Stargrace

Screenshots? I’ve got those

Is it bad that a lot of the games I play, I actually just play because they have steam trading cards? Well, that’s why I played the Batman game above, I’m not ashamed to admit. Please remember if you want to see any of the images in full view you just need to click on them. [6/50]

Child of Light is an amazing game, with beautiful graphics. My cousin got me this for Christmas (completely by surprise, family doesn’t usually get me video games) and everything was just so pretty. [7/50]

Lego games are awesome. That’s all I can say about that. [8/50]

Terraria. I am so excited about the second one coming out even though I know it will be quite some time yet. I’ve spent many hours designing simple homes and exploring dungeons. [9/50]

Don’t forget, it’s never too late to start participating in IntPiPoMo, so have fun sharing, and happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

IntPiPoMo Day 1-4

Never heard of IntPiPoMo before? Well, no time like the present! I’m going to swipe the information from Gamer Girl Confessions, and you can find the post about it here.

NaNoWriMo is about writing 50k words throughout the month of November. If a picture is work a thousand words, that would mean we’d need to post fifty pictures!

These can be screenshots from any game, or even photographs you take in real life and want to share on your blog. They can be anything–character selfies, shots of combat, sharing your game UI, showing off that awesome-tacular Deathclaw kill you got in Fallout 4… you get the idea.

So without further wait, here are my first four screenshots for the IntPiPoMo of 2015. First up, EverQuest 2. Long time readers of this blog will be very familiar with my love affair with this MMO. I played it fairly steadily for 7 years before wandering off – and returning – and wandering off – and returning. It has been a few years since I’ve played with any sort of consistency, but that seems typical for video games. Below I’m wandering around in Commonlands, enjoying the sunset.

Next up, another of my MMO loves (and my current one) Wurm Online. I’ve been playing Wurm for 6 years now, and if ever there was a sandbox to love, well. This is it (at least for me).

Next up, Cities: Skylines. This game (to me) was everything that Sim City should have been, at a more cost effective price. Bugs? Sure, all games have a few of those, but it ran the way I expected a polished product to run, and I had hours of enjoyment from playing. Now they’ve released a few DLC, and while I haven’t picked those up, they are on my wish list.

Finally, we have Tropico 5, and my island being pummeled by natural disasters. That’s OK, my citizens didn’t need homes anyway…

There you have it, the first four days of IntPiPoMo, underway. Expect more screenshots throughout the month, I’ll probably post them in a bundle like this every couple of days instead of posting them individually. Don’t forget, you can participate too! The rules can be found on the post linked above, and it’s a really simple little project to get into. Plus it gets you looking at your screenshots folders – and lets face it, there are probably a lot of those, along with some fantastic memories stored up.

Happy gaming!

No 2015 Gamers Secret Santa

Since 2009 I’ve been running a Gamers Secret Santa, where I would take names of gamers and match them with other gamers and then everyone would unite and purchase or craft a little something for one another, and spread a little joy and cheer around. Unfortunately this year I won’t be hosting the event. If someone else would like to take over that’s great, but honestly I just can’t dedicate the time involved this year, especially since I’m doing NaNoWriMo for the month of November. I loved running the event previously, but it’s a lot of work. I also spent quite a bit out of pocket to ensure that everyone actually received a gift, I wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted to was able to participate no matter their financial situation, and I wanted to make sure that things that were unintentionally lost in the mail didn’t deter people the next year from participating.

With that being said, I want to remind everyone that we don’t need a special day or event to connect with other gamers. Sure, we don’t all like the same types of games, but we’re still joined in this not-so-secret club and that means we should treat each other with the utmost of respect (ideally of course you’re treating everyone with respect, but I see so much gamer on gamer hate that spreads back and forth over the year that I want to make a special note). Remember, it doesn’t take much effort to make someone smile. It can be as simple as leaving a comment on a blog post of theirs you admire. Responding to a particular tweet in an uplifting way, noticing something about them and checking in to make sure that they’re alright. Maybe taking a peek at their steam wishlist and randomly buying them a small gift. Treating fellow gamers well in-game and helping out new players. Lets not forget these small acts of kindness over the days and weeks that go by. We’re all so very wrapped up in our own situations that it can be difficult sometimes to take a step back and see how others around us are doing – it’s well worth the effort to try.

