Category: “Adventures in Game Building” –

– Near Lucid Dreams –

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-Edited = Sunday, January 26th, 2025 – -21˚C / -6˚F —> Dark & “Fair” @ 07:05 am in Atlantic Canada on Catherine Ednie’s Birthday 🙂 – {{ Happy Birthday, kid- }}

-Xhyrean + Jessicka In Her Early 20s-"

– “Xhyrean – With Jessicka { In her Early Twenties ) – Exploring the safe Parallel World he discovered that they called the “New Earth” -” –

— (( The Game World I spent more than ten years designing —> With the name “Aerendel” that I first used in 1973 after reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy in two weeks my first time through it – where I was transported into Tolkien’s world – to the point where I could hear the bugs and birds chirping and peeping in the forests and almost couldn’t recognize my hand when I turned the pages }}

— Xhyrean has no idea how old he is, he was recruited by an Ascended Master and whisked off to a planet that hovers on the line between portals between the Material, Astral, and Causal Universes – and his ‘boss’ who sometimes appears as a fourteen feet tall pure bright white being with wings, and sometimes appears as a normal-ish six feet tall ‘humanoiod’ – won’t tell Xhyrean who he is – says Xhyrean already knows who he is and has had bits of his memory blocked by traumatic events. that he will overcome – and remember everything – But until then, his ‘boss’ sends him into various Earth Like Parallel worlds and dimensions where he aged into dimentia after about sixty years, was rescued and regenerated and told that he’ll have to learn to regenerate himself – which he barely managed to do the next time he aged to the point where he was all aches and pains – and because he keeps being sent to worlds where time passes differently – he thinks he’s about 350 years old and feels like a late teenager most of the time –

—Xhyrean rescued Jessicka as a 16 year old about to be raped and probably murdered by a monster commanding a legion of monsters that jumped from world to world and killed and raped everything in sight – and nearly died in the process – but jumped through a portal his boss probably sent him and landed in a world where Elves lived in a cavern for safety and their leader was training young Elves how to use the laws of higher dimensions to heal people and animals they saved from certain death – where it took Xhyrean and the Elves six months to heal him to the point where he could see another wild portal and jump through it to bring Jessicka back home where her parents heard her story and were convinced that she’d had a psychotic break and threw her out of their house – { Wonderful, Enlightened Bostonians, they were. }

— Jessicka walked down the steps of their brownstone where Xhyrean was waiting and suddenly grew to eight feet tall with very angelic white wings, picked her up and flew away. Her parents almost died of heart attacks on the spot.

— They eventually found their way to a parallel world where the vibrations were high enough to activate latent DNA to the point where Jessicka began to grow a little more almost imperceptibly and her ears grew points –  (( <— That is the short synopsis of the ending of one of my unpublished novels, “Llyn Ellyn / Deep Water Still Runs” — Jessicka spends a lot of time hoping and praying that Xhyrean, who saved her life and brought her to a world where the locals don’t like her – the young women are afraid their boy friends will dump them to court Jessicka as soon as Xhyrean dies – and Jessicka has been assigned to tend to his wounds and fully believes that the dreams he tells her about —> including his encounters with his ‘Ascended Master’ boss – are symptoms of what her psychiatrist father snarled and described as, “the fantasies of a dying mind very near the end of life.-” when she came home from school with a library book on the subject of ‘Near Death Experiences’. She cried a lot. {{{ & When it looked like Xhyrean wasn’t going to die the Elves’ leader – a Woman named Drahanna – convinced Xhyrean and Jessicka – when she was sixteen and maybe seven months old – that they better get married to keep the young women in that place from doing something desperate, like poisoning her so their boyfriends won’t keep believing they could seduce the exotic person from ‘somewhere outside their protected community’. }}} Xhyrean whispered that as long as they didn’t consummate the marriage after the Elvish ceremony she could get their marriage annulled – all they had to do was find a Catholic Priest who believed that they’d been taken to another planet and forced to get married and had no intention of consummating that – Good luck with that? }}

~~~~~ Jim

The Cat Says, “Make The Snow Go Away-“

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Saturday, March 17, 2018  —> -10˚C / +13˚F in the dark and clear atmosphere @ 11:11 pm in Atlantic Canada, on Cousin Ricky { Patrick } Conroy’s birthday 🙂 —

Moe

– Moe’s got his nose in the planter where he just finished off most of the cat grass and catnip –

— That’s three and four feet deep waves/dunes of snow outside Moe’s insulated window – Once a day he goes to the door and stares at one or both of us until we open the door, then he stares out at the snow and finally turns, looking heart-broken, with a desperate, “Make it go away-” look and something close to disillusionment behind his sadness, looks like he’s wondering what he needs humans for if we can’t magically make the snow go away and his wonderful green world appear  where it should be – Ya Know?

Moe looking at us.

– One of Moe’s “Make it go away-” looks –

— Moe was called “a cat and a half” by a friend near Ottawa – But that is a lot of fur around a lot of cat there –

Plants on our porch.

– Happy Plants – Basking in sunshine –

— The plants on our porch – patiently wait for warm weather when they can go outside and happily bask in the same sunshine Moe wants around him – but they don’t whine and complain the way he does.

Eslyn in the cat tails at the waterfall.

– Meanwhile – over the border in our game world –

— We had several of us corroborate on how to make a waterfall without a five or six thousand dollar graphics package. ‘Eslyn’ here loves the results.

Eslyn asa Ranger with the falls behind her.

– Eslyn posing with the ‘Exploded Rock Falls’ she helped clean up this evening. –

— About once a day even I wonder if getting this game world up in working order may be too lofty a goal. But then – A fresh face like ‘Eslyn’s ( Who was with us in like, um, 2012 but recently returned – ) shows up and goes, “Oh wow – This is great, I think I can fix your little problem there —” ) and gets it done.

