It's quite sad that I've got an apt chance to use that old pun/joke in a title, but it is well and truly appropriate as there's no other way of saying it; I've dropped the ball again on blogging.

This blog was designed to be daily.

I ran the blog daily, sometimes more than once daily, for...well it started slipping some time in 2021 so like...6-6.5 years?

What the hell happened to me where what I did without fail religiously for 6, maybe six and a half, years, suddenly became something I'm lucky to not slip up on?

I kinda suck.

That said.

At least I've been fairly productive.

I literally did a ten hour stream yesterday.

TEN hour stream!

Granted. Quality wasn't high at the start and tanked after my family got up.

But ten hours of streaming is like...a lot.

Granted, it's not without consequences.

For our Thanksgiving celebration today, I ended up getting only ~3 hours of sleep, and not the highest of quality sleep because I slept in the room everyone was talking in, with all the noises of phone calls, cleaning, etc.

While tiredness isn't an issue for me, potential sickness is.

I made a bit of a miscalculation when I streamed that long:
I thought that the main issue with me not getting a good night's sleep would be things like,
Throwing off my sleep schedule;
Making me dead tired;
Making me exhausted;
Messing with my circadian rhythm;
Things like that, where I would struggle with lucidity, but otherwise be fine and recover quickly.

Turns out that I forgot the most important thing sleep is for:
Keeping you from getting sick.

I didn't get zero sleep, so I might not get sick, but I need to be really careful.

It doesn't matter how little contact I've had with things that could make me sick; if I don't get the bare minimum amount of sleep my body needs, it can succumb to illnesses that it by all rights should have great ease in repelling just by virtue of the body needing sleep to combat sickness.

So, uhhhh...oops?

I am many things; smart is not among them.

That's also a contributing factor to me being unable to stream tonight.

I also have labwork tomorrow, at a scheduled time.
Which means that I have to get up at a certain time--earlier, if I want a shower, too!

I might've been able to stream if it was just one of these two, but added up, probably both smarter and safer not to, both for my body's health and​ for safety tomorrow.

Is unfortunate, but hey, we all make mistakes sometimes and must live with the consequences of them--in my case, being that I need to take extra self-care steps tonight to prevent issues down the line.

​Sometimes, being responsible sucks.

Let's just say that if I manage to actually get this blog through, it'll be a blessing...
Among the many​ other issues I've had.

I can get a bit grumpy when playing TFT and go on rants, but the rants help me feel less tilted at the game and when I can say what I am doing without bitterness in my voice, it's a wonderful thing to do.

And, hey! We reached a new high tonight!

Still not at Platinum, but we're at Gold I again, at 38 LP!

It's mostly been off the back of Academy comps with a side of Yordle comps. Now, I'd like to emphasize: I don't try to force those comps. In fact, I prefer not to, because I know that they are highly contested. It's just that often, I legit don't have any other choice.

I've had absolute garbage luck at rand'ing Void mutants and the few times I did, I either didn't have the items for Cho'gath or couldn't get mutants on my bench early enough to run it so was forced to run other things.

Because if given the choice, I would run Mutants every game just because they're my favorite comp.

I've also had a lot of rotten luck in general mind you, but not running my favorite comp is among the least of the unluckiness I have had.

Still, tho, new high is exciting!

I've fallen down in the latter in spite of it being a new high tho.

I was in, what, top 5% before?

Now it's top 9% in spite of being at a higher LP--because it took me too long to get there.

We'll see if I can get into Platinum and if that helps me.

​But that'll wait until tomorrow. As it's 7:30, I need bed.

Sorry.

Probably still won't be much of a blog but that's more due to the fact that I'm not really sure how to make the thoughts into my head become a proper blog, but hey, at least it's already better than yesterday!

Anyway, today went quite well. Work, I didn't feel incompetent but I do know that I can become more competent than I am. After I came home from work, I worked on my Civ 3 mod. I went from ~40% finished on the second era tech tree to maybe-possibly-100% done on the second era tech tree? (It's hard to tell for sure, and will probably require more tweaks, especially in positioning. Techs' appearance can change based on the civ being played thanks to what units they get.)

It seems like it's mostly flowing as I want it to (although there's a couple spots that are basically impossible to rectify so I will need to figure out how to edit the background of the tech tree to put in the arrows in the needed places).

I think that I got the units placed in ways such that while it's not necessarily mandatory to get the prerequisite unit, it is far easier and earlier to get. That having been said, I do need to tweak the tech tree's technology cost, because right now it's fairly universally the same value which may be too high or too low, I honestly don't know.

This actually puts me within striking distance of getting the tech tree entirely finished though. (Well aside from detail work like exact pixel positions, technology value, etc.)

