February 11, 2016

Good morning!

After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.

I added 9 games to my collection yesterday from the weekly HumbleBundle & then did a short YouTube Let's Play video: https://youtu.be/eZa8mfeWPyI

This game seemed so cheesy after watching hubby play Battlefield 4 on the XBox One every day. But this game is 14 years old, so it should be expected.

I know I said no more mod of the week posts, but I just now stumbled across this mod while getting the YouTube link for my Battlefield 1942 Let's Play video. It's called The Earth Mod! You've got to check this out! I just downloaded it & can't wait to try it!

It's for Minecraft 1.8.9 & it uses REAL Earth coordinates, so you can easily to right to YOUR house! Your house won't be there, but you can build it! :D I just loaded it up & placed a marker at the coords of my childhood home & my home now. I can't wait to start building!

I played the Unified Gaming server last night & I'm not doing too well on that server. I have a tiny little house & am just blank as far as expanding. It's not the server's fault, it's where I ended up on the map & sometimes I just end up in a place that's not very good for me. This one has a great view, but so far ... I'm just drawing a blank.

My server is doing great! I have such a beautiful place on the map. I live in a flower forest right on the shore. Breathtaking Minecraft views!

Until tomorrow ... have a great day!

Battlefield 1942 Let's Play Day 1

February 10, 2016

Good morning! A lot of changes again. I did a schedule reqrite & got rid of a lot of newly added stuff that just wasn't going to work out well. I still need to figure out the video editing & streaming stuff before I have so much in my schedule that requires it. I've decided to do a daily YouTube video as I have downloaded & figured out the Windows movie editing software. I had tried the Adobe software, but it was WAY over my head. That software is for people that already know what they're doing. It looks like it does everything, but I couldn't even figure out how to get my video imported into it to start doing anything with it. HA! I did manage to get a video clip of Sid Meier's Railroads onto Plays.TV, but I won't be using that service again as I believe it's only short video clips & highlights as opposed to live streaming or full length edited videos.

The texture pack of the week is a bust, because it turns out I don't like most texture packs. I only use Faithful32 with the clouds pack & sometimes, on rare occasions, I'll load up Dokucraft. Beyond that, I don't really like change. I want my Minecraft to look like I expect it to & with some of these texture packs, I find myself wondering what it is I'm looking at because they change how things look to an extreme.

I watch a movie every day while I crochet the row of the day on the temperature afghan which has the low, average, & high temperature of the previous day crocheted onto it. We have varying temperatures here so it's very colorful so far. So far this week I've watched Evil Dead II, which was so cheesy that I found it impossible to be scared. I was too busy laughing at it to be scared. Legends of the fall is a movie I've seen before & enjoyed watching again, & Scream is a movie that my son said was cheesy, but he's never seen Evil Dead II. LOL!

I did something amazing (for me) yesterday. I finally figured out how to run a Minecraft server on my home PC. This was important because I like to run custom modded Minecraft AND I have some plugins that I don't want to do without. For this reason, a simple solution such as downloading & running minecraft-server.exe was out of the question. I needed version 1.7.10, mods, & something that would run mods AND plugins. Now I'm running a Kcauldron server here at home & everything is working great. I no longer have to pay $15/mo to have it hosted elsewhere! I used to want others to log into my server, but when I had to ban 9 out of 10 people for logging in ONLY to break the rules & grief, I decided to just give up on that part of it. I stopped advertising & just paid the $15/mo so I could have my special setup. Well, now that I've figured it out & it runs great, I have all that I wanted for free. If I ever meet someone who plays Minecraft that I trust enough to let log in, I can just give them the IP address. I still have protections (or can add them in an instant), so there's nothing to worry about if I let a person or two onto the server. If I ever do want company, I still log into other servers daily. One of them is Frostmane. A server I've been on for a long time that recently started a new map & I have a nice house in a savanna that was beautifully decorated on the outside by a friend of mine on that server. Vegemine is another server I used to visit, but they were offline & I'm assuming gone. If not gone, they are out of my lineup since they weren't online at the time I tried to log in. Winthier is a server that has partnered with another server I used to log into called Blocky Nights. If you log into Winthier, you can go through a portal to end up at Blocky Nights, making this server one that I have 2 houses on in 2 worlds since I was a member of each before they merged.

