Robert Ballecer, a Jesuit priest who has apparently carved out the name “Digital Jesuit” for himself online, has started a Minecraft server for the Vatican. Not to build it. No, just as a place to do all the normal Minecraft things that folks do but in a less “toxic” environment. Folks seem a bit surprised. The Catholic church doesn’t exactly have a pro-tech image so a Minecraft server probably sounds out of left field to many people. I’m not Catholic, but I did go to a Catholic school for four years. A Jesuit one specifically, even. If there’s one thing I know about Jesuits (but there are still plenty I don’t) it’s that this kind of dorky merging of tech and faith is extremely their thing.
I can’t say I’m entirely surprised; quite a few priests have been known to be connected to today’s youth, sometimes in more ways than one.. I would also like to assist the Vatican with making a Catholic Gmod Server. I already know of a good church (skip ahead to 2:50 to see):
In fairness, this shouldn’t be too surprising. The Vatican is known to have blockheads.
When I first woke up yesterday I contemplated getting out of bed, or staying put and playing a little game. The weather has been cold enough here that I’ve been leaving my computer on to act as both a heat source and entertainment, and my kind of entertainment is known to heat up a room or two. My muscles were too tired to do much, so I propped myself up on a couple of pillows and played AudioSurf 2 on my Steam Controller for awhile. I worked on what is turning into a nice config, it still needs some tweaking but it’s more usable than the default controller settings. I have the gyro and right touch pad enabled to act as a mouse, and if I enable the gyro I can drive my controller like a steering wheel. It’s fun, but I still need a bit of practice before I can match my score on my everyday Logitech G502.
I went through a bit of my library yesterday and revisited some other games that I’ve been neglecting, progressing a tiny bit before hitting a stuck point and going off to the next point of interest. Both for pleasure and preemptive pleasure. I went through some of my couch co-op enabled games and tried to optimize them to the best of my ability for if I ever want to invite someone over digitally or physically. I’m looking forward to getting my new Steam Controllers (assuming the orders don’t get cancelled) in the mail, if only to experiment with local co-op config building; see how well two of the same controller work together.
I wanted that fucking hat…
Yutram and I were going to play Trine last night, but that has been proving difficult with Steam Controllers and a regular mouse. I’m thinking the next time we attempt it we’ll try regular controllers (if possible). I was too tired to do any streaming last night (was still overwhelmed from Thanksgiving and Black Friday) and wanted to relax in some Borderlands 2 DLC instead… I think I’ll save that for another post, and maybe a future video.
Today was a little more productive; I did some Cyber Monday shopping, and drank lots of tea as per morning, afternoon, and evening tradition. I’ve been combining fruit teas with regular loose leaf tea to make super tea!
This morning was a Blueberry Watermelon Oolong morning. I have cranberry blood orange black tea lined up for tomorrow, though that one was already pre-mixed. Now I’m sipping just blueberry and jade green tea, both filled with antioxidants.
I’m getting closer to the finish line for this particular project. I worked on it a little bit today, will probably finish it the rest of the way tomorrow. There really isn’t much else to do on it other than some animation cleanup. Hand animating has been an interesting learning curve, and I feel like I get less and less worse with each attempt. After I finish up this project I’ll be putting together something for a New Years Eve video. To celebrate my new-ish video style I’ll be selecting the best animated bits from videos throughout the year. If anyone has a suggestion feel free to throw one my way. :melon:
You can already count on Ronald and Batman… Open Thread!
The last couple work days have pretty much left me in a stupor. I’ve felt like I’ve only lived in work and bed, and while doing so I read an article a guest poster over at Kotaku wrote about game related dreams, which kind of piqued my interest as I suffer from an overactive imagination that I’m pretty sure is trying to kill me. When I was little I dreamed about Doom a lot, and since I modded the game they would sometimes appear in the dream. For example; if I were to play a game of classic Doom with the pinky demons being replaced by Barney the Dinosaur, and replace all the floating hellspawn with Sam Kinison yelling in the background there would be a good chance it would appear in my sleep. Yes, even at the age of 5 I not only modded, but had a really bizarre taste for how my Doom played. :zorak: The other kids didn’t like my appreciation of Barney.
Of course that’s nothing compared to the other surroundings that have corrupted my brain over the last few years. Having known a few people throughout the years that have these dreams on occasion makes me wonder what other imaginations have come up with. She’s one of the few people to have survived my imagination.
Speaking of; you’ll see some imagination tomorrow. :trollface:
I woke up this morning to $5 Steam Controllers and had a few accidentally fall into my steam cart, which I accidentally paid for with my PayPal, which I accidentally entered my name and password for, and accidentally purchased. The accidental emails I received on the incident have foretold such tales.
