Sleeping Coworkers

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I thought I would start off this mornings post with a picture of one of my coworkers sleeping on the job. The cats are still confused as hell as to why we never leave the house and go to work. The funny bit about this is that Kenzie and Josie tend to hang out with me in my office during the day and Mollie the skittish cat hangs with my wife when she is downstairs. This has actually been pretty great for Mollie since she is actually getting time to play and be cat like without being freaked about the other two being around. Usually Josie sleeps up behind one of my monitors as shown and Kenzie sleeps on an old PC Case box that is sitting beside me that she adopted at one point and now as a result I cannot get rid of it.

As far as our well being goes, we are doing pretty good. We have been in limiting outside trips for a few weeks now and both my wife and I are at home for the foreseeable future. I’m working remotely and as a teacher she has not reported back from spring break yet with that whole situation sorta being up in the air as to how it is going to work. We still have quite a bit of food and plenty of other assorted products, but I figure at some point over the weekend we are going to have to either make a trip out to a grocery store or luck out and get an order in on one of the grocery pick up sites. We got our first order like that on Monday and were a little frustrated that they didn’t attempt any substitution of items. For example we ordered a specific type of butter just because you had… which they apparently were sold out of but they had other salted butters that eventually my wife went and picked up.

All in all we are doing pretty well, which is not meant to tempt fate but more just to give a general status update. The world around us however is not doing so hot. The Governor made a declaration that any non-essential business is to remain closed, which effectively means if you are not involved in food cycle or involved with critical infrastructure like hospitals then you are effectively closed. For a long while the part that was disturbing about this is how I knew things were getting bad but the world didn’t seem to reflect that yet. It reminded me of being in a Zombie Apocalypse movie but one where everyone tries to pretend that the Zombies aren’t actually a thing. However since the most recent order the world does in fact look changed, and everyone sorta seems to eye every other human being with suspicion.

Other than having trouble with a frame of reference for what day of the week it is, I am doing fairly well with social isolation. Given my druthers I would spend all of my time at home anyways, so giving me a reason to do so doesn’t seem to be impacting me nearly as much as it is some of my friends. I am also super lucky in that I get along well with my spouse and we are more or less treating this like one long extended weekend. Because she has a better immune system than I do, she has been the person to go out in public for the majority of the needed trips. However I did make a trip to the local comic shop that was closing for twenty one days as per the order so I could settle out my pull box and make sure she went into the lock-down with some additional funds.

As far as Blapril our moved up running of the Blaugust festivities… we have quite a few signed up and ready to participate with still a bit of time to get new folks signed up. As of the time of writing this post we have twenty three, which is down a bit from our normal Blaugust runs. However last Blaugust was among the lowest as far as participation goes, so we might just be in a bit of a blogging slump. I did also completely spring this thing onto the community without much warning, but hopefully as we get started more folks will show up and chime in. Here is the list of participants so far.

Regardless of numbers we will have a good time going through the process that Blaugust is. It will serve as a delightful distraction to the things we are going through on a day to day basis.

Flower and Tree Placement

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Good morning folks! Another fine day here in Pandemia, where I have created a welcome sign at the docks for everyone who might visit. Yesterday was the day when I actually started trying to give a shit about how things looked and quickly realized that I have way the hell too many trees on the island. One of the things that I wish I could do is flip into a grid system in the outside world like I can in housing because trying to control with any semblance of precision where I am facing with an analog joystick is most definitely a challenge.

One of the things that I spent part of yesterday morning researching was how to best place tress to make sure that they would grow. I’ve accidentally placed a few of the fruit I collected from island hopping and my fruit exchange party in too close of quarters. Apparently trees like a little bit of social distancing and as a result I documented some of my research in pictogram form. Essentailly based on what I could tell a tree needs a ring of eight empty squares around it, which makes sense because the same thing is true with trying to maximize the yield from banging on a rock. That means that if I wanted to be absolutely efficient I would set up a grid pattern like shown above and spend time moving all of my trees into that arrangement.

[UPDATE] – Based on Stephen’s comment it seems as though the trees need a ring of 8 empty squares but can apparently square an empty square with another tree, so in theory that means you can compact things down even tighter to something like this grid above. Again I really wish that I could flip into grid mode like you can with a house to allow for more precise placement, but as I start moving my trees around I will experiment with packing them in tighter and then potentially can leave only things like my money trees out in the open with everything else in the orchard.

