It's been an alright week although my mood does tend to fluctuate. Got some good progress on job hunting and played some video games. Went to the theater too.
Read
Whilst I didn't finish any books this week I did start some new ones
Main one was the rulebook for the second version of Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was the first version of DnD I ever came across and I have fond memories of playing it with my dad and brothers.
The rules have so many little differences from what they are today. In many places they are more restrictive as you couldn't have some combinations of race and class, classes had ability score requirements and different experience rates.
I was particularly interested in the rules for carry weights and weights of items. The rules even took into account limits for containers in terms of weight and dimensions. The equipment lists have some weird details like lots of kinds of ships and heaps of slightly different polearms.
One of the most fun things that Advanced DnD had was the assumption that a mid level character would have their own castle and followers. It was assumed that you would have a small army of a dozen soldiers or so following you on adventures. Also it got quite creative with how difficult it was to gain a high level in some classes. For Druids only so many high level ones can be in the world at once.
I also got started on a biography of Terry Pratchett written by his personal assistant. It is sobering to think he died 11 years ago now. I really like the Discworld novels and have a collection of most of them.
It's not a book but I did read the Let's Play of the Dwarf Fortress game Boatmurdered. It is a classic of the genre of Let's Plays that were made on the Something Awful forums. Really neat to see what Dwarf Fortress was like only months after release.
The playthrough is naturally comedic as the fortress is beset by elephants and the LP was done by having a succession of players take on running the fortress after the player beforehand. Lots of megaprojects made by one player and then forgotten by the next. One of the most fun things they made was a method of flooding the world with lava.
There seemed to be a lot written on warnings about AI on the BBC News this week. Not sure why I read so much of it as it was really just reiterating the same talking points. One researcher quit Anthropic saying what they were developing was too dangerous and another researcher publicly said there is a 10% chance AI wipes humanity out. Nothing new for people keeping track of AI but it is interesting seeing what the general public is hearing about.
One thing I haven't been reading and for quite a while now is social media. I used to spend so much time reading the likes of Twitter and Blue Sky but felt it was kind of wasted as I rarely interacted with anyone. It is so easy to doomscroll that I've mostly cut it out completely as a kind of detox. I do kind of miss it though as I don't get to hear from very many people otherwise.
Listened
I didn't listen to much this week other than some video game music in the form of the soundtrack for Metroid Prime whilst doing some project related writing.
Watched
A big event this week was going to the theater to watch a performance of 12 Angry Men. For some reason I ended up watching the film version twice this year and it just so happened to be on at the theater too.
It was very faithful to the film version having the same dialogue in it. They did put a lot of work into the choreography for it being a theater performance and changing where the characters stood. A very neat feature was a slow turntable under the main table so that it made a full revolution during the production. That way you got to see the actors at all angles round it.
Whilst it was good in itself I do think I prefer the film version. You can get the camera so much closer to the characters in a film and there were some details a theater performances just couldn't do. One thing I noticed was that the whole thing was longer due to having to space out the actors lines and instead of having incidental chatter in the background each line was given its own focus.
The sequence with the racist tirade was a lot more uncomfortable to listen to in a public place like a theater as it made me think of some things people say today. It was handled a little less impactfully than the film version where it is really an iconic moment. Still a play is always impressive for being done live and it is good to remember that.
As always I got through quite a lot of youtube videos this week.
There was the conclusion of the voiced multiplayer version of Deltarune with the most recent chapter. It was a fun watch and it was neat that Alpharad went the extra mile of getting the same voice changer as used by one of the characters.
I got a little bit interested in the colony builder game Gnomoria and watched some videos of it where the player was attempting to build a fortress in the sky and another one where they cranked goblin invasions to maximum. Gnomoria was a nice Dwarf Fortress like game, pity its development ceased after release.
There was a stream where people were making a game in only one hour. For the one I watched the game designer used something called Puzzlescript which was interesting to see as it treats the game as a rules based, gridded automata. Charmingly minimalist graphics too with only 5 by 5 pixel sprites.
Along with Gnomoria I looked at other small indie colony builders. There was one called The Kindred which was wiped from Steam. A bit understandable after seeing a video of it as it looked buggy, nice flat voxel art style though.
Nilaus was playing a new factory builder game, this one taking place on player built space stations which is very cool. You got to build the station room by room and could also make ships in the same manner. It was in first person which isn't ideal of a factory building game in my opinion.
Speaking of space stations I hunted down footage of an old edutainment game from the 90s about the International Space Station. Aptly called Space Station Simulator it had you crafting your own ISS out of modules that you could then explore the inside of.
There was a PvP match of all the planets in Factorio fighting each other. Of course Vulcanis won as it is hard to beat infinite metals from lava.
