Starfleet's Newest Cadet!

That would be myself: Cadet VelvetKey!

I've been talking about the Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup group on Ravelry.  One of the other NQFY (Not Quite First Year) students named Becktrek also mentioned that there was a similar Star Trek group!

The Starfleet Fiber Arts Corps!

Their current tour of duty is also underway, so folks like me that join up but miss the enlistment period are taken on as cadets at Starfleet Academy.  We post all of our missions in a single, different thread, and we don't earn points for our ships.

But we do get assigned to ships for role-play and funsies!

Thus, I am Cadet VelvetKey of the U.S.S. Zimmermann!

(That's the header I have to put at the top of all of missions.)

The very first project I did for the SFAC was my "Brig" challenge, which is just like Detention at Hogwarts: finishing an older project you didn't start in the current month.

I had to have it done for a weekend vacation coming up in early March, so I wouldn't have to pay shipping.  However, every time you turn in a mission (just like Hogwarts) you have to provide an explanation of how it fits the prompt (or just tell an amusing story that would totally take place in the Star Trek universe).

Here's the posts I did for the Brig:

VelvetKey does her best to straighten to attention in front of the commodore, with her writing utensil still in her mouth.

Commodore, might I ask a question? Are prisoners in the Brig only eligible for rehabilitation if they were originally part of a mission? You see, I have this little side study I was working on before I enrolled at the Academy…a study of probability theory and the significance of the number twenty…and I thought I might see if some time in the cooler would help its…uhm…propensity to fall apart?

Thank you for your time!

She blushes and sticks her stylus in the messy bun atop her head.

 Followed by:

Good morning instructors! I am turning in a Brig request.

Cadet VelvetKey, U.S.S. Zimmermann

As part of a study prior to my enrollment in Starfleet Academy, I was studying probabilities, the form of the icosahedron, and the significance of the number twenty. I thought to do so by obtaining twenty of the alien lifeform triangulus crocheticus and synthesizing the exact conditions it needed to achieve cellular bonding into the icosahedron form. However, I was unprepared for the mischievous nature of these lifeforms, and several escaped before I could complete the final twenty-sided form. I confined the ones I had to the brig, while rounding up the others. Finally, I recovered the remaining creatures yesterday and was able to finish my experiment:

Now that the lifeforms have stabilized in their new configuration, I am requesting their release from the Brig; I have a technician friend in Virginia who is looking forward to the second phase of this study, so I will forward the icosahedron to him with permission.

Thank you for your time, instructors.

Now, there are no badges for the Starfleet Fiber Arts Corps, but I'd get to advance in rank if I got enough projects done.  I should have the opportunity in May to sign up to be on a ship, but for now, I'll keep working on the list!  

(Number 23 and counting down!  I'm gonna need a new list!)

Video Game Reflection: Relationships

True story: I am not used to video games having relationship angles in them.

Except for the Sims.  But that's all the game is about without extra expansions, so I disqualify it.

No, I'm talking about typical hero/quest/adventure video games.  Action and adventure; swords, battle axes, shapeshifting, using the Force, whatever.

Let me back up and explain that my first ever "true" video game was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Everything before that (other than Mixed-Up Fairy Tales) was educational.

Anybody remember any of these games?

My brothers and I still have the abandonware today.

Featuring the Shady Glen television station.

Starring paint-slinging robots and math puzzles galore.

Then for Christmas, we got a new computer to replace the brick of an IBM (which only took 3.5" floppy disks (which really weren't floppy compared to the larger 5" disks the old school computers ran on)) that was my first home computer.  That shiny new machine had a CD-ROM drive and Windows 95--it was a thing of beauty!

It also game with a small binder of game discs, which included Myst by Broderbund.

The first realistic 3D game environment I'd ever encountered.

And that was how I got my love of puzzle games, and a glimpse into how games could look (as long as the game didn't have people in it--the first Myst game only had one actual person, and because of the mechanics, you couldn't move in all directions around him).