~~~~~ Jim

Ice Chunks –

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Friday, March 16th, 2018  —> -2˚C / +29˚F with very light snow falling @ 6:39 pm in Atlantic Canada —

Ice Chunk.

– Let’s see- This monster is like two and a half to three feet long and a foot high – Solid Ice – and weighs about 80 to 100 pounds. –

— Ugh! Good thing Cathi was already scheduled to work from home today. If she tried to drive over the above chunk of ice, which was blocking our driveway where she usually turns to stay in her proper lane on her way out of here. It would either have stopped her dead in her tracks or sliced through any vital cables and/or gas lines, brake lines — thinks like that.

— While I was digging this thing out or the end of the driveway I was thinking it might be poetic justice to launch that sonofagun at the windshield of anybody driving a snowplow on this street. —> Luckily, I’m a writer and I can imagine that as a plot angle in a story and not believe I owed the ‘birty dastard’ who pushed that thing into our driveway the scare of his life.

— & by the way, in this photo the ice chunk is posing atop a three and a half foot high mound of packed cleared snow at the edge of our driveway.

Snow chunks.

– I thought yesterday’s snow chunks were bad. –

— If somebody hit you in the head with one of the above ‘boulders’ of tightly packed snow, it might make you angry. If you head was ‘thick’ enough the chunk of snow would break.

— Today’s monster Ice Chunk could probably kill a healthy adult male human being.

Paw prints in the driveway beside my size 13 boot print.

– On the lighter side, Cathi thinks these paw prints belong to a very small cat. –

— It felt like a waste of space to center that above this.

— Now, it might just be a bit of ugly formatting on my part.

— But, yeah, Cathi thinks those are a very small cat’s paw prints. She worries about a cat that size being outside in weather like we’ve been having lately. – Worries more that it might be homeless and shivering in the dark somewhere.

= = = = =

— But, on then other PAW –

TaleRocker in a cave.

– TaleRocker’s latest look, since Doug gave him a pair of glasses. –

— We gave TaleRocker a new ‘Gravatar’

