September 2021 Wrapup!

September is over! But if you’re like the majority of people who read this blog (weird), you only check it from time to time, so here’s a post that should tell you things you may have missed this month that you can go check out!

You can view every month’s Game Pile in terms of the effort involved to make it. If something that takes a lot of planning and preparation and recording gets made, chances are good everything else in that month is a little easier, right? Some Game Piles are easy, some are hard, and some are in the middle. This month, I made a video about Sonic The Hedgehog that used custom art assets, transition animations, and a whole bunch of research, so much so that I made an article about the making of that video. Based on that, I did what I could to make the rest of the month’s work easier. The Sonic video didn’t just eat effort from this month, though: August and July also had to surrender some of their time to the long-term effort of getting Is Sonic The Hedgehog Good out the door.

The Game Pile this month was:

While they were absolutely a byproduct of having less time and energy to work on things after the Sonic article, I really liked the shorter text articles, especially the Blackthorne one, because it sort of required me to check myself, and account for what I found.

There was also a theme to my Story Pile this month. Thanks to the contributions of rebellious internet gun expert and gluten-product acquiring disrespectful internet daughter Miss Nixie, I decided to do a rundown of nothing but Nicolas Cage movies, of varying visions of quality. The way Nicolas Cage works, I could have made literally the entire year of Story Piles about interesting Nicolas Cage movies, really.

The four movies I covered are:

  • Con Air, a movie impressive in how wrong it is
  • Gone In 60 Seconds, a remake with a lot of neat characters even if it’s not really an amazing whole
  • Drive Angry, a ‘holy shit moment’ movie that hangs together okay
  • Lord Of War, which I think is my favourite Nicolas Cage movie period?

I did try and talk about an anime or manga this month, but, well, there are challenges to getting that to overlap with Nicolas Cage month. He hasn’t done much dub work, and he isn’t present in any videogames I could find.

Other articles this month? There’s a bunch of stuff I wrote this month that I think are great, so you should read them. I talked a little bit about D&D history with 3e’s Sonic Fireballs and the way the hardness rules had weird results. I talked about the worldbuilding around the two little monster races, Kobolds & Goblins. I answered a few questions like Who Should Perform The Mikado? and How Should You Start Reading The Discworld Books? Since the topic was apparently meaningfully on Youtube’s mind, I delved into providing a meaningful explanation of the Himbo archetype in Himbography. I also made an article out of not bothering to watch a movie, with Not Watching The Joker.

I also started what I hope to make something of a monthly series, with the first Let’s Look At Some Assets And Brainstorm. I need a name for this kind of article, though, because I do want to do it more often, but that’s not a useful name for searching. Odds are good they’ll be like ‘Brainstorm:’ titled. We’ll find out.

This month’s shirt was an addition to the genre of Loss Shirts I have for my classes, because I didn’t like some of the designs in practice and wanted something that signalled an interest in videogames:

If you want, you can get the shirt here.

Okay, September.

Deep breath.

September and August kind of melted together for me. A lot of the work that went up in September was done in August, which is what working ahead does. But while doing the things that filled out this month it, well, included a bunch of stuff being influenced by Elli having a sore leg and the bed I sleep in being broken.

Work has been very hard this month? The online teaching part. I like the class and I like doing it, but my teacher load is large right now, and timing-wise, three major assignments all need marking in the same time. I need to document the time I spend marking work, and based on my journal documenting it, this eat almost all the time I had during these three weeks trying to give students meaningful marks and feedback.

This isn’t a ‘oh I’m overworked’ by the way. I am worked at a level I quite like. It’s that the three classes needed marking at the same time, and when that’s the priority, all my other work (game development, youtube, podcast editing, blog writing) gets pushed to later in the schedule. Hell, that’s the point of having a backlog!

September also sucked for reasons I don’t want to put here on the blog. Sad news and stuff that sapped my energy.

And the backlog took some hits this month.

That’s just how it was.

I write every day, and at some points during this month, I just haven’t written anything. Or worse, I’ve written something and had to put it away because it isn’t good enough. Some of it became drafts, and some drafts got put in the bin, as I realised that if I really wanted to talk about that, I’d best just start again.