A New Chapter Begins - Erylian Extra January 2021 Edition

Is anyone else tired? Does it feel like January was both 2 weeks and 6 weeks long? No? Just me? Well that’s why this months newsletter is a week late. I think it was last weekend while working on editing the last episode of Arc 1 of the Mieveht Story that I realized it was the end of the month and I didn’t even have an outline written for the newsletter. So here we are, a week into the shortest month of the year, with last months newsletter!

Podcast

Through The City We Go - Mieveht Story - Arc 1 - Episode 9 [Remastered]

Our adventurers make their way back through the Under City, sure that they have no loose ends left to tie up. After a brief altercation in The Commons, they make their way back to Cyrin to find transport back to The Den. However there is some debate over the payment to easily return home. Once Xanphia is back safe in The Den, the group settles in for a meeting with Cassien.

We’ve slipped just a little bit on episode releases this month. The remaster for Episode 9 of the Mieveht Story didn’t come out until the 18th, which was fairly on track given my holiday break, but also pushed us to a 1 episode month again. I’ve got some more thoughts on this coming up later.

Mieveht Story - Arc 1 - Finale Progress

The final episode of Mieveht Story - Arc 1 should have hopefully come out on the first, but we didn’t quite hit that mark. In fact, after I finish this newsletter, I am hopping back into the editing booth to finish it up and get it ready to come out on Monday. I probably could have managed it if it was a normal episode length, but the original cut of that episode is over 2 hours long! We’ve only had three other episodes (that weren’t special one shots) that were over 2 hours long.

For some extra behind the scenes info, because you should be rewarded for actually reading the newsletter, there is current 1 hour and 5 minutes of edited audio for the next episode. I have another 19 minutes of “raw” to go through. Either way, this is the first remaster to break 1 hour after being given the remaster treatment. After this, will be my second pass over the audio to add in music, ambiance, sound effects, and clean up anything I missed on the first pass.

Reflections After Remastering

This section is probably better suited for next month, when this first arc of remasters is actually completed, but since I am so near the end, I have some thoughts I wanted to get out now, while its still pretty fresh for me. The first of which is that remastering this episodes has been hard. Harder than I expected really. When I first set out to do these, the thought was I would clean up the audio, run the new plugins I have gotten, maybe add in some new music and ambiance. Ever since remastering the first episode, that was not good enough for me.

You can tell by how much shorter these episodes are after being remastered, that these really turned into brand new edits for me, Through the course of this project, I have been confronted with so many things that I wish I had done better since the start. I can tell, going back, that I did have a vision for the show. Music and ambience has always been a part of the show, so we had some good roots for where I want things at today, but there is a lot that I look back at now and am confronted with my own inexperience. Some things, were creative decisions at the time, I left in way too much off topic chatter, that I have changed how I feel about in the last few years. Others, were just lazy editing on my part. I wish there was a way to pull actual stats for a specific edit point, but I have removed so much silence during this project. I was just leaving in blocks of 5+ seconds of no one talking while someone figured out what to say.

However, in listening back to these episodes as they have come out, I don’t feel like I have gone too far. Yes, they are shorter episodes, but I think that is okay. I listen back and I don’t feel that content is missing. I have more to say on this, but I think that can wait until next month, this section is already longer than I expected. Just know that this process has been harder, and taken longer, than I expected when I started, but I am happy to have done it.

A Much Needed Break

I have made a decision that I hope doesn’t come back to bite me. Once the finale of Arc 1 of the Mieveht Story is released (tentatively Monday), I will be taking a true break. Even when things are slow to release, I usually open up Hindenburg and do a little editing here and there, just not enough. After this next episode, I will be spending a solid 4 weeks not editing. This means there will probably be a 6-8 week window before the first remastered episode of the Erylian Epic comes out. I will be spending this time working on other parts of me being a content creator. I need to work on some updating my Twitch channel, there are some updates I want to make to the website, and I want to do some more writing and world building in preparation for when we can get together to record again.

Streaming

Adventures in Erylia Streams - Community Choice

We had our first month of community voted streams in January, and it was a lot of fun! We played No Heroes Here and Borderlands 2 as a result of the polls this month.

No Heroes Here is a game we played like 2 years ago but I think only got 1 or 2 play sessions out of us as a group, but on the night that we streamed it, the time just flew by and we actually pushed past our usual wrap up time because we got so invested in keeping up with the game. Hoping to see this come up again, possibly even ending up as a streamers choice game.

Borderlands 2 is a game that has seen some more traction with us lately since starting it up again at the end of last year. It’s such a chill way to play a shooter and the wild and wacky antics of the game are super entertaining. However, we did make the decision to leave it off of our current poll because we want to see some more variety in our streams, so if a game is getting a lot of requests, expect it to take a break for a stream. It will be added to the poll again after this week!

And this is a reminder that we have a Community Choice night coming up on Feb 10, this coming Wednesday, so go get your vote in for what we play next now!

Damian’s Solo Series

I finished my playthrough of the 2014 Thief on Jan 7th, which meant I needed a new game to play. There was a lot of early hype for me to play Bioshock as my next solo series game, but things got close at the last minute, however, Bioshock still won out! So I am now playing through Bioshock 1, the remastered version, every other Thursday as my Solo Series game.

A little backstory is that I had tried out Bioshock years and years ago, but honestly got too freaked out by the dark levels with enemies that jump out at you, even after you have cleared a room. The furthest I had gotten back then was finding the submarine in Neptune’s Bounty. However, I have always been interested in the aesthetic and setting of Rapture. When I was getting things ready for the stream, I even realized that I had started the game up back when the remastered version launched and just never opened it again after that.

I do have a new poll started up to start voting on the next Solo Series game, with Bioshock 2 taking the place of Bioshock, so swing by and place your vote while you vote on our next Community Choice night.

Damian’s Twitch Overall

So some big things have happened on my Twitch Channel in the past week. Technically, they both happened in February, but they are pretty big and important so I am including them here. First, I joined Stream Raiders as a captain after playing it on some other streamers streams. Stream Raiders is a little RPG style battle sim that is played on stream where the streamer is the captain and the viewers are in charge of actually placing units. The battles take place over 30 minutes where viewers can place a new unit every 5 minutes, then a short animated battle is triggered by the streamer after placement is done. Stream Raiders seems to have done a ton for stream engagement in the week since I started it. Come join my team here!

Oh, and also the huge thing. As of this morning, I am now a Twitch Affiliate! This means viewers can now subscribe and use bits in my channel, as well as channel points which are generated over time while watching the stream. I’ve been streaming for a long time and wasn’t sure I’d ever get to this point, and I am so happy to have made it to this point.

Real Life

Adventures in Alerylia

So with everything going on in the world, there is not much going on with us in the real world, however, a fun personal project has been started at home. Caitlin and I have gotten into brewing our own mead! There is not much I can say about it right now, since the time it takes to ferment, but it has been fun to make. We started off with making the Nord Mead and Honningbrew Mead recipes from the Official Elder Scrolls Cookbook. After 1 month of fermenting, we started new batches as part of a cycle. These new batches are a pomegranate-hibiscus mead, as well as the Blackbriar Mead from the Elder Scrolls Cookbook.

Here’s some pictures of the process so far!