Quiet

So. I have moved. I'm basically just putting stuff away at this point, but that is why there were no videos uploaded over the weekend. I was too tired and busy to sort that all out. I'm almost settled (still a lot of work to do), but video releases should continue today.

I have some Far Cry 3 co-op and more Bioshock 2 for you. I will be switching things up fairly soon (so if you're not interested or sick of those, new stuff will be coming once I am in a good place).

I am officially LPing Dead Space 2 right now and I will be uploading that in the near future. I think I might actually like it better than the first game in some respects. The combat is a lot more responsive (less input latency, faster movements etc.), but the enemies seem to have HUGE attacks. In some cases if you are just in their general proximity, they will injure you, even if they just nudge you gently. And it's dark. Holy crap it's dark. I have had multiple instances where I can't tell wtf is going on and die because I can't see anything but the glowy bits on my back. Also the game has no tension. Any apprehension/fear that the environment generated in the first game just...doesn't exist here. There's some creepy bits, but it's not scary. There are many jump scares though. And some got me.

Only other thing I need to worry about now is sound proofing. My new location is...noisy. There is a lot of reverb caused by the room I'm in. In addition, the walls are fairly thick, but the doors are REALLY THIN. This is a problem when you have other people living with you because we have slightly different sleep schedules and you can hear EVERYTHING through the doors. I'm looking to invest in some materials to reduce noise from the door (both noise I make...like when I record, and noise from anyone outside). I will see how this goes. I'll come up with something.

On the bright side...THERE ARE NO CROWS. Just bees and spiders and song birds and magpies.

Month of Solo LPs

While not 100% true, this month will likely finish with mostly solo LP videos being uploaded. I only have Far Cry 3 videos prepared for co-op, though I have a good start on more Tera videos. The biggest barrier I have there is how I want to handle Bastion of Lok, because we ran it a few times in various levels of completion. I might just pull clips from the one session and then post an entire run. We'll see. I expect Guild Wars 1 will be a July project for me. Saints Row 3 is just sitting on my drives because I wanted to work on other projects (plus Delta has enough videos to tide him over for awhile). Shauna and I keep trying to tackle Evil Within, but we still only have about an hour of that recorded. It's just...vomit educing. One day I'll finish Bioshock Infinite. One day. Good news is I have some more Sherlock videos to giggle through. I'm excited for more broken animations in that regard.

Anyway, none of this is actually prepared. It's just taking up space.

Speaking of space...I started playing Dead Space 2. Because, you know, I have so much time on my hands. It's actually not too bad. I can put in like, an hour of gameplay at at a time and it actually doesn't take up too much hard drive space. AND YES, I'M USING STASIS. To answer the question I know at least two of you have. I dedicated power nodes to it and everything. Be proud of me.

War for the Overworld is finished. I just have some multiplayer games with Nick if people are interested. There's a lot of giggling and shit-talking.

Lastly I'm just going to keep slogging through the Bioshock 2 stuff. As much as the game irritated me, there was some pretty silly stuff that happened during that series. Watching again, I might actually consider it one of the more randomly funny LPs I've done. This really wasn't because of me or my commentary...things just broke so astronomically. Guess the pain was worth my time.

Update?

I can't remember if I actually wrote up a post last week. I had a pretty busy week...and I know I say that a lot but I REALLY had a busy week last week.

So a lot happened in the last week and I actually can't remember most of it because my memory is maxed out. I've literally been writing everything down/recording it electronically, because if I don't, I just forget. Also it is ridiculously hot here. It was 27 degrees at 9am this morning. God help me.

I'm going to be moving over the course of the next month. It won't be immediate, but I'm starting to transport things as of today. The computer will be one of the last things I take, so I should be able to continue video work and recording when time permits. I'm going to have to ask you to be patient with uploads, streams etc. as I have no idea what my time is going to be like. This should all be sorted out and settled by the time July hits.

The end of last week and the weekend for me consisted of driving people everywhere, driving myself everywhere, dodgeball semi-final, all-day dodgeball tournament, board games, a five hour hike up a mountain (HOLY CRAP HOW DO SO MANY FOREST SPIDERS EXIST?), a neighbour's birthday, D&D Evil campaign and a lot of other things I can't remember. I'm also pretty exhausted as my body is unhappy about all the climbing and jumping and I've got bruises everywhere from being pelted with large, rubber balls and driving my legs into rocks and tree branches. Oh and falling down the stairs at the end of it all. That was an adventure.