Once again my apologies for not running the event this year. I hope that everyone understands and that I’m not letting too many people down. I hope this post inspires some random acts of kindness throughout the gamer community that I have come to know and love.

Letting Out my Inner Knitting Geek

I spend a lot of time on Ravelry just browsing different patterns and thinking about whether or not I actually want to attempt said pattern. I fit some where into the ‘medium ease’ category. I typically set patterns to a level of 2-3 on the difficulty setting. I don’t think I’m quite ready for category 4, but I’m hoping that as time progresses I’ll get better, and learn more skills. Eventually I’d love to be able to attempt very complex difficult patterns. Since I’ve only been knitting for three months so far, I won’t beat myself up too much over the level at which I’m knitting.

A lot of patterns have very few differences between them. Take hats, for example. They are all created in basically the same way, with variations at certain parts. They start off with a set amount of CO stitches, are worked with ribbing (often, so that the hat sits properly on your head) or cables acting as ribbing, and then you work up a few more inches before you start to decrease, closing up the hat. How the decrease is achieved can vary, but a lot of the time it’s a simple Kx, K2tog pattern that repeats until you’re left with just a few stitches. Then you weave your tail through those stitches and close up the hat. Really not complicated, and the more you knit these types of things the more familiar you become with any adjustments that you may need to make. What you decide to do in the ‘fun’ parts of that object are up to you. One thing I’ve been having a lot of fun with, is finding patterns and designs that are a bit ‘geeky’ in nature. Take the hat on the far left side as an example. That hat is knit with Minecraft creepers going around the circumference of it. It was incredibly fast to knit up (took a single day) and the pattern I planned out with graph paper. It’s not unique as I’ve seen others create items with the same pattern, but on graph paper patterns like this become much easier to visualize and plan out. For this hat in particular, I did a few inches of K2P2 ribbing, then worked straight stockinette stitch in the round while doing stranded colour work for the creeper faces and the green stitch above and below the faces. Then I did a few more rounds of stockinette so that the hat would be long enough, and started my decrease rounds. I don’t own DPN in the proper size yet (they’ve been ordered but haven’t arrived) and I really do not enjoy the magic loop method of knitting, so finishing them became a bit tricky. Thankfully I have a set of “shortie” knitting needles from KnitPicks that just arrived last week, so they have been seeing lots of use. When I have 6 stitches left on my needles I finish the hat off with the kitchener stitch, and then tuck the tails into the hat and weave them to secure. Overall, I’m quite pleased. The hat posted here was my first one, and I’ve made two more after that one. I have one more left to go, I’ve knit three of them for a friend who wanted them for her children. Two are in the green pictured above, and one is done with the creeper icon in pink, and has a pink / black pompom attached to the top. I think that one is my favourite.

In the meantime, I’ve also still been working on my cable scarf. I’ve also got a November KAL (see previous post if you’re not sure what a KAL is) that is a cable hat – and I’m hoping to complete this hat in the same yarn that the scarf is being knit in. That’s the Brava Bulky yarn from KnitPicks, in the Fairy Tale colour. It’s a wonderful rich colour, and the price was perfect (I bought it on sale, $1.99 for a 100g ball). The yarn is not the most fantastic, it splits quite easily, but it is very warm and like I said the price was right. Anyway, I’m really hoping to be able to knit the hat to match the scarf (even though I know the cables are not the same, it shouldn’t matter much I don’t think and hopefully it’s still very beautiful). With that being said, I’ve had to ask for some help in how I would adjust the pattern. The weight suggested is a worsted weight yarn, and I want to create the hat in a bulky weight yarn, so it’s a bit tricky for me as a new knitter to understand what I do in that situation. The people on my KAL forums are amazing though and I’ve asked for some help, so I’m sure they can get me situated. That’s one thing I really enjoy about Ravelry, there are so many very kind people there.