The plugin of the week is also something that I believe I'll be scrapping since I have all of the plugins I want & to do proper "of the weeks", I need to install these things & test them out long enough to have an opinion. Texture packs, plugins, mods, modpacks ... it's a lot of work & a lot of cleanup after the fact, so I won't be doing those anymore. It was an idea & I tried it out for 1 week before making a decision. The things that were newly added that I decided to keep are going to be decent quality at least. I didn't want to do half-assed reviews in mass. I believe in quality more than quantity.

Starting tomorrow I'll have screenshots, as daily screenshots are a lot easier to add than a week's worth. Blogging daily is much easier for me because I do more than 1 thing a day. :)

Have a great day & I'll see you tomorrow!

February 7, 2016

Hello Russia! And everyone else. :) It seems most of my views are from Russia last week, so that's why the shout-out. So how is everyone? I hope you all had a good week. Well, there's a lot to cover from the past week, so let's get started!

Age of Empires III (YouTube Let's Play): This game wasn't too bad. I enjoyed it, but I couldn't figure out how to record it for a YouTube Let's Play. I use OBS & it was listed as "Explorer" & the audio was there, but no video. If anyone knows how to record this game other than in-game with it's own special extension that can only be played back from the game's main menu, I'd appreciate a quick "how-to". I know it can be done because other people have posted this game on YouTube. Anyway, It was a relatively short game. I died. I was doing well, had some buildings up, even had a wall ... but then one of the AI players came in, knocked down the wall, & killed everyone. Still, not bad for my 1st time. :)

Biomes O' Plenty (Minecraft mod of the week): This is a mod that when I 1st found it, I loved it! I HAD to have it in every world I played & even started a modded server just so I could have it. Then, over time, I got bored with it. Not because it didn't have enough, but because it seemed to overwrite all the regular biomes in Minecraft, leaving only Biomes O' Plenty biomes. I really missed the plains & taigas ... my 2 favorite biomes. I preferably love to start building my home in the plains right on the edge of a taiga because I love building with Spruce logs as the corner accents of my home. Well, after quite a long time I decided to try out Biomes O' Plenty again for the purpose of the mod of the week & it's changed. There are Biomes O' Plenty biomes, but they didn't overrun the vanilla biomes. Now I really love it & am running modded Minecraft again just to run this mod. I think you'll like it, it adds a lot without doing away with the tried & true vanilla favorites.

Captain Phillips (Movie): "The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years."

FeatherJump (Plugin of the week): This plugin wasn't bad. If you're holding a feather, you can jump farther. I didn't really get how it worked though ... if you're on flat ground in the plains, you jump a little farther, but not much. If I was going up a hill next to my house, I suddly jumped very high & landed on my roof, which was kinda cool. Be careful jumping down hill though, as you will still take fall damage as you normally would.

Gallifrey (Minecraft server): MineCraft_Gallifrey Server is a semi Vanilla server that 120 slots. sethome, home, spawn, vote are the commands you can use when first signing in. Land claims protect your things, so no worries! We also have a strong economy. Several ranks can be earned through challenges. And anyone can join!

The server is run by a mature staff. The staff are trustworthy and very welcoming and we would all love for some players to join our server. Come fight the Ender Dragon with us!

Commands are free, but must be earned! Gallifrey is not pay to win!!

Plugins installed on server: Grief Prevention, Chest Shop

Goximo (Minecraft server): Goximo is your standard community-centric PvE survival server. We also a few neat features and quality of life improvements here and there. We are brand spanking new and are hoping to build a laid-back, friendly environment to make new friends. We expect all players and staff to play legit. We do not allow teleport commands such as /tpa, with only /spawn being the exception. (2h cooldown)

Harness (Crochet project): I'm working on a crochet harness for my dog Taz since they are so expensive in stores. I don't have directions, but I'm basing it on the one shown in the photo above.

Modded UHC (Minecraft modpack): This one was way out of my league. It's for people who like a challenge & who understand quest modpacks, which I don't. I tried it for a little while, but quickly lost interest. You can't craft a tool & have it work, none of the vanilla tools will actually mine anything. Something that leaves me out real quick. LOL!

Need for Speed Most Wanted (Twitch broadcast): This was the game of the week for my live twitch broadcast. My son played it & had a great time. "To be Most Wanted, you’ll need to outrun the cops, outdrive your friends, and outsmart your rivals. With a relentless police force gunning to take you down, you’ll need to make split-second decisions. Use the open world to your advantage to find hiding spots, hit jumps and earn new vehicles to keep you one step ahead. In true Criterion Games fashion, an enhanced Autolog puts your friends at the heart of your experience. In an open world with no menus or lobbies, you’ll be able to instantly challenge your friends and prove your driving skill in a variety of seamless multiplayer events. Your rivals will do everything they can to stop you from getting to the top. In this world, there can only be one Most Wanted."

