One Chance

In a very short time, I am to be married for time and all eternity, according to the customs of my religion.

I've also been playing One Chance, which the creator describes as follows:

One Chance is a game about choices and dealing with them.
Scientist John Pilgrim and his team have accidently created a pathogen that is killing all living cells on Earth.
In the last 6 remaining in-game days on Earth, the player must make choices about how to spend his last moments. Will he spend time with his family, work on a cure or go nuts?

As I see it, it is in essence a game about consequences. There is an auto-save feature that uses Flash Player's automatic storage feature to make choices permanent. The player is doomed to failure, because of the nature of the choices ahead of him: save humanity from certain death, show your family that you love them, escape the horrifying trouble facing you. Any of those are acceptable courses, but in all of them you lose. Not necessarily everything, but you lose at least one important thing no matter what you choose. Save humanity, lose your family. Show your family how important they are, only to allow them to die in the end. The game is highly fatalistic, to say the least.

But at the same time... it rings true.

"You have one chance."

I stand at the edge of the greatest moment of my life. I have one chance.

I'm taking the only path that wins.

 

I am choosing to be with Melody forever. That is my chance. That is my victory, and my chosen fate.

It is nearly time for forever to begin.

Projects and a new dream

So I dreamed a blog. Like, legitimately dreamed that I was doing professional web development, and in that dream I designed a blog for someone, who was going by some name beginning with C and alluding to monarchy. Then he handed over the website to me for doing some kind of content distribution, I think for a podcast, and I renamed it to Abdicating Monarch and changed it so it looked like this, more or less:

Mostly on the "less" side, actually. But you get the idea.

Also, in a surprisingly related turn of events, I've been working towards being able to do quite a lot of projects, of wildly varying merit and attainability. I think I'll list them in semi-chronological order, rather than the likeliness of them actually getting done.

First, a vlog. Just straight-up recording to YouTube, talking about life and maybe answering questions or doing segments or something. This seems like it's actually quite redundant, since this is updated just about as often as I think I'd get around to recording, so it's low on the priority list.

Second, a Heroscape campaign between at least five regulars. Of all of these ideas, I think this is the one I'd get most enjoyment out of, and also the one I think would be nearly the most work, second to my 52-week podcast idea. Basically this would consist of weekly-or-so Heroscape matches in conjunction with a larger-scale map across which armies move and territories trade hands. I've got a lot of the background work done on this, and from here much of the effort would be in schedule-juggling. Which bites, because I can't get anyone together when I'm free most of the time, plus I'm barely keeping up with classes right now.

Third, a podcast about trance work and altered states. This is the huge weekly one, specifically one 'cast per week for a full year. I'd release it at the beginning or end of the week, based on a queue, and it would feature script readings, discussions of concepts, potentially request or commission work if people showed interest, and a pronounced focus on the mystical -- specifically by means of tarot cards, with some assistance from other fantasy and occult systems. I'm excited for this one, guys. I really am. I've got an editor already set to work on it, and a whole backup community that I may or may not be able to enlist for conceptual help. That said, I know for a fact that about a third or more of the people I know in person would majorly, majorly object to me doing it in the first place. In my experience, normal people really knee-jerk against this sort of thing. Hard. And I'm really not looking forward to explaining to anyone that would need to ask. Still, I have high hopes.

Fourth, a podcast that had its genesis from an offhanded comment about a podcast the author of an excellent tutorial specifically  mentioned as something he would never listen to. A podcast in which I simply cough into the mic one time per week and post it. I call it The Weekly Cough. This is the one that's probably going to be easiest overall, and I think quite funny. I have plans to make an A.A. Milne reference in the first episode.

Fifth, a livestream. I'm pretty much all set up on this one. I think I want to do Minecraft on it a lot, but there are plenty of those out there already, so I also want to play through and review art games. Now, this is going to require a lot of content moderation by not-me, because I have a hard time showing art games that I've already played through and not spoiling them right off the bat. I have a huge list of games I can do, though, so I'm rather looking forward to giving it a shot. The main difficulty involved here is promotion and finding a time when I can actually stream regularly and any reasonable number of people will be able to watch.

Sixth, and to my memory last, a personal podcast, basically for me to rant and do basically the same stuff as would happen in the vlog except with only audio. I don't think I'll actually do this one either unless a lot of content magically drops into my lap.

So in summary: I want to make a trance podcast, a cough podcast, a livestream, and a Heroscape campaign. Not sure if all of those are achievable, and I'm already probably dropping the vlog and personal podcast right out of the gate. I'm most excited about the trance podcast and the Heroscape campaign, but the livestream will likely be very rewarding as well. Plus I get a huge kick out of the idea of doing something like The Weekly Cough just because someone I don't know specifically said to not do that. Not much work, really stupid, but highly, highly amusing. I also love the idea of someone just marathonning TWC in the middle of the night and giggling manically, just 'cause.

The Intro (Part 2): In which I ramble on about dwarves and video games

Yes.  As I mentioned last week, I am indeed a geek.

