Blog Features

There is a virus burning through the blogosphere and apparently I have now been infected. It is also apparently my solemn duty to infect other people as well. This is a concept I have seen spread a few times by various names. If you search for “Liebster Award” you will find some similar schemes from the past, but I always largely think they are good-natured. Simply put they tend to be a vehicle which allows you to get to know the blogger a bit more, that then multiplies and spreads to other blogs so that before long it is really hard to find someone who has not already filled one of these out.

This specific strain travels under the name of the Real Neat Blog Award and comes with is associated branding as well. The idea is pretty straight forward. You are tagged by someone and in theory you are supposed to answer seven questions that they proposed to everyone who was tagged. You then make your own post answering those questions and then proposing seven new questions and tag seven new people. In theory there should be limited cross over, but given that people are tagging at the same time there is absolutely going to be moments where multiple blogs get tagged by different people. This happened with me on the Liebster and I instead made a post where I answered both sets of questions.

The Basic Rules Summarized

• Participation is not mandatory. You can either choose to be a good sport and follow along or you can ignore your tag. You do you.
• Create a new post where you answer the seven questions that were proposed to your cohort.
• Come up with seven of your own questions and include those in your post.
• Come up with a list of seven bloggers/content creators to tag in your post.
• ????
• Profit!

Now we move forward with the questions. I was tagged by Magimos of the Indiecator blog who is one of the Blaugust newbies you can find listed in my sidebar. Definitely check out their blog along with all of the other blogs that are getting caught up in this current infection. In truth it really is an excellent way to get some exposition from folks as you ask them a string of questions. Now let’s get on with the questions that were posed to my cohort.

Question 1

You have to choose an awesome superpower but it has a huge drawback! What’s the best superpower that you can think of with the worst drawback?

This is actually something I have thought about at length before. The example given was flight but with explosive diarrhea which isn’t exactly a cause an effect scenario. Instead I am going to focus on the negative side effects that would likely be caused by the power itself. So for me… I have always wanted the ability to stop the flow of time, since so often I feel like I just need a few moments to compose myself when I am feeling rushed or stressed. The idea being that you could pause the flow of time for everyone but yourself.

The problem there is that everything in the world would effectively be paused as well. Anything mechanical would cease to function normally. So that means you could not open a door, or use anything that had moving parts. In fact you would likely have to be extremely careful about disturbing anything while paused because even the slightest movement would effectively be rapid acceleration on the part of the object causing it to continue along that trajectory. Think back to the scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past where Quicksilver disrupts the flow of objects while moving extremely quickly… and effectively pausing time. Every time you paused time there would be the high likelihood of disastrous outcomes.

The other negative side effect of stopping time… is that in theory you would continue aging while the rest of the world is not. That means slowly, bit by bit… each time you used your power you would be pushing yourself further and further out of the natural flow of time. Not even taking into the account the possible internal stresses you would be placing on your body, you would eventually age beyond that of your friends and family. Your power would be a curse, but still a very powerful boon.

Question 2

What’s your favorite drink/cocktail?

I am going to interpret this as alcoholic drink, given that cocktail is listed? The truth is I don’t really drink that often. We have a fridge full of alcohol because we thought something sounded good… then proceeded to have a single item and stranded the rest of the six pack on the bottom shelf. If we are talking mixed drinks I almost always order one of two things:

• Screwdriver – aka orange juice and vodka
• Rum and Coke – I mean the name explains it

The only time I really drink though is socially, and since I am a massive introvert those occurrences are happening less and less as I age. Oklahoma as a whole does not have much of an alcohol culture that extends past beer and tailgate parties. Again not being a huge follower of “sportsball” the tailgating occurrences happen infrequently as well.

Question 3

If money didn’t matter, where would you choose to live?

Again this is something that I have thought about at length before, which means you are going to get a longer answer. Because I live adjacent to Missouri and Arkansas… areas that are known for having large cavern structures under them… I have had several opportunities to go delving into the Underdark (on guided tours mind you). I always feel deeply peaceful and safe when I am underground, and when I play a game like Minecraft… the vast majority of my structures involve me hollowing the earth out to create grand passages.

One of the interesting remnants of the cold war era is a large number of abandoned missile silos. So if money were no option I would love to live in one of those that had been fully renovated and modernized.

Question 4

Would you rather see everything in different shades of the same colour or rather be colour-blind?

It would all depend upon the type of color vision deficiency. However given my love of film noir… I think I would probably just rather live in a world where everything were shades of the same color. Effectively that would be like a black and white movie, and if I could control what shade that is even better. I just feel like it would be easier to move around if everything were grey scale rather than if things were occasionally showing for you as an incongruous color. That said video games have gone a really long way into giving options to account for most of the major color deficiencies.