I probably won’t post tomorrow. Busy work day, and have to get to bed early for Black Friday. I have to be to work at midnight to prep things, which I volunteered to do. Half of my shift will be out of the way of angry screaming asshats that have nothing better to do with their lives other than wait outside in freezing weather just to buy a pair of shoes for ten dollars less, or buy a TV that has been the same price since August, but we changed the sign to emphasize that it’s a Black Friday deal, and somehow feel satisfied about that for some reason.
I treated myself to a beef and lettuce sandwich wrap today instead of the usual diet shake. I made a Korean inspired sauce and poured it over some cooked ground beef, a little jasmine rice and green onion, wrapped with some bibb lettuce and spinach wraps. I wanted to do something different, and not only did I achieve that, it tastes really good! I think next time I’ll chop up some tomato and cook some bell pepper or carrot along with it.
I basically came home on Saturday, and accidentally fell into a 12 hour nap. Hell even through Sunday I felt jet lagged, pretty much spent all of yesterday in chill mode. I made up for some lost animation time, and even made time to play a couple other things:
I played some single sessions of Melon Simulator yesterday, good game to play if you want to do something silly for a few minutes. It also has a level editor and a workshop. It reminds me of survival mode in the Left 4 Dead games, or any game where the goal is just to survive as long as possible. You can collect weapons, and even beat up melons with dead melon gibs, and feed upon them to regain your strength. Best played with a watermelon candle lit, some watermelon tea, and if you live in the appropriate state watermelon vape. :melon: I also played a bit of Far Cry 5 when taking animation breaks. I haven’t decided if I’ll continue animating today, or if I’ll wait til tomorrow. I’m anticipating this week to be more brutal than last week, and last week was already quite brutal… and I’m not just saying that because of my watermelon tourmaline gemstone falling off of my ring. I’m hoping it fell in a tote somewhere. Oddly enough I was contemplating buying another ring for the other hand about a week or so ago, and now I kinda had to move that up a bit it looks like.
No, I don’t plan on wearing all of them at once… The two in the top pic were a couple of cheap cocktail rings I got off of ebay, and the other one is a custom ring I got off of Etsy! I made sure to keep the cost under $75. I don’t buy jewelry for myself very often, in fact I think the last time I bought myself any jewelry it was the ring that broke recently… Guilt absolved. I also got some watermelon tourmaline earrings on the way, oh and early Christmas gifts for people persons. :trollface:
I’m anticipating another ballbuster week, so if I go radio silent I think you’ll know why. But on the plus side if I survive Black Friday there will be a video the next day. :melon:
I got a late start in yesterday with one of the videos I plan to release further down the pipeline. I’ve also been mentally going over some of the things I might have to do in order to keep YouTube off of my arse. In case you haven’t heard YouTube is changing their rules due to COPPA and YouTube’s inability to keep their shit together. Channel creators now have to declare their channels as for kids or not for kids (but neither of the 4Kids), or do it on a video by video basis. I’ve pretty much marked my channel as a “not kids” channel; but in future videos I might start including warning intros to make it clear that my videos don’t target kids in any way whatsoever. One must be of a mature age before they can view my melon laden content.
Yutram and I tested the new Steam couch co-op feature recently released by Steam. It allows you to play a local co-op game with a friend (assuming the game is supported). The nice thing about this new feature is the ability to play with a friend who doesn’t own the game, and since it’s your computer they’re connected to they’ll see your nightmarish mods:
There really is no escape… why did I have to find this while looking for Bayonetta mods?
I’ll have to progress through my library and see what works and what doesn’t, even keep my eyes peeled for some local co-op games in the upcoming sale. I like where this is going!
So, this week’s excuse for why I haven’t been posting much lately is because once again work has collected most of my attention. I got to basically write my own schedule last week, and made myself work a full 40. I might be lucky enough to do that next week too, always willing to make more money when I can. With Christmas coming up I’ll need every penny that I can get to send out my usual gifts, fucking tariffs can go die in a pile of flaming dicks.
I tidied up a bit, did a little shopping for Christmas, and played a bit more Bayonetta. I even decided to check out Resident Evil 6 for the first time. While looking for Bayonetta mods I found a Bayonetta mod for RE6, and then a rabbit hole of other mods to choose from.
Pretty sure this will haunt my nightmares.
I’ve already made some changes to my game, should be fun to do couch co-op with. 😛 Possibly stream too if I can defeat the Quick Time Events… my worst enemy in those games.
I continued to progress through my animation during the week. I just need to record some dialogue with Yutram and find a good way to close the scene; then I can begin piecing together another disasterpiece. We’re coming up with so many characters that we’ve been in discussion of whether or not we should build a wiki to keep track of events and “lore”.