Since I am updating the buildings and units as I am creating the tech trees due to needing them there to help visualize the optimal layout for the techs (I'll obviously need to double-check this though to make sure they're accurate), that means that when I complete the tech tree, 1/3 of the hardest parts of the mod will be complete!

Now, granted.

The hardest-or-second-hardest (hard to tell if it's the hardest or the second hardest), building the map, might spell the death of the project if my idea for how to build the map ends up not being something that I can actually do. (My basic plan for the map is to start the geography looking close to the Rome scenarios, but modifying it to accommodate for all of the cities from all of the scenarios--including making room for cities that are identical but owned by two different civs in two different scenarios, e.g. Londinium being at least a few blocks from London. There will be some limits to this, obviously; the Turks aren't going to have Istanbul next to the Greek Byzantium/Constantinople for instance. But by and large, mostly, I want to have all the civs have all their cities from scenarios, within reason.)

Even if that doesn't kill the project, the second-hardest-or-hardest very well could. The civilopedia will need a complete and total overhaul, top to bottom, of literally everything. And I do mean, everything. Every Wonder/Building/Unit will need to have entries created (not to mention, have their BLDG/PRTOs adjusted from their current defaults into actually more suited ones).

But it doesn't stop there.

Governments need to have their entries be accurate.

Resource pages need to have their values be correct.

And then every concept needs to be updated, with some outright created.

The map is a daunting, perhaps impossible, task, of making a map that actually manages to encompass the entirety of what I am hoping to create.

But the civilopedia, the thing needed to make my mod actually playable without being the mod's creator (and even then I often have to refer to my notes and am not entirely 100% positive), is definitely going to take me the most time.

This mod as a whole, I've been working on for a couple months by now, probably have sunk like ~30-60 hours on it so far.

The civilopedia work will at least double that if not triple it before I get close to finished.

Of course, once I get the civilopedia work finished, the mod is actually in playable format. It could use a lot of detail work to do. I want to, for the first time ever, put in the art for the buildings so that the building art is what it should be. (I think I know how to do this in theory, but I was really hoping that I could be lazy and just copy someone else's work, like I did for the "all resource icons" one. Alas, no such luck.)

I need to figure out how to do the Science Advisor's Tech Tree descriptions.

If I can, I need to figure out how to modify the opening screen message that you get. (I never could figure that out before.)

I believe that, as this is technically a modified Rise of Rome, my advisors and units-with-multiple-eras are all set to have their ancient era art for all four eras. I need to modify that to be my intent (ancient, medieval x 2, then final era as industrial art).

And I want to add in extra music. I want normal-vanilla-game ancient-era music in the rotation for the ancient era, for the Medieval Era to have the Medieval Era scenario music but to keep the ancient-era music (including the general Conquest theme song) in the rotation and add in the standard Medieval Era music from the normal vanilla game, and to have the final era have the extra music beyond that.

That aside from how I have a couple of easter eggs that I want to program in. One, a near-impossible unit to achieve, something theoretically buildable but which is pragmatically nearly impossible to pull off, and yet it being basically an instawin cheat code for anyone who does go through the ridiculous trouble of getting it to actually work.

The other, 2-4 barbarian encampments which have 5 (slightly nerfed in bombard range as a precaution) elite-experience versions of said easter egg unit, each. As in, 10/20 total, on barbarian huts at the corners of the map, surrounded by ocean (as to make sure the barbarian units cannot actually leave their encampment), designed to be raid bosses of sorts.

The units in question have maximum bonus health, maximum attack, maximum defense, maximum bombard, maximum bombard rate, maximum movement, long bombard range, blitz, lethal land/sea, and enslave (with enslave creating a copy of themselves), making taking so much as one down a fairly hard feat (at least in theory, it might be easier in practice than I give credit for).

So the mod is progressing along quite nicely, but it's still far from even 50% complete I'd say.

If I got the map complete, including all civilizations with all their cities and all their city improvements/wonders and all their starting units and the tech tree values appropriately set? I'd call the mod probably ~50% complete.

But as-is we're probably less than 25% complete.

Still, tho. Is fun to work on it and if I keep it up, if the big hard-to-achieve things don't kill the mod, it will get done, and it will be something that I will then proceed to show off.

I am, after all. A streamer now.

I have a streaming schedule and everything!

Now, granted.

I'm a variety streamer and that means I get 0 viewers because streaming variety is not the way to grow your channel.

And I stream at a time that nobody else is awake, meaning even the people who normally might want to (friends, associates, etc.) literally can't because they are asleep. Meaning 0 viewers because streaming at a time nobody is awake is not the way to grow your channel.