Owl Academy (Minecraft server): This server is for the young. I've found players on here to be generally mean towards older people & mean to each other. The last time I played they were cursing & threatening each other as to what they would do to each other if they ever met in real life. However, the server itself is great, which is why I keep returning. They have a lot of custom plugins, a great map, & several worlds to choose from.

Popped Chorus Fruit (Minecraft block): I haven't had any experience with this block yet as I rarely play the 1.9 snapshots & the couple times I did, I didn't come across this block. It looks interesting though & I like the block it creates when you combine 4 of them. To pop a chorus fruit, according to the wiki, you need to smelt them in an oven. Once they pop you combine them to create that purple block shown above.

Realistico (Minecraft texture pack): This texture pack isn't too bad. I liked how things look & it was still easy to tell what I was looking at. I didn't use it as intended though, my screenshot doesn't include shaders & bump mapping. "Realistico has an innovative approach to Minecraft: it has been created with the bump mapping in mind. 

As a default, a standard, a normal thing. 

Minecraft doesn't "support" bump mapping (or anything which is realistic), so Realistico requires the Shaders mod to work properly. 

This doesn't stop you from playing it without Shaders and bump mapping, but keep in mind that you need the Shaders mod along with a shaderpack (the SEUS, in particular ) to get the full experience. 

PS: I know what you're thinking: "512x textures, Shaders mod, bump mapping - what else?". Yes, you need a powerful PC to play it. 

Rehab (Minecraft server): Rehab is another server I've been on for a long time. The staff is friendly & so are the other players. I have a beautiful farmhouse on this server along with a new build I've begun working on which is shown above.

Shutter Island (Movie): This was a good movie & I wasn't expecting it to end like it did. "The implausible escape of a brilliant murderess brings U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) to Ashecliffe Hospital, a fortress-like insane asylum located on a remote, windswept island. The woman appears to have vanished from a locked room, and there are hints of terrible deeds committed within the hospital walls. As the investigation deepens, Teddy realizes he will have to confront his own dark fears if he hopes to make it off the island alive."

Sim City (YouTube Let's Play): My 1st YouTube Let's Play is on one of the games I've had for a while & really enjoy, but haven't played in a while so I'm a bit rusty. I think I did pretty good though, the city has a nice positive income & the people are generally happy. Not bad for a 1st time in years. LOL! You can view this & all my future Let's Play videos on my YouTube channel by clicking on the link above in the title for this paragraph.

Trust (Movie): We're going to wrap this week up with a movie called Trust. "A teenage girl is targeted by an online sexual predator."

Well folks, that was my week. How was yours? Until next time, have a wonderful week & I'll see you on Valentine's Day! Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.

Sim City Let's Play Day 1

January 31, 2016

Good morning everyone! I'm back! Not daily like I used to be, but hopefully weekly from now on. I have a new schedule & a new plan & I'm REALLY excited about it! Normally this happens to me on New Year's Eve / New Year's Day, but this year there was nothing. I wasn't feeling it like I used to & thought maybe I was just getting older. It was kinda depressing not being as excited as I used to be ... but here I am, at the end of January & NOW it kicks in. Just a little late this year, but it did come. Friday was the big day of change & inspiration which also meant the day of rewriting / recoding my entire schedule in HTML grid format. As usual, I wanted to go to bed early & get a bright & early start to my "new life". And, as usual, I was so excited that I couldn't sleep & then overslept until much later than I normally wake up. ::: sigh :::

I watched a couple movies:

I checked out a work-from-home site called Elance. The trouble I have with these sites is that I'm not a salesman. I was there looking for other types of work, yet what do you need to do 1st? Sell. You need to sell yourself. Come up with a "professional title" & then write a nice bio about yourself & of course, the better the bio, the more work may come your way. What am I supposed to say? I'm an almost 50-year-old gamer that has cats? Seriously, what the heck am I supposed to say in a bio meant to get me paid work? I sat there & stared at the blank screen for a while & then just gave up on that whole idea.