 

~~~~~ Jim

Working Through Catastrophic Deletions & Learning to Really Appreciate Colour

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Saturday, February 24th, 2018 —> +2˚C / +35˚F with less than an inch of new snow on the ground, and the vehicles … @ 8:13 am A couple hours North of the Bay of Fundy —

Xhyrean's new look -

– First the Good News? – This is me in Aerendel –

— Yup We had a Catastrophic “oops” – One click wiped out like ten days of work.

— Working inside a 3D Compute Game – World Building – has it’s ups and downs. Now the bad news? —> While trying to resize an ‘asset’ ( big old rock ) the pyramid moved, I clicked and we lost – jeeze – I don’t know – The bottom 4th of one area —? Ten days’ work messed up in half a split second?

— But – Before I admitted anything I tried to undo that click, nope  – didn’t work, so I started fixing the area the hard way – & three hours later I had the perimeter back where we started – But we had some intense landscape that was missing – including the connections with other areas – We’d spent hours fussing with ‘water’ to fake a waterfall – and tip up one ‘oceanic’ bit of water – at a weird gravity defying angle – and messing with orientation adjustment tools to try to match up the edges of three bits of water, two parts of a river and the waterfall – so it didn’t look as horrible as we feared it might. And we were proud of that. But that ‘One-Click’ disaster had buried all that hard work beneath a now suddenly flat featureless landscape. — Luckily – the water, the rocks we used to cover the seem at the top of the waterfall – all that stuff was still there, hiding.

Ocean inlet about to be deleted.

– The “Ocean Inlet” Above ( We weren’t entirely sure whether it was going to be and ocean or a big lake /inland sea – ) – Was actually beyond the limits of the area it was connected to – And it was slowing us down –

— The above was just before the disaster – We deleted two cosmetic additions to one major area because they were really slowing us down, making it frustrating to try to navigate around – No matter how pretty or aesthetically satisfying they looked, they had to go.

TaleRocker looking at thesky.

– Jim’s Builder character – Checking out the ‘altered’ blue fog –

— “Before”? – Please notice how flat the land is to ‘TaleRocker’s right –

Have ou seen the stars tonight?

– In the process of driving ourselves nuts to fix the landscape – Jim went off and checked out an old area that never lost the stars, came back and tried something –

— Now look – Pulling down the ‘Landscape’ again – left us with a dilemma – and the opportunity to make some changes that might be more visually interesting – We’re not finished with that ugly weird hill on the other side of the river, but the river itself looks better than it did ( Um – in my opinion anyway – )

— & Another unexpected bonus to working our tails off in marathon sessions – I got up exhausted and headed for the kitchen to get myself some ‘nourishment’ and everything I looked looked absolutely amazing – Suddenly everything around me was vibrant with colours I probably saw, but didn’t  pay much attention to – paint on the walls – even the sand on the dog’s stairway in and out from the elements – even the sand in the driveway – Everything was beautiful – I remember a Yogi giving me advice way back in my misspent youth – He said that anything artistic we do helps us in our quest for spiritual ‘enlightenment’. Like the quote from “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” – “Before enlightenment – chopping wood and carrying water — After enlightenment – Chopping Wood! and Carrying Water!”

— Did I tell you that when Jim came back from North Shamrock Island he went in and deleted our ‘Skybox’ and bingo – the stars came out – They’re not all that visible in the screenshot above, but they’re there –

Ellyn the half-elf

– “Ellyn the half-elf” –

— “Ellyn” ) I don’t know how well putting her to the left of this text will work, but there she is, cropped – with the exposure adjusted so she actually shows up in this ‘photo’ –

Ellyn.

– I think this is Ellyn posing in a full width screenshot that had to be adjusted for size to keep it under 2 MB so this blog will accept it here.

— This was Ellyn before we messed up the landscape behind her.

Fidaria

– Fidaria – The female cat person. –

— Fidaria. Jim met a young woman of ‘Yugoslavian’ pedigree whose name was Fidaria. He thought that name was both beautiful and exotic. So when one of us wanted a Female cat Person as her main builder Character – Before she knew I had a cat person avatar for me here –  And she wondered what to name her – Jim went down the alphabet and got as far as ‘F’ and or friend lit up – “Yeah – that’s a whole lot better than “Kitty” –

Xhyrean at sundown.

– “Me” in the dark at Sundown – just before the stars came out and dazzled us all –

— I should probably end this here – I was the last one standing a couple hours ago and things got slowed down to an agonizing scrawl as the loads of landscaping changes we made were stacking up in a buffer somewhere – And I’m pretty sure I can safely log out and re-enter and run around to see how the changes we made look in the ‘daylight’ here 🙂

— Hasta luego –

—– Xyrean ( the bloodshot and starry eyed ) –