My hope is that, eventually, I can settle into mostly doing a single viewer-dense but streamer-light game that I genuinely have fun playing, which would then set me up for success big time because if I am doing the same thing, at the same time, every time, and am streaming at a time nobody else is streaming, then that means I have a fairly high chance of viewers stopping by and maybe staying because the few viewers who would be awake at that time would want to find the game content they're looking for. (Dead by Daylight would be an amazing game for this as, me following basically every DBD streamer, I know for a fact nobody streams DBD at that time because literally all the DBD streamers are either asleep at that time or streaming a non-DBD game at that time. Alas, I don't own DBD and I'm not even sure I'd have fun playing it even if I did.)

But for now, lacking that, I do whatever I want. I streamed me going through my blog twice! And recently, have streamed pretty heavily TFT.

Speaking of which...I was within striking distance of Platinum IV as of my last stream (Gold I 29 LP), but then I played yesterday and...well, let's just say, I ended up falling to barely Gold III. (21 LP if I recall correctly.) Well, another reason I feel pretty good today is that I've mostly recovered. I'm not quite back to where I was (still Gold II but at like 89 LP or so), but I got basically exclusively wins today which was much-needed since yesterday was basically nothing but losses.

I'm not going to make it before Tuesday, so there might be a patch requiring me to re-learn everything. (This was why I even played on Sunday to begin with: I wanted to get into Platinum IV before the new patch, so that I could spend time learning the new patch without tanking my rank. Alas, if the patch is tomorrow, that's not happening. It might not be tomorrow, mind you, depends on Riot Games' schedule honestly, but if it is I failed. If it isn't, still got plenty of time, but we'll see after I'm home from work tomorrow.)

Still tho. While it's at least 1-2 more wins away than it was when I last streamed, I still consider myself within striking distance of Platinum IV. And even if the patch is tomorrow, there's no guarantee that the comps I best know how to run get hit. I'm afraid they will be because I am a dirty filthy Mutant spammer in 60-80% of my games (Void makes every Mutant a carry; Omnivamp makes your whole team a carry; the increase in combat makes all mutants carries; the increase after allies die makes all mutants carries; the only times I don't abuse Mutants are the Cybernetic mutants which limit carries to Kai'sa and Kog'maw with a side of Mundo, and the mana-reduction which gets the most mileage out of non-mutant units having 20 less mana e.g. Lux + blue buff + mutant) so I imagine the mutant comp is going to get gutted when the next patch rolls out.

But if it doesn't, then hey...I might actually be better off. If the strategies being used at the highest level aren't the strategies *I* am using, then I am probably fine.

We'll have to see.

​Anyway, I've gotta eat dinner and then go to bed so wrapping this up now.

No blog tonight.

I got the entirety of the Rise of Rome era done in my Civ 3 mod and am ~40% done with the Middle Ages section of it (a lot of the specifics for units needs to be set and ordering the techs is also something I need to figure out so it'll take me some time to do), although it comes with the caveat that I also need to look into how long each tech takes in my inspiration for them, so that I can set better times for all the techs. (Mostly middle ages, but a couple in Rise of Rome may need tweaking, too.)

And I streamed! For basically a record length for me. I also continued to climb in TFT, and am within striking distance of Platinum IV! (Gold I 29 LP as of my last match.)

I also did a lot of stuff right.

I will however be failing at setting a good schedule as it is almost 9 am, and this being Saturday, I go to bed early on Saturday meaning I basically have zero time tomorrow. Plus probably won't do much hygiene care.

Whoops!

Ah well.

Also, I beat Kingdom! That was also a thing, survived all 100 days, then destroyed the last portal.

Good times to be had, and productive, just...well, not perfect. And I DO need to be better.

I got an endocrinology appointment set up.
I might be able to get my overdue labs done.
I shouldn't run out of my medication.
I stayed on top of a lot of stuff today like a shower.
I managed to stream even though I was literally half a thought from giving up and not streaming tonight.

So like.

While I didn't get a ton done, I still got a lot done.

I am progressing. Not as fast as I want to, but I am moving forward.

...None of which will be done.
I'm already 50 minutes late to start my stream so...

Just, not much. I've been feeling both short on time and dead tired for the last couple of hours, even though it's only now 3 am.

I've put in some plans for things, done a little bit here and there, but not committed to doing much of anything.

I did some work on my civ 3 mod again, tackling the tech tree. It's, well...right now a total mess, because restructuring everything to get it right will take a looooot of time.

Restructuring the tech tree is probably the third-largest part of the project, behind updating the civilopedia (second) and building the map (number one). So, it's...going to take a long time to actually get right. My notes are reasonably good, but not perfect, and I need to refer to the base scenario for some better idea of unit placements with me keeping things to where they should be.

Probably best to tackle that after sleep tho, so did as much as I could tonight, and probably going to bed.