VG Diaries: Black Metal Dragonborn

So, Skyrim looks like Norway and other mountainous regions of Scandinavia. If there was any doubt about that, one could always speak to a Nord and listen to their accent or turn their gaze to the carved woodwork and other design traits dominating their architecture. I've spent around 500 hours travelling the harsh, unforgiving wilds of Skyrim, where one can find the burned remnants of a family and their household around one corner, and a body desecrated by the bloody rituals of a necromancer around the next. Constantly fearing death by fire or some other element from above, one starts to wonder: What would make the perfect dragonborn?

I contimplated this matter for many playthroughs, finally coming to a conclusion: he or she must be the most metal son of a bitch to ever grace Tamriel. Not just any metal, either, but the deepest and blackest of all metals. The kind where no song on the album is shorter than ten minutes long; the kind riddled with intermissions of the cold ambient sounds of wilderness to nip at your eardrums.

I dropped my current save and started a new one. At first, I tried layering black face paint over an albino white Nord. It was just the vanilla face paints, which I decided wasn't enough. I quickly found a mod for corpse paint, which is amazing by the way, and got to work. I present to you now: my perfect Dovahkiin:

Yep.

A warrior forged in the frozen depths of the Tundra in the dead of night, his magic as cold as the black ice that runs through his veins. That is a face no mother could love, and a face that could love no mother. His only friends are ice wraiths and barren wastelands. His name...

...is Tartar Sauce, because he makes me think of grumpy cat. 

I've honestly never completed the storyline of Skyrim myself. I've watched my family beat the main quest plenty, so I know the lore, mind you. I've almost beaten it myself before discarding my character for a new one... after that, I dreaded the Thalmor embassy crap enough that I steered clear of the main quest. Couldn't be assed... This time, though, I will do ALL QUESTS, including the guild that I've not even begun before, the Dark Brotherhood. (Sorry, wasn't interested... I'm still not, really. I'm a huge Morag Tong fan, just to put that out there.)

No one controls Tartar Sauce. No one.

If I get any more decent pictures along the way, or do anything noteworthy, like accidentally setting a church on fire with my voice, I'll keep you posted. Honestly, I think I will be making this guy a traditional character of mine and start making him in as many games as I can... but only if convincing corpse paint can be found.

Now if only someone would mod that cat into the game for his companion. Or, perhaps, Fadades...

(Seriously... watch it until the 1:30-1:35 scene. It's life changing.)

Bacon Wings and Science Tuesday

Technically, it was last night, and I'm just now posting it, but anyway:

I'm all about mods to diversify and improve the flora and fauna of Skyrim, such as: Improved Fish, Harvestable Elves Ears and Frost Mirriam, Harvest Overhaul, skyBirds, Birds of Skyrim, and so on.

One of the bird mods that I have has added a lot more hawks in a lot more regions... especially Solitude. Solitude has so many birds that it seriously needs its own weather effect, replacing rain with a flurry of bird poop bombs. It's fantastic for hunting hawk parts, however, so every time I pass through, I try to shoot a few down. Usually, that's fine and dandy and nothing goes wrong, but last night, I fired an arrow into a hawk and hit the magic button that turned its wings into bacon.

It was amazing. It made a bacon bridge from the point in the sky where the hawk was shot to the place where it would have landed had it fallen like a normal bird would. It kind of just teleported to the road.

What made this even more amazing (and sadly, even though I thought about stopping to record this event, I didn't) was that, when I pressed and held the E button to drag the corpse, the wing literally retracted like releasing tension on a rubber band. It shot the bird corpse into oblivion (well, way out into the Sea of Ghosts anyway.) It was the most glorious slingshot ever... I only wish I had looted the corpse first.

==============

In other news, I had a real life glitch occur a moment ago... I filled the ice trays with water and put them in the freezer. About an hour later, I opened it to get out some of the already-made ice to cool off my coffee and, lo and behold, I found this little arctic boner:

I ran across the entire house to grab my ipad so I could get pictures of it. My future sister-in-law has just informed me via facebook that "apparently, this is a thing." They're called Ice Spikes! I like my name better... but there is a science behind how they form. I had imagined it'd be something like this, but apparently it's super rare for ordinary tap water to make these. Typically, people pouring distilled water into ice trays get them in abundance, but tap water almost never yields them. I feel special!

