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.

PoE Finished (Finally)

Finished playing the actual game a few weeks ago, but the encoding was completed today. There are 131 segments of 25-45 minute videos. This was for approx. 82 hours of gameplay, just one the one run alone. I enjoyed playing the game, but I'm not sure I'd play it again in the near future. It's just a really long game. It's good if you want to get wrapped up in a long RPG, but eventually my commitment to reading most of the dialogue out loud wore me down. Anyway, currently have up to segment 80 uploaded on YouTube. The rest should hopefully be up by Christmas.

Which brings me to this past week. It wasn't that great for the most part.

The wedding I went to was great aside from the ridiculous heat in Southern California (30+ degrees Celsius). I nearly passed out waiting in a line up on the last day we spent there as it was already 28 degrees at like...9 in the morning. I really don't do well in heat. I got home on Tuesday and found out in the International baggage claim on the phone that I had been laid off my job (I wasn't the only one).

Then I spent the next evening in the hospital because of severe abdominal pain. I got pissed off at the nurse cause she poked around areas that weren't the issue and then said I didn't seem like I was in a lot of pain. I proceeded to be sent home for an ultrasound the next day to which they found the issue. There's nothing they can do about it so I was doomed to remain in pain for the next 48 hours. Got some relief today.

Good news is that I have possession date for my new house, so I'll be dark for a few days in November, but I'll be hopefully permanently settled for a long time.

So I'm in the market for a new job. We'll see what I can find. For now, I have a lot of free time, so I'm going to use it to catch up on projects and just...sleep. Also going to try and play more Divinity OS2 with Mesk and HKS and make more progress on it. We played yesterday and I managed to get myself into a few precarious situations. I also created a pillar of exploding plant death.

So yeah, bummed out and in pain, but I'll keep on going and make the best of the extra time I have.

Undead

I am, quite frankly, exhausted. The house was way more chaotic than I anticipated, and the expectations of the people trying to sell it are hard to meet. I have a list of everything that needs to be done in my head, but like many large projects, I underestimate the time needed to complete that vision. My life has literally been packing, moving and cleaning since...Saturday or something. I've lost track of this.

I just have to keep the end goal in mind. Here's hoping we don't move again for a very long time.

The good news is I'm too tired to really be worried about not getting done in time/to be stressed out. The bad news is I'm pretty sure I'm getting sick. Also I managed to mess up my toe. There's like a whole chunk of my toenail missing on the one side and I have no idea how it happened. It never bled or anything. Maybe this means I'm undead.

Anyhow, will be leaving soon to deliver ketchup chips to the uncultured masses down south. I'll try to get some uploads up before I leave, but there's likely going to be less than the usual upload rate (which is like 4 videos a week currently -_-).

Also Shauna says I need to play Darkwood before Lunar-SSS, so cue all the innuendos from Mesk when he reads this.

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.

It Happened

I was waiting for it to happen all summer. We almost made it all the way through when finally, a couple nights ago, a person crashed into the park.

We expect it was a drunk driver this time as they ran away from their car, but I was woken up by someone yelling. I had slept through the impact somehow, which is amazing since it completely totalled the car. The driver seemed to be fine since they got out of their car and fled the scene, but when I went down to look at the impact site the next morning, there's all this cracked concrete everywhere.

Anyway, the person who woke me up was my neighbour a couple doors down. The first thing I hear is him yelling "where you going buddy? You're on camera!" (a bunch of the neighbours finally caved and got cameras pointing at the park it seems). When looking out the window you can see this mangled car there with coolant spewing out of it and this guy just running away down the street. The police showed up like 30 minutes later to clean everything up and tow the car away.

Great response time.

I suspect this will be the last one before I move. Will be moving into my grandparent's old house before the end of the year as it's bigger and is currently available. Also has a bit of a bigger yard for my puppy. The good news is I won't have people breaking into the shed, or pooping in cars, or peeping in the windows, or crashing through the park, or getting lost and blowing out tires when they turn around on the one-way, or singing on the swings at 5am, or screaming at each other about Pokemon, but the bad news is the new location is likely to be a lot less interesting in terms of stuff happening. Maybe I'll just make friends with all the crows in the area and turn them into couriers.