Question 5

What’s the last book you’ve read/show or movie you’ve watched and what’s the best thing you liked about that one?

The last book that I read was Giant Days volume one at the suggestion of my good friend Jason. I recently opted into a trial of Comixology Unlimited and this is a read that he suggested. It is a sort of moment in the life type comic about a group of girls a some college in Britain. I guess what I liked about it is how it was both humorous and serious at the same time.

The storytelling reminded me an awful lot of the video game A Night in the Woods, which also had a lot of emotional content for me personally. It is a tale of people coming into their own and being pulled upon by forces they really don’t have much control over. It feels the same as so many of those John Hughes films that I grew up with… like someone just took an incidental snapshot of the things that actually happen to people.

Question 6

If you could only play one game for the rest of your life, what would that game be?

So my gut reaction would be just to say Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night since it is a more evolved and more system rich continuation of my all time favorite game Castlevania: Syphony of the Night. However even though I own Casltevania for something like seven different platforms, and Bloodstained for three of the four that it is available for along with a duplicate copy that I am just going to keep sealed… I know at some point that would get stale playing a game with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end.

So instead if I had to choose a single game to play for the rest of my life… I would probably have to go with Final Fantasy XIV. I realize choosing a live service game is cheating a bit, because in theory a game like FFXIV is going to have a long life span and keep churning out additional content. However the main reason why I pick this one is because as a game goes, it feels like there are so many aspects of it that I have never really touched. I enjoy the crafting system for example, but I have never really had the time to explore it fully. There isn’t a single class that I have not really enjoyed, and having the time to explore them all would be nice.

Question 7

Since you’re on this post, you’ve surely read through my rom-com-novel about the rabbit and the other person. Which one of those two would you rather be?

Clearly the rabbit. Bunnies are sweet and adorable… and fluffy.

My Questions to the next Viral Cohort

Now comes the time for me to write a bunch of clever and thought provoking questions. I am sure I will fail at both of those points, but regardless the number is to be seven and here we go.

1. What is your earliest memory?
2. What is something that you have lost in your past that you would love to have today?
3. What is the last piece of media (book/movie/video/whatever) that really moved you emotionally?
4. What was your favorite childhood “character”(comic/movie/literary/etc) and has that changed over the years?
5. What are you looking forward to the most in the second half of 2019?
6. What is your greatest fear and has it changed as you have aged?
7. What keeps you engaged in a community over time and where do you feel the most at home?

Bel’s Viral Cohort

Now we arrive at the point where I am supposed to infect some people with this madness. May god have mercy on their souls.

• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Nimgimli – Dragonchasers
• PizzaMaid – PizzaMaid.Moe
• Ryuhkin – RyuhNote
• Scopique – Scopique’s Bunch ‘o Stuff
• Welshfox – What’s Occurring:  Life of a Welshman
• Wolfyeyes – Through Wolfy’s Eyes

Here is hoping they are a good sport about it. In some cases I am trying to drag folks back into the fold who have not posted in awhile. In the case of Fox and Wolfy… I think it would be interesting to see what each side of a couple would write about this. I also think it will be interesting to see what this would be like delivered as a video with the two of them… hint hint. Pizza and Ryuh I just adore them and wish they were participating in Blaugust this year. Chestnut I just adore and she has been so great throughout the various incarnations of Blaugust helping out with all sorts of things. Finally Pete and Scop while not participating are some of the peers I greatly look up to in the community.

One of the things that I take fairly seriously is screenshots. I find them to be terribly useful ways to break up large blocks of text, and as such I try to generally place one at least every other paragraph. The challenge with this means that I need an awful lot of them to make it work. Since I write my posts first thing in the morning and on a fairly limited time schedule, it also means that I need them to be somewhat organized so that I can get the right one at the right time. As such this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about my routine, and how I go about managing images.

The Tools

I largely find myself relying upon two different tools to capture all of the images that you see. The reason why I have multiple is because occasionally certain games do not like being captured by certain tools. The unfortunate bit about duplicating your effort is that there will occasionally be situations where an image has been captured in multiple locations… and when you are recording 4k images like I am this leads to a bit of clean up and reconciliation after the fact.

The first tool in my toolkit is DxTory by ExKode which is a little piece of software that does exactly one thing… record screenshots and images of Direct X windows. For years I used Fraps, but more recently Windows 10 started causing issues with it forcing me to fall back on another product. Most of these tools are payware and not share/freeware but in the case of DxTory it is a reasonable one time purchase of 3800 yen or roughly $35 at the current exchange rate. For this you get a key that will then allow you to effectively register copies effectively forever. The things that I like the most about DxTory is how generally lightweight it is and how good the output looks. As such I generally use this as my primary tool for capturing video and even use it to capture consoles since I play those through my Elgato Pro card.

