Hit a little stumbling block this week. It wasn’t a good week, mentally or physically. Let me tell you why…

Game Update

Unfortunately, I barely got anything done this week. I had two days of rendering, but then all of that came grinding to a halt on Wednesday. If you wanna know why, that’s going to be covered in the next bit…

Personal Update

Oof. Seriously, this entire section could just be summarized as “oof”.

I had my colonoscopy on Thursday (Halloween! It was a spooky butt-probing!), and I thought “awesome, I can do renders Wednesday evening, then go on a spree before and after the procedure on Thursday.

Anybody who’s ever had a colonoscopy knows this was not a feasible plan.

You see, the day before and morning of a colonoscopy you have to do “prep”. In basic (and as un-gross as possible) terms, you need your colon to be empty so they can see what’s going on up there. It was impossible to do anything during this prep period, because I was not able to stay at my PC for very long before scampering back off to the bathroom. I wasn’t ravenously hungry like some friends had been, and I wasn’t in any actual pain or discomfort during the process, but it was not a time I could be anything approaching productive.

Then the actual colonoscopy happened. Or rather, it… maybe 10% happened. I’d done all my prep properly, but something had part of my lower intestine so inflamed and swollen that the scope couldn’t get past it safely, and the doctor had no idea what it could be. I have no pain in that area, and the prep definitely worked so it’s not like a blockage. This means I need to get a CT scan done to see if that can shed some light on what’s going on.

This leads to another problem; money. I’ve mentioned that we’re having some financial struggles due to all the medical stuff this year. Not only will the CT scan surely cost money, but we just got hit with $700 more in bills for Morgana’s medical stuff (the second mammogram and the emergency eye visit). I’m close to considering trying to do a GoFundMe or something like just to try to dig out of this rut. We’re basically one expensive emergency away from being in severe trouble.

Saturday would have been a day I could do a lot of renders… but we were called upon for aid by a very good friend who is having big troubles of her own. I don’t wanna spread their business out in the open, but basically we had to help them run a booth at a convention where they sell collectibles because they suddenly found themselves having to do it alone. We had to get up at 4 AM to get to the convention hall and help set up the booth, then we did a bunch of selling. It was fun and they were very grateful, and we know they would have done the same for us. Not only did they buy us lunch and dinner, but they gave us some stuff from the booth… one of which looks like it could be the Nine of Swords mascot. Look at this cutie!

I have no idea what to name my new fox friend, so I’m taking suggestions!

One last note, and I don’t think many of you will understand this… but those who do will probably agree with me. I really don’t like about half of the outcomes that happened at Crown Jewel. 

Hey Nine, Whatcha Playin’?

I got very close to finishing My Time at Portia, but then something happened to make my game continually crash. I’m sure it’s one of the many mods I have installed, but I got so frustrated trying to figure it out that I decided to just read the text of the final quest on the wiki and move on. I’ll get to Sandrock soonish.

Due to my inability to sit at my PC, a game I played a lot of (on the toilet) is Balatro! Balatro is… kinda hard to describe. I’ve liked playing poker for a long time (probably starting with Poker Night at the Inventory), and Balatro makes a neat game out of being able to modify your deck and tackle different objectives. When I first heard about it I was like “ehhhh,” but after trying it I got like… obsessed. Plus, ya know… not many games I can play on the toilet as my laptop isn’t really built for gaming.

With Portia done, I’m surely gonna pick up Sandrock now, right? No! Because pretty much every person I know is playing Dragon Age: the Veilguard. So I’m gonna pick up Veilguard? No! Because… I haven’t played Inquisition, yet. It makes no sense, since I did love the first two Dragon Age games, and I’ve owned Inquisition forever. I guess this is just the kick in the ass I needed to finally play it.

Once I figure out how to get mods working on it. I hate the hairstyles in the base game, and I will not play a game looking ugly! I’m ugly in real life, I don’t need to be ugly in my fantasy world. But trying to get mods working on a ten year old game is like doing fucking archaeology. There’s two different modding platforms, apparently, and then launching it through Steam (which I own it on) brings up this EA App, which I thought was Origin but apparently Origin is gone? I’m so confused.

… This was way longer than I wanted it to be. Sorry. See you next week!

Keep the legends alive!
– Nine