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The big when, what and why?

I have been partially MIA from the modding and guide writing community for about a year. There has been a lot of going on and people have been remarkably patient with me. I think you all deserve some explanations.

New job and back to school

I was unemployed for about two years, after my previous job as union organizer ended. It was fixed-term employment to begin with, so end didn’t come as a surprise. I kept filing application after an application, but nothing came out of it. I spent a lot of time at gaming forums during the unemployment period. I wanted – or rather needed – to do something, that I wouldn’t become passive. Forums gave me a break from frustration and sense of progress, even if the progress wasn’t financial.

I finally ended up applying to a course that would allow me to work as event security. My thoughts were that I would end up doing occasional jobs here and there. No one was more surprised than me, when that course ended up redoing all of my plans. I got employed after few months. The job wasn’t – and still isn’t – exactly regular. Amount of work depends on amount of events and competition, but we fared quite well.

I decided to expand my professional skills and applied to study. I ended up completing my guard license as well. If you are curios and unfamiliar with the Finnish law, security and guard are actually different professions and they require different licenses. 1

Finally I even signed to school and started study for a professional papers. I don’t know what happens in the future, but while I am working this, then I can just as well be professional about it.

1 Link is in Finnish. I didn’t find any properly dated English translation from Finlex.

Technical issues

Top of it all, certain games – like Fallout 4 – started crashing my system. I saw BSODs in the middle of gaming. I wasn’t in financial position, where I could start replacing hardware and I wasn’t even 100% certain that it was hardware issue to begin with.

Now I have replaced all my memory blocks (32 GB DDR4), reinstalled and updated all of my drivers, done several checks to both hardware and software. I have not seen any crashes lately. Let’s hope that they are gone now. Otherwise I need to carry this thing to some professional. I can’t find any unresolved issues. Fingers crossed that playing FO4 no longer BSODs my system.

Health issues

The work kept me busy and away from forums. I had to take pretty much every job I could, to get back on my feet. I managed to keep my economy stable over the unemployment time, but everything was naturally breaking around me. I needed the money and worked for it.

I was ready to return back to forums. One night out changed all of that.

At Autumn 2019, I was out with my boss and few of our colleagues. Next day I got stuck with a heavy illness. Hard cough lasted for several weeks. It was dry, beating cough that refused to go away. It finally went so bad that I collapsed in the middle of work, when I felt heavy pressure on my chest. Red Cross took me in to van and I was sent to hospital. The heart film and lung x-ray were clean. It looked like I had just coughed too long and hard, so my chest muscles were in pain.

Later it got worse. I started having severe pains on my chest. I couldn’t really concentrate on forums and I was worried about complaining to people looking for help their own problems. I stayed back and mostly communicated through Discord. I streamed some time at Autumn, but constant pain and cough drove me away for that, at least for some time.

Pains returned this year. I visited the doctor again. New doctor realized what the problem actually was. The long cough had developed Tieze Syndome. The diagnose was a relief. It was worrying to suffer from pains, without knowing what caused them. And this should even go away in one or two years.

Diagnose made me feel better. I started to post forums again, which was noted by others, and I also finally started posting proper gaming content to my YouTube channel.

Current situation

Right now things suck a bit for all of us, don’t they? The ongoing crisis has closed all the events and bars here in Finland. I would be unemployed again, without the guard license. Situation isn’t brilliant, but it could be far worse. I don’t have steady hours right now, but at least I have some, while plenty of other people are being left unemployed. I can’t complain.

The YouTube channel is progressing well. I have been able to provide stead 5(+) releases for each week. It looks like I am able to keep doing that. These days between work have granted me enough time to work with a proper buffer. I return to work at Monday, with full weeks worth of videos already uploaded and waiting for release.

I did want to post more videos, but there are few things that prevent me from committing to more than 5 steady releases.

I am working with my own set of modding tutorial videos. Those videos will get support post on this blog and I will type them out for those who have hard time to follow videos tutorials. That will be my next big project.

The second big project is Sim Settlement. I joined to project support team and I was both happy and busy to work with them. Unfortunately work, technical issues and health problems have kept me away from the project for almost a year.

I assure you all: this is not what I wanted and I am very sorry for being sidelines for a very long time.

If my technical issues are indeed solved, then I will return to Fallout 4 and Sim Settlements support. This is why I am not able to commit for more than 5 videos per week right now. I will have my hands full working with my tutorials and testing out Sim Settlements. I have kept reading all the release notes and watched videos, but I need to actually test it all myself.

As you might have guessed, Sim Settlements will come to this blog and to my YouTube channel as well. I will also return to Sim Settlements forums soon, once I have time to setup the game and start testing new features myself.

Social media

As you might have noticed, I currently have plenty of social media links available. I am most active in Discord. We have two servers around.

Coffee Room Discord is a general modding, chat, support and development server, which was built around Coffee Room community at Steam discussions. We have plenty of experienced people around both there and Steam discussions in general. We do not have any annoying advertisements and pings rarely happen.

Imp’s Lair is my personal Discord server, which was built to support my work. I am posting all the releases there, as well to my Twitter account. Imp’s Lair and my Twitter feed are the best places to see what is going on and when. Pings on this server happen, when I start a live Twitch stream. Other releases do not cause pings for users.

You are more than welcome to join us in those servers. We have very nice and helpful community, willing to help others with their games and modding.

I also have Facebook page. It is actually a bit more silent now, when I have two servers and this blog to work with, but I do post and reply there in regular intervals.

Have a nice spring, everyone. Stay safe and and have fun.

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