Very old GW2 shot from my media library because my back hurts too much to sit at my PC to find a new one, and this post has been sitting here for a week waiting to post and I’m tired of waiting. (304 words.)

Considerably more talking than writing on day 4. Morning update: Irish accents, daylight savings, second Mythica movie, nervous about iOS Scrivener, feeling mute when I’m not able to type on a keyboard, struggling to differentiate character voices in dialog. Evening update: the story so far, NaNoWriMo community and me. (49 words.)

Kind of a long one. A better day. Hilarious text-to-speech on the iPad, switching scenes, what I like about my writing so far, blanks between writing sessions, thinking about getting Scrivener for iOS, starting fresh every day, finally getting into the world of the story, bringing complex modern sociopolitical themes into the backdrop of the sword-and-sorcery city setting. (58 words.)

I’m trying an experiment this year for NaNoWriMo. Instead of writing blog posts about my progress, I’m recording “vlogs” about it. I created a YouTube channel where you can watch me ramble about my NaNoWriMo journey this year. My goal is to record a short video every day talking about my progress, the challenges I run into, how I deal with them, etc. Things that I think might be educational or inspiring or helpful or just funny to other writers. A lot about “the writing process” and how I’m feeling about the project as I go along. Thrills, chills, spills. Stuff that I would normally write about, but I’m just going to talk about them instead. I would rather reserve my writing energy for the NaNoWriMo draft as much as possible. (302 words.)

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, photo by Brandt Luke Zorn. I saw a tweet the other day that made me raise an eyebrow: Hey Twitter fans: please go track down people who could legally get us Star Wars Galaxy's server code, and City of Heroes server code. If they agree to hand over the server code, we can bring those games back online legally. (688 words.)

Bless Online launched on Steam for free the other day to exactly zero fanfare, as far as I can tell. Certainly nobody mentioned it on Twitter or in the blogosphere. I had to use my feed reader’s search feature to find the announcement on MassivelyOP. I’m a big fan of free trials when it comes to MMORPGs, and very rarely have I ever spent money on one without trying it out in some way first. (Not counting the old days when you had no choice. Let’s say I haven’t played without a trial since 2006.) So now that it would cost me nothing but time, I finally downloaded Bless Online, installed it, and gave it a shot. (1025 words.)

Trion Worlds was just acquired by a company called Gambino. No wait, it’s Gamigo. I don’t have much to say about this except I’ve never heard of Gamigo before. I’m hardly an expert in the global operations of every company in the gaming industry, but it does seem a little bit strange that the name Gamigo has never crossed my MMO radar in the last twenty years. They seem to be based in Germany, so maybe it’s not that surprising. The first impressions I’m hearing from people on social media are not particularly good. (668 words.)

I just realized this image is pretty similar to the Horizon Zero Dawn image in my last post. I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. (1577 words.)

I woke this morning to an almost literally freezing cold house, which means that we can no longer pretend that the cold months of the year won’t happen. By “we” I mean “me,” because there are some people who actually like the transition from summer to fall. I personally spend most days between November and March in three or four layers of clothes, moving slowly, barely staving off uncontrollable shivering fits, unable to concentrate, hiding in the darkness that consumes most of each day. (582 words.)

Horizon Zero Dawn, the only thing I’ve played in the last week. I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. (1201 words.)