Hey guys, I had a wedding shoot Sunday, which is why we weren't playing. Or at least I wasn't I *might* be able to play this upcoming Sunday but it's up in the air as to whether I'll be home Sunday night (visiting my sister during the day and may stay there overnight, though I could ask to borrow her machine for gaming, I'll pack my dice and whichever way it falls I'll let you guys know).

Sorry it took a while, but I'm glad I finally got around to this! It was fun. Took some time to get used to who was who and where all the players were. In a final version you'd need either more time spent establishing characters (hahaha Fingers man, that shit was priceless) or a quick dramatis personae before it gets going.

Immediate engagement is an issue too, like Teague said. You want to arrest attention in the first sixty seconds, even if it's something toward the end that's big and exciting, then some officious-sounding bureaucrat saying, "Roll the tape back," so you can then take the slow-burn approach but the audience knows that it's working toward, "The wing fell off!"

Or in this case, that a bunch of guys are trying to leave somewhere, apparently unauthorized.

Well I apparently haven't posted in here since last month's subscription drive so... time for this month's! I'm sorta going overboard this month. Not just a video a day, but a different, unique video a day, not just ongoing Let's Play series.

WEEK 1: Intellivision Week. A selection of games from this Atari competitor in the early 80s, like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, BurgerTime, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

WEEK 2: Classic Racing Week. Not your Mario Kart or F-Zero, but mostly PC games like pod (not to be confused with Star Wars: Episode I: Racer, which is also a video this week), Re-Volt, and Project Gotham Racing 2.

WEEK 3: Tabletop Week. Board games and card games, some old and some new, like Daytona 500, Superfight, and Werewolf: A Party Game for Devious People.

WEEK 4: Boter Bug Fish Care Series. Uh, what? A week of videos devoted to learning how to set up and maintain a freshwater aquarium in a healthy and sustainable way, with topics like tank setup, types of fish, and how to clean the tank.

WEEK 5: With three days left over, we're releasing the finished versions of borth Turning Point lightsaber duels so far and releasing a teaser (single shot or something) from the third one.

Looking forward to the programming this upcoming month and wanted to share at least this one. Thanks for reading, and video shares are always appreciated

PC. Gaming-wise I'd say that mods are usually the winning factor for most people, but for me I actually really like the personal nature of building your own system. It's my baby, and I'm proud when it works the way I want, and I take care of it and get it the upgrades it needs to stay current.

Plus you can't really edit video on an Xbox, so.

If you could learn any new, complicated skill/skillset instantly, but had to give up all knowledge on a skill/skillset you'd worked at long and hard in your life, would you, and what would those skills be? If you wouldn't, why not?

People that are friends with me on Facebook probably already saw the short version of this story, but here's a clip I made last night, followed by the longer version.

I needed a background of a waving checkered flag to put behind the end slide of the week of racing games I'll be releasing on my channel. With the exception of a few in the $10 range, most were like fifty bucks for thirty seconds of looping footage. This being crazy and me being poor, I decided, "Screw that, I'll make it myself!"

Some regrets were had.

The flag was easy enough to assemble; some nice high resolution checkerboard from Wikipedia tiled in a way to match a flag.

The first animation tutorials I found used fractal noise. I skipped through those and felt they were a bit too esoteric, not the right tool for the job, and the resuts weren't quite what I was looking for.

Then I found a tutorial by Chris Zwar, whose results were what I was looking for, whose methods made sense, and holy hell it's 45 minutes long. I started scrubbing through, and fully half of the tutorial is how he made the flag. Wikipedia, some fabric noise, grunging it up a bit. I'm fine with my plain checkerboard, thank you, how do I make it do the flappy.

When it finally came time to talk about how to use the Wave World plugin, which comes pre-baked into Adobe After Effects CS3 and later, he was scant on the details of how it actually worked. He was better with CC Glass, but that one didn't require nearly as much tweaking.

Then when I was nearly done I decided, "You know what that could use? Depth of field." Add a camera, make it like an f/0.3 aperture or something, then spent a while troubleshooting banding that was showing up even in a 32bit workspace only to realize that it was just fine on the export.

...Then I went and exported it to H.264 and uploaded it to YouTube so I'm sure it's not perfect. But it's there, and free, if you ever need it.

The troubleshooting was fun, but I don't think it's something I'll ever do again; if I'd found it for free I probably would have just gone with that. Still, I like it. Guess that's what matters.

Yeah, I definitely remember Jakku being his first mission. It was a sink or swim moment, after which he would have been found to be successful or - after that performance - discharged at the very least. And he sank, hard, they just had no way of knowing he'd do what he did.

Dying battery + car alarm + phat beats = Friday jam.

Extended version on Soundcloud.

YouTube's been doing that on my computer at work - sometimes it'll play something, other times you have to wait on the page for half an hour. (Seriously, left the tab open and forgot about it, all of a sudden Peter Hollens is blasting into my ears while I work on a wedding video.)

I haven't played them; the closest I've gotten was a really well done fan-fiction. The guy took the one minute opening cutscene and expanded it into seven chapters. That naturally being the start of the story, people wanted him to finish, so he took it from there and wrote the story out, sometimes wildly diverging from the game.

The story is Free Radical by Shamus Young. I definitely recommend the read - I've done so numerous times and indulged in getting myself a copy from the guy's Lulu store.

Yes we did, so we should all be synced still.

I'll message Spiro and make sure he knows we're on for tonight.