Tuesday – May 10th, 2022 – Rasputin’s Birthday –

– Tuesday – May 10th, 2022 —> 14˚C / +48˚F —> Sunny, breezy and fairly ‘nice’ on My Uncle. Bruce’s Birthday —> + at least t2o of my 2nd cousin’ Sarah’s childhood friends’ Birthdays’ { Sarah called me “Uncle Jimmy” to avoid confusion when I was her “T”-Ball coach 🙂 } – And, yeah – it’s also Rasputin’s Birthday – when adjusted to our ‘Gregorian’ Calendar. }  –

"Xhyrean with Autumn Trees in the Background"

– “Xhyrean – in the Lowlands – { Example area } With red leafed trees in the background.” –

— Rasputin was not the insane character the Bolsheviks and British Secret Service painted him as to justify his assassination. I have it on good authority that he was finally murdered by a British Agent in order to stop him from influencing the last Tsar to stay out of the first world war. Everything that happened in Russia after that is on the conscience of the British Secret Service.

— But that has nothing to do with the above screen Shot- “Xhyrean” is a time traveler born several centuries in our future in What we call Canada, but in his Parallel world they called it the Métis Province of the Turtle Island Confederation. His mother is, was, will be- half Métis, Half Asian Indian-  His father  tested as having half Métis { Mostly Cree with French blood } and roughly one quarter Scandinavian, and one quarter  ‘Keltic’ dna. I gave him almost black hair after I took this Screen Shot.

"Kaelyn in Ceremonial Dress"

– ” Kaelyn in Ceremonial Dress” –

— Kaelyn’s another mostly Métis Character – Not quite pure blooded enough to satisfy ‘First Nations Purists’ & ‘Not White Enough’ to avoid being bullied most of her young life. So far – we haven’t been able to design and upload really good examples of Métis floral decorated Ceremonial dress. This is as close as we could get her look.

"Junior Gonzakowitz"

– “Gonzakowitz” is the family name of one wild and crazy clan of Ymmps-” –

— Junior Gonzakowitz – { Muhdagus Gonzakowitz’s Grand Son } – Most members of the Gonzakowitz family { both physical family members and ‘adopted’ extended family members } have Bardic talent and ‘Psi’ abilities – most of them can open ‘Wild Portals’ { and don’t always know where they’ll end up if they blindly jump through one of their portals } Those who live in the computer age claim they can communicate with computers using their ‘Psi’ abilities. } Ymmps are known to be ‘hopelessly addicted to practical jokes’. Most Ymmps have thick reptilian tails. “Junior” either wrapped his tail in fake fur or was born with a distinctly feline tail – Ymmps will rarely answer a direct question with any easily understood ‘straight answer’. Most Ymmps have a spell they call “dragon breath” that is useful for lighting cigars and camp fires. If they really work on it, that spell can kill anybody stupid enough to attack them.

"Xhyrean discovered a white tailed deer."

– “Xhyrean discovered a deer.”

— While I was working on Xhyrean – I took time out for dinner and when I came back he was staring at a deer. I think the deer are a very new addition to the example area that comes with the game building software.

"The deer grew antlers-"

– “Okay – after I originally posted this on Tuesday – I took a break and went back to the office and the game building stuff had disappeared from my souped up game building computer- I guessed it was another case of “[%^%$@%%%#!!!]” Microsoft Windows updating itself without my permission. But -When I got the software back up and running – Xhyrean’s pet deer had grown antlers – 🙂 ” –

— Hmmmm- I should probably check in with the people who are developing stuff for the game building software company…

"Shelley"