That or make up my own neighbourhood drama and assign roles to everyone. It'll be hard to beat the duplex though...or my previous home with underdressed 80 year old Russians yelling at each other and randomly turning on super bright lights at 2am, or secret grow-ops/party houses who started 6-foot bonfires ON THEIR LAWN WITH PIZZA BOXES and danced around on the roof, or the people that over-watered their lawn to the point that water would pour down the walkway like a waterfall.

So aside from that craziness, started a Divinity: Original Sin 2 LP with HKS and Mesk. We've already managed to murder a few people. It happens it seems. I kept getting side-tracked since I thought the other two were with me. Suddenly they're murdering turtles. Oops. I got a severed head and returned back to them. I'll likely just let them lead in the future so I don't get myself into any unfortunate circumstances.

Also continuing to play Starsworn. Might not get a session in this week because people are terrible at notifying me about plans that have apparently already been made. I feel bad, but I essentially offered up my entire week next week to atone. This week has been filled with birthdays, chats with realtors, medical crap and work. Then this weekend I have my friend Igpy's reading to go to, then Saturday I have more birthday stuff plus helping out a friend. Then Sunday is free until the evening when it would matter, then I have some family commitments.

The Forgotten

So much has happened in the last couple weeks I'm not sure where to start...

Smoke in the air has been consistently bad. I think we had 1 day where I couldn't smell it. It's just been this oppressive hot and smokey hell for the past two months. 

Last week the battery for my car fob died and I had to manually unlock my car, which set the car alarm off and it wouldn't stop until I started the vehicle. I get to work that day, run upstairs and find the entire floor deserted. I stand there dumbfounded for a few seconds before I realize that our all-day training must be at a different venue. So I pull up the event on my phone and see that it's just a few blocks away at another building. I rush downstairs and back to my car, which I try to get into again, but this time I can't get the door to unlock and the alarm is just going off. At this point I essentially run away from my car and jog 10 minutes over to the place I'm supposed to be and enter 15 minutes late, tripping over everyone as I move to a seat at the back. Then I was all sweaty for like an hour as the school doodles made a come-back appearance in my notebook.

This week I attended a football game and there were fighter jets and biplanes and gatling guns that fired mini footballs and they threw beef jerky around at the crowd for some reason (it was packaged). I also got a nasty sunburn and mustard all over myself.

Then yesterday I borrow a deep frier to make some popcorn chicken for a potluck today. We over-filled the frier with oil and didn't think of the consequences. Woke up this morning with oil all over the counter and floor because the drainage tray filled up and overflowed when the oil was cool. So that was fun and now the house smells like deep fried oil. 

I finished Pyre completely, purchased and downloaded the new Life is Strange game (but haven't played yet) edited another session of Sonic 2006, and participated in another Starsworn campaign game.

I don't think I did an official summary of the first campaign game, but I feel like the last two sessions went really well other than me forgetting information I really should have known. The party seems to be meshing well with each other and I feel like we're all getting a chance to interact, ask questions and do stuff. I've been a little confused a couple times mostly because I'm not sure who information is intended for or what I'm supposed to share and to what extent. I suppose it's up to me a lot of times, but translating that into dialogue or action is a bit hard for me sometimes. I also feel like I don't ask enough questions if I'm unsure of something. 

The thing I forgot was a dude's name. I knew who he was, what happened to him, all the details, etc. But when I heard his name I'm like "oh that sounds familiar" and then just continued along with it. You don't hear me swearing in the video...just a tired sigh. I can, however, assure you I was cussing like crazy in my head. I can write the mistake off easily enough, but I was really mad with myself afterwards. TO BE FAIR THOUGH. I never actually MET the NPC. I encountered his body in a vat and read about him, but I had tunnel vision and didn't really make the connection between the vat and the dude because I thought the dude was in another tower. Long story short, I basically confused myself 'cause all the information was there and made sense, but I interpreted it wrong.

Anyway, first two games were really good. Mucky, HKS and Thal are easy to play with, which I wasn't really concerned about, but I always get anxious when starting up these kind of things with new people. As for the game structure, content, environments, etc. it's all solid so far in my opinion. I may be a little biased as I'm used to/familiar with Mesk's storytelling and have been for many years now, but I don't really have anything to complain about.