Craziest thing was at that neighbour's birthday thing last night they had two big dogs there. One was resting under the table, decided it was a good idea to suddenly launch himself off the deck and he took the umbrella stand with him. Problem was there was an umbrella in said umbrella stand. It came crashing down on Oliver and myself and then smashed the glass table. I have never seen so much broken glass in my life. Made a spectacular noise though. A bunch of drinking glasses and a plate were broken as well (the bottles and my phone sitting on the table survived). So thankfully there was a good number of us there to help clean up, but we were picking glass out of the grass and shoveling the dirt under the deck for a good hour. We wanted to make sure no paws got glass in them though. Then later that night I fell down the last couple of stairs because I thought it was a good idea to go get my headphones in the dark. I know I'm exhausted today from the weekend cause I cracked my head on the door of my car and spilled hot water on my hand.

I'M IN GREAT SHAPE =DDDDDDD

I hope to finish up the Saints Row 3 video this week as well as what I have recorded of the new Dungeon Siege series I'm doing. Place of spiders is coming, but not until after my disgusting failure. Yeah. I'm going to snag the rest of the Sherlock Holmes videos from Shauna next Sunday so maybe expect some of those next week. I want to finish up the Tera video I have so I can move on to Guild Wars 1. Those are my priorities. Oh and War for the Overworld. I have like 2 missions left. I should do that.

As for uploads, I really only have Bioshock 2 and Farcry 3 content at the moment. I can't remember off hand if I have anything else to add to that/that I have prepared. I probably do. I still have Contrast to post, but it is short and I want to save it for emergencies (i.e. I have nothing else to post). So I'll get back to you on that.

EDIT - In terms of recording, I'll likely be playing Gauntlet with Mesk, HKS and Wibod in the near(ish) future. I will be starting the Skyrim Dawnguard DLC on Legendary (with a level 37-40 character) soon. Tera and Guild Wars 1 recordings will resume when people have time/aren't sleeping (recording has been delayed mostly because of me). Shauna wants to continue Evil Within (even though I'm not too interested in the game after spending a good hour jumping through hoops to get it to work and STILL have it perform poorly). So we'll likely do more of that too.

Slowly Getting There

The subs have been teasing me the past few days. Jumped from 990 to 998 super fast, and then I lost three, and then I gained two, and now it's just sitting there. Regardless, I have my content ready once I'm safely over the 1000 mark. I could lose some at that point I guess, but meh. Good enough for me.

I also have another random video I'd like to post in the next couple days. I may still edit it up a bit, but I'm rather proud of it for a video I made over the span of a day and a half on a whim.

Since I've crammed too much into my head and don't know what I'm doing anymore. I've been creating lists everywhere to do the remembering for me. My poor brain.

Current LPs and videos being released:
Among the Sleep, Tag-Team - almost done (it's like 6 episodes total)
Bioshock 2 - there's a lot of this left
Farcry 3, co-op - LP is finished as of a couple days ago. There's still quite a bit left
Tera - I don't have any more episodes prepared, but some Bastion of Lok is coming up (likely a couple clip shows and then an entire run or two of it)

I think that's it. Yeahhhh must be. Also I've been finding a lot of random unreleased stuff...so it's either being thrown on YT whenever I find them, or on the public drive. Unless I think I've released them and I actually haven't and wonder why you are all looking at me strangely. That's also a very likely possibility.

Strange is Life

Yeah so I meant to play Life is Strange Episode 3 after midnight on its release. I'm a genius and thought it was midnight this evening and not last evening at midnight. And it's very confusing to talk about because technically midnight is a new day, so it WAS released midnight Tuesday, but I still thought it was later today. Point is, I'll be pretending it was actually released tonight and I'll play it through when I get home from work at 11pm.

My 1000 subscriber mark is approaching. It's really just an arbitrary number as I'm pretty sure only 10 of those people are actively watching my videos. The rest I'm sure are either bots or subbed because of the Dungeon Siege or Diablo 1 videos. Still, I feel it's an excuse to do something special. Not going to say what, but I'm in the process of making it now (when I'm not trying to sift through 7-8 hours of Saints Row 3, the bits of Tera and War for the Overworld I have left, Guild Wars 1 and other things that have been getting stale on my hard drives).

Halfway finished the Among the Sleep LP, which really isn't that monumental as it was something like 3 hours long in total. Still, I feel like SOME progress is being made. Then poor Mesk and HKS have been wanting to play through more Guild Wars and Tera, but I've been all out a lot the past couple weeks (doing things like covering for my coworkers who monumentally messed up their shifts at work and interviewing for a new job). Once my hard drives are a little cleared up, I owe them quite a bit of game-time to catch up.

And hopefully I can avoid upsetting Mesk further with how I'm playing my archer in Tera. Hee.

