Monthly Archives: June 2021

Friday —> June 11th, 2021 —> Two of my favourite cousins’ Birthday —

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Friday – June 11th, 2021 – +9˚C / +47˚F &  cloudy @8:51 am in Atlantic Canada —> On Cousins Kathy Pellenz and Jenba Pelletier’s birthday – 🙂 —

- Julie checking out the nasty evil fire spell -

– “Julie checking out the nasty evil fire spell – hurled by an evil goblin type at a defenders’ fort a hundred years ago -and still burning “-

— Thanks to Joe Biden’s relief check I was able to upgrade my game building experience with some stuff that is almost too fast for some things – I can’t just turn slightly to one side to see how what I just did effected the surrounding landscape – I have to jump out of the terrain modifying function and into the game mode, have a building character/avatar land on her feet and turn slowly this way and that, and then jump back into editing the terrain, designing rivers and other interesting stuff.

— With my new spiffy computer stuff, I was able to get access to a few things that were beyond my reach for the last ten years here – Like, in the ‘assets’ menu they have “Particles” listed and inside the Particles selection pull down menu the only thing listed is “Fire” – I ‘built’ myself an area not connected to anything else to test a few things, especially the fire particles. And Wow – it’s impressive – I don’t think I can tone it down or shrink it down for a campfire. But here – At the edge of the desert where monsters live underground and eat each other when they don’t have good guys to butcher and chow down on – The legend is that a really nasty bad guy evolved through his allegiance to the dark powers and was given the intelligence and magical abilities needed to create a really bad fire spell, that melted half a mountain and destroyed the fort maintained by the good guys at the edge of the desert.

— I’m thinkin’ – since what I’m doing now is ‘developing’ a brand new version of the original Newbie starting zone – “Shamrock Island” – that one of the slightly more advanced newbie quests would be to find their way to the mountains just this side of the desert and get a look at how mean and nasty the bad guys can be – I’m also flirting with the idea that a more advanced newbie quest might be to journey into danger and find out if they’re strong enough to ignore nasty fire spells – because if they believe it might hurt them, they’re dead – and if they can maintain their faith in their religion or their training, they can walk through the magical fire unscathed. { “Don’t try this at home, kids …” }

- Julie at the ruined fort. -

– “Julie at the ruined fort.” –

— One of the quirks I discovered with my upgraded hardware etc, is that – with the latest upgrade to the ‘Blade’ the collection of world-building tools – One guy who let me believe he was the team leader at the company that owned everything to do with the ‘Hero Cloud’/Hero Engine – left the company and took all the male builder characters with him, left only women with two occupational choices, they could either be a Ranger or a Wizard. And they can only be human. The rumours in this game world – that I’ve been actively building for ten years after gradually graduating from Applesoft basic in something like 1987 – to the present – Same Virtual World? – from text only – to whatever the heck it is now and what it will be when I finally take it ‘Public’ – And it still has the same name – “Aerendel” – Which – thank God – is not what the people at Disney called the world where ‘Frozen’ takes place – I couldn’t sue them for stealing my name even if I could afford the high powered lawyers to take them on – because they spelled it and pronounced it slightly differently. I don’t think I could stomach a long drawn out lawsuit with all its dirty tricks and well planned bluffs – I’d be really tempted to use my mutant mind powers and after I turned them all into frogs and salamanders I would feel morbidly guilty about it. 😉 –

— At any rate – Julie – above – is staring at the fire, with the decimated fort behind her and the scorched, burnt ground slowly healing itself all around her.

- "Jim" in a corral with horses -

– “Jim” in the tutorial world with horses.” –

— Another thing that happened with my upgraded hardware – there has been a tutorial world accessible with the ‘Blade’ and all that comes with it – “Heroes Journey” – Several years ago they upgraded everything and my wimpy older computer was no longer able to jump into that tutorial world – but now, I can go there – And they still have male and female and human and elf and ‘other races’ available for a limited romp through the realms of possibility…

— Here’s my latest attempt to ‘create’ a slightly younger version of myself – { shhh – I don’t think I looked that healthy even 50 years ago – } And that avatar was able to run around and visit the horses – I thought I remembered there being cows there, but I haven’t seen any of them lately –

- "Jim" surveying the tutorial world from a forested hillside -

– “Jim, surveying the tutorial world from a forested hillside.” –

— I might even use this guy for a temporary profile picture somewhere – { laughing to myself … }

— Yeah – so that’s the latest 24 hours’ adventures in game building and avoiding listening to or watching the evil nasty news of the ‘Real World’ which is reportedly going through some of the nastiest growing pains ever – where the bad guys in the ‘Real World’ would kill all the rest of us to hang on to their delusions of power and all that –

— Frustrations in the game building world are no fun, but they’re nowhere near as scary as some of the stuff you see on the nightly mainstream media news.

