Every screenshot of RimWorld kind of looks the same unfortunately. First, just the month of December, though I hardly need ManicTime to tell me this: RimWorld, 142 hours. The final tally changed right up to the end of the final day. Incidentally, as I look at the blah screenshot of RimWorld up there, I should say that I never found the game the slightest bit interesting from looking at other people’s screenshots or descriptions.

Raiders tunneling into Ancient Danger. Again, the screenshot looks dumb and meaningless. Just trust me when I say this was a super dramatic, white knuckle, holy crap moment. People on Twitter are probably sick of hearing about RimWorld by now, but blog readers can enjoy these quips for the first time! Unless you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve probably seen them before. But now you can read more about what I meant with the power of more words!

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2019. (Here is 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak. I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs.

It’s time for another performance review of my YouTube channel. Thanks to YouTube’s change in monetization strategy at the beginning of the year, I basically stopped putting any effort into video production in 2018. The only videos I upload now are completely unedited-basically mini-streams without a chat room. (Occasionally I do some edits, but it’s minor and rare.) In fact, toward the end of the year as I’m writing this, I would say that I only upload about 1 video for every 10 that I actually record.

If you don't instantly recognize this, we can't be friends. While seemingly every where I turn at the start of 2019 I see people talking about how it’s a great time to start blogging because blogging is super hot and rewarding and it’s all fine and nothing is on fire and burning right to the ground around us, *I* am sitting here wondering what the heck is even the point of this blog anymore.

I’m going to try a new thing this year on the ol’ blog. Last year, I would start writing a post, thinking it was the greatest thing ever, words flowing all over the place, but then I’d hit a wall and couldn’t really think of a conclusion, and I would wander away to something else. Then I would read the post the next day or the next, and realize it wasn’t that good, despite having a kernel of a good idea.

Here’s another one of those posts I started one day and then decided the next day that it doesn’t really say anything, and doesn’t contain any valuable content except the one link to Scopique’s post. But per the new 2019 blogging rules, I’m posting it anyway. I saw Scopique’s post on audio settings for streaming, which gives me an excuse to write about one of my favorite things: Audio engineering! I could write thousands and thousands and thousands of words on the inside baseball minutia of all the work I put into the audio tracks on my YouTube videos.

I saw @Stargrace and some other folks talking about Dwarf Fortress in the blogosphere and on Twitter. It’s that game that has that reputation for being the greatest game ever, and also the most impossible to actually play, that I’ve been hearing about for the last ten years. I think I first heard about it on the Gamers With Jobs podcast years and years ago. It dawned on me that I’ve always heard it’s a game that sounds similar to RimWorld, and I love RimWorld, so therefore by the transitive property I should also love Dwarf Fortress.

Well we’re starting off the week by deciding *not* to post the post I was going to post about why blogging is such work for me right now, because of the reasons I explain in that post, because I just don’t want anyone to know how much work it is, which quickly kills off the era of “2019 is when I post my half-finished drafts even when they’re not done instead of letting them accumulate in Drafts for years on end.

So a weird thing happened. I played more Dwarf Fortress. And then a little more. And I kind of started liking it. “It’s really not that hard once you learn it.” This is Bekarlogem, my third fortress. Bekarlogem apparently means "Dippedpainted" which makes me giggle every time for some reason. Ha! Just kidding. It’s still super hard. Every screen has a different method of navigating the menus. Sometimes it’s arrow keys.

I imagine if you draw a Venn diagram of “people who play Dwarf Fortress” and “people who are programmers,” the two circles would overlap quite a bit. Unfortunately for me, I’m a programmer, so I think I’m more vulnerable to this DF sickness than most people. Playing the game is quite a bit like using a text editor, considering how much you use the arrow keys to select things in rhythmic patterns.

I’m pretty weary of writing about Guild Wars 2 so this is going to be a short post. Mostly it’s just to note that I did finish the new Episode 5, All or Nothing last night. I don’t say what happens here, but there is one big hint below (from ArenaNet) which is plenty to work out what happens, so beware. I hadn’t logged into Guild Wars 2 a single time since I finished episode 4.

There’s supposed to be a diacritic or something on one of those vowels in Guzilingiz, but who can be bothered with such things. I started another fortress in Dwarf Fortress. Guess what? If you guessed “werelizards destroyed the whole fortress again” you’d be exactly right. Yeah it's another scene of unspeakable carnage and horror. So much gore splashed on the walls here it couldn't even get an R-rating if it were a movie.