My backup is configuring GeForce Experience which offers the ability to capture images at a hardware level… as such bypassing lockouts like the one Destiny 2 tried to put into place. Since it is pulling your data at a driver level, in theory there should never be a game that can somehow block this from recording. The negative about all of this is that it is a little flaky and if I leave my system up and running without a reboot for too long it just stops responding at all. It has a neat feature where it dumps games into a directory named after whatever game you happen to be playing. The gotcha there is this only works if you are playing it in full screen, and otherwise it just dumps everything into a directory called “Desktop” with a bajillion images that are all named Desktop with a timestamp tacked onto the end.

The Storage Scheme

The problem with screenshots is that they get stranded all over your harddrive if you allow the default tool for each game to capture them. Initially my goal was simply to collect them in a single location and I personally chose “Gameshots” as a directory name on my bulk mechanical storage drive. I went through the process of pointing everything to this one directory, but occasionally would encounter a game that would not allow me to configure where the screenshots were saved. It is around this point that I started a new strategy of relying entirely upon a third party image capture software and disabling the default screenshot functionality within each game.

Effectively I have two directories that matter in this scenario:

• Working Gameshots Directory – these are fresh images that I am capturing on a nightly basis and are generally going to be what I am most likely to be writing about. The above screenshot shows various folders based on games as configured by GeForce Experience. I have DxTory writing to a folder in this structure called Captures as raw screenshots need a little bit of processing that I will get into later.
• Deep Storage – Since I accumulate a lot of these images, every so often I reach a point where the windows file system becomes unwieldy when I am hunting for a specific image. As such every few months I spend an evening filing away the raw images into game based directories on my network attached storage system.

The core problem I have with my deep storage is… how exactly does one organize several hundred games worth of screenshots? I have a rough system that you can see above, but it also at times is just nonsense. Diablo 3 for example… for whatever reason when I first slotted it into the system I labelled an “Online” game and not an “MMORPG”, and I have never bothered to go back and move it. Apparently in my head there was a distinction between something that was a WoW-like and something that just happened to have online play. You also see an “FPS” directory and a “Shooter” directory and the distinction there is I am apparently using the term Shooter to describe Bullet Hell style space combat shooters.

“Miscshots” becomes any debris that happens to also collect in my gameshots directory such as clips of things that are not games when I happen to capture screenshots from a movie. “Stream” is a catch all directory for me backing up anything associated with my stream like overlays or titlecards. Then you have the ultimate lazy directory which is “ToBeSorted” which has anything that is not easily identifiable in a thumbnail or weird one-offs that I will resolve at some later date… the only problem is that later date has never actually arrived. The other directory is “nonshots” which is anything that happens to get saved to the directory that is not an image.

Conversions

The only negative about this set up so far is the fact that I am playing an awful lot of the games at 4k resolutions, which becomes extremely cumbersome to deal with. There is no way that I want to upload a 4k screenshot to my blog even though Jetpack image hosting does some chicanery and renders it in a semi-optimized format. This meant that I needed something to easily batch convert large numbers of files down to something more reasonable like 1080p, and for this I lean on a software I have used since the 90s.

IrfanView is a swiss army knife when it comes to image maintenance. First off it is one of the fastest image viewers if you simply want to page through a directory full of images looking for the one you are actually trying to find. Next up it offers a whole slew of image conversion options allowing you to shift things between formats and does a solid job of relatively lossless resizing. I have mine configured to set everything to 1080p and save the output as a jpg to drop the size down a bit more before uploading it. If you are so inclined you can even use it to OCR documents with a pretty high accuracy rate. It is completely free to use, but registering your copy is only 10 euros.

This is Madness

Before you comment… I realize this is complete madness. It however is what works for me personally. I am not suggesting anyone adopt my scheme for dealing with screenshots, but I am suggesting that you ultimately develop your own. I went down this rabbit hole because in the early days of my blog I would simply do a google image search and call it “good enough”. The problem there is you wind up with results of varying quality and all manner of sizes. I began to obsess about making sure that I had plenty of screenshots so that I would never have to do this last minute hunt ever again.

The end result works for me, and helps ease my mind… that if I absolutely need to find a screenshot from the opening of Guild Wars 2 I know I can with a moments notice. The other nice side effect is that keeping my screenshots organized also gives me a way of seeing exactly what games I happened to be playing during a given block of time. This has given me fodder for another side project of mine which is keeping track of what games I played during which months in a given year. That admittedly is also madness, but whatever… it makes me happy.