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The First Ascent

Setting goals, keeping perseverance, outreaching to others, and accepting help; these acts are what made this happen. These acts are what have made what started as a hope into a truth. What made April 4, 2020, our founding day of affiliation. Thank you, all of you, who have helped make this possible, who have hyped me, who have watched, and who have followed. Each of these are stones that have set a foundation together, and made the climb up the mountain possible. Thank you.

And that’s how we’re going to start April.

We’ll launch with streaming content since we’re already on the high of the topic with the affiliate announcement. Last month we set expectations across a number of MMOs, but found ourselves realigning about mid-month. Destiny 2’s Season of the Worthy is fun, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch of previous Seasons. We’re still playing it but it’s showing up less on stream than previous months. Similarly, Warframe also is less present on the main line. Operation Scarlet Spear has fun content but without the draw of the rest of the clan, I’m less inclined to throw it into co-op content. Monster Hunter World co-op content, on the other hand, is still going strong. We reached the endgame two weeks ago, and have been playing with the post Iceborne content in the Guiding lands. That said, it may be soon time to move past active MHW content, and we might be looking at something new in the future.

Fridays and post-raid Saturdays we’ve been playing a new single player experience, Cross Code. This game is a lovely action-adventure RPG puzzler, reminiscent of Secret of Evermore and other SNES titles. It is amazing. The game play is smooth on keyboard and mouse, the puzzles range from cute to I HATE THIS SO MUCH. It’s a blast. The developers, Radical Fish Games, really put a lot of love into the project and it shows with how each region unfolds, the hidden lore, the animations, everything. I don’t know how much longer we have left with the game, but we’ll be digging in until it’s done. There’s also a new game plus option, but we won’t be jumping into that right away. It’ll be something worth revisiting later this year or the next.

A follow up on the Eden Raids in XIV, Dinner First has reached e8s, the new Shiva battle and the final part of the current raid tier. I’m rather happy with how the group has progressed. It’s certainly faster than we managed it last raid tier, and hearing the communication going through our team has been inspiring. By the next monthly update, we’ll be done, I’m certain.

There’s a lot to go over with the Twitch affiliate content, so I’ll be separating that out to another post. Thank you again to everyone that helped that happen.

Following up on the spring Patreon poll, we’ve started work on this month’s short story. The patrons wished for a revisit to the land of Manta and Draco Artifactium, and so I spent time digging into the setting and making sure anything I write becomes consistent with the past and future novels. Revisiting the agents of the dragon Harbinger and her world has been lovely, and working on the initial draft has gone well. Pop into the Patreon for details of how that story is progressing, and to get a free copy of it and January’s short story.

By this time next month, we’ll be chapters deep into the next novel. Epicus is ready to go in terms of outline, so once we’re done with the short story prep, we’ll hit the ground running. Ideally, we’ll knock out the first draft by June’s status update, and see a launch of the novel maybe two years after the release of Doppelganger: Draco Artifactium. Crossing fingers for this September.

Finally, let’s talk about the discord, The Hiddennode. We just went live with public access to the server, and supporter access areas. I’ll be mirroring update information from those supporter routes to those channels, so while fans can connect with each other on the discord, they can stay up to date with the different threads of my content. The discord is publicly open, so come visit. My goal is to grow that community; to make it a thriving center of cool people who like hanging out, like my content, and help me with developing more worlds. Everything starts small, so I know this will take time.

And that sums it up. April is ready to go with some awesome content coming in streams and writing releases. Stay tuned for more Patreon posts, join the Discord, and keep an eye on public announcements via Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch.

Otherwise, see you in May.

featured Image Source: Photo by Victor Duarte from Pexels
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It’s a Foundation

This post’s music is Watsky’s x infinity. The album is an interesting combination of high-powered flows and introspective reflection. They’re powerful words that acknowledge self-doubt and then reminds us of our worth. The album has a special place in my head because of where I was in life when it showed up. I had lost a dear friend and fellow writer in late 2016, and Watsky’s poetry helped ease that burden on my heart and head. These days, the album acts as a sort of rejuvenator to my writing. Unlike other music that inspires specific types of stories, x infinity is of a neutral energy. It sparks me to create, to build, to get pumped up for the work ahead. It makes me remember the past, and the promise to keep going I made to that dear departed friend.

So here we go kicking it forward.

Welcome to March.

