Still Alive

I just realized I haven't posted anything since the New Years post. I'm not even sure why since January has been fairly quiet for me. I think it's just I've been enjoying the first real slow-down I've had in a long time by being lazy.

And I've been doing a lot of writing. I'm not sure why, but I've written over 50 pages worth of content, and one has been a spontaneous project I just...started randomly. Good news with that one is I have pretty much zero attachment to it. I just started it as an exercise with fantasy elements I pull out of my ass, so my focus is still trying to get the project I ACTUALLY want to finish done. Someday.

I have been working on video, however, as I've posted two episodes of Before the Storm (in all it's  transitional animation glitches and rubber newspaper glory) as well as continued to upload Pillars of Eternity. I still have about 30 episodes to go, so that will keep me running for a bit. Other than that, my other current projects are going through the Divinity 2 OS footage (which I am going to hold in reserve until we either get far along in it or completely finish it). I need to process Divinity footage as it takes up a lot of space. It's slow work though as I need to splice in audio provided by Mesk as I had a few issues on my end with my mic (mostly self-inflicted as I didn't check the things I was supposed to). Resident Evil 7 is my other priority project since I'm halfway through it and a lot of people seem to be actually interested in it/have been waiting for it...

Heh.

I need to find a good few chunks of time for Diablo 3 this week as there's an event that will be done by the end of the month. Apparently it's something I HAVE to experience, so I may do that with Mesk and HKS on Wednesday this week.

I also cleared some ancient Gauntlet footage off my drives, which I'm unsure if/when I'll be releasing.

Other than the above, been continuing with the Starsworn D&D campaign. Also revived the 4th Edition campaigns I've been playing with Nick and Shauna, only on a less frequent schedule. I'm glad they've continued regardless. It's been like...a 4 or 5 year series of campaigns. I really need to get around to the highlights videos for these. I'm also planning on making a master document for our Starsworn chat logs since it's now a massive document and impossible to find things in decent time. Hopefully this will be useful to the others, or at least a foundation for something better that they can devise.

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.

8am Parade of Cars

I guess they all start work at 8:30-9am cause every single day there seems to be a coordinated exodus from the houses along the back alleyway. I swear there aren't that many properties along the alley though, so I have no idea where they're all coming from, whether they're taking shortcuts of if there's a secret Stepford-esque society I don't know about lurking somewhere in the maze of houses that is my neighbourhood. I'd believe it too. If you walk down one of the centre walkways in that area it's this eerie line of identically built, but slightly different coloured houses and it's quiet aside from the occasional child or dog in the backyards staring out at you with beady little eyes. Whatever it is, it's unsettling.

Anyway I'm like the antithesis of this orderly manifestation. Aside from the off-chance I'm up in time to witness the Parade of Cars, I'm usually the one who's running out of the house late with their hands full pulling on a jacket and trying to juggle my pack, keys and coffee, leaving laundry on the roof of my car, using the air conditioning/heat to dry my hair and eating week-old cookies from the package I left in my car on the way to work.

And these are on the days where I'm not carrying electronics out to the car, or having birds fly into my vehicle, or carting puppies around, or learning that someone took a dump in one of the cars.

I'm super healthy and organized.

While it's still Calgary's rainy, cool months, the season is fast approaching where I'll need to keep the windows open overnight. It'll be too hot in the house otherwise and we all know what that means: Shit that Happens in the Park is about to begin. It is with mixed feelings that I announce this will be the last summer witnessing the events in the park as I am moving again around September. I'll be taking up residence in my grandparent's old house as they have moved to a senior's assisted living home. The neighbourhood is almost deafening in it's quietness every time I've visited and is on a tiny side-road vs at the end of a major roadway. This means no more nights of people screaming about Pokemon in the sound-dish of a park outside, no more creepy singing swing lady, no more people turning around on a narrow one way street and bursting their tires on the curb, and no more street racers turning the greenspace in front of the house into a crash-test course. There is promise of trolling an overly nosey neighbour on the horizon though. This also may mean the return of the Crows as I think that the new neighbourhood is infested with them. Maybe I'll make friends with them this time and have a legion of birds at my commend.

