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.