Endgame Viable

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.)

I’m going to try a new thing this year on the ol’ blog. Last year, I would start writing a post, thinking it was the greatest thing ever, words flowing all over the place, but then I’d hit a wall and couldn’t really think of a conclusion, and I would wander away to something else. Then I would read the post the next day or the next, and realize it wasn’t that good, despite having a kernel of a good idea. So I’d edit it again and put it away. Then the next day I’d realize it’s even worse, and edit it again and again and again, adding paragraphs, removing paragraphs, changing it entirely from what it once was on the first day. Eventually I’d decide it was utterly pointless garbage that didn’t have a conclusion for a reason-because it was garbage-and it would remain forever buried in the Drafts folder. This is one of those posts. But this year, I’m going to post it anyway! Maybe that’s kind of cynical. It feels kind of cynical. But after writing this post, I don’t really know anymore. (1044 words.)

If you don't instantly recognize this, we can't be friends. While seemingly every where I turn at the start of 2019 I see people talking about how it’s a great time to start blogging because blogging is super hot and rewarding and it’s all fine and nothing is on fire and burning right to the ground around us, *I* am sitting here wondering what the heck is even the point of this blog anymore. (594 words.)

It’s time for another performance review of my YouTube channel. Thanks to YouTube’s change in monetization strategy at the beginning of the year, I basically stopped putting any effort into video production in 2018. The only videos I upload now are completely unedited-basically mini-streams without a chat room. (Occasionally I do some edits, but it’s minor and rare.) In fact, toward the end of the year as I’m writing this, I would say that I only upload about 1 video for every 10 that I actually record. Most of them just sit on my hard drive now. I recorded my entire playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but only uploaded an edited summary of the first couple of hours of it. I’ve recorded probably close to a hundred hours of RimWorld videos, but I’ve only uploaded seven. I actually click the “record” button on OBS pretty much every time I play a PC game now. Hard drive space is a bit of a problem. (1127 words.)

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2019. (Here is 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak. I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs. Actually, even MMORPGs these days aren’t much like old school traditional MMORPGs anymore, but that’s another topic. The point is I try to weed out things that are obviously not traditional MMORPGs, like, say, Anthem or Fallout 76 or Rend or Cyberpunk 2077. (1410 words.)