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

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 – 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.” –

— 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 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.” –

— 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