its Everquest -- for Legends!

So, I wasn't fully tuned in to this Everquest Legends release that happened just a few days ago. I mean, I saw the e-mail from Daybreak and skimmed a few blogposts (enough to know Tipa was playing). I even logged on to Twitch and watched several streamers play for about 20 minutes. I hate to admit this, but watching the Twitch streams bored me enough that I thought I wouldn't play the game (it just wasn't that exciting to watch despite the personalities). I'm blaming Tipa. Talking to her over Discord about the game really pushed me over the edge . . . mmmm . . . and also realizing I could play an Iksar Beastlord sealed the deal.

Funny enough, I made a Stingite Sleestak T-shirt about a month ago. I took my favorite screenshot of my Beastlord standing in the Plane of Time, had AI add in my warder pet and make the wording, then used Ninja DTF transfers to make a quality heat transfer. 

STINGITE SHIRT!

Twenty bucks plus a free month of sub time seemed the perfect price point, so, while wearing my Stingite Sleestak shirt, I began my journey back in Norrath ... in an all-new way! At first I was confused. I thought you played as three separate characters ... kind of like multiboxing or playing with henchmen in actual Everquest. Wrong! No this is much crazier and actually part of what makes this experience so unique. You MULTICLASS! WHAT?! Gosh dang it's so cool.

LOL, that face . . . I need updated graphics STAT

So when I was playing EQ, I started my experience as a high elf cleric because it's what my friends needed. Eventually the Beastlord class released and Stingite became my new number one character. Listen, you have no idea how many times I wished that as a Beastlord I could separate tightly packed in enemies with a Calm spell. Now it's possible. CRAZY!

Single pulling Dervish Cutthroats like a boss!

If that last paragraph made sense to you, you probably played Everquest. You see, in Everquest, the aggro radius of nearby enemies was always scary for me. It was meant to be that way because Everquest was a game made for group play (even though as a Beastlord I could pull off solo play). Each person had a role. Clerics can help lower the aggro radius of those tightly packed enemies making pulls of enemies much less dangerous, something I knew I could do with my cleric, but not with my Beastlord.

As ridiculous as it sounds, sometimes I would even log on my cleric, debuff enemies with calm, log back on as a beastlord, and then take my chances that the debuff hadn't worn off. 

So, long story short, in Evequest Legends you can mix and match the abilities of any three classes (well, only two until you reach level 10 -- then it's three). That's crazy cool! I'm so on board for that kind of synergy! Now that I'm playing as a Beastlord Cleric Shadowknight, I can have a cool pet, heal with efficiency, Harm Touch, nuke, and pull. Ridiculous! 

My old lack of experience here is that I really don't know that much about playing as a Shadowknight. You know, now that I think about it, I kind of doubt that a regular Joe schmo would understand even how to play this game. It feels like this game was built for the old Legends who used to play Everquest 26 years ago, like me. Not saying a regular Joe schmo can't play this game, just that the learning curve is going to be kind of steep and probably less enjoyable. I feel it, and I spent YEARS playing this game. Anyway, for now, I'm loving the retro fun and being a new legend in the old world of Everquest.

Happy dueling!

I made a comic book for my D&D Group

I briefly mentioned this at the beginning of last month, but as I was cataloging my new D&D group's journeys, I started to get the idea that I could produce a kind of comic book. The goal wasn't to mass distribute it and sell it on shelves, but rather I just wanted to hand them out to these new friends I had made.

It all started with a blog that I called Thotham's Journal. As most know, keeping notes and writing about your D&D character's adventures isn't anything new. I (and countless others) have done it a bunch before, and in fact my old DM encouraged it by handing out Heroic Inspiration for anyone willing to write about their journey. Because of that, it became almost second nature -- of course I'm going to write about my adventures!

I was also using AI to produce pictures to go along with the blog posts. (I've already discussed my struggles with AI art at length.) I didn't really need help with the writing department, but what I did use AI for was to stop me from being so long winded. It was not uncommon for me to throw down 750 to 1,000 words to describe a play session, and honestly, once I started looking at making a comic book, that just wasn't going to work. So I also asked AI to condense my posts down to about 350 to 400 words so they would still be readable and fit on one page.

