elanya

In my continuing quest to conquor the internet, I present to you episode three of the Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Let's Play I've been recording with longpig and wererogue!



Let us know what you think!

In other news, someone is trying to convince my lunch friends to make a podcast of our meandering conversations :p Today's topics included cannibalism, shipwrecks, infant mortality, and Middle Eastern travel. We'd just have to edit out all the silences where everyone is knitting quietly ;p

In other news, I stayed up late-ish last night playing Monaco with folks and it was super fun! Then I dreamed I was playing a different video game I invented in my brain. I don't remember all the details, sadly, but it involved finding and punching meteors that were infected with evil alien spores. When you punched the 'soft' spots, they would deflate back down to their regular size You had to punch them to stop them from getting to earth, I think? And I/the main character was the son of some kind of space admiral? My brain is awesome, guy, I just thought you should know.

The Second episode of the Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Let's Play I've been doing with my sister and BiL is now up for your viewing pleasure! Check that shit out, yo!




I don't know why wererogue decided to put in a pre-intro intro on there, but hey - watch us mock his terrible parkour skills before we get on with shit ^-^

YAY!

To counteract all the various minor furstrations of the past few days, I have had a lot of good things happen today!

For one - I am going to be posting two stories today! One is for Remix Madness, so it won't go live until....Sunday I think? But it amuses me, anyway. And smoene actually remixed one of my fics too :o

For another - my new shoes shipped! \o/

And finally, the first Zeroth (?) episode of the Assassin's Creed IV Let's Play I'm doing with wererogue and longpig went live tonight :D Future episodes will be shorter - we were still getting our shit together here ;p



From the youtube page description:

"Join Edward Teach as he takes you on a journey through the Golden Age of Piracy, as told by Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, and picked apart by your hosts Dr. Elanya, Longpig and wererogue.

Edward Teaches History is a Let's Play of Assassin's Creed 4, focusing on how it compares to the known history of the era, and deviating into game design, technology and your Mom."

But I think it should be Join Edward Kenway, hmmm. Although Teach is in it, eventually! And the pun was too terribad to pass up ^-^

I had a good night last night, more or less. Whoever left work before me set the alarms wrong, so they went off when I came upstairs, which was annoying. I went to the grocery store, which was annoyingly busy, and then the buses were running a little weird, so it was 6 by the time I got home. But! Then I made enchiladas! A first for me. I had a recipe that flamebyrd linked me for Yam and Black Bean Enchiladas. Only I'm in Texas, so I cheated and bought a jar of mole paste. That's pronounced mo-lay, or molé, and has nothing to do with burrowing mammals, I assure you. I also accidentally got white maize tortillas instead of whole wheat, because I can't read, apparently. I wound up adding a can of crushed tomatoes to the mole to give it a little more body, and once I'd used up all my chopped yam/sweet potato/whatever mix (I got a little over 2cups from one, and it seemed wasteful to cut open a second), I made a few more out of some pulled pork I had in the freezer. And then I covered the lot of it with shredded Monterrey Jack :D

They turned out pretty well, though I'd have preferred the wheat tortillas because they have structural integrity that the corn ones lack. But overall pretty tasty, and I wold definitely make them again!

After that I got set up with longpig and wererogue to record the first bit of the let's play, which, at the very least, *we* had a lot of fun with! We want to build up a backlog of them and check some other stuff before we post them anywhere, but I'll let you know!

After that, I picked up my dog, and returned to chat briefly with naryrising who had just gotten back from a long day at work followed by a long snowy drive home, at which point we both decided that bedtime was in order.

Excite! I slept really well last night, at least, and Jola got up on the bed and slept beside me after I got up once around 2:30 (usually it is 3:30, but I was in bed an hour early ;p), and stayed there all night :3 This morning I am all awake and alert and trying to think through some interesting work things that have come up in the past few days dealing with identification of some mother of pearl glass/satin pearlglass objects, and fluorescent glass...

So, tonight, I am going to be watching a video of my BiL, wererogue play through the first part of Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, while three of us (I, my sister, and he) talk about it. We're making a Let's Play! And I'm super excited!