Charlie’s been running through my head all month. She’s been rough with me, rarely telling me where she needs to go, and it makes me want to go back and rename the February post to “A Promising Foundation” as that is what the month was. I’ve realized I needed a larger cast than I expected with the story, but they’ve been blossoming into existence rather easily. January’s Hand of Void helped a lot with putting my head into the right place for creating within the Phased universe.

We’re a month out since HoV went live and that means I’m almost to the time to start writing the next short story. We’re awaiting the final tally from the patrons on which setting the April short story will be in and as of this posting there are still three days left before the poll closes. Want to help influence that vote? Join the Patreon at any level and you’ll be able to start reading and influencing what short stories come out going forward.

Speaking of the short stories, I’ve put into place the format that those will go out in the future. Every even story will be put to a vote of a number of settings, and then the odds will be a new story of my choosing. This will help make sure I get to the shorts I’d like to tell while also focusing heavily on the specific entries the patrons want to see grown.

With March we’ll be looking at the finished outline and then working on the April short story. Once that is knocked out, we’ll turn our sights back to Epicus and push through the second novel. I don’t want to give a deadline at this time as that’ll depend both on the progress through April’s short as well as the final steps towards the outline. Keep tabs on the weekly Patreon posts for more details on how we are progressing.

I met a number of interesting folks throughout February on Twitch. We spent a great deal of time with other streamers and trying to improve my knowledge and skills with community growth. As a direct result of that, nine new people have started following the channel, and we’re inching closer to that affiliate goal post.

March is looking to a be busy month in terms of keeping up with titles. The 10th sees the next season of Destiny 2 going live, Season of the Worthy. After last season’s push towards the title, I’m really looking forward to my second full season. Last month saw 5.2 go live for Final Fantasy XIV, and some time later this month more 5.2 content is going live. We’re still pushing against the next tier of the Eden raid, and have had some pretty nice successes two weeks in. Warframe is hinting at new content coming with Operation Scarlet Spear, and I’m eager to get back in there and experience the team work that was promised with Railjack. Monster Hunter World is also seeing new content coming along on PC, with two new monsters and a new region. Further, April will see PC becoming officially synced with consoles, so we can expect more fun in the New World. That’s, what? 4 MMO/MMO-ish games we’re trying to keep up with? Oh, and we’re also doing Space Engineers stuff, because why not? What a time.

Speaking of the Eden raids, the title image for this post includes the preview of Dinner First’s 5.2 desktop image. Rewinding a bit, February saw the first full month of Patreon weekly updates and that included some unique previews including the image above. But, here’s the full image now publicly available:

And that ties it all together. March is now locked in with more streaming progress and writing goals. Stay tuned for more Patreon posts, and public announcements via Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch.

Otherwise, see you in April.

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A Promising Month

I sit down to write this with the sound of cool synths and drum machines on loop in my headphones. Something about listening to retrowave, chillwave, synthwave, whatever-wave feels like the future. A grungy, wonderous future perceived by so much cheesy 80’s sci-fi flicks and imaginative cyberpunk novels. Loud hair, neon lies, and the hopeful grasp of the underdog.

A retro future so bright, you gotta wear shades.

It’s the head space I’m entering as I think about the next project. Rusty ships sailing between worlds, capitalistic stellar empires, strange mental powers, space whales, and a menagerie of diverse aliens dotting the cosmos. Culture drives their worlds, and influence and style are all at the core of what makes Phased and the new novel’s setting thrive.

We spent January neck deep in that universe. On the 19th we released our first Patreon Early Access Short Story, Phased: Hand of Void. This short represents the quarterly fiction projects I’m bringing to people who sign up for the Patreon, and I’m excited to see the growth the story has caused. April will see the next story show up, but the plan is to start voting on that piece later this month. I’m curious if readers will be hungry for more from Phased, Manta, or seek out other settings I’m interested in playing in.

HoV kept us busy through January, fulfilling our promise of getting a new short story out. Yet working on the short wasn’t a one-time jaunt into that universe. It was meant to be a kickstart, a flavor test, a change to expand the range of the writer’s bible and help that galaxy come to life both for readers and for myself. It was an exploration to prep me for working on Epicus and help accelerate the progress on the next novel. And accelerate it has. During the last week of January, we reclaimed many of the various outline documents for the novel, the light drafts we had put into place, and have begun indexing and merging them into a single unified document. Charlie has a lot of work going for her, but I know her story better now. Soon, so shall you.