When I first had the idea, I actually tried to make a standard comic book out of our adventures because one play session really could have been stretched out into one entire comic, but explaining word bubble orientation, keeping character details straight, and directing character positioning is actually pretty hard to do with AI. It's like I'd describe a small change I'd want done to an otherwise great looking comic page spread, and it would just bungle and change a handful of other things in the process. 

So I went back to my original thought, which was . . . hey, current AI may not do great making comic page spreads, but it is actually pretty good at making simple storyboard panels! It reminded me of the old Prince Valiant comics in the newspaper from when I was a kid. They worked kind of similarly in that there weren't really word bubbles, instead it was a lot of text with storyboard pictures. THAT, AI could pull off.

Once I had all my storyboards made and words condensed down to 350-400 words per page, I could have a page of text on the left and a storyboard picture on the right as you thumbed through the comic book. The inside cover was a tribute to the players of the game, the game store for hosting, and the GM for making the adventure. The first page was my character as a level one Rogue. The back inside cover was my character now as a level 4 soul knife rogue. 

When I was at a local bookstore I had seen a number of local comics for sale and on the back of several of them was a company called Ka-blam. When I was searching for a printer, Ka-blam was in fact one of the top results and looked to be a great company to work with. I love that they will cut some of your costs by letting you put their ad on the back page of your comic book. 

To be honest, they were amazing to work with. I had used AI once again to try and produce my full pdf, and as per usual, AI had bungled a lot of the finer details like continuity between pages and keeping enough safe space between art and edges per the template that Ka-blam had provided. They contacted me before printing and raised some concerns about the art being too close to the edge.

At that point I took all the artwork to Microsoft PowerPoint and placed the pages by hand because I had had enough of messing around with AI to try and get the last bit done. After exporting the .pdf, I sent it back to Ka-blam, and a few days later they had printed out 12 high-gloss copies of my comic book and shipped it to me for around $55.

Honestly, I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out, and being able to hand these out to the other players and the DM as a gift to commemorate our adventures felt really satisfying. I guess more than anything, I'm happy I learned so much about the process of just printing and preparing a comic along the way. Perhaps if I had $1,000 to pay a really good artist on Fiverr to make a comic book for me, I'd do it, but this was good for what it was: a fun commemorative item and a learning experience.

Happy Dueling!

Asian Buffet with a side of Cancer

Happy start of Blaugust!  I don't know why I signed up for this. It's not like I don't have a billion other things going on right now, and I usually don't sign up unless I'm dead set on posting EVERY FREAKIN' DAY. That may be different this year. We shall see.

For today, I don't know, just thought I'd talk a bit of real life. I posted to my friends on Facebook a couple days ago, just a random goofy video.

"I've been watching a lot of Mullet Review lately, and when my co-worker magically found a coupon for City Buffet in Roy, it felt like . . . serendipity? kismet? synchronicity? My co-workers and I went there for lunch and I went there for the memes. (I'm really not going to eat at this same buffet until I get food poisoning.) Thankfully, I did not get food poisoning. I did eat waaaaay too much, however. On Yelp this has 3.3 stars, on Google it had 4.2 stars. I'm leaning 4.2 stars! We gooning and there was pizza!  Side note: Tomorrow is chemo day!  Wish me luck!"

As it turns out . . . it WASN'T chemo day yesterday. My oncologist told me that we're just going to go back to regular immunotherapy for now and that the 3 (4 with a break) rounds of my 2nd cycle of Chemo should have accomplished what he wanted to do with it, which is kick start my immune system again to continue fighting the cancer.

I fully thought I might have 3 more rounds of Chemo to look forward to (or dread) this time around. I was incredibly upset that the cancer came back, but I'm starting to realize that this is going to be kind of my new normal for a while.

While my goal may be NED (No evidence of disease), the reality is (so far) I'm in it for a long fight where we do this stuff . . . bounce back and forth, trying to control and contain. Wait for new treatments. Try new stuff. Fight it off as long as we can. It's in the lining of my lung and it's a sneaky type of cancer.

Long story short, I'm not going to feel like crap next week. Immunotherapy is pretty chill in comparison. I might be a little tired, but I'm not going to be poisoned (whether from chemo or Asian Buffet).

Thanks for reading, and go get some Asian Buffet -- do your own Mullet Review for the day!

Happy Dueling!