My wardrobe comes from ThinkGeek, and from various webcomics.  My current favorite shirt is from Three Panel Soul, and references both a pair of their comics and the Bay 12 Games flagship project, Dwarf Fortress.  That game is easily one of my top three favorites of all time, and reading through the TVTropes page on the game (fair warning to those who do not know TVTropes: you click on that link and it will devour your life and free time for a very, very long while... possibly also cause insomnia) will tell you much of why.  It lends itself possibly better than anything else I've ever seen to fanfiction and stories otherwise based on the game, and by far the best parts of being a fan of the game are being able to read about the more-remarkable successes and failures of the many and sundry fellow players.  Of these, my favorites are (and one only needs a cursory understanding of the insanely-complicated game to appreciate these stories):

Boatmurdered -- The now-infamous story of an early succession fortress (the save file was passed between different players for each year of the fortress' fairly short lifetime) in which things were going okay until someone decided to implement a doomsday device that flooded the world with magma.  Everything went totally insane from there and eventually ended in every single dwarf going insane and/or killing each other in an oddly hilarious fashion.  This came in spite of (or possibly because of, depending on your perspective) the fortress starting off with everything that a player could possibly want (magma, underground and outdoor water sources, plenty of wood and food sources aplenty, plus three good seasonal trading partners).  Essentially the fortress started off as well as it could, and then failed spectacularly in every way the players could think of.  Word to the wise reader: the story thread was originally posted at SomethingAwful, and as a result some rather foul language is bandied about with little to no restraint throughout the thread.

Nist Akath -- This fortress is probably the exact opposite of Boatmurdered.  The game was more or less the opposite of Boatmurdered, in that the fort started on a haunted glacier (virtually no resources and animated skeletons everywhere) with an aquifer, meaning only very limited stone for the first while.  It was also opposite in that in a game with no victory condition somehow the player behind Nist Akath managed to actually win.  Needless to say, much awesomeness and hilarity ensued after play got serious.  Currently the story is on the verge of wrapping up once and for all, in what promises to be the most epic showdown between undead and dwarves in the history of the game.

The other two games in my top three are Darwinia and NiGHTS Into Dreams (both of which are linked to in the previous post).  If you have the means, and the dare to get into something really great, then I strongly suggest taking a long look at all three of these titles.

To reiterate a point I made near the top, TVTropes is a massive, massive time-waster.  I can prove this by example: I made the mistake of clicking on the link I posted to make sure it worked.  It's been three hours since I did that and I'm only just now getting away from it.

The Intro (Part 1): The Basics

I have a lot I could talk about here, or rather rant about, but I'm going to restrain myself until you at least know who's behind the keyboard on this blog.

I am, to say the least, not a normal person.  Most of my wardrobe comes from ThinkGeek, and I'm a hardcore Apple fanboy (also known as a Mactard, a label I'll willingly step into) even though I see the company moving in the same general direction as Microsoft.  I like Mac best even though I actually acknowledge some Linux distributions as being intrinsically better.  I spend my free time (and an unhealthy amount of my non-free time) playing such niche games as NiGHTS Into Dreams and Darwinia and Dwarf Fortress, plus oldschool favorites like Starfox 64 and Super Mario 64... and I sometimes alternate that with useful productive things like work for my deviantART account, but lately that's been pretty rare.  I typically also waste a lot of time with websites like the ever-famous FAIL Blog, Very Demotivational, and Halolz, plus webcomics such as xkcd, Irregular Webcomic!, Housepets, Broken Plot Device, and Megatokyo.  Then there are those ever-so rare websites that are just plain beyond awesome, like LoadingReadyRun that I cannot stay away from even if I try.  So yes, I am a web addict.

Let's move on to the labels.  What can I be classified as?

I think of myself as all of what follows (and I've been called most all of these at some point or another): a geek, a goofball, a computer nerd, a good friend, wise, intelligent, a dreamer, an idealist, a gamer, a programmer, a designer, cynical, liberal, an artist, a thinker, a philosopher, weird... the list goes on, but for now that should suffice.

Stylistically, I'm defined by a few items of clothing that I'm rarely seen without -- my trenchcoat and driver's cap, my glasses, some geeky or witty t-shirt, my fractal bag (from my CafePress store, Fractalle -- I'm by no means above shameless self-advertising), and more recently a collar and tag or a bandanna around my neck.  I also think of myself as being far more stylish than I probably actually am, since my fashion sense has never really lined up with social norms.

Identity-wise, I take up a lot of different mantles.  In person, to most people, I am Jacob Van De Graaff; to some few others I am Cog Cyprian.  Online, there are nearly as many pseudonyms as there are characters by which I identify myself.  deviantART, and most conventional websites (discussion forums and the like) know me as Q-Lok, but others know me as Avalon, or as (again) Cog Cyprian.  Some people knew me as Nami the Chameleon for a time, while others knew me by the name Windman.  More recently, on Second Life, my name is Limerick Lexington, and for some time I went as Jacob "Q" Libris within the NiGHTS fandom.  For as many different names as I have gone through, I have likewise conducted myself in even slightly more different ways, dependent upon the situation -- I have been just as many different people.  And for those that know me beyond the limits of any one single name, it becomes even slightly more complicated.  They get to see a composite of different faces, of several of the different metaphorical masks and hats that I wear, and for them I become rather more complicated.

There are many sides of me, and this is only a general smattering of them -- in fact, a number of the most important roles and labels are absent from my lists.  This is by no means a complete definition of me, nor is it even a good outline... however, it does hopefully give the reader a reasonable starting point for knowing where I come from in my writing.

And for those who honestly couldn't tell from the amount I wrote on this topic, I am also the original king of tl;dr.  Welcome to my life.