IntPiPoMo 2018

Yesterday did not go according to plan, and as a result I wound up not making a post at all.  Essentially I woke up at 5:15 yesterday morning and by the time I finished showering and checked into the world around 5:30 I noticed that we had a major system down at work.  This caused me to leap into crisis mode and instead of going upstairs to blog, I went upstairs to remote in and try and assess the situation.  As such you got a brief tweet stating that there would be no post and I moved on with what turned out to be an eleven hour day.  I had intentions of making a post last night, but by the time I made it home I was mentally soup.  I had some awesome tamales from the coney place down the street and largely avoided any mentally strenuous activity.

The only problem with this is that I missed out on making a post for an initiative that has been going on for several years in the blogosphere…  but that I have never actually participated in.  Everyone knows about NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, where you are challenged to crank out 50,000 words worth of cohesive prose that can in theory get edited into a novel that makes sense.  I participated in that initiative back in 2013 and wound up live blogging it as I progressed through the goal of writing 50,000 words.  You can see the rough and unedited form here in a series of posts that I started cross linking at some point.  The sad part is I never really made it much further than this…  there is a google doc floating out there with some edits done but I feel like at some point I largely just need to nuke this from orbit and rewrite the entire thing.

intpipomo2018

IntPiPoMo plays on the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if NaNoWriMo requires you to crank out 50,000 words….  then IntPiPoMo asks you to post 50 pictures/screenshots/whatever during the month of November.  This initiative started back in 2011 and has changed hands a few times until it landed in the lap of my good friend Chestnut who was insanely helpful during the recent running of Blaugust.  Admittedly I have never really set out to participate since I felt like it would be cheating…  given that my blog is already super screenshot heavy.  During the month of October as an example I posted just shy of 100 pictures associated with my blog posts.  However she indicated that this didn’t matter and that I should sign up anyways…  and as a result I am going to be supporting this process with Aggronaut.  If you also feel like participating then you should totally check out her post outlining all of the specifics.  There is a very short sign up process and an image seen above that you can incorporate into your side bar as I have done with mine (albeit scaled down a bit since my sidebar is narrow).

randomshottool

One of the things I am sorta known for is my nonsensical storage of screenshots.  I have a network attached storage device full of loosely organized screenshots from the various games I have played, and at some point I wanted a way to just randomly pick a few shots from the pile.  I thought this was an easy way to do a post when I wasn’t necessarily feeling up to writing something more well formed.  The idea being I have the tool pick a few screenshots and then write something about each of them.  This is largely something that I built for my own purposes but if you are interested I threw it up on GitHub at the suggestion of a few folks.  If you are interested I highly suggest you grab the source code and download Visual Studio Community edition to compile it yourself just to make sure it is completely safe.  If you don’t feel comfortable with that I have uploaded a compiled and ready to run version of it out on TinyUpload.com.  If you get stuck on trying to decide what screenshots to use on a given day, a tool like this might come in handy.

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As an example I decided to use it myself this morning and grabbed 3 random screenshots from the stack.  This one is from the PC Beta of Destiny 2 and I largely know this… because the file is named “Desktop Screenshot” because annoying the only way I can get Destiny 2 to capture is by running it Borderless Windowed and capturing it with Nvidia Experience…  which probably has another name for the screenshot functionality but I don’t know what it is.  I am consistently annoyed that I cannot use a more proper capture technique to grab Destiny 2, but regardless that has nothing to do with the screenshot itself.  I have dozens and dozens of screenshots of the “warp” graphic from Destiny 2 because I think it is so damned pretty.  This is probably one of the first ones I captured during that PC Beta, and it is making me want to go equip that ship again in the live game for nostalgia sake.

landmark64-2014-03-28-06-13-28-23

This is a screenshot from Everquest Landmark Alpha…  and I am not sure if this was the first reset or the second reset.  I am pretty sure this is from the first alpha because I believe I had a better plot when the first major reset happened.  Regardless I miss the hell out of this game, because quite frankly it was one of my favorite building games.  I loved the tools that it gave us to build really interesting shapes… and then create templates off of them.  I also loved the way that you could harvest with a group… and all get the loot that was harvested by any one member of that team.  I remember running around with Lethbridge and Rae running amok harvesting everything in sight and all reaping the benefits.  I wish someone would functionally reboot this idea in a modern crafting game.  Part of the reason why I have a dislike of Daybreak is admittedly because deep down inside I blame them for the death of Landmark.

wow-64-2016-10-09-15-46-46-80

One of the cooler things about Legion were the hidden artifact appearances.  One of them for the Warrior involved finding a shield that looks like Deathwing in a cavern full of Kobolds.  What made it frustrating however was that it was a random chance sort of thing, and you had a single chance each day at getting it to show up.  It became a ritual on my Warrior to log out at the cave every night, and then check it first thing in the morning and again that night just in case it was on the daily reset cycle and not on the server time cycle.  I even had a macro that would tell me whether or not the shield had showed up… just to make sure that I didn’t miss it.  The day that it finally showed up for me was extremely exciting, and as a result I took a screenshot for my blog before actually looting it.

4 thoughts on “IntPiPoMo 2018”

  1. Great post, thank you for sharing your screenshots and your random screenshot program. I am excited to hear about it and also terrified to now know about it! You see, if you consider yourself a cheat for having roughly 100 screenshots on your blog a month then I’m not even sure what I would classify me as 😀 I take that many screenshots that I have an entire gallery dedicated to them. My World of Warcraft section alone has THOUSANDS. So giving me something that allows me to get even more screenshots is like giving me candy lol – it’s awesome but probably not too healthy!

    I’m also taking part in IntPiPoMo but unfortunately I heard about it after I already started doing a photo challenge this month so I’m doing a weekly round up every 7 days as to not overwhelm myself (I’m disabled so have to watch I don’t take on too much).

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