So what does the rest of the spring and summer look like for me?

Well, I may be officially joining Mesk's Starsworn campaign with a regular character vs playing as an array of NPCs. This depends on the availability of the others joining, but either way, I need to seriously think about a character in any case.

Speaking of D&D, going to try to set up a session every other Sunday with Nick and Shauna to get through our own campaigns and make a bit of progress. I still need to produce the videos for these.

I'm going to try and make the RPG playable as one of my top priorities. I have a massive backlog of video, so I don't need to worry about not having any videos to release. The problem is a lot of this video is un-edited, so I really need to get working on the backlog. Top priorities for editing/recording right now are Resident Evil 7, Sonic 2006 and Outlast 2. I still have another special video I'm trying to produce, but, I need the Deletion Ceremony for Evil Within to happen first, which requires Shauna and I to finish re-watching the series (there are reasons).

I've made a lot of progress on writing this year, so that will likely continue. I have identified a number of issues with the narrative that I will go back to fix in the coming weeks. Really, what I need to do is get my documents organized because all of the work is spilt into about 10 pieces over a number of files in about 3 places.

As for current releases, Pillars of Eternity and Dishonored 2 should remain pretty regular. RE7 and Sonic 2006 will be the other ones posted as I finish them. Other than that, I have made it this week's project to get the rest of the Riven videos on YouTube with timestamps as I have left that project stagnant for too long.

Middle of August I'm checking out and disappearing for two weeks. Going to keep contact down to a small group of people and actually take some time to relax for once (I'll likely prep videos to release for two weeks and just press the "publish" button periodically...but it's not like I've been super regular with releases lately anyway).

What does right now look like?

Chaos mostly. Sitting back and watching the fallout of some of the events at work, because there's a lot of things I simply can't do anything about at the moment. One is just watching a person who has been cheating/boosting their work get caught and burned...the other is a little more disheartening. The latter is hard because I want to see these project succeed so badly, but things have been difficult, through no real fault of the particular person I'm working with on the client side. Also saying goodbye (hopefully temporarily) to a friend at work as she leaves to have her baby, but, with a company this small, anyone leaving at this point is kind of sad. I'm lucky I work with some great people.

As for what else is going on...dodgeball has a couple weeks left and then I'm joining in the Teddy for a Toonie tournament. I've checked out of my one job for the summer (aside from one final random shift...but meh). I have yet to decide if I will return in September (probably will just for Tuesday nights). Took a first aid and CPR course over this past weekend, which is probably why I have no idea what day it is most of the time this week. Now I have Stayin' Alive perpetually stuck in my head and know what happens when your eyeball falls out and is still attached by the optic nerve (you can totally still see out of it). Uhhhh all caught up on Game of Thrones, much to Shauna's delight. Carlo intends to do a final session playtest for his Fickle RPG, but not this week cause he's sick. Friday might get more recording done, Saturday is fooooood, Sunday is fooooood and also HKS' final session of pre-campaign Starsworn stuff and then Monday going to be playing Outlast 2 with Shauna in afternoon and evening.

So I'm busy and stressed, but still going. Really looking forward to those August weeks out in the boonies.

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.

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.

Msuh. Yes...Msuh.

Or "mush" rather.

So tired...was up late just staring at the ceiling wanting to sleep, but couldn't despite my measures to do so. Just staring, thinking about useless things.

Brain is mush. Abdomen hates me. Everything blowing up first thing in the morning cause people don't know how to click on a link. Ugh.

But yay soundtracks.

Reservoir Dogs - Heather suggested this to me last week so I wrote it down here for the sake of my memory and let it sit in drafts until today. Another soundtrack that uses Hooked on a Feeling? Oh dear this song will be stuck in my head forever. Oh no, it got worse. Not Coconut. Nooooooo.

No Man's Sky - Just searched "soundtrack" out of curiosity. Think this came up because of it's current relevance.