– “Shelley Stephenson” –

— “This was an accurate depiction of what I really looked like – The clothing choices were not mine – My abusive, manipulative older cousin – who convinced me as a twelve year old that he was the only person who understood me and loved me for who and what I was { <—  His words. } – got me drunk, got me naked – took suggestive photos of me – not just then, but several times over three years – When I was fifteen years old my divorced mother sent me to stay with that cousin in the apartment he rented as a Grad Student at a University famous for its advances in Computer Science – for a couple weeks while she went with my sister to a Hospital for further tests – after my younger sister had test results mixed up with another patient and had been given the wrong positive test results and diagnosed with advanced  Leukemia. My cousin told me he was going to have me scanned – using a 3D camera and would send the results to a modelling agency – had me wear a really revealing bikini while Istood on a motorized turntable and the camera did its thing. The next evening he brought me to a ‘house party’ where several of his friends were playing a computer game – I saw a version of the above screen shot and felt sick – My cousin told me that he’d scanned the 3D images of me into a computer game and he thought I would like the above results. I did not like the way his friends looked at me. I did not like the way one guy there grabbed me by the bum and tried to get his hands inside my pants. I stole my cousin’s credit card and took a bus home. I thought I would be alone there for at least another week and made sure all the doors were locked and hoped there was enough food in the pantry so I wouldn’t starve. My mother and sister came home the next day, were happy to see me. I told my mother I felt sick at my cousin’s apartment and came home. I didn’t tell her I stole his credit card. I didn’t tell her what made me feel sick – I didn’t tell her that my cousin had called me just after I got home, called me a string of nasty ‘eff’ words and “c” words, and threatened to send my mother ‘all the naked pictures’ he’d taken, including the ones that looked like I had some guy’s hardened penis in my mouth – if I ever told anybody any part of what he’d done. { One time while I was blind drunk and unconscious my delightful cousin stuck a realistic looking plastic penis in my mouth, took the photograph and carefully cropped it so it looked like the real thing with a real guy just beyond the edge of the photo. } – A couple weeks after I went back home I got what looked like a greeting card in the mail, opened it while I was babysitting for my little sister while my mother was at work and read: “You [effing] [G.D.] slut – You [m.f.-ing c ] I paid your cousin one hundred bucks and he said you would suck my [ male C ] and let me [F] you up your [ bum ] and make you lick the [sh*t] off my rigid [d*ck]” – I actually thought I’d be better off killing myself than living with that kind of b.s. — Then a popular guy who was a football player on the high school’s winning team showed some interest in me and asked me to be his date to a big deal high school dance – I was thrilled – But during the dance, the guy groped me – roughly – I mean it was painful. I asked him to stop and he said, “Oh, you know you want this, honey -” I raised my voice and roared, “Keep your bloody hands where they belong-” And two chaperones swooped in and carted him off – and a woman chaperone – a guidance counsellor – walked me out of the school gymnasium, where the dance was held and told me there’d been a nasty practice in the last few years where a new guy on the football team would have to pass an initiation task by pretending to like a *marginalized young woman – and invite her to be his date for the high school’s pre-Thanksgiving { big game } dance { *read that – ‘not a popular girl – definitely not a cheerleader’ – } and have sex with her – preferably in a car in the parking lot, with the cheerleaders close enough to cheer “Rah rah – he’s our man- if he won’t f*** you nobody will -” when the guy ran out of the car with the young woman’s underwear and even her dress to signal that he’d achieved his goal. – The teachers had also heard rumours that the guys got extra points if they had that sex over her objections. And over the past couple years, none of their victims would admit that anything happened – they’d been threatened with bodily harm and brutal humiliation by the cheerleaders for the rest of their time in high school if they said anything. I was not going to remain silent. That football player was told he could not participate in any school sponsored sports activities for the rest of his time in high school. The team was disallowed from playing against any of their local rival high schools for five years. Some of the coaches were fired. The morning after that announcement was made – I found my locker broken into and all my stuff messed up. My school books had been vandalized, ‘F’ words written in ‘magic marker’ on various pages inside the books, “[ ‘F-ing’ ] Slut” written in lipstick on the books’ covers and on the door to my locker. Police tried to match the lipstick to anything in the cheerleaders’ possession, and later told me that someone in the police department had probably warned the cheerleaders to get rid of their usual lipstick before the officers and detectives got to their homes and inspected their school lockers. The police apologized to me. The school wanted to disband the cheerleading squad, but one of the girls had a lawyer for a father and he threatened to sue the school ‘big time’ if they couldn’t produce convincing evidence that the cheerleaders had been the ones who vandalized my locker. The school assigned a bodyguard to walk me everywhere inside the school that year. That didn’t help much. The guy was pleasant enough – a known gay person with a brown belt in Karate – he’d had to learn to defend himself from football players in junior high school. But other ‘marginalized’ women were afraid to be seen talking to me – and there were rumours that the football players were ‘discouraging’ any guys from having anything to do with me. Somebody killed a neighbour’s kitten, thinking it was mine – hung it’s mutilated body in front of our front door. Again, I couldn’t face going to school – I was literally sick to my stomach every morning. My divorced mother couldn’t afford to send me to a private school anywhere – my father – who my mother had a restraining order against – had changed his name and only had any level of contact through his lawyer – told his lawyer not to bother him with any requests for any kind of help from his ex-wife or ‘her children’. My mother tried to convince me that I would feel a lot better if I managed to convince my tormentors that their tactics weren’t bothering me. She wouldn’t let me stay home from school even after she burst into the bathroom to watch me vomit after accusing me of faking that. I don’t know how I survived for two years – I believed it would be a lot easier to just end it all. But then, a new guy moved to our town and he looked interesting and the one woman classmate who wasn’t afraid to be seen anywhere near me told me that she’d overheard someone tell him that I was a lying b*tch who had ratted on a football player who’d tried to kiss me and got the guy kicked off the team and also told him that somebody hacked my cell phone { I never had one } and broadcast naked photos of me to everybody in the school. The new guy’s response was, “Bull Sh*t – if some idiot got kicked off the football team he probably deserved it – I’ve seen too many morons like you trying to ruin somebody’s life because she said no to the wrong person and I can pretty much tell when somebody’s lying to me – so take your idiotic rumours and stick them where the sun don’t shine.” – I got to know that guy, and I really liked him. I had real issues trusting anybody and the poor guy had to put up with a lot after he let me know he ‘really liked me’, but we’re still together – and I believe there really is hope for the future… even if the rest of the world is going stark raving insane lately.” { — Shelley S. }

"Edited Elf with Deer"

– “Edited Elf with Deer” –

— The elves in the example area come with blue skin – which can be slightly modified – but they still look more than slightly weird. And more than a little bit smug. I was able to edit his body type a bit and managed to shrink the ears a little and left him standing there while I was doing something on another computer and when I glanced back – I got the odd feeling that he looked a bit like me – { maybe in a past life? } – if you dismiss the blond hair and pointed ears.

— I had to give up on trying to upload the last cropped and shrunk screen shot { directly above this } – all I got was a bunch of error messages saying the screen shot was somehow unacceptable – Then I quit the browser and reloaded it and it uploaded – no problem.

