It doesn’t seem like a game from 2007 would be that “old,” but it sure is. I tried out a shooter called TimeShift from my Steam backlog. I bought it in 2016 for $1.80. Installing TimeShift was painless. In fact, since it’s so old, it took almost no time at all to install. The size of the game was measured in Megabytes-3000 of them, roughly. The mechanics of the game are pretty standard for a shooter: You point at things and shoot them, with various weapons, which generally fall into the standard categories: Pistol, Assault Rifle, Shotgun, and variations thereof. (660 words.)

I grouse about Elder Scrolls Online a lot, so I thought it would be fair to point out that I actually had an enjoyable play session yesterday for a couple of hours. My “main” from the game’s launch in 2014 is a Nord Templar who is now somewhere around level 48 I think. This is the character I keep trying to play, and keep running into frustrations because the game consistently refuses to let me play the way I want to play this character. (1240 words.)

Life Is Feudal, the MMO, as opposed to the other two games with the same name that are different, recently became free to download and play on Steam. This is a game I’ve wanted to check out almost since the day I heard about it, which seems like five or ten or a hundred years ago now. It’s been an Early Access game all this time (and still is), but it’s always been more than the amount I’m willing to pay for an Early Access game, which is $10. (774 words.)

Theoretically you can click the following link to download the latest version of an OPML file of Blaugustians: Blaugust 2019 OPML File I tend to model my software development life around the Perl mantra: “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.” Thus did I find myself hemming and hawing over the prospect of manually adding a whole bunch of blogs to my RSS feed reader for this Blaugust. (485 words.)

It’s raining this morning, which is always a bummer of a way to start the day. Even my dog and cat don’t want to do anything on rainy mornings. I thought I would mention something about games on this gaming blog for a change. I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I finished playing Bloodborne on the PS4. I’m uploading the video series now. (I did a much better job with thumbnails and metadata than I did with Sekiro. (809 words.)

I’m trying a new RSS feed reader for this Blaugust. It’s a Windows-based reader called NewsFlow. The grid layout. I don't read posts like this but it was more colorful for the screenshot than just a list of text. It’s not that I particularly wanted to try a new reader, but InoReader, my web-based reader of choice, has implemented a limitation of 150 feeds in the free version. At the time they implemented the limitation, some time earlier this year, I had over 300 feeds in my list. (560 words.)

I forgot that I was trying to write something every day to get into shape for Blaugust. Writing calisthenics, if you will. (I just now learned that I have no idea how to spell the word “calisthenics.” My first attempt was “calusthetics.” It’s entirely possible I have never written that word in a document before in my lifetime.) Writing is a habit that needs to be exercised, by the way. You can’t just sit down and write out of the blue, just like you can’t just run a marathon out of the blue. (1102 words.)

Today’s post is an experiment in a different writing position. Due to various aches and pains that I mentioned before, I’m constantly looking for new physical positions to write in. Here are the writing positions that I know cause pain over time: Sitting at desktop PC like I’ve done all my life “Standing desk” in front of living room television Sitting in living room chair with laptop in lap Sitting in living room chair with laptop on a mobile laptop stand shelf thingy Lying in bed with laptop on lap Lying in bed with laptop on a stand thingy I recently bought This time, I’m trying to sit in the living room chair, looking at the television, using a wireless keyboard in my lap that is attached to the media PC. (1506 words.)

One of my long-term projects is to “compress” the mountains of videos I have put on my network drive over the last couple of years into smaller bitrates to save space. I thought a 16TB NAS was basically the same as “infinity” space, but it turns out when you record a whole lot of game videos at 14Mbps, it actually isn’t. Now, I render my videos to smaller bitrates before putting them on the NAS. (1182 words.)

Here is the official list of games I will play for Blaugust, randomized with random.org using atmospheric noise or some such nonsense: TimeShift The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Antichamber Majesty Gold HD Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 Dead Space 2 World in Conflict Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit NEO Scavenger Vortex: The Gateway KHOLAT Crysis Warhead Game of Thrones Apotheon Penumbra: Requiem The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Alan Wake’s American Nightmare A Story About My Uncle Darksiders II The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Crysis Wars The Age of Decadence Gothic 3 Forsaken Gods Enhanced Edition Crysis 2 Maximum Edition Max Payne 3 Tree of Savior (English Ver. (382 words.)

I think I’m sufficiently setup for streaming now. I just have to push some buttons and I’ll be live on Twitch. I did a test this afternoon and everything seemed to work satisfactorily. I mean except for the part where the final frame of the video was me rubbing my nose in an awkward way, so that when the video ends my hand is frozen there on my nose and it looks weird. (611 words.)

I’ve just been reliably informed that next month is August. In fact, it will be August in just over two weeks from the time of this writing. (Which was yesterday, as of the time of this posting.) That means Blaugust is back. Head over there to Tales from the Aggronaut for all the details. Thanks to Belghast for making these awesome images available! I have to be honest. The idea of writing a blog post every day for a month elicits a heavy sigh from me. (1719 words.)

I’ve heard about a thing in Final Fantasy XIV called the “Trust System.” I didn’t pay any attention to it. Why would I? It’s called a “trust system.” Typical of most things in Final Fantasy, there is nothing within the words of that name that even remotely implies what it actually *is*. If they had called it what it is, which is apparently “AI Party Members For Completing Main Scenario Quest Dungeons Solo,” then boy would my ears have pricked up fast. (897 words.)

Another super easy month to figure out. It was Bloodborne on the PS4. I basically only play one game at a time anymore, and have little interest in anything else until I finish with it. Bloodborne (PS4), ~50-60 hours. Time estimated by looking at how long I ran OBS Studio on my PC, which was 50 hours. However when I finished the game and entered New Game+ last night, the total save game time was 68 hours, but that extends a little bit into May as well. (239 words.)

Bloodborne: It’s fantastic. I’m not even finished yet and it clearly deserves to go into my entirely fictional All-Time Hall of Fame Game Library. That’s it. That’s my impressions. If you like this kind of game, it’s a must-play. (If you don’t, then you probably won’t like it, because it is the quintessential version of this kind of game, the template from which all others of this kind of game are poorly copied. (1767 words.)