January has been a PC simulation game month, continuing from December. The big oval room is a bustling tavern in my most-recent fortress, Amostitdun. Dwarf Fortress, 69 hours. Yeah, I kinda still play Dwarf Fortress. It’s really not that bad once you learn it. No, really! I mean, if you’re a programmer, that is, who’s spent decades using programming text editors, moving cursors around and learning keyboard shortcuts. And also someone who’s played a month and a half of RimWorld beforehand to get the hang of this specific kind of game. If nothing else, it’s a very intellectually stimulating game, and there is no shortage of new things to experience and learn. It’s a giant brain teaser puzzle. RimWorld, 41 hours. I have to sheepishly admit I haven’t played any RimWorld since I started playing Dwarf Fortress. Subnautica, 11 hours. I started out playing a half hour a day in January, but one day I forgot to play and I haven’t been back since. I reached a point where I didn’t know where to go or what to do next, and the whole routine of “wander around until you find the next thing to do” gets old pretty quick for me. Guild Wars 2, 3 hours. This was the brief time I played Living World Season 4, Episode 5, All or Nothing. No PlayStation 4 games were played. I didn’t pick up a controller all month. (266 words.)

I’m doing that thing again where my posts start piling up in Drafts because I write them on my MacBook Air in the living room, but I only add images on my gaming PC in the computer room, and I spend all of my time with my gaming PC actually gaming instead of adding images to blog posts, so the posts just sit here in Drafts until I force myself to add an image some days or weeks later. I know, I know, blog posts don’t *need* images to post, but I’ve been entirely convinced by years of “expert” advice and examples that nobody will ever click on any Internet content unless there is a colorful, compelling thumbnail picture associated with it. (822 words.)

This post is about the boring inside baseball minutia of audios and videos and scripting, so beware. I uploaded the four videos comprising the entire brief lifespan of my Gusilingiz fortress to my YouTube channel. Since I did some experimental stuff in those videos, I thought I would document it all here, because I love this stuff and you can’t stop me. By the way, I spelled Gusilingiz wrong in my last post, in case you’re an expert on the dwarven language and noticed that glaring error. And I know, I know, the diacritic is still missing. (2417 words.)

There’s supposed to be a diacritic or something on one of those vowels in Guzilingiz, but who can be bothered with such things. I started another fortress in Dwarf Fortress. Guess what? If you guessed “werelizards destroyed the whole fortress again” you’d be exactly right. Yeah it's another scene of unspeakable carnage and horror. So much gore splashed on the walls here it couldn't even get an R-rating if it were a movie. (542 words.)

I’m pretty weary of writing about Guild Wars 2 so this is going to be a short post. Mostly it’s just to note that I did finish the new Episode 5, All or Nothing last night. I don’t say what happens here, but there is one big hint below (from ArenaNet) which is plenty to work out what happens, so beware. I hadn’t logged into Guild Wars 2 a single time since I finished episode 4. I started this one on January 9th. Sometimes I didn’t play more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. (913 words.)

I imagine if you draw a Venn diagram of “people who play Dwarf Fortress” and “people who are programmers,” the two circles would overlap quite a bit. Unfortunately for me, I’m a programmer, so I think I’m more vulnerable to this DF sickness than most people. Playing the game is quite a bit like using a text editor, considering how much you use the arrow keys to select things in rhythmic patterns. Anyway… (764 words.)

So a weird thing happened. I played more Dwarf Fortress. And then a little more. And I kind of started liking it. “It’s really not that hard once you learn it.” This is Bekarlogem, my third fortress. Bekarlogem apparently means "Dippedpainted" which makes me giggle every time for some reason. Ha! Just kidding. It’s still super hard. Every screen has a different method of navigating the menus. Sometimes it’s arrow keys. Sometimes it’s tab. Sometimes it’s the + and - keys. Sometimes it’s the * and / keys. I’m not kidding about any of that. Every single thing on the screen leads to the question, “What does *that* mean?” As in, “What does it mean when that dwarf is blinking like that? What does it mean when those letters pop up in the corner of the screen there? What does it mean when this guy’s name is blinking in this list?” (839 words.)

Well we’re starting off the week by deciding *not* to post the post I was going to post about why blogging is such work for me right now, because of the reasons I explain in that post, because I just don’t want anyone to know how much work it is, which quickly kills off the era of “2019 is when I post my half-finished drafts even when they’re not done instead of letting them accumulate in Drafts for years on end.” Let’s just assume there isn’t a terrified artist child hiding behind these posts at all, cringing and holding his breath every time he hits that publish button, and I am just another confident egomaniacal writer who revels in forcing my thoughts and opinions on everyone out there! (581 words.)

I saw @Stargrace and some other folks talking about Dwarf Fortress in the blogosphere and on Twitter. It’s that game that has that reputation for being the greatest game ever, and also the most impossible to actually play, that I’ve been hearing about for the last ten years. I think I first heard about it on the Gamers With Jobs podcast years and years ago. It dawned on me that I’ve always heard it’s a game that sounds similar to RimWorld, and I love RimWorld, so therefore by the transitive property I should also love Dwarf Fortress. A bunch of people on the Reddits actually recommend Dwarf Fortress if you like RimWorld. Those people are insane, as we’ll soon see. (But insanity is a requirement for using Reddit, zing bang boom, hey-oh, har har.) Anyway, I’ve always wanted to see it for myself. (1749 words.)

Here’s another one of those posts I started one day and then decided the next day that it doesn’t really say anything, and doesn’t contain any valuable content except the one link to Scopique’s post. But per the new 2019 blogging rules, I’m posting it anyway. I saw Scopique’s post on audio settings for streaming, which gives me an excuse to write about one of my favorite things: Audio engineering! I could write thousands and thousands and thousands of words on the inside baseball minutia of all the work I put into the audio tracks on my YouTube videos. (“See how different it sounds when you move the microphone two inches *that* way?? See how much different it sounds with a 4.25:1 compression ratio instead of a 4.5:1 ratio??? Isn’t that the coolest thing ever???”) (677 words.)