so I'll get to work on that...eventually.

I like how "Blender of Disappointment" has become one of my saved tags.

Not Nearly As Exciting

So far this week has been pretty dull aside from all the insanity happening in the United States right now. Continuing the medication and it seems to be better aside from the stiff/swelling sensation in my joints when I wake up in the morning. My hands are the most affected where even now they feel...off. Also keep catching myself saying or typing the wrong word even though my brain thought it was the right one. Not sure if that's concerning or not.

Currently posting content for the following:
-Evil Within: Co-op, blind (have chapters 11 and 12 ready to publish)
-Sonic 2006: Solo, commentated (a very anticipated LP if your name happens to be Janette)
-Dishonored 2: Solo, blind (a very unanticipated LP if your name happens to be Janette)
-Pillars of Eternity: Solo, blind (will probably go on for eternity)

Working on:
-Evil Within
-RPG stuff
-Writing
-Sonic 2006
-Recording a Banished game but I doubt anyone wants to watch me try to stop people from starving and freezing to death for hours on end as the quest to circle the giant lake continues.
-Dishonored 2 (minor edits)
-Recording the last bits of Pillars of Eternity
-2k subs video. No idea what yet.

Also I may be getting a puppy. Keep you updated.

Smell You Later 2016

Well, 2016. It was a year. 365 whole days. How 'bout that?

To be honest, kind of a rough year for LPs. I got more than I thought I would done, but with moving and some major things happening, it was a little hard to get as much as I wanted to done. 

Not finished Evil Within 'cause it makes me angry and Dishonored 2 seemed to be a better use of my time. Not finished my year-end video, mainly just because I'm trying to figure out what the best clips I can use for it are (almost done tbh). I couldn't remember what I released this year because I'm sitting on a lot of old stuff that I haven't published yet. Thankfully YouTube has date and time stamps to help me. Overall just a lot of video didn't get done because a) most of it requires extensive editing, b) I work 40+ hours a week because I like to eat food and live somewhere, c) a lot of random shit happened like my car breaking and my grandpa dying, d) it's been an emotional rollercoaster of anxiety, dread and depression all year. That's looking at things negatively though. On the flip side, my production standards and editing skills have increased, I managed to hold onto a steady job while many people here are struggling to find work due to a bad economy, I got a new car with door locks that actually work, someone close to me rekindled their love of playing guitar after playing at my grandpa's funeral, and I learned that I can survive a full-blown panic attack while driving a car. 

And to start off the year 2017, I got my first "get back in the kitchen" comment ever! I didn't think they actually existed. I thought it was a over-simplified joke that people made when talking about assholes on the internet. a) Either the laziest troll ever, or b) an idiot so frustrated with his life that he actually believes this shit.



It's okay though. This dude and the ambiguous "we" not only created my comments section, but the whole "website" single-handedly. I figured it deserved a special shout-out. Does Google even know? Also he seems to be another person who doesn't understand that you can edit your own comments on YouTube. That or he really likes spam.

Either way, 2016 LP recap video is up. Hope you enjoy!

PS - Almost complete Silver's storyline in Sonic 2006. I wasn't feeling well when I was playing it an ended up having a minor panic attack while playing and nearly puked. I actually had to stop playing for like 10-20 minutes to take a rage break, so I can safely say that this game is now hashbrowns-on-forehead bad. Two games now fit that category and they were both part of 2016.

We're Going to Win Christmas

It's really hard to decide which one enrages me more. Like Sonic 2006 is bad in every way possible. Sonic Unleashed, if I remember, was at least PLAYABLE, but I rage quit a few times and never finished the stupid thing. I got to the end of the game and it FORCED me to watch the same cutscene over and over and over every time I died. It was not a short cutscene and it was annoying as hell. At least Sonic 2006 has skippable cutscenes.

Getting closer to the holidays and my opportunity to take a bit of a break. A community launch will be happening over the holidays, so I'm sort of on call if everything blows up, but other than that I will likely have time to relax a bit. I am very tired. Spent 4 hours attempting my grandmother's cabbage rolls. I did most of it right, but I accidentally used the wrong tomato product (sauce not juice) and slightly underseasoned the filling (but that may have been because I needed to layer them due to the size of the pan and the sauce juice stuff trickled down too far).