Alpharad was playing a Pokemon Fangame called Infinite Fusions and doing a Nuzlocke in it. Really impressive fan project as it has 250,000 new sprites for all the Pokemon combinations.
Another silly thing I saw was a group effort by 300 people to make historical dioramas in Minecraft. The gamut of dates went from the beginning of the universe to the far future. Some of the submissions were jokey but a lot of them went into detail of the historical event being depicted.
Art
I do a whole lot less artistic endeavors than I'd like to do but one thing I'm sort of consistent in doing is going along to an art class at the weekend. This weekend we were doing a landscape painting.
Instead of doing an entire picture we were given a photograph where one section had been replaced with a blank square. Our task was to fill it in from a reference image. I felt like I did reasonably well at it although I do struggle to do small brushstrokes with acrylic and feel my choice of colours are childish.
Played
After saying how little I've played video games recently last week it is ironic that I got quite into playing various things this week.
The big one was going back to Skyrim for the first time in years. Reading all those rules for DnD got me in the mood for some adventuring so I went and bought Skyrim. Yes bought, as before I had simply been playing a shared copy of my dad's. Bit amusing to see 250 hours played on installing it.
Like always I was full of ideas about what kind of character to play. Whilst I was tempted to do a magic only character I decided it was right to go for a nice simple Nord warrior even to the extent that I'm considering doing the civil war quest on the side of the Stormcloaks.
My Nord wouldn't just be a warrior though as I always enjoy the gameplay mechanics of alchemy and smithing so I'd be collecting potion ingredients and mining ores. I also thought I'd explore the cooking mechanics too, shallow as they might be. My Nord would also be well read as I'd actually sit down, collect and read every book I'd come across.
I really took my time and thoroughly explored Riverwood and the surrounding area. Picked up the wood elf archer follower and went to the first dungeon, Bleak Falls Barrow. I wondering what would happen if you took back the quest item, the golden claw, before completing the rest of the dungeon and gave it back to the quest giver but alas nothing happens, he won't even acknowledge you have it.
It was really nice to wander through a game with such detailed domestic interiors. I always think one of the strengths of the Elder Scrolls games is that you can interact with nearly everything. I may be trying to collect every piece of miscellaneous clutter to put them into a diorama in my house once I buy one. Y'know such a normal thing to collect.
Another game I played and completed the demo of was Resettle a neat little idle city builder. Whilst the idea is nice with you collecting various resources to make new buildings the placement mechanics were kind of shallow. I feel it falls into the issue of lots of idle games where you just want to be building the maximum numbers of every building as costs are so high.
The demo isn't much of an idle game though as you can beat it in 13 minutes once you've maxed your ascendancy perks. It did get me thinking about other idle games I've enjoyed and it made me re-find WorldShaper Idle. It's a lovely little game where you build up combos of different terrain tiles and you can specialise your settlement into one particular tile type. I was pleased to see there is an expanded version on steam now.
Wrote
Playing Skyrim got me thinking about what kinds of generic items I'd have in a game and what furniture models to have. To that end I ended up making a list of all the basic items to make homes in a medieval village. I'm thinking it would be nice to make some kind of colony builder game which is as detailed as Skyrim and where you get to place furniture as well as items.
Another kind of list I made was recipes from a vegetarian cookbook. It strikes me that cooking could be a very indepth skill in a game as recipes are already formulas and you could swap out one kind of ingredient for another. I have lots of ideas about doing more detailed nutrition in a game and having to keep track of cooking materials by weight.
Other
A big accomplishment for this week is that I finally got a job application submitted. It was only by chance that I saw it advertised where I do volunteering. There is a cafe there and they want part time staff. Now I've done volunteering in a cafe before so I think I'd be quite suited to the role and capable of carrying it out.
There was meant to be a DnD session with my dad and family friends last Friday but it had to be rescheduled. It has been fun to introduce the family friends to tabletop roleplaying and I'm quite enjoying the character I'm playing. We don't meet very often though, only once a month so missing a month is gutting.
I was clearing out my old laptop the other day and it struck me how many tabs I had open in Chrome. I'd taken to using tab groups and had hundreds of tabs within them. Moving to this new computer I decided I wouldn't end up in such a situation of having hundreds of tabs I hadn't touched in months so I'll be wiping my tabs each time I close my computer. it's a different experience and has me using a lot of bookmarks.
Something I struggle with quite a lot is having lie ins and going back to bed simply to lie down during the day. This week hasn't been as bad as some but I still have been going back to bed for a couple of hours a few times. I think part of it is not knowing what to do with my time and finding lying in bed a happy state of nothingness.
Anyway that's some of what I've been up to this week. Well more like everything going off of how much I wrote.
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