Once I complete the rest of the Minecraft hats, the cable scarf, and the cable hat, I believe I’ll be switching back to socks for a bit. I want to learn how to knit them toe-up, and how to add patterns like lace or cables to them. So far I only know one sock pattern, and while it’s delightfully simple, I’d like to widen my experiences and knowledge a bit.

Happy knitting!

Market Roads

The Rag and Bone Market (located on Xanadu at P22 for anyone who may want to stop by and place a merchant) is coming along nicely. There are market stalls up, an inn, pens for horses to be sold, a craft hall, a public mine, and other amenities. We’re also working on dredging the canal for larger ships, right now only knarr / sailboat depth boats can pass through. My next task was to join the market by road to a highway that runs North and South along the map. The highway is West of the market, a few hundred tiles away, through a desert and into the woods. It’s right beside a nice guard tower and travelers spot. I spent most of the weekend working on that road, flattening the path and then paving it. Then I went back and lined the cobblestone with gravel on either side, so that it’s three tiles wide and considered a ‘highway’. I can only place 1 sign every 24 hours if it’s off-deed, so I put one at the end of my new road that points towards the market and lets people know what direction it’s located at. I also added a fountain along the side of the highway so people can stop for drinks. I may eventually also plant a barrel in that spot and fill it will meals for travelers. I don’t actually know how many people use the highway, but I think it’s a great start.

In the meantime, my priests, Oshi and Maivis, have traveled to F25 of the Xanadu map. There they are participating in sermons that have been going on since July or so, in an attempt to raise their faith. Maivis (my Vynora priest) is sitting at 82.54 faith at the moment, and Oshi (my Nahjo priest) is at a quaint 61.61. I’m really trying to get Oshi to 70 so that he can cast genesis and strongwall, the two spells that I started a Nahjo priest for to begin with. There are enough others at the sermon that each time we preach the counter for prayers re-sets, so I’m getting quite a good gain. It should only take a week or two of preaching to reach 70, I’m hoping. A lot of that depends on who sticks around and how many are active listeners.

I’m hoping with the addition of the market, the area gets a bit more use. It’s on the East side of the server, so it’s close for those traveling from other servers. It’s not exactly coastal as it’s a mesh of waterways to get to our destination, but it’s accessible by the ocean which also helps a lot. There’s a ton of space in the area (which is the nature of Xanadu, the server size is gigantic) and it’s not too far away from Estron, one of the starter towns. Whether or not this attracts any new players we’ll just have to see.

I’ve seen a few new players coming to explore Wurm Online thanks to Wurm Unlimited. On that same note, I’ve seen a fair amount of older players selling their characters and leaving for Wurm Unlimited. I played Wurm Unlimited for a few days, but after my hard drive crashed (it had the server on it) I was once again reminded of why I prefer to play the MMO version of the game, and not the (much smaller) solo-esc version. There are just too many community aspects that I adore about the base model of the game. I’m hoping that Rolf doesn’t decide to terminate the MMO servers any time soon, and that the steam version of the game only enhances and adds to the support that the MMO version requires. I suppose only time will tell. I’ve seen my share of games shut down over the years and if that has taught me anything it’s that when you enjoy a game, you should play it. No matter what anyone else says about the game. I’ve enjoyed Wurm more than a lot of other games I’ve played, and I’ve come across a lot of naysayers over the years. None of this has ever bothered me, and I’ve always just continued doing my thing. Honestly it has been the best thing for me and as long as I enjoy playing, that’s what matters.

Anyone else have games out there that they enjoy playing, that perhaps the general populace does not enjoy? Did you continue to play it anyway?

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!