Givin' it a Sniff

Sad day in my quarantine kitchen, I was planning on cooking up some chicken for dinner but I had to throw it away since it started to go a bit funky. I chuckled a bit as I thought 'this is exactly what my hunter-gather sense of smell was designed for' so I could sniff out bad meat. Never had to throw out raw chicken before, and in the current climate, it felt jolly rotten to do so. It was in date, and wrapped up well, guess I just got unlucky.

As a baby side project I've also been making a bunch of custom Mario levels in Mario Maker. Previously you could only make a level or two but now you can make an entire game's worth of content if you have the will power. Instead, I made 5 classy levels, each with it's own theme, gameplay devices and story, and submitted it for the world to play. Was very fun to tinker around with it and tech myself some fundamentals of game design. Hopefully the community will enjoy it too.

RoboCop

Louis and Rachel swung by to drop off some super delicious raspberry and Malted Milk brownies, perfect for sustaining Rebecca and me through this wet Wednesday. Luckily I had a mini breakthrough with my project which has given me something more tangible to wrestle with. It still needs a lot of time in the oven though but polishing it up is about to get a lot more gratifying.

Initially Rebecca and I were meant to watch Danny Boyle's theater adaptation of Frankenstein - its being shown on YouTube for free over the next week. But she got the airing dates off by 24 hours so we decided to watch another popular piece of fiction about a man who has risen from the dead to fight his creators: RoboCop! This film is infamously one of the only movies my parents walked out on when it was showing back in the day so its kinda got a forbidden fruit vibe for me. Now I finally got a chance to watch it for myself and, I didn't walk out, hell I was quite entertained! Its kinda become mandatory 80's action movie viewing and its fascinating to think how it captured and parodied its own Zeitgeist. An interesting watch for a gamer too because its influenced countless titles, only now am I picking up on all the stylistic callbacks many of my favourite games owe to RoboCop. Ultimately, it was a fun watch, if you need some obvious 80's action this is a winner.

Polly Roger

It was the Birthday of an old uni coursemate and good chum of Rebecca's today, so we arranged a little celebration for her through Animal Crossing. Rebecca went to visit her village, bringing with her a little gift from the both of us. I'm just glad we could do something for her, even a tiny thing, just to make her Birthday in quarentine a little more jolly.

Speaking of jolly, I teamed up with the boys for another bout of pirating on the high seas in Sea of Thieves. We had a BIG session too. Battled galleons manned by skeletons, dueled with a kracken and fought off hoards of pirates for a humongous pile of loot. Just as we were about to raise a grog in celebration and cash in our booty, Daniel sighted another ship of greedy players heading right for us - they had eyes for our well-earned riches. We set sail, they gave chase across a 20 minute game of cat and mouse. Eventually, they gave up the ghost and turned away, leaving us free to frolic amidst our gold. It was a roller coaster of emotion let me tell you.

A New Project

Started the week fresh, moved my desk papers around a little bit and cleared way for the next project I want to work on. So far I've spent the isolation maintaining the status-quo but I want to do something a little more special since I've got the time. I don't want to say too much about it here just yet, for all I know I could scrap it or loose faith in it after the first week, but I sincerely don't want that to happen. I'm just seeing where this takes me for the time being.

Very (Video) Chatty

Wow, Rebecca and I were almost socializing non-stop today. Before I even left the bed I was chatting with friend on the phone, asking them if we could play some Animal Crossing together. Just after breakfast I hopped into the game while Rebecca called her parents, I ended up juggling conversations for a short while. Just before lunch I called my Grandma to wish her a happy birthday, with all the good weather recently she's been enjoying spending plenty of time in the garden and even mentioned there being a new black cat in the neighbourhood - I'm looking forward to meeting him next time I visit her.

The afternoon quickly vanished while playing board games online with Mark, Lucy, Daniel and Emily. Mark has recently been replicating several of his games on word processors with remarkable results, it was lovely to hang out as a group of six too and hand out on this lazy Sunday. One final video call with my parents, Granny Sue and my bro shortly followed to cap off the day. Everyone's doing well and our kitchen in Newbury is looking more like a rain forest every time I see it.

After dinner Rebecca and I squirreled away some alone time. I'm feeling good and ready to tackle the next week in isolation now after such a social day!

Green Thumbs

Threw on a pair of gardening gloves and dove right into some long-overdue weeding. A carpet of clover has been laughing at us ever since we moved in, today I got my revenge. Rebecca and I plucked it all out by hand, leaving a barren patch of soil, primed some lawn. Fingers crossed the clover doesn't grow back in the meantime, but for now its a job done.