The other thing that I spent time researching was flower arrangement and hybridization. There is a twitter user @GracieSwitch that has a ton of really good guides in thread form. Unfortunately between yesterday and today the user has locked down their account and as such they are not readily available. I am guessing either someone started using the guides without credit or was a jerk to the user. [EDIT] – turns out it was just an overwhelming amount of social media interaction. As such I have attempted to recreate the concepts from memory and if I manage to bungle something please forgive me. The basic layout for flowers is a grid pattern where you are skipping every other square. As I understand it on a given day a new flower can spawn in any one of the open squares if you have watered the flowers during the previous day.

When the flower is in between two different colors a hybrid flower can spawn with a new color. Essentially as I understand it you have three options for a new flower where it could spawn with either of the original colors or if you are lucky you might get a new color. Polygon has a guide outlining which colors can be produced from which species of flowers so I suggest you go over there and read that if you are wanting something specific. Since I have no clue what I am doing and am mostly just working with Tulips I planted the majority of my flowers in grid pattern.

Now here is where I am hoping my memory holds up, because @GracieSwitch outlined another method that is supposedly more predictable in the results of your flower generation. The idea being that you have two flowers side by side and then the maximum possible empty space around them without overlapping allowing for lots of possible area for flower generation. Of course however you can see that you need a lot more empty space but I also set up an area near my house that has some of this going on so we will see if any of these schemes worked. Once you have a flower generator set up the way that you want, the idea is that each day you harvest any new flower spawns and water your flower bed in preparation for the next possible day of spawning.

[ANOTHER UPDATE] – Turns out the I need to credit @TwillitPrince for the flower placement pattern that was in the @GracieSwitch thread I referenced.

I feel like I need to give the very important disclaimer that once again… Animal Crossing New Horizon is my first Animal Crossing game. I am figuring all of this out for the first time and am standing on the backs of all of the AC players that came before me. I am just sharing whatever I happen across in case someone else is needing to figure these things out as well. However if anything I post is incorrect please by all means comment below and correct me. I am always open to thoughtful criticism. I mean I don’t love the folks who pedantically point out some spelling or grammatical error, but I am always down with someone correcting me on factual bits.

Shake that Tambourine

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You know I probably should be talking more about Blapril today, but there is an entire post on that already. Instead I am going to talk some more about Animal Crossing New Horizon which is apparently my new main game. I still find this all bizarre given that I had never really played one of this games and wasn’t even sure if I would be that into it. Now I would say that much like Breath of the Wild, this is a game that is worth plunking down the entire price of a console just to play it. From what I am hearing this also may be responsible for console shortages because apparently it is extremely hard to find a non-mini style switch that docks and plays on a television. I still think that the mini would have been the perfect device had they just included the video output chipset to allow it to be docked.

I’ve visited so many islands and they are all adorable. Mine is decidedly not. My room decor is what I would like to call “swap meet chic”, where I basically cram everything I come across into the same room without it actually making any semblance of sense. Sure I have a random candle on the wall because it came from a balloon. I also have an inexplicable cat tower but no cat… so whatever… it allows me to go over and bat the ball if I try and interact with it. Why do I have two wardrobes? Because I built one and then built another one for a quest because I forgot I had built the first one… don’t judge me.

I spend my days harvesting resources and stockpiling them… which then I turn into stone axes… which break… so I make more of them. Were this on the PC I would have long downloaded a way to cheat durability so nothing ever broke. However I guess it does give me a reason for all of my harvesting… even though it seems like only one type of wood regularly gets used for anything that I actually need. I have so much hard wood folks… and I am not even trying to make a joke about that. I figure at some point when I unlock terraforming I will actually start caring about the placement of things, but I am super jealous of all of the folks that I go visit that seem to have a “plan” or even “goals”. For now I mostly just have a random assemblage of shit I drug home from the dump.

For example, this is the island of @playerVShobbies and it is absolutely adorable. I am super jealous of her Gnome collection and really do need to spend more of my days hopping around and shopping from different nook stores. I popped over her to sell all of the apples that I had been hoarding for a whopping 35,000 bells. We talked on twitter while she sat on this rock and did the joyful emote over and over, and I did it back as a thank you for opening up the island and giving me a place to sell my fruit.