Here's a link to the article she sent me, it's really cool! Bad pun is bad!!

Link: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/icespikes/icespikes.htm

~ M.D. Hammond~

VG Diaries: Skyrim Memories pt. 1, Army of Ulfric

I've recently taken to playing TESV: Skyrim again. It's probably something about the season--not long ago was November 11th, which was the game's fourth anniversary. Shane's gotten into it, too; he had the game, but hadn't invested any time into playing it beyond getting out of Helgen keep. Now, we've both modded up the graphics and tweaked it to our liking, and loaded up with all of the DLCs that we were missing. (He sent Dragonborn to me with a gift message in steam reading Fus Ro MUAH!) ... I love my life.

A magical shot of aurora/revontulet from Skyrim.

Anyway, getting into it has brought back all of the good and bad memories from the first year of its release.  I decided I would share a few of the good stories from my various encounters, the kind of stuff that not everybody necessarily encounters (so not 'the first time I entered Markarth' or 'that time I found an old orc by the side of the road.') This is the absolute essential 'first story' that I had to share... The day fifty Ulfrics killed a dragon.

So we all know Ulfric Stormcloak. That iconic voice, that regal get up and dramatic storyline and all of that. If you didn't go to Windhelm or do either side of the civil war etc. then you will still at least know him from the beginning sequence in Helgen as the dude that was gagged. Anyway, my cousin was over and we were really playing with the console codes for the first time. We did the whole 'summon 100+ dragons outside of Whiterun' kind of stuff to see what my computer could handle and bring about the apocalypse. Thankfully I kept a few pictures from that... look at that evil bastard in the background.

But after that, we ran up to the top of the mountain east of the city where the word wall and dragon priest rests. For SOME reason, divines only know, we entered the snowy clearing and decided 'hey, let's summon Ulfric.'  So yeah, there's an Ulfric standing on this random ass mountain top in the snow. It wasn't interesting enough, apparently, because we summoned like fifty more Ulfrics to join him. As they're all looking around and telling our player 'yes?' over and over again, the dragon, who was in a sleepy stupor over on the word wall, decides the stench of human is too strong and must be annihilated.

Then the most glorious, thunderous moments of skyrim audio history happened. Did I get a picture of it? No. I didn't get a video either, and I am so, so sorry that I didn't, because it was amazing. The dragon begins its death spiral above, roaring and swirling in a circle, and fifty Ulfrics craned their heads up and, standing loose and casual with no weapons drawn, all let forth a mighty 'FUS RO DAH.'

No clue what it looked like when it hit the dragon. We were laughing our asses off. I still laugh my ass off trying to tell this story to anyone who will listen. It totally did piss off the dragon though, who landed and enraged the Ulfric Army.

Predictably enough with all the racket going down, the dragon priest knocked off the lid of his coffin and joined the fray. Hell no, I wasn't going to lift a finger to help... They downed the dragon, I took its soul, and off to the races they went, charging perilously the tattered lich on the mountainside.

I'm pretty sure they blew him off the face of the mountain.

When the battle was done, they all wandered about, chillin' like this sort of affair goes down on the daily.

We rounded out this misadventure with a tribute to the gods, spawning and killing Nazeem. It's for good measure...  come on he's the adoring fan of this game. We buried him in the snow like a cat covers its poop and made off into the sunset. (And by that I mean he spawned half in the ground so we ran with it.)

 

We summoned Byrnjolf too, apparently...

Anyway, thanks for listening to one of my favorite Skyrim stories of all time. Next time, I'll indulge you in my tumultuous marriage to Farengar--yes, Farengar, Balgruuf's court wizard from Whiterun. I know, I know, what could possibly go wrong with that.

Until next time, keep calm, game on, all that.

And please, I encourage you!! Share some of your favorite Skyrim (or even other games in the elder scrolls series) stories! I'm dying to hear them!!!

~~~~ M. D. Hammond ~~~~