Abzu - Did the same thing for this as No Man's Sky. I think I got it for the same reason. It's very mystical sounding.

I'm going to be away for a week and a bit. Yearly trip to Lake Winnipeg. Got some family stuff going on so will be out there with them. Will have limited internet access, but I think the cell tower down there is actually good enough to hold better than an Edge signal. I think I had LTE last year. Anyway I'll try to finish up Murdered completely before I got and upload some stuff I can release every couple days down there.

Going to try and figure out some games as well. Either going to take Arkham Horror or Kill Shakespeare with me. I don't think I can fit both in a suitcase and still have room for a few books and clothes.

But yeah, if anyone needs me I'll be hiding out in a remote location begin tormented by the evil white stripe hunting spiders while I stuff my face with as many baked goods as I can afford. I apologize in advance to my stomach.

Buh?

I completely forgot it was Thursday today, so I'll postpone soundtrack day to tomorrow. I blame a poor sleep. I woke up at like 430am cause I was too hot, then I threw off the covers and it was too cold like ten minutes later, so I put the covers back on again and then had to throw them off a few mins later etc. Eventually found a happy medium and then my abdomen started complaining because of something I ate or w/e. Anyway when I finally dragged myself out of be I noticed the window was wide open next to me.

So since I fail, here's the song I haven't been able to stop listening to the last couple of days. Also, I think my mind is tissue paper because it ripped in half after this.

I feel like I should at least give you an update, so over the past week I've mostly been working on clearing out the Saints Row 4 stuff. I found an old Thief 1 test recording from...who knows when taking up 13GB of my hard drive so I processed that and uploaded it to the unreleased folder. I made the decision to take all the Guild Wars 1 footage I have and just process it into unedited footage (i.e. not pair it down into a clip show like SR4) as we are unlikely to continue it at the moment and if we did pick it up again we'd likely start over. That way I clear up space. I have two Dead Space videos uploaded, but unreleased and am considering that series finished. I will likely still lower the difficulty just to officially finish it, but I'm mostly moving on now.

I'll likely just marathon a good 4-5 hours to finish the Murdered series so I can move my focus to Evil Within for the co-op series. I'm continuing to record VTM with Shauna today actually. I need to bring my external to her house though since she's running out of hard drive space.

As for writing I've actually been mostly focused on that lately. I'm still re-editing Mesk's Ret Tech document and working on the RPG as well as WMRR. My productivity has been drastically reduced due to a struggle with motivation and mood issues. I'm slowly crawling my way out of that, but for now, business as usual. Looking forward to when I get my poop in a group and release the stock pile of videos I have built up over the past couple months. It's been pretty sparse due to laziness lately. Sorry 'bout that.

I'll also have to take time in the near future to tell you all the tale about my boss, his inherited Italian Apartment and the saga of the squatters. I swear to god he has the best stories.

Unholy Grail

Last night I expected to find the holy grail of documents, music and other files on the hard drive I pulled out of the old laptop. I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I spent a good hour+ trying to get into it too. The one good section I recovered was all of my old school and writing class stuff as well as a dump of all the early WMRR documents (of which I was looking for one particular piece of information and it turned out to be lame so I'm not using it). I also found a section of old conversations I saved for whatever reason and god I used to know some annoying, pretentious people. That's not to say I wasn't annoying myself. It's amazing what 8 years can do to a person. I hope I'm not as irritating as I used to be back in the MSN messenger days. Also half the conversations make absolutely no sense. I think we were all on crack. At any rate, unless I find something particularly useful, I'm going to obliterate these logs permanently once and for all.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any of Mesk's old video. I think everything I had was copied onto the externals, so what I have there is what I got. There's some ancient backup CDs, but I'm pretty sure I've already scoured those. One entertaining bit I found, however, was a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack stuff. God it's hilarious. I can't believe I listened to this stuff seriously:

Shadow the Hedgehog - So I listened to this entire thing at work today. I was squirming in my seat at some points and stifling laughter. I have to admit though, some of it is a little catchy. I can see why I liked it with some of the heavier rock tunes. Man "Almost Dead" and "All Hail Shadow" are terrible though. I really need to do something silly with these tracks. Oh god...the memories. NO VECTOR, SHUT UP ABOUT THE COMPUTER ROOM. NO I WILL NOT TOUCH YOUR GLIMMERING JEWELS. Just...the reveal at the end...the gas...the blobs...okay, Michael and I need to LP this.