– – – – – Okay – everybody, have a slew of great days and nights – I last added and edited this article on Thursday, May 12th @ 7:43 pm,

~~~~~ Jim

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 -

– “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” –

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

If It’s Wednesday – This Must Be Isle San Michel -“

Wednesday —> June 24th, 2020 – 1:24 am —> +19˚C / +68˚F – Dark & ‘Clear’ in Atlantic Canada –

- Daerrikk & Volffe + Isle San Michel -

— Daerrikk & Volffe on the Docks at Keltic Vale – Gazing at the Beacon High on the ‘mont’ on Isle San Michel –

— After a frantic week of repairing links between areas inside the Game World – We finally got a chance to work on a couple improvements – Brought down the Space Needle like rock on Isle San Michel – and shaped the mountain or hill more like Mont Saint Michel in France – It isn’t prefect –  but it’s pretty good. Then we put a lamp post and a bright blue light up near the summitt – And here – Daerrikk { Right } and Volffe { With his name showing over his head } were watching clouds roll in and glow blue from the light. There were times, from that vantage – that you could see the whole top of the hill lit up.

- "Isle San Michel -" -

– Isle San Michel and the NorthWest Corner of the Inland Sea. –

— Too many different shades of colour in our mountains? Earlier – { Yesterday? } – We finished shaping the grey stone hill or mountain. Before we conked out in the not-quite-so- ‘wee small hours’ of Sunday Morning we put a lamppost and a bright blue light up near the final chimney-like bit at the top.

— The ‘Mythology’ is, that when a rag-tag fleet of sailing ships carrying refugees from the “Last Wars Of Magick” found “Aerendel” — All they found was an Island in the ‘middle of nowhere’ with a fairly high mountain and fairly lush vegetation. They put ashore and found all kinds of fresh berries and other fruits – good water – and then – as a nasty storm hit – sought refuge in a pretty big cavern halfway up the mountain. The storm lasted three days and the ground shook several times. A lot of the refugees thought the bad guys were winning the Wars – But when the storm was over they discovered that their mountain was much higher above Sea Level than it had been before – and a lot of land had risen from the sea around them – Including a lot of jagged mountains.

— I’m thinkin’ the rocky hills or mountains in the lower left corner of the above Screen Shot are a little too jagged. No matter how sharp and pointed they might have been when the world changed – which might have been 5,000 – 10,000 or more years back – In an area where fresh water freezes and snow is a common sight in winter – I thought it would be more realistic – or at least interesting – to have more rolling ribbons of hills and fewer sharp points. { Shrug }

— So it looks like the world needs a lot more cosmetic surgery – We’re still finding loads of major ‘earthquake damage’ – Areas that used to be connected look like they’re at least a football field apart – And then there’s a lot of areas that are just kind of landscaped with monochrome hills and mountains & without grass or trees or cobblestone roads  or other necessary details – To say nothing about the buildings and caverns and caves and tunnels that are still in the planning stages and – can { or should } we give each race their own style of housing?

— And I better go – I’ve been staring into space and beginning to blink in and out of dreams while I’m trying to type here. And I have a Dentist’s Appointment in the morning —->

— Aaaaaaaa ….

~~~~~ Jim

– It Used To Be Friday –

– Saturday – June 13th, 2020 – +15˚C / +59˚F – dark & partly cloudy @ 1:42 am on my friend, Bob Balough’s Birthday –

Draelen & Nikki in the guard house in the "Norff Land" area

– Draelen & Nikki on guard duty together in the guard house in “Norff Land” – The chosen and highly defensible ‘New Homeland” of quite a few Ymmps –

— Not long after I took this screen shot the world we’ve been working in went ‘Down’ – { Schnarr! } It went down at about 6:31 Friday morning and it’s still down as of the last time I checked, maybe half an hour ago –
— I spent hours last evening thinking I could copy and paste the page of “The sentient Races of Aerendel” that I laboured over and put together painfully in HTML sometime between 1995 and 1997? – Before I could get my hands on a working copy of Dream Weaver. Long story – You don’t want to hear it. It’s all about me joining the vast hordes of unpaid US home health care providers trying to keep my father alive and then being so burned out I couldn’t work for a couple years.

"Norff-Land" The Ymmps adopted homeland.

We were building this new area and adding the sea to its south – This is about as far aw we got –

— The rocky coast of “Norff Land” { Ymmps, wiff dere demented senses of humor love making fun of language and talk funny for the plus perfect hell of it. } – They’re also hunted by the goblin-like race in this world who, if they can capture an Ymmp, and cut off its tail, and locate the correct glands and process the oily juice they can squeeze out of those glands just right – and survive the hallucinations and near-death experience they go through when the drink the stuff – become almost demonically powerful after having been born sickly, weak, stupid and generally useless – Ymmps are fun characters, ‘old souls’ who just want to laugh their way through this life and have as good a time as they can – And they all develop a ‘spell’ they call fire breath – which can kill bad guys, maybe ten at a time, but then they’re exhausted and need to rest and hope there are enough other Ymmps around to protect them and kill off the crazed attackers who want their tails – literally. I was raising steep hills along the jagged coastline while Nikki’s player was sleeping and had left her there as a place holder in case I tried to do too much at once and crashed out, if it took me a while to get back on I wouldn’t have to twiddle my thumbs for a minute or so while the world ‘spun back up’ and allowed me back in to get back to the business of building the landscape of this world – which is coming together and looking a lot better than I thought it could when I started this.

Julienne in Glacier Valley

– Julienne in Glacier Valley – with the early spring melted snow reflecting the absolutely gorgeous terrain behind her. –

— Looks like a ‘Visit Aerendel and Stay as long as you like’ Post card above, doesn’t it?

Juvenile Palm Trees.

