I hope everyone had a peaceful day, celebratory or not. I slept in due to sleep deprivation and the sound of rain. Enjoyed some holiday tea, opened presents, and even played one of them! Also caught up on a little Yakuza, figured it would be appropriate given the in game universe is set around Christmas season. I’m still waiting for packages to arrive, a couple of them go back to November. Fortunately I’m patient, and I’m double fortunate to have patient friends.
I did quite a bit today… Made a breakfast shake, baked muffins, animated more of the current nightmare fuel project, and even found a proper poll plugin that passes flying colors. All in all a productive way to end my weekend.
I’ll put the poll up as its own page, or possibly integrate it into the main page somehow if it doesn’t look too intrusive, and also make a post about it after Christmas. Just like last time no account is necessary, and the limit will still remain as one IP vote per household. I’m really interested in how this turns out! No matter how big or small the participation is. :v
I cycled through some games today to properly decompress and get my mind off of yet another work week surviving morons, and waiting for late packages in the mail (waiting on gifts to send to people… some of them late, misdelivered and dropped off by residents on other streets, the post office is kind of fucky over here at the moment). I wanted to try some of the freebies I’ve accumulated in my library over the years, and decided to try Lego: Ninjago Movie because, why not? I tried to play it under Linux awhile ago and ran into audio issues, and I figured I’d play it under Windows to get around that issue. The good news is that the audio works! The bad news is that it crashes more than a drunken sailor. I did some reading around, and this game, despite the positive reviews, crashes galore on certain setups, and mine seems to fall into that happy little club. I’m running up to date drivers, it was a clean install of the game, and I even tried running it in both DX9 and DX11 mode. I’m going to see if I can tweak something under Proton, but so far I’m thankful this was a freebie; the amount crashes alone would have made me demand a refund.
Upon returning to the ultimate trudge that is my Steam library I took notice of Neon Boost; a parkour style platformer with an 80’s tron/synthwave aesthetic. You have to get from point A to point B by bouncing, ducking, rocket jumping and running along walls while listening to synthwave during constant movement. There was a LOT of dying. Some instructions are floating in the air, and I had to come around a few times just to figure out what I was supposed to do, or I didn’t climb onto the wall or rocket jump properly from said wall. You can check it out for yourself on Steam, it’s an eternal freebie.
I also gave Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris a try again (not a freebie, unfortunately), but the damned game still suffers from amnesia every time you launch the game. At least a free indie came through for me, even if it is a ballbuster.
To kick off the weekend I combed my library of what feels like infinite entertainment, and decided to give an indie called A Memory Of Us. I picked it up in a charity bundle a few months back, and it seemed to be one of the more interesting ones in the bundle. It tells the tale of a young girl that loved to read all kinds of stories about robots and the like, but grew bored of these same tales and ventured off to yonder book store to find a new story to dig into. You find an old man sleeping on the other side of the desk, and through chat balloons and dream speak he tells you to venture upstairs to find stories. I had to drag a ladder to the other side of a room to find the book of plot device (not the actual name of the book), and encountered a bug preventing me from dragging the ladder with my controller. I even tried mapping my Steam Controller to behave like a keyboard, but the arrow keys didn’t seem to register on the analog stick, will need to science that out another time. This game is playable with a keyboard, but this would be a perfect candidate for relaxing on the couch or in bed (or if you play in the bathroom like select Nintendo Switch users and the gaming laptop owners before them). Getting over my peripheral hurdle I found a book and brought it to the old man, and he finds a picture contained within showing a younger him, as well as a girl that looks oddly like the young girl before him. He has a flashback to his childhood, where he first meets her after outrunning cops and hiding in a garbage can you fall/hide in.
You play as both characters, and rely on one another to solve puzzles and other obstacles; such as stealing a slingshot to shoot apples down into a basket, or using a pocket mirror the boy picks up to blind a drunkard, and who knows what else I’ll find? I’ve left off at outrunning the police… I do that a lot for some reason.
Other than the game not being controller friendly I like the rest of it, at least thus far. I’ll return to it again when I’m not feeling like I could sleep for an entire week.
Too tired to post, can’t brain, must mentally prepare for complete morons tomorrow.
Open Thread.
In between the food bloggenings I’ve been hard at work creating strange fever dreams in Source Filmmaker. I’ve actually posted a few WIP’s in my Discord thing if anyone is ever bored. What started out as a simple scene idea became slightly more… involved. I keep arriving at certain points where I’ll ask aloud “What happens after Batman forces two figurines to bump uglies with one other?” and then the answer becomes obvious.
This one is taking awhile, lots of bodies to animate interacting with one another, and I’m trying new types of animations I’ve yet to attempt while trying to maintain that they look somewhat passable.
I’m also looking into possibly doing a poll to determine the next set of videos to do, just like last year. I’m still a bit of a ways away from finishing the current project, but wouldn’t mind something to mentally chew on while working on some of last year’s leftovers before moving on to newer last year’s leftovers. Make it themed to determine what porn I should focus on in the new year. If I do go through with it however, it’ll be yuuuuuuge. As in there will be so many options you’ll be able to literally poll dance around this poll. I have over 28.3TB of video footage to go through, and voter roulette is kind of sounding fun to me. 🙂
Or Banana Nesquik rather… Decided to put a spoonful of the banana powder in my overnight oat mixture and it tasted pretty good mixed with chocolate chips and a touch of granola. I have a couple healthier ones to finish out the week, been doing my best to try and plan ahead. I made a blueberry matcha one, and a strawberry one with garden strawberries and some (British) strawberry nesquik for extra vitamins and natural strawberry.
I would have also shared another round chicken dinner porn, but I was so hungry I forgot to take a picture. Oh well, consider yourselves spared!
I felt like doing Italian tonight. I made a chicken pasta with a tomato mushroom pasta sauce, a three color salad made of mozzerella, tomato and basil, and some corn. I was inspired by a recipe, but couldn’t find proper ingredients so turned it into my own thang. For the sauce I used:
I browned the chicken in one pan, and I placed the entire can of tomatoes and their juice, added the serrano, carrot, garlic, sauce, mushrooms and parsley and seasoned it with salt and pepper. After I finished browning the chicken I placed it in the sauce and let it simmer for about an hour with the frequent stir. You can actually eat it after half an hour, but waiting longer does make it more tender. It hit the spot! Plus I have more for later.
If you haven’t played it yet I highly recommend checking it out! It’s a mod for Portal 2 that you can download directly via Steam. It serves up more Portal related brain teasers with a catch, you have a portable time machine!
The time machine has three buttons: Start, Stop and Play. You can record yourself standing on or pressing buttons, picking up items to hand to yourself, firing portals or even crouching to help your current self get up walls.
The mod campaign is pretty short, although there is a workshop with more levels if you feel like punishing your brain into overdrive. I finished it in about three hours playing on and off, and most of that was through trial and error as the puzzles started to become more advanced. It’s definitely worth checking out if you want another portal related adventure… with a twist!