Once we were all worn out the mail arrived including our new board games to play in isolation! We picked up an adorable and simple game called Deep Sea Adventure, the kid and adult friendly game Dobble and the much more involved murder-mystery game Mysterium. We've already formed a not-so-friendly rivalry over Deep Sea Adventure, Rebecca and I have a score to settle tomorrow I reckon...

This evening I hung out with a group of gaming YouTube bigshots whole doing a pub quiz on gaming over a video call. I only got middle marks overall, but they were an especially friendly crowd. It was good to show my face there too, getting some exposure.

Stream Dreamer

Marched to Asda early this morning to grab supplies for the week. Being a bloke I reckoned I could muster everything by myself, turns out a weeks shopping is jolly heavy, my pride ached afterwards. Popped round to Louis' quickly again to pick up his webcam for this evening's stream which went rather well. It was nice to go for a goal with an audience, got a little buzz out of knowing that I had spectators cheering me on as I went for the gold rank. Don't know if I'll make it a regular occurrence just yet, not unlike radio, you kinda need to keep talking to fill the space sometimes but it reminded me of doing live broadcasts at uni which is always a welcome feeling. If I have a fun gaming challenge I might consider doing it again, we'll see.

Split Stream

Last week I chatted with a friend about joining a Dungeons and Dragons. Rarely these things actually come to fruition since they take a lot of organizing, but this friend is really gearing to make it work so I sat down with them and created a character over a voice chat. I ended up with a Hobbit-type monk with a criminal past, still need to figure out what drives my little guy and his flaws but I'm pretty stoked to put him out into the world and play some games.

I strolled round to Louis house to pick up his old monitor. Now I'm rocking a very swish two screen set-up which is pushing my desk space to its limits. I set it up as a little test mostly but I've opened Pandora's Box now and the thought of dropping back down to 1 screen seems primitive.

The main reason to asking for the second screen comes with a tiny announcement. I'm going to give streaming a little go. Basically, I'll be playing video games live to anyone who fancies watching. I'll be attempting a Gold Rank run on Sayonara Wild Heart's arcade mode, I was off by a hair last time so this attempt is my redemption. If you want to join in the fun, just click here and tune in at 8pm sharp tomorrow. 

Sunny Sunflowers

Hopped on the Louis' vegetables again just after marvelling at my own bit of growing vegetation. At least one of the sunflower seeds Dad gave me is starting to poke out. I've never grown anything in my life so I'll be beaming if it manage to get it to flower.

I also got to at long last play a bit of the Louis' game for myself. Louis put put his Alpha to a small group of play testers so they could try it and report any bugs. I was naturally more interested in how the dialogue system functioned and flowed, which gave me plenty on insight into how I can tailor future lines. Mostly, my writing needs to be a tad shorter and chopped up into more chunks - Louis commented on this the other day and now I've seen it in practice I know how to fix it.

Resident Evil 3 is a Big, Dumb Action Movie... (and that's ok)

Hit the writing desk briefly today to tinker around with a few things, but today mostly felt like a weird admin day. I informed several of my Youth for Europe friends that this years meet up wouldn't happen due to the pandemic which was a real bummer. I wrote a quick news piece for Sick Critic (Animal Crossing is getting a cute update) and Rebecca and I splashed out a little too today and bought some new board games online. They'll take a short while to arrive, but I'm still riding that euphoria that came with playing games with her over the weekend.

As promised too, here's a link to watch my latest video 'Resident Evil 3 is a Big, Dumb Action Movie... (and that's ok)' I spent a substantial amount of time editing this one, despite the fact its one of my shorter videos. Production values are a little higher and the pace is much quicker, if nothing else I hope it's entertaining.

Editing For Tired Eyes

Big editing session today. I gave myself the goal of getting my latest video done and dusted today, no excuses. Nearly 14 hours of work later yielded a video that made Rebecca laugh out loud not once, but twice! A new record by two! Super stoked to share it but it still needs to export and upload and I'm sleepy as anything now so it won't go live until tomorrow as per my schedule. I'll pop the work-in-progress thumbnail here though as a little teaser, keep your eyes peeled for the actual video here tomorrow.

Two Weeks Notice

Went to sleep yesterday miffed at myself for not being able to beat the final boss of a game I'm playing, so I set my alarm for early this morning so I could sneak out of bed and try a few more rounds. After an hour of grueling attempts, I finally beat him, jubilation was heard by a weary Rebecca as she strolled in at the perfect moment. I was chuffed as chips before I'd even had my breakfast.