— — — — — Everybody – please enjoy a lifetime of wonderful, marvelous, fantastic days and nights – and don’t let anybody convince you that you don’t deserve that – or that it’s only their ‘leadership’ that’s keeping you safe – when that ‘leadership’ is the most dangerous threat to your safety – and happiness.

~~~~~ Jim

 

Fun With Rivers & “Ribbon Water” –

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Tuesday – June 8th, 2021 —> +23˚C / +70˚F – Sunny with heat warnings for later @ 06:30 am in Atlantic Canada – I think today is J.J. Kacick’s Birthday – and any discrepancies between ˚C & ˚F is probably due to the two different services that tell me what they think my air temperature here might be. –

- River with Waterfall -

– “Corrected River with Waterfall” – This is after deleting a river with several cosmetic problems and starting over. –

— I complained to the right person about the problems I was having using the { – new to me – } Ribbon Water – while I’m trying to get one new multi-area “Newbie” landing zone “created”, prettied up, clean and ready for inviting beta testers in – hopefully sooner than later.

— The problem I had was exacerbated by the silly fact that I tried to add ‘ribbon water’ from the ‘assets’ pull down menu link at the top of the developers’ ‘blade. – That loads a fully formed squiggle of a river about ten feet above the builder character’s / avatar’s head – pulling that snake-like river down presented problems – bending it around to fit inside the ‘river/canyon’ I’d carved into the landscape was frustrating – a lot of weird things happened. sections of the river disappeared underground – other sections curled up into the air and didn’t want to settle down into the ‘canyon’ home I’d carved for them. —> AND – when I started out – that snake-like river didn’t reach the boundaries of the area it would hopefully settle into. But when I finished moving the unruly twists and turns into place – the river had decided to lengthen itself and stretch out over the ‘ocean’ water that I’d hoped the river would happily become a waterfall and splash down into without acting like a once lovable kid who’d grown into his or her “terrible two’s” – no such luck. —>

— And then – the ‘boundary tool’ couldn’t cut off the excess river ribbon. And when I tried to pull it down under the sea – it rebelled – twisted and turned and flipped over and around and acted like it wanted to become the wildest design for a roller coaster in any overpriced theme park on planet Earth in the ‘Real World’. —>

- river gone crazy -

– ” River gone Crazy -” –

— The above is a mild example of the problems I encountered the first time I tried to hide the errant runaway ends of a river under the surface of a sea.

— After the best support person in the real world pointed me to the tutorial that wasn’t there ten years ago when I started this – The above was my first attempt at starting from the ‘create’ menu – which gives you a small square of ‘mirror/water’. – When you change the type of water you want to ‘River’ and ‘Ribbon’ you find the ability to turn it around to tell the currents to go in whichever direction you want them to travel. Then you use the boundary tool – which doesn’t act the same with ribbon water as it does with anything else you’d like to shrink or grow or widen or deepen or whatever –

— That { above } screen shot shows several circles and bars that tell you where the points are that you can edit the river at – & they don’t always play nice … 😉 –

- 'before' - "Go Down Without Going Crazy" ? -

– “Before?” – “Please go down without going crazy…?” –

— This was before I tried to pull a lot of it down –

- almost there? -

– “Almost there? – Looks like this is working -” –

— This is what I saw when I thought this was working out well –

- "But -" -

– “But — ” –

— This is what I saw when I zoomed back out a bit –

- twenty minutes later -

– “Twenty minutes later…”

— The crazy twists and turns are now underwater – but dangit – they’re plainly visible – I blinked a couple times and shrugged, “So maybe I’ll plunk an island down in that spot to cover the mess.”

- apres cosmetic surgery -

– “Apres le cosmetic Surgery -” –

— After cosmetic surgery / plunking an island down over the mess … Still not perfect – but heck, it’s a million per cent better than what was there before I watched the tutorial …

— Sigh.

— &&& After an hour break to do my pranayama exercises, breathing exercises and Raja Yoga meditation attempt that lasted 30 minutes after the more or less isometric exercises with internal concentration – sensing energy flows-  and then the esoteric breathing stuff – I kind of floated into the kitchen and looked out over the glassed in porch and saw some ears bobbing up and down about six inches from a window out there – and then a deer’s head rose just enough to look at me – I went and bothered Cathi in her office and she followed me back to the porch where we guessed the deer was starving and eating some of her flowering plants. I went and grabbed some bread. The deer looked up, right at Cathi through the window. Cathi said ‘Hello -” and the deer didn’t run away –

— Cathi walked out onto the small bit of deck and continued her conversation with the deer, who looked a little ragged – I handed her three pieces of bread and she tore it { the bread, not the deer } into pretty good sized chunks and tossed them away from the garden, but still in front of the deer –

— The deer – the one with the hooves – looked like it considered alternatives and then walked over, tasted the bread and then gobbled up the other bits, glanced back at Cathi and might have thought a little bit of that bread might have been worth the risk of maybe becoming our lunch –

— We left the deer alone and it wandered around in our little bit of yard for five or ten minutes and then wandered back toward the ‘deer hill’ where they often come sniffing for yummy grass and stuff – and he or she happily munched on whatever looked appetizing there and didn’t even think about going back and chomping down on the Hostas again.

— 🙂

~~~~~ Jim