– “Juvenile Palm Trees” – Besides checking a lot of minor problems with ‘Seamless Links’ and making some cosmetic changes, putting finishing touches on several areas – I’ve been working my way through ‘Speed Tree” tutorials and here’s some of the results –

— Palm Tree Saplings? 19 + feet tall? – The pink sphere is a collision thing – no characters can run between the young trees – I was thinking I could ‘sink them into the ground’ and have myself a jungle like look –

Tall twisted Palm Tree.

– Here’s a slightly twisted palm tree guaranteed to react to breezes – I wasn’t a big fan of palm trees, but I know where I can put this –

— A “66.21” foot tall palm tree that’s been buffeted by Trade winds? I randomized this from another palm tree that was 50 feet tall and couldn’t resit. I’ve got some more reading to do before I make sure it has all its intended features and close my eyes and push the button to send it through the pipe line with a couple whole forests waiting to join it. I liked the trees that disappeared with a server upgrade – I forget how many years ago – but these are a lot more interesting.

Tosha - without her axe

– Now this was an interesting occurrence – Tosha did a lot of work landscaping the other day and somewhere along the line might have actually lost her ‘Gear-Axe’ .

— I want to know if her axe magically reappears next time she pops in to help me here, but I guess I’ll have to wait –

— Have I done enough damage for one day? If I don’t get some quality rest I’ll be in trouble, deep.

— “Have a good life -“

————— Jim

Thursday, June 4th, 2020 —> “Planting Trees”

Thursday, June 4th, 2020 —> +23°C  / +72°F —> Mostly cloudy & Muggy here in Atlantic Canada @ 7:30-ish pm. –

"Broadleaf Speed Tree" 001

– “My first Speed Tree” With this Version. –

— Windows 10 still hates me. I downloaded the latest version of ‘Speed Trees” that I need for ‘creating’ trees to replace the place-holding leafless monstrosities I snitched from an example area. I downloaded this new version three times and it kept telling me that I was an idiot and it didn’t want to work for me. I almost gave up. But I stumbled into the start/stop menu and noticed that the ‘alias’ for speed trees said it was for (32) bit machines – so I waded through the “All Programs” files and opened up the “Speed Trees” folder and clicked on the (64) bit folder and clicked on the “modeler” app and it blinked at me and said, “Oh, that’s what you want- Okay!” and opened right up.

— And in the ‘manual’ it says ‘click here’ to see what I’m talking about – and when I did that I got more confused than usual – until I realized the link shot me to YouTube video tutorials for the wrong Version. A woman who knew how to set the volume levels while she recorded the wrong version’s tutorials didn’t quite blow me out of the room. But when I found the right version’s tutorials the guy was speaking so softly I thought the woman had blown my speakers. In his second tutorial video, that guy got it right and by the time I got through a couple tutorials – I felt confident and stupid enough to jump in and try to generate myself a tree. The tree above is the first tree I ‘created’ from scratch.

— Let me step back a bit —>

"Randomized Conifer"

– “Randomized Conifer” There are several example trees already made that came with the software. I clicked ‘randomize’ and it said, “You’re stupid, but if you really want to do this-…” and removed a lot of lower branches. –

— Before I went wading through instructions and tutorials I clicked on “Example trees” and blinked and it gave me a really tall conifer, and I clicked on “Randomize” { Just in case the graphic screen shot didn’t load for you } and it warned me that I would lose a bunch of detail – but what the heck – I told it to go ahead, and the above is what it gave me. 🙂  I thought, okay, that’s weird. – But what the heck? – And I saved it. It might look okay sunk into the ground to maybe halfway up the trunk … and then the software got nervous and told me, ‘You can’t save that here, how about we save it somewhere on your computer?’ – I said, “Sure – why the bleep not?” – and had to convince it that I wanted to plop it on my desktop for now – where it would be a lot easier to pull it back up later and mess with it, or whatever… Almost every program/app these days thinks everybody should love to have to search through half a million ‘documents’ anytime they want to open a file or look at something they worked on and saved yesterday before some random weather event shut down the local electrical grid or maybe a snowplow took out a utility pole or something – and achieved the same end, “Boom, crackle crackle – Fzzzzt!” – And our UPS guardian thingamajig beeped like crazy for an hour or so when nobody was in the building to hear it and then … “OMG – where’s all the work I hope I saved????”

"Not quite the Colorado Blue Spruce I expected, but hey, that's cool -"

– An Experimental second tree, I told it to be a “Spruce” and this is what I got. –

— Nature doesn’t subscribe to human sensibilities and I was really glad this tree isn’t perfectly symmetrical.  I’ll have to ask my cuter than heck cousin, the botanist – if this looks like an actual ‘other than Colorado Blue-” spruce tree – or do the ‘normal’ needles belong to some other species. But wait a minute- If I’m building a world for a computer game that doesn’t necessarily look exactly like this one – That might be a ‘Plejarin’ Spruce or something…

"A slightly inebriated palm tree."

– This was one of their example – pre-finished trees. I altered it a bit –

— In their tutorial, they use this palm tree as an example of how you can bend and twist your trunk around – I ‘played with it’ and lengthened the trunk a bit and tried to get it to stand up a bit straighter after its bend. And this looks okay to me.

- My Original Pine Tree -

– This Palm Tree – I ‘built’ from scratch – I actually lengthened the fronds a bit and I wasn’t happy that most of them stood pretty much straight up and none of the ‘magnet’ tools I clicked on bent the fronds down… But I don’t think I ever saw a real Palm Tree in real life – so maybe they look like this? –

— Interesting? Next time I’ll give a palm tree longer fronds.