Her island also had this super sweet gas pump, which I bought for some reason… and is now just sorta sitting in my front yard because reasons. Anything that speaks to me I am dragging home in part because I know what is being sold is completely random on a given day and that I might only ever see it the one time. I learned that lesson from the small amount of time that I played Pocket Camp. I love old gas pumps in real life even though I am not in the least a “car guy” so I guess it makes sense that I would want to try and drag one home from my travels. The thing that I really need to find at some point is bamboo, which I guess means more island adventures… which in turn means more damned tools breaking.

The highlight of the night however has to be going over to South Perry and visiting @Kuriie. She gave me a super sweet Tambourine which is fun to bang on and I have been doing this pretty much from that point forward. It makes me just ridiculously happy to do this, and while I am certain that the novelty will wear off at some point it is pure enjoyment for the time being. Now I am starting to think that maybe I should not have named my island Pandemia… though I guess I could do a sweet logo like this for my docks. Kuriie’s island was super good and once again… here is a person with a major plan and a lot of talent. Everything was laid out purposefully and I guess made me realize that I need to probably sort out exactly what I want to do and how.

My happy place on the island however is the Museum and more specifically the deep water area. It is so peaceful to watch the schools of sardines swirling around. Getting this building opened up has singlehandedly done more or my desire to fish than anything else in the game. I want to catch more fish to make the aquarium even cooler. Like I am sure the dinosaur exhibit will be sweet once I have completed a few of them… but for now this is my moment of zen. I named my island Pandemia in part because I am using this game as a way of combating all of the frustration surrounding the very real Pandemic we find ourselves dealing with. Games have always been an escape for me, but I am not sure if I have ever needed a happy place to keep returning to quite in the same way as I have now with Animal Crossing. Thank you so much to Nintendo for releasing this during our time of need.

A Dose of Blapril

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Sometimes events coalesce in a spontaneous manner and develop an inertia of its own. Most of us are dealing with the effects of social distancing and maybe even full on quarantine thanks to the time in which we find ourselves. So a few weeks back I wondered what Blaugust would be like this year, which lead to me starting to contemplate pushing it a bit forward to give us something to focus on instead of life in Pandemia. Then completely disconnected from this I was approached by Roger and Tessa from the Blaugust discord about maybe pushing the proceedings forward so we had something good and pure to latch onto. This started the ball rolling a bit, but yet again completely disconnected from the other events Syp reached out to me saying that he thought we should do a Blapril, and as a result you are getting this official kick off post.

The idea being that we can use a dose of internet togetherness to combat the negative effects of social distancing. When I thought about the name Blapril (pronounced Blay Prill), it reminded me of one of those pharmaceutical commercials that you get with the evening news where they never quite tell you exactly what the drug does… but they absolutely catalog all of its possible negative side effects. The only negative side effect here however is a renewed sense of community and a bunch of interesting blog posts to read during the month of April. Once again we rally around the blogging community and support each other with good ideas and helpful tips and gain the side effect of forgetting that each day we change out of our daytime pajamas into our evening pajamas since we have not left the house in a week and a half.

The Schedule

Something that we started over the last few Blaugust’s was setting up a bit of a schedule that is completely optional to follow. The idea being that if you find yourself in need of a bit of a structure you can fall back to the overarching theme of a specific week. If you instead have nothing but ideas flowing out of your head and enough posts to completely make it through the month of posting unaided, then by all means go with it and ignore the schedule. I personally do a little mix of all of the above and generally write a post or two on topic during a specific week and then do my normal daily blogging thing the rest of the time. However once again I feel like I should reiterate that the schedule is a completely optional thing as are the rest of the “rules” of Blaugust or in this case Blapril.

