It’s a nice sentiment, anyway… but this week looks to have done a number on a handful of esoteric folks I know, and those challenges I foresaw for this year are likely starting to rear their ugly heads…
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.
I won’t speak to others, though by comparison to some friends my week was pretty tame. Mostly I’ve just been increasingly focused on my actual day job, and the work work work there I need to keep a strong bit of focus on for the foreseeable future. If that sounds vague, good. All that’s got nothing to really do with this site… publicly anyway…
Still, I’ve tried to keep my nose to the grindstone and spend those wee hours of the morning working on the rest. So I buckled down and finished up the final edits on Blackspire Episode 19 which is due out on iTunes the first week of March. These last two episodes were the ones where we had all those recording drop offs during game play and we ended up having to create an episode “19.5” to fill in those gaps and redo some scenes. I hated having to do it, but I think overall the final two episodes that comprise the “Aiming High While Lying Low” story line have a pretty good flow considering, and there were a few scenes in there I’d long been looking forward to matching to music, and hopefully the end result is fun.
Anyway, that’s as caught up as I can get so far without a bit more material recorded, and we are also fast running out of recorded gaming sessions, so we’ll look to record one or more in March as well if we can.
Also, our month-long hiatus of podcast releases for both Adventure Hook and Blackspire is over this week with the release of Aaron and my latest: Episode 18: The New Land on the Horizon.
This one kinda had a bunch of different interesting ideas throughout, but we ended up gravitating towards a Planescape approach to the story, as well as tying it in to a published (classic) adventure within the Tales from the Yawning Portal D&D source book.
This is interesting, as we ended up making that the entire crux of Episode 20, which Aaron and I also recorded this week. I was on a tear, determined to get the editing responsibilities for that episode off my plate ASAP, so I buckled down and finished both the edits and the show notes/links for that episode. It’s a fun, solid episode, and had a number of topics (namely “characters with flaws”) that I’d like to revist again in another episode perhaps… I just want to get my thoughts in order about what we didn’t discuss this time.
And now that “Season Two” of Adventure Hook is upon us, in the interest of both expediency (and perhaps thoroughness) I’ve taken over responsibility of manning our d20 lists of episode suggestions (made using the hashtag #newadventurehook) and Critical Failures (submitted using #CritFail).
We’ve really had a number of outsider suggestions to fill out most of the list at this point, but with each new episode we need a new suggestion, so if you have one let us know..!
Send us your best ideas for adventure hooks and they could end up the topic of a future show! https://t.co/dFwaVE3bff
— Adventure Hook (@adventure_hook) February 12, 2019
Aaron is also talking about switching to recording a live stream on like Discord or Twitch to serve as our Patreon-only content (replacing the pre-recorded Legend Lore) and I suppose its worth a shot. He’s wanting us to explore a complete Ravenloft redux for Curse of Strahd by revisiting the original 1-3 edition content that was left out of 5th. Could be interesting (and easier) and worth experimenting with, anyway.
Jenny and I were also quite pleased that our old friend Rick was in town this week, and crashed at our place for the weekend. It was great to catch up as we hadn’t seen him since he moved to Raleigh last year… plus we never miss an excuse to visit our favorite Thai place (which is always a big hit).
Our cat Crowley, either didn’t want him to leave, or wanted to go home with him (which I suppose is unsurprising given that Rick “wrote the book” about his namesake).
And before he left, Jenny also made a gift of one of her staves for him to take home, which prompted Rick to coin her the nickname “The Martha Stewart of the Occult” which Jenny has now fully embraced…!
And finally, my YouTube Channel hit 555 subscribers, so I tried once again to tackle the video edits on my Magick 202 – The Formula of Ritual lecture so I can have more to release for anyone wanting more…
Now… while I now have technically finished the edits of the Part 1 of that talk in Lightworks… for some inexplicable reason I can’t seem to export anything but the vocal track under a black screen.
NO VIDEO!!!
Now, I’m sure it’s some sorta issue with frame rates, or conflicting file types, or the fact I’m only using the free version… but no tutorial or help forum I’ve found thus far hasn’t helped be riddle out why my video editor can’t make videos. It had for the previous lectures, I don’t know what could possibly be different here, but what do I know..?
The damn if the thing is so glitchy it crashes half a hundred times each time I try to use it… and I had this computer built specifically so I could use programs like this. 8 gigs should have been enough… and now my continued attempts to “fix” the video has started making changes to the original edits that can’t just be undone.
It’s become frustrating to the point where I just had to turn it off and abandon the project for now. Maybe I can figure out a solution somehow, but for now I seriously can’t endorse the Lightworks v14.5 free version, even if all you want to do is make YouTube videos… which is basically the only thing the free version can do… theoretically…
Maybe I’ll have better news on this front soon… but the Part 2 of The Formula of Ritual (of course) doesn’t even have a video portion to it (which may be better or worse depending) but there’s no point in putting the (exorbitantly) extra work into making the (who knows how) many slides it’d take to make that video work if I can’t even get the Part 1 out.
Like I said… obstacles are going to be common this year.
Stay strong.
Keep focused.
Remember.
Tuesday 2/12/19-
Sun: Aquarius–
Moon: Taurus (50% Waxing)
If you’d like to start from the “beginning” of all this… you can read from my first blog post.
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.
Write a SIGIL for success for the ritual video that is giving you problems (dragons). My SIGIILS have had great results. I am up to #22 so far. I even wrote ✏️ one for a friend that needed some healing…that was not feeling up to doing it himself. [MAGIK by proxy?] I’ll say a little proxy / prayer for you if you like…?
Many thanks! We can all use a little help now and again, and “technology dragons” have plagued me most of my life (which makes me feel it’s somehow my doing… though I’m still not sure how). I’m glad you’ve been having such success with your sigils, I may follow your advice on this, but I’ll take some prayers too.