"Ash Saplings"

– “Ash Saplings” – I wasn’t sure what I’d get when I clicked on the template that generated several Saplings. here – but yeah – I like the results. –

— & Hey! I don’t have to ‘plant’ a forest with only huge mature trees. – Maybe next time I can ‘create’ a bunch of baby Christmas trees?

- One of their examples. A broadleaf with roots around a bunch of rocks. -

– I thought this was cool, but maybe I’m a sucker? – This is one of their example broad leaf trees with roots hanging on to some rocks. I like the rocks…. –

— Yum? A broad-leaf tree with roots wrapped around some unusually rounded rocks. And it looks like somebody cut off a couple lower branches.
“Speed Trees” – in their tutorials, want to make sure you put ‘caps’ on broken or sawed off stumps of branches. It took me a little bit of trial and error to realize that when you put the ‘cap’ on the broken top of a tree – that puts caps on all broken/sawed off branches.

- Another broad-leaf tree- I defined this one. -

– “Another broad-leaf tree.” I defined this one.-

— The first time I tried to add roots to a tree trunk – before I added branches – all the branches wanted to hang out down at the roots – Which I found quite ‘irksome’. – And until I deleted the roots and the branches, I couldn’t find the editing stuff to pick the branches up and tell them to bond with the tree trunk – not the roots. –

— I wasn’t going to show you all my experiments and goofs here – but I did.

— I’m pretty happy with what I did here today – most results were surprising and most of them were positive surprises.

— Yeah, I can live with this…

————— Have a good life….

~~~~~ Jim

 

June 1st, 2020 – Windows 10 Sux – But it almost works –

Monday,  June 1st, 2020 —> +14˚C / +57˚F —> Mostly cloudy with nice diffused light & a little bit breezy @ 5:00 pm in Atlantic Canada —> On our friends’ Drucine’s and Cyndi’s Birthday. 🙂

Redundant Upload ;)

– Annie & Nikki Fixin’ the border that came unglued on May 12th –

— { I think this is the third time the above screen-shot was uploaded, but It shows a bit of the distortion that comes with looking at other player’s characters/Avatars/’cartoons’ in the 3-D environment of the ‘software, hardware and firmware’ it sometimes feels like I’ve building my game world in since before Atlantis sunk into the sea. }

— { The side walls do look wonky here – after our catastrophic event around Mothers’ Day when several areas ‘came unglued’ while we were trying to fix some weird looking ‘graphix’ anomalies – While we were stitching areas back together – They didn’t match up right – And rather than fuss with ‘slope smoothing’ for hours, we decided to ‘glue’ our areas back together where they appeared to line up okay – and discovered we had something like a fifteen foot high Mesa with vertical sides blocking the road from ‘Keltic Valley’ to ‘Keltic Vale’ —> So we plowed through the Mesa with our levelling tool and knew there would be a whole lot of modifying  later, but it is a lot easier to mess around with landscape anomalies that are not on the border than it is to try to get a border between areas to allow random crossing on uneven slopes – or get a hilly border landscape to mesh properly and not look really strange or even awful. So two of our builder characters / place holders – were standing there, close to the border while we were making mole hills out of mountains and wondering if we should or could do something with a deep gulch that was almost at the border… We could have widened the flat area where the flat stone ‘paved’ road was and then used some of our ‘erosion’ tools to make those weird looking cliffs look a lot more ‘natural’ — so while the cartoon women were looking like they were chatting away – Their human world builders were wondering what to do a kilometer long – fifteen feet high – 20 feet wide { impassable } Mesa that – if it appeared in California – could be explained as a weird looking but almost normal aftermath of an earthquake … —> “Well, heck -” Doug said, “It keeps us off the streets -”

—> I guess this ‘Article’ or ‘Posting’ will feel like a “What I did on my summer vacation’ assignment for a grammar school kid –

- Annie & Nikki on their lunch break -

– Annie and Nikki posed for this screen shot before they took a break to eat something before resuming their efforts here. –

— So – having cute ‘builder characters’ / Avatars / …Whatever – is more fun that watching guys’ butts run around while while testing ‘play-ability’ and all that. And these two are ‘BFF’s in the latest novel I’m trying to finish writing between building game worlds and telling myself I should avoid watching, listening to, or reading any current ‘news of the real world’ lately – Actually it was my step son who explained that he liked watching a female avatar’s bum a lot more than he liked watching a male character’s back side as he had to guide his in-game avatars through quests and stuff in the computer game we were both playing when he was something like 9 years old (?) And I do believe he had a point there.

Rachel and Rocky fixed a wonky border crossing.

– Rachel and Rocky fixed a border crossing. –

— Rachel – { she might be a Human-Ottarian hybrid as we’ve all been messing around with theories on how to design the different races we want to populate our world with } And Rocky –  { An Ymmp – Ymmps are basically a race of decent, intelligent, fun loving creatures with a ‘slightly demented’ sense of humor {{ or ‘humour’ if you’re Canadian … }} } Anyway R&R look like they’re wondering what the bleep I’m doing while they’re fixing a perplexing problem that took us years to solve, when it turns out the solution was rather simple —>

— When ‘seamlessly ‘ stitching areas together – weird things happen if the ‘heightmaps’ of the two areas you are connecting are not both named ‘default’ — I’d named one ‘room’ in the area south of ‘Keltic Valley’ —> “ElvishLands” and tried to have a rain event happen in a room called ‘ElvishLands’ but not in ‘default’ – And the problem that came up was – ElvishLands was the name of the farthest North heightmap that connected with the ‘default’ room and heightmap in ‘Keltic Valley’ —> And it makes absolutely no sense to me,  why this would happen – but ‘Elvish Lands’ kept making itself invisible to the ‘default’ map in the Valley – which is unnerving… I never knew when a character I was using to check the connection between areas – might either not be a able to cross into a ‘land’ that was apparently invisible – and might just stand there, running in place, getting nowhere – or worse, fall through a crack in the world and go sailing downward through eternity –

— The problem went away when I renamed the heightmap from ‘Elvish Lands’ to —>”Default” —> And, almost miraculously – all sorts of invisible buildings and stuff popped into plain view.

Annie - staring at pistacio green fog coloured mountains..

– “Tweaking the fog colours can be fun -” –

— RE-setting the fog colours can be fun – & whatever colours you choose – you can be quite surprised when you see the results. A plain blue might turn out to be an electric ‘Indigo’ or purplish ‘federal blue’. A’ light blue’ choice might end up being more like the colour of pistachio ice cream.

— — — I started trying to build games and game worlds when my nephews were young – Dave was six years old and I think his older brother , Charles, who we used to call ‘Harley’ so as not to confuse him with his father —> Another ‘Charles’ who might have been more ‘Charlie’ than Charles… And I think Dave just had his 35th birthday a coupe days ago – { Yikes? }

— I wanted to design and build a world that would be fun and interesting – where players who didn’t want to just kill everything and everybody in sight could enjoy themselves, have fun, – have their characters thrive in a game world where they might even painlessly learn things that might make their ‘Real Lives’ more fun or less painful – or hopefully both…

— And when I was experimenting with the ‘Atmosphere’ settings in an area I’d named ‘Easlynne’ – I thought the surprising results might be appealing to, especially, women and girls. Clouds, fog, and sky colours weren’t just unusual, they were eye-openers – amazing – My imagine came up with what I thought might be a plausible explanation – dust kicked up by ‘Del-Vahrians’ mining for gems and brilliant coloured minerals got blown into the upper atmosphere and produced some very interesting results – And that kind of made me take another look at the ‘Real World’ around me –  I once ‘made up’ a distant planet for a science fiction exercise and thought the mountains on that distant world might be – purple? – Sure, why not? – And then –  walking my sister’s hound dog on an evening after a storm – well ‘Holy Bleep!’-  the mountains across the river in New Hampshire were purple as the sun was going down.

- "Jassper" - at the ruins of an ancient temple -

– “Jassper” at the ruins of an ancient temple. –

— And –  no – I am not totally averse to ‘rolling’ male avatars – “Jassper” has gone through a bunch of changes since 2011, when he was first ‘created’ and given the name of our dog, who, sadly, I am missing dearly these days.

— Way back in 2011 – there were a lot of assets available that disappeared from our selection window – but since one of the first weird areas I tried to build used a lot of those assets that I thought were deleted when the trees we could use back then disappeared – and when I went and looked at the first areas I built – they were still there – the assets, I mean –