This was followed by some early internet chatrooms, which introduced me to the wider concept of MMORPGs.  The first one I ever tried was Runescape, and I made it my mission to be the best miner, smelter, and blacksmith ever without raising my combat level (as much as possible; you had to be certain levels to mine in special locations).  

I was the great ore stealer; people would assume that li'l old level 22 me would lose at the ore deposits (because the game awarded the ores to the highest mining level, which was also affected by equipment) when they were level 80+.  Mwahaha!  

Apparently, I'm an early internet troll.

But imagine what it was like for me when in college, somebody gave me an N64 emulator and a bunch of different game images to play on them.  (College was in 2002, in case  you're wondering.)

I went from thinking that 3D characters looked like this:

To this:

And then of course, to this:

This is probably how I got my thing for blond elves.

Around that time, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring came out in theaters.  Besides being the deciding factor in my choice of college major, the trilogy was accompanied by the Gamecube RPG game The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age.

Do you see where this is going?

Couple that with what I was learning about tabletop games, and then the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the brand-new Wii system...well.

Now we get the gist of where my desire to play hack'n'slash characters comes from.

However, though the relationship between Link and Princess Zelda is always heavily implied (discounting all of the other ladies in the games such as Midna and Ilia), there's no real "romance" opportunities.  I thought games were supposed to be linear, for the most part, with tons of tiny side quests for bonuses and loot.

Then I entered my Dungeons and Dragons Online phase in grad school.  (There may have been some Serious Sam mixed in--I warned you about me and hack'n'slash!)  This opened my eyes to cool customizable characters.  My friends and I spent real money buying the pretty armor from the store, in whatever colors we wanted.  To me, that was the most advanced character creation I'd ever seen.

(Here I'm discounting the creation of Minecraft skins in Paint, which I've also done.)

This is Deevius and I posing in a clothing/armor shop.

But it didn't stay that way...

Another friend, who is a fellow Lord of the Rings geek, had heard that the online MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online was going free-to-play (this was a couple years ago) and we should check it out.

...yeah...

I never go into these things alone; I of course told my other geek friends what I was doing (the same ones that used to Serious Sam with me, and DDO with me) and lo and behold...we now have our own kinship and game together once a week.  (I in fact bought us all each two expansions during the Black Friday sale this year at the Turbine store.)

Now, I'd heard of other MMORPGs that have relationship options with NPCs, I think from Mike the coworker.  While LotRO does not have that mechanic in place, Deevius, DSCA and I have already divvied up the elf lords we're going to snuggle if that should ever be a possibility.

I mean, DSCA already has Elladan's pants...

Ahem.  I digress.

Around the time I began to play LotRO, I also started dating the Panda.  He was impressed that I had my own Wii.  I was impressed that a boy wanted to talk to me.  (At our small college, geek and/or nerd girls are a minority, and were somewhat frowned upon in my day.  This resulted in me bringing my Wii and television to all the on-campus parties I could.  I educated even the most sheltered of people with Mario Party 8 and Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix.)

A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

We married the summer of the year I began playing LotRO and he moved all of his gaming equipment into our house.  Now, the Panda is an only child, and he would save his money to buy each of the Nintendo gaming systems as it came out.

So, my sparse video game life suddenly exploded.

I didn't know what to do first!  (I still don't know!)

The Panda favors games such as Halo, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, and Destiny (to name a few of the lasting ones).

He brought with him a PlayStation 3--to me, a mythical device that replaced my DVD player and could also use Netflix and Amazon Video.  At first, I had no use for it; I couldn't even figure out how to play movies.

But then the Panda started playing through the Mass Effect trilogy...and suddenly I didn't care that I didn't know how to use a PS3.  I watched him interact with the characters and make decisions.

And then I watched him romance Miranda.

Well.  Two can play that game.

Yes, I do mean literally.

I would spend the nights he was at work playing the Mass Effect games as (of course) FemShep.  The first time Kaidan made a move on her, I didn't see it coming and I turned him down flat.  (The only options in ME1 are Kaidan and Liara.)  I was too busy mastering the mechanics of a type of game I'd never played before to complicate FemShep's life with another person.

Also, thanks in part to my roleplaying game background, I had already begun to put together a probably backstory for my FemShep (other than her Spacer, Hero chosen requirement).  Her inspiration came a tiny bit from Honor Harrington, David Weber's character and the subject of over a dozen space navy books (toward the end they get a little ridiculous).

Anyway, Velvet Shepard's backstory included at least one failed shipboard romance, likely early in her Alliance career.  It was likely very hurtful, and possibly detrimental to her career, and it could have taken some interference from higher-ups for her to get out of that situation.  (Details unclear--read my fanfic.)  Needless to say, she resolved never to date within the Alliance chain of command ever again.

So my Shepard went on her way, trying and failing to be a good Infiltrator (I do not have the steady hands to use a sniper rifle at all).  My go-to team for ME1 was Wrex and Garrus.  I loved their interplay, and BioWare did a fantastic job creating a well-rounded, interesting universe.

When I find a new fandom/universe and it really, really grabs my attention I go all-out.  That means reading wikis, articles, walkthroughs, and anything else I can get my hands on.  The Lord of the Rings was the last fandom I got really entangled in.

I knew that ME2 was going to be very different from ME1, and not just because of the expanded party options (ten people?  Seriously??).  My FemShep was waking up in a changed universe, presumed dead and brought back to life by the enemy.  The first familiar face she ever saw was Garrus'.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I had already decided (based on the Panda's playthrough) that if I was going to get sidetracked by a romance, I wanted it to be with Garrus.  This didn't stop me, however, from nearly running right into Jacob's arms accidentally.  I didn't just turn him down flat, I dropped him like a hot potato (because I wasn't aware that I had picked him up--oops).

When asked why I chose Garrus, I wasn't sure why (the character is an alien) at first.  But as I did more and more of his conversation interactions, I noticed how charming and awkward he was.

Just like the Panda.

Hm.  Could be a fluke.

Well, last night I spent some time playing Dragon Age: Origin with the Panda's shared Steam library.

(Side note: this is the one time I have ever been ahead of him in a game!  I know what's coming!  My glee cannot be contained!)

Another BioWare game, Dragon Age is a medieval RPG game, but the plot is so fascinating, it's almost like a disaster you can't look away from.

Anyway, there's another awkward character, and as a female gray warden with any shred of sympathy, you could also find him charming and bashful.  Yeah, I'm talking about Alistair.

What's not to love about a man that says things like that?

The Panda finds it amusing that all my romance choices are essentially him in the games.  I think he's proud.  (I hope he's proud, at least...)

What can I say?  Bumbling charm is what does it for me.  And I don't mind the corniness because of the sincerity.

In one of the cut scenes, Alistair says something like: "Have I told you that I love you today?  Well, it doesn't matter, because it bears repeating: I love you."

My warden answered: "I love you, too."

Alistair:  "See, was that so hard?"

I had to play this part twice, and both times I yelled at Alistair for quoting the Panda.

But enough of me and my video game history.  I didn't have a craft project to share, so I thought I'd talk a little about what I did in game yesterday night, and early this morning.

Later!

Dungeons & Dragons - Crocheted!

So I faced a trying decision this year of what to do for the Panda (my husband) for his birthday.  My plans to buy him a new board game fell through when I found out we didn't have enough money for a trip to Boardwalk.

No seriously, that's the name of the game store.

...okay then.

So I checked my Paypal balance from the sales of my Minecraft crochet pattern, and I had just enough to afford the only decent dice patterns I could find, courtesy of Planet June.

Now, when I buy crochet patterns, I look for basically two things:

1.  Simple readability -- i.e. is this written in terms I can understand??

2.  Finished product sell-ability

Because really, if I'm paying you more than $2 for your original pattern, I'd better have permission to sell what I make.  

There was one other D20 pattern (but it was only the D20, not an entire dice set like Planet June offered in her original pattern plus the expansion) that I thought looked better than this one, but I couldn't sell what I made.  

And for somebody like me, who wants to provide a wonderful union of crochet and nerdiness, that was just inexcusable.

All that to say, however, that I grabbed the Panda's favorite yarn colors (previously from making PauseUnpause plushies) and made 20 teeny triangles, which I then crocheted together.  A few dashes of fabric paint, and I hung it up to dry!

The Panda was evicted from his man cave for 4 hours while the die dried (his office had the only ideal drying spot that would be out of the way).  

That evening, he was able to use his new, plushie D20 to aid in the recovery of four magic amulets, in order to free the Shardmind in our party who is currently being used as a battery to power an underground city.  (Long story.)

Everybody knows you shouldn't place your die with the 20 up.

Ah, mementos of our ongoing campaign (we have been playing since February 2014 and currently have two members participating via Google Hangouts).  That's my character sheet in the upper left corner, and those are two different maps I've created for the campaign.

(I will make the first person to identify the original source of the maps a plushie of their choice for free.)  ^_^

Have a great Tuesday!

Broken Buttons Blackbeard Blurb

(Insert appropriate phrase about saying that X amount of times fast.)

So my endeavors to equip plushie Etho with a redstone torch to carry to the SC Comicon are for the moment, foiled.  I worked extensively on his torch last night...after receiving some Skype messages in the Broken Buttons - Lore Writer chat.

As I may have previously mentioned, I wrote some blurbs for different bits of the blamethecontroller.com website and a few maps.

The Broken Buttons has now officially rolled out the new Blackbeard PvP map, available on BTC's fan server only.  It is currently builder- and member-play only while it's in beta after writing new plugins, but I'm hoping that BTC is going to ask some of the Mindcrackers to come on and horse around with it in order to do some official promo recording, and to raise awareness of the game's existence.

All that leads me back to the Skype messages last night, requesting a how-to-play script for a short video BTC was putting together.  My poor other lore writers responded quickly, but they are both in university and have mega projects and tests going on (both are from Europe, so they say 'university' instead of 'college').

Since I don't get home from work until mid-afternoon, I was the latecomer to the conversation, but I asked some questions, narrowed down the scope of BTC's request (and managed to do all of it without fangirling excessively).

Let's make one thing clear:

I am not strictly a BTC fangirl.

I am a Mindcrack fangirl.

I fangirl all Mindcrackers equally.

(Except Aureylian.  She's new.)

I think I may have told BTC in a different Skype chat that I was going to go fangirl over his latest video.  Wisely, he did not have a comeback for that.  Perhaps I should have clarified that I was going to fangirl over the fact that my pixel art design is now on the Mindcrack Server.

My Minecraft username might not go down in infamy, but...how cool is that anyway?!

But I digress.

(Oh, here's the pixel art:)

(Now I really am getting back to the main point.)

So, script!  BTC needed a script for a video.  I referred back to my MineCon Map script from last year, and went to work.  It ended up looking something like this:

INTRODUCTION

Begin at spawn, where new players will automatically appear when they join the server for the first time.

BTC: Hey guys, I’m BTC and this is a quick introduction to the Broken Buttons’

newest minigame map, Blackbeard.

Blackbeard is a multi-player PvP map where the Royal Navy and the

Pirate Crew are battling to collect enough gold for their team to win.  

The address for the server is MC.BLAMETC.NET, and the server is

running Minecraft 1.7.5.

Text for the server address should appear on the screen.  (Recommend a nautical/pirate-style such as lowercase Blackadder ITC.)

BTC: To find Blackbeard once you join the server, follow the signs

from spawn and jump through the portal, which teleports you to the

Blackbeard lobby.

Footage switches to the lobby area of Blackbeard, or jump into the portal.

LOBBY

BTC: A full game hosts 20 players, and team selection is random.  Every time

an instance fills up, a new one begins, so there’s no waiting for a match to

finish.

Consider doing a wide-angle, panning shot of the lobby.

INSIDE THE GAME

Perhaps open with a few select fly-over clips to show the general terrain and the three main landmarks.

BTC: Winning the game sounds easy; the team that collects ten gold ingots first

is victorious!

(It's all very script-y and straightforward, etc., etc.)  So we'll see how that goes; there haven't been any changes to the script so far (I've left it open for the other lore writers and BTC to make changes or leave suggestions) and there weren't any messages left on Skype this morning saying good/bad yea/nay.

There was a link to the forums of a new person requesting a lore writer application.  Thaliest was awesome enough to point her in the right direction, and I posted the old lore writer app for her to refer to.

Hmmm...not much else happening.  D&D session tonight.  Need to plan that.

(Don't tell my players that the GM is still unsure what evil things she's going to do to them tonight.)

Until tomorrow, or even Sunday (depending on the con?) adieu!

Thursday Catch-Up

Wow, well there goes my goal to blog every day in May (but at least I made it further than my May goal from last year...).

So much happening this week!  Tuesday I was called in for jury duty (in traffic court, which is also considered a 'magistrate court')--all located in an old brick strip mall along with with a tailor alteration shop as well as a renal care facility.  (o.O)

My poor panda husband was trying to give me directions as I'm madly circling the parking lot looking for the appropriate entrance, and then my cell phone (which has been steadily holding less and less charge) decides it has been possessed by the beep demon, so I had to hang up on him.

Anyway...there is a trip to a Verizon store in my very near future...is it too much to hope that they still offer my model of phone as a free upgrade?  My hard plastic case has protected my little Samsung Gusto for the past few years and I don't even think I ever took the protective plastic off of the screen...it'd be a shame to lose it so soon!

Then the great and craftsy Deevius came by so that we could work on re-shaping the Halloween mask she bought into something more Silence-y (from Doctor Who).  (Note:  While I sometimes have great crafty plans, they often fall flat and do not achieve their true potential due to my own derpiness.)

Several hours of gluing, caulking, and painting later...well.  She's going to take it to a friend in the art department where she works and ask for shading help.  (Mostly to see if what we've done can be salvaged.)

In between all of that, I've been doing an emergency rush order of a 'cactuar' plushie (no, I do not play Final Fantasy) for a friend; he had an acquaintance fall from a ladder and fracture his clavicle, which required emergency surgery and a stay in the hospital.  Pics to come when it's completed!

I'm also in the process of designing business cards to hand out on Saturday.

Why, you ask?

Well...I'm attending my first con!  (It might be a small con, but a girl has to get started somewhere!)

The SC Comicon is being hosted by Borderlands (a local comic book/game/nerd store) and when I participated in the blood drive they held on Free Comic Book Day (May 3rd), I got a free one-day pass to the con!

Thus, the great and fabulous Deevius and I shall be attending, (possibly along with Mike the Coworker's fiancee Midori) and doing a group costume.

She's going as a Silence from Doctor Who.

I'm a cheapskate and I'm going as a Silence victim.  (What could be easier than wearing normal clothing and drawing tally marks all over my hands and face?)

I also plan to tote one of my Minecraft plushies around with me (and I will be wearing my Broken Buttons shirt), and handing out business cards to those that ask where I got him from.

I have a choice of taking Etho (who belongs to me) or VintageBeef (who's part of a triple order and the other 2 plushies are not yet finished).  Etho has 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and Beef has 900k.  Beef is by far my most popular sale item, but I'd want to contact the buyer and ask if it was okay to take him to the con (in the case of severe handling).

Decisions, decisions!

But before all of that happens, I'm running another session for my D&D players on Friday night!  I'm so excited because I'll get to share this with them:

It's our entire party!

From left:  Xerxes, Saffron, Darius, Malaris, Kuri, and Ana.

A special thanks to Nbiester on Deviantart for taking my commission request and showing it who's boss.

We'll get back to crochet shenanigans another time...maybe tomorrow...maybe later!