Couldn't be a winner all day though. We declared this Sunday as a board game day so we cracked out the Scrabble board and went head-to-head. The number of times Rebecca completely sabotaged my plays was disgusting, at one point she even placed exactly the same tiles I was about to (making 'grave' 'gravely') THERE'S ONLY 2 'Y' TILES IN SCRABBLE! What are the chances?! She won, I was a sore loser.

The only other part of the day that was a bit of a miss was the movie we picked out. 'Two Weeks Notice' is am early 2000's rom-com starring Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, it also has the privilege of being one of the most morally ignorant movies I've seen in years. Poor chemistry, ugly characters and flat direction plagued this picture. Lord knows I tried to find a saving grace and it was only after I discovered Rebecca also thought it was pants that we had some fun chatting over the top of it, poking its flaws and marvelling at the 2002 costume design...

It also had a Donald Trump cameo, which was hilarious.

Sofa Flapjacks

I woke up to the sound of my front door opening. Before I had even stirred from my slumber Rebecca had got up, walked to Aada, queued outside and walked home with extra groceries. Saturdays are meant to be lazy though so as soon as she got home and settled I pulled my PC downstairs and hooked it up to the telly so Rebecca and I could enjoy some games from the comfort of our sofa. That is where we stayed for virtually the entire day, minus getting up briefly to open the door to Louis and Rachel who were dropping off some superb flapjacks.

Got my first hate comment for something I posted online too, feel a little but flattered! I intentionally poked the hornets nest in a recent article of mine and they sprung the trap beautifully. I shan't make a habit of doing that but it does make me feel a wee bit smug.

Phantom of the Opera

I became one with my desk chair as I tinkered with the edit for my upcoming video. I am immensely pleased with how its shaping up, I keep chuckling to myself and sharing snippets with Rebecca. She just rolls her eyes but that just tells me I'm doing the right thing.

Hit the supermarkets once again, spent my furlough pennies on a clearance Easter egg with no regrets. Torn into it while watching Phantom of the Opera as a live-stream with Rebecca. I'd never seen any adaptation of the story before and now I really want to see any other version that doesn't include singing.

Performing the Script

Got to work on putting my latest script into production for my upcoming video. For what feels like the first time, I treated my script more like a script. By that I mean I read it aloud as if I was giving a performance and while cutting the audio I noticed just how much more engaging I sound. I'll be attempting a few cleverish things in the next video while keeping the pace brisk. If it comes out as good as I have it planned in my head, this could be a real winner.

Speaking of good vibes, I just read Louis' latest devlog post about the development of his upcoming game, The Garden Path which I've obviously been helping out on over the past few weeks.I was beaming with pride when I saw he wrote this:

"...My brother has been writing a large amount of dialogue for the game, and I was finally able to load a portion in. It was such a joy to suddenly be able to talk to the characters and experience new dialogue as I would a player playing the game for the first time. It made the characters feel so much more alive, and it really gave me an insight into how the experience would be, playing the game for real."

 I just hope I can keep delivering him some fun lines and help him make this game as good as it can possibly be.

Bitter End Board Games

Tapped on my keyboard a little bit today, trying to write and refine an upcoming video. It'll be pretty different to my normal stuff and that fills me with doubt and excitement, hopefully it plays out well because I know it'll be fun to edit.

The evening though was solely dedicated to playing some online board games with some chums. I stayed on until the bitter end at 2am and discovered a nifty little pub game along the way that I can't wait to pick up. Shattered now though, these gaming nights always hit me hard the next day, it almost feels like reliving my uni days again.

Quarantine Work Ethic

The long weekend hasn't slowed down my quarantine work ethic. Wrote a whole feature article from scratch for Sick Critic and sharpened the concept for my upcoming video which I'm hoping will be a bit of a fun one. Totally ballsed up dinner though. My homemade fishcakes normally are a bit 50-50 in their quality and these ones were too wet to hold their shape. So we ate fish flavoured sweet potato mash with some charred breadcrumbs. It actually tasted quite good since I I got the seasoning down pat, but it was a 2/10 effort for presentation.

Animal Crossing Critters

Blazed through this Bank Holiday Monday with the help of a few games and a few friends. Prior to today I'd never really engaged with Animal Crossing's online features which lets you visit another friend's village. This afternoon though, Mark, Dan, Lucy and I all crewed up to spend some virtual time together, our adorable avatars enabled us to enjoy the fresh air, go fishing and even museum touring together. This is probably my favourite picture I got of all of us, taking a well-deserved break on a museum bench - I'm on the far right.