Speaking of knowing more, I spent time in January going over plans for expanding how much information I’m sharing and how I’m sharing it. Weekly updates are going up on Patreon every Friday. While the monthly blog post is meant to be a digest of the entire month’s cycle, the Friday updates are meant to serve as a richer experience. More exacting numbers, direct screen shots and minor spoilers of how things are going. It’s an accountability exercise for myself while keeping readers and viewers in the loop. The same can be said for the Patch Notes page that now appears here on the site, both are tools meant to provide accountability to people interested in my works and want to know their payments are being invested wisely. It’s something I like seeing from those I invest it, so it’s more than reasonable to expect others to want the same from me. Future plans for communication include a newsletter that should be launching next week. The newsletter will also be monthly, but will be less narrative and more bullet point. Essentially between the blog, newsletter, and Patreon posts, readers and viewers can decide how much or how little information they want to know about my projects.

We had a good month on the Twitch side of things. Views are up, we’ve attracted some lovely people who are coming about regularly, and we’re now officially at 3/5th of the follower minimum we need on our march towards affiliate. While officially we’re only streaming Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, we’ve started to add more days (Friday and Sunday), which has helped expand that capture net for collecting new viewers. Streams are now regularly at least 4 hours long, and I’ve started to put together a plan for what games the channel will start to focus on over the coming year. On the back end of things, I learned a bit about Adobe After Effects and made a thing. It’s the first of many features I’ll be adding to the stream as I learn more about that program, and understand how OBS’s and Stream Elements’ notification work. I look forward to seeing how the stream will look six months from now.

February holds so much potential after such a powerful January. This week will see the completion of the new outline and production begin on the first draft of Epicus. The rest of the month will include a lot of pushing forward to have the novel sitting at least 50k words deep like NaNoWriMo was rearing its head in the shortest month. Twitch streaming will officially expand to fit the new days, with Tuesday and Thursday being my official “off” days. I can’t say for sure if we’ll hit affiliate in the coming month, but we’re going to keep at it. The new raid content coming later this month for FFXIV will help with that, but the steady hand we’ve been keeping since October has been our greatest asset for growth. The newsletter will go live, and more effects will enter our Twitch stream. New pixel art variants of the Dinner First crowd will appear once I know who everyone is going to be, so keep an eye out for that. I’d also like to do more pixel art in the coming month, but don’t hold me to that. It’s the long plan, not the priority.

That’s it, our February update. I’m looking forward to sharing more over the next few weeks via the Patreon posts. Putting together the newsletter later this week will be a fun exercise, and you can expect updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch for when that goes live. I’m especially looking forward to seeing how the novel goes during it’s first few days of production.

Blog Image Source: Pixabay on pexels.com

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January in Retrospec

It took me quite some time to get used to writing out 2010, and let’s not even talk about the complications of the 19 to 20 conversion ten years prior. Here we are on the dawn of a decade, getting ready to break muscle memory and set our sights forward to a new era.

At least, that’s what we culturally tell ourselves. That these sets of ten we’ve assigned in the concept of recording the time our rock successfully orbits that big ball of plasma herald new periods on our society’s existence. But change is never quite that fast, is it? As if great change comes with the coin flip of the new year. Changes to culture comes as a patient hunter, a slow-moving glacier that grinds against our sense of identity and self.

This isn’t to say we can’t use these moments to mark milestones in our lives, our cultures, to take a step back and look at where we stand and see what direction we’re going. Our years, our seasons, our months mark the rhythm of our lives. Bills, the phases of our moon, pay checks, biological cycles, how long it’s been since we took care of that bedroom closet and making yet another plan to clean that sucker out; we mark ourselves by these spokes on the wheel, and the year and decade changes are a wider view of those patterns.

So, as has become my tradition, I mark the start of these months with an introspective view of the month in review. With it being January, the herald of the new year, we are tempted to look back at the year and see where we’ve come and gone. And with it being a year ending in that lovely null zero, we fulfill the promise of the greater spiral and look at where the years have brought us.

Let’s talk about here first. A decade ago, we weren’t here. Originally The Hiddennode was my blog, and until 2014 I kept my thoughts, updates and public writing on that site. In 2012 I started using The Hiddennode as a podcast/audio journal and once the written blog fell out of favor, the podcast took over. During my reconstruction phase in 2016, the blog officially moved over to J Samuel Diehl and we’ve intermediately used it as our update/journaling site. Since then we’ve created fifty-three posts offering updates to my writing, podcasting, and creative efforts.