Did a gift exchange in the office as well and managed to score one of the Nerf guns my CEO got for it. There are four Nerf guns in the office now. Rob thought he was protected by his wall of monitors. His forehead sticks out at the top so Todd and I were trying to snipe it. Then Rob borrowed Todd's gun and started sniping the CE team. He lost one of the bullets in the process, but the CE pod is still well supplied thanks to Judy. The Nerf war has begun.

In other news, I do a pretty decent Tommy Wiseau impression.

Speaking of Sonic 2006, progress continues on editing the video for it. It will be part of my holiday "special" this year. I still need to put together a compilation of some sort for it. Not too sure what I'll do yet, but I had a couple ideas including making a new trailer for u toob. I should aim to finish editing Evil Within before the New Year. That and Murdered will be pretty much the only co-op projects I've finished this year. Yikes.

I can't guarantee anything for the new year, but know that I have a good stock of videos saved up so...shouldn't run out of content any time soon. My anxiety has been a little out of control lately and my sleep has been disrupted significantly 3 times in the last couple weeks. I'm tired a lot of the time and busy with holiday family stuff etc. so...I haven't had much time to work on personal projects let alone catch up on what a lot of other people are doing.

To the people I know who were put through hell in 2016 (aka the Blender of Misery and Disappointment), I hope you at least have a peaceful holiday season. I feel we're on the precipice of something big. But hey, on the bright side, if we all survive it, at least we'll have one hell of a story to tell.

The Elephant in the Room

This week...I tell ya. I'm not going to talk about the obvious, cause frankly I'm sick of it. Sick and tired and just...

Extra Life was great and we managed to raise just over $1200 for the Alberta Children's Hospital. Thank you so much to everyone who watched, donated or stayed awake in solidarity. You are all awesome. I managed to make the full 24 hours PLUS 1 hour because of daylight savings time. I got to the time and my knees and back were KILLING me. I stretched out on the floor to help that feel better and I guess I passed out for awhile because the next thing I knew was a cat was rubbing against my hair and face. The capture card worked well, so I'm really happy with that purchase overall. Also glad I worked out most of the issues with it the night before. Don't ask me how I fixed things cause I still don't know.

I got my new car this week. That's pretty cool. It's small and red and actually accelerates when I press the gas pedal. The door locks work. It has FOUR doors. I can open it remotely instead of spending 5 minutes trying to get the key to work manually in the lock. And yet, I'm still sad about poor Sir Charles.

Missed soundtrack Thursday because I was too busy all day yesterday trying to pull some resources together to launch three new communities in the next couple of months with work. Next week will also be busy. I'm back in a state of always thinking I'm forgetting to do something.

Working on a few projects right now. Writing like crazy when I have a chance. I haven't touched Pillars of Eternity in about 2 weeks because of all the stuff that's been happening. May play some more tomorrow. Evil Within is still ALMOST done, but I haven't had motivation to edit. Have a few Left 4 Dead videos I want to post. Extra Life videos are currently going up, just slowly because they're rather large videos and my poor bandwidth can't handle it. I've been streaming Sonic 2006 and recording while I play so...I'll be pulling the highlights out of that. Dishonored 2 came out today. I plan on getting it and playing it just...$80...

Also, someone has been particularly vindictive on YouTube and has gone through all of my Dungeon Siege 3 videos and disliked them. Like...all of them. There's 59 there. It might be the dude who called me uneducated and then incorrectly told me how to pronounce the name. I DID butcher the name to his credit. Either way, I just laughed in his face and then Shauna swooped in. I just don't think this person realizes that he gave me a swath of extra views. That and the dislikes actually contribute positively to the rate in which videos are found.


As for the elephant in the room...all I'll say is someone at work crowned the cut-out with a tinfoil crown and I don't remember much of Tuesday night other than Tails' death screams and Elise's mutant neck.