Foggy

I keep forgetting that I have the Contrast LP that I can post in case I run out of solo LP stuff. My memory in general is really bad lately as I've got a lot to remember. Allergies/inner ear issues isn't helping the matter. So if I forget about something, I apologize. I'm doing it, but it's not on purpose. Usually I remember something important in time...at the last second...and then fly into a frenzy trying to recover the situation.

I need a full day to just work on video. It's the only way I'm going to catch up at this rate. That or just an hour each day, uninterrupted to work on this stuff. It hasn't been easy this past week with my aunt staying with us to visit my grandpa as well as work and other chores I've had to handle. My car still needs an oil change and that glass chip fixed...

Lost Kingdoms is officially finished. I may post my other failed attempts at the final level on the public drive at some point, but to save you all time, I only posted my first and last tries on YouTube. You miss a lot of anger and exasperation. If you screw up and die in this level at any point you have to do the entire level over again...and it's not short. Even rushing through the level (not even the boss portions) is a good 15-20 minutes with the mobs that jump you. Then there's two bosses to get through (annoying vampire dude and the final boss with an arena-wide AOE attack that takes your health down to 1...unless you hug the very edges). This is actually one of my all-time favourite bosses...but it'd be better if it took you to a save point at the beginning of the boss.

GeneralDelta seems to be taking this video channel thing to the next level with a website and contests and such. I think I'll remain a bit-player in this for now. I'll join in their games from time to time (right now Dead Island...much to Mesk's amusement), but for now I have no time to do more, especially when I have other video projects I want to do. Like Guild Wars 1 with Mesk and HKs (since we've been trying to do this stuff for ages...and really at this point they're waiting on me...heh).

Also poor Voyeur. We were trying to FINALLY finish RE5. Little did we know that Window Live finally got toasted and Steam took over hosting. Somewhere in the process all the save files were lost. We were literally on the final boss and it me so long to get my shit together that we lost all our progress that close to the end. So after waiting 2 hours for the game to update (i.e. redownload), we found this out, tried to restart and then experienced a string of crashes and disconnects. So we aren't finishing that LP. Consider it complete and off my list of things to do.

Sigh...

So it likely won't be posted until tomorrow, but I've run into a bit of a problem with the Bioshock 2 content. Like the first game, it has music in it that is copyright protected. Really great for immersion...really terrible for LPs. YouTube picks up on it and then companies like SME and UMG swing their weight around and suddenly my videos are blocked in multiple countries for something I have no control over (unless I want to completely turn music off). It's bad enough that companies like Nintendo are leeching money off of Let's Play videos and content (cause they obviously need more millions to add to their billions), but then music publishers come along and say mmmm we want a piece of that, or just slam the doors in producer's faces. There's already a number of my videos that these people are making money off of (I don't monetize and likely never will), as little as it is, and some of them I've discovered make claims on content in videos that they have no ownership of to make money off of them. Joke's on all of you! My view counts are low! Enjoy the 2 cents you're going to make (assuming any of my viewers don't actually have ad blocker).

I make no money, at all, on my videos. I do this for myself, to improve my skills, to have some laughs, and to have fun. I do the requests, I do collabs, but really why I keep doing this is because it's a great way to communicate my interests and ideas, especially to people I know. Even if those interests and ideas are limited to cussing at a screen for several hours. When I use music in my videos, or record a game, I am doing it solely to entertain (whether I accomplish that or not is another matter entirely). So you can imagine how frustrating it is to have my content blocked, because big music is butthurt about the minuscule money they're missing out on. I really don't mind the copyright claims and I generally accept them. These people put effort into the production of their music and deserve to be compensated for it. That said, I highly doubt the actual artists see any of this money in the long run (please correct me if I'm wrong, experts), especially when things are claimed like THREE HUNDRED YEAR OLD SYMPHONIES. I'm pretty sure Mozart and Beethoven are fair use guys. Lastly, just like LPs of games, use of music in videos can sometimes lead to viewers listening to more of that artist's music or even buying albums. For instance, I learned about and started listening to Imagine Dragons because of an Assassin's Creed music video I watched.

Somewhat angry rant aside, I will remind all my viewers who read this that I do have a public drive with content that is blocked in one or more countries on YouTube. Feel free to view and download that content at your leisure. The link is here as well as under the title at the top of the page. I will be removing the track in Bioshock 2 part 6 (hopefully this doesn't mess up the quality of the video too much, but if it does I plan on uploading the blocked parts to the public drive anyway). Just a heads up in case you are wondering why there is no audio around the 6 minute mark.