Speaking of writing, the decade saw the greatest two milestones of my writing career to date: In 2013 for the first time I finished a novel, and in 2018 I published my first novel. That first novel, still unpublished, was a challenge to my hand wriggling, start a new project every three months, and never get things done mindset. Writing about Rebin, his challenges, and his growth, was a wonderful experience and let me know I could manage that dream. 2018 saw the publishing of Draco Artifactium: Doppelganger, and let me present the world with my ideas of dreaming worlds. It let me explore Micara’s fight, present shades of grey in a world of good and evil, and to envision some rather dark dragons. Five years was a long time between novels, but it was growth. The next one won’t have such wide spacing.

Podcasting, as a part of my life, rose and fell over the span. I started out as a fan going back to 2007, and stepped into the world of podcasting at the start of the decade. Hiddennode, Five Things We Like, Five Sentence Fiction, and Trans-dimensional Café were all projects I started, and have mostly sunsetted. Hiddengrid became mine during those years, and after three wonderful seasons of The Sixth World Chronicles, it was set to rest. I’m still a cohost on Seize the GM, but that seems to be my last consistent bastion of being a podcaster. Instead, I find my sights set on video and streaming. I don’t have as large of an audience yet as I did with Hiddengrid, but there has been growth since the middle of 2019. Even as a listener, podcasting’s presence has dropped heavily from my life and I find live streams and VOD’s as my choice of entertainment. This came from a change in lifestyle, but I’ve gone from listening to twenty to forty hours’ worth of podcasting a week to maybe less than a dozen in a month. The two are likely tied to one another.

While my health has shifted much in the years of my late twenties and through my thirties, no greater change of health came than in 2017, when I lost useful bioptic vision. The second retina detachment took me by surprise in the summer, and by the start of 2018 I knew I had permeant irreparable vision damage. Now I see the world with a shroud of darkness and blur in that eye. But all is not lost. I still have a “good” eye, and with it I am more appreciative of the beauty I see.

I’ve had family come see me in those years. I’ve become closer to my brothers and talk to them near nightly as we game together. I have plans to stream with one of them this coming month.

I’ve been to lovely Asheville, and fell in love with the place my wife dreams of living.

I’ve been to conventions big and small, and have become closer to my tribe of nerdiness.

I’ve found strength in the serenity of knowing who I am in my gender identity.

I’m the most me I’ve been, a me I never dreamed I could be ten years ago.

The 20’s, these new 20’s, do not come with the promise of ease. It comes with the promise of a fight. It comes with a promise of new dangers; social, political, technological. There’s been dark times this past decade; struggles, fights, losses, and hurts. New terrors are visible on the horizon, and perhaps more shadows ahead. But shadow comes with light, and with it comes the chance to grow and temper ourselves.

To strengthen myself.

To know myself.

Ten years have gone behind me.

I look forward to the challenge of the ten to come.

.

.

.

Shit, wasn’t I supposed to review the year?

Uhm, *checks notes*

*paper shuffling sounds*

*deep sigh*

Yeah, I think we sort of did that up there, didn’t we? Kind of covered the highlights worth mentioning. Guess we move onto the month.

It is January, and thus the start of a new month. The two big projects currently underway are the short story for Patreon, chugging along, and the streaming. The rest of December’s works took collateral damage in the holiday season. Teaches me a lesson about promises in the holiday season and I know to prep December’s offering earlier in the year. Other projects mentioned last month had work done but not to the degree I’d hoped.

The core of the month is going to be a schedule. I’ve done well with keeping to it for the streaming, but now I need to make sure to stay on top of other projects. It’s not done yet but as I develop it, I will hold myself to posting about it. Let’s say the 20th. Mark the day. That gives me two weeks to develop and get it written up for sharing.

That sounds right.

Alright, back to work on the short.

Want more? Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. If you’re really looking to help out, check out the Patreon for earlier news and updates.

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December’s Arrival

The end of the year, thirty-one days ‘till sunset. December starts the desire to look back, to see what we’ve gone through the last dozen months and wonder if we’ve accomplished goals or if we’re spinning wheels. Looking back at the first three hundred thirty-four days, I wonder where the time has gone. I wonder where I spent them and how failure and success crossed my path. These posts are meant to be a look ahead, but let’s wade back through time for a few sentences and see the echo of our footsteps.

The last personal podcasting episode I created went up in November of 2018. It’s the first year in over a decade that I didn’t do a podcast of my own. I’ve been on podcasts, but it’s not the same as cranking out my own stream. December won’t change that, but it reminds me that in 2020 I need to get back to work.

The blog was silent for most of 2019. Until September, I didn’t post updates here nor on the Patreon. The monthly update has been a lovely boost, but it’s become not enough. December will see more; 2020 will see a growing trend.