My soundtrack Thursday got a little derailed. All right...

Sonic Adventure Battle 2 - Again, just...some truly awful tracks. There's some great level music though. Michael and I used to spam the sound test tracks. That "Follow Me" song is perpetually stuck in my head. It takes like 2 seconds of the song for it to take hold.

I refuse to play the Sonic Heroes soundtrack. At least for now.

"When there's nothing left to lose, you win!"

...what? Well, I suppose it's...optimistic, but in a depressing way.

I Pressed Publish Instead of Save

You know...it kind of weirds me out when people say I have a "sexy voice" on my videos. Not for the reason you think either. It weirds me out, because half of YouTube thinks I'm a pre-pubescent boy. That raises some very interesting questions for some of these random viewers.

I should start telling people I am a 12-year-old boy just to mess with them.

Summary of my week so far:
-Back to work, huge queue of projects to review, reminded that monthly reports need to be done
-All but one report breaks. One of them broke because SOMEONE couldn't get the support needed one day sooner (slacker).
-Spend thirty minutes trying to get the reports to work while working remotely with one of the only people who knows how these reports work (more or less).
-After not being able to get the reports to work, give up and work on the one that did run.
-Coffee
-Get mad at Argentina because it keeps resetting its filter to not show up.
-Lost Puerto Rico for 10-15 minutes.
-Got Puerto Rico back.
-Coffee
-Died in Gauntlet for about three hours.
-Filled up my hard drives again.
-Lamp works (yey)
-Too much coffee and couldn't sleep (actually was likely tea that did this).
-Keep falling asleep during the last 30 minutes of watching Mesk and HKS' Divinity LP. I'M ALMOST DONE WATCHING GUYS (on segment 27 now and yes, that perception thing was stupid).
-Nearly threw my radio out the window because the morning radio hosts for the channel I normally listen to in the morning make me want to puke rainbows every single day. Changed the channel in haste to some really chill folk music station. Currently searching for a new radio station that's interesting enough to wake me up but intelligent enough to keep me from waking up angry. Currently on some crappy modern pop channel, but at least the hosts don't make me want to kill myself...or them.
-Coffee
-Spend 5+ hours working with development to get reports working.
-Reports eventually work after a lot of dirty hacks.
-Coffee
-Receive an angry support ticket in French.
-Inventory still broken cause SOMEONE didn't mark down two days worth of inventory even though it takes literally 5 seconds to do. Literally.
-Found out that even my boss is scared of me yelling at him over inventory (I don't actually yell...I just leave passive aggressive and confused notes all over the spreadsheet).
-Vacuum is now projectile vomiting debris
-Another segment of Gauntlet edited. I hit 100 deaths on the counter.
-LANTERNS ACQUIRED
-Coffee
-Yay free breakfast
-Finally finished reports. If there are any mistakes I will actually cry.
-Called a hotel to book two rooms for later in the year after trying another number and getting no answer for three weeks. Learn that the phone number, the one listen on their site, has "limited hours" (i.e. no hours). Book two rooms. Get confirmation for one. Need to call again.
-Coffee etc.
-Find out another report needs to be run for next week (might actually cry).
-Spend an hour and a half driving to work because of bad roads (normally takes about 30 mins)

And now I'm here for soundtrack Thursday, drinking coffee again and putting off testing the final report. Because do not want.

Oblivion Soundtrack
Elder Scrolls Online
Diablo 2 - because who needs themes?

I'll be gone over the weekend and will not be available unless you happen to catch me checking my phone at the top of a mountain in -10C + windchill weather. Because that's only place that gets reception on that mountain and it's hard sharing a wifi connection that only allows two connections at a time. Unless all this has changed in the last year. Also going to look for a blanket I left behind...only I'm not sure what it's been through in the last year. I may not want it back. Not going to die first OR second in Werewolves this time.