  • March 29th – April 4th – Blapril Prep Week: This is a time for those of us in the community who have been through this process a few times or at least feel like we have figured out this blogging thing to help those of you who are new to the process to get started with some advice posts. Additionally this is a time to sign up for the Discord if you have not already and start mingling with the folks who are active there year round. This is also a time for the newbies in the bunch to get started on setting up their blog and getting those first few “Hello World” posts out there.
  • April 5th – April 11th – Topic Brainstorming Week: This is a time for the mentors among us to throw out topics and ideas for posts to help you out when you find yourself staring down the tyranny of the blank page. We all have those days when we cannot figure out what to write about and being able to fall back upon the community for ideas and inspiration is a tried and true method. The prevalence of topic ideas also helps the newbies get started a bit with a constant flow of things to write about.
  • April 12th – April 18th – Getting to Know You Week: Tell us about yourself and your preference as a gamer or whatever thing that you happen to like doing. This is also a time to reach back into the wayback machine and dredge up interesting stories that you don’t mind telling the community. For the newbies it serves as a time of introducing themselves to the broader community and bonding.
  • April 19th – April 25th – Developer/Creator Appreciation Week: One of the things that has happened over the years with Blaugust is that it enveloped some of the better ideas from other events and combined them as part of the single month long celebration. Years ago Scarybooster started this idea of devoting a week to the sharing our love of the Developers and Studios behind the games that we play. Last year this morphed a bit to also include a celebration of the various content creators that we enjoy as well, so I am officially tweaking the name of the week a bit as a result to serve both purposes. Essentially it is a time to gush unabashedly about the things that you love.
  • April 26th – May 2nd – Staying Motivated Week: Towards the end of the proceedings we start to have a drop off in post frequency as folks hit their writing wall. The idea behind this week is to share the tips and tricks that we have learned throughout the years on how exactly to stay motivated and keep posting on a daily basis. I feel like this is even more relevant this year since we are all going through massive disruptions to our usual schedules and having to deal with all sorts of external changes impacting our well being both physically and mentally.
  • May 3rd – May 9th – Lessons Learned Week: The goal as always with Blaugust and now Blapril is to revitalize the blogging community and ignite those fires fresh for another year of posting. As such this is a marathon that we are running and not a sprint, so we continue forward a little bit into the next month for folks to have that cooldown lap and talk about the things that they learned during the month. This could be a discussion of your own personal journey, or focused on some of the things that you learned from the community. The idea being to keep it going just a little bit longer so that maybe the habit of posting regularly sticks.

The Awards

Something that has existed since the very first Blaugust was the concept of winning some sort of an “award”. In reality this just means that you get permission to use a dorky image that I cobble together each year, but the spirit is that you challenged yourself and followed through with the process. Daily blogging is not a thing for everyone, so as a result we have a bunch of “awards” at different levels of participation from the “I was here and got the t-shirt” level to actually standing on the medalists podium at the end of the month. A rundown of the “awards” and what it takes to earn them is as follows.

  • Newbie Blogger Award – This is a special recognition for anyone who started a blog during Blapril or is relatively new to blogging in general and is using this event as their entrance into the larger blogging community. You are the hope for the future and we are going to celebrate it!
  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You made at least 31 Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020.

Mentorship

One of the benefits of getting our act together and coming up with what appears to be a reasonable format, is that we already have a council of mentors ready to answer your questions and assist with your blogging. However if you feel like you are a grizzled veteran of all things blogging and have something to offer the world, then we are always open to more. Ultimately mentors should have at least two years of blogging experience under their belt in order to gauge the ebbs and flow of content creation in front of a live studio audience. We are not expecting perfection, just a willingness to share the lessons you have learned along the way with fledgling participants and a large dose of patience for questions you have answered a bunch of times before. Mentors should be relatively even keeled and only prone to fits of hyperbole when it is used for comedic absurdity. Mentors will be clearly marked as such in the Discord and can likely share some sage advice for those who seek it.

How Do I Participate

  • The first step is to fill out the Sign-Up Form for Blapril 2020 which can be found here. Only those who have signed up will be given credit towards the awards.
  • Next make sure you are active on the Blaugust Discord and the link for that can be found here. This is the third year we have been active on Discord and it is a community that has managed to stay evergreen throughout the years. Maybe even share your content each day in the appropriately named “share-your-content” channel.
  • When you share your content on social media please use the hashtag #Blapril2020 for tracking purposes and to make it easier for those watching the event to find fresh content.
  • Mingle with your other Mentors and Participants because this is a community event, and part of the fun is getting to know the community. These folks represent a social structure that you can lean on for advice in the coming years. I personally deeply value my ties with other bloggers that I have built up over the last decade of doing this thing.
  • If you are so inclined there is a “gaming-together” channel on Discord for impromptu grouping in various games while the event is going on.
  • Welcome to Blapril 2020 as we use the power of internet togetherness to help combat those negative side effects of social distancing.
  • If you want an archive of all of the various logos and such, check out the Media Kit page which is the final resting place of all Blaugust and now Blapril related media.