There are four novels in my active project list, with three of them untouched since summer. I lament the time it took me to drag through those, but I won’t let those ghosts linger for too long. I’m not straying from Epicus, but I will see it through. I will see a return to those other stories. 2018 saw my first release, 2020 will see several more.

Okay, no more ripping into myself. September saw a turn of pace and we’re going to focus on the growth from those autumnal days.

Streaming picked up in September, and I hid my stride in October. I finished getting the base screens for my page ready in November, and December will see the on screen production jump up. I’ll also be adding additional days to my weekly schedule. Wednesdays, Wednesday nights, and Saturday nights are my current schedule, but expect Mondays to join that night list starting on the second.

Working on Epicus since the end of summer has been a lovely experience. NaNoWriMo last night helped me lay a foundation for the novel to come, and the world building I’ve mustered over the last few months have opened the door to get other projects working in the setting. The early December goal is to work on and publish a Patreon exclusive short story in the setting. This will feature characters that will appear in the novel as well as settings from the novel. Essentially, it’ll be my first semi-public sneak peek at the setting. Stay tuned to my various feeds to learn when that go live.

I didn’t get additional art worked on in November, but I’ll be working on the gamemaster concept more in the coming weeks. I need more practice as I learned during a previous stream, so I’ll release a few teases but don’t expect anything solid until I’m very comfortable with the design to come.

So, let’s recap shall we? We’re going to see an uptick in blog entries, and some will tie into new podcast episodes that will be out early next year. We’re adding Monday night as another streaming night, and will be working on the displays for the stream. There’s going to be some short story work going out his week to have a Patreon exclusive later this month. Finally, I’ll be studying more pixel art and will develop the characters I spoke about last post during December. As always, we’ve got a lot ahead of us, but I’m excited about it.

Want to help out? Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. If you’re really looking to help out, check out the Patreon for earlier news and updates.

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On the Coming November

Like the image? It's a teaser for the upcoming Twitch Theme.

Time again for our monthly check in. NaNoWriMo is on our doorstep, which means it’s time to dive headfirst into the current project, FFXIV’s patch 5.1 is out and the streams are coming regularly, and we’re finally finished creating the initial Dinner First icons. A couple of things to unpack in there, so let’s take them apart one by one.

November plays host to the event known as NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. From the official site: “National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel during the thirty days of November.” I’ve participated since 2011 with varying degrees of success. Many of my completed projects started in this forge, and once again we return to the fire for a return to the Epicus project. Epicus is the project I’ve been poking for the past few months and in November I’m looking to knock out the first draft of the first part of the novel. Ideally I can knock out parts two and three, but based on the potential size of the novel those might not get compiled until December. Keep eye out on the usual haunts for updates. Or my NaNo profile page.

October saw a growth in my streaming presence. I’m primarily streaming my Final Fantasy raid content with Dinner First on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but we’re starting to come together with what I want the channel to be. I’m still working on the animations for the events, and the profile page images, but we’re coming along. I’m aiming to launch official columns by the end of next week.

Finally, we started working on pixel art again. I’ve shared a number of pieces on Twitter, but in case you missed them:

The first few entries are focused on a character concept I’m running for the Twitch page. The Gamemaster character is meant to be a persona representing me on the page. I liked the first one (a 40 x 40 pixel size) but felt the portions were not quite right.

The second one, 64 x 64 pixels, I think turned out nice for scale, but lacked any sense of movement or life.

The next attempt started off working on a model base from Final Fantasy VI, 16×24 pixels. The 3 by 4 layout comes from RPG maker, as I was using it as a template to try out getting something animated made.

Which I think came out okay:

From there I started toying with a new style that I’m not 100% in love with, but I wanted to get some practice with. Check out the full Dinner First character sheets:

I started with the Gamemaster character and went on to make the eight nine members of Dinner First. For a break down on who is who, check out the album. Again, like the second test they lack movement/personality, but the coloration was fun to do and trying to limit myself to the 16 color choices from SNES level graphics. I think of them as world map avatars, but not combat avatars. Those will be my next goal.

To recap, next month is NaNoWriMo, where we’ll knock out part one of the next novel. Streams will continue through the month with Wednesday and Saturdays being my primary streaming nights. More pixel art is on the way, to get an early glimpse of those, stay connected to my social media as they tend to show up on those first. It’s going to be a great month, and the start of ending the year off on a high note. Hope you’ll continue to join me for the ride.

Want to help out? Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. If you’re really looking to help out, check out the Patreon for earlier news and updates.