This post is about the boring inside baseball minutia of audios and videos and scripting, so beware. I uploaded the four videos comprising the entire brief lifespan of my Gusilingiz fortress to my YouTube channel. Since I did some experimental stuff in those videos, I thought I would document it all here, because I love this stuff and you can’t stop me. By the way, I spelled Gusilingiz wrong in my last post, in case you’re an expert on the dwarven language and noticed that glaring error.

I’m doing that thing again where my posts start piling up in Drafts because I write them on my MacBook Air in the living room, but I only add images on my gaming PC in the computer room, and I spend all of my time with my gaming PC actually gaming instead of adding images to blog posts, so the posts just sit here in Drafts until I force myself to add an image some days or weeks later.

January has been a PC simulation game month, continuing from December. The big oval room is a bustling tavern in my most-recent fortress, Amostitdun. Dwarf Fortress, 69 hours. Yeah, I kinda still play Dwarf Fortress. It’s really not that bad once you learn it. No, really! I mean, if you’re a programmer, that is, who’s spent decades using programming text editors, moving cursors around and learning keyboard shortcuts. And also someone who’s played a month and a half of RimWorld beforehand to get the hang of this specific kind of game.

First! Wait, what? Other people have written about Anthem too? Oh. Oh well. I guess here’s another. Roger basically wrote the exact same post that I did. In fact, I dare say most every reaction to Anthem I’ve seen from newcomers to the free demo weekend is basically the same: “It’s okay if you like that sort of thing, but it’s not for me.” That’s what this post is, so buckle up.

Amostitdun turned out to be kind of a boring fortress. Everything just kind of worked fine and the dwarves went about their lives. They had plenty of food and drink and housing and most everyone seemed happy, except a few pesky killjoys. I got tired of managing them when they reached the population cap of 200. Just like RimWorld, it’s just not fun for me to play this kind of game unless I’m reacting to some kind of threat or obstacle.

I created a new world called Emeecamo, “The Eternal Universes.” I used all the default settings except I set the mineral occurrence to “Frequent” because I’m a filthy casual and I don’t like looking all over creation for metals. Unlike my last world, which was dominated by humans, Emeecamo has a fairly balanced population between all the races, and almost all of them are at war with the goblins. All but the dwarves, oddly enough.

I’ve been trying to think about how to approach this particular story, and whether I should address it at all. It doesn’t really affect me personally, and it’s dangerously close to Expressing A Political Opinion On The Internet. Which is basically an invitation for the world to come over here and yell angrily because there is only one correct opinion on everything and conformity must be enforced at all costs. Because yelling at people is historically proven to be the best way to change their views.

One of the interesting things about Dwarf Fortress is that your “save game file” (which is actually a huge directory of tiny files) contains not just your fortress, but the entire world around your fortress, including all of the other AI-controlled fortresses and civilizations on the map. In RimWorld, if you get an itch to try something different, you simply save your game and start a new game with a new colony.

ArenaNet is laying off an undetermined number of employees on the orders of NCSoft. Random Guild Wars 2 screenshot because thumbnail. I actually don’t have much to say about this, but I felt like it was big enough news to warrant a blog post to mark the occasion. To be perfectly blunt, I’m so numb to the game industry right now that this barely elicited a mild shrug. It’s a weekday, so of course another major MMO studio is suffering losses.

I can’t stop chuckling about this so I have to mention it. I got an email. Someone saw my Dwarf Fortress videos on YouTube and sent me a Steam code to try their game. I’m an INFLUENCER now. Live image of a YouTuber becoming an influencer. This is hilarious to me. <a href="https://twitter.com/endgameviable/status/1100045565302206465?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 25, 2019</a> Hilarity aside, it brings up a slight ethical dilemma. I don’t consider myself a journalist here, but I would like to think that in life I follow some basic codes of conduct and ethics, which would also extend to my YouTube channel.

Bhagpuss’s recent post and also one of his older posts that I can’t remember-because for some reason I never, ever bookmark things I want to refer to later-remind me of a theory I’ve had for a while now but I haven’t quite been able to articulate, so I’ll give it a shot now. This also touches a little bit on “Gevlon’s final post,” which I haven’t read yet, but Bhagpuss quoted some of it.

I think I’m getting a little weary of Dwarf Fortress. I’m starting to detect some repetition in how each game plays out. The outcomes aren’t exactly the same, but the events that happen along the way are starting to feel a bit routine. There’s always artifacts, there’s always a cavern system, there’s always goblin invasions, there’s always forgotten beasts and titans and ettins, there’s always unhappy dwarves, etc. It feels a little like if I build the same fortress plan every time, I’ll get the same outcome every time.