 
In other Animal Crossing related news, my review is FINALLY online and available to read. Spent long enough on it and under the wing of a helpful editor I think it reads quite well, plus a few Oxford commas... check it out here.

Happy Easter 2020

Prepped an Easter egg hunt around the house for Rebecca while she was still sleeping. She had no idea I'd done anything until she stumbled across one I his in her favourite coffee mig, the games began then. She darted around the house, banging her head on all sorts of thongs in a desperate hunt for chocolate. Glad it makes her feel special, and indeed it injected a little bit of wonder to an Easter Sunday in isolation.

To make it even more special was a heart hot cross bun breakfast, brushed down with a mandatory sugar glaze. After a video call with my family I rolled up my sleeves and hopped to cooking my first ever joint of beef. I did some Yorkshire puddings from scratch too and thankfully, the Easter roast lunch turned out to be a huge success. Plenty of beef for weekday sandwiches too which I'm arguably even more excited about than the chocolates Rebecca got me.

The Rocky Road to Rocky Road

Set my alarm to get me up and working first thing this morning. For Louis' game I typed up a good chunk of the dialogue into a spreadsheet, formatting it so it was compatible with his code. I think he's pleased with it all, I dropped off some of my hot cross buns at his house this afternoon and he seemed in high spirits.

Rebecca dared to make some Easter rocky road, as if we didn't have enough sweet things to snack on. Awkwardly, I prefaced her baking session by saying its virtually impossible to mess up rocky road. She then proceeded to mess up rocky road - at least that was her take in it all after her melted chocolate seized up. I think I spent more time consoling her than I did kneading dough yesterday bless her. Once we mixed everything in though and stuck it in the fridge it came out splendid.

Tomorrow is Easter, a bit of an odd one for everyone considering the circumstances. Even in isolation I encourage folks to embrace the spirit of the holiday and spend some time on the phone with family or just doing something a little special for the day. Happy Easter for tomorrow!

Hot Cross Fun

Swung by Louis' place to pick up some yeast (from a safe distance of course) because today was all about baking hot cross buns. Initially, things were going very well, I manages to cycle my electric scales to work with imperial measurements which was a big help, and my electric whisk has some dough hooks for easy kneeding. First few steps were fine, but once I tried working the dough on a surface things went quickly downhill. Never in my life have I worked with such a stretchy dough, it was totally unworkable! Even after 30 minutes kneeding it wouldn't get into a state where I could roll it into balls. I decided to just walk away for 15 minutes and to my amazement, the dough immediately played ball afterwards.

Shaped them up, stuck them in the oven and get out these beauties.

Their texture is a wee bit biscuity on the outside but they taste legit.

Super Stressful Shopper

Shopping has become a fairly stressful concept recently, what with all the queuing and the distance keeping - all very acceptable precautions but it has the unfortunate side effect of giving us all a few grey hairs. Rebecca and I hit ASDA this evening for a little pre-Easter shop, and what do you know, the queue to get in was virtually non-existent. We waited outside less than two minutes! Once I stepped inside though I realised how they made that possible, they doubled the number of shoppers at any one time. This made it nearly impossible to maintain a good distance from my fellow man and it turned a stressful situation into something a little worse. We stocked up good though, so we won't be needing to head out again for some time.

Looking forward to enjoying four days off in a row though, I'm treating myself to a full Easter break! I got the recipe for my Grandma's hot cross buns and baking them are the first thing on my to-do list for tomorrow.

Last Loaf

Completed my third and final draft for my Animal Crossing review, just waiting on my editor to green-light the final version and then we're good to go. Likely won't be until tomorrow now, hopefully it'll be worth the wait for anyone who's still eager to read it.

Crept into my study for more of Louis' game writing and crept out again to grab some easy groceries. I hit up our local bakery and greengrocers for a loaf of bread and some bell peppers respectively. This meant two separate queues for two separate shops, but it felt good supporting the little guys during this time. I was also lucky enough to grab the very last loaf of bread at the bakery, sliced and served with a soup for lunch, tasted so good.

Neighbourhood Music

Sun's out, that means lunch outside! I rustled up a moka pot coffee for Rebecca and myself, just as I walked outside to pour it, I noticed the distant neighbours playing some really good music that reverberated around the back-gardens. Neil Young, The Antlers, all good stuff. It was so nice I decided to work a bit outside too (top up my vitamin D while I'm at it.) I'm still working on Louis' vegetable. I set myself a goal for 120 lines by the end of the day and smashed 128 by 5 o'clock. I'm working on villager responses to all the different traveling merchants, which turned out to be a lot more fun than I anticipated. Got a lot more of them to do, but at the moment, dialogue is flying out my brain.