...but if I do, it was Mel. Avenge me.

Speaking of falling face first...

EDIT 1: Went to run reports and discovered I had no idea what R File to use. Spend 30 mins trying to run the most recent ones to see if they work. Finally found the one I was supposed to use in the first place after a lot of hoop jumping. Still don't know if it will run. I get to wait two hours to find out unless it snaps in half.

EDIT 2: Kathleen wrote a book. She's trying to hire an editor. She is an awesome writer. You should go support her. She will be giving out cool stuff to people. Kathleen's GoFundMe.

EDIT 3: Shauna has a good number of videos up on her channel now. Like Dragon Age? You should go watch. Don't like Dragon Age? You should go watch. Shauna's Channel. Nick is also starting to do LPs. He is not ready yet. I will post a link when he is ready.

EDIT 4: Update on those reports 'cause I know you were all holding your breath on this one (that was sarcasm if you're like me and don't pick up on these things). I was running the wrong shit at first. I had to run back and cancel the report started and it exploded spectacularly. Once I got everything up and running I altered the .csv it was reading. Then I spent the next three hours futzing around with dates and formats. I figured out it was having issues with the way it was written (it's case sensitive), only I changed it in the wrong place when I was testing it. I was too stupid to pick up on this and assumed I was an idiot and had nothing to do with case sensitivity. I left frustrated last night and asked Oliver about it. He confirmed case sensitivity would mess with it. Came in today, changed it in the RIGHT place and it's currently running now. 10 minutes of work today and it's running. Ugh thank god this week is almost over.

Rock on.

2016

I posted some half-assed messages on G+, but I'll say it here again. Hope you all had a lovely holiday and happy new year. 

I have managed to get a little video editing done over the holidays despite me being back with family for a few days. I have a ton of unreleased, incomplete footage that I may pull the best parts out of and release as a compilation video for the new year. I won't say what's going to be in it cause even I'm not so sure. Either way, as I go through things I'll be pulling footage from each. 

Dead Space 2 is on the top of my list to just get finished. I don't think I have much left on it.

SOMA is top of the list for LPs with Shauna.

Gauntlet is top of the list for LPs with Mesk and HKS. SR4 is top of the list for LPs with Mesk.

FEAR 3 is top of the list for Delta.

It's not really the right blog for this, whatever. It's 2016 and as of this year, I will have been working on this writing project for 10 years. It has been a decade since I started version 1, which I worked on for about a year and a half. It's been 6 years since I started version 2. It's been 4 years since version 2.5 when I truly started working on it, and 4 months since I started building a reader version (i.e. version 3). Still working away on it whenever I can. 

Pain in right side is slowly going away. The lymph nodes were what the lingering pain was from. Not sure what that means other than they were irritated or something. Anyway, I have a theory about what's going on, which will make the next few years of my life very interesting...at least medically. Good news is if I'm right, I may be able to prevent this kind of bullshit from happening for awhile. 

Busy Busy Busy

Half Life 1 LP is almost complete (finally). I have very little left to record, just need some time to sit down and be patient with the final chapters. There will probably be rage. I'm not the greatest at FPS. My aim is terrible and these levels get incredibly confusing, so I hope you enjoy my agony.

I have a lot of options for LPs after this, but frankly, I think I'm going to buy some time with some other random videos as I have really been focusing on my writing the past few days, plus I have work and other activities keeping me busy. The main reasons for wanting a little time off is to a) Play games I don't have to worry about LPing, and b) So I can allocate some real time to writing. The one LP I'll probably dabble into at least a little bit in this time will be Half Life 2.

In the near future I still want to do:
Dark Souls
Dishonored
F.E.A.R.
A bunch of other stuff that I referenced in other posts and am too lazy to go and find mainly because I need to go edit a document that I'm putting off because I'm tired.

Co-op:
Hunted: The Demon's Forge
Unreal Tournament 3

Magicka is close to being finished.