I bought a few games:

Worked on a kit afghan I've been crocheting for a while called Ripple Afghan:

My personal Website has been offline for a while. I still own the domain name, but it was blind forwarding to a Wix site that I had build for my Minecraft server a while back. I just found out yesterday that the blind forward was only half working. The page was blank white except for a Wix ad at the bottom. That version of my server has been gone for a long time, so I removed the forward & tried to get my personal Website online again. Well, to do that I need hosting for it, which I currently don't have, so that's going to have to wait until Monday at the earliest. Besides that, I ran into other snags too related to my Website. I still have Paint Shop Pro, but Animation Shop was lost in a hard drive transfer (along with a ton of other files) & I have no way of making animated graphics now. I have to look into a whole new way of doing it other than how I used to & I don't even know where to begin looking. This is also going to require money since I'm sure I'm going to have to buy the software & those 11 years of Paint Shop Pro are out the window now. When I said I wanted to start over, I didn't mean I wanted to have to purchase all new software. :/

Of course I'm still playing Minecraft! Although my new plan won't allow for as much of it as I'd like. Raw Fish. Go kill some spiders, gather some string, make a fishing pole, find a nice spot on the edge of a lake, & go fishing! This is my favorite way to obtain food in Minecraft. I hate killing all the animals I come across because once you kill them all off, then what? I prefer to go fishing for my food, as that supply never runs out & then the animals can later be caught, fenced, bred, & their numbers increased before killing any.

This is the Streamwave afghan. My take on it anyway. This is one of my favorite patterns & I've crocheted several already with 2 more currently in the works. This rainbow version is my all-time favorite of any of them I've made though. 1 of the new ones I'm currently working on (no photo yet) is made with Simply Soft yarn & is solid lavender with black edging. There will be a photo ... eventually. :)

This is my temperature afghan for 2016. It's worked in Tunisian crochet & each row is a day of the year. Each row is 3 sections: The low for the day, the average temperature for the day, & the high for the day. The section you're looking at is the high temperatures for January up through January 30th. The rows that appear white are actually pale yellow. I'll get a better photo when I finish today's row & then I'll post the entire month of January on my Ravelry page.

Besides my own Minecraft server, I also enjoy logging into other servers. One of those other servers is called VitalCraft. Check them out! They're a friendly bunch & the owner was online along with a Moderator, so if you have any questions, staff is usually available to help.

Well, that's all I've got for this week. I'll be back next week with a WHOLE lot more to say. Have a wonderful week!

January 17, 2016

Good morning everyone! Only 2 months since my last entry ... not too terrible compared to the last time. So how is everyone? I'm going great! I stopped smoking!! Stopped, not quit. I have decided that there's a definite difference. When you quit smoking, it's a conscious choice you make. You decide that you're going to quit smoking & you set a date & on that date you hide all the ash trays, throw out your cigarettes, give away your lighters, etc. Then you stop smoking & usually take it out on everyone around you, much to their horror. I didn't do that. I enjoyed smoking & had no plans to quit. This whole thing happened over 3 days & went like this: Day 1. I woke up, had a cigarette & it didn't taste as good as usual. Kinda like they were a little bit stale. I just assumed I had a cold. That night hubby & I sat down to watch TV like we always do & I made my usual bag of microwave popcorn. It didn't taste quite right either. Now I was almost certain I must be coming down with a cold. The next morning I woke up, again lit a cigarette & it tasted worse than the day before. Yep ... I have a cold. Strange though, I felt just fine ... but my taste buds were definitely "off". That night, TV ... popcorn ... tasted worse ... confirming this cold that I didn't "feel". Day 3: Saturday ... we went out, I lit a cigarette & it tasted FOUL! I mean horrible, nasty, licking an ash tray foul! It gave me a headache that lasted for hours & it took me a long time to get the horrible taste out of my mouth. That was the last cigarette I ever smoked in its entirety. That night I made a bag of popcorn & it was also horrible. That was the last bag of popcorn I ever microwaved. So you see, I didn't "quit" smoking ... I just stopped. Since that happened I have tried a couple of times to have a cigarette. I take a single puff & out it goes. I just can't do it anymore. Cigarettes & microwave popcorn are forever out of my life. Definitely a healthy thing for me! I have no idea what happened. Divine intervention? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm not complaining. We've saved a fortune by not buying cigarettes anymore. As for the popcorn, another snack food has taken its place. Apparently I'm now completely addicted to Cheesy Poofs (Cheetos). They cost more than the popcorn! Ugh. Well, that's my huge news for the new year. I hope all of you are doing well. Until next time ... stay safe & be happy. This is the only life we're given, don't waste it being angry or sad.