Video Game Let's Play's are a big part of online videogame culture, which is a very heavily male-weighted (but certainly not exclusive) thing. I've never been comfortable with the idea that men don't do fanworks, or not transformative ones, or that if they do they're a minority. My general observation tends to be, as we discussed in the last ficthropology episode, that this production is still gendered, in that men and women who do fanworks on the whole are approaching them very differently. Of course you get crossover, and I would definitely not go as far to say that men have a monopoly on more technological expressions, because vidding is a largely female section of fandom and it involves a lot of technological skills, and of course podficcing is a largely female enterprise as well. I don't think the pattern translates to a huge divide, but I do think it is there and it is something I am curious about, in the general way I am curious about fandom from an anthropological perspective. Fandom is so just broad, and fascinating!

So, I'm really curious to see... a number of things as regards this project. Both me and my sister will be commenting, but as neither of us have played the game - how will our comments be received? I'm mostly on board because of the pirates. I've never been much of a video game *player*, but I have a long history of watching people play them that goes back to the days of my youth when my dad and sister would fight over the Nintendo (Dragon Warrior 1!). I'm curious to see how we get on with this project overall, really - what will we have to say, do any of us really have the time required to pull this together technically? My podcasting experience, such as it is, has shown me how tricky it can be to get a good audio track, let along tossing video in the mix there. I'm certainly very hopeful that we do, and as state, I'm super excited to give it a shot :D

I woke up early with all these *plans* and then I sat down at the computer and now it is going on three hours later. Bah!

I had some ideas for pirate-meta that I want to write up. In addition to talking about Black Sails, I may be going to do some conversational narration stuff for an Assassins Creed IV Let's Play with my bro-in-law. I have some things I'd like to talk about for the show though specifically - anyone have any preferences as to whether I talk first about Ships, or Wrecking?

I also had some ideas for what to do with my dissertation, article wise, which is that i want to write something that is looking more just at "here is what i can tell you about Harbour Island from the archaeology I did" and leave the big question theory for something else. I did some outlining while it was still in my brain, but it is hard for me not to hop into the theory >.>

I also had an anxiety dream last night that I was totally unprepared to run the LARP I want to do for Webercon. I don't think that it was really *about* the larp, per sey, though I do need to start working on it more seriously, but more about how I am a social fraud, and of course my RL friends mostly only tolerate me, some of them actively dislike me, etc. although the people who didn't like me in the dream were not relatable to actual real people, though there were actual real people that I know appearing in the dream, so that's something :p Either I don't know who doesn't really like me or they don't exist, I'm not sure. Even in the dream I was more concerned about the people I did know being disappointed, I think? Anyway, I am really a fairly confident person, but I'm also terrible at socializing with people. I don't participate in conversations the same way, or something? I don't know. I played pool with some t=friends on Thursday and despite it being people I know I was mostly quiet while other folks were chatty, and it left me feeling a little marginal and I think this has affected my subconscious. Which I almost wrote as 'self conscious'. Oh, brain, you ain't subtle :p I do think that I am *differently* socially awkward than most of my friends, and that does make it hard for us to connect sometimes.

Anyway, I *should* start working on something. I have other things I'd like to do today, or at least this weekend, as well, like laundry, baking, maybe even *shock* tidying my room.... I can find the floor, sure, but everything else is covered in things (mostly clothes and paper) that need to be put away :p

Oh and in other fun news, we definitely have a pipe issue of some kind in the bathtub. we thought it was water getting on the floor (for a variable configuration of 'we'), but it happened (or, at least, I noticed) again today and that was definitely not the case. I emailed lukoni but I'm really not sure what the best solution is going to be :/ No showers, anyway, I suspect, until we have a better idea what's going on. Yay?

In other mild annoyances, I ordered yarn for my sweater the other day, but the company emailed to let me know that they didn't have enough skeins in the same dyelot (I had asked for them all to be the same). They were really super nice about it and offered to backorder, but that was going to take eight weeks+! (Not their fault, that's just malabrigo for you >.>). I cancelled the yarn, but am still getting needles from them, and am now yarnhunting elsewhere. Even though they didn't have what I wanted I was really pleased with their customer service and will definitely be looking at getting other things through them again.

To end on a high note, though, I did at least get my prompts all finished for the Invisible Ficathon, and I am very happy with all of them! Now I just need to finalize my offers... Aftwer I go out and get some kitty litter!