111

Sat at my desk with a renewed sense of purpose while writing Louis' vegetable dialogue today. He shared with me some of the character art and music too which really helped guide my tone just a little bit and generally inspire me a bit more. Tally says we are at 111, a fun number to write and a better number to smile at and think 'we got a lot more to go'. 

Online Quiz Jackpot

We found a crumbling wooden garden table hidden in our garden today. Since the weather was so nice we thought we'd pull it out and sit in the sun for a bit today. When I wasn't soaking up the vitamin D I was gaming with Louis in a dark room. He even hopped over onto my island in Animal Crossing, he slandered my interior design, fly-tipped a few satsumas and buggered off back home. Basically what Louis does when he comes to visit in real life. 

But later on in the evening, I was in for a surprise Pub Quiz disguised as a Sick Critic team meeting. The questions were mostly educational, lot of grammar based stuff so we could sharpen our skills and learn from our mistakes. Lord knows I don't play by the laws of the English language 99% of the time, but with Rebecca helping me out, we managed to smash the quiz. Good thing too, the grand prize was ANY video game priced $60 (£50) or less... guess who's enjoying a complimentary copy of DOOM Eternal? Just as I ran out of games to play too. Nice.

Quarantine Quiz

Kicked back and chilled for a whole day. Caught up on my entire video game back log now too, then I realized I starved myself for entertainment for the rest of the quarantine. Not to worry though, because you can always rely on your friends for entertainment. I spent the evening with some friends beamed in from London as we played our very own pub style quiz. We all turned up with a round and tested eachother - was a lot of fun! In case you want to test YOUR film knowledge, I'll pop my questions down below:

My round was called 'They're In Everything'. Each question has the name of 3 film and TV shows, you need to identify the actor (or actress) that they all share.

1. Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Lion King (1994), Blackadder Goes Forth 

2. Stranger Things, Beetlejuice, Black Swan 

3. Downton Abbey, Gravity, Fantastic Mr Fox 

 4. Batman: The Animated Series, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Kingsman: The Secret Service 

5. True Detective, Wolf of Wall Street, Magic Mike 

6. Pride and Prejudice, Love Actually, Nanny McPhee

Pop you answers in the comments if you fancy, winner earns my respect.

Reeling Review

Labored for far too long over this Animal Crossing review. Rebecca very graciously elected to proof read and offer her input, she's put several hours into the game too I was only too happy to hear her advice. Between us we rewrote my piece and sent it back to my editor. He still hasn't got back to me, but I an truly interested to hear his thoughts on the new version.

We braved the supermarkets again today, Rebecca got her first real dose of quarantine queuing which made me chuckle. We snagged everything we needed and rushed back home to the safety of our four walls. Looking forward to another weekend in, we've actually be invited to design pub quiz style rounds for a games night tomorrow evening with out London friends. I naturally snagged a film and TV round, already got a good concept for a round too. 

Sayonara Wild Hearts

Playing games with chums most nights is fun and all, but sometimes you just need a bit of time to yourself. While Rebecca enjoyed her virtual book club, I settled into a night of pure gaming 'me time'. I picked up a little indie gem called Sayonara Wild Hearts which was only 90 minutes long, but the experience was pure bliss. It played like an interactive pop album, you control your heroine to the rhythm as you drive motorbikes and beat up your old lovers. I was mesmerized the whole way through and all the while I was reminded that sometimes all a game needs to be good, is to be unashamedly fun. Once the credits rolled, I hopped back into Nier: Automata, a game that stopped being fun about 18 hours ago but the internet promised me the ending would be worth the suffering. It's like reading (but not enjoying) a critically acclaimed novel, a rite of passage perhaps. I sense the ending is coming though, just gotta push through a little more.

Long Distance Board Games

Pecked away at my Animal Crossing review for Sick Critic for most of the day, got Rebecca to proof read it with me too which was sweet. I sent it over to an editor and got some pretty strict feedback on it. Under normal circumstances, I'd feel pretty defeated but I'm treating this as an opportunity to take my work and make it better. It'll take a fair bit of rewriting but a familiar Ernest Hemingway maxim about first drafts springs to mind lending me confidence.

After all that I logged into an almighty webcam group chat board game session. I joined up with seven other friends to play some long distance Codenames, Drawful and Insider. Modern technology is a marvel when it comes to communication and between us we shared a legitimately terrific night of fun and laughs despite the distance that separated us. I mean, it's 1am and my cheeks ache from smiling so it must have been a good night!