— And, although I don’t know if I want any of my weird old experiments to be available for odd hallucinatory events and/or dreams or nightmares – I discovered that if I temporarily connected one of my clunky old areas to one of the areas that are much more likely to be with us if and when I finish building something I think other people might enjoy wandering around in – I could ‘clone’ and move those assets across borders and ‘import’ them into the new area and then dis-connect the wonky old area and keep the cool old assets …

— And see – Jassper, who is currently pretty much a full blooded Ottarian – had fun exploring the ruins of an ancient temple that might have been honoring a fertility goddess or something like that –

— I also had fun describing – I think – nine religions – like, ‘The Church of Conspicuous Consumption’ – and I think every religion I started with had ‘colourful’ nicknames uttered by members of other religions – Like the ‘Church of Peace, Love, and Harmony’ would be called ‘The Orgy Church’ by jerks who wanted to convince their friends and neighbours to tithe into their coffers instead of ‘throwing their gold away’ by donating to any other sect. —> But that’s a subject for another post at another time.

"Maurina" - a couple hours before dawn.

– Maurina – a cross between an Elvish warrior and a healer/botanist –

— Maurina might belong to the aquatic race, The Mer – Many Mer have exotic hair colours – maybe she was shunned for being too ‘ordinary’ – Mer can go crazy if kept from being able to swim and immerse themselves in large bodies of water – They also have re-breathing chambers in their lungs – and subsequently, large chests. Until a couple days ago, Maurina looked like a rather creepy elf. I spent over an hour trying to modify her face into something a lot less creepy – Then spent a little more time trying to make her not look like a baby-faced Barbie.

"Tosha" on a clear day -

– “Tosha” on a clear, sunny afternoon. –

— One complaint I have with the faces and clothing available here at the beginning of things, while we’re building pretty much from scratch – Well, two complaints – One – women pretty much have a choice of either being scantily dressed bimbos and walking around in clunky armor – with maybe one blouse for the more modest types and one skirt that looks like it was designed by fiends who wanted to make sure that women couldn’t get away if they were attacked. —> & Two – Faces seem much too difficult and time consuming to modify without looking ridiculous –

— In the Reference  Game – That I think can’t be played at all any more – Every time I tried to roll up a woman, she looked terminally depressed.

— But then again = Enter Tosha – Tosha used to be completely Ottarian – and the first time I saw what happened to her face when I slid the racial sliders all the way to their version of my Ottarians – I thought she looked like she was probably related to Betty Boop – with a really wide face – but with a little bit of modification – playing with the dozens of sliders for over an hour – each slider having strange results that do not appear to have anything to do with the qualities they’re ‘advertised’ to represent – I mean the ‘happy – sad’ slider doesn’t seem to make anybody look happier or sadder – more like makes them look weird or clueless –

— But when I finished messing with Tosha’s facial morphing sliders I thought she looked like a bit like a close family friend’s daughter – who was growing up to be beautiful, brilliant, creative and and full of ‘heart’.

— And then recently, The first time I brought her out after several years – I thought she looked a lot more like Betty Boop than Mary Ellen.

— So I thought it was time for her to grow up – or evolve into somebody or something else – maybe become a cat-person or a friendly or not so friendly elf.

— And, when I made her look more ‘human’ her face wasn’t so Boop-ish – and she almost reminds me of an actress I’m trying hard to place – and/or remember who she played in what series or mini series I liked enough to watch all the way through.

"Tosha" - looking thoughtful at sundown.

– Tosha – close up – looking thoughtful just after sundown. –

— Some of these characters take on shades of expressions in one screen-shot that I never noticed before – Here – Tosha might be checking out somebody she’s thinking of flirting with, or she might be a bit apprehensive about some scary character who might be sneaking up behind her.

- Tosha Hates Disco -

– I get to see those big red letters too often –

— I started writing and importing the screen shots here almost two and a half hours ago – I think I mentioned “Windows 10 Sux” when I named this post.

— I’m more used to Macs. My first computer was an Apple IIe. I managed not to upgrade to Windows 10 for quite a while. For one thing, every time I checked – the world building site did not say their stuff was compatible with Windows 10 –

— But then – they made sure I couldn’t do anything with Windows 7 – My gut feeling was – if felt like they tossed a routine into their mix that took your world ‘Down’ if they recognized that you were still using Windows 7. Not that Windows 7 couldn’t handle their latest upgrades – just that there was something ignoble in their character that made them sell their souls to Microsoft.

— And Windows 10 tosses out a lot of simple, useful apps like ‘Paint’ – and replaced them with asinine ‘Paint 3-D’.

— They take choices that used to be there away with no warning or explanation.

— They replaced halfway user friendly apps with simple commands – with insidious ‘You can’t get there from here, you have to wade through a bunch of new ‘bull-chips’ choices to save what you just worked on. — Instead of ‘one click and you’re done-‘ they throw in something like ‘Wouldn’t you really rather do it my way?’ detours. Which leave me with a bad taste in my mouth, and  – “Okay, I understood how your previous app worked, why the bleep have you decided to ‘fix’ what wasn’t broken?”

— I get the feeling that Microsoft has a lot of ice-holes pretending to be creative – who get weird ideas into their insanely cross-wired minds – about how they’d like things to be – and implement them — especially if they complicate their customers’ lives beyond the point where we all expect micro-shit to be much too frustrating for words – like the earliest computer salesmen who were convinced by con artists – that the words ‘powerful’ and ‘elegant’ would make them millionaires, all they had to do was repeat them incessantly like some hideous mantra to anyone they believed looked like a clueless moron – who’d probably wandered into their kill zone by mistake – and that would convince all kinds of idiots to overpay for overpriced-useless junk and believe they were getting a bargain.

— Everything they market should come with the warning “Designed to fail and become obsolete before you can possibly figure out how to use it.”

— sigh — Yeah, but I will slog through this and learn new tricks and — dammit — They can’t keep raising the bar to make sure I never can finish building this danged thing – can they????

————— Argh!

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

Mother’s Day Massacre 2020 –

Monday, May 11th, 2020 – +15˚C / 59˚F —> Sunny with some high white and grey clouds to the East @ 7:27 pm Atlantic Time –

"You Have Been Disconnected"

– This came at almost exactly 4:00 am here – after we worked all day to correct some weird glitches. –

— We had one temporary area that was causing problems – This area has a bunch of assets some of our team can’t get through their not quite top of the line set-up.

— So Jim this time, warned us ahead of time and went in and removed a ‘seamless’ connection to the area that was experiencing the glitches. That seemed to have gone well.

