Half-Hearted September Update

• Development
• MMORPG
• Music

I’m back in a “I don’t really have anything to say” blogging mood. I’ve played maybe, possibly, two hours of games in the last week. I played a little bit more of Max Payne 3, and I logged into World of Warcraft for about 20 minutes to check something.

I logged in to check that a wonderful discovery someone made in Classic is, in fact, right there in Retail as well. The main thing I don’t understand about the Classic Phenomenon is why people can’t find the same chill, relaxing fun with friends in WoW Retail, creating memories and tales of adventure just like they’re doing in WoW Classic. It’s essentially the same game, it’s just that the time sinks are mandatory in Classic instead of voluntary.

I’m seeing that old habits die hard. With rare exceptions, every time I see someone talk about Classic, they’re not talking about unique role-playing adventures they can only have in Classic, they’re talking about some arbitrary milestone they’ve reached … a level they’ve dinged, an amount of gold they’ve made, an item they’ve collected, etc. Either that, or they’re making plans for how to achieve the next milestone. In other words, everyone seems to be busily working away on the same go-go-go treadmill I thought they eschewed in Retail. It makes no sense to me. (And most of the unique role-playing adventures I see are some variation of: “Boy it sure did take a long time to get from this one place to this other place!")

Anyway my subscription is going to run out … sometime. A week? I don’t know. Just like WoW Retail, Classic is fun for short periods, but I haven’t felt any interest in playing Classic for over a week now, and I’m sure not going to pay $15 to not play a game. (I did that way too much with Retail!) I think my total played time is probably going to be about 15 hours for all my Classic characters.

I can’t recall any other gaming news worth discussing. I think Guild Wars 2 announced something that amounted to more of the same. Final Fantasy XIV has a patch coming with more of the same. All of the same MMOs in development are still in alpha and if they ever actually launch, it won’t matter, because they’ve effectively already launched years ago and nobody cares anymore. The MMO genre still seems pretty stagnant right now to me. Actually I can’t think of any new games I’m looking forward to playing in any genre. There’s a handful of games I wanted to revisit from my Steam Backlog Bonanza, and that’s about it.

I haven’t done anything more on blog migration. However I did successfully build a prototype of a static Endgame Viable archive with Hugo. I think I started a post on that. I wasn’t sure where to go from there, so I’m pondering my next move. I’m particularly hung up on what to do with old comments. I’m also not sure how to “re-brand” a new site. I’m strongly considering just putting everything back under my real-name domain name. That would certainly be the simplest thing. Terrible branding though. My name’s not very catchy or easy to spell. Anyway those are all subjects for future blog posts.

So while thinking about that, I got distracted playing around with REAPER again. I mentioned trying to remix an old song, which I’ve been working on for … I don’t even know how many days now. It’s a lengthy process. A lot of small iterations over time. Then I got distracted working on sampling all the drum sounds from my aging TD-12 drum module into .wav files for a couple of days. The LCD display is a bit wonky and I figured I’d better sample everything I can before it dies completely and I have to toss a ~$500 street value sound module into the garbage. I wish I’d done that with my old gear. I wish I’d kept my old gear. How stupid I was to get rid of it. “I’ll certainly never use these old things again!” Ugh. Oh well. It made sense at the time because I didn’t have the storage space for old junk. I suppose there’s always eBay if I want to replace them. Not that I can afford to buy any of it now.

Sunday night I took a break from remixing the old song and actually started working on a new song in REAPER. The last time I wrote new music was in 2010, if memory serves. I’m using some of the tips and tricks I’ve seen in the REAPER Mania videos I mentioned before. It’s fun. I need to find a distribution channel though. Just *something* where I can at the very least post a link to a song in my blog posts. SoundCloud is okay but it has limitations. YouTube would be ideal of course but it’s a tremendous pain to make a video to go along with music.

Meanwhile I’m also working on building a super cheap Windows 10 PC that I can use as a writing workstation to meet my peculiar physical writing needs and basically-non-existent budget. So far I’ve assembled a $95 “Computer Stick” and an $85 10″ HDMI monitor. The only thing I need now to complete this Frankenstein’s monster is a wireless keyboard/trackpad. This will replace the iPad I’ve been using, which is getting horribly slow and half the apps now crash on it, because it’s too old to run the latest iOS. Thanks, Apple. I’ll have a blog post about this project eventually, if I get it working, at least.

Oh one more thing, I forgot to do a “Games Played” post for August. I’m getting weary of writing those every month, so I think I’m going to discontinue it for a while.