Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Mid-July 2016 uploads

7.18.16
Mid-July 2016 uploads

I was feeling very tempted to do an entry on some videos, but I decided that it would be a better idea to do my videos first, since the videos themselves do tell you to come visit this place to learn more about them. The entries quite obviously don't simultaneously get released as soon as the videos are published, but the least I can do as attempt to post them in a timely manner, so here we go! This entry will be covering Asphalt 8 - Ratio Fail!, How to play Flappy Bird, 2016 Canada Day Fireworks and Millennium Trail.

This was the first video recorded out of the four, but I didn't get around to editing it and uploading it until recently, hence why it's being lumped with this batch. Canada Day this year was a bit on the cooler side in my area, but still reasonable enough to get out there and have fun. I didn't leave the house until after 8:00, so that too, explains the evening coolness. Last year I had somebody warn me about there being lots of cops down there, but I didn't receive such a warning this time around. LOL? Depends on the way you interpret it. You know what? I'm not going lie – that was pretty damn funny! Seriously, why would I be worried about that unless I was planning to conduct some mischief? I consider myself good, but maybe he was a villain? Who knows for sure! Anyway, I didn't bother with rides this year, but in order to make my footage a little bit more unique from 2015, I decided to briefly record a gig with singers, guitars, a saxophone and violin. If the video annotations didn't make it obvious enough, the violin and alto saxophone was what really caught my ears and eyes. Yes, I am an instrumental geek. Would've been cool to see one of the bigger saxophones like the baritone or bass, but they weren't present. Or were they? While waiting for the fireworks, I wondered around for a bit to take pictures of all sorts of stuff, and when the fireworks did start, I thankfully made it in time to watch the show. Ah, it was beautiful!

This place caught me by surprise to tell the truth. I was expecting it to be a short paved trail between to regional two roads, that would be completed in 10-15 minutes, and boy was I wrong! As a result, I did not prepare for it very well, so I forgot about bug spray, didn't bring a bag, and didn't bring a proper sized bottle of water. Wow! Not very smart of me at all! Despite the surprises and regrets, I still managed to enjoy the extensive winding networks of paths and forested areas. There were a lot of branching pathways, which made it hard to choose at times, but I just went with wherever I thought would be most interesting. As seen from the video, the trails I chose eventually led me out to Nash where I then found something I thought I wouldn’t end up filming: Courtice Secondary High School. Yep, so this makes it the 2nd time where I film a high school in one of my outdoor videos. I have no idea what this school focuses on (some focus on trades, performing arts etc.), nor do I know anyone from that place, but it was fun to film it, especially since no one was there. Well, no one within my proximity I should say, because I did see people on Nash and also while I was in the forest. Now I don't have a problem with casually or unintentionally filming people (I did this on Canada Day), but ya certainly don't want to go around filming schools while the students are fully out and about. There have been issues in this region (and of course many other places as well) where some people have done this with the intentions of being creepy and perverted, which has caused police and the news to get involved. Anyone reading this will probably be like “Duh!” “Common sense!” or “Do you really need to mention this?” Well yes, it's important to bring it up just in case viewers are wondering why my videos are the way the are. Anyway, Millennium trail is cool! I've seen people wander into this place quite a bit, so that tells you something: it's a good place to explore!

Ohhhhhhhhhh, boy! And now the time finally has come where I must discuss what was such an immensely popular game: Flappy Bird! In fact, it was so popular that the developer himself, Dong Nguyen, became concerned about the health of people and it's addictiveness, so he did the extreme thing and pulled it from the Google Play store and iOS app store altogether! Wow! I have no idea if it's back at this point (probably is), but there are thousands of other spin-offs that have since popped up to fill the void during its absence. If you own an Android device running 5.0 Lollipop or 6.0 Marshmallow, you can play a lollipop or marshmallow themed spin-off of Flappy Bird by following a few instructions that involve you going through some settings. Yes, Google developers have gone to that level to actually do that! So, for the big question: why did I make this video in 2016 and not during the times when people needed help most, and when smartphones were being abused and slaughtered? Well, you're not going to like this answer, but I don't know. I can remember being disappointed about not having it on BlackBerry 10, until I discovered how to get the APK, but I guess it's because I just never really cared to do a video about it then. This time around I did feel like a doing a video on it, and decided to add some hilarious narrations and annotations while I was at it, just to make the video that much more entertaining. Oh, and I even demonstrated another spin-off: FlappyHerbie Saga: Trolls of the Forest! This was done both for the sake of amusement, trolling, and for proving points about weight, rebound height and gate gaps. I was disappointed about not being able to get super high scores while filming on either of these games, but with time, patience, practice and careful following of my golden advice, you can become a flapping champion! I will also be posting videos of other spin-offs occasionally, so you can either rejoice, smile and be glad or mourn, roll your eyes and sulk!

On my Asphalt 8 videos I normally try to play on at least 3 tracks during recording sessions, but because this one was mostly intended to be a quick video ratio test, I limited it to one. There has been no complaints to date about the black bars that plague my gaming videos, but I don't really like it, so I thought that I would finally attempt to do something about it and stretch the ratios to have it full up the screen, but it didn't work. I tried it in the video editor, no luck. I tried YouTube's editor, useless! I tried entering a code for stretching, which worked while I was in the video manager, but failed else where... I uploaded two versions initially to test things out, but ended up removing them and decided to edit them the way I usually do. Ugh! I wish my screen recorder gave me more resolution and ratio options. For now, I guess I'll just continue to upload the gaming videos the way they are, until I find another solution. Now for the content of the video: as you can tell from watching the first couple of seconds, I play in Iceland with the iconic Lamborghini Countach. Not the highest paying race, nor the best car, but it was something a little different, and the car is nonetheless fun to drive with. And did I say that it drifts pretty damn well? Seriously! I was able to carefully manoeuvre the Countach away from a truck in a certain part of the video and saved myself from what would have been an annoying, embarrassing wreck! The Countach is far from being the fastest in its class, but its good retro looks and handling has me coming to it now and then.


That does it for this entry, so now I can finally go and talk about some videos I've been just itching to write some blog commentary on! And for a spoiler, you can expect to see no less than 3!

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