— Then he ‘moved’ it, attached it to another area where somebody wanted to clone and move assets to the area she was working on.

— But then, really weird schnarr hit the fan.

Still Broken after we fixed this problem three times and it looked fine -

– “Still Broken after three of us fixed this problem at least once each and it looked fine – but then-.” —>

— From here that might not look like much of a problem – but “Down on the ground” we have a lot of “Can’t get there from here” problems. Everything in five areas came unglued. And there is an area to the left of those mountains you can probably see at far right middle? And the water? The “Inland Sea” water has very weird black diagonal stripes.

— This was at about 9:30 pm yesterday –

— Then Jim came back from a late-ish dinner with Cathi – who is working on Vancouver time from home near Fredericton –

— Jim said, “Okay, let me try one last thing -” —> Made sure all areas that were connected to the inland sea removed their “Seamless Links” —> Removed the inland sea, then re- added it. Then Re-added two more sections of the inland sea bed to “Del-Vahria” { Where the Delvahrian miners find most of their gems and rare ores – } And voila! 95% of the Sea Bed yawned and said, “What’s all the commotion about??” — & it pretty much popped into place where it shouldda been all along. We had a minor bit of slope smoothing to redo – and applied bandaids to all the edges where they connected to other areas – and we parked a couple builder characters in strategic spots, told them not to move, just kind of stand there and twiddle their thumbs – because weird stuff often happens if the builder characters log out or get booted by a system overload or if some of their last several commands haven’t been processed yet.

— So then most of us waved goodnight with our characters still connected – and Jim, who’d been trying to fix things since 12:30 pm { 9 hours ago – } deleted the weird water and went in and ‘created’ some new sea water –

— Unexpected problems with the sea water —> His builder character was standing on the dry sea bed way the heck out there when he ‘created’ the water by clicking on the ‘create’ & ‘mirror / water’ links inside the world creation & modification software window.

— Then there were problems with the water not wanting to stretch to the size it had been before the Mother’s Day Catastrophe — He worked that out and left his builder underwater for a while while he and Cathi watched a post season-ender program put on the “Curse of Oak Island” guys – and when he came back, things looked stable enough –

— He had his builder character swim to the nearest shore, climb out and run around back down to the ‘Del-Vahria’ shoreline, thought he might get a nice happy glimpse of moonlight on the water – but – the water was invisible.

— Jim did not drop dead from a heart attack, he winced, sat back, sighed a few times, thinking he might have to spend a couple more hours trouble shooting – but then thought of something, ran back around to a spot near where he was when he ‘created’ the water and yup – there it was – happily lapping on the shore.

— So – working in stages, he ran halfway back to Del-Vahria, looked again, and – yup, the sea was still there, still looking virtually wet – So he went into the ‘properties’ tab – clicked on the sea, and sure enough – The sea thought it belonged to the North Eastern Plains area. So inside the ‘Area’ tab there’s an option, “Bring assets here -” which he clicked and then selected the sea again, and now it thought it belonged to the Isthmus area.

— Then – because the Isthmus area is not directly connected to the Keltic Vale area, he ran all the way down to Del-Vahria and went through the ‘properties’ click – ‘Areas’ click – Bring assets here – click – and now, almost twenty two hours later – the sea is still there, and it’s still visible to everybody who wants to see it. —> We hope 😉 –

— It took Jim 2 hours to get the sea back where it was supposed to be.

Screen Shot - Annie Plantig Flowers on the Isthmus.

– Annie planted flowers around the building on the Isthmus – The thing is – the building got ‘wonky’ on us. –

— The building above got a little bit weird after the Mother’s Day Massacre – That was the first thing we noticed. Annie tried to go into the building and ended up levitated – my best guess? ten feet above the ground…

Screen Shot - "Flying Annie"

– Annie couldn’t move, couldn’t turn around, couldn’t do anything but hang there. In the past when anything like this happened, we learned we could just wait a couple minutes and our builder characters would come crashing to the ground, no bones broken – no problems – but this time, half an hour later, she swas still floating. –

— So Annie – knowing that if she ‘exited’ her building software, things might become even stranger – tried teleporting to another area and back again, and this time she could walk right in at ground level – but she turned around to leave and there were gaps between the inside walls and the outside walls. She tried to fix that for about an hour or so and nothing she could do could get the walls to line up right.

— She called Jim. Jim came over and tried to fix the problem – but after ten minutes, realized the building was just too far out of sync and deleted it. – He also discovered that part of the weirdness he was working on had raised the Isthmus what looked like several meters.

— Annie had noticed that, and rather than bother Jim earlier, fixed that by angling a hill from north eastern corner of Del-Vahria up to where she fixed the slopes and bandaided the edges together and —

— Jim thanked her, and they didn’t think that had anything to do with the levitation problem, but Jim shrugged and thought it might be Aesthetically more pleasing to have the building, which now sat on a higher bluff with the Northern Sea with all its blustering storms battering against the walls – He raised the bluffs a bit and carved a protected  area into a fairly level space with the higher bluffs to the north and a bit of a smallish rocky hill to the south. Then he importated another version of the building that had gone wonky and they checked it out and everything looked fine.

- Nikki & Annie during a sunset Heat Inversion - Screen Shot

– Meanwhile, ‘before the fit hit the Shan’ – Saturday Eveing, Nikki – had suffered a weird teleportation glitch the day before, and ended up naked with short blond hair and somebody else’s face – which never happened before —> to any of us.

— Nikki went and had a summer make-over – got a new outfit and new boots, – new everything – and here she is clowning with her ‘BFF’ Annie during a sunset temperature inversion while Annie was showing off her horticultural skills.

— Yeah, so luckily those of us with wives and/or Mothers who – thankfully, didn’t mind being left mostly unbothered all day while we went nuts fixing things – still have stuff to do and time to do it. Thanks to the CoVid-19 Fiasco all around us….

— { “Have a good life …. }

~~~~~ Xhyrean Shantivarta – { – inter-dimensional time traveler stuck on Earth for a while longer – finding you ‘Earthlings’ almost as amusing as you are irritating…. }

New Page Added – “Stuff From Yahoo Group”

Sunday, October 27th, 2019 – Dark and chilly @ 6:39 pm  in Atlantic Canada

DreamCat as a Dryad

– DreamCat as a Dryad – Screen Shot from eons ago when we were playing Simms online in its first incarnation. –

{ DreamCat is the character with the butterfly wings. }

Yahoo Groups will be nuking its group’ content soon. they will not allow any new content after tomorrow, the 28th. I copied everything worth copying and pasted that into 60 pages of word processing { Open Office } @ a font size of 12 pixels ( I think it’s measured in pixels ).

So- at any rate – there’s a new page and some of its content is personal memorablia and some might be worth reading.

— Grumble grumble

——— TaleRocker