Just want to check in and let everyone know I’m making good progress on a new quest that will involve a small group of older NPCs as well as a brand new location, built by nonoodles. Having someone else do the world building is a huge time saver. It makes me want to press the PLAY button on this file forever.

I’m also slowly putting together a slightly larger project related to the underground city of Mzinchaleft, but that one’s going to require some time to fill in the clutter.

The New Music Player 
One of the things you may have noticed is the new music player slotted on the right hand column. It came as a surprise to me too. I didn’t know how it got there or what its demands were, it just moved in in the middle of the night and started sleeping on the couch.

When I first saw the player, with all the crazy doo-hickeys, mismatched names and bizarre headers, my first instinct was to take a deep breath and remind myself not to panic.

Yup, cool as a cucumber. Eventually, I managed to figure out this is all WordPress’ doing, and while the curmudgeon in me fears change, ultimately I’m pleased with the new interface. My only criticism is that the bar to forward the track is too narrow, but if you didn’t want to listen to a song, there was never any reason to click on it in the first place.

The changes also forced me to upload some of the newer tracks, such as Blood of Kings by Sebastian Schneider and Ronja Monto‘s Seven Septims for Sigurd. And best of all, the new format displays metadata in a way that I can list both the singer and the composer, which is huuuuuuuuuuuge.

While they would never complain, I’m sure the composers might have felt a tad under-appreciated because their names weren’t credited beside each song. So while the alterations themselves left me in a cold sweat, in the end whatever programming wizardry WordPress forced upon me was a net positive. Score another point for science.

As for an actual, full length soundtrack, that will come when all the orchestral songs, variants, and miscellaneous shit is finished. Which should be any day month year century now. I typically don’t like releasing soundtracks that are incomplete, I hate it when I buy a soundtrack only to find it doesn’t have all the songs. Of course, it’s different when it’s free, so maybe I’m just lazy and making excuses. The world will never know.

Lastly, I want to mention Ravyio, a user who did a guest story for the blog previously, has started a blog called Dragon Strange and Other Insanity, which I’m told will feature video game reviews and other ramblings. Check it out, bitches.

Although the mod will always be the key and cornerstone of this site, I do feel obliged to give you words to read and music to listen to and videos to watch. So as we approach the two year anniversary of the mod, here is another state of the union post that will do a little of all three.

Here is Merrigan‘s cover of Arisen1‘s Tears of the Hist. I like to imagine her playing this with a flute in her mouth, a harp in one hand and a drum in the other, all while her feet play the triangle. Although science has allowed people to play the parts separately, I find human cloning to be a sketchy practice so I’m going to assume Merrigan played them all at once and sang the harmonies using a less controversial method like time travel.

This is an art project video made by Viridiane and friends called Sinhail’s Endgame. It features a bunch of dreamboat male voices including our very own Aranas. Vi has been hard at work on this and other school projects, but worry not, Zora fans, she’ll get back to it soon enough.

Lastly, the following is pretty much why Alphena will never get finished. This is another demonstration of the difference between the vanilla content and the content after integration. This took me 3-4 hours to finish, and it’s not even new content per se, it’s just for immersion. The other difficulty was trying to make sure the vanilla quest functioned properly when Alphena was dismissed, so in essence everything had to be done twice. In other words, ETA for finishing would be sometime in the year 2088.