Today's Notes 4/9/21

Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream of Star Trek Online was the usual as of late, where it was just me doing random stuff for my own amusement more than anything. Hell we spent a large chunk of time just roaming around Defara, one of the many neglected areas of STO. Now of course, last night wasn't totally free of incident, when someone we haven't seen since the whole exodus to Mixer fiasco from 2018, and they tried to defend STO very lightly but all I had to do was just roam around and point out how barren some things are and they shut their traps real damn quick. 

Again, ya'll know I like Star Trek Online, but when you put as many hours into as I have, you'll know I'm not going to defend it, hell the fact that there are 15 different in-game currencies can't be defended when the developers went out of their way like eight years ago to try and simplify things only to gradually complicate them over time

Got my copy of Ghostbusters / TMNT 2 yesterday, and flipping through it, I can safely say it was an enjoyable read, with a nice variety of artwork that shows the differences between the different dimensions most of the characters went to. Normally when you have multiple artists working on a mini-series, there would be wild differences in what the reader sees from page to page, but I got to give the people at IDW credit in terms of presenting a clean look to what they publish.

Knocked out some more War Table stuff off-stream for Dragon Age Inquisition last night, as well as trying to finishing up what collectables I could. I do wish there was an easy way to find what regions in the various open areas I've been to because I'm mission one in Crestwood. 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, about 30 minutes, plus I did a little extra because you know I'm working on the achievements. Doing blocking motions have become increasingly troublesome because it never seems to register the same way twice. 

Tonight's stream will be focused on the PlayStation 3, as we'll bounce from game to game doing random stuff. For sure I know we're gonna start with The Simpsons Arcade Game, since that was a PSN Store title. Beyond that, everything will be kind of random.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden! 

Today's Notes 4/8/21

 Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream of ESPN Major League Baseball was pretty solid as we played 5 games, lost one of them while simulating three games. One of those games played was the 2004 All-Star Game and needless to say, my in-game version of Phillies was well represented, with Jim Thome, Jimmy Rollins, Mike Liberthal, David Bell, Bobby Abreu all in the starting line-up, with Pat Burrell and Randy Wolf among the reserves. At this point with 87 games into the season, there are 75 games left to get through, so we've got a whole lot more baseball left to play.

I do have a major headache as I have to move some furniture because my local power utility needs to do a little work inside my office space on Saturday morning because they have to do things involving moving the gas meter... which means Friday night's stream is gonna be kind of short. The problem is I got to move a dresser but I'm not sure where exactly I can put it temporarily.

Yesterday, The Extreme Ghostbusters episode Deadliners premiered over on YouTube, and if you hate clowns that episode isn't for you. There is a bit of oddness as to why Eduardo kept his proton pack when being dropped off at his home early in the episode, which is just weird... granted it worked for the episode's ending where he remembers the team was facing demonic clowns and wanted to show up Garrett, but it was still weird.

Got the Life Is Strange comic box-set yesterday, and as I was flipping through them I saw the series continued beyond that, so I pre-ordered volume 4 of the series, Partners in Time, which comes out next week.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was a solid 35 minute workout from start to finish, did not include any stretching, so it was straight get up and go. We did unlock the Sophie's Trainee achievement which is to perform 10 Daily Workouts using her as the trainer, which leaves the Free Training and Best Buddy achievements associated with her to work on. Obvious the Free Training one will be the easier one to deal with because as we discovered with Hiro the Best Buddy one doesn't have an obvious scoring system associated with it.

Tonight' stream will be focused on Star Trek Online, so probably a mission and a few Task Force Ops will be our focus for tonight. Nothing to complex. I did see they are rolling out the Delta Recruit gimmick as yet another way to inflate numbers by saying 'look at how many people are playing now' because lets face it, all the developers at Cryptic want is to show Perfect World (the publisher) they have a strong enough audience to prevent them pulling the plug on the game.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Today's Notes 4/7/21

 Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream of Dragon Age Inquisition was mostly focused on the open area called Emprise du Lion, where we dealt with bears, a desire demon, Red Templars... and three dragons... and we didn't battle those dragons in order from easy to hardest, no no no.... we took them on back to back to back because I came across Kaltenzahn first, which was a pretty drawn out battle nearly using all my potions to keep folks from getting knocked out.... then I stumbled across Highland Ravager, the toughest of the base games original 10 dragons with only three potions left and that saw my party being KO and me solo battling it with bunch of little dragons coming out to cause me a headache (this made me glad I choose the Champion specialization and that I crafted the armor I was using)... and then finally we came across Hivernal, which is the weakest of the three dragons in Emprise du Lion, which was a cake walk in comparison to the first two. 

At this point we only need to take out one more Dragon for an in-game achievement, and it's in the last area we have yet to explore which will be the focus of Monday's stream. Also of note, I'll be periodically loading up Dragon Age Inquisition off stream between today and Monday to tackle what's on the War Table since now a bunch of 2 to 7 hour long items popped up on it due to actions taken during the last two streams of the game.

Following last night's stream I loaded up Overwatch to begin work on grinding out for the first of three weekly skins associated with the Archives Event, and I like the tweaked that they made. Instead of it being 'win base', it was focused on getting stars on the archive PVE missions (Uprising, Retribution, Storm Warning) with a 2X multiplier applying if you do the listed mission for a faster path to getting things done. PandaSweet also joined in for a few runs as well which was awesome. In terms of the new skins, my favorite is Tracer's 1776 skin, because she is dressed as a British soldier from that time period and because of all the British is Coming innuendo jokes that  can be applied to it thanks to the R34 and Fan Fic communities.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, nothing to troublesome, just a good 35 minute workout as we continue to get use to Sophie's speaking style when giving instructions and keeping the player (aka me) on rhythm with the sequence of punches and movements need to be perform. I did not do anything extra with today's session however, just did the base daily workout.

Tonight we'll be back to ESPN Baseball on the PlayStation 2, as we're closing in on the All-Star break of the 2004 season with a very large lead in the NL East. I believe we got a 4 game series with the Mets and 3 game series with the Braves before the All-Star game, so I'm thining we'll play the first two games of each series and depending on time we may play the All-Star game outright. Who knows

Anyway, on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Today's Notes 4/6/21

Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream of Dragon Age Inquisition didn't see any of the blips of frame rate drops that popped up during yesterday morning's Fitness Boxing 2 stream, so it was smooth sailing.

That said, we got a lot, and I mean a lot of story stuff doing last night as we tacked several story missions that involved Varric and Bianca (the dwarf not the crossbow), Iron Bull, Blackwell, Leliana and Vivienne plus the entire Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts quest which sees the Inquisitor having to play the political game at a grand ball. It certainly was a change of pace, but sadly we did not get all the goodies or find all the secrets during that, but on the flip side I did get one of the apparently toughest achievements to get called 'Belle of the Ball', which is to to gain full approval of the Orleasian court. 

Speaking of 'tough to get achievement', how come fewer people have the 'Botanist' achievement, which is just farming plants you grow at Skyhold? I don't get it.

Anyway we'll be back to exploring more of the open areas of Dragon Age Inquisition, as we still have two major ones to go through, plus work on some of the loosen side quests, so basically, last night was story heavy, tonight's it's all about wandering around. Which is fine because it means we'll be able to put more into leveling up to be able to over power nearly everything we come across. Also this means we'll have a lot of opportunity to clear out the War Table things as well

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was the first daily using Sophie, and man, her voice's lack of intensity makes me think whoever her actress was must of been thinking they were doing voice work for like Wii Fit or something, where a softer tone of voice would've worked better. That said, the session was solid and I did a little extra on top of the daily because we had the extra time this morning.

I've been taking a look at a few things on Amazon and if I time things right I could easily go about finding a lot of brand new mint condition stuff for the PS2, PS3... not so much the PS1 however.

I do have a slight case of writer's block when it comes to laying out a fan fic someone wants me to put together, actually I started it but I didn't like how it was going... and I hate restarting fics.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

 

Today's Notes 4/5/21

 

Good afternoon everybody,

Last night's stream of Overwatch was all over the place, but we had a lot of fun. Perhaps the highlight was seeing the April Foolish concepts in the Experimental side that saw Mei classified as a tank and that she was made to be 15% larger.... so she got extra thick, which I know pleased a lot of the folks the R34/SFM/Blender content creation communities. Big thanks to PandaSweet for joining in on all the fun. We did pick up four plays of the game last night, three as Reinhardt and one as Torbjourn. The best moment of the night though was getting a quintuple kill with Reinhardt that involved jumping off a ledge with his ultimate then using his charge to knock five people over the side, granted I thought I only caught four!

Clip:HAMMER DOWN! Quintuple Kill!

I see that Yahoo is closing yet another one of its sections this time Yahoo Answers, man ever since the Tumblr fiasco, which like Yahoo is owned by Verizon, anything associated with it that can be used for and by the community has been gradually shut down. And people wonder why Google is number one.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was streamed as per usual for a Monday as we finally wrapped up everything associated with Hiro, and then for the bonus stuff we switched to Sophie who has a very soft, passive voice. And while the main daily exercise was nearly flawless, the bonus exercises which featured blocking were... well horrible. Granted I selected to do the blocking combo set, but it was bad. Very bad! 

Clip: Show me you can do  this! 

Now I am aware there was some bit rate dips during the Fitness Boxing 2 stream, not enough to cause problems, but enough for me to notice it. Might have been just network congestion but I'll be keeping an eye on that for sure with tonight's stream.

Tonight we'll be back to Dragon Age Inquisition and I will admit that we did even more off stream grinding last night, and took out the Dragon on the Storm Coast. No major quests or character dialogs were done, so we're good on that front. We do have a few inner circle quests to do with tonight's stream, so we'll be starting off with high adventure!

And on that note we'll see you later today over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

 

 

Today's Notes 4/4/21

Good afternoon everybody,

Last night's stream of Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma saw a lot being done, with the last of the apparent puzzle rooms being finished, so the rest of the way should be just remembering various facts and things for a couple of decision puzzles. There are 35 in game achievements, and we got 21 of them,and as far as I can tell the rest all involve just going through the story. That said, last night was a lot of fun because of things that happened such as Akane clocking Carlos with a fire extinguisher and beating him to death. Eric's creep factor when it comes to Miro, the revelation that Diane and Sigma are Phi's parents, that everyone is in the same area but are only awake at different times... and that Diane and Sigma's other child Delta is also there, but no one notices him. Hell I took a guess upon learning his name to enter it into a the decision box during the triangle stand off for Team Q to learn that Delta is there. I'ms ure all that will get explain when we wrap this game up next Saturday night.

Best Clip Of The Night: You See That Big Nuclear Reactor....

Following last night's stream I did load up Dragon Age Inquisition to work on one of the side quests that involved getting certain materials for a banner, and fuck me does the game penalize folks for advancing too far too quick because I had to look up on how to get Decorative Gems in the game, and it involved going to a certain spot, saving the game and reloading repeatedly to get a particular set of enemies to appear. Like what the fuck! Good thing I did not do this on stream! But of course Dragon Age Inquisition is on the line up for tomorrow night!

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was real solid, but the actual workout length was an 1 hour 5 minutes , because I was hoping to wrap up the last of the achievements associated with Hiro, as we're at 99/100 for what's needed for his Best Friend achievement, so we'll get it tomorrow as part of the weekly Monday bonus stream. I ended up setting new records for myself with an Estimate Calorie Burn of 1033.64, but we did gain a little weight as well over this two weeks. 

Tonight we'll be playing Overwatch, and it'll mostly be quick play with maybe some arcade matches as well. There's not an event going on, so it should be a chill yet intense stream because ya'll know how I suspicious I become when I see 'new accounts' playing as if they have put in 1000 hours of practice time into using various characters. 

So on that note, we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden! 

Highlights For The Week of March 28, 2021

 Here are the best moments from my twitch channel (http://twitch.tv/fredcasden) for the week of March 28, 2021 which featured Overwatch, Dragon Age Inquisition, Fitness Boxing 2 Rhythm & Music, ESPN Major League Baseball, Star Trek Online, Forza Horizon 4 and Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma!