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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Satisfactory: Rocky Start, 2.5 Updates Later

    I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.

    This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.

    At any rate, here you go:

    All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.

    It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.

  • A Diligent Worker I Am

    I took today off as a mental-health and personal-projects day, in advance of starting my on-call rotation tomorrow. I needed the break. Technically I need a longer break but I was so busy and stressed out and off-balance this month that I didn’t think to actually apply for time off until… yesterday.

    Oh well.

    I still got up with the alarm, though. Being on a pill-taking regimen sort of requires sticking to the daily routine; if I sleep through the alarm, my phone’s pill-taking reminder goes off a while later anyway. So I went through the regular start-of-day shuffle: shave, shower, etc.

    While in the shower, the solution to a nagging work problem came to me. Because I am who I am, as soon as I got to my computer I confirmed the validity of the idea, then loaded up my work email and sent a message to my boss about the solution.

    I get brownie points for that, right? Good. Thanks.

  • So Long, Augtober

    We were getting 80F+ temperatures in the middle of October. Not just once, but repeatedly. Today, however, the rains finally arrived and “Augtober” can be nailed into its coffin and buried in the deepest pit we can find.

    If “endless summer” is what we have to look forward to in the Pacific Northwest going forward, I want to know where I can go to escape from it.

  • Satisfactory: Turbopower!

    I picked Satisfactory back up a couple of months ago in anticipation of the Update 6 patch landing on the Early Access branch. Instead of starting yet another new save, however, I decided to keep going on the save I started back before Update 4 landed. This neatly avoided having to climb the tech tree all over again, not to mention it takes advantage of the fact that I deliberately left the Spire Coast region alone the entire time so far. (The developers warned everyone that major map changes were coming to that area.)

    Update 6 and its quality-of-life improvements arrived at the same time that I unlocked my very first ever “Turbofuel” recipe. I needed more electrical supply anyway (the lines on my power graphs criss-crossed a lot more than I was really comfortable with) so I decided to try out the more potent variety of fuel generation.

    Gus? Buddy? You know that the Blender is not your friend, right? No, no you don’t.

    Here’s how that turned out.

    (more…)

  • Impressions From First Episodes: Fall 2022 Anime

    Remind me to, at some point, backfill my impressions of the Spring 2022 anime season, because it had a lot going on, most of it genuinely good.

    Anyway, since I am actually watching more than merely one or two new “first episodes” this season I figured I should jot down some thoughts. Here goes, listed by the order (mostly) in which I viewed them:

    (more…)

  • October? I hardly know ‘er!

    And no, I’m not going to trawl through the years worth of archives to see if I’ve done that joke before. It’s my website and I’ll repeat myself if I want to.

    I fell down on posting in September, and that’s largely because summer is awful and this one was particularly awful and somehow it’s not even over yet because here we are, partway into the tenth month of the year and still seeing high temperatures in the upper 80s Fahrenheit.

    Good thing global warming’s a myth, eh?

    The job’s fine, everyone in my closest circle of humans is fine, I’m playing a lot of Three Hopes and have picked Satisfactory back up again, etc. (I continue to expand my current/existing Satisfactory savegame and have started a new co-op game with both of the kids. We’re out in the desert this time, where none of us have started a savegame before!)

    Dunno, I might do some Satisfactory posting soon. It’s nice to be back in that groove again.

    Other than that, I’m just trying to keep my head down